Dissidents of the International Left. Andy Heintz
been bombed by the Assad and Russian air forces in Syria, and there are some on the Left who note that they have received funding from various Western forces and that therefore they are legitimate targets. So, when the White Helmets are bombed, you have some analysts saying, ‘this is great, and this is what they deserve because they are supporting terrorists’. The people who are saying this are justifying war crimes. Saying it’s justified to target the White Helmets, who are unarmed first responders, is just grotesque. It’s been a basic principle of humanitarian law that you don’t shoot medics.
A pro-German medic during World War Two may have had rotten views but it was still a war crime to intentionally target medics. The people taking the view that killing medics is acceptable are basically echoing the Assadist view that everyone against him is a terrorist and he has a right to massacre anyone.
There are things about US foreign policy in eastern Europe that should be strongly condemned. The United States told Gorbachev in the late 1980s that if Germany was reunited, NATO would not be moved further east. But NATO has moved further east and this is a provocative move, and people who have criticized the expansion of NATO shouldn’t be denounced as Putin puppets. On the other hand, people who insist there is no problem with what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine or Crimea are adopting the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ approach. When you look at Soviet leaders, at least the people they were trying to put the thumb on the scale for were people on the Left of their respective societies. So, if Soviet money went to any parties in western Europe, they were likely to be communist parties. But today, Putin’s money goes to rightwing forces in Europe.
Do you think leftists are neglecting to pressure the Trump administration to lobby Russia for mutual reduction of nuclear weaponry?
I think some people in the Democratic Party have gotten so enthusiastic about Trump’s political vulnerability in terms of his positions on Putin that they have overlooked that it has always been a progressive position that the nuclear arms race is a) very dangerous, b) very wasteful, and c) something that we should be trying to reverse.
Trump acts randomly based on his own ego, so it’s hard to see a consistent foreign policy. If there is a consistent foreign policy position on an issue, it’s a John Bolton intention, which is not good in any case. But it is good to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula, even though one step in reducing the tensions involved Trump because he wanted to make himself look like he had been a great negotiator. Although Trump did it for narcissistic reasons, I think his decision to stop the annual joint US-South Korean exercises was correct because they are not helpful. The South Koreans want to see an end to the Korean War, the North Koreans wants to see an end to the Korean War, and progressives have always been saying that one way to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula is to end this state of war. Let’s see if we can do things that could build mutual confidence and, in turn, lead to a less militarized situation. I supported this position before Trump was elected, and I still support it. But I also believe there was nothing in the Trump platform to suggest he will lead us to a more peaceful world. Trump has increased military spending, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, making war with Iran much more likely, and aligned himself with the Far Right forces in Israel. These are not the policies of a peace candidate.
Could you talk about the consequences Trump’s decision to pull out of the nuclear deal and apply sanctions on Iran will have for the pro-democracy and pro-reform movements in that country?
Those folks have always said, don’t impose sanctions because they make things worse for us. They rationalize repression. Trump’s decisions will strengthen the most reactionary forces in Iranian society and will make the democratic space in Iran that much smaller. ■
MEREDITH TAX
Meredith Tax has been a prominent feminist voice and political activist since the late 1960s. She was the founding chair of the International PEN’s Women Writers’ Committee and the founding president of Women’s World, a global free-speech network that opposes gender-based censorship. Among her books are The Rising of the Women and Double Bind: the Muslim Right and The Anglo-American Left.
You have written about the Rojava Revolution [a de facto autonomous region calling itself the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria]. How do supporters of the Rojava Revolution strike the right balance between being supportive of the people there, while remaining objective about reports of alleged human rights violations happening in that area?
There are good reasons to defend the people of Rojava. First, they fought ISIS more effectively than anybody else on the ground. Second, they are trying to do interesting things politically, particularly in terms of women. To me, they are a great source of new ideas and a possible magnet for progressives in the region and the rest of world as well. They are providing a type of political experimentation that we very much need because we don’t have a lot of liberated areas in the world where this scale of political experimentation can be attempted.
We have to recognize Rojava is a work in progress: they are going to get some things wrong and we are going to disagree with them on certain points. I’m not interested in criticizing how anyone does stuff when they are in an existential fight for life against ISIS. You can voice criticisms, but the question is: how can you do this in a way that is productive?
The Rojava self-administration has been very open about letting human rights groups into its areas for inspections and not sending them with minders like dictators do. However, it’s been very hard to get into these areas so it’s very hard to assess what’s going on except from the volunteers who go into these areas and then come out. I would say it’s probable that some human rights violations have been committed, but they are not systemic. They would be particular to a person or a small brigade in most cases. The cantons are new and the people who are fighting are peasants, many of whom are just beginning to be educated; and violations always happen during war.
When human rights violations are committed, the self-administration tries to find the perpetrators and they put them on trial if they think they have done something wrong and this is all done in public. They have admitted to recruiting under-age fighters in the past, but they say this practice has stopped. They definitely practice conscription, but they also do not send people to the front lines who don’t volunteer. People who are conscripted are used as domestic police or border guards. As far as I can tell, they are trying to address human rights violations. This is what is being said by the people I know who have served with them.
The main accusation that has been leveled by the Turkish state and Syrian opposition groups against the YPG/YPJ [the Kurdish ‘People's Protection Units’] is ethnic cleansing. This is the accusation that was pushed by Amnesty International. There was a United Nations report that completely exonerated the Kurds of this charge. The report assesses all parties involved in the Syrian civil war. It accuses many of the groups of horrible abuses, such as using chemical weapons, bombing civilians, starvation tactics, summary executions, etc. The worst thing it says about the YPG/YPJ is that they have been accused of recruiting child soldiers (people under 18), detention under harsh conditions of a 17-year-old who was accused of working for ISIS, and confiscation of computers and cellphones in areas that were liberated from ISIS. I suspect they confiscated computers and cellphones to gather intelligence from them, not for personal use. If that’s the worst that you could say about a party in this civil war, it’s not that bad.
How should the Left respond to Far Right nationalist and religious movements around the world?
I don’t think they have responded very well at all. I don’t think they have a clue. The US Left, which is the part of the Left that I know most about, needs to understand what’s going on in the world. There is a tendency now to view everything through the prism of domestic policy, and to only talk about fighting back against Donald Trump over domestic issues. While I think the domestic stuff is central, it can’t be considered in isolation from global factors.
We live in a period of globalization. We live in a period when essentially fascist