8. What Can We Do?
What do Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, Bashar al-Assad, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have in common? Despite their superficial differences, these are all political leaders who have contempt for human rights and have waged war against democracy. This consensus came clearly into view during Trump’s presidential campaign and in the reactions to his victory. At a conference in Germany in October 2016, white supremacists from Europe and the US, including the KKK, stated that Trump’s campaign represented a win for their movement (Liebelson 2016). During the campaign, Iran’s Press TV repeated Trump’s rants against ‘crooked Hillary’ and the American media as if they were fact (Press TV 2016b). Netanyahu called Trump ‘a true friend of Israel’; Israel’s education secretary said that ‘Trump’s victory eradicated the idea of a Palestinian state’ (Akbar 2016); Assad called him a ‘natural ally’ (The Telegraph 2016).
They are not the only ones to show a reinvigorated contempt for democracy and human rights. A wave of far-right politics has swept the world since the 1990s. What is most alarming is that it has swept along with it a section of the anti-imperialist left, which now joins hands with the right in opposing democratic revolutions. Unless this situation changes, the threat of fascist and totalitarian regimes, which inflict mass incarceration, torture, rape and murder upon their own people as well as other peoples, looms over much of the world. How are we to counter this threat? I want to suggest five ways in which we might begin: (1) pursuing the truth and telling the truth; (2) bringing morality and humanity back into politics; (3) fighting for democracy; (4) bringing internationalism centre stage; and (5) pushing for global institutions to promote human rights and democracy.
Pursuing the Truth and Telling the Truth
In many countries, investigative journalists who try to uncover the truth, such as Anna Politkovskaya, are killed, media are heavily censored, and free access to the internet is blocked; in such circumstances, it is understandable if people give up the struggle to find out what is really happening because it takes too much effort and may be too dangerous. But the situation in the West, according to journalist Peter Pomerantsev (2016b), is far more insidious:
As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no longer matter much in the land of the free. When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.
This ‘don’t care’ attitude to the truth was on display on Trump’s first full day in office, when he and his press secretary lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and denied his previous attacks on intelligence agencies – both easily checkable facts – while his aide Kellyanne Conway defended these ‘alternative facts’ (Baumann and Calderone 2017; Swaine 2017). The cavalier attitude of these politicians is matched by an equal disregard for the truth on the part of other politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens, who not only swallow lies without any scrutiny but repeat and propagate them too. What is most disturbing is that this is also happening on the left. Thus we have Pilger propagating Putin’s lies; Fisk and Hersh repeating Assad’s propaganda; the British Labour Party leadership massively underestimating deaths from Russian bombing in Syria while websites like Counterpunch, Alternet and Jacobin publish articles that do the same; in addition to countless people spreading such falsehoods on social media despite being under no threat of arrest, incarceration, torture or death if they were to try to find out the truth.
So why do they do it? Part of the reason, Pomerantsev (2016b) suggests, might be technology. ‘Instead of ushering a new era of truth-telling, the information age allows lies to spread in what techies call “digital wildfires”,’ he argues. ‘By the time a fact-checker has caught a lie, thousands more have been created, and the sheer volume of “disinformation cascades” make unreality unstoppable. All that matters is that the lie is clickable, and what determines that is how it feeds into people’s existing prejudices.’ But why do those particular lies feed into people’s existing prejudices? One reason – which would also explain why, as a study from Northeastern University showed, people less trusting of mainstream media are more likely to fall for disinformation (Pomerantsev 2016b) – is that social and economic insecurity feeds a retreat into nostalgia and fantasy. Pomerantsev continues,
‘The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness’ wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, ‘but by the proliferation of nostalgias …’ … Thus Putin’s internet-troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet Union; Trump tweets to ‘Make America Great Again’; Brexiteers yearn for a lost England on Facebook; while ISIS’s viral snuff movies glorify a mythic Caliphate. ‘Restorative nostalgia’, argued Boym, strives to rebuild the lost homeland with ‘paranoiac determination’, thinks of itself as ‘truth and tradition’, obsesses over grand symbols and ‘relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding … In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters’. (Pomerantsev 2016b)
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein (2016) has a similar explanation in his speech criticising Trump and the European right for seeking to restore a mythical, ethnically pure past. It is easy to understand why the far right buys into these patent lies, and likewise sections of the white working class of declining imperialist powers, who are nostalgic for the privileges of empire. However, explaining why anyone on the left subscribes to such falsehoods is not so easy. Take, for example, the myth that Obama founded ISIS, which, like the myth that Obama was not born in the US, was peddled by Trump. People like self-professed socialist Glen Ford (2016) of Black Agenda Report, who might be uncomfortable with the patent racism of the latter claim, are quite happy to agree that Obama created ISIS. This is presumably because, as Stanford professor Michael McFaul testifies, ‘Trump’s line that Obama founded ISIS echoes exactly a myth propagated by Russian state-controlled media and bloggers … For years, I have seen posts nearly every day from Russian bloggers suggesting that President Obama founded and continues to fund ISIS. It seems to be one of their standard talking points … Last night, after I posted and refuted what Trump said in Russian, dozens of Russians jumped in to say that Trump was right, and I was wrong’ (cit. Nuzzi 2016).
