And I didn't know they still existed
From the Class War Federation statement on the Lebanon War:
"The left have adopted two approaches.
Firstly, wholesale adoption of the Islamist agenda, cheerleading Hamas or Hezbollah without qualification or criticism. This 'Idiot anti-imperialism', the trademark of today's SWP, says my enemy's enemy is my friend and any criticism of them, no matter how mild, is 'racism, islamophobia, and Zionist pro American warmongering.'
The second approach is slightly more subtle - Hezbollah is fighting back, therefore we must support Hezbollah and the slogan 'we are all Hezbollah' is an act of basic solidarity with those who are fighting back against imperialism - the slogan is compared with the Parisian students who, when Danny Cohn-Bendit was attacked in the bourgeois press as a German Jew, marched through Paris chanting 'nous sommes tout les jiufs allemands!' (we are all German Jews).
This argument is crap - Hezbollah isn't a nationality or a racial epithet, it is a political party/militia, if the slogan really wanted to fit then the SWP should have handed out placards proclaiming 'WE ARE ALL SH'ITE'."
Well, there it is. And I bet you all thought they'd just disappear with the demise of the "hospitalised copper" column.
Actually I never really "got" Class War as an organisation - they never seemed quite to be part of the anarchist millieu proper, nor part of the wider left. And I really did think they'd vanished by the end of the 1990s - I was surprised to see the statement from which the above exerpt was taken.
The ropey "wit" is obviously at the same level it ever was (witness the oh-so-funny pun on "Shi'ite" at the end of the paragraph above), but my question to any sectariana hunters reading this is: are they actually still going or are they just a phantom web presence?
posted by voltaires_priest at
2:24 AM
1 Comments:
They split in the late nineties, when the majority decided that the 'Class War' project had exhausted its usefulness and wanted to move on to other movements. (This led to, amongst other things, the Bradford Conference which brought together hundreds of anarchists in a non-sectarian setting).
A minority, which I understand was centred in London, disagreed with the decision to wind the organisation up and carried on regardless. I always saw them at various libertarian events, so I'm surprised you'd though they had wound up.
Perhaps you've been spending too much time at Speakers Corner? ;-)
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