October, 24th 2020
Tribute in the 4th anniversary of Abu Al Baraa's death
Speech by Carlos Munzer,
… We pay tribute to Abu al Baraa and we are not going to change course because we believe that civilization has no way out if the masses do not try again with new successful socialist revolutions… there is no other way out in this rotten imperialist system other than revolution…
From the FLTI, we want to convey our affection to comrade Khero, Abu Al Baraa's brother, we want to convey our greetings and a huge kiss to Samiah and Nour, the daughters of Abu al Baraa, and to the whole family, who we consider as our own, of all of us.
We are saluting them and paying tribute to him, four years since the fall of the comrade and, from the FLTI, on this day we want to say: "We do not change course."
Several comrades ask us: "Why are we calling a Congress saying 'We are not changing course'?" The homage to Abu al Baraa is a subjective political fact of our current, but it is also part of a political phenomenon of the vanguard in the revolution. Abu al Baraa was an insightful element of the vanguard. He and a core of comrades rose to understand what the victory of the Syrian revolution was ultimately about and what the road to its defeat was all about.
Together we were part of a team. When the bourgeois press finds out that there is a brigade of foreigners fighting in Syria, they wonder who they are. Quickly, agents of the "left" of the bourgeois state, come out to say that "the Leon Sedov Brigade does not exist, it is an invention of a certain Carlos Munzer, who created it in his imagination."
They always do this when they want to isolate those who are fighting. Because to say that "the Leon Sedov Brigade does not exist...", was to give the oppressors a free hand to kill all these comrades.
In the first place, we did not do anything that were not our obligation. As comrade Abu Muad correctly said, "Why was it just us and not hundreds of detachments of the world working class?" Because, the “backwardness in conscience” of the Syrian workers, after 10 years of genocide, is due to the strength neither of religion, nor of the ideologies that reign in the great oppressed masses, but rather, the greatest backwardness in the consciousness of the masses of Syria and the Middle East is a product of the betrayal of the leaderships.
For years we have said in the Congresses of the CSP-Conlutas of Brazil: “Let's organize delegations of workers of one hundred, five hundred, thousand unions, bringing food, aid and solidarity, on behalf of the unions and workers' organizations of the world to the refugee camps; let hundreds of workers march to fight alongside the Syrian working class…”. Thus, the Syrian workers would have understood that their greatest ally were the world working class and the socialists.
However, the Syrian working class suffered a tragedy, which was the tragedy of the entire world working class. It happened that the "socialists" and those who speak in the name of the refugees were on the side of their murderers, with their executioners. These same “socialists” who later cried about the “backwardness in the conscience of the Syrian workers”. But, the "backwardness" is that betrayal, which pushed them more and more into the hands of that Sunni bourgeoisie that cruelly sold out that revolution from within city by city.
We met Abu al Baraa and we fought alongside him, we were part of the same team. The comrade was a member of the FLTI leadership, a young revolutionary, with whom in recent years we have followed one of the great revolutions that shook the world, the Syrian revolution, today crushed and defeated.
The proletariat could not concentrate its forces there; the bourgeoisie and the reaction, in a perceptive way, realized what this revolution was about and what was in danger because of it.
In the 2008 crisis, capitalism blew up into a thousand pieces and, in 2011-2012, in the face of devaluations, an increase in the price of oil and the increase in food prices, millions of exploited entered the combat throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East.
The Syrian revolution was which went the furthest at that time, the same as in Europe the Ukrainian revolution did, putting into question the bourgeois order and the route of the oil and gas pipelines with which imperialist Europe sucks the wealth of the Russian steppes.
The Ukrainian revolution and the Syrian revolution were two huge revolutionary hot spots, where imperialism, with a cynical and cruelly prepared strategy, concentrated all its forces to stop the struggle of the masses at the international level and give a great lesson to the world proletariat.
Against the Ukrainian revolution all the forces of NATO and the butcher Putin were concentrated in the rear, to split Ukraine and strangle the revolution. In Syria, with absolute insight, they played using all their agents. It was necessary to stop not one revolution, but all the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East, which threatened to cross the Mediterranean and unite, as they later did from Greece, with the entire European working class.
Abu al Baraa was killed in 2016, in a place where the bourgeoisie and imperialism in the region had received a very hard blow, where the "Seven Sisters" (the imperialist oil companies, NdeR) control the planet's black gold and where gas and oil are extracted, gas and oil that feed 80% of world production.
