Chomsky interview: full transcript

Professor Chomsky, it’s great to meet you. You were the first to really open my eyes to the reality of class power on a global scale and for that I’m very grateful. But I also take to heart your injunction to hold public intellectuals to account, so I hope to do a little of that today as well.

Firstly, on Libya, a few days before the NATO bombing started, you were interviewed on the BBC. You said you thought the rebellion was “wonderful”; you claimed that it was “initially non-violent” and you called the rebel takeover of Benghazi “liberation”. Now that groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are reporting that the rebels were armed from the very first day of the uprising  and have been rounding up and executing innocent African migrants and black Libyans in droves ever since, do you feel ashamed of your public support for them in those crucial days before the NATO aggression began?

“No. I mean, what Amnesty International reports I am sure is correct, that there were armed elements among them, but notice they didn’t say that the rebellion was an armed rebellion; in fact the large majority were probably people like us [sic], middle class opponents of Gaddafi. It was mostly an unarmed uprising. It turned into a violent uprising and the killings you are describing indeed are going on, but it didn’t start like that. As soon as it became a civil war, that happened. In fact, right now at this moment NATO is bombing a home base of the largest tribe in Libya – Libya’s a tribal country. Benghazi is not Libya, its separate from the country, quite separate in fact, historically. Now they’re bombing the base of the largest tribe, it’s not getting reported much, but if you read the Red Cross reports they’re describing a horrifying humanitarian crisis in the city that’s under attack, with hospitals collapsing, no drugs, people dying, people fleeing on foot into the desert on foot to try to get away from it and so on. That’s happening under the NATO mandate of protecting civilians. That’s something we should think about it. And if we want to talk about Libya, we should remember that there were two interventions, not one, by NATO. One of them lasted about five minutes. That’s the one I was thinking about, the one that was taken under the UNSC resolution 1973, which actually came after that discussion, and that one called for a no fly zone over Benghazi when there was the threat of a serious massacre there, and the longer term mandate of protecting civilians, and that one lasted almost no time. Almost immediately, not NATO but the three traditional imperial powers, France, Britain and the United States carried out a second intervention which had nothing to do with protecting civilians and certainly wasn’t a no fly zone, but was participation in a rebel uprising, and that’s the one we’ve been witnessing. You can think what you like about it, but it’s almost isolated internationally. Libya’s an Adfrican country and the African countries are strongly opposed – they called for negotiations and diplomacy from the very beginning. The main independent countries – the BRICS countries – they had a major meeting right during this and again opposed the second intervention and called for efforts at negotiations and diplomacy. Even within NATO’s limited participation outside of the triumvirate, in the Arab world – almost nothing – Qatar sent a couple of planes, Egypt next door, very heavily armed, didn’t do a thing, Turkey held back for quite a while, and finally participated weakly in the triumvirate operation. So it’s a very isolated operation. They claim that it was under an Arab League request - that’s mostly fraud. First of all the AL request was extremely limited and the AL participation was a minority, mainly just Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They issued a request for a no fly zone – actually two no fly zones – one over Libya, the other over Gaza. We don’t have to talk about what happened to that one. And after that, it kind of backed off(?)

Q2: But nevertheless it seems like you say that the attacks on black Libyans and migrant workers happened later o., but actually its been documented that50 African migrants were executed on the second day of the rebellion, February 18^th.

The rebels, the armed rebels?

Yes.

They were a part of the uprising, but they weren’t the uprising.

But nevertheless, this has been something that has really characterised a large,  significant chunk of the uprising

In the West, where it was taken over by the Western tribes – not Benghazi - there have been serious attacks against black Libyans and black migrants. That’s basically what there is of a Libyan working class. Like other oil dictatorships, there’s not much of a working class, but there was is very substantially black, and they’ve been under attack, that’s true.

But what I’m saying is that when you were doing this interview at crucial moment before NATO’s aggression, these things were already clear.

These things were absolutely not clear, and they weren’t reported, and even afterwards when they are reported, they’re not talking about the uprising, they’re talking about an element within it, which we now know is correct.

But it’s quite substantial

NOW it is.

