First of all, I do not condemn it because I had nothing to do with it. No one on the left did. It is not my responsibility. The racist oppressors create the conditions for people to be driven to terrorist acts; it is shameful that so many on the left find that they have any need to apologize for what is clearly another's doing.
And yeah, I can give you the usual spiel about how Marxists do not support terrorism, and I can link to Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism and tell you how crazy* and radical the attackers are. I can do all the things that every other leftist has been doing. On the face of it, it would be true. But the truth is contextual: it is true that Islam, as a religion, just like any other religion, is reactionary and oppressive; but to write an article about that in the context of a worldwide racist campaign against Muslims is to play into the hands of the racists. That's how most of the left is nowadays, though: cowardly and desperate to pander to white racism and Islamophobia.
*Gotta love equating mental illness with violent terrorism, right?
This is in stark contrast to the classic Marxist attitude, as expressed in Trotsky's Grynszpan approach. Just over 76 years ago, in the same Paris, France, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan assassinated a Nazi diplomat. The assassination served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, and Grynszpan was attacked by the Stalinists as a Trotskyist provocateur. Trotsky replied:
"All the more revolting in its police stupidity and inexpressible violence is the campaign now being conducted against Grynszpan by command of the Kremlin in the international Stalinist press. They attempt to depict him as an agent of the Nazis or an agent of Trotskyists in alliance with the Nazis. Lumping into one heap the provocateur and his victim, the Stalinists ascribe to Grynszpan the intention of creating a favorable pretext for Hitler’s pogrom measures. What can one say of these venal “journalists” who no longer have any vestiges of shame?...
The Stalinists shriek in the ears of the police that Grynszpan attended “meetings of Trotskyites.” That, unfortunately, is not true. For had he walked into the milieu of the Fourth International he would have discovered a different and more effective outlet for his revolutionary energy. People come cheap who are capable only of fulminating against injustice and bestiality. But those who, like Grynszpan, are able to act as well as conceive, sacrificing their own lives if need be, are the precious leaven of mankind."
How different from the common left sentiment of our days.
As usual with analogies, it is easy to find differences and use them to discredit the analogy altogether. The first will probably be that while Grynszpan was a Jewish youth who wanted vengeance against those who forced his family into a miserable life as stateless refugees in Poland, the men who carried out the attack on Charlie Hebdo were terrorists. This distinction without a difference is again steeped in racism, as if there is any doubt that those who join Islamist groups are generally motivated by a desire to strike back against imperialist criminals in some way, without having a revolutionary organization that would appeal to them. The fact that so many French Muslims find themselves forced into the arms of a group like Al-Qaeda (which is the group that the attackers apparently associated with, not ISIS) is a crushing indictment of the French left, which has either equivocated or fully supported French imperialism's aggression, most recently in Mali and the Central African Republic.
The other one will probably be that while Ernst vom Rath was a Nazi diplomat, those who were killed in the attack were journalists and caricaturists. To answer that argument, let me put into perspective what sort of journalists we are talking about:
This is the sort of "satire" that Charlie Hebdo is known for. With a few details changed - as one caricature shows, not that many - these caricatures would not be out of place in Der Stürmer. Leftists who appeal to international law and other such bourgeois institutions would do well to recall that Julius Streicher himself was rightly accused of crimes against humanity for his role as a propagandist for the extermination of the Jews and German aggression:
"... For his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as 'Jew-Baiter Number One.' In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution. ... Streicher's incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity."
And what are the people who produced the above caricatures but little Julius Streichers?
I do not support the attack. I think it will backfire, and I think people who, as Trotsky said, are capable of "sacrificing their own lives if need be" would be better saved for the work of building a revolutionary party to overthrow class society. At any rate, Communist revolutionaries would not behave this way. But when the official communists, socialists and other leftists look the way they are, who can be at all surprised that hatred of imperialist racists is manifested in this way?
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