20th Anniversary of 9/11 Terrorist Attacks: The Bloody Cycle of Imperialism Continues

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Jason Toynbee Socialist Alternative (ISA England, Scotland and Wales)

Twenty years ago, the world changed. Few single events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States can have such a large impact. Of course, it's not just the act of terror itself that changed the course of history, it's more about how people react to it. 9/11 unleashed a new bloody wave of imperialism led by capitalist countries such as Britain and the United States, who waged savage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and spread Islamophobic ideology by state. The cycle of hatred and death continues today.

This is not to lessen the horror of the incident. In the United States, nearly 3,000 people were killed in 9/11 and its subsequent attacks. Socialists should know this: we firmly condemn this attack, and indeed all acts of terrorism, not only because of their brutal nature, but also because they inevitably lead to reactionary situations at home and abroad. However, as we have seen, after 9/11, the ruling class's response to events was met with massive mobilized resistance from ordinary people, and possibly even a movement to stop the war and reshape history.

World Patterns Past and Present

First, it is worth recalling the year the atrocities occurred, 2001, when the capitalist system was full of self-confidence. It has been more than a decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. The "communist" state, despite its autocratic and distorted features, retains the memory of the Russian Revolution and the possibility of replacing capitalism. The capitalist world is comforted by their downfall.

In fact, in the early 1990s, commentators confidently declared that we had reached "the end of history" (Francis Fukuyama's book title). In other words, capitalism in the form of benign "liberal democracy" will rule the world unchallenged - and forever! This is of course nonsense. In the 1990s, global inequality increased dramatically as neoliberalism eroded the social welfare system. In all advanced capitalist countries, as well as poorer ones, privatization, deregulation, and cuts in public spending have impoverished ordinary people while increasing the wealth of the rich.

In terms of trade and capital flows, the United States and other capitalist powers have promoted the "globalization" project. The establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1994 was an important milestone, thereby accelerating the "opening" of new markets for goods and services. In practice, this means that emerging industries in poorer economies are cornered, while multinational corporations make a fortune on cheap exports or build their factories in developing countries to exploit cheap labor.

If all this sounds like a capitalist success story, we just have to go back to 2021. The promise of capitalism's never-ending expansion is brutally shattered today by the facts of the 21st century: catastrophic wars, the Sino-American Cold War, prolonged depressions, falling real wages, and austerity. In response, working-class struggles around the world have risen. As governments intervene in the Covid-19 emergency to save their systems, neoliberalism itself — the global system of free markets and unchecked capitalism — looks battered, even unsustainable. The Taliban's victory in Afghanistan has added to the plight of the United States and its imperialist allies.

Of course, the crisis facing capitalism in many ways today cannot be attributed solely to 9/11. But there is no doubt that that event and the retaliation against it played the most important and pivotal role.

9/11 and the "War on Terror"

After the attack, the U.S. government's first response was bloody retaliation. Afghanistan is al Qaeda's stronghold and one of the poorest countries in the world. The carpet bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7 of that year. British Prime Minister Berry immediately provided British military support to US President Bush. By the end of the year, U.S. and British troops had overthrown the Taliban government — inevitable given the overwhelming brute force exerted.

In fact, this was only the beginning of a brutal war of aggression in which some 241,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them Afghans and Pakistanis, among them 71,000 civilians. * Ordinary people also suffered immeasurable levels of poverty, hunger, disease and poor sanitation - all as a direct result of the war. This is a disaster for this country.

Despite the brutality, the imperialist forces' revenge against Afghanistan was never enough in this "war on terror". In addition to inciting racism and nationalism for the purpose of dividing the domestic working class, there is also the use of "just" war to directly achieve the needs of imperialist interests - to control Afghanistan's proximity to the strategically important Middle East and its main oil reserves.

Socialists anticipated this, and in 2002, when then-US President George W. Bush began advocating the Iraq war on the grounds that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein not only represented a terrorist threat but was developing "weapons of mass destruction" became very clear. Prime Minister Belial also spread this lie. Then came the 2003 invasion, and an occupation that was bloodier than the events in Afghanistan.

The long-running war in Iraq, combined with the conflict in Afghanistan, has had serious consequences for the world. The power of Iran's reactionary clerics and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict in the Muslim world is bolstered by the ongoing civil war in Iraq itself and a new one in Yemen. The civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, and ISIS-backed terror attacks, including in the UK - all were more or less the result of the imperialist incursion started by Bush and Beria.

It is clear that the war on terror has not only failed to increase security or make the world a more peaceful place, but has made the underlying social and political causes for the growth of terrorism worse, and resentment and resentment against the United States and other imperialist powers are rife across the globe. surge.