And Jabril has given his support to the ethnic cleansing of Tawarga

Now it is, but that wasn’t

So this is not a minor sect within the rebellion

You’re talking about what happened after the civil war took place and the NATO intervention.

And on the second day of the uprising, long before the NATO intervention

Two points, which I’ll repeat. First of all, it wasn’t known and secondly it was a very small part of the uprising. The uprising was overwhelmingly middle class nonviolent opposition. We now know there was an armed element and that quickly became prominent after the civil war started. But it didn’t have to, so if that second intervention hadn’t taken place, it might not have happened.  

But surely it was clear that UNSC 1973, from the beginning when Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama were pressing for it, that it was only ever going to be a figleaf for an invasion, surely that was clear.

You’re talking about things that happened after the interview, even the resolution, and it wasn’t clear, even for those five minutes that the imperial powers accepted the resolution. It became clear a coupe of days later when they immediately started bombing in support of the rebels. And it didn’t have to happen. It could have been that world opinion, most of it – BRICS, Africa, Turkey and so on - could have prevailed.

I wanted to touch on an article you wrote, published on 4^th April. In the past you’ve been very critical of intellectuals who have used their platform to focus on the real or alleged crimes of official enemies rather than on the crimes of their own government. But in this article, you focussed mainly on the alleged crime of Gaddafi in the nineties, that’s how it opened, when this a few weeks into the aggression when NATO had already killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands…

You remember how the article started?

Yeah

How did it start?

By talking about Gaddafi’s alleged involvement in Sierra Leone.

No, it didn’t start like that. It started talking about US and British support for Gaddafi’s crimes, practically up to the moment of the invasion. It talked about an article which appeared in the London Times about the Sierra Leone tribunal – that’s how it started – right at the time of this article, the prosecution had rested in the Sierra Leone tribunal and a London Times reporter had interviewed the prosecution lawyers, an American Law Professor and an English barrister – and they complained bitterly, they said that they had wanted to prosecute Gaddafi because of his training and arming of Taylor forces that they’d charged with killing about a million people, but Britain and the US according to them threatened to defund the tribunal if they went after Gaddafi and when the American law professor was asked by the reporter why, he said “welcome to the world of oil”. That was the opening of the article, then it went on to talk about the involvement of the Harvard Business School in support for Gaddafi – writing the dissertation for his son, which led to the (lawsuit, early) retirement and so on. And he did commit – he was a terrible person in my view, he committed plenty of crimes, and some of the worst of them were supported by the US and Britain right up to the moment when they decided they could do better by turning against him. That’s what the article was about and I think it’s right to write about that.

Surely, at the moment of this NATO colonial aggression, surely focussing – albeit on US and British support for Gaddafi’s crimes – focussing primarily on the evils of the Gaddafi regime is to a certain extent playing into hands of – even manufacturing consent for – the aggression.

Supporting – pointing out the – I don’t describe it the way you do, so don’t accept your description so I won’t comment on it – but criticising the imperial triumvirate for having supported the worst crimes, I think is exactly the point. And the crimes are real, there’s no reason not to describe them. Look, I’ve written about Gaddafi plenty of times before. I wrote very harshly criticising the Reagan bombing in 1986, which incidentally is extremely interesting in ways that have never been acknowledged by the media, I don’t know if you followed that much, but that bombing was the first in history that was timed specifically for prime time television and it was carried off effectively. Kind of an important fact, and there’s a lot more to say about that; nevertheless I would never question his crimes, they’re terrible.

You said that Libya was used as a punch bag to deflect from domestic problems.

Yeah, it was. But that doesn’t mean that it was a nice place.

But do you not accept the possibility that your helping to demonise, I would say, the Libyan government and whitewashing the rebels may have helped facilitate the invasion?

Of course I didn’t whitewash the rebels, I said almost nothing about them. But it couldn’t facilitate the invasion a month after the invasion took place.

But the interview four days before.

The interview was before any of this – it was in the period when a decision had to be made about whether even to introduce a UN resolution to call for a no fly zone – and incidentally I said after that was passed that I think a case could be made for it, and I would still say that.