Another example: When US intelligence analysts determined that Russia had intervened to help Trump win the 2016 election, Russian officials denied the charge, while Trump said, ‘I don’t believe they interfered’ and alleged that the intelligence agencies ‘are the same people that said Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction’ (Walcott 2016). This is such a complex web of lies that it takes an effort to disentangle it. First, even if we discount the intelligence agencies, the evidence that Russian state-owned media and social media were trying to get Trump elected is there for all to see (see Chapter 2). Second, the intelligence agencies did not unanimously say that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. CIA agent Valerie Plame ‘had been involved in finding intelligence that showed Iraq had no active nuclear weapons programme’, while her husband Joe Wilson ‘wrote an article for The New York Times … rubbishing the Bush-Blair claims that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium from Niger. The Bush administration hit out at them by leaking Plame’s identity as a CIA operative, thus ending her career, with Bush retorting that she was ‘fair game’ (Iley 2011).1 Even the document provided by the intelligence agencies said that they lacked ‘specific information’ on ‘many key aspects’ concerning Saddam’s WMD programme and cast doubt on Donald Rumsfeld’s allegation that there was an operational link between Saddam and Al Qaeda (Leopold 2015); as the Chilcot Inquiry concluded, this was not a sufficient basis for waging war on Iraq. It was the governments of the US and Britain which fabricated lies to justify the war, contradicting weapons inspectors who also denied that there was evidence of an ongoing WMD programme in Iraq (Thielmann 2013).
Thus Trump repeats the lies of one president – Putin – who falsely claims that Russia was not supporting Trump in the 2016 US elections and that he is helping Assad to fight terrorists in Syria – while also repeating the lies of another president – George W. Bush – claiming that intelligence reports all said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Given the death and destruction that such lies seek to conceal and perpetuate – almost two million Iraqis and Syrians dead, tens of millions displaced, and both countries devastated – it is imperative to expose them for what they are. One should ask the same questions as in any criminal investigation. Is there consistency between the various stories an actor puts out, or do they chop and change (for example, was MH17 shot down by a Ukrainian plane, or was it shot down by a ground-to-air missile from Ukrainian territory)? Does their story conform with evidence from reliable witnesses (for example, does the Bush administration’s story about Saddam’s WMD conform with reports by weapons inspectors who have reliable information as a result of their inspections)?2 Does visual and forensic evidence contradict their story (for example, the denial of concentration camps in Bosnia in the 1990s)? Do those who are accused of a crime have a motive for committing it?
It is worth looking at a diversity of sources, and not just those that confirm what one already believes, that is to say, one’s existing prejudices. Al Jazeera is anti-Assad, Al-Monitor pro-Assad; but once aware of their biases, one can obtain useful information from both. And for those who are familiar with the Israeli propaganda machine (see Levy 2015), it will not take long to identify the themes that dominate Assadist propaganda, which is so similar that if you substitute ‘Syria’ for ‘Israel’ and ‘the rebels’ for ‘the Palestinians’, the justifications for mass slaughter are identical (Zunes 2016). The main thing is to keep one’s critical faculties awake instead of swallowing fake news in a zombified stupor. At the same time, orientalist prejudices, like the idea that only people in the West have agency or desire democratic rights and freedoms, should be examined and discarded.
Bringing Morality and Humanity Back into Politics
Morality requires standing up for the truth, but it also requires something more: taking sides. One of Janine di Giovanni’s headquotes in her book on Syria (2016) is Howard Zinn’s simple but profound observation in A People’s History of the United States: ‘In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people … not to be on the side of the executioners.’ Nothing sums up the moral degradation of pseudo-anti-imperialists more than their propensity to take the side of the executioners: Milošević, Karadžić and Mladić in Bosnia; Putin in Russia, Ukraine and Syria; Khomeini and Khamenei in Iran, Iraq and Syria; and Assad in Syria. Even where they do not actively take the side of the executioners, they do so passively by opposing any sympathy or help for the victims. Sympathy requires an effort to listen to what the victims are experiencing and saying; instead pseudo-anti-imperialists vilify the people in death camps, the political prisoners undergoing torture, rape and execution, and the men, women and children suffering continuous bombardment and poison gas attacks. They oppose not only the military aid that would help the victims defend themselves, but even the humanitarian aid that would help them to stay alive and the communication equipment that would help them make the world outside aware of their plight. In effect, even if pseudo-anti-imperialists make some token criticism of the executioners, they still assist them to carry on raping, torturing and killing their victims.
Double standards are another symptom of moral degradation: condemning US support for brutal dictators but condoning Russian support for brutal dictators; condemning US military intervention in other countries but condoning Russian military intervention in other countries; and so on. Much of this follows from Stalinist support for Russian imperialism during the Cold War, carried forward by neo-Stalinism into a post–Cold War generation. Double standards underlie the ‘We will oppose only our own imperialism’ stance of some Western anti-imperialist and antiwar groups. Of course, opposing the imperialism of one’s own country is absolutely necessary, but silence about other imperialisms constitutes passive support for them and a refusal to extend solidarity to their victims.