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All of this could have been prevented - there must have been an anti-war desire among the population. An international movement of socialists, youth and trade unionists began in 2002. Millions of ordinary people were mobilized as the lies from Bush and Belle about the need to attack Iraq continued to be debunked by emerging truths. Between January and April 2003, 36 million people worldwide took part in nearly 3,000 anti-war protests.

The largest of these was on the International Day of Action on February 15 of that year. In London, up to 2 million people marched against the war - the largest demonstration in British history. The event was astounding, not only because of its size, and the participation of many who had apparently not been to the march before, but also because of its militant nature. Liberal Democrat leader Kennedy has spoken out against war, but said he would support it if the United Nations passed a second resolution backing intervention. He was mocked by loud boos.

Meanwhile, the left, like Tariq Ali, who insists that the system needs to be changed to end the war on capitalism, are greeted with great cheers by the populace. And when the attack on Iraq finally started calling for a strike (a call initiated by the predecessor of the International Socialist Road ISA, the International Council of Workers International), leftist union leader Bob Crow (from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) RMT) and Billy Hayes (CWU) also received strong support.

It is shameful, however, that these calls have not been echoed more broadly among the leaders of the union movement. They either actively support the new war, or they remain silent. Meanwhile, the union left has failed to organize. As for the "Stop the War Coalition," which called for protests, it missed a golden opportunity to mount a movement from the fervent resistance.

At the time, members of the Socialist Alternative called for a general strike to be organised from the bottom up if movement leaders did not take the lead, and demanded votes and marches against the invasion of Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. A new working-class party to fight the pro-war New Labour and neo-liberal policies, so that the appeal to the millions of protesters would receive a huge positive response, possibly almost overnight. Form a new political party. But while some heroic efforts allowed the mobilization to continue in the days after the Iraq war began on March 20, including student strikes across the country, the nascent movement ultimately failed to stop the war.

However, for many, especially young people, the anti-war movement represented a turning point in the tide. It politicized many who later organized in other movements and groups, and who still loathe the stance of Belial and her faction. Even if the movement did not succeed, the bourgeoisie still feared a large-scale anti-war movement, an important factor in their hesitancy to send troops to Syria and Libya.

Our lesson is also clear. Ordinary people will flock to resist the imperialist war. But what movement leaders needed at that time was a bold plan to organize and advance the movement, and the reality was that it was gradually quelling it. Above all, we need unions and workplace action to harness the power of the working class in the millions and to use the strike, an extremely powerful weapon, to combat militancy in the capitalist state. Today, socialist alternatives organize, and it is precisely for the establishment of such a leadership that the program is proposed.

Marxism and Terrorism

The Marxist approach is the exact opposite of terrorism. For parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, leftists carried out terror in the form of assassinations, hijackings and bombings. But as Trotsky pointed out, such behavior always distracts from the actual work of socialists: building mass working-class movements, bringing people together and showing them the power of their collective action. This is the way to change society. Conversely, a secretly planned individual terror strategy disrupts collective work.

Of course, al-Qaeda was never a left-wing group, but a reactionary organization whose agenda was to throw the world back into religious bigotry and hatred. In this regard, the violence of 9/11 seems to have succeeded only in instigating the war on terror. In the short term, the Arab world is sure to respond, which has helped al Qaeda's cause in part, boosting recruitment and fundraising. Islamophobia supported by capitalist states has a similar (but limited) impact on Islamic communities in Europe and the United States.

Yet the extraordinary mass revolutions of the Arab Spring in early 2010 showed that 9/11 did not, in fact, succeed as its planners had hoped. The uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain were mass secular uprisings of the separation of church and state, demanding a change in the system and an end to dictatorship and bourgeois elite rule. Trade unionists and left-wing parties fight for revolutionary change; solidarity and collective action are imperative. This is the exact opposite of the madness of Al Qaeda's theocratic caliphate.

A socialist alternative is needed

Twenty years after 9/11, the event has become a bleak symbol of the decline of capitalism. Instead of the righteous roar of revenge, the ruling class has only doubt and hesitation. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces have withdrawn as quietly as possible, and the country has once again fallen into the hands of the Taliban. Its future remains a highly uncertain prospect, one that will be less dominant as the US shifts its focus elsewhere. In any case, the problems of Afghanistan cannot be solved by any imperialist power. What happened in the 20 years after 9/11 serves as an objective lesson to prove why great power intervention always fails.

The world has entered a new period: unstable and perilous, only one thing is certain: only the broad masses of the world, led by the working class and aspiring youth, can overthrow the odious capitalist system. There are signs everywhere that people are more and more aware of this. You can speed up the process - become a socialist and join the international socialist road!