Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 21
May 23 – Let there be no mistake about it. The military intervention into Shaba province in Zaire by Belgium, France, and the U.S. was an organized, orchestrated, and coordinated effort of NATO, headed and engineered by the U.S. and by NATO commander General Alexander Haig.
It was organized in the manner of a fascist, military blitzkrieg to destroy a national liberation movement and to keep a rebellious people under the thumb of world imperialism. The horror stories about the killings of Europeans are a smokescreen, a cover story, a rerun of what took place in January 1959 when the first anti-imperialist insurgency took place in the then-capital city of Leopoldville at a time when Zaire was called the Congo.
In 1959, screaming headlines about the killing of some European settlers were used as a smokescreen to cover up the birth of a national independence movement and its attempt to take destiny into its own hands. And today, the so-called massacre of Europeans in the province of Shaba, assuming that even one-tenth of what has been said is true, is only the tiniest bit of the entire panorama of political struggle by the people of Shaba and all of Zaire against the brutal, dictatorial puppet regime of Mobutu.
Nowhere do we see how many hundreds or thousands of casualties have been inflicted on the people of Shaba by the brutal invasion of the imperialists. Only the smallest and most incidental elements of the general uprising against the Mobutu regime are described.
The fact that it took the combined military strength of Belgian and French paratroops with “only logistical support” (if not much more) from the U.S. illustrates one of the fundamental purposes for the existence of NATO: as a counter-revolutionary force to suppress the liberation struggles in Africa and also as a counter-insurgency force against the Western proletariat, something for which the imperialists are most certainly preparing.
The present military intervention is in some respects even more abhorrent than the imperialist effort to install Mobutu in 1965, four years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the President of the then Congo Republic. It was assumed by all that that might be a short-lived affair, that a progressive revolutionary regime would soon follow in the heels of Mobutu’s installation as a puppet of the Western imperialists.
But it is the coordination of the major imperialist stakeholders in Africa which is responsible for the survival of the Mobutu regime for so long and for the crushing, even if only temporarily, of the rebellious people for the second time in only the space of a year.
How are the imperialists able to accomplish this monstrous crime – a crime which not only has elements of the repressions of the early 1960s, but is a throwback to the days of the 1890s when the African continent was being carved up by finance capital? It is partly because imperialism was also able to raise a monstrous smokescreen in the form of anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban hysteria. Their propaganda operates on the principle of the big lie in a manner which differs little from Goebbels’ Nazi lie factory and can succeed only thanks to there being a deep division among the socialist countries and also a proletariat in the metropolitan imperialist centers that is disoriented and taken in tow by anti-Soviet and pro-imperialist interests.
In the early 1930s General Smedley Butler, an ultra-rightist Marine with a peculiar slant of his own, said in a burst of brutal frankness, “If Soviet Russia didn’t exist, the great powers would have to invent her.”
The imperialists always need to divert attention from their crimes in order to entice, bewilder, and confuse the working class and the oppressed. Anti-communism and anti-Sovietism has been a handy tool whenever a social, political, or economic debacle engulfs the capitalist system – an especially necessary ideological tool to divert the masses when their real enemy is preparing a predatory military adventure. The intervention in Zaire is a classical example taken right out of the book.
Force along cannot maintain the suppression of a rebellious people who are struggling for liberation from the yoke of the transnational corporations. The imperialists’ present, temporary success can partly be accounted for by the division in the international workers’ movements, as we said, and above all else by Sino-Soviet relations.
Aiding and abetting the anti-Soviet drive, in fact trying to be in the forefront of it, is the current leadership in the People’s Republic of China. The constant barrage that emanates from Peking attacking the Soviet Union and its allies, particularly Cuba, for their aid to the liberation struggles differs in form but not in essence from that of the imperialists. It is this element which differentiates the present period from that of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
At that time the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership was attacking the USSR (and this is when Khrushchev was at the head of the Soviet state!) for not fighting hard enough, not being revolutionary enough in the struggle for national liberation – particularly in the Congo, as Zaire was called then. But later the CCP line swung 180 degrees. Now the Chinese leaders maintain that it is the imperialists who are not fighting the Soviet Union hard enough, that NATO is not strong enough, that the West and the Carter administration are appeasing the USSR in the Horn of Africa and in Africa generally! It is all too plain which side they are taking in this crucial struggle in Zaire. No revolutionary rhetoric can cover it up.