The lack of sympathy among pseudo-anti-imperialists towards innocent victims of other imperialisms and the brutal regimes they back puts a question mark over their sincerity when they express sympathy for the victims of Western imperialism and the brutal regimes they back. How can anyone who feels anguish when Palestinian children are targeted and killed in Gaza not feel anguish when Syrian children are targeted and killed in Aleppo? Such double standards expose the hypocrisy of those who claim to support the Palestinian cause but – like the IRI, Hezbollah, and their supporters – pursue a very different agenda. Unlike them, the Palestinian children in Gaza who protested in solidarity with Aleppo spontaneously identify with the victims (Ma’an News Agency 2016). Unless compassion, kindness, humanity, imagination, sympathy and love are brought back into politics, unless you take the side of the victims and not the executioners, it becomes a completely cynical exercise and you miss the inspiring stories of heroism and altruism that are to be found even in the darkest of times.
Fighting for Democracy
On the issue of democracy, liberal democrats are to the left of many people who call themselves socialists. This is partly a consequence of Stalinism, which represented a complete negation of democracy but also propagated the idea – shared by right-wingers with socialists who are fond of the term ‘bourgeois democracy’ – that democracy is organically linked to capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that during the bourgeois revolutions3 against precapitalist ruling elites or imperial powers, the bourgeoisie needed the support of the popular masses, who put their democratic slogans and demands – like liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, solidarity) – on the agenda. But, as we see from Albert Soboul’s (1977) history of the paradigmatic French revolution, once the bourgeoisie is ensconced in power, it often turns on its erstwhile allies and crushes their democratic revolution. Thus we might say that while a nation-state may be necessary for the development of capitalism (Hobsbawm 1990, 28–30), democracy is not. Democracy is only a result of unremitting struggle by working people demanding the rights to life; to freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly; to equality before the law and equal protection by the law; and to participation in government either directly or through freely chosen representatives. And, even where these rights are won, they can be lost again if a totalitarian or fascist state comes to power.
In other words, bourgeois counterrevolutions almost inevitably follow bourgeois-democratic revolutions, making it necessary for the popular masses to keep fighting for even the limited form of democracy that is compatible with capitalism. And they do. It is a myth that freedom, equality and friendship are exclusively Western values; people around the world have fought for them throughout history. In all the countries examined in this book, they have fought desperately for these values, sometimes against unimaginable odds. The struggle for a democratic revolution may go on for decades under various types of authoritarian capitalist states.
For liberal democrats, the need to engage in this fight is self-evident. Socialists, however, have taken ambivalent stands. Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few who defended it explicitly. In ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1900), she wrote,
If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.
With admirable consistency, she continued to argue for a democratic revolution in Russia and against the imposition of authoritarian rule after the Bolshevik revolution: ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently … Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element’ (Luxemburg 1918). To give up the struggle for these democratic rights and freedoms to be incorporated in the state is to abandon a crucial element of working class struggle; as Nicos Poulantzas (1978, 132) argued, ‘Class contradictions are the very stuff of the State: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization; while the State’s policy is the result of their functioning within the state.’
Luxemburg’s intuition that communism is incompatible with a one-party authoritarian state was ignored by Lenin and Trotsky, and buried by Stalin, who, on the contrary, presided over a regime which identified communism as the rule of a one-party totalitarian state. This conception was conveyed around the world by the Comintern, which imposed Stalin’s policies on its members. Most disastrous, perhaps, was the ‘third periodism’ imposed on the Communist Party of Germany, which, at a time when galloping inflation and unemployment was turning millions of voters towards the Nazi Party, was told to attack the ‘social fascist’ Social Democratic Party instead of forming a united front with it against the Nazis. This helped to create a split in what was then the most powerful labour movement in the world and allowed Hitler to come to power in 1933 (Bois 2015).
Another source of the contempt for democracy displayed by many left groups and parties is the notion that a socialist or communist revolution is made not by the working class – which would need to prepare for it by exercising their democratic rights, as Luxemburg explains – but by a party that claims to speak and act for it. As Martin Grainger (a pen name of Christopher Pallis) observed in his pamphlet on ‘Revolutionary Organization’ in 1961, ‘The Labour Party, Communist Party and the various Trotskyite and Leninist sects all extol the virtues of professional politicians or revolutionaries. All practise a rigid division within their own organizations of leaders and led. All fundamentally believe that socialism will be instituted from above and through their own particular agency. Each of them sees socialism as nothing more than the conquest of political power, and the transformation, by decree, of economic institutions’ (cit. Goodway 2006, 300).
Despite the catastrophic consequences, Stalinists, and even sections of the non-Stalinist left, have never acknowledged the importance of fighting for democracy, nor of defending it when it already exists. We see this failure in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, where ‘none of the Marxist organisations believed in any type of political democracy’ (Behrooz 1999, 159), thus allowing some of them to collude in the establishment of an Islamist theocracy. We see it in their willingness to allow eastern Aleppo’s experiment in democracy (al-Shami 2016; Chouikrat 2016), similar in so many ways to the Paris Commune, to be drowned in blood by Assad’s totalitarian regime backed by Iranian Islamism and Russian imperialism (The New Arab 2016; Sky News 2016b), in a massacre reminiscent of the massacre of the Communards, with pseudo-anti-imperialists cheering on the counterrevolution (Smith 2016c).