How are the areas of the planet that produce 80% of the energies with which all factories operate and generate electricity on the planet going to be "backward and barbarous nations"? 80% of the world's energy works with the black gold that comes out of these areas -the richest on the planet- which were in a state of revolt and revolution.
That is why so much massacre, because there is much wealth to continue to extract and the "Seven Sisters" organized, with the General Staff of imperialism, a plan and a strategy concentrating all their forces in Syria to crush the revolution.
What did they do? What was the plan of the counterrevolution? They first recruited their agents in 2013 and 2015.
In 2013, in Paris, the magazine Charly Hebdo", which made fun of and diatribes against the Muslim masses with cartoons of Muhammad was attacked in a frame-up "attack. France, with the excuse of the "attack" (as Bush had already done with the Twin Towers in 2001 to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq) launched the rallying cry of making a "world antiterrorist front".
The United States had sent ISIS to Syria from Iraq to control the resistance where the Syrian masses had not been defeated by Assad, and crushed the exploited in Rakka and Deir Ez Zor, while France organized a "great anti-terrorist front".
The "antiterrorist front" slogan unified big bourgeoisie, imperialism and all the traitorous organizations of the working class, stating that the enemy in Syria was "terrorism" and that is why an "antiterrorist front" had to be built.
All forces were concentrated in 2013 and 2015 in an International Congress of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Tunis. First in 2013, all the “Bolivarian” bourgeoisies, all the social-imperialist parties of Europe, arrive in Tunisia, hold a conference and resolve: “the enemy is ISIS”, “the enemy is the terrorists”.
The next day, the forces of Bashar al-Assad with Iran, bomb the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, which is located a few kilometers from Damascus, and start a war of siege and starvation to isolate and separate the Palestinian masses in the refugee camps within Syria from the Syrian masses.
In 2015 the operation was repeated. All the reformist currents of the world came together, the PT of Brazil, the French Socialist Party, the trade union centrals of all Europe, all the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisies, to say again "the enemy is ISIS", "the enemy is terrorism ”,“let's all be with Assad, all of us with Putin ”.
In other words, the bourgeoisie and its agents managed to convince and neutralize the majority of the world working class around "the enemy was terrorism", that the enemy was "ISIS", when it was the masses which were fighting, nothing more and nothing less than for bread and freedom.
That was the highest concentration of forces. That was the "army" set up by the counterrevolution. Al-Assad could have done nothing, nothing would have been done after the entry of the assassins of the Russian army, without first the traitors of the working class throwing this cloak of darkness over the Syrian revolution.
Not a single finger was moved on the planet as the massacre progressed. The darkness surrounded Syria because they made the exploited of the world believe that "there was justice in al-Assad's attacks." A tragedy, one of the greatest betrayals of the revolution where the allies of the world working class were passed off as their enemies and their enemies as allies.
Al-Assad together with his cousin Makhlouf run the bank by which HSBC and all the oil companies launder the black money from the looting of oil from the Middle East. He had been the great privatizer of all the companies of the Syrian state, which defends the Golan Heights for Zionism.
They made the greatest agent of imperialism pass as an “ally of the peoples” and, with the “antiterrorist front”, they made the world working class believe that the “terrorists” were the exploited who were fighting in Syria against Assad.
Other criminals within the working class, led us to believe that the Kurdish bourgeoisie (which subjected the Kurdish people to a deal with the US imperalists and al-Assad in 2012) would be which would liberate Syria and that they were the only ones who had the right to fight for self-determination.
Thus, the Syrian revolution was isolated, with the masses of the world blindfolded by the treacherous leaderships and, in the darkness of the black night of betrayal, Putin arrived with the most powerful counterrevolutionary troops in Eurasia and, together with the dog Bashar, they launched a counterrevolutionary offensive by iron and fire, only comparable to the Nazi offensive on Stalingrad in World War II (because it was a policy of urban demolition), which demolished all Syrian cities with bombs and missiles, and never, either Turkey or the United States touched any plane, or any Russian or al-Assad's soldier.
All the bombs fell on the masses. The policy of imperialism was: Scorched Earth. (It does this when the masses are untamed and cannot be defeated.) It was a policy of occupation, looting and destruction. This could be done because there was a black night that led to Putin entering Syria in 2015 and completing the concentration of forces to crush the revolution.
Also during 2015 the Syrian masses carried out a new counteroffensive. In Idlib province, Russian aviation attacked with a bombardment that killed 3,000 people in a camp of 100,000. There was a spontaneous uprising that caused hundreds of thousands to march to the barracks to conquer arms and retake Aleppo. This was the heroic response of the masses.
