BY SHUDDHABRATA SENGUPTA
The record of the twentieth century is ample illustration of how yesterday's victims, turn into tomorrow's aggressors. All terrorists are state terrorists. They act in the name of existing or desired states. Conversely, I would also aggree that all states are terrorist states. I am not for a moment suggesting that we try and weigh whether the Taliban or the Northern Alliance are preferable to each other. Or whether Saddam Hussain (who massacred all the leftists of Iraq even as they sang his praises) can be considered as an ally against imperialism.They are all shades of each other ... Capital demands wars, and violence on a global scale, just as much as it desires the peace and quiet of the graveyard. In the confusion of fluttering national flags, flags of faith, and flags of states aborted and still born, let us not lose sight of the cold calcualations of money and profit that are made on all sides in times of war and peace (is there a difference any longer anyway) ... The miltiants of national liberation, and jehadis, are just as happy to milk the global financial system by speculating on the stock market. as are the managing directors of Exxon corporation. On occasion, they even do business and set up joint ventures with men in suits who can be seen on television in finance programmes and heading the boards of respectable transnational corporations and public sector monopolies. No national liberation movement anywhere, no jehadi group known to human history has ever been heard to call for an abolition of wages, or of capitalism, or of the market or of the state. They want their market, their state, and the ability to determine wages for work on their terms. They want to overthrow evil jewish-christian- hindumuslim- black-white-brown- yellow regimes and replace them with their own jewsih-christian-hindu- sikh- black-white- brown-yellow regimes. And leftists everywhere will sign petitions in their behalf and congratulate themselves on the impeccability of their anti-imperialist credentials. And then leftists everywhere will rot in the prisons of their own making. Perhaps it is time we all returned to a dispassionate examination of capital, and remember a young man who once wrote in the wake of the rising tide of nationalism in 1845 the following pithy comment - about the citizenship of the graveyard: "The workers of the world have but one country - and that is six feet under the ground" Perhaps it is time to reflect on this phrase yet again, and to transpose funeral pyres for graves and see how the phrase reads today: "The workers of the world have but one country and that is made of the ash of the aftermath of explosions".
We can enter this country anywhere, we can see its citizens in the ash covered survivors of September 11, in the to-be-reduced-to-ashes people of Afghanistan, in the ashen sullenness of children in Iraq and in the blood and ashes in Kashmir. We can see the ashes falling like flakes in front of our eyes. It makes us sick and tired and humiliated, everywhere. Let us not weigh today the fragile chance of solidarity of all those who are humuliated, of those who have no estate, anywhere, be it in Jackson Heights or in Jalalabad - against the questionable record of the naton state in human history. Is it time, then, for the last international? And time to leave our dreams and nightmares of statehood behind. And time to conceive of "Internationalism" not as the alliance of nations, but the coming together of people who find themselves, outside, the mind frame of the nation state, or of civilisational and cultural certainties.
shuddha@sarai.net [Reader-list] on the word »imperialism« Wed, 3 Oct 2001 13:42:07 +0530