The failure of sections of the left to support democratic revolutions and defend democracy where it has been established is all the more dangerous at a time when rising unemployment, insecurity, poverty and inequality has led to widespread disillusionment with the existing order. Liberal democrats may be sincere in their defence of democracy and, to this extent, should be seen as an essential part of the struggle against the extreme right (white supremacist, Islamist or other), but their commitment to capitalism makes them incapable of explaining why workers are losing jobs and getting poorer. Here the role of revolutionary socialists who have a critique of capitalism is indispensable. However, they can play this role if and only if they support all struggles to establish or defend democracy, understanding that socialism and communism are not the negation of democracy but, rather, the extension of democracy to areas – such as production – from which it is excluded under capitalism. If the emancipation of the working classes is to be achieved by the working classes themselves, the democratic revolution cannot be skipped.
Bringing Internationalism Centre Stage
Despite her valuable contribution on the importance of democracy for socialists, Luxemburg failed to realise that even the proletariat of an imperialist country may share the racist ideology of imperialism. This led her to oppose the right to national liberation of the Russian colonies, despite the fact that she was strongly opposed to tsarist imperialism. Partly because she was expecting a Europewide socialist revolution in the near future, she saw only the danger of reactionary forces coming to power in these countries, but not the even greater danger of reactionary forces staging a counterrevolution in Russia; and since she was murdered by the proto-fascist Freicorps in 1919, she did not live to revise her views, which, however, do have valuable suggestions for safeguarding the rights of ethnoreligious minorities.
By contrast, Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky, who in the 1920s had been the chief theoretician of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, had the benefit of hindsight in 1948 when ‘he was reinterpreting a particularly devilish theoretical issue, the national question, whose horrifying actualité had just been demonstrated by Hitler’s infamous policy towards Jews and other “Untermenschen” as well as by Stalin’s less well known, and only somewhat less deadly, policies towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union’ (Himka 1986, 8). Among Rosdolsky’s conclusions was the observation that ‘just as the working class cannot be socialist or revolutionary a priori, neither is it internationalist a priori … Far from being “by nature without national prejudice,”4 the proletariat of every land must first acquire through arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it’ (Rosdolsky 1986, 182–83, emphasis in original).
At the time Rosdolsky was writing, the hard work of acquiring an ‘internationalist attitude’ included the need for workers in imperialist countries to support freedom struggles in the colonies. Today, when independence has led to industrialisation in many former colonies as well as to labour migration from them to former imperialist countries, internationalism must include principled opposition not only to racism and xenophobia against migrant workers, but also a theoretical separation of globalisation (freedom of movement of commodities, money, capital and labour across international borders) from neoliberalism (privatisation of public utilities and public services, attacks on social security and welfare, financial deregulation, pro-corporate clauses in trade agreements, and assaults on workers’ rights and environmental protections), and opposition only to the latter (Hensman 2011, 41–43). Protectionism is justified when an industrialising country is trying to protect its infant industries from competition that would destroy them before they are able to stand on their own feet; there are also isolated cases – like apartheid South Africa and occupied Palestine – where workers of a country themselves may request that other countries refuse to import their products, because such imports support racism and occupation in their own countries. In all other cases, opposition to freedom of movement of commodities and labour across international borders is wrong, because the message it sends is that the workers of other countries, who produce the commodities that are being imported or who come to your country in search of employment, are your enemies. If the imported products are cheaper because workers in these countries are deprived of labour rights, there are various ways to help them to gain those rights, as I have argued elsewhere (Hensman 2011, 320–36). But solidarity with workers of other countries is not a luxury or something separate and distinct from working-class interests: it is an intrinsic element of working-class interests.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks broke with the Second International because its nationalist social-democratic parties backed their own bourgeoisies in World War I, but Stalin reinstated nationalism in the Third International with his doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’; thus, there is a tradition of nationalism among both social democrats and Stalinists. This explains the overt and covert support for Brexit from sections of the left in Britain, whose arguments echoed sentiments from 1971 when ‘national sovereignty’ was defended from the left (see Nairn 1973, 11), despite the racism and xenophobia driving the Brexit campaign. Similarly, opposition by Bernie Sanders to free trade deals on the grounds that they resulted in US workers losing jobs to workers in Vietnam, China and Latin America (OnTheIssues 2016) dovetailed with Trump’s xenophobic campaign to put America first.
These sections of the left failed to counter the economic nationalism of Farage and Trump by failing to tell workers: ‘The workers of Poland, Mexico, China or any other country are not your enemies, they are your class brothers and sisters; neoliberal capitalism is your real enemy, but you will never succeed in defeating neoliberalism, much less capitalism, unless you join together with the workers of other countries.’ They allowed workers to think that keeping out imports and workers from other countries would restore jobs and raise wages in their own, reinforcing the right-wing illusion that national capitalism can solve the problems of unemployment and poverty. The exact opposite is the case. Capitalism is inherently global, and it has become even more so over the past half-century; unless the opposition to it is equally global, capitalism will always win. Globalising the opposition even to neoliberalism, in the first place, requires organising across national borders, which is facilitated by freedom of movement across those borders. Closing borders, as the far right wants to do, only sabotages the struggle against neoliberalism.
By contrast, the transnational Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) offers a ‘Progressive Agenda for Europe’. It rejects both ‘Euro-
reformism’, which cannot counter neoliberalism nor democratise the EU, as well as ‘Lexit’, which willy-nilly strengthens the racist and xenophobic right.5 Instead, as former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (2016) writes it
proposes a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience with which to bring on a surge of democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels … The Left’s traditional internationalism is a key ingredient of DiEM25, along with other constituent democratic traditions from a variety of political projects (including progressive liberalism, feminist and ecological movements, the ‘pirate’ parties etc.)