So what would you say in general terms should be the role of intellectuals during the period before NATO or Western aggression starts, the period of demonization, the period of manufacturing consent?

First of all, I don’t accept your description –

Which description?

I wouldn’t call it NATO aggression, it’s more complex that that. The initial step – first intervention, the five minute one – I think was justifiable. There was a chance – a significant chance – of a very serious massacre in Benghazi. Gaddafi had a horrible record of slaughtering people, and that should be known – but at that point, I think the proper reaction should have been to tell the truth about what’s happening. In that interview, if I had known about the US-UK blocking of the prosecution of Gaddafi, I would have brought that up too. I happened to find it out a couple of weeks later.

Many thanks for your time, and great to meet you.

Libya and the manufacture of consent – an interview with Noam Chomsky

This is a difficult interview for me. It was Noam Chomsky who first opened my eyes to the basic neo-colonial structure of the world, and to the role of the corporate media in both disguising and legitimising this structure. Chomsky has consistently demonstrated how, ever since the end of the Second World War, military regimes have been imposed on the third world by the US and its European allies with an ascribed role to keep wages low (and thus investment opportunities high) by wiping out communists, trade unionists, and anyone else deemed a potential threat to Empire. He has been at the forefront of exposing the lies and real motives behind the aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Serbia in recent years, and against Central America and South East Asia before that. But on Libya, in my opinion, he has been terrible. 

Don’t get me wrong; now the conquest is nearly over, Chomsky can be quite forthright in his denunciation of it, as he makes clear during the interview: “right now at this moment NATO is bombing a home base of the largest tribe in Libya” he tells me, “It’s not getting reported much, but if you read the Red Cross reports they’re describing a horrifying humanitarian crisis in the city that’s under attack, with hospitals collapsing, no drugs, people dying, people fleeing on foot into the desert to try to get away from it and so on. That’s happening under the NATO mandate of protecting civilians.” What bothers me is that this was precisely the mandate that Chomsky supported.

Wesley Clark, NATO commander during the bombing of Serbia, revealed on US television seven years ago that the Pentagon had drawn up a ‘hitlist’ in 2001 of seven states they wanted to “take out” within five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Thanks to the Iraqi and Afghan resistance, the plan has been delayed – but clearly not abandoned. We should, therefore, have been fully expecting the invasion of Libya. Given Bush’s cack-handedness over winning global support for the war on Iraq, and Obama’s declared commitment to multilateralism and ‘soft power’, we should have been expecting this invasion to have been meticulously planned in order to give it a veneer of legitimacy. Given the CIA’s growing fondness for instigating ‘colour revolutions’ to cause headaches for governments it dislikes, we should have been expecting something similar as part of the build-up to the invasion in Libya. And given Obama’s close working relationship with the Clintons, we might have expected this invasion to follow the highly successful pattern established by Bill Clinton in Kosovo: cajoling rebel movements on the ground into making violent provocations against the state, and then screaming genocide at the state’s response in order to terrorise world opinion into supporting intervention. 

In other words, we should have seen it coming, and prominent and widely respected intellectuals such as Chomsky should have used their platform to publicise Wesley Clark’s revelations, to warn of the coming aggression, and to draw attention to the racist and sectarian nature of the ‘rebel movements’ the US and British governments have traditionally employed to topple non-compliant governments. Chomsky certainly did not need reminding of the unhinged atrocities of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Nicaraguan Contras, or the Afghan Northern Alliance. Indeed, it was he who helped alert the world to many of them. 

But Chomsky did not use his platform to make these points. Instead, in an interview with the BBC one month into the rebellion – and, crucially, just four days before the passing of UN Security Council 1973 and the beginning of the NATO blitzkrieg – he chose to characterise the rebellion as “wonderful”. Elsewhere he referred to Benghazi’s takeover by racist gangs as “liberation” and to the rebellion as “initially non-violent”. In an interview with the BBC, he even claimed that “Libya is the one place [in North Africa] where there was a very violent state reaction repressing the popular uprisings”, a claim so divorced from the truth it is hard to know where to begin; Mubarak is currently being prosecuted for the murder of 850 protesters, whereas, according to Amnesty International, only 110 deaths could be confirmed in Benghazi before NATO operations began – and this included pro-government people killed by rebel militia. What really makes Libya exceptional in the North African ‘Arab Spring’ is that it was the only country in which the rebellion was armed, violent, and openly aimed at facilitating a foreign invasion. 