Against so many counterrevolutionary fronts, the policy of the masses was to "retake Aleppo." We, the revolutionaries, were there in that attempt to stop the counterrevolution. In the first place, we did it at the international level, fighting hand in hand against the greatest betrayal to the world proletariat.
As I said, we went to the Congress of the CSP-Conlutas to propose that a collection of one dollar per worker had to be made from the 3 million members of this central union that has a leadership that calls itself "socialist", which, if they did not want to go to fight, at least could bring solidarity to the refugee camps in Greece, Turkey or Lebanon, where there were millions of Syrians crammed into tents dying in the desert; so that delegations from the unions could come to each camp to organize resistance and international solidarity as those millions of Syrian slaves deserved. We proposed this would create the best conditions so that, from the refugee camps, thousands of people could enter again to fight, as the masses who wanted to retake Aleppo requested, because they knew that if Aleppo fell, then Damascus would fall, where, as comrade Abu al Baraa said, "there is the head of the serpent."
Within Syria, this was expressed in a huge concentration of forces, the most important of which was done by the comrades there. Before entering to break the siege of Aleppo, the revolutionary comrades, the leftist, socialist and revolutionary fraction of the Levant brigades, raised a vote: whether you entered cross country, through the suburbs or entered by sweeping and doing justice against the high bourgeoisie of the private quarters of the millionaires of the Alawite bourgeoisie. Hundreds of volunteers enlisted in the Leon Sedov Brigade to enter to fight and directly attack the interests of the bourgeoisie and advance in retaking Aleppo. There the most important textile factory in the region was expropriated, for example.
The bombing was brutal in the face of this offensive by the masses in Aleppo, against the left wing of the militiamen and partisans. It was the moment where, for the first time, they attacked with drones commanded directly by the United States that attacked our comrades who were trying to enter from that flank to retake Aleppo. Meanwhile, the FSA generals surrendered the weapons that the masses had captured in the Aleppo barracks and hid them.
During that great mass counteroffensive, the entire bourgeois leadership dedicated itself to hiding their weapons. For this reason, when they say that these revolutions "are promoted by the bourgeoisie, imperialism," etc., it is a cruel lie. Never did imperialism and the bourgeoisie arm the masses, because no boss wants to see the armed workers inside their factories.
They say this today, that "imperialism and the bourgeoisie are arming the masses of Belarus who are entering the struggle," as they also say in Ukraine or Indonesia, where there are great uprisings. They say that "they are led by imperialism", it is a great lie, an infamy. There is not a single bourgeois in the world who wants to see a worker working in his factories carrying a Kalashnikov, because they know that they would not be able to command the armed workers.
Every struggle and mobilization that is directed to the arming of the masses, the bourgeoisie is there to disarm them. And so they did, they disarmed the masses in Aleppo, disarmed them in the resistance, hid their weapons and imperialism attacked, defeated the revolution and besieged them in Idlib where today it still resists.
A huge concentration of counterrevolutionary forces acted on the Syrian revolution, as on the Ukrainian revolution, and thus imperialism could have a respite. It was in those two great revolutions where the revolutionary rise that emerged worldwide in 2008 was broken.
Imperialism concentrated its forces and the world working class could not. The old World Social Forum (WSF) withdrew from history handing over and starving the workers in Venezuela, handing over the revolution in Honduras and Nicaragua, handing Cuba over to imperialism, handing over Bolivia's resources with Morales as a darling of Wall Steeet and paying off fraudulent foreign debt.
And, what a coincidence, when in 2015-16 Comrade Abu al Baráa decided to come to Latin America and work together to fight this international battle, the Brazilian and Argentine bourgeoisie denied him a visa with Dilma-Lula from the PT of Brazil and the bastard Cristina Kirchner in Argentina. They were with al-Assad, they were with Putin, they were with the US imperalists massacring the Syrian revolution.
The visa refusal for comrade Abu al Baráa was the WSF's response to the current that had risen up in the world working class to say that the enemy was al-Assad and the butchers of Iran's Gurkish troops, along with Putin and the imperialism.
That is why they denied our comrade a visa. They knew the same as we revolutionaries knew, that no revolution would triumph if the world working class does not rise up. That is why we fight to conquer an international current. That is, we revolutionaries know what it is about, that an international current must be built, not because of a declamatory issue, but because imperialism is going to attack a revolution in one country internationally.
For this reason, it is essential that the proletariat have strong internationalist organizations throughout the world so that it can revolt the world working class and stop the war machine. There is not a single revolutionary who really wants to make a revolution, who does not fight to unite the international ranks of the working class, because he knows perfectly that if his revolution triumphs in one country or in "his" country, he needs the world working class to stop the war machine that would crush it.
