'Socialism or Barbarism'
she was looking at the world through the bloodstained lenses of WW1, focusing on a tidal wave of death and destruction. But she was aware that barbarism is not just the collapse of a previously prevailing society. Depending on the strength, or lack of it, of those classes and parties with a progressive alternative, it can also describe the abject detritus initially spun off from the convulsions of the world, which then sweep into the centre of the vacuum created by the absence of an alternative and thereby become the concrete form of the new barbarism.
Socialism is not the victory of the new world, it is an announcement that the struggle for a different society has been born. Equally, barbarism is not the end of an old civilisation, it is the congealing of its waste and rot - now brought into its decaying centre.
Rosa Luxemburg saw, fought and the best guess would be was finally murdered by young men who had returned from the German front. In their anger and despair and trauma, they had been organised by early fascists into the Friecorp - a wild militarised band that raped and murdered its way to the New Order.
So far a million of the estimated 4 million refugees whose lives have been destroyed by the Syrian war have swept into Germany. Some hundreds of alienated, trauma ridden, disassociated young men in Cologne and perhaps a couple of thousand across other cities in Germany, went on a gang-based spree of sex attacks and theft. This is a taste of barbarity. It is what an endless and cruel war looks like even 500 miles from its source.
There may be specific conditions, yet to be discovered, for the events in Cologne and wider on New Year's night. There are always particular and specific structures surrounding even the most nihilistic and apparently mindless large-scale behaviour. Such widespread actions are never just the product of a vague ideological or cultural background, however shared. There must, for example, have been elements of social media prompting.
Perhaps particular religious or criminal groups or individuals encouraged this version of 'defiance' among the young North African and Syrian men. Certainly ISIS has up to now seen the Syrian camps in Turkey and in Lebanon as their potential recruiting ground and the promotion of alienation and antagonism to western European social mores, targeted at its apparently vulnerable and available people on the evening of a public holiday, would be a natural extension of such organising.
At this stage it is impossible to say.
What is certain is that the far right, and the not so far right, will propose that the barbarism exhibited in Cologn and elsewhere eminated from Germany's acceptance of refugees - when the truth is the exact opposite.
Certainly a thousand or more extra mysoginstic young men in Germany must be taught that they will meet a severe legal response for such actions. And a movement, led by refugee women, supported by all, as there are none so fit to break the chains as those who wear them, needs to completely and utterly isolate and denounce such behaviour on the streets, in the camps and in the public squares. But the acceptance by relatively rich western countries of the new millions who are trying to escape from the barbarism in their cities and homes can only massively reduce the growing appeal of those who would want to organise trauma and despair into a truely mass force for reaction.
Whatever the political weakness of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its acceptance of office to end up trapped between Israeli military might and hand outs from the West, its work over decades, even despite its failed direct actions across the globe, especially in the Palestinian camps, kept a people together in hope, which was a major benefit to the rest of the world.
Today, despite some real advances (for example various Kurdish initiatives at both a state and a military level) no such generally hegemonic force exists in the Syrian and Sudanese diaspora. Western war mongering, sometimes direct, sometimes through its allies, has destroyed for the foreseable future any chance for an Arab based solution to the long agony of the Middle East. The removal, today of the Wests' bombers, their special forces, their immense economic leaverage, are essential preconditions for the emergence of any general progressive movements. The sole Western action today (tomorrow a new Marshal Plan etc., will be called for) that has any chance of reducing the millions who are the victims of chaos and brutality, of avoiding the genuinely mass, continental, emergence of a new barbarism, is bending every effort to stop the war and ensuring an open door policy to refugees.
Rosa Luxemburg saw, fought and the best guess would be was finally murdered by young men who had returned from the German front. In their anger and despair and trauma, they had been organised by early fascists into the Friecorp - a wild militarised band that raped and murdered its way to the New Order.
So far a million of the estimated 4 million refugees whose lives have been destroyed by the Syrian war have swept into Germany. Some hundreds of alienated, trauma ridden, disassociated young men in Cologne and perhaps a couple of thousand across other cities in Germany, went on a gang-based spree of sex attacks and theft. This is a taste of barbarity. It is what an endless and cruel war looks like even 500 miles from its source.
There may be specific conditions, yet to be discovered, for the events in Cologne and wider on New Year's night. There are always particular and specific structures surrounding even the most nihilistic and apparently mindless large-scale behaviour. Such widespread actions are never just the product of a vague ideological or cultural background, however shared. There must, for example, have been elements of social media prompting.
Perhaps particular religious or criminal groups or individuals encouraged this version of 'defiance' among the young North African and Syrian men. Certainly ISIS has up to now seen the Syrian camps in Turkey and in Lebanon as their potential recruiting ground and the promotion of alienation and antagonism to western European social mores, targeted at its apparently vulnerable and available people on the evening of a public holiday, would be a natural extension of such organising.
At this stage it is impossible to say.
What is certain is that the far right, and the not so far right, will propose that the barbarism exhibited in Cologn and elsewhere eminated from Germany's acceptance of refugees - when the truth is the exact opposite.
Certainly a thousand or more extra mysoginstic young men in Germany must be taught that they will meet a severe legal response for such actions. And a movement, led by refugee women, supported by all, as there are none so fit to break the chains as those who wear them, needs to completely and utterly isolate and denounce such behaviour on the streets, in the camps and in the public squares. But the acceptance by relatively rich western countries of the new millions who are trying to escape from the barbarism in their cities and homes can only massively reduce the growing appeal of those who would want to organise trauma and despair into a truely mass force for reaction.
Whatever the political weakness of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its acceptance of office to end up trapped between Israeli military might and hand outs from the West, its work over decades, even despite its failed direct actions across the globe, especially in the Palestinian camps, kept a people together in hope, which was a major benefit to the rest of the world.
Today, despite some real advances (for example various Kurdish initiatives at both a state and a military level) no such generally hegemonic force exists in the Syrian and Sudanese diaspora. Western war mongering, sometimes direct, sometimes through its allies, has destroyed for the foreseable future any chance for an Arab based solution to the long agony of the Middle East. The removal, today of the Wests' bombers, their special forces, their immense economic leaverage, are essential preconditions for the emergence of any general progressive movements. The sole Western action today (tomorrow a new Marshal Plan etc., will be called for) that has any chance of reducing the millions who are the victims of chaos and brutality, of avoiding the genuinely mass, continental, emergence of a new barbarism, is bending every effort to stop the war and ensuring an open door policy to refugees.
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