Now that Amnesty have confirmed that rebels have been using violence since the very start, and have been rounding up and executing innocent black Libyans and African migrants in droves ever since, I begin by asking him whether he now regrets at his initial public support for them. 

He shrugs: “No. I’m sure what Amnesty International reports is correct - that there were armed elements among them, but notice they didn’t say that the rebellion was an armed rebellion; in fact the large majority were probably people like us [sic], middle class opponents of Gaddafi. It was mostly an unarmed uprising. It turned into a violent uprising and the killings you are describing indeed are going on, but it didn’t start like that. As soon as it became a civil war, that happened.” 

In fact, it did start like that. The true colours of the rebels were made clear on the second day of the rebellion, February 18^th, when they rounded up and executed a group of fifty African migrant workers in Bayda. A week later, a terrified eyewitness told the BBC of another seventy or eighty migrant workers chopped to pieces in front of his eyes by rebel forces. These incidents – and many others like them - had made clear the racist character of the rebel militias well before his BBC interview on March 15^th. But Chomsky rejects this: “These things were absolutely not clear, and they weren’t reported, and even afterwards when they are reported, they’re not talking about the uprising, they’re talking about an element within it.” 

This may be how Chomsky sees it, but both incidents I mentioned were carried by mainstream media outlets like the BBC, the NPR and the Guardian at the time. Admittedly, they were hidden away behind reams of anti-Gaddafi bile and justified with the usual pretext of the migrants being “suspected mercenaries” - but that’s nothing that someone with Chomsky’s expertise in analysing media could not have seen through. Moreover, the forcing out last month of the entire population of the black Libyan town of Tawarga - by Misrata militias with names like “the brigade for purging black skins” - was recently given the official blessing of NTC President Mahmoud Jibril. To present these widespread racial crimes as some kind of insignificant element seems wilfully disingenuous. But Chomsky continues to stick to his guns: 

“You’re talking about what happened after the civil war took place and the NATO intervention. [I’m not]. Two points, which I’ll repeat. First of all, it wasn’t known and secondly it was a very small part of the uprising. The uprising was overwhelmingly middle class nonviolent opposition. We now know there was an armed element and that quickly became prominent after the civil war started. But it didn’t have to, so if that second intervention hadn’t taken place, it might not have turned out that way.” 

Chomsky characterises the NATO intervention as having two parts. The initial intervention, authorised by the UN Security Council to prevent a massacre in Benghazi he argues, was legitimate - but the ‘second’ intervention – where the ‘imperial triumvirate’ of US, Britain and France acted as an airforce for the militias of Misrata and Benghazi in their conquest of the rest of the country – was wrong and illegal: “We should remember that there were two interventions, not one, by NATO. One of them lasted about five minutes. That’s the one that was taken under the UNSC resolution 1973, that called for a no fly zone over Benghazi when there was the threat of a serious massacre there, along with a longer term mandate of protecting civilians, and that one lasted almost no time. Almost immediately, not NATO but the three traditional imperial powers, France, Britain and the United States carried out a second intervention which had nothing to do with protecting civilians and certainly wasn’t a no fly zone, but was participation in a rebel uprising, and that’s the one we’ve been witnessing. It’s almost isolated internationally. The African countries are strongly opposed – they called for negotiations and diplomacy from the very beginning. The main independent countries – the BRICS countries – also opposed the second intervention and called for efforts at negotiations and diplomacy. Even within NATO’s limited participation outside of the triumvirate, in the Arab world, there was almost nothing; Qatar sent a couple of planes, and Egypt next door - very heavily armed - didn’t do a thing, Turkey held back for quite a while, and finally participated weakly in the triumvirate operation. So it’s a very isolated operation. They claim that it was under an Arab League request, but that’s mostly fraud. First of all the Arab League request was extremely limited and only a minority participated - just Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. They actually issued a request for two no fly zones – one over Libya, the other over Gaza. We don’t have to talk about what happened to that one.” 

