What should the stance of working people be to terror methods?

Why revolutionaries condemn terror methods, from Boston to Colombia 

 

BY JOHN STUDER  

Evidence continues to surface that the two suspects in the April 15 bombing of the Boston Marathon had connections to reactionary Islamist jihadist forces, posing the question, where do these forces come from and what should be the stance of working people toward them and the methods they employ?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly told special FBI interrogators that he and his deceased brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were inspired by online speeches by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and al-Qaeda leader assassinated by a U.S. drone in Yemen in 2011. Tsarnaev also said he and his brother used instructions published in the al-Qaeda online magazine Inspire to build their bombs.

Al-Qaeda and similar groups rely on terrorist actions and indiscriminate killings to instill fear, divisions and submissiveness among working people. The bombing in Boston is one of many signs that these anti-working-class Islamist groups continue to gain adherents from northern Africa to the Caucasus. Above all, these forces gain a hearing amid the political vacuum of leadership left by decades of counterrevolutionary betrayals of the toilers by Stalinist and petty-bourgeois nationalist forces that claimed the mantle of struggles against imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation, but acted to block all possibilities for revolution.

The leadership of socialist Cuba stands on the highest moral ground in relation to the question of the anti-working-class character of any form of terrorism, for any purpose, by anyone. During the 1956-58 Cuban revolutionary war and since, Fidel Castro and other leaders never used or condoned terrorist methods, or any actions that could result in deaths of innocent people, or any form of torture or humiliation of enemy combatants.

On April 16, Josefina Vidal, director of Cuba's Foreign Ministry North American Affairs Division, delivered a note from the country's revolutionary government to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, saying Cuba "rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism, in any place, under any circumstance, and with whatever motivation."

The Cuban statement offered "the most heartfelt condolences … to the people and government of the United States, particularly those directly affected by this tragedy."

Cuba's revolutionary leadership has taken the same position regardless of whether such actions are carried out by openly reactionary forces or groups that claim to speak and act in the interests of the toilers and oppressed.

In 2008, for example, Castro criticized the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for using terrorist measures against civilian captives and captured Colombian soldiers.

"The civilians should have never been kidnapped, neither should the militaries have been kept prisoners in the conditions of the jungle," Castro said. "These were objectively cruel actions. No revolutionary purpose could justify it."

Meanwhile, the big-business press runs near daily reports of police actions in response to supposed new threats that seek to sow fear and garner support to curtail constitutional protections and other workers rights in the interests of public safety.

For example, all subway service to New York's Grand Central Station was shut down at rush hour May 6, the New York Post reported, after "someone left behind a knapsack."

Cops in Methuen, Mass., arrested 18-year-old Cameron D'Ambrosio May 1 on felony charges of communicating terrorist threats, a charge that carries up to 20 years, for posting "a threat in the form of a rap" song on Facebook. The Valley Patriot reported the youth posted "disturbing" statements online disparaging President Barack Obama and the government. 

 

 http://www.themilitant.com/2013/7719/771958.html