Le Monde of May 21-22 reports that the official Chinese press “has presented favorably the intervention of France and Belgium. On Wednesday China had officially express its ‘total’ support of Zaire in a declaration by Minister of Foreign Affairs Huang Hua denouncing the offensive of ‘Soviet-Cuban mercenaries’ in Shaba.”
A dispatch by John Fraser to the Toronto Globe and Mail picked up today by the Christian Science Monitor reports on the visit to China of U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and his welcome by the Chinese leadership. At the state banquet for Brzezinski, Foreign Minister Huang Hua stated that “The struggle for hegemony [a code word referring to the USSR] is the main source of global intranquility. The shadow of social imperialism [another code word for the USSR] can be seen in almost all the changes and disturbances in every part of the world.” Well then, who sent paratroopers into Shaba province and dealt death and destruction with sophisticated weapons? Was it “social-imperialism”?
Who invaded southern Lebanon – social-imperialism? Who is carrying on a war against Chad and Polisario? Who is fighting against the liberation of East Timor? Who is torturing the Irish freedom fighters? Who everywhere on the face of the globe is the fundamental oppressor and exploiter of the world’s oppressed? Who continues to threaten Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea, and Laos?
The Peking leaders seem to have forgotten all that they ever learned when it comes to the contemporary relations of the USSR and the U.S.
But the U.S. has not forgotten. The Pentagon and the State Department, as well as the White House, are in general agreement on what they want vis-à-vis the USSR and China. So clear is their motivation that they often forget to use euphemisms and code words and speak their real thoughts. Thus the New York Times in a news story (not even an editorial) on May 18 says about Brzezinski that “more than other American officials he has been interested in playing China off against the Soviet Union and in trying to exploit their dispute against the Russians.”
Here in a nutshell is what we have been saying over the years. They even say it openly in almost the same language: the U.S. policy is to play off one against the other and to “exploit” – yes, to exploit! – “the dispute against the Russians.” The only thing that is missing in this brutally frank admission is the conclusion: that they are planning not merely to exploit the differences and to play them off against each other but to involve them in a military conflict after which U.S. imperialism in concert with its Western imperialist allies would pick up the pieces.
Hasn’t that always been the blueprint for world imperialist domination?
A great deal is made out of the so-called division in the Carter administration between hard-liner Brzezinski and soft-liner Vance. But successive administrations over the last 30 years have shown that while factions arise based on a variety of different tactics, all are equally interested in the same objective – not merely curbing or subverting, but destroying the socialist countries as the surest way to suppress the world liberation movement, using the massive weapons with which imperialism seeks not merely to improve its position but to maintain world superiority.
High on the agenda at the current UN Special Session on Disarmament will unquestionably be plans to curb the sale of arms. There may be proposals for limiting or even eliminating the use of not only such horrendous weapons as the neutron bomb but of all other nuclear weapons.
Such proposals are all good. The overwhelming bulk of humanity is thoroughly opposed to not only the use of nuclear weapons but to their production and would like to see them destroyed as soon as possible.
It is important, however, to remember the genesis of nuclear weapons in the first place.
The Pentagon was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the U.S. was the first and only one to use them. And it is the U.S. which has consistently raised the nuclear threshold by producing more complex and sophisticated weapons systems with each passing year. Concrete proposals for reducing or eliminating the development, testing and production of weapons systems by the U.S., the USSR, and other nuclear powers should not be opposed but encouraged.
But it is an altogether different proposition to sow illusions that general disarmament can prevail while imperialism exists. The U.S. agreed to ban the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere only because it no longer had an advantage; the USSR had caught up with the U.S. SALT I was agreed to only because a rough equivalence in nuclear weapons systems seemed to have been reached.
