EXTRACT: It could not be clearer that the imperialists’ ‘no-fly zone’ was never about ‘protecting’ civilians from supposed ‘genocide’ or any other such thoroughly mendacious crap - that was just the big lie. Imperialism has no intention of spreading democracy throughout the Arab world - or anywhere else, for that matter: the bourgeoisie has never been a democratic class and never will be. But criminally, or tragically, some on the left fell for it, hook, line and sinker - or at least pretended to. Though from out-and-out social-imperialists like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty we never really expected anything else. First and foremost, the imperialist meddling in Libya was about reasserting control - so as to make sure that it was the ‘great powers’ determining who and what replaces Gaddafi, not the Libyan masses themselves. If it turns out that this or that section of the Libyan people tacitly prefer the new regime to the old - whether temporarily or longer - then that is purely incidental for imperialism. By turning the Benghazi proto-government into its agents or proxies, imperialism hopes that further down the line this will assist it in its efforts to reassert dominance over the region as a whole.
That does not mean we were wrong to support the spontaneous democratic uprising again the Gaddafi tyranny - quite the opposite. One would have to be wilfully blind, or a hopeless dogmatist, not to acknowledge that the Libyan uprising was inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions - which the protesters in Benghazi and elsewhere sought to emulate. Tragically, being weak and divided, they failed - with the last vestiges of that democratic revolution being subsumed by an imperialist-sponsored civil war. To borrow a phrase, the Arab revolution became deflected - then appropriated.
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