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Imperialist Left and the War in Chechnya: Reflections on One Campaign (parts 1–2)
By Vladimir Bilenkin, December 2000
Dedicated to Vladimir Burtsev, “the Sherlock Holmes of theRevolution,” a man who unmasked Evno Azef.
I
Will ISWoR, a London-based organization of “International Solidarity with Workers of Russia,” condemn the murder of civilians—most of whom are ethnic Russian working class retirees—by the chlorine and ammonia released by Islamic fascists in Grozny? That was the question I asked myself this morning when the news of this crime appeared in Russian and Western press. Or will they continue to be one big happy family with the governing faction of the British ruling class, its imperialist agencies, its NGOs, and its anti-Communist left? To put it differently, will they remain on the side of LIBERAL IMPERIALISM of Clinton and Blair against the CONSERVATIVE IMPERIALISM of John Maples or will they be able to disengage themselves from any kind of imperialism?
So far the answer is negative. It's time to speak up. I cannot be silent.
Neither the genocide of ethnic Russians in Chechnya, in 1994–1999, nor the enslavement of and slave trade in thousands of working class people by Islamic fascists, nor their murderous attack on Dagestan, as the result of which the entire ethnic group (the Avars) was driven on the brink of extinction, nor the repeated pleas of Maskhadov-Basaev clique for NATO to attack Russian cities (mostly populated by working class people), nor dynamiting the working class apartment buildings in Piatigorsk, Bujnaksk, Moscow, and Volgograd—none of these crimes elicited as little as a token expression of protest from ISWoR..
Instead, ISWoR, for all PRACTICAL means and purposes, joined Maskhadov, Basaev and British imperialists in their last crusade against Russia and . . . communism.
Why communism?
Let us listen to Maskhadov himself:
“The whole world must know that the Russians want to perpetuate the Communists' power by destroying Chechnya. Russia has bared its teeth. By annihilating Chechnya the Communists aim to demonstrate to the whole world that they have restored their former power.” (Aslan Maskhadov. Interview “Yeni Safak” Newspaper 21 December 1999)
What is this? The pathetic gibberish of a desperate man? Yes and no. Yes, because the sober, and far from being desperate, British ruling class knows all too well the difference between the communist Kremlin and that of the lumpen capitalists. No, because both Maskhadov and Blair know that if communism still has a chance in the foreseeable future it is in the former Soviet Union, above all, in Russia. Neither the senile working classes of the West, corrupted by its social-imperialist shepherds, by its all but total submission to bourgeois ideology, nor the young working classes of South and East, though more vibrant that Russian workers but lacking arms to defend their revolution, will be capable of any significant breakthrough any time soon. Only the working classes of Russia, Ukrain, Belorus, and Kazakhstan, if united and in possession of their nuclear shield, can yet stand up against the world bourgeoisie and face it confidently, giving encouragement to the toilers of Indonesia and Peru, Cuba and South Africa, India and China.
This is what the old fox Maskhadov feels, with his unerring class feeling of the former Soviet Army colonel. This is what makes the leaders of Western bourgeoisie to push NATO eastwards—to the Black and Caspian seas, to the gates of Leningrad, to the Dnieper and Don—to begin a new arms race in space, to spend billions for their “fifth column” in Russia and to give encouragement and material support to Islamic fascist in the Caucasus.
The Committee for Workers Solidarity with Chechnya was set up not in Moscow, Leningrad, or Makhachkala, but in the city of London, a locale usually inaccessible to any working class person from Russia, precisely at the moment when the campaign of intimidation by the leaders of NATO countries, accompanied by the anti-Russian propaganda of imperialist press, reached the shrillness and venality reminiscent of Dr. Goebbels. The timing is important. For the birthmark of the imperialist left is its opportunism in relation to bourgeois public opinion. From the days of Burnham and Tony Cliff to AWL and our new Committee the story is the same, time and again: a section of the Western left, without any connection to militant workers, but a lot of splits behind, joins the “left” section of its bourgeoisie (e.g., the left Labor MP's in our Committee), finding it unbearable to choose the opposite: to stand up to the solid common front of all classes and face up to charges of treason, etc.