The problem is that for the "left" of the 21st century there is a specter, a specter that not only shakes the world, it shakes them: the specter of the revolution. That is why the concept of "revolution" and of "taking power" have been made to disappear. For them, the working class only has to fight for “more democracy”, for “expanding democracy and liberties”, at a time of a huge world crisis, when capitalism is in full decline and in a frank process of putrefaction.
The defeats of the Syrian and Ukrainian revolutions in the first revolutionary wave were paid for by us, we are paying for it, not only by watching over our martyrs, but also with the exploited suffering new leaps in their historical calamities. Barbarism is already here, new wars are shaking the planet.
Today it seems that “nothing is happening”, but tomorrow we have a bomb falling on our doorstep. Capitalism is running amok, it is in crisis, it robs the masses even of the right to live, to eat. Revolutions are not invented by revolutionaries, they are a fact of reality. The workers have to fight, either starve or die fighting, because there is no way out, that is the only way out that this rotten bankrupt capitalist system leaves them.
“We do not change our course” means that we fight all the way through to set up a current that says what the revolutionary Marxism of the 20th century said and fought for: “we have to try again because, without the success of the socialist revolution there is no possibility of victory ”.
Because the Syrian revolution would have succeeded as a socialist revolution, if we had expropriated the capitalists in each liberated zone, if we had expropriated their banks, with those funds we would have obtained weapons; the Syrian revolution would have succeeded if, when the country had been liberated and the regime defeated in 70% of the territory, we not only had taken up arms, but also given the land to the peasant, we had given the workers the control of the factories; the Syrian revolution would have succeeded as a socialist revolution if we had won over all the masses and millions of hungry people to see that the funds to live with dignity were in the bank of Al Assad's cousin, that bloodthirsty Makhlouf who is in charge of laundering black money from the imperialist oil companies, and we had showed that in Syria there are plenty of funds and wealth for eating, living in peace and having dignity.
The Syrian revolution lacked a revolutionary program of social liberation for the working class, to make its struggle invincible; the Syrian revolution lacked an international leadership capable of defeating, before the world working class, the perfidious betrayal of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism who crossed sides to support a genocide against the working class. What the Syrian revolution lacked was a revolutionary leadership. We do not change our course!
That is the reason of this tribute and why Abu Al Baraa was great, because he was the founder of a revolutionary nucleus, not in Syria, but he was the founder of this new stage of the FLTI, because before giving his life in Aleppo, he gave it so that triumph and an international current arises that would break the siege of their revolution.
We pay tribute to Abu al Baraa and we are not going to change course because we believe that civilization has no way out if the masses do not try again with new triumphant socialist revolutions. There is no way out in this rotten imperialist system other than revolution.
We saw in Russia in 1905 there was a great defeat in a great experiment and dress rehearsal of the revolution. There were massacres, pogroms, etc., because the masses had made a great revolution. And they did it in Russia in 1905 with a more backward consciousness than that of the Middle East. The Russian revolution of 1905 began with the Orthodox Church and the priest Gapon leading a mobilization with crucifixes and incense asking "Father Tsar" to give bread to the poor and ended with incense and crucifix running through the streets of Saint Petersburg and with the insurrectionary working class, with the sailors turning against their officers.
The problem that defines a revolution is not ideology, but is the hunger and empty stomach of the masses that enter the combat as a result of their unprecedented sufferings. While the "socialist" scholastics believe that the masses are going to make revolutions through the "socialist universities", something that does not exist. That is why a revolutionary leadership is needed to lead them to victory.
The Mensheviks, the reformists in Russia, had already drawn the conclusion that in 1905 “they had come very far”, the same thing that everyone says today: “Syria was defeated because it went too far… it went so far that they killed them all” .
We think the other way around, that it didn't get very far, that it missed almost 80% of the work. We lacked expropriating the capitalists in each territory where we were; we had to rise up in Paris, in Greece, in the United States; we needed to unite that revolution to the Maghreb and the Middle East and to the rest of the world. "What little we did!" we say.
That is our conclusion: we executed few bourgeois, there were few exploiters with whom we did justice in the face of so many years of death and massacre, there were few traitors that we defeated worldwide. That is the pending task and that is our honorable commitment to Abu al Baraa.
