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WHO IS TARIQ ALI?

by Alex Constantine

Thu Apr 14, 2005 21:51 WHO IS TARIQ ALI? A: TARIQ ALI IS A BBC COMMENTATOR, ALSO A FREQUENT
GUEST AT WBAI AND KPFK, THE AUTHOR OF NUMEROUS
BOOKS AND ARTICLES ON THE AMERICAN SLOUGH OF
FOREIGN POLICY DISASTERS. HE WAS EDUCATED AT
OXFORD AND IS QUITE CAPABLE OF RESEARCHING THE
ROOTS OF FAR-RIGHT POWER BROKERING AND ITS TIES
TO THE SAME CORPORATIONS THAT QUIETLY SUPPORTED
GERMANY'S NAZI PARTY (NOT TO MENTION HUNDREDS
OF DOMESTIC FASCIST FRONTS)YET CLAIMS WITH
COMPLETE CONFIDENCE THAT THE U.S. IS "NOT FASCIST."
STRIKING COMMENT. HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN
FASCISM - GEORGE SELDES, SAYERS AND KAHN,
LINDA HUNT, CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON, MARTIN A. LEE,
MICHAEL PARENTI, MAE BRUSSELL, THE CONTRIBUTORS
TO COVERT ACTION INFORMATION QUATERLY,
TO NAME A FEW - WOULD WRINKLE A BEMUSED
BROW ATTHIS WRONG-HEADED STATEMENT. B: IT'S INTERESTING TO NOTE THAT TARIQ ALI IS A
PAKISTANI, AND THAT HIS UNCLE WAS HEAD OF THE
GENOCIDAL, HEROIN-SMUGGLING, TERRORIST-SUPPORTING
ISI, PAKISTAN'S NOTORIOUS MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
DIVISION, LINKED FINANCIALLY TO ACCUSED
SUICIDE-PILOT MOHAMMED ATTA AND THE
DECIMATION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/
features/feature_tariqali.shtml After graduating, HIS UNCLE, THEN HEAD OF PAISTANI
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, told Tariq's parents to send
him abroad: his radicalism was becoming dangerous
and he risked imprisonment. He came to Britain and
studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at
Exeter College, Oxford.
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C: TARIQ ALI WAS A JOHN KERRY SUPPORTER, AND
HIS HOLLOW ARGUMENTS DREW THE IRE OF MANY
LIBERALS AND MOST ESPECIALLY HIS FELLOW SOCIALISTS:
Was the vote for Bush a vote for war? by Joe Auciello Leading up to the 2004 presidential election, some
prominent figures on The left, including Tariq Ali,
author of "Bush in Babylon" and an editor of
New Left Review," urged the defeat of George Bush.
Ali¹s voice was a surprising addition to the
"Anybody-But-Bush" crowd. As a socialist, Ali would
have been expected to call for a political Break from
the Republicans and Democrats and in favor of an
independent, working-class perspective. But Ali and
many other left-wing opponents of President Bush
election campaign argued that a vote for Bush would
be seen throughout the world, especially by Arab nations,
as a vote for the U.S.-led war in Iraq. According to this argument, a second Bush term would
signal that millions of Americans, for the first time,
declared themselves in favor of the Iraq war, in favor
of attacking a country that had not and could not attack
the United States. It would mean that most Americans,
from workers to "soccer Moms," supported a bloody,
brutal imperialist conquest and occupation. In an October radio interview, Ali explained, "This is what I
constantly say when I¹m in this country to people on
the left: Look, you have a responsibility to the rest of
the world as well. This is no time to fool around. Do not
mimic the imperial rulers of your country and think
exclusively about yourselves and your own interests,
whatever these may be. "Just look at the situation globally and ask yourselves
this: How would a defeat for George W. Bush be seen
in the rest of the world? I am 100 percent confident
his defeat would be seen as a victory. "To say that Bush
shouldn¹t be defeated is to underestimate the loss of
Iraqi lives and the loss of American lives in this conflict.
You have To vote against Bush, which means behaving
politically and maturely and Voting for Kerry."
(The entire interview is available on-line in audio at
www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#041028.) It is hard to imagine a younger Tariq Ali, leader of the
Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in Britain, urging a vote
for Democratic Party presidential candidates
Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and George McGovern
in 1972 on the grounds that a Democratic electoral
victory would have been seen by Vietnam and the rest
of the world as a victory for the Vietnamese revolution. Instead, Ali called for "struggle against imperialism
abroad, struggle against capitalism at home"
("The Extra-Parliamentary Opposition," in
Tariq Ali, ed., "The New Revolutionaries,"
William Morrow & Co., Inc., New York, 1969). Another prominent "Anybody But Bush" supporter,
feminist columnist Katha Pollitt, agreed with Tariq
Ali opinion that a vote for Bush meant a vote for war.
In an article entitled "Mourn," she lamented Kerry defeat
and suggested, "Maybe this time the voters chose what
they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war"
(The Nation, Nov.22, 2004). In this view,
the 2004 election was an implicit, if not overt,
referendum on the Iraq war. Bush victory, then,
would be a mandate for continued hostilities.
But is this belief, in fact, true? There is good
reason to think it is not. First, it is necessary to state the obvious.
In this election, voters Were given no real choice.