[…] [O]ne may cheekily ask: ‘Why stop at the EU level? As internationalists, why don’t you campaign for worldwide democracy?’ Our answer is that we do campaign for democracy everywhere and from an internationalist point of view … But, given that history has, for better or for worse, delivered a borderless EU, with common policies on the environment and a variety of other realms, the (by definition internationalist) Left must defend this absence of borders, the existing EU commons of climate change policy, even the Erasmus program that gives young Europeans the opportunity to mingle in a borderless educational system. Turning against these splendid artefacts of an otherwise regressive EU is not consistent with what the Left ought to be about.
Organising against neoliberalism requires freedom of association, a basic democratic right. Supporting – or failing to oppose – totalitarian regimes like the Assad regime, which crush all democratic rights and kill or drive out all opponents, ultimately results in weakening the global opposition to neoliberalism; unless we support democracy in other countries, we will face the right-wing backlash in our own. A moving expression of solidarity with democratic revolutions everywhere is found in a letter from Razan Zaitouneh in 2011, when she received the Anna Politkovskaya award on the fifth anniversary of Politkovskaya’s murder:
Dear Anna Politkovskaya,
I am well aware that this honor, which bears your name, is not merely awarded to me personally but rather to the sons and daughters of Syria, and the 3,000 whose blood was spilled over the past 7 months by the same criminal exclusionary mentality that spilled your own blood.
I am aware that your passion for truth and the defense of human dignity, for which you gave your life, is but a link in a chain that stretches across the world, through individuals and entire peoples, all of whom believe in everyone’s right to live free of oppression, humiliation, and subjugation.
Nonetheless, bestowing this honor on me personally out of all other Syrians assumes another dimension, as it comes on the fifth anniversary of your death. It means a lot to me to receive an award in your name, Anna, as a Russian citizen – even as the Russian government continues to support the Syrian regime, which has been committing crimes against humanity for several months now; crimes that have been documented by international human rights organizations.
This vividly exemplifies that what we share in humanity transcends languages, nationalities, and borders, just as tyranny and corruption share the same essence although they differ in details.
For this very reason I believe the battle for freedom, being fought by Syrians for months now, would bring comfort to your soul: because each step forward towards peace and justice in any part of the world benefits all humanity […]
Just as we are proud, dear Anna, that you found loyal friends who kept your name alive to remind us of who you were, and what you sacrificed for the sake of truth and human rights, I wish I could recite the names of all our martyrs, one by one. […]
And so, Anna Politkovskaya, we continue. We continue in your memory, and in the memory of all the other symbols of truth and freedom in the world, until freedom, justice, and democracy prevail in our Syria and the entire world. (Zaitouneh 2011)
Pushing for Global Institutions
to Promote Human Rights and Democracy
What are the ideas, and the global institutions organised to uphold them, that have been involved in the various struggles for democracy described above, and what is their record?
One key concept is that of sovereignty, believed to derive from the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, which ‘is said to have consecrated the principle of sovereign equality of states, which has been at the core of international law ever since’ (Beaulac 2004). A closer look at the two treaties that constitute the Peace of Westphalia shows, however, that they
do not at all support the traditional position that the Peace of Westphalia constitutes a paradigm shift whereby the political entities involved gained exclusive power over their territories. The two main purposes of the agreements related to the practice of religion and the settlement of territories, not to the creation of distinct separate polities independent from any higher authority. … 1648 cannot legitimately be deemed a turning point in the development of the present state system. Rather, the outcome of the congress constituted nothing more than a step further – even, arguably, a relatively modest one – in the gradual shift from the ideal of a universal overlordship to the idea of distinct separate political entities enjoying full autonomy over their territories. (Beaulac 2004)
If it is true, as Beaulac (2004) argues, that ‘Westphalia constitutes a myth, an aetiological myth, or origin myth’, it is equally true that this myth ‘has represented, as well as indeed created, a new reality, a mythical reality, about the present international state system’. It is important to remember that this myth dates from the seventeenth century, a time when the people of a state were subjects rather than citizens; to apply it unchanged to the twenty-first century is anachronistic. For this reason, there have been attempts to formulate a notion of ‘democratic sovereignty’.
The Charter of the United Nations, which was signed and came into force in 1945, includes notions of both state sovereignty and democratic sovereignty, the rights of states as well as the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals. Thus its preamble begins, ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.’ According to Article 1, the Purposes of the United Nations are:
Article 2.4. says, ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’ (UN n.d.a). This makes sense, and if implemented consistently would have prevented many of the conflicts examined in the foregoing chapters. It certainly would have prevented the US/UK invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which is easily identified as unlawful under Article 2.4. A careful critique of the arguments used to justify the Russian annexation of Crimea shows that it, too, is unlawful under Article 2.4., as it amounts to the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state, namely Ukraine (Balouziyeh 2014); the same could be said of the Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine.
