← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hamilton
Thread ID: 19961 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-09-02
2005-09-02 22:46 | User Profile
This is hilarious. Yeah, they're a bunch of sectarian commies, but at least they believe in something. At least they're willing to take to the streets and fight for what they believe. When are some nationalist militants in America going to work up this kind of courage?
There's also another interesting thing. These guys are anti-racist, but they're actually consistent about it: they say Israel a racist state that needs to be destroyed. Regarding World War II, they condemn Allied imperialism and brutality just as much as that of the Axis. Sorry, but I feel a kind of perverse pleasure to read about rich liberals getting beat up by these guys!
PL'ers Chase Jesse Jackson From Anti-War Rally **
CHICAGO, IL, March 19 -- City College students, led by PLP, headed the anti-imperialist forces in today's anti-war rally, marching under the banner, "CCC Students Against Imperialist War." The day's high point was chasing millionaire sellout Jesse Jackson from the stage in Federal Plaza. We started chanting, "Jesse Jackson Means We Got To Fight Back!" A comrade's speech exposed Jackson's support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, saying he had no business at an anti-war rally. Security tried to shut the comrade up but other workers defended him. People encouraged us to go on stage. When we did, Jackson scurried down like a rat and left the rally in his limo. Earlier in the day, we joined one of the feeder marches, chanting, "Soldiers Turn Your Guns Around, Shoot The Profit System Down!" While march organizers argued with the cops about what street to take, we made speeches linking the war to inter-imperialist rivalry and calling on students, teachers, workers and soldiers to destroy this system with communist revolution. Many were drawn to our line and bought CHALLENGE. When we finally did march, many joined us and gave contact information.
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We left with high spirits and new potential comrades who saw the differences between our line and the rest of the so-called "left." Young people took leadership, renewed their commitment, and expressed serious interest in the Party as an alternative to capitalism. The next day we had a club meeting with two new students.
`It's Not Just A Few Rotten Apples'
The liberal media are filled with hand-wringing articles that condemn atrocities the U.S. military commits against prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Pundits like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman decry the murder of 26 prisoners in U.S. custody since 2002. A Times' lead story (3/27) announces: "U.S. Is Examining Plan To Bolster Detainee Rights."
The pompous, self-righteous scribblers in the bosses' press would have us believe these atrocities are "aberrations," deviant behavior that can be fixed by throwing the book at a handful of criminal elements in the military. Just punish the bad apples, the theory goes, and the U.S. armed forces can set themselves straight to carry out their mission properly.
** The real atrocity is imperialism itself.** Murder and torture of prisoners and civilians are standard operating procedure and cannot be otherwise under capitalism. Wars like those the U.S. is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan are genocidal by their very nature. The mass slaughter of civilians, the high percentage of casualties among women and young children, the devastation of cities and rural areas, come as inevitable by-products of wars waged for conquest, profit and domination.
Of course, those who murder prisoners of war deserve the severest punishment. But this begs the question. The U.S. rulers' plan to conquer Iraq and its oil has already caused more than a million deaths. In the Democrat Clinton's eight-year presidency, economic sanctions alone killed hundreds of thousands, mostly small children, through starvation, drought and preventable or curable disease. As CHALLENGE reported last fall, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, estimated that nearly 100,000 Iraqis had died since Bush, Jr. launched Desert Storm II in 2003. A study in 1991 shortly after Bush, Sr.'s Desert Storm I described conditions for civilians throughout Iraq as "apocalyptic," after the military action had killed tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
But Iraq is no exception. U.S. bombs and bullets are slaughtering thousands of Afghani civilians. The Clinton-NATO air war over the former Yugoslavia in 1999 poisoned water supplies, perhaps for decades, with an incalculable consequence of future mortality among civilians. When U.S. rulers went to war in Vietnam, they murdered millions, using a variety of obscene weapons and tactics, whose only reason for existence was to spread terror and mayhem among civilians. These included carpet-bombing, flesh-burning napalm, agent orange defoilation and "strategic hamlet" concentration camps.
** In World War II -- the so-called "good war" -- the U.S. military copied the Nazis in routinely bombing and slaughtering thousands of civilians in places like Dresden and Tokyo. The U.S. is still the only power to have dropped atomic bombs.** It did so over hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and now in Iraq routinely uses nuclear-type weaponry -- containing depleted uranium -- with deadly consequences not only for the immediate victims but also for future generations of unborn and never-to-be-born.
This type of genocide is not exclusive to U.S. rulers. As the world's main military power, stopping at nothing to defend and extend its economic and political domination, U.S. imperialism naturally commits the greatest number of atrocities at the present time. However, it has plenty of worthy predecessors, and until communist revolution ends imperialism altogether, it will have worthy successors.
** Hitler and the Nazis are the most obvious and well known masters of past genocide. But they learned from other European bosses. Hitlerite racism took more than one page from the U.S.-born