James Matthews, a British man who has fought against ISIS with the Syrian Democratic Forces has just been charged with terror offences by our government. He’s not done anything wrong in the two years he’s been back in the UK, and he was fighting on the side of progressive Syrian Muslims allied to the United States against some of the most sadistic and depraved enemies imaginable, but the home office is suddenly extremely concerned that he might have learned violent habits.
This stands in stark contrast to the treatment of Salman Abedi. This was a guy who Theresa May sent out of the county to fight alongside extremists in Libya, who were armed by the British Government after the fall of Gadaffi a few years back. When he’d finished helping his new friends set up their open air slave markets, he returned to the UK and despite five different community leaders and relatives contacting the police about his alarming behaviour, he was left to his own devices right up until he blew up over twenty people outside the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
This isn’t an isolated case, either – it happens on an international scale. The latest chapter of the war in Syria is a dark one – with ISIS on the verge of defeat, president Erdogan of Turkey has shaved the beards off some of the jihadi fighters who fled across his border, and is now using them to invade Afrin in North Syria. These are people who, keeping their old habits, have released videos of them torturing, mutilating and beheading people they’ve captured, while openly announcing their intention to commit a genocide in the region and settle there. Their targets, on the other hand, were the guys that with the help of the United States drove ISIS from the country, have sheltered hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in the south and were setting up a progressive, socialist and feminist regional government until they started getting bombed last month with the best weaponry NATO can buy.
Protests against this obviously illegal war of aggression are banned in Germany. Theresa May cannot send the Turks enough weapons, and when it was suggested to her that we condemn them for openly sponsoring ISIS 2.0, she pulled that grimace where she looks like someone stuffed a lemon up a dog’s asshole, and changed the subject. Trump and his friends have indicated that they’re going to abandon their former allies and allow Turkey to crush them. Why?
Don’t worry, friends, I’ll tell you fuckin’ why.
Modern imperialism consists of greasing the wheels of western corporations as they extract resources and work from the middle east, Africa, and Asia. For over a century, any government in those regions that might have restricted profits has been deposed. The most stark example is Operation Ajax back in the 1950s. The first democratically elected Iranian President, Mohammad Mossadegh, noticed BP pumping oil out of his country and selling it, and suggested they fork over half their profits so he could educate Iran’s children, develop infrastructure and the like. Instantly he became an international pariah, BP complained to our government and we then orchestrated a coup against him that put the Shah back in charge.
Sankara in Burkina Faso, Patrice Lamumba in the Congo, The Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Allende in Chile, Mossadegh in Iran, all killed or deposed, and what do they have in common? Trying to resist imperial and corporate exploitation of their countries. On the flipside, you can be as deranged and evil as you like, provided you let western companies operate without interference and buy your weapons from us – Pinochet in Chile, the headchopping inbred kings of Saudi Arabia, Erdogan in Turkey, Suharto in Indonesia, all of them were or are our best pals. So the first point is that our government’s love for these figures has nothing to do with their democratic legitimacy, or brutal intolerance of dissent – what matters is their tolerance of western corporate power.
The second point is more subtle. There are only two permissible forms of government in these places – either you want a corrupt strongman who you can buy off, or you want a religious fanatic that will beat down the population and doesn’t care if you ship his country’s wealth overseas. Neither of those governments are very pleasant to live under, and when the inevitable revolution comes, you need to suppress any faction that might rule in the interests of that country’s people, and instead try and flip the country from one permissible form of government to the other. A corrupt authoritarian regime is pretty different from religious fundamentalism, but what they have in common is that they’re easy to manipulate. That’s why we overthrew Gadaffi and then actively helped turn Libya into a caliphate. This is why Saudi Arabia is such a valuable ally – because of, not despite, their sponsorship of extremist movements around the world.
These two dynamics also perfectly explain our actions in Syria. ISIS were too crazy and malevolent even for our government. However, the extremist-dominated Free Syrian Army were more promising, so we have been sponsoring them to try and overthrow the authoritarian president Assad, whose unpopularity means he has outlived his usefulness. The alliance between the USA and the Syrian Democratic Forces, meanwhile, has put ISIS on the back foot, but they’re socialists and explicitly against capitalism – their movement will never be allowed to live. Letting Turkey and their mercenaries butcher them would be most convenient, which is why our foreign secretary (a man who is quick to try and channel fear of terrorism into political power) is whistling a tune right now.
Our establishment’s stated opposition to dictatorship or Islamic extremism is keyfabe, as is their praise of “moderate” Muslims or love of democratic values. They very clearly don’t give a shit. It’s all about money.
Similar dynamics affect countries in Europe and the west too – except the only permissible governments are free-market liberalism or fascism. Once one kind of government loses legitimacy and popular pressure starts to build, corporate power will try and flip the other into place. Again, they’re as different from each other as Saddam Hussein was from Al Baghdadi, but the one thing they have in common is that they would continue to let capitalists run amok.
As an aside, Erdogan’s not-so-subtle support of ISIS paid dividends when they bombed opposition meetings and rallies during his most recent election a couple of years ago. Also, there were two major Islamist terror attacks just before the 2017 UK election. That’s probably just a coincidence, I’m not sure why I even mentioned it.