On most of this we agree. My argument, however, is that it was painfully clear that UNSC 1973 was intended (by the ‘imperial triumvirate’) as a figleaf for precisely the “second intervention” he decries. 

“It wasn’t clear, even for those five minutes that the imperial powers accepted the resolution. It became clear a couple of days later when they immediately started bombing in support of the rebels. And it didn’t have to happen. It could have been that world opinion, most of it – BRICS, Africa, Turkey and so on - could have prevailed.” 

It seems bizarrely naïve for a man of Chomsky’s insight to feign surprise when the imperial powers used UNSC 1973 for their own purposes to topple one of the governments on their hitlist. What else would they have used it for? It is somewhat exasperating; if it was anyone else I was talking to, I’d tell them to go and read some Chomsky. He would tell you that the imperial powers don’t act out of humanitarian but totalitarian impulses – to defend and extend their dominance of the world and its resources. He would tell you – I would have thought – not to expect them to implement measures designed to save civilians, because they would only take advantage and do the opposite. But apparently not. 

I try again: Does Chomsky accept that his whitewashing of the rebels, and demonising of Gaddafi, in the days and weeks before the invasion was launched, may have helped to facilitate it? 

“Of course I didn’t whitewash the rebels, I said almost nothing about them. The interview was before any of this – it was in the period when a decision had to be made about whether even to introduce a UN resolution to call for a no fly zone – and incidentally I said after that was passed that I think a case could be made for it, and I would still say that.” 

Even after British, French and US aggression had become abundantly clear, however – on April 5^th – Chomsky published another article on Libya. By this time thousands - if not tens of thousands - of Libyans had been killed by NATO bombs. This time his piece did open by criticising the British and American governments – not for their blitzkrieg, however – but for their alleged support for Gaddafi ‘and his crimes’. Does this not all feed into the demonisation that justifies and perpetuates NATO’s aggression? 

“First of all, I don’t accept your description – I wouldn’t call it NATO aggression, it’s more complex that that. The initial step – the first intervention, the five minute one – I think was justifiable. There was a chance – a significant chance – of a very serious massacre in Benghazi. Gaddafi had a horrible record of slaughtering people, and that should be known – but at that point, I think the proper reaction should have been to tell the truth about what’s happening.” 

I can’t help wondering why the responsibility to “tell the truth about what’s happening” only applies to Libya. Should we not also tell the truth about what is happening in the West? About its unquenchable thirst for diminishing oil and gas reserves, about its fear of an independent Africa, about its long track record of supporting and arming the most brutal gangsters against governments it wants removed – and god knows, Chomsky is familiar enough with the examples – and most importantly, about the crisis and chaos currently enveloping the entire Western economic system and leading its elites increasingly to rely on fascistic warmongering to maintain their crumbling world dominance? Isn’t all this actually a lot more pertinent to the war on Libya than recounting alleged ‘crimes’ of Gaddafi from twenty years ago?

Chomsky had an argument with James Petras in 2003 over Chomsky’s public condemnation of Cuba’s arrest of several dozen paid US agents and execution of three hijackers. Petras argued then that “Intellectuals have a responsibility to distinguish between the defensive measures taken by countries and peoples under imperial attack and the offensive methods of imperial powers bent on conquest. It is the height of cant and hypocrisy to engage in moral equivalences between the violence and repression of imperial countries bent on conquest with that of Third World countries under military and terrorist attacks.” But Chomsky has done worse than this – far from painting moral equivalences, for a long time he simply airbrushed out of the picture ALL crimes of NATO’s Libyan allies, whilst amplifying and distorting the defensive measures taken by Libya’s government in dealing with an armed US-backed rebellion. 

I remind Chomsky of his comment some years back that Libya was used as a punchbag by US politicians to deflect public attention away from domestic problems: “Yeah, it was. But that doesn’t mean that it was a nice place.” 

It’s a lot less “nice” now.

This article first appeared in Al Ahram Weekly. 