The classical example of the opportunism borne out of these pressures is the early history of Trotskyist movement, especially, the emergence of the “state capitalism” tendency within it. It is not an insignificant fact that this tendency emerged and flourished exclusively in the constitutive member countries of NATO. This does not mean, of course, that the leaders and adherents of this tendency were mere stooges of imperialist agencies, though its history had more than its share of provocateurs and informers. It's just that in those countries the ruling classes took a particularly good care of forming the public opinion and the ideological milieu of everyday life especially hostile to any manifestation of ‘disloyalty’ to one's nation. The touchstone of ’loyalty’ and everything that depended on it, from academic career to one's marriage, was not the question of one's belief in the Pope or habeas corpus, whether one was a Satanist or a Marxist. This touchstone, one and the only, was the Soviet Union. Abstract beliefs, one must say in passing, are not of any concern for the bourgeoisie unless these beliefs are armed and actually threaten its order. The bourgeoisie has long used to Marxism that peacefully exists in its most prestigious institutions of higher learning and whose existence only makes louder and more believable the hosannas to the ‘pluralism’ of liberal bourgeoisie.
It was very different with the Soviet Union—not an abstract thing at all!—who made the bourgeoisie to face a quite real prospect of its own extinction. Trotsky, who knew this better than any one else—called his followers for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism. UNCONDITIONAL. What a terrible meaning this word had for generations of Western trotskyists! No less terrible than the other half of Trotsky's testament: to facilitate a political revolution in the SU by its toilers. Now, I insist that both demands, mutually conditioned, were terrible and impossible to live with for regular mortals, of whom, after all, all earthly movements, communist including, consist. So it's no wonder that none of them was even attempted to carry out, except by a few angels maybe. But I do not know their names. Nonetheless, there were two ways to bail out of this predicament.
One was simply to avoid acting according to Trotsky's blueprint. To fail by inaction, so to speak. Who would throw a stone at those people? Perhaps, only those who did act. But I don’t know their names.
The other way was to “rethink” and “refute” Trotsky's dictum. That was the way of “state caps” (and some others, less important, groups and tendencies). If the Soviet Union was not a “workers' state”, if only “deformed,” but a capitalist one, then the imperative of its defense by communists disappeared as an illusion born by Trotsky's faulty analysis. Moreover, since the Soviet state is not just “capitalist” but “state capitalist” and presents a system of class oppression more ruthless than in its bourgeois-democratic counterparts isn’t it a duty of true communists to desire the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold, as well as in in the “Hot” war with Western capitalism, with NATO? Isn’t this defeat desirable if only because it will mean a partial liberation of Soviet toilers from the worst abuses of capitalism, because it will allow them to have their own “independent” unions and workers' organizations which they are deprived of under “state capitalism”?
Yes, such was the other way of bailing out of orthodox Trotskyism. The way of Burnham, the way of Cliff, the way of innumerable sects of imperialist left, and the way of the AWL. But in the beginning was Cliff. He created a theoretical (and moral) justification for the significant part of the Western left to join their ruling classes in the anti-Soviet crusade. More correct is to say that Cliff's book materialized out of the palpable need, the “social order” of the middle-class left to accommodate their leftism to bourgeois public opinion and the international policies of imperialist West. Without this “social order,” one could not understand how a book, marked by such intellectual mediocrity and political philistinism, became so influential in the history of the post-war left.
But Cliff was also a maker of another shibboleth of imperialist left. Long before Reagan summoned the forces of Light against the “evil Empire” and before “left Labor” MP's Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn submitted their “early day motion,” Cliff pronounced the Soviet Union an “empire” and cautiously but unambiguously expressed his support for the Ukrainian fascists of UPA and the Baltic Nazis (Cliff also sympathetically wrote about General Vlassov's Army who fought the Soviets on the side of the Germans). Let us not forget, after all, that Cliff's book and the formation of the new imperialist left coincided with the announcement of anti-Soviet crusade, the creation of NATO, the Orwellian witch hunt (in which Orwell himself volunteered to take part), with the time when Bertrand Russell—the “moral conscience of the West”—was calling on the Americans to nuke the Soviet Union to radioactive dust before it makes its own Bomb. Such was the reward of the Soviet people for “saving human civilization” on the battlegrounds of Stalingrad and Prokhorovka!
