In Afghanistan several Dozends and maybe hundreds of people were killed during accidents in recent military actions. This is a reason for mourning for the relatives and friends and for the NATO to backpedal and re-engineer the strategy.
In Germany and other parts of Europe as in the Americas it is common that rigthwing and leftwing pacifists express their instrumentalized sorrow through gathering after similar occasions and demonstrate „against the war in Afghanistan“. Yesterday the post-socialist Party „Die Linke“ was excluded from the „Bundestag“ for displaying posters with the names of victims of the airstrike at Kundus. They did never display posters with names of victims of suicide bombings in Iraq or Afghanistan.
There lies much attraction in the idea of war as bad (because of death, pain and related phenomenons) and peace as good (because of laughing children and the like). Peace in this dichotomic ideology is a resentment. This resentment bases on one of the main symptoms of narcissism: The reversal. This reversal is to be set upon its feet to speak with Marx.
Peace has a dark side that the socialist party of Germany does not speak about. They don’t mourn for victims of peace.
The peace waged against the Hutu-Militias by UN-troops in 1994 resulted in the genocide of one million people – this peace was stopped by Tutsi-guerillas of the RPF who finally conquered the regime of the FAR. France assaulted Africa with an ongoing onslaught of peace against Dictators like Bokassa, Eyadema and Bongo, leaving the population empoverished and dismantled of any opposition. These dictators were the most corrupt in history while ruling some of the poorest societies in the world. Opposition in Togo, the Central African Republic and Le Gabon was either killed of or exiled or silenced through various means of censorship, torture and terror. The so-called development aid, that the German Party „Die Linke“ is suggesting as being alternative to war in Afghanistan, collaborated with the regimes, making the elites richer while paying them financial contributions and „fees“ for any project. In Togo the official German Development Agency even funded constructions of a concentration camp for oppositionals and people accused of witchcraft by the regime. (ref. Dirk Kohnert)
In Somalia the development agencies have not managed to overcome neither war nor poverty – they paid warlords for saving people from drowning during floods, for delivering water and distributing food. Through this they paid the weaponry for warlords and thugs. (ref. Michael Birnbaum) This is the same peace „Die Linke“ is postulating for Afghanistan – while bashing the NATO for collaborating with warlords.
Peace against Sudan caused the genocide against the people of Darfur. 400 000 people were killed and 2.5 Million displaced while all the west sent were some MSF-Medicals to vaccinate the refugees and survivors.
This is the result of the peace for Oil China is fighting in Africa. Peace is always as bad as the war that no one attends or as a correctly forged quotation puts it: Imagine it is war and no one attends – then war will come to you.
It is not about war or not war nor even about the option of taking part – it is about in which way to take part if it takes place.
Paul Parin defined phallic aggression as healthier than repressed aggression – the psychoanalyst always kept his Beretta he used during the guerilla war against Nazi-troops in Yugoslavia. Later on, his wife Goldy Parin-Matthey went to Spain to join the anarchist forces. In a system that denies ones bare existence weaponry and death – Thanatos – might open the path to liberation and Eros. War is always as rational as its cause and the party „Die Linke“ knows that very well. They are not even militant pacifists. In the past, their members did rarely hesitate to support guerillas in South-America or wave the red flag with the portrait of Che Guevara. The liberal guerillas in South America were successful where they were fighting proto-fascist dictatorships that were far too often supported by the anti-communist USA and rigthwing Europe. They failed where they favoured a utopian socialism, maoism and barbary. (cf. Augustin Souchy) In the end, even the giant „Sendero Luminoso“ was forced into disarmament – though the methods of the counter-guerillas were barely less brutal than those of the sectarian „Shining Path Movement“ that even kept indigenes of the Ashaninka as slaves. (ref. Michael F. Brown/Eduardo Fernandez) Just in the case of Cuba a liberal guerilla managed to transmutate into a long lasting and encrusted dictatorship – that is still supported by the youth of the party „Die Linke“. In Nicaragua, the liberal guerilla-party of the sandinistas mutated into authoritarian and irrational policies against minorities like the english speaking Miskito, who joined the Contras for some reason.
The party „Die Linke“ is a peace party as much as a warring party. While it cites a tradition of failed warfare it fails to bear in mind the tradition of successful warfare that lead to peace and democracy (mainly in Europe and Japan) and the tradition of failed peace-fare – in Somalia, Ruanda, Congo, Sudan. It does not provide any convincing strategy on how the Taliban could be prevented from regaining power in Afghanistan after a withdrawal of troops nor does it talk about the possibility of a civil war between the competing tribes. Anyone who studies the history of guerilla warfare knows the deficits of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan – the failure to ensure safety after ousting Saddam Hussein was a war-crime, true. This warcrime was perpetrated not the least through the retreat of spanish forces after the bombings in Madrid that motivated terrorists to continue with their bloody strategy of suicide bombing.
One could argue, that the war of islamists is also deeply rational as long as it is founded on the bugbear of a west that seeks to eradicate Islam and kill all muslim population. If this would be true: Anyone should attend such a war against a superpower who wants to kill off millions. But it just is not true while those creating this phantom are indeed threatening to kill off millions. It is all about seperating those erring from those who want to err. The leftiest propaganda overlaps with islamist propaganda in many issues. Both imagine a perfect planning, conspiring superpower with all its destructive potential – maybe the same destruction that they feel tempted to bring over their enemies if they imagine the possession of this superior firepower.
