As the Libyan resistance fights on, ‘Stop the War’ misleaders are already dancing on Gaddafi’s grave

Issued by: CPGB-ML
Issued on: 08 September 2011

The CPGB-ML warmly applauds the heroic resistance that the Libyan people have mounted against imperialism’s six-month-long assault on their national sovereignty. Despite the blitzkrieg visited upon them by the best-equipped military forces on earth, deployed in support of a rag-tag band of terrorists and agents seeking to undo the gains of the revolution, the Libyan people have remained steadfast.

We recall Fidel Castro’s earlier warning that the “crude attacks against the Libyan people, which have taken on a Nazi-fascist character, may be used against any third-world nation. The belligerent organisation now depends on Gaddafi. If he resists and does not yield to their demands, he will enter history as one of the great figures of the Arab nations.” (panorama.am)

Even were the resistance struggle now to flag, confronted with such an uneven balance of forces, Castro’s words would hold true. Yet despite the false impression created by government and media lies, it emerges that the forces of national resistance are in fact fighting on against enormous odds. In Sirte and elsewhere, the resistance continues.

Shamefully, it is at this hour of greatest peril for the Libyan revolution that the national leadership of the Stop the War Coalition has chosen to issue statements rowing in with the anti-Gaddafi hysteria whipped up by imperialist propaganda. So eager are they to see the Libyan revolution buried that they would dance on its grave, even whilst the outcome remains in the balance.

The final paragraph of a statement on Libya issued nationally by the Stop the War Coalition on 22 August chimed in with the imperialist demonisation of Gaddafi, airily informing us that “The old rulers will not be missed if and when they depart. The decisive issues – genuinely democratic and popular regimes across the Arab world, the exclusion of great power interference in the region and justice for the Palestinian people – remain in the balance and require our solidarity.

So rather than support the real resistance that is actually being mounted against the aggression of our own ruling class, these gentry are reserving their precious ‘solidarity’ solely for what their tunnel vision is prepared to recognise as a “genuinely democratic and popular” resistance movement – ie, a movement which for the moment exists only in the realm of their imagination.

Such ‘solidarity’ can well be dispensed with by those engaged in resisting imperialism in reality.

John Rees in turn informs us in a YouTube interview that “nobody is going to shed a tear for the fall of this brutal dictator” and advises the quisling “Transitional National Council” to gain credibility by “telling the major powers where to get off” – ie, to adopt his own tactic of salting a counter-revolutionary position with some bogus anti-Nato rhetoric.

Such games will not sanitise Nato’s quislings any more than they sanitise Rees’s own vile stance.

We denounce all such treachery towards the Libyan national resistance. It brings the Stop the War Coalition further into disrepute, weakening and dividing an anti-war movement whose ability to mobilise has already been seriously weakened over the past ten years by its persistent enslavement to social democracy.

The working class in Britain will advance the faster on the road to its own emancipation as we learn how to break the link with Labour and social democracy – and how to give real solidarity to those engaged in resistance against our own imperialist masters.

The struggle of the Libyan people is also our struggle. Whatever the immediate future may hold, we may be sure that history is on our side.

Victory to the Libyan resistance against Nato terrorism!
Victory to Gaddafi!