Today the grandsons of UPA fascists are marching in Lvov and Kiev dressed in brown shirts; assassinate communist activists in Western Ukraine, exactly like they did in 1949, when Cliff applauded their struggle against “Russian (sic!) empire.” The Baltic Nazis are knocking in NATO's doors, speak of the “inferiority” of their eastern neighbors, erect monuments to their SS heroes. The fascist battalions from Ukraine are now fighting Russian troops in Chechnya hand in hand with Islamic fascists. Latvian women snipers, “white stockings,” keep counting the heads of Russian conscripts. They are assisted by the “early day motions” of “left Labor Party” MPs and the pickets of the Committee for Workers' Solidarity with Chechnya. They are cheered up by “human rights” imperialism. Exactly like fifty years ago, when Russell wrote his anti-Soviet agitprop, Orwell compiled a list of “crypto-communists” sympathetic to the Soviet Union, Cliff dreamed of the liberation of the peoples of the Soviet Union from “state capitalism” and “Russian imperialism,”and British M15 sent arms, materiel, and intelligence to Bandera army.
2 December, 2000
II
[I must apologize before the members of this list for publishing this article in installments, separated by days. The reason for this is simple. On the one hand, the development of events in Russia and abroad makes this subject of this article highly relevant. On the other hand, researching and writing it take too much time from a slow writer, like myself.]
Since I invited some people from Russia to participate in this debate only recently, I would like to state briefly the gist of the matter.
A London-based organization “International Solidarity with Workers in Russia,” who has been actively involved in organizing international support for militant labor movement in that country for the last year or so, has recently joined and became active in the “Committee for Workers' Solidarity with Chechnya” (CWSC). This Committee, of whose organizers and political nature I will write at great length, demands from Russia to stop military actions in Chechnya and recognize its right for self-determination. In other words, the demands of this Committee, ISWoR including, not only agree with the explicit demands of Western imperialists but go “one step” further, expressing, so to speak, their unspoken wishes as well. What the ruling faction of imperialist West is temporarily coy to demand (remember Serbia!), its dominated faction—the imperialist left—feels free to articulate under the guise of “workers' solidarity.” I will yet analyze the canny similarity of this peculiar “one step ahead” tactics of CWSC's demands with those used by their political doubles in Yugoslavia. [Since the first publication of this article it became known that not only the organizers of CWSC were the same groups and individuals who organized the support of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, but that ISWoR itself was based on the same crowd—editor). The least I can say about ISWoR's participation in this imperialist ploy is that it is a grave political mistake which puts into doubt the relation between this organization and the militant labor movement in Russia.
Let me now begin with the recent letter by Lisa Taylor of ISWoR, written in response to my criticism of ISWoR's search for partners among Russian “human rights” organizations. This is a key passage, to which I will use repeatedly.
She wrote:
“In the west, subject to the swamping influence of capitalist mass media, many leftists become fooled by both imperialist-funded “human rights” organisations and so-called “humanitarian” propaganda, designed to engage people's emotions and camouflage the real motives of the US interventions around the world. We saw this very spectacularly in the Balkans. It needs to be remembered that the directors of the “human rights” organisations do not place their political agenda or their financial backers up front in the public eye, but only their reports (which may often be true, but extremely selective) which focus people's minds on the suffering of real human beings somewhere in the globe. And this is what those leftists are responding to.”
1. This is a surprisingly sober view on the “human rights” imperialism, given that, as I will demonstrate, some of ISWoR's partners in the Campaign are precisely these very directors and, by extension, those who pay them. This subject will be covered later. First, I’d like to make a more general comment on the spirit of Lisa Taylor's approach.
I do not doubt for a moment that not a few leftists indeed take part in such campaigns as yours, as their way of responding to “the suffering of real human beings.” The same is true about many other people, including those belonging to the political right. Humanitarian concerns, we might recall, are not the exclusive property of the Left, nor constitute its political essence.
Indeed, a catholic priest, a right-wing politician may feel stronger compassion to human suffering than a CP leader or a Marxist theoretician. Nor this compassion depends, or rather should depend, on class, race or gender. Philanthropic sentiment does not know a Greek or a Jew, a Russian or a Chechen, a capitalist or a worker, a man or a woman. It knows only human beings. This is why I always feel certain falsity in any slogan and campaign which attempts to combine humanitarian and class perspectives. At best, they cancel each other. At worst, this combination benefits the ruling classes by obfuscating or altogether sacrificing the standpoint of class struggle which for Marxists is the guiding light in understanding social reality and changing it. Whether ISWoR is a Marxist organization or not is beyond the point. I am Marxist, and I see my duty before the Russian working class to establish a Marxist perspective on the organizations like ISWoR and the political terrain which they occupy.