The present impasse in the SALT treaty doesn’t lie in any difficulty over resolving technological questions or finding means to ascertain whether it’s in the realm of possibility to limit or stop the race in the particular field of nuclear arms. The difficulty lies in the overall geopolitical position of the unbridled militarists and the military-industrial complex and their interlocking community with the banks and industrialists generally. This requires of them a constant, never-ending chase for super-profits and calls for the wildest adventures and the most flagrant abuses of power in the name of maintaining the so-called free enterprise system.
Disarmament, as viewed by the imperialists when they speak frankly, is an illusion. Only the other day an assistant to the Arms Control Division of the Defense Department, Harold Blechman, said that disarmament was an illusion (CBS news of May 22). He gave the imperialist rationalization for it: “religious differences,” “political factionalism of all sorts,” and so on. However false his basic explanation is, his general conclusion serves the ruling class well – to maintain arms at a level necessary to suppress the masses and to continue wars of destruction to serve the ends of imperialist finance capital.
The lesson of the Zaire invasion is that the workers and the oppressed in the metropolitan imperialist centers, who are for peace, must not be confused with pacifist ideology. Lenin taught as long ago as 1916 that Marxists and pacifists both desire people. But Marxists view the issue of peace in the light of the class struggle, in the light of the existence of two mutually opposed classes, the exploiters and the exploited. The exploiters never fail to arm themselves to maintain their domination and to keep the masses at home and abroad under conditions of suppression. From this Lenin drew the conclusion that an exploited class which does not and will not learn the use of arms will forever remain enslaved.
Lenin’s contribution after the Revolution was to teach that a workers’ republic and the workers everywhere have a duty to render political, material, as well as military support in the struggle for liberation from the yoke of imperialism. This was also often the theme in China in the years preceding the final split.
Why should it be considered a virtue for the imperialists to arm their puppets to the teeth in Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, and now Zaire just to name a few countries, but wrong for a socialist republic or a grouping of socialist states to render not only political but material assistance in the struggle against imperialism, which the CCP leaders used to call the “main enemy of mankind”? Why is it “correct” to train Mobutu’s forces, who are prone to demoralization at the mere sight of the insurgents, but “wrong” for the USSR, Cuba, and other socialist countries to extend training and military equipment to the rebellious people trying to throw off the yoke of the imperialist-dominated Mobutu regime?
Is this not the essence of proletarian internationalism?
Every movement of necessity is duty-bound to rely first and foremost on its own inner forces, to get the backing of the masses. But internationalism is of key importance. The Soviet republic, according to Lenin himself, owed its final victory over the imperialist powers, who intervened to crush the Bolshevik Revolution, to the intervention of the European proletariat – from Germany to France to Britain. Even the American soldiers under General Graves were also infected with mutiny, and all this was the result of the tremendous internationalist sentiment displayed by the Revolution itself.
The Chinese Revolution was aided in its struggle for survival by the Soviet Union. Both China and the Soviet Union aided Vietnam. The existence of both China and the Soviet Union and the support from both of them (in spite of their differences) to the Cuban Revolution and in solidarity with Cuba against U.S. imperialism, especially during the dark days of the Missile Crisis, was of course helpful for the success of the Revolution.
So why is it such a great danger to the world for the Soviet Union and Cuba to help in Angola or Ethiopia – or for that matter in Zaire, where there really has not been any evidence to date whatever of Cuban or Soviet support, except in a political sense? It should be noted that Prime Minister Fidel Castrol called in the U.S. representative in Havana to promptly and categorically deny that there was any Cuban involvement in Zaire.
Why then has they been such a might uproar? Why the smokescreen put up by the imperialist press? Is it the fear that once the insurgents gain the upper hand, it is possible they will ask for Soviet or Cuban assistance and perhaps be in a position to get it? But is that not appropriate for a national liberation movement struggling for its life against the combined forces of NATO?
It seems to us that merely to ask the question is to answer it.
The experience of the Zairian invasion demonstrates that the question relating to arms and disarmament should be posed in the following manner: arm the exploited and oppressed masses, ideologically, politically, and where appropriate and necessary, militarily; disarm the exploiters and oppressors. That alone will pave the way for a peaceful world, a socialist world.
Last updated: 11 May 2026