Both George Bush and his Democratic opponent,
John Kerry, supported the war. Only minor,
marginal candidates called for U.S.
withdrawal from Iraq. Kerry, who said, "I voted for it the first time before
I voted against it," pledged to fight a better war by
fighting a bigger one. He promised to send more
U.S. soldiers to Iraq and to draw in more support
from U.S. allies in Western Europe. Kerry promises
for a better war were hardly inspirational. The logic of "don¹t change horses in midstream"
favored the Republican president. With no real choice,
voters merely expressed a preference. They pulled
the lever for the genial, friendly-appearing Republican
with the folksy drawl rather than the stiff Boston
Brahman Democrat with the elite accent.
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D: ON ALI'S ARGUMENTS AGAINST
THE NADER CANDIDACY:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/
american_left/TariqAli.htm
"Tariq Ali is urging a vote for the Democrats
because he thinks that There Is No Alternative.
In his own words: "Because that's the alternative. There's no third party"
[NOTE: CONTRAST THIS TRASHING OF RALPH NADER'S
PRESIDENTIAL BID WITH THIS STATEMENT, MADE IN 1971,
CONCERNING AN IDENTICAL SITUATION DURING
ELECTIONS IN THE UK: "At present there exists no
alternative to the Tories which the revolutionary
movement could support. . . The only real alternative
to capitalist politics is provided by the evolutionary
left groups as a whole. Despite their smallness and despite their many failings,
they represent The only way forward." Tariq Ali, 1971,
The Coming British Revolution)] Ali seems to have forgotten that Nader received
2,882,955 votes in 2000, which was 2.74% of the total vote.
While Debs won 6 percent of the vote in 1912, his first
campaign in 1900 yielded a paltry 87,814 votes.
If Nader had the support of the Greens and the liberal
intelligentsia in 2004, it is entirely possible that his
support among the broader population would have
been even larger, especially in light of the elimination
of Howard Dean as an antiwar candidate. Instead,
people such as Doug Henwood, Micah Sifry,
Norman Solomon and Medea Benjamin have
used their intellectual and moral authority to
stampede anybody who would listen into voting
for a candidate who pledges to win the war in Iraq. In a more fundamental sense, Ali's problem is this.
He has become so Far removed from the world of
practical politics that he cannot think strategically,
at least in terms of what Marxists should do. For Ali,
there is no grasp of transition. We are stuck in
mutually exclusive static states. Today and for the foreseeable future obviously,
we have awful Republican Party candidates and
Democrats who are not so awful. In order to prevent
the more awful candidate from taking power, we have
to insure the victory of the less awful. Since somebody
like Ralph Nader will obviously never be able to win a
majority vote, he can only succeed in stealing votes from
the less awful candidate. Missing entirely from this schema is a prescription for
how radical alternatives, especially on the electoral front,
can be created. You are stuck with the minimalist
here-and-now and a maximalist outcome far
down the road when American workers arise from
their slumber and become willing to cast a vote for a
contemporary version of Eugene V. Debs. However,
for Marxists the only question worth addressing is how
to get from the current stage of politics to something
more advanced. As James P. Cannon (the founder of
American Trotskyism and just the sort of figure derided
in Tariq Ali's satire on Trotskyism titled "Redemption")
once put it, "The art of politics is knowing what to do next."
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ALI POOH-POOHS ANY CHALLENGE TO THE ESTABLISHMENT
LINE ON 9/11 AND "THE WAR ON TERRORISM" AS
DIM-WITTED CONSPIRACY THEORY. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:oJDdZSkwrA8J:
www.questionsquestions.net/real_skeptic.html+
tariq+ali%27s+disinformation&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 Most of the endless stream of "analysis" from the
Left or "progressive" side has centered on "terrorism",
posing and answering questions such as "what is
terrorism?" or "why do they hate us?" For example,
the "Marxist" Tariq Ali's critique of events amounts
to pointing out the ineffectiveness of the US military
assault as a method of eliminating terrorism. His main
conclusion seems to be that the US rulers are really dumb;
anybody with half a brain can see that the attack in
Afghanistan will only breed more terrorists! It never
occurs to him that maybe they're not dumb, but have a
different purpose in mind; he takes their propaganda
at face value. And so do most other "critics" of the war.
This is the wrong way to stamp out terrorism! Wage
peace instead! Dispense justice! Be nice! Then "they"
won't hate "us" anymore (and "we" can carry on with
our relentless pursuit of money and goodies like SUVs). Evidently the Left, like everybody else, spends too much
of its time watching TV and reading the newspapers, i.e.,
absorbing propaganda. How else to comprehend why
almost everyone from "liberal" Democrats and
"progressives" to Marxists and anarchists has accepted
the propaganda line of the corporate media and psyops
specialists in the US government: the attacks on
September 11 were planned and carried out by Islamic
Fundamentalist Terrorists, namely Osama Bin Laden
and Al-Qaida, and Caught the US national security
apparatus completely off guard. The fact that no proof
has ever been produced doesn't seem to bother anyone.
And when this lack of proof is pointed out, and all the
innumerable facts and circumstances that cast very
serious doubt on this story are brought up, even
"critics" of the war dismiss these persistent questions
as lunatic "conspiracy" mongering.
. . .
The failure to look hard facts in the face could be fatal,
especially to the Left, which, judging by its response
to this point, doesn't seem to realize that it is one of the
principal targets of the coming global war. . . A huge mass
of evidence suggests that the events of September were
planned and carried out by the same team of "rogue"
secret government planners and operatives who have
wrought so much murder and destruction worldwide for
the last 40+ years: the CIA, the Pentagon,
the National Security Agency and their contractees. - Alex Constantine