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Title: Somalia — Chaos or Anarchy?
Author: Mike Hargis
Date: 1993
Language: en
Topics: Libertarian Labor Review, Somalia, chaos, anarchy
Source: Retrieved on September 10, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050910051515/http://www.syndicalist.org/archives/llr14-24/14b.shtml
Notes: From Libertarian Labor Review #14, Winter 1993

Mike Hargis

Somalia — Chaos or Anarchy?

The United States Marines have landed on the shores of Somalia. This is

the third invasion carried out by the Bush administration. In each case

the people of the U.S. have been subjected to sophisticated propaganda

campaigns via the media to elicit popular support for these imperialist

adventures. The invasion of Panama was justified as part of the “war on

drugs”; the war on Iraq was supposed to punish aggression by “a fiend

worse than Hitler”; now, in Somalia, the enemy is chaos and anarchy and

the goal is a humanitarian one — to feed the starving masses.

But, hold on. There’s something wrong with this picture: since when is

the U.S. military a humanitarian agency? Those guns aren’t there for

show, they’re for killing. Of course, only those who resist U.S.

beneficence will be blown away.

The propaganda campaign that has accompanied the Somali operation has

been slick. Pictures of starving children counterposed with those of

drug-crazed gun slingers could do nothing but elicit sympathy for the

victims and hatred for the victimizers. How could any decent human being

oppose the use of force in such circumstances?

Sure, the U.S. shares responsibility for the disaster. For a decade U.S.

arms and food flooded Somalia in order to shore up the Barre

dictatorship and subsidize his war with Soviet-backed Ethiopia over the

Ogaden region. This “aid” destroyed agriculture in Somalia leading to

the current famine. The fall of the Barre dictatorship in 1991, and the

clan-based civil war that followed in its wake, has led to the current

relief crisis. Surely the U.S., as the world’s cop, has a responsibility

to step in and put an end to this “anarchy.”

How could any decent person oppose the U.S.‘s “humanitarian”

intervention (and be assured that this is a U.S. operation, albeit

behind a United Nations veil)?

Now, nobody likes to see people starve to death and some way has to be

found to get food to the people, and no one could possibly sympathize

the gun thugs who are stealing food and selling it on the black market

(that’s capitalism at its rawest).

But there are reasons for opposing the invasion. The most compelling

reason being the precedent it sets for future interventions in the third

world, both foreign and domestic. Liberia, Bosnia, Cambodia,

Afghanistan, Georgia, and other areas that are torn by civil strife have

already been mentioned as areas that require the use of military force

to shore up the nation-state against the disintegrating effects of

ethnic strife. Strife that very often disguises class conflicts.

Our own domestic third world, the inner cities of our metropolitan

areas, could also become candidates for even greater military occupation

in the name of the “war on drugs.” No less a propagandist for the ruling

class than Ted Koppel, in his first report live from Mogadishu, let the

cat out of the bag when he made a comparison between the drug-crazed

teens with guns terrorizing the streets of the Somali capital and the

gang-bangers of the U.S. inner cities. The inference should not be lost

here: just as military force was necessary to clean up the gangs in

Somalia, it may also be the only viable solution to the gang problem in

the U.S.

The para-military operation of Darrel Gates’ “operation clean sweep” in

Los Angeles or the calls for the use of the National Guard to clear the

gangs out of CHA housing projects in Chicago will now be made more

palatable by referring to “operation restore hope.” Another example of

how a militaristic foreign policy inevitably rebounds on the domestic

front.

Much has been made of the “anarchy” that currently reigns in Somalia.

But what exists in Somalia is not anarchy but chaos, engendered by the

collapse of a central authority and the competition between rival gangs

to fill in the power vacuum. What is needed in Somalia is not a central

state authority but grass-roots organizations that can reorganize the

economic life of society.

Where are these organizations going to come from? Certainly not from the

U.S. military or the UN. These bodies are interested in only one thing:

restoring the national state known as Somalia, an artificial legacy of

European colonialism. For the U.S. it’s a question of restoring a stable

client in the strategic Horn of Africa as an asset in its ongoing quest

to control the world’s oil supply; for the UN its a matter of upholding

the very idea of the nation-state, its very reason for being (for

without nation-states, why would you need a “United Nations”?).

But, are a people on the verge of starvation capable of creating the

necessary organs for survival? This is the crucial question for

anarchists and, frankly, this writer doesn’t know. All we do know is

that the statists do not want such self-organization to come about and

will do everything in their power to prevent it. We also know that the

absolute dependence into which the Somali people have fallen makes for

passivity rather than activism.

The lesson in all this, for anarchists, is the absolute necessity to

prepare grass-roots organizations: unions, cooperatives, agricultural

collectives, self defense groups, etc., in advance of any revolutionary

crisis brought on by war or any other disaster so that the people will

have the infrastructure of a new society in place before the collapse of

the state comes about.

It may be too late for the Somali people, their neo-colonialist

subjugation appears inevitable. Perhaps the survivors will, at some

future date, take up the struggle for freedom again. But for anarchists,

particularly those of us in the U.S., the task is to point out the truth

— that the U.S. is not a humanitarian agency, and its military adventure

in Somalia is not for the benefit of the Somali people but to serve the

long-term interests of the U.S. ruling class. U.S. get out of Somalia

and North America!