Liberals claim to have discovered amazing new principles of political change. Chief among these is that socialism and national liberation can – and usually will – come about without any violence in the struggle.
It is true that the liberals are currently having difficulties identifying any historical examples to validate their radical new theory but in a brilliant departure from traditional ways of thinking they say they don’t have to rely on history at all.
“Besides,” as Bel Eaver said in a discussion held to announce the new theoretical framework, “just because it didn’t happen before doesn’t mean it can’t ever.”
This is of course theoretically true and difficult to counter. One who attempted to do so during the discussion stated that just because no-one had (so far as is known) survived a direct hit by a high explosive tank shell, didn’t mean no-one ever would. He was clearly being sarcastic.
Bel Eaver didn’t deign to rise to the bait, just calling him a “hidebound doctrinaire” and walking away from the provocative individual.
“It’s so liberating not to have to read boring old history,” said Ivan Luzion. “This way is so much simpler. We simply desire what we want to be true about politics and economics and then assert it.”
“So, for example, we want change to be possible peacefully, so we insist that it is. Naturally, having asserted it, we won’t be using violence to achieve change.”
But what happens if violence is used against you when you’re advocating change? “Using violence in response just breeds more violence,” says Rosie Vue, “And it gives the authorities the excuse to use violence in return.”
“But have there not been many incidents of those in power using violence against peaceful protest?” asked another doubter. “Where did the violence being used against peaceful advocates of change come from in the first place?”
“And did the violence used against the Nazis breed more violence – or actually end it?” Asked another, adding: “If we don’t respond to violence and they kill our best activists and put the rest in jail – what then?”
Ivan Luzion maintains that these “what-ifs” are merely objections thrown in by people who oppose the newly-discovered principles and don’t want to give them a chance. “But neither they nor their pedantic historians will prevent us spreading these principles,” said Bel Eaver.
Yes, you peace-loving liberals, we told you but you wouldn’t listen. Told you that Zionism means racism, colonial settler expansion and, ultimately, genocide. But you wouldn’t listen. And you’re not listening now.
There just had to be a way of resolving things so everyone got something and then there would be peace, you all said.
People like you think all that has to happen for peace is that both sides sit down and talk. But what if what one wants is irreconcilable with what the other wants? Well, then you say, they both have to give up something.
The problem with that is that it’s always the oppressed who have to give up the most – or even everything. However, that’s necessary, because that’s how we get peace, you say. But would you apply it to yourselves as easily?
If a thief got your wallets, would you suggest sitting down and talking it over with him or her? Maybe suggesting s/he only stole half the contents? Well, you might, I suppose. But what if they got your cars, your houses and emptied your bank accounts?
You’d very quickly resort to violence! Oh, not you personally, of course not! You’d get the police to use force for you and a judge to use force to put them in jail and prison officers to use force to keep them in jail for an allotted time, to try and ensure they didn’t steal from you again.
We told you that the only peace the Zionists could achieve would be the peace of the Palestinian cemetery; but as many graves as the Zionists dug for the Palestinians, more would rise up fighting and they would never give up their land or agree to be kept down.
Every time the Zionists carried out a massacre or another atrocity, we told you: the only solution to this conflict is a unitary democratic state of Palestine, “from the River to the Sea”. But you wouldn’t listen.
And even now, as you begin to talk about “peace again” “after Gaza”, it’s clear you haven’t learned. The massacre of 22,600, including over 9,000 children, the ruins of Gaza, refugee camps, hospitals, mosques, water and sewage treatment plants have taught you nothing.
Because here you are again, proposing something other than the rational solution, in this case re-marketing the two-state plan. All the imperialists agree and you’ll get Abbas and the corrupt Al Fatah to go along as before of course but the Palestinian people as a whole will never do so.
The irony is that by pushing your kind of ‘peace’ measure and avoiding real peace, you are effectively advocating the conditions for war without end – or wiping out/ expulsion of the Palestinians. Really, it would be better if you just shut up and stop trying to ‘help’.
Because the only ones you’re helping are the genocidal Zionists and their imperialist backers.
When I read or hear someone say something like: “We should stop supporting Israel” or even “We need to stop ignoring Israel’s crimes”, my hackles rise somewhat and I ask myself “Who are this ‘we'”?
Are you turning a blind eye? No, you are not. Amy I? Are those who post the crimes of the Zionist state and all the others who have “liked” those posts, or the thousands who have demonstrated in Ireland in solidarity with Palestine? Or those who go on solidarity visits every year, braving Zionist surveillance and traveling under cover? Or the unknown thousands who don’t buy goods produced in Israel, so much so that when supermarkets display avocados from Israel they leave off the country of origin and one no longer sees herbs for Israel on sale in their shops (not in Dublin anyway). No matter the limited effect these actions have, clearly “they” are not supporting Israel and are in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Part of Palestine solidarity march in Baggot Street, Dublin, June 2021 (Photo: D.Breatnach)
This is more than personal protest at being lumped in with the imperialists and their collaborators or even the apathetic in the “we”. More importantly, I am making what I consider to be an essential political point.
I and “we” are not part of the oppressors (nor of the apathetic sections, those who have not yet awoken). To speak in that way is liberalism. It implies that you and I and so many others are part of a society that we order and run and that its rulers represent us. We are not and they do not.