But a new world crisis is shaking the planet, new revolutions will give birth to new revolutionaries, new wars and new barbarities will also give birth to new revolutionaries of the quality of our dear comrade Abu al Baraa, the comrade of the FLTI leadership, with whom we shared that management team and we discussed daily the elaboration of the “Syria under fire” books. These were not written by strange characters locked up in university libraries, but were written by comrades who were intervening on the battlefield itself and were a proud part of our team in the FLTI, of its leadership, which is fighting hard to regroup the ranks to recover the Fourth International.
The last reflection we want to make is that in Syria, the liquidationists of Trotskyism and of our world party, the Fourth International, put themselves to the test and demonstrated to the enemies of the working class that they were useful and that they served to crush revolutions, that they were fit, and they passed the test. That is why capital co-opted them, they are all co-opted to support the bourgeois regimes.
We do not change course. We have had deserters, comrades who were demoralized, others who believed that with the blood shed by others they were going to lead revolutions and make parties. Here we are those who say that this blood is ours and it is for the victory of the working class. Those of us who fight for that, remain here, while the most valuable forces from the vanguard of the world working class are also incorporated.
Trotskyism has a future because it is the future of the revolution. Ahead there is nothing other than revolution and counterrevolution on this planet and in this rotten capitalist system.
We want to pay tribute to our dear comrade Abu al Baraa, but above all, because reformism has to explain, because there is a new generation of workers and young rebels, to whom they have to explain why they made an "anti-terrorist front" with Macron, with the French imperialist bourgeoisie and Trump, to crush the Syrian revolution. They have to explain to a new generation of youth and workers why they supported the butcher Putin, who in Russia even prohibits strikes and marches and anyone who does not comply is punished with prison and tortured in his dungeons. They have to explain why they backed and supported the fascist al-Assad who tortured more than 100,000 Syrians worse than the Nazis in concentration camps.
They have to explain why there is such a defeat. The only thing we can do is denounce them to the new generation of the proletariat, explaining that this "New Left" is a den of bandits, traitors and the most backward thing that the world proletariat has: a corrupt leadership, paid for by capital for saving their businesses when the revolutions come.
We want to pay tribute to Abu al Baraa and, with him, to all the militants and fighters of the Syrian revolution. We put our grain of sand, a point of support for the revolution. But we know that in that revolution many "Abu al Baraa" arose, who did not deserve a defeat, they deserved victory.
In tribute to our comrade, we want to pay tribute to all the fallen combatants of the Syrian revolution, because they are our comrades, for them we fight and we give our lives, as we do for the world working class.
We are fighting for justice and to avenge the murder of Abu al Baraa, we are fighting in the streets of New York, we are fighting with the black workers movement that has risen up, with the masses of Indonesia that are entering the combat. Putin's last hour will come! The workers of the Donbass in Ukraine have risen up again, in Belarus there are mass actions against the Lukashenko government and its fierce dictatorship, in Kyrgyzstan the revolution has also begun, the masses are beginning to surround Putin's White Russia.
There the forces are created and joined to do justice for the Syrian revolution and stop Putin's war machine. The American working class has risen. US imperialism begins to have its hands tied to make a direct offensive. The masses of the Middle East are fighting.
We have just learned that, yesterday, Sudan has recognized the state of Israel. The government of Sudan is a government with the Communist Party, an issue that everyone wants to hide. The government of Sudan is the fifth Arab country to recognize the Zionist State of Israel and Trump's plan for the Middle East. There is the Communist Party that supported al-Assad, the one that today is in government with the bourgeoisie in Sudan that recognizes Zionism and has openly put itself in the bloc with US imperialism.
We then want to argue that, in the 21st century, again, between Trotskyism and Stalinism there is a river of blood.
Sometimes the time will come when the enemy will suffer as many ignominies and abuses as they have imposed on the world proletariat.
We salute all the comrades of our international current. We reaffirm that we do not change the course, that it is fixed in the revolution.
We know that the revolution and the counterrevolution lie ahead and that the times of peace are only temporary. Just look at the situation in any country, in a world that is adrift. The crisis of domination of imperialism continues to deepen. Here and there, the famines and sufferings of the masses become unbearable. The working class needs many Abu al Baraa and many of them are in our ranks. We are the flesh of comrade Abu al Baraa and that is our pride.
From here we send greetings to all the comrades in Syria, to the family of Al Baraa, to his daughters who are our daughters and to our comrades who will avenge the blood of our martyrs in the future.
We thank all the comrades for having attended this tribute. We know that Abu al Baraa and his flag will not be forgotten. A fraternal hug to all the comrades in this tribute to one of the leaders of the FLTI, who fell where he had to fall, in the classes civil war.
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