As the world’s capitalist powers rally around the racist French cartoonists (dead and alive) of Charlie Hebdo, they are seizing upon the killings to celebrate the myth of “free speech” [see box] and to intensify racism against Muslims and Arabs. French bosses are using the incidents to push through their version of the USA Patriot Act “to authorize more intrusive surveillance” (New York Times, 1/13/15) — code for a fascist crackdown against protesters and dissenters. As they target small-time Islamic terrorists, the biggest terrorists — the U.S., the European Union, China, and Russia — are maneuvering to gain an edge in their escalating inter-imperialist rivalry. They will exploit the victims in Paris in the cause of nationalism and fascism — and for the bigger wars to come.
The U.S. and European bosses need to win millions of working-class youth to think they are fighting racism by joining the military to fight the Islamic State (ISIS). Their greatest fear is that youth and workers will follow the lead of the rebels in Ferguson, Missouri. That’s the real fight against racism: to confront the bosses’ brutal use of state power and the apparatus (cops, courts, jails) that props them up.
Individual terrorists can never defeat the rulers’ racism. It was the working-class masses in the Soviet Union and China and the Resistance movements that smashed the Nazis and their Japanese fascist allies in World War II. Racism can only be obliterated by mass working-class revolutionary violence. We need to organize tens of millions of workers, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to smash capitalism and build a worker-run society: communism.
In the aftermath of al Qaeda’s latest atrocities, U.S. rulers worked overtime to obscure the main source of violence: capitalist competition over oil and gas. In reality, the assaults in France stemmed from two related factors. Al Qaeda (along with rival ISIS) aims to seize Middle East energy riches from U.S. and allied control by force, including terror attacks in the West. Meanwhile, the long, vicious history of French imperialism’s anti-Arab/Muslim racism spurs on the terrorists, helping al Qaeda and ISIS recruitment efforts. But you wouldn’t know any of this by reading Foreign Affairs (1/7/15), the journal of U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR):
The death toll makes this week’s attack the most significant on French soil since the Nazi occupation — a huge milestone in al Qaeda’s campaign against the West. It is part of a long line of plots to kill media figures for their symbolic value in the West as paragons of free speech and to some Muslims as examples of the evil of secularism.
French Rulers Murder 600 Muslims
The CFR, like virtually all the rulers’ media outlets, are ignoring the far deadlier government-led massacre of Arab workers in Paris on October 17, 1961. Only Robert Fisk of the (London) Independent (1/9/15) made the obvious connection:
Algerians had long provided the majority of France’s Muslim population and in October 1961 up to 30,000 of them staged a banned independence rally in Paris — in fact, scarcely a mile from the scene of last week’s slaughter — which was attacked by French police units who murdered, it is now acknowledged, up to 600 of the protesters.
Terrorists, as bloody as they are, can never match the lethal power of a threatened capitalist state. In 1961, cutthroat French rulers were trying desperately to hang on to an African empire that generated super-profits from super-exploitation of Black, Arab and Muslim workers. The French imperialists engaged in mass savagery in Algeria, their former colony, killing tens of thousands who were fighting exploitation.
Today’s embattled U.S. imperialists kill millions — 3 million in Iraq alone — in their Middle East energy wars as they ramp up for broader conflicts with China and Russia. U.S.-led forces more than doubled the Charlie Hebdo body count one week earlier, when their rockets wiped out 25 Afghan civilians (New York Times, 1/1/15). The victims were celebrating a wedding in Helmand province, along the route of a proposed but much-delayed, U.S.-dominated TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline.
The media’s big lie is their focus on Islam as a source of terrorist violence. While oppressed rank-and-filers may in fact be won to jihad as a form of rebellion against the West, profits matter more than the Prophet (Mohammed) to the chiefs of al Qaeda and ISIS. Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden came from a billionaire, non-royal Saudi family shut out of the state-owned Aramco’s multi-trillion-dollar oil holdings. His 1996 declaration of holy war on the U.S. was keyed to a demand to dethrone the reigning Saud family and expel “American occupiers” from the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. A 2004 bin Laden message to believers targeted ExxonMobil and Anglo-Dutch Shell, Aramco’s biggest partners:
One of the main causes for our enemies’ gaining hegemony over our country is their stealing our oil; therefore, you should make every effort in your power to stop the greatest theft in history, which is being carried out through collaboration between foreigners and [native] agents… Focus your operations on it [oil production] (Quoted by Middle East Media Research Institute, 12/30/04).
As for ISIS, which has ties to the Paris kosher market attack, its oil profit motive couldn’t be more blatant. Like al Qaeda, the top tier of ISIS unites Islamic energy barons in search of state power. ISIS operates on oil revenues from fields and refineries grabbed in Iraq, resources that the U.S. war machine was supposed to secure for Exxon.
Anti-Immigrant Racism Riding High in France
France is fast becoming an ever more virulent bastion of racism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Muslim scarves and other religious garments are banned in public schools. Marine Le Pen’s National Front led the voting in recent elections, with an ultra-racist platform directed against Black and Arab/Muslim immigrants from North Africa.
The French fascists tie immigration to rising unemployment, the highest in decades. They hide the true source of joblessness, which is built into the cyclical boom and bust of capitalism. Many immigrant workers are segregated into ghettoes surrounding Paris and other big cities, victims of joblessness and slum housing. Their living conditions are similar to those facing Black and Latin workers in the U.S.
Anti-immigrant attacks are spreading throughout the European Union. In Dresden, Germany, pro-Nazis organized an anti-immigrant demonstration of 18,000. The 40 capitalist state leaders, the ruling-class servants who turned out for a photo-op at the mass demonstration in Paris, all represent countries that routinely torture innocents. Charlie Hebdo serves the liberal rulers’ purposes by dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims. The magazine’s disgusting cartoons evoke Nazi caricatures of Jews in the 1930s, a classic tool for a ruling class bent on war. Charlie and Charlie-inspired cartoons now appear in “respectable” U.S. publications. As mosques are attacked in France, major U.S. corporations are donating funds to this rampantly racist magazine.
Only Communist Revolution Can Eliminate Racism
Racism can be fought and crushed only by smashing capitalism, which depends on racism for super-profits and uses it to divide the working class. The goal of PLP is to destroy the profit system and its bosses, and to rid the world of unemployment, poverty, racism, sexism and imperialist war.
Building such a movement means spreading communist ideas in every organization: shops, unions, community groups, churches and especially the military. Rank-and-file soldiers, Marines, and sailors must be won to turn their guns around and direct their fire at their generals, who lead the rulers’ wars for profit. These workers must be won to unite with their sisters and brothers throughout the world.
Join and build a mass PLP!