Our society’s managers are representatives of capitalists and worse, monopoly capitalists, whose governing ethos is profit, maximisation of profit and continuation of profit, amen. In pursuit of that they compete with other monopoly capitalists and other monopoly capitalist-run states but also cooperate and collude with them when their interests coincide. Clearly for some substantial time now the interests of the rulers of the EU and other Western capitalist states coincide with those of the USA. And clearly, Israel serves US interests in the Middle East, the only state in that region which is safe from a) socialist revolution and b) take over by anti-imperialist Islamicism.
People in Grafton Street, Dublin (Photo credit: Stephen Collins)
So if WE are in solidarity with Palestine and WE want to see it free, WE must be against Israel. And if WE are against Israel, WE have to be against the USA. And if WE are for that people and against those powers, then WE are on the other side of a line from the Zionists and their local supporters. The greatest help WE can give the Palestinians in addition to expressions of solidarity is to overthrow the imperial powers and their monopoly capitalist allies wherever WE are.
If we think of those rulers as being part of us, as part of “We”, we are ideologically disarmed and unfit to go into battle against them. In that case, the assistance WE can give the Palestinians will be even more limited than that for which we have the potential at the moment.
On October 31st two people died, one known around the world for his cinema roles, Seán Connery, who played James Bond and many better and less well known roles. The other death was that of the Colombian liberal politician Horacio Serpa. No sooner had he died the liberals and NGOs and all the former revolutionaries began to write and comment on the life of Serpa with a script that not even Connery could convincingly play.
So, just who was Horacio Serpa and what was his role in Colombian politics? His body hadn’t time to go cold and they were already rewriting the history of the country. The headline on El Espectador said it all, Remembering an Authentic Liberal. i Of course part of the problem depends on what you understand as a liberal, as in the current times when they talk of liberals and the Liberal Party one can barely recognise that it is and always has been the party of a sector of the Colombian oligarchy, that it is the party that gave us legalised paramilitaries, it is the party of massacre after massacre and of course they talk about it as if it wasn’t Liberal Party that gave us the health reform Law 100 (the liberal senator Uribe was the the speaker to the motion on the law, but the law was a proposal from the entire Liberal Party), nor that it was the party that gave us the infamous economic aperture of 1990.
So, for starts, Horacio Serpa who was the Minister of the Interior, under Samper, a government which deepened the aperture, was a neoliberal politician. In the midst of the political poverty of the current Colombian left, such as statement comes across like a grenade thrown or a burst of gunfire against Serpa’s good name. But, how are we to describe a minister in a neoliberal government as anything else? They say we shouldn’t and part of the problem is there are those who forget who President Samper was and what his government’s policies were. Worse still, they forget their own criticisms of that government. So let’s remind ourselves. Serpa was a neoliberal. Of course, he was a neoliberal speaking out both sides of his mouth, capable of calming the angels whilst defended the devils tooth and nail. A man of the right wing at the service of the oligarchy who with his populist discourse made himself out to be a progressive. Once again, some will say he wasn’t right wing. Is there another type of Minister of the Interior? Not only was he Minister of the Interior under Samper and champion in defending him against accusations of links to drug traffickers, but also he would later be Uribe’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States.
As we are in Colombia and politicians like Serpa are very deft, there is no lack of supposed lefties who will talk about how Serpa helped them. So in order to see what he was really like we should deal with some examples when Serpa did the exact opposite. In his passage through the Procurator General’s office he did nothing for the disappeared from the Palace of Justice. It was not at all surprising given his own role in that. The then Procurator Carlos Jiménez Gómez drew up a report and formerly denounced to
… the House Commission of Accusations President Belisario Betancur and his Minister of Defence, Miguel Vega Uribe for violating the Constitution and the Law of Nations now known as International Humanitarian Law.
The Procurator Jiménez’s denunciation with precise hard-hitting proof in hand was shelved through a motion presented by the representatives Carlos Mauro Hoyos, Horacio Serpa and Darío Alberto Ordoñez, arguing that “it was a typical act of government in the most important area under the remit of the President of the Republic namely to uphold public order and re-establish it wherever it has broken down”.ii
That is Horacio Serpa, the man who ensured that there would be no investigation of the events. A friend and accessory after the fact of criminals. It is worth pointing out that two of those who suppressed the accusation would later hold the office of procurator, Hoyos was the successor to the whistleblower Jiménez Gómez and Serpa then replaced Hoyos and thus the truth was buried underneath the ruins of the palace and the manoeuvres of Serpa and company.
But some claim he was a friend of the workers and an enemy of paramilitaries. Leave aside that he served in governments that actively promoted paramilitaries, those of Samper and Uribe and lets look at when workers reached out to his office to seek protection. After the 1995 massacre of palm workers in San Alberto, Cesar, the workers met with Horacio Serpa who was the Minister of the Interior at the time. In their oral history published in 2018, the workers narrate how Serpa told them “there was nothing that could be done as the paramilitary project was very big, and upon finishing the meeting and when we were heading towards the door he said ‘lads it is best that you be careful, because in this country if you stick your head above the parapet it will get knocked off.”iii Of course, he didn’t want to do anything to protect the workers of the palm company Indupalma, whilst at that exact time both he and his government maintained a military base within the plantation to protect the company’s assets. That is Horacio Serpa, loyal friend of the oligarchy, traitor speaking out both sides of his mouth to the workers, a defender of criminals such as the murderers behind the events of the Palace of Justice and a man capable of placing an entire battalion at the disposition of a company in order to protect it and not lift a finger to protect the workers in that company.
So, on October 31st, one of the greats died who we will remember fondly, with admiration, someone who contributed positively to our lives. Rest in Peace, Seán Connery.
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