The military intervention of Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi and Russian forces in Syria is a more complicated case because it can be argued that it occurred at the request of the existing head of state who, unlike Yanukovych, had not abandoned his post. But is it lawful for a head of state to surrender the country’s sovereignty to foreign powers in return for retaining a formal role? It can be argued that these interventions were ‘inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’, and specifically with the requirement ‘to achieve international co-operation … in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all’, and also that they compromised the territorial integrity and political independence of Syria. This would make the Syrian struggle for national liberation lawful in terms of the UN Charter’s support for ‘the self-determination of peoples’. If none of these forces, nor the Turkish, nor the US-led coalition forces had intervened, and the Syrian people’s sovereignty had been respected, it is entirely possible that they would have had greater success in solving their internal problems, including dealing with the Islamists unleashed by Assad. Even after the humanitarian catastrophe created by these multiple interventions, respecting ‘the territorial integrity and political independence’ of Syria would require the cessation of all foreign military action and withdrawal of all foreign forces from the country.
The abject failure of the UN to prevent or halt these conflicts, or even to provide humanitarian aid to the civilian populations being subjected to military assault, needs to be explained. We will return to this issue after examining two other strands of international law.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), signed by the General Assembly of the UN on December 10, 1948, is generally seen as the founding document of international human rights law. ‘It represents the universal recognition that basic rights and fundamental freedoms are inherent to all human beings, inalienable and equally applicable to everyone, and that every one of us is born free and equal in dignity and rights. Whatever our nationality, place of residence, gender, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, language, or any other status, the international community on December 10 1948 made a commitment to upholding dignity and justice for all of us’ (UN n.d.b). Its commitment to securing for all human beings the democratic rights and freedoms outlined above, as well as its explanation of the right to freedom of conscience and belief, the right to form or join trade unions, and the right to social security and welfare, affirm that ‘everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized’ (UN n.d.c).
It is often assumed that the UDHR represents a Western notion of human rights and democracy, but this is far from the truth. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee, but there were important contributions from others, including many from the Third World: Ricardo Alfaro of Panama (who proposed the idea and wrote the first draft), René Cassin of France, Hansa Mehta of India (who insisted on the wording ‘all human beings are equal in dignity and rights’ rather than ‘all men’), Charles Malik of Lebanon, Begum Shaista Ikramullah of Pakistan, Charles Romulo of the Philippines, Wahid Rafaat of Egypt, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, and representatives from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, China, Australia, Canada and the UK. Fifty countries voted for the Declaration, none voted against, and Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the Soviet bloc abstained (Sehgal 2014).
The UN Commission on Human Rights (replaced in 2006 by the UN Human Rights Council) had already been established in 1946, periodically compiling human rights reports on member states and investigating complaints. Its procedures involved the participation of human rights defenders and activists from the various countries. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights developed most of the rights enshrined in the UDHR and entered into force in 1976. Together with the UDHR, they comprise the International Bill of Human Rights. In addition, numerous other human rights conventions, declarations and resolutions have been adopted by the UN, covering issues ranging from racial discrimination, torture and enforced disappearances to the rights of women, children, migrants, minorities, people with disabilities, and indigenous people. Together they comprise a large and growing corpus of international law protecting human and democratic rights.
This means that any member state, or any citizen of a member state, is authorised by international law to provide people in other countries with assistance in their struggles for human rights and democracy in the form of funding, literature, education and training, whereas the despots (and their followers) who complain that this constitutes support for regime change have no basis in international law for their pursuit of unbridled power. Indeed, wherever such despots are in power, regime change by the people of the country itself is a democratic right supported by international law. The governments of Russia and China routinely ignore this enormous body of international human rights law when they speak and act as if state sovereignty is the only right protected by international law (and in the case of Russia, even this right has been violated).
A third strand of international law emerges from the codification of the laws of war after the mid-nineteenth century, in the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. What came to be known as ‘international humanitarian law’ dealt with issues like the protection of civilians and their property, and the prohibition of the abuse of prisoners; at first violations were seen as illegal rather than criminal, yet soon these came to be regarded as war crimes. After World War II, Nazi war criminals were tried in Nuremberg by the International Military Tribunal, for which the groundwork was laid by the four major victorious powers (France, the UK, the US and the USSR), each of which also supplied a judge and prosecution team when the trials began on November 20, 1945. The charges included crimes against peace, war crimes, and a new category – crimes against humanity – to take account of the extermination of millions of European Jews. ‘But the Nuremberg Charter seemed to indicate that crimes against humanity could only be committed in time of war, not a critical obstacle to the Nazi prosecutions but a troubling precedent for the future protection of human rights’ (Schabas 2000, 10).
Dissatisfied with this approach, others, including Raphael Lemkin, worked on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948. The General Assembly confirmed ‘that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish’, and defined it as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. As William Schabas explains: ‘By defining an international crime, and spelling out obligations upon States parties in terms of prosecution and extradition, the Convention falls under the rubric of international criminal law’ (Schabas 2000, 5).
The Genocide Convention breaks with the concept of state sovereignty, legally justifying even military intervention if there is no other way to prevent or halt genocide. It certainly justifies arming victims to defend themselves from genocide. The UN Security Council resolution of 1991 – which placed an embargo on the delivery of weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia and thereby prevented Bosnian Muslims from defending themselves against the genocidal assault of far better armed Serb nationalists – did the exact opposite. In Bosnia, the Security Council violated the Genocide Convention by facilitating genocide rather than preventing it.
