Pat O’Dea – Campist? What is that?

ByThe Daily Blog

Who or what are “Campists”?

And what do they believe?

Daphne Lawless explains

….the metaphor that the world is divided into several military “camps”, with the largest being the Western camp led by the United States. Therefore, any government which disagrees with American foreign policy – no matter how oppressive to its own people, or however wedded to neoliberal market economics – can be supported. These governments are even called “anti-imperialist” – as if there were only one imperialism, that of the Western bloc.[1]

…..This sophisticated geopolitics often fails to convince, due to basic human empathy for the oppressed and suffering.
The more degraded campists are then forced to resort to what experts in domestic violence call DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.[3] This aims to counteract the impulse to solidarity by portraying the apparent victims of violence as in fact the bad guys. Hence, fighters for a Free Syria become “ISIS-like headchoppers”, who gassed their own children to make Russia look bad. Ukraine is not a country with an ugly Nazi subculture – like almost all capitalist nations – but an actual Nazi state which wants to exterminate all Russian-speakers (whose president, interestingly, is a Russian-speaking Jew).[4]

…..solidarity with all the oppressed and deprived is not only a moral duty, but the basic step in building a global movement to replace capitalism and imperialism.

…..We understand that one imperialist power will only help those oppressed by another if by doing so it furthers its own selfish interests.

Daphne Lawless is a Left political activist and writer and accomplished Kiwi muso.

A people fighting a war of national liberation against a powerful imperialist power can not beat them with sticks and stones they need weapons as powerful and plentiful as their oppressor.

Getting weapons and assistance from one imperial power to liberate your country from another imperialist power has proved to be a winning strategy in wars of national liberation.

The Irish Nationalists got the weapons they needed to liberate their country from the British Empire from Germany and the Triple Alliance.

The weapons that the Vietnamese used to defeat the US imperialists were supplied to them by the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

The weapons supplied to the Ukrainians to defend themselves from the Russian imperialists come from the US imperialists and Nato

Daphne Lawless writies; “….we might of course warn them that Western help always comes with strings attached, but amazingly enough, they usually already understand that”

But the Campists of course don’t see it that way. To them the Ukrainian people are dupes of US imperialism with no right to fight for their freedom from Russian oppression.

But even the the Bolshevik leadership including Lenin sought the help of the German Empire to get into Russia to lead the revolution that overthrew the Tsarist Empire. And yes, because of this they were accused of being German agents.
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Pat O’Dea is a trade unionist and human rights activist.

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4 Comments

  1. This sort of Shactmanite propaganda only works if your audience can’t define imperialism, and has no idea what a national liberation movement actually is.

    According to these dupes, ‘national liberation’ is being a (far-right religious) mercenary who supports the U.S. plan to occupy Syria, which Paul Wolfowitz first revealed to Gen. Wesley Clark in 1991.

    Supposedly ‘national liberation’ is supporting seven decades of C.I.A. destabilisation in Ukraine S.S.R., based around the funding of Nazi collaborators and other ultranationalists — who in 2014 overthrew the government, and crushed the labour movement (by banning the opposition parties and press outlets).

    We are also told to support the related U.S. policy to ‘liberate’ Russia, by smashing it up into tiny warring statelets (the ‘Captive Nations Policy’ and the C.S.C.E. ‘Decolonisation Plan’).

    The ‘liberation’ of Libya was perhaps even worse, when apparently free healthcare, education, electricity and housing all had to be abolished — so the U.S. could install fanatical ultraconservative goons as the ‘liberators’.

  2. Shactmanite never heard of it.
    Is Shactmanite like Krytonite to Campists?

    Wow

    I think I will keep some with me.

    So I have learnt another new word. I didn’t know what Shactmanite was, so I had to look it up. It seems that Shactmanite is like Krptonite to Campists. Who knew? I didn’t. I guess it doesn’t hurt to know the terminology. I didn’t know what a campist was either, not until I read Daphne Lawless excellent explanation. Which made it all clear to me.
    Now I know why some people who claim to be ‘Left’, and even espouse left causes, can heartlessly justify, and excuse, mass murder and imperialist aggression and invasion. Because mass murder and military aggression and invasion, isn’t mass murder and military aggression and invasion, if it’s not done by the US.
    I didn’t know that either.

    1. When Dan La Botz recently coined his new ‘campism’ slogan in the pages of the D.S.A. journal, what was he referring to?

      La Botz did not create a new theory. His position is the Third Camp position of Max Schactman, which the Harringtonites of the D.S.A. always supported.

      His article simply declared that opponents of Schactmanism should now be called ‘campists’.

      This is the same Dan La Botz who supports virtually every U.S. regime change operation: calling for the overthrow of the governments of Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, and Russia.

      He openly promotes this by featuring N.E.D. funded speakers at his conferences.

      Of course, this puts him in direct opposition to the labour movement in all those countries — an inevitable consequence of Schactmanism.

      Unsurprisingly, La Botz does not want people at home to rise up against their own government, or even start their own party. The D.S.A. claims that workers must instead make an alliance with Wall Street liberals!

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