Leaflet for the "Occupy" demonstrations

The problem is not lack of money

According to the Sunday Times “Rich List”, the 1000 wealthiest individuals in Britain increased their wealth by £60billion between May 2010 and April 2011. This is not on the back of economic growth; the economy, as we all know only too well, has been stagnant. Therefore, this money has come directly from other sections of society; a redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the very richest (75% of British people saw their real incomes decline in the same time period). Warren Buffet, the world’s third richest man, put it very clearly: “It’s class warfare. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war. And we’re winning.”

Three years ago, the banks were bailed out with public money, to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. We are now told that we need to lose the bulk of our hard-won public services in order to pay off the huge debt this bailout incurred. Cameron said “frontline services” would not be affected, but this was a lie, as is now becoming more and more obvious. Bristol Council has already announced plans to close ten of its twelve residential nursing homes, and to abolish homecare services for the elderly completely. Even the NHS, who Cameron told us would be exempt from cuts, has now been told to find £20billion “efficiency savings”.

We are often told that there is “no alternative” to public spending cuts, because we need to “reduce the deficit”. This is nonsense. The total private wealth in Britain amounts to £9000 billion (£9 trillion). Just under half of this - £4trillion – is owned by the richest 10% of the population. A one-off wealth tax of just 20%, to be paid only by the richest 10%, would pay off the entire national debt of the country (£800billion) in one go. A Yougov poll commissioned by the Glasgow Media Group found that 74% of the British population supported this idea. But this alternative does not even get an airing anywhere in the mainstream media. Instead, we are told that public spending cuts are the only solution, despite the fact that they will not only cause misery and unemployment to millions, but will not even begin to pay off the national debt, and will in fact plunge the economy into an even deeper recession.

So why is the establishment (all three mainstream parties and the entire media circus) so committed to this path, and so deaf to the calls to do something to challenge the power of the banks? In a word, because they are all owned by the banks (in the case of the media) or sponsored by them (in the case of the politicians). They rely on them for election campaign donations and for advertising income. They will not bite the hand that feeds them. But they do not feed us; they rob us – and we most definitely should be biting their hand.

The problem is too much capital

So why do the banks want the government to close down all our public services? The big problem for the banks at the moment is that they have more money than they know what to do with. If money cannot be profitably invested, it loses its value. But in a recession, there are very few places to profitably invest. They are nervous of investing in the housing market, because another big crash is looming. There is no point investing in manufacturing (e.g. the car industry etc), because markets are already glutted- there are already too many products that cannot be sold. This is where public spending cuts come in. Cameron says he expects the private sector to step in where the public sector gets cuts back. Put into plain English, this means you will increasingly have to pay private companies to do what you used to get for free from the state (good quality schooling, weekly rubbish collections, a local library, decent healthcare provision, etc). All of this will open up whole new avenues of investment for those billionaires desperately looking for somewhere to invest their money, as once-public services are turned into profit-making concerns.

This is the first part of the strategy. The other big problem now facing the owners of massive wealth is that their use of the third world as a source of dirt cheap labour and raw materials is seriously threatened by the shifting balance of power in the world. For five hundred years, the ruling elites running the Western world have been able to use their overwhelming firepower and technical superiority to force their own terms of trade onto the nations they impoverished in Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, this period of history is now coming to an end with the rise of places like China, India and Brazil as powerful, economically developed countries. They are not only less reliant on the export markets of the West to sell their goods, but are also increasingly demanding higher wages and fairer prices for their raw materials – and giving a lead to the rest of the global South in doing so. This threatens the ability of the world’s richest to continue making money out of global poverty in the way they have been doing for generations.

All this is increasingly pushing the billionaire bankers and the governments to which they dictate policy in the direction of war. Only war can reverse the tide of economic development in the third world, and ultimately only war can destroy enough of the world’s surplus capital (products, housing, factories etc) to pave the way for a successful new round of profitable investment.

