BY DON FITZ
The Bush administration found September 11 to be a golden opportunity to push for control of world resources, to crush political dissent, and to trample the Bill of Rights.
The cornerstone of its propaganda offensive is portrayal of the crime of September 11 as so uniquely horrifying that it overshadows the millions who are slaughtered for corporate profit and governmental power. Thus, it bellowed that its attack on Afghanistan was a "war on terror" which would somehow protect Americans.
The fabricated connection between September 11 and the beginning of perpetual war is the Great Lie of the Bush administration. The major division between political groups is between those who perpetrate the Great Lie by echoing its ideology of the "war on terror" versus those who understand it to be a war for empire.
The vast majority of members of the US Green parties work to expose the Great Lie and explain the unavoidable connection between the war for empire and the war on civil liberties. However, the politics of compromise have spread through many levels of Green leadership, in the US and elsewhere.
German Greens
Last year, the German Greens jumped whole hog into the war for empire. The November 24 resolution of the German Greens, "Fight International Terrorism, Practice Critical Solidarity, Continue the Red-Green Coalition", details the rationale for its actions.
The fundamental premise of the resolution is that the war on Afghanistan is a "war against terrorism". Writing that the "majority of our MPs voted ... to fight international terrorism", the German Greens unambiguously chose to echo the verbiage of George Bush and spurn views of the worldwide peace movement.
The resolution provided three justifications for endorsing war: Green participation might make the war more humanitarian; the war would bring a better government to Afghanistan; and, voting for war was necessary to preserve gains of the Social-Democratic Party-Green coalition government.
The resolution offered soothing reassurance that German troops would be confined to "humanitarian, defensive ... and law enforcement" purposes. Even if we ignore that the identical promises could be used by Bush and even if we believed the claim that German troops would only be driving medical vehicles, such participation gives a Green nod of approval to the US bombing for corporate plunder.
The resolution reflects classic doublespeak, replacing Orwell's "War is peace" with its own claim that pacifism is slaughter with a humanitarian facade. Statements such as "We reject the use of cluster bombs" and "There must be no strategy of escalation" clearly imply that it can have some influence on the manner in which the US carries out the war. This, of course, is a farce, as the German Greens have no more ability to prevent cluster bombs in Afghanistan than it had to prevent the use of depleted uranium in NATO's 1999 war on Yugoslavia.
The willingness to participate in the war while simultaneously attempting to deny responsibility for it displays the cowardly naivete for which the press is so fond of ridiculing the German Greens.
In an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, the resolution proclaims the ethno-centric view that "democracy" brought to Afghans somehow justified the atrocities of the war for empire. Such logic bears an uncanny resemblance to that used by US slaveholders 150 years ago.
The cynical claim that the "situation in Afghanistan is now developing positively", the promise that the forces of empire can further improve the situation "caused by drought, civil war and the Taliban", and the blaring silence on the devastation of US bombs illustrate how shamelessly the German Greens spread the Bush doctrine. The document almost groans beneath the weight of the "white man's burden" of bringing "civilisation" to those who cannot comprehend the higher mission of delivering oil to the West.
Many say that actual German involvement was inconsequential. Inconsequential it was not. The goal of German participation was never for its soldiers to produce a high body count. The central goals were to break the taboo on sending German troops into combat outside of Europe, and to spread Bush's rhetoric of a "war on terror".
The European Federation of Green Parties (EFGP) includes more than 30 parties. The major question it faced when it met in Budapest one week after passage of the German Greens' resolution was that its largest member party had betrayed the most basic of Green values. The EFGP confronted this challenge with the same courage and determination with which Neville Chamberlain opposed Hitler's march into Czechoslovakia.
The most noteworthy absences of content in the December 2 EFGP resolution, "International Terrorism, Global Security, and Building Democratic Afghanistan", are that it discusses the war in Afghanistan for two pages without once mentioning the German Greens, and it ponders "international terrorism" without once mentioning the eight million butchered by the US and its client states since World War II.
Greens in US
The Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) formed in 1996 as an "elections only" split-off from the Green Party USA (GPUSA). Its founders have a 12-year history of trying to drive leftists out of the Greens. They detest the GPUSA goal of building a mass party based on local activism and sought to replace it with a party whose structure would reflect an exclusive focus on elections. In 2001, ASGP proclaimed itself the Green Party of the US, using the acronym GPUS, which seemed designed to take credit for the accomplishments of the GPUSA.
The EFGP's Budapest resolution was distributed to the US press by the ASGP-GPUS, along with an introductory note which claimed that the EFGP document opposed unilateral military action by the US in Afghanistan. However, the Budapest resolution never even mentions unilateral military action by the US in Afghanistan, much less does the document "oppose" it. It appears that this was an intentional effort to give a false portrayal of the EFGP to Greens in the US.
The ASGP-GPUS stated its position that the US war on Afghanistan was "in retaliation for the September 11 attacks". Like the German Greens, the ASGP-GPUS helped spread the Great Lie of George Bush rather than explain the war for empire.
By 2000, many were frustrated at the existence of two national Green parties in the US. When the ASGP refused to negotiate unity seriously, several GPUSA members decided to support the "Boston Proposal", which would dismantle the GPUSA and create a Green Party modelled after the Democrats and Republicans. At the July 2001 Green Congress, the "Boston Proposal" did not win approval and some of its supporters left vowing to destroy the GPUSA.
When the ASGP renamed itself GPUS, those who left GPUSA proclaimed that GPUS was the one, true Green Party. They announced their intention of forming a caucus to push GPUS in a "left" direction. When they finally met six months later, they named themselves the Green Alliance.
Once inside the ASGP-GPUS, the politics of Green Alliance became indistinguishable from it. They advocated that "lefts" reduce objection to Green militarism to a whine inside the ASGP-GPUS that would not be broadcast to the press.
Apologists for the Green Alliance sometimes say "Nothing came from their action". Such a "defence" speaks mountains about the organisation. Surely, there is little future for a group whose most persuasive defence is not refutation of the vileness of its acts but rather a quip that the puniness of the organisation ensures the irrelevancy of its behaviour.
Illusions of power
A thread runs through the actions of those who yearn for a more central place in the spotlight of power — as Green groupings chase illusions of power, each assumes a need to accommodate itself to a larger force.
The German Greens stand in awe of their coalition partners, the Social Democrats; the EFGP stands in awe of the Germans; the ASGP-GPUS stands in awe of the Europeans; and the Green Alliance stares with its mouth gaping open in befuddled admiration of the vast powers it attributes to ASGP-GPUS.
Each grouping has a leadership which seeks to drag its rank and file to the right in order to secure a tie to a group it imagines to be more important. Each Green entity rationalises that it had to lie prostrate because nothing could be gained without the larger group. Rushing headlong after illusions of power, they ignored the original Green vision that true power lies in the power of the people, in the untapped anger of hundreds of millions who feel the lash of globalisation.
But it is unlikely that Green honchos lie awake at night trying to figure out how to mobilise this mass anger. It is more likely that they view concepts like "power of the people" as adolescent slogans which a mature politician slops to the crowd and discretely dumps in the trash on the way to the table of corporate power.
The central task of all progressives is putting an end to the war for empire and its twin war on civil Liberties. Greens must never forget that terrorism does not cease to be terrorism when carried out by a government. Nor do war criminals cease being war criminals by painting themselves green.
[Abridged from Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, No. 28, Spring 2002, < http://www.greens.org/s-A HREF="mailto:r"><r>. Don Fitz is a member of the Green Party of St. Louis.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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