If it is indeed the pure compassion to “human suffering,” rather than a political agenda, that motivated the founding members of this Committee, then why this compassion is so selective? Why this compassion excludes thousands of people from all over the Russian Federation, enslaved by the Chechens? Hundreds, perhaps, thousands of ethnic Russians murdered and hundreds of thousands expelled from their homes in the ethnic cleansing of 1994-99? Where is your compassion to the people of Dagestan, who with hunting rifles and rocks beat back Khattab's commandoes, not a few of whom were trained in Britain, perhaps, even in Benn's own election district ? Why not to express compassion to ordinary Chechens whose country and lives were raped by Islamic fascist, both home grown and foreign? And why this compassion leads to the demand for Chechnya “self-determination”? Alas, the experience tells me that all these questions will remain unheard and unanswered.
The Committee demands: “Russian Troops Out of Chechnya”? Are the Committee members aware that these are not “Russian” troops but the troops of almost one hundred twenty nationalities who inhabit the 89 legal subjects that constitute the Russian Federation? If you read Russian accounts of this war you wouldn’t make this mistake. Because every second officer mentioned has a non-Russian last name. Do you know that Chechnya is an autonomous republic of Russian Federation? Do you recognize the right of these one hundred twenty nationalities to defend the *territorial integrity* of their homeland, both from the Islamic fascists and imperialists, and even from Cliff's prodigy in Canada, or the sensitive British leftists, “simply” responding to “human suffering”?!
And yet, so far I remain completely within the rhetoric of bourgeois humanitarism of your own Committee. You wouldn’t deny 88 out of 89 legal subjects of RF *their* right to protect their federation, would you?
But we are not bourgeois humanitarians,—you may object. We are “leftists.” —Look at our web page! Don’t you see how eager we are to create a credibility gap between the Blair bourgeoisie, NATO, and IMF demanding that Russians get their troops out of Chechnya, and us, “leftists” and “workers,” demanding that Russians get their troops out of Chechnya? Aren’t you a lying, slandering, great-Russian pig of a chauvinist SOB, Bilenkin, for refusing to see this credibility gap of ours, painted all over this page and edited 2-3 times for the past week to make it even more credible?!
First of all, your organization includes liberal bourgeoisie by your own admission.
“ISWoR is a broad front with an anti-sectarian approach uniting individual and organizations from several countries and across a wide spectrum of political views. As a result we have, for example, supporters who are anarchists and others who are Marxists and others who are neither.”
We are not children. “Others who are neither” are bourgeois. Actually, this coyly negative definition of the part of ISWoR's membership made me recall Barthes' witty aphorism: “Bourgeoisie is a class who does not want to be named.” There is nothing terribly bad or shameful in being bourgeois, ideologically or class wise. If I am naming things as they are it is only because we need clarity as to what is the ideological composition of one London-based organization which about a year ago actively intervened into the anti-capitalist movement in Russia. This question is not irrelevant to me and my comrades in Russia. And there is nothing ominous, inappropriate, or ridiculous in this inquiry. We want to know who we are dealing with. We want clarity, clarity, and more clarity.
Lisa continues:
“ What unites us is our common support for workers internationalism, our opposition to the IMF/Yeltsinite privatisation which we believe has devastated Russia's economy, and opposition to racism and fascism. These ideas are prominently advertised on our website, and in most of our publications, time and again.”
Are any of these commonplaces unacceptable for the liberal imperialism of Clinton and Blair? Absolutely not!
“Workers internationalism” is defended by Sweeny and Shmakov, by Eric Lee and ICEM, and a great deal of other pro-capitalist labor leaders and the ideologists of the bourgeoisie in the working class.
The same is true about the attitude of the growing section of Western bourgeoisie to “IMF/Yeltsinite privatization.” It was a “bad” privatization, it is a “crooked” capitalism., they say. Not only they say so, but they also act against that privatization and capitalism, and do so much more effectively than their own “broad left.” They want to “put it straight,” because this capitalism is embarrassment to their own “good” capitalism, and because it is getting out of hand, out of their control.
Above all, there are great many ordinary people, middle-class people, in the West who sincerely despise Russian capitalism on *humanitarian* grounds. They are decent people. Most people are. They are also politically thoroughly bourgeois. And again, this is not a swear word. This word only goes beyond the “purely human,” beyond the political philistinism of statements like “leftists responding to the sufferings of real human beings.”
