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Bali, the left and `anti-imperialism'': is Cold War thinking blinding the left to the fact that its enemy''s enemy is not its friend? (on the eve of war).

Article Excerpt
Were the ASIO raids on the homes of various Australian residents late last year justified? To any self-respecting leftists the answer is instant. Of course not. How could it possibly be otherwise?

Well, I am a leftist and I wrote a critical and comprehensive book about the history of ASIO (Australia's Spies and Their Secrets) and I think the raids were justified.

Not only that, but I believe the September 11 crisis, the Bali bombing, and the responses to those events, including the ASIO raids, have exposed the deep crisis in Left thinking that has been slowly growing for the last decade or more. Essentially what has occurred is an inability to rethink the dynamics of the post-Cold War world and to rely instead on frameworks generated by the Cold War. In this context the significant differences between the legitimate `war on terror' are muddied with the unjustifiable war on Iraq.

Foreign policy, anti-imperialism and the Left

Foreign policy issues and solidarity with anti-imperialist forces have been the foundation-stone for the Left for most of the last fifty years. In the post-war world this view began with Left support for the anti-colonial struggle of dozens of countries against the British, French, Portuguese, Dutch and others. It continued in the 1950s and 1960s when national liberation movements fought in Vietnam, South Africa and a host of smaller countries.

Every one of those struggles was refracted through the prism of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union (and their allies). To both the super-powers, local struggles were not really about local issues but about the Cold War, about the larger conflict. In this context the US supported a string of brutal Latin American dictatorships on the basis that they were firm opponents of communism.

In all of these solidarity struggles an implacable and determined anti-Americanism developed as the key part of our framework through which all major issues of world politics were interpreted. Though hardly anybody supported the Soviet regime or Stalinism, the nature of world politics was conditioned by the centrality of the US-Soviet clash. And our framework of thinking meant that while we said much about the US's appalling foreign policy, we said little about the internal regimes of the USSR and China. Naturally, in my part of the Left, the Communist Party of Australia, we supported Polish Solidarity, we opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and so on. But these were not the issues which got us onto the streets time and again and made our blood boil. The people who made our blood boil were the Americans.

This framework of thinking tended to make us embrace any movement which seemed `anti-imperialist' and submerge criticisms of it. (In the same way, today, some people feel it is letting down the side to point out how monstrous the Saddam Hussein regime really is.) An early lesson for us could have been Cambodia, post-1975. The unthinkable extermination of `political enemies' which Poi Pot's Khmer Rouge carried out is still mind-boggling. These were, after all, fellow Cambodians, who were worked to death or executed in their hundreds of thousands, not some rival ethnic group or outside invader.

At first, the reports of Poi Pot's insanity were simply dismissed by the Left (including this writer) as American propaganda. How could it be otherwise? The Americans had predicted a blood bath in Saigon. It did not happen. Now they were claiming it occurred in Phnom Penh. It took an invasion by the communist Vietnamese (subject to Poi Pot's border raids) to impose `regime change' to convince us. Perhaps because of this, the aberration of Cambodia did not fundamentally disturb our anti-American world view. Indeed, some today still try to `explain' the madness by blaming everything on the American bombing prior to 1975.

As the 1970s and 1980s went by there were...

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