Trotsky on the League of Nations

[Kez]

In most cases u can change LeagueofNations for UN in the article. Very good, proving we should have had any hope in the UN from the start.

http://www.marxist.com/Theory/league_of_na...ns_trotsky.html (http://www.marxist.com/Theory/league_of_nations_trotsky.html)

im gonna cut and paste the most important bits for those lazy fuckers out there ;)
although id advise u to read it, its not tha long.

comrade kamo

[Ian]

Although I have done this before, I will post my favourite article (the one you provided is now 2nd Kamo, thanks) on the dynamic and function of the United Nations

Tariq Ali on the `United Nations of America'
BY TARIQ ALI

The emergence of a mass anti-war movement shows a complete distrust of official politics. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the London Financial Times crowed that it would finish off the anti-capitalist movement. No such luck, gents. The opposite has happened. A new generation has realised that the politicians who preach neoliberal economics at home are the same people who make wars abroad, and for the same interests. How could it be otherwise?

In Britain, a majority is opposed to the looming war. It is the first war situation since Suez in 1956 in which there are more doves in the UK than hawks. Then, the Labour Party and its leader Hugh Gaitskell came out against the invasion of Egypt. This time, the anti-war movement confronts a virtually uniform House of Commons. Both front benches are united.

However, the British peace movement has a soft underbelly. According to opinion surveys, a war that is unjustifiable if waged by US President George Bush and British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair alone becomes acceptable to a large majority (more than 60%) if sanctioned by the “international community” (i.e. the UN Security Council).

Is it? This level of confusion raises a number of questions about the UN today. Who does it represent? Does it matter anymore? Do its resolutions carry any weight if opposed by the US, as has repeatedly been the case with Palestine and Kashmir? And does membership of the Security Council reflect the realities of today's world?

Unipolar world
In the absence of a countervailing power since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has been able to impose its model of economics, politics and culture on the world at large.

International organisations such as the UN and its ill-fated predecessor, the League of Nations, were created to institutionalise a new status quo, one arrived at after two bloody conflicts — the first and second world wars. Both organisations were founded on the basis of defending the right of nations to self-determination. In both cases their charters outlawed pre-emptive strikes and big-power attempts to occupy countries or change regimes. Both stressed that the nation states had replaced empires.

The League of Nations was unable to resist Italian dictator Mussolini's imperial ambitions. The institution collapsed soon after the Italian fascists occupied Ethiopia.

The UN was created after the defeat of fascism. Its structures reflected the new order. Its charter expressly prohibits the violation of national sovereignty except in the case of “self-defence”. However, despite the presence of the Soviet Union, the UN was unable to defend the newly independent Congo against Belgian and US intrigue in the 1960s or to save the life of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. And in 1950, the Security Council took advantage of a temporary Soviet boycott to authorise a US war in Korea.

Under the UN banner, the Western armies deliberately destroyed dams, power stations and the infrastructure of social life in North Korea, plainly in breach of international law. The UN was also unable to stop the US war in Vietnam. Its paralysis over the occupation of Palestine has been visible for over two decades.

This masterly inactivity was not restricted to Western abuses. The UN was unable to act against the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) or the Warsaw Pact's entry into Czechoslovakia (1968). Both big powers were, in other words, allowed to get on with their business in clear breach of the UN charter.

But then there was one. In the unipolar world of today, with the US as the dominant military-imperial state, the Security Council has become a venue for trading, not insults, but a share of the loot. The Italian theorist most feared by the fascists of the last century predicted this turn of events with amazing prescience.

“The `normal' exercise of hegemony”, wrote Antonio Gramsci, “is characterised by the combination of force and consent, in variable equilibrium, without force predominating too much over consent”. There were, Gramsci elaborated, occasions when it was more appropriate to resort to a third variant of hegemony, because “between consent and force stands corruption-fraud, that is the enervation and paralysing of the antagonist or antagonists”.

Here we have an exact description of the process used to buy French and Russian support at the UN Security Council for resolution 1441, as was made clear by a remarkably straightforward front-page headline in the October 4 Financial Times: “Putin drives hard bargain with US over Iraq's oil: Moscow wants high commercial price for its support.”

No shelter for the weak
European allies shuffle their feet at excessive US “unilateralism” — essentially, discomfiting failures to consult, which serve as a cover for European subordination. China and Russia bargain weakly in return for their favours in the Security Council. If these are not forthcoming, action is taken anyway.

The UN offers no shelter to the weak against the soldiers of infinite justice or the bombs of enduring freedom. There are 189 member states of the UN. There is, according to US defence department figures, a US military presence in 120 countries today. The United Nations of America?

The UN has, in the past, created organisations such as UNESCO and the World Health Organisation, which have benefited the world. But in these days of neoliberal governance, it is an ethos of consumption, rather than well-meaning social welfare organisations, that rules the roost.

The world has changed so much over the last two decades that the UN has become an anachronism, a permanent fig leaf for new imperial adventures.

The last UN secretary-general to be elected with only one vote against (from the US) was removed after he insisted that the Rwandan genocide needed intervention (US interests required a presence in the Balkans instead). Madeleine Albright, the then US secretary of state, demanded and obtained the removal of the man who had dared challenge the imperial will — Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He was replaced by the current incumbent, Kofi Annan, a weak and pathetic placeman, whose sanctimonious speeches may sometimes deceive an innocent British public, but not himself. He knows who calls the shots. He knows who provides the song-sheet.

The League of Nations collapsed after the “pre-emptive” strikes carried out by Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler used to argue that his invasions were provoked by the threatening attitudes of nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, etc. Mussolini defended his invasion of Albania by arguing that he was removing the “corrupt”, feudal and oppressive regime of King Zog and newsreels showed grateful Albanians applauding the entry of Italian troops.

The actors have changed, but the script remains the same. And if the Security Council green lights the invasion and occupation of Iraq (as it is bound to do), then the UN too will die a long overdue death.

In the meantime the anti-war movement must explain patiently why a UN-backed war would be as immoral and unjust as the one being plotted in the Pentagon. That is because it will be the same war, give or take a few of Chirac's mercenaries.

[Ian]

Quote: from Ian Rocks on 10:28 am on May 28, 2003
The world has changed so much over the last two decades that the UN has become an anachronism, a permanent fig leaf for new imperial adventures.

This is probably the most pertinent point in the article


For a really good view on pacifism read 'The Question of Peace' by Lenin (July-August 1915), I will post some quotes from that soon

[Ian]

The Question of Peace
V.I. Lenin

The present war has been engendered by imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of capitalism.

The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists, as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised “defence of the fatherland”in the meaning implied by those aims, and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the oppressed.

The war of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has turned reactionary. With both groups of belligerents, this war is a war of slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war for the repartitioning of colonies, for the “right”to oppress other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the part of both warring groups, all talk about “defence of the fatherland”is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the victory of any one group nor a return to the status quo can do anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the freest.

In reality, the “defence of the fatherland”slogan in the present war is tantamount to a defence of the “right”of one’s “own”national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations; it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a negligible section of the workers and their “own”national bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists, social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining governments, of Burgfrieden,[1] and the like, is a betrayal of socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the “peaceful”, period which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the proletariat’s movement for liberation. The working class cannot achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism (the majorities in the Social-Democratic parties of France, Germany and Austria; Hyndman, the Fabians and the trade unionists in Britain; Rubanovich, Plekhanov and Nasha Zarya in Russia, etc.) and the so-called Centre, which has surrendered the Marxist stand to the chauvinists.

Unanimously adopted by socialists of the entire world in anticipation of that very kind of war among the Great Powers which has now broken out, the Basle Manifesto of 1912 distinctly recognised the imperialist and reactionary nature of that war, declared it criminal for workers of one country to shoot at workers of another country, and proclaimed the approach of the proletarian revolution in connection with that very war. Indeed, the war is creating a revolutionary situation, is engendering revolutionary sentiments and unrest in the masses, is arousing in the finer part of the proletariat a realisation of the perniciousness of opportunism, and is intensifying the struggle against it. The masses’ growing desire for peace expresses their disappointment, the defeat of the bourgeois lie regarding the defence of the fatherland, and the awakening of their revolutionary consciousness. In utilising that temper for their revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from considerations of the defeat of their “own”country, the socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and freedom for the nations.

The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of socialists, while making use of every means of the working class’s legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this immediate and most important task, develop the workers’ revolutionary consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle, promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible to turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.