Finally, what about the “opposition to racism and fascism”? A NATO bomber pilot who dropped depleted uranium bombs on Serbian villages could sincerely put his signature under this slogan on the ISWoR's website. This pilot and most of his comrades-in-arms were, indeed, convinced that by dropping their bombs they actively fought racism and fascism. The men and women of NATO are also decent human beings. Most people are.
2. Not all “leftists” are necessarily Marxists. And not all those who claim to be Marxists are necessarily agree on even the most fundamental points of the doctrine, let alone questions of practical politics. Moreover, history teaches us that “leftists,” including Marxists, often find each other on the opposite sides of the barricade. Actually, this happens always when the class struggle reaches its sharpest. Let me give you an example, so well-known that every one can see my point easily.
In the beginning of this century, the Russian left included the social democrats of both tendencies (M/B), the anarchists, and (up to 1905-7) the so-called “revolutionary democracy”: the socialist revolutionaries and the constitutional democrats (i.e., liberals). On many issues of Russian life this Left was more or less united against the old regime, most obviously and closely on humanitarian issues, like Jewish pogroms, the persecution of religious minorities, or police violence. However, it took no more than 10-12 years before this Left was in the mortal struggle between each other on the side of the main battling classes, internally and internationally.
The constitutional democrats formed direct alliance with Western imperialists in order to crush the Soviet republic. The social-revolutionaries led peasant rebellions against the Bolshevik regime. The Mensheviks participated in White governments which executed red workers en mass. The anarchists fought the Bolsheviks in the nationalist army of Makhno. And the Bolsheviks used Red Terror against all of the above. These examples, from the French Revolution to the ongoing civil wars in Peru and the Philippines, can be multiplied. This is another reason why the working class should be on guard when another humanitarian campaign by “leftists,” like the one that began last week in London., is being launched under the name of “workers'” “Left” is too broad, too vague. It can include people who express, consciously or not, the interests of antagonistic classes. Even worse than that: a campaign can work hand in glove with the openly imperialist forces and yet be legitimately called “leftist.” This may sound like a bad paradox. But it is not. Let me explain myself and offer some other well-known examples of what I have in mind.
3. Since the French Revolution the Left and the Right are constitutive parts of the bourgeois political sphere. Marxist and anarchist left are special only in that that they desire the “positive” supercession of the bourgeois order as such, i.e., private property, while all other leftists believe that the good society can be achieved by reforming the existing order. There are very few Marxists and anarchists left these days in the West. The bulk of its Left is now overwhelmingly bourgeois. This is not a dirty word. I use it in the above-mentioned sense. For example, in Britain to this bourgeois left belong most of the trade union leadership, the left wing of Labor Party, all kind of “democratic socialist” parties and groups, etc.
The bourgeois and even anti-bourgeois left traditionally comes from the dominated sections of the ruling class, i.e. the petty bourgeoisie. Historically, humanitarism and moralism, in general, have been central to the ideological expression of this class. What IS relatively new is that this traditional humanitarism and moralism of the bourgeois left has recently been mobilised by the big, imperialist bourgeoisie for the cause of creating a “new world order,” i.e., a truly planetary bourgeois empire. I have in mind the “human rights” or liberal imperialism, the imperialism of “globalization” led by the new international of monopolies, financial capital, its international organizations and bureaucracy, de-nationalized, English speaking, cross-border mobile bourgeoisie and “professionals,” Westernized, comprador sections of the peripheral middle-classes.
The bourgeois left has become essential to its project. Not that this is an entirely new role for this left, as the “social-imperialism” of the 1900s or the post-war Laborite politics testify.
Do the desperate efforts to make ISWoR's participation in the CWSC palatable for the *majority* of the radical Left in the West (and make no mistake, they ARE a tiny minority) and Russia testify to the uneasy consciousness of its leaders? Why did not they proclaim their independent position, the *good,* the *correct* one? Why did not they condemn not only the regime of Russian restoration for this war, but the regime of Maskhadov-Basaev, and, above, all the main villain, the godfather and the chief puppeteer of both—the regime of Western ultraimperialism?! Why did not they proclaim:
Stop the War!
No to the Regime of Medieval Fascism in Chechnya!