On the same day that the General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention, it also passed a resolution calling on the International Law Commission, a body of experts named by the UN General Assembly and charged with the codification and progressive development of international law, to prepare the statute of an international court to investigate, prosecute and try individuals – not states – accused of committing the most serious crimes of concern to the international community, namely war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression. The prosecutorial policy was to focus on those bearing the greatest responsibility for the crimes, including those highest up in the chain of command.6 ‘The International Law Commission made considerable progress on its draft code and actually submitted a proposal in 1954. Then, the General Assembly suspended the mandates, ostensibly pending the sensitive task of defining the crime of aggression. In fact, political tensions associated with the Cold War had made progress on the war crimes agenda virtually impossible’ (Schabas 2001, 9), and serious work on an international criminal court was resumed only in 1989. In 1994, the commission submitted a draft statute focused on procedural and organisational matters, and two years later adopted the final draft of its ‘Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind’. These two drafts played a seminal role in the preparation of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, which was also influenced by the rulings of two ad hoc tribunals set up by the UN to deal with the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.
But the Tribunals did more than simply set legal precedent to guide the drafters. They also provided a reassuring model of what an international criminal court might look like. This was particularly important in debates concerning the role of the prosecutor. The integrity, neutrality and good judgment of Richard Goldstone and his successor, Louise Arbour, answered those who warned of the dangers of a reckless and irresponsible ‘Dr Strangelove prosecutor’. (Schabas 2001, 12–13)
In 1995, the General Assembly convened a ‘Preparatory Committee’ (PrepCom), inviting Member states, NGOs and various international organisations to study the International Law Commission draft and propose amendments. This resulted in the active participation of a large number of groups around the world, and significant contributions from them. One of the most significant was that of a diverse range of women’s groups:
Women’s rights activists throughout the world – of every political stripe, faith, sexual orientation, nationality, and ethnicity – mobilized at each step of the International Criminal Court (ICC) process. They have worked to create an independent court to afford women greater protection from violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
Women’s rights activists participated in every major United Nations preparatory meeting on the ICC. They worked to ensure that the range of abuses that happen to women was accurately reflected in the list of crimes over which the ICC would have jurisdiction. They worked to ensure that the rules and procedures governing how the court functions would be responsive to gender-specific crimes.
Activists held in-country workshops to educate other women and policy makers about the benefits of ICC adoption and ratification. They lobbied their home country officials to sign and then ratify the Rome Statute, which outlined the establishment and structure of the ICC. […]
Thanks to women around the world, violence and persecution of women will be treated as the serious criminal and humanitarian law violations that they are. The ICC offers a dramatic and long-awaited improvement in how international crimes against women are treated and greatly increases the possibility for redress. (HRW 2002)
The enthusiastic participation of NGOs and activists in the PrepCom marked a departure from much of the work of the UN. Together with the ‘like-minded caucus’, comprising sixty members of the 160 participating state parties attending the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court convened on June 15, 1998 in Rome, they put forward a conception of the ICC which was, ‘by and large, in conflict with the conception of the court held by the permanent members of the Security Council. The principles of the like-minded were: an inherent jurisdiction of the Court over the “core crimes” of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes (and, perhaps, aggression); elimination of a Security Council veto on prosecutions; an independent prosecutor with the power to initiate proceedings proprio motu; and the prohibition of reservations to the statute’ (Schabas 2001, 15–16).
The final text of the Rome Statute of the ICC was a compromise, adopted on July 17, 1998 by a vote of 120 to 7, with 21 countries abstaining. Iraq, Israel, Libya, China, Qatar, Yemen and the United States voted against, but the Clinton administration eventually signed it on December 31, 2000. The crime of aggression was almost left out, due to lack of agreement on its definition. It was the non-aligned countries as well as the German and Japanese delegations who insisted that aggression remain within the jurisdiction of the Court, and they pursued a compromise according to which aggression would be included as a generic crime, pending the definition of its elements at a later date (Schabas 2001, 26–27). This amendment was enacted at a conference in Kampala on June 11, 2010; it would come into force after thirty states had ratified it (which was achieved in 2016), and a decision to do so was taken after January 1, 2017 by a two-thirds majority of member states (Coalition for the International Criminal Court n.d.).
The definition of genocide closely followed the definition in the Genocide Convention, but the decision to limit the definition to acts intended to destroy ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious groups’ was contested, with suggestions that, for example, social and political groups should be included. However, the final decision was to retain the narrower definition. One drawback is that equally heinous crimes may not attract similar international condemnation. For example, we commonly refer to the ‘Cambodian genocide’, and the scale of killings, incarceration, torture and cruelty perpetrated against the victims makes this appear logical. Yet the majority of victims were from the same Khmer ethnic group as the perpetrators and were targeted not because of their ethnicity, but because they belonged to certain social groups (urban dwellers, intellectuals, etc.), or were politically opposed to the Khmer Rouge. This issue has not been resolved (Schabas 2000, 118–19).
The Cambodian atrocities would fall clearly under the definition of ‘crimes against humanity’ as defined in the Rome Statute, but there is dissatisfaction with this solution because crimes against humanity, although more serious than war crimes, are commonly seen as being less serious than genocide. However, ‘it now seems broadly accepted that genocide inheres within the broader concept of crimes against humanity’ (Schabas 2000, 11), and this provides a better way to look at it: that genocide is one particular crime against humanity, and there are others which are no less heinous. Logically, this requires the UN General Assembly to adopt a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity modelled on the Genocide Convention, using the same definition of crimes against humanity as the Rome Statute. This would provide legal justification for military intervention to prevent crimes against humanity like the slaughter in Aleppo; indeed, there is already strong moral justification for providing the victims with adequate means to defend themselves. The definition of sovereignty in the UN Charter does not allow a state to exterminate a section of its own people; still less does it allow foreign military forces like the Iranian IRGC, Lebanese Hezbollah and Russian military to exterminate hundreds of thousands and displace tens of millions. Such a convention would be better than the rather nebulous and ill-defined ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (ICRtoP n.d.).