We have been here before. Capitalism always has periodic booms and crashes, but there have only been two crashes gigantic enough to bring about the near total collapse of the world economy similar to that we face today. The first was the “Great Depression” of 1870 – 1896, and the second the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. Both had the same causes as today’s crisis – the drying up of profitable avenues for investment – and both were ultimately ‘solved’ by colonialism and world war, the second of which was so successful a solution, that it paved the way for the “golden era” of capitalism – an unprecedented two-decade long boom period of growth based on rebuilding what had been destroyed in the world’s biggest ever mass slaughter.

Sirte, Libya, after pounding from NATO's "hellfire" missiles

This is the context in which we have to see Britain, the USA and France’s destruction of Libya. Anyone who thinks the British ruling class was momentarily distracted from dealing with its profitability crisis by a small group of Arabs in distress is living in cloud cuckoo land. 50,000 bombing raids were carried out against Libya, totally destroying huge swathes of advanced infrastructure, not to mention entire cities (in the case of Sirte) and at least 35,000 people. Within days of the conquest of Tripoli, Britain’s Defence Minister Philip Hammond was calling on British companies to “pack their suitcases and head for Libya” in search of the lucrative “reconstruction” contracts that will soon be dished out by NATO’s puppet government. Furthermore, in destroying Libya – a wealthy oil state which was continent’s leading force pushing for African unity and economic independence, and had $30billion set aside for African development and a new African currency – the old imperial states are intending to put the clock back on African development for generations. Most importantly of all, Libya will soon host the first sizable African base for the USA’s new AFRICOM section of the US army, set up in 2007 to invade African countries. This is part of the overall drive to use war in order to resolve this crisis of profitability, a war ultimately aimed at China, but likely to take in Syria, Iran, Algeria, South Africa and Venezuela along the way.

David Cameron is, for once, telling the truth, when he says “Whatever it takes to help our businesses take on the world – we’ll do it.” ‘Whatever it takes’ means not only the destruction of our public services; it also means the destruction of entire countries. We need to recognise that the attacks on public services and living standards here in Britain is part of a much bigger picture - the class warfare being waged by the rich against the poor, and especially against the most organised and independent sections of the third world. The constant warfare waged by the Western world for the last ten years has all been part of this struggle to maintain the class power and privilege of the dominant elites.

Their only solution is poverty and war

There are many in the third world who are resisting this onslaught, and we need to make common cause with them. When the next victim is being lined up for destruction by the media propaganda machine, we need to stand in solidarity with those under attack. We should learn the lessons of the destruction of Libya, a war which was sold to us with lies even more preposterous than those used to justify the destruction of Iraq. Do you remember the stories about 10,000 killed by Gaddafi in Benghazi? According to Amnesty International, the true figure was 110 - including those killed by the rebels - who we now know were armed from the first day of the insurrection. Do you remember the claims that Gaddafi was feeding his soldiers Viagra so they could carry out mass rape? Again, after looking into these allegations for months, Amnesty could not find a single credible case of rape by government troops. Do you remember the claims that Gaddafi had carried out aerial assaults against Tripoli? This too was false – as later verified by Russian satellite pictures. Do you remember the reports about rebel militias rounding up and lynching innocent African migrant workers by the dozen, from the very start of the revolt? Of course you don’t – although true, they were rarely reported. “But surely Gaddafi was a bad man” many people say. Even if this were true – and there are millions of Libyans who would dispute this – it is surely better to live in a functioning, peaceful and prosperous country with a bad leader, than in a dysfunctional wreck of a society like those that have been created in Iraq or Afghanistan.

But there is plenty of hope in the world. Latin America has been at the forefront of a successful, popular and organised rejection of the rape of their continent by the financial institutions of the Western world. Every major economy on the continent – with the sole exception of Colombia – is now governed by popular movements committed to the use of their natural wealth and labour to raise living standards for all, rather than simply as sources of profit for financial vampires. Venezuela’s slum dwellers now have free healthcare and education – and a constitution they actually helped to draft – for the first time ever. These governments have been involved in discussions with other independent-minded third world countries – including China, Iran and Libya before the invasion - about how to defend themselves against the war and poverty long imposed on them. We need to learn from and unite with these movements – and, above all, to reject any attempts by our own government to try to destroy them by force.

The views expressed here are only those of myself and (sadly!) do not necessarily represent those of the movement as a whole…

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