Western Imperialists, Hands Off the Former Soviet Union!
Soldiers and Officers of the Federal Army, Help the Toilers of Russia to Overthrow the Regime of Restoration!
Turn Your Bayonets Against the State of Capitalists and Bureaucrats!
Why? There are several reasons for this, one of which is that even the most radical elements in ISWoR do not feel, and rightly so, that they have the moral right for the last and most crucial of these calls. Still, to take such a position would save ISWoR from getting itself into a cesspit organized by imperialist stooges, pure and simple.
However, the more I studied the list of signatories of the Committee's demands the clearer it became to me that it was not a mistake, not an accident, but a logical, inevitable step taken by the nucleus of ISWoR, the result of their political development highly symptomatic of the imperialist left in the 1990s. Of course, should I known that this group of people came out of Cliff Slaughter's Workers Revolutionary Party (Slaughter's first name is politically symbolic), it would have spared me a lot of time and shaped my relations with ISWoR very differently, if at all
What I want to do now is to tell “a story of one campaign,” which concretizes the general reflections above and shows, if only in the outline, the political anatomy of the imperialist left and its place in the mechanism of hegemony, presently being established by Western ultraimperialism.
Lisa Taylor had this to say about one important link in this mechanism:
“In the west, subject to the swamping influence of capitalist mass media, many leftists become fooled by both imperialist-funded”human rights” organisations and so-called “humanitarian” propaganda, designed to engage people's emotionsand camouflage the real motives of the US interventions around the world. We saw this very spectacularly inthe Balkans. It needs to be remembered that the directors of the “human rights” organisations do not place their political agenda or their financial backers up front in the public eye, but only their reports (which may often be true, but extremely selective) which focus people's minds on the suffering of real human beings somewhere in the globe. And this is what those leftists are responding to.
There is an enduring belief (and not just in the west) that charities and human rights organisations are basically independent, impartial organisations just trying to do some good work. For many this mental image extends to anything that calls itself an NGO (nongovernmental organisation), as if the very fact that an association is not officially part of a government signifies political independence. “
I have to take issue with this characterization of NGOs and similar organizations of Western hegemony. In the first place, this description reflects only the surface of things and serves to produce an alibi for gullible leftists. The leaders of ISWoR are not naive newcomers. They could teach any one of us a few things about the British, and, especially, London Left circles and their complicated history of the last twenty years, which includes the “Balkans era” marked by the intensive interpenetration between the British Left and the institutions of imperialist hegemony. Contrary to Lisa's gentle characterization of the Left as a passive victim of these institutions, the real picture is very different.
Just two days ago in one of my messages I drew this scenario:
“Yes, ISWoR joined the ruling class of its own country in its desperate attempt to break the will of the regime in Kremlin to regain control over Northern Caucasus and to save the backbone of Basaev's troops. The motion came right after Russian paratroopers cut their main supply line from Georgia in the Argun Gorge. Simultaneously, the Northern group of Chechen forces was completely encircled in and around Grozny area and lost any viable communication with the Southern group. The corridor between the two has been widening since despite the desperate attempts of Chechen elite forces to break through it. From the military point of view this situation means the close end for of the Chechen army.
This is what bothered the gentlemen in London on the eve of this motion. The time came for the “total mobilization” of forces. The early day motion by Benn was a signal for the troops, so far sitting in the reserve. And there they were, always on the call: the “broad left.” -How can we help you, Sir?”
This is how I imagined the order of moves, the logic of the chain of commands, the sequence of chemical reactions binding together the different organs of the hegemony machine just two days ago. I was about to post this, second installment, when thanks to one of my correspondents, my attention was directed to a couple of seemingly small facts. Soon it dawned on me that my whole thinking about the imperialist hegemony on the threshold of the third millennium mistakenly follows the same logic that pervades Lisa's account, the logic which was largely true in relation to the older imperialism, when the ruling class did not have to hide the mechanism of its rule as thoroughly as the liberal imperialism does now.
The seemingly appalling fact is that it was not Benn who gave the signal to the “Left.” It was the “Left” who gave it to Benn.
These small details related to the personalities of two signatories of CWSC's “Letter.” I had to get aquatinted with them closer than I thought was needed. One of them turned out to be so fascinating that he deserves a separate chapter in this investigation, even if his signature occupies the strategic, but less conspicuous third place on the list. Let me introduce you to this gentleman,