One reason for Clinton’s reservations about the ICC was that although the UN Security Council could refer cases to it, it remained independent of the UN, and the prosecutor could proceed with prosecutions based on referrals by member states or on the prosecutor’s own initiative, whereas the US wanted an ICC that was controlled by the UN Security Council, where the US had a veto (Krohnke 2011). For this reason, and fear that it could be used against Americans, the Bush administration effectively unsigned the treaty and attempted to sabotage it, passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which cut off US funding for the ICC, and signing bilateral immunity agreements with other countries guaranteeing mutual immunity from ICC prosecution, under threat of sanctions if they refused. The Obama administration’s relationship with the ICC was more positive, but ASPA was not repealed (Lambert 2014).
Russia had similar concerns and therefore signed but did not ratify the Rome Statute (Kaye 2012). In November 2016, Putin, like Bush, unsigned the treaty after ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda issued a report on the status of her ongoing investigation into Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in eastern Ukraine. The case had been referred to the ICC by Ukraine, which had signed but not ratified the Rome Statute; however, it accepted ICC jurisdiction in 2013. The ICC’s preliminary list of alleged crimes included ‘harassment of the Crimean Tatar population; the killing and abduction of at least 10 people in Crimea; the ill-treatment of individuals who had been detained or abducted in Crimea … the detention of opponents of Russian assimilation of Crimea; killings as a result of armed hostilities in Eastern Ukraine; destruction of civilian objects in Eastern Ukraine; the capture, detention, ill-treatment, torture, and disappearance of people in Eastern Ukraine; and, finally, sexual and gender-based crimes in Eastern Ukraine’. It was in response to this report, as well as an ongoing investigation of crimes committed by Russians in Georgia in 2008, that Putin issued his decree withdrawing Russia from the ICC (Newcity 2016).
The ICC’s independence from the UN Security Council, which these states object to, is seen as the strongest point of the ICC by other states, some of which objected strongly to Article 16, allowing the Security Council to pass a resolution deferring an investigation or prosecution for twelve months. If we see the ICC as part of a world judiciary, its independence would certainly be a requirement from a democratic point of view. There has been a great deal of criticism of the ICC because it has prosecuted mainly Africans; but this is because African countries participated vigorously in its creation and constituted the largest number of states (thirty-four) that signed and ratified the Rome Statute. It seems unfair and it is unfair, but this is a consequence of the limited jurisdiction of the ICC. Its jurisdiction should be wider, covering the nationals and territories not just of members but of all states. Even if in practice it might be impossible to bring to trial nationals of states that do not accept its jurisdiction, it should at least have the power to investigate their crimes and indict them. This change, as well as more states signing and ratifying the Rome Treaty, would make the ICC more effective.
This brings us to the question of why the UN, despite having such an impressive array of human rights laws and principles at its disposal, backed sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children, facilitated the Bosnian genocide, has done nothing to prevent or punish genocidal assaults on Palestinians by the Israeli state, and has done nothing to halt the carnage in Syria or even to provide humanitarian aid to almost a million civilians subjected to starvation sieges by the state and its allies.
Article 2.1 of the UN Charter states that ‘the Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.’ In the General Assembly, therefore, which can be seen as akin to a parliament, all members are equal. However, Article 23.1 says, ‘The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council. The General Assembly shall elect ten other Members of the United Nations to be non-permanent members of the Security Council.’ This introduces an element of inequality. But it gets worse. Article 27 says,
It is the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council that most radically undermines the democratic character of the UN and its ability to carry out its mandate. It means that the permanent members and their protégés (like Israel in the case of the US and Syria in the case of Russia) can commit the most horrific crimes and get away with them because not even a condemnation of them can be passed in the Security Council without being vetoed. And if they are not member states of the ICC, their nationals cannot be prosecuted by the ICC unless they happen to commit their crimes, and get caught, on the territory of a member state. Without that veto power, even if they continued to remain permanent members, the other members could take a decision without them. With it, one member state can block the functioning of the entire UN. So long as permanent members retain their veto power, there can be no equality, democracy or justice in the UN. If the UN is to accomplish the purposes for which it was formed, the veto powers of permanent members of the UN Security Council must be abolished.
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At a time when rising unemployment, insecurity, poverty and inequality are leaving many people disillusioned with mainstream liberalism, it is important for the left to offer a clear alternative that supports all national liberation struggles and democratic revolutions. Neo-Stalinists who actively support Russian imperialism and the far-right despots it sponsors offer no serious alternative, nor do those who fail to oppose Russian imperialism and the despots it sponsors because, in the name of a distorted anti-imperialism, they lose sight of what real democracy and internationalism look like. Thus, we have on one side the menacing growth of the far right, and on the other a disastrously divided band of liberals and socialists. Unless the measures outlined above are taken, the threat of fascist and totalitarian regimes, which inflict mass incarceration, torture, rape and murder upon their own people as well as other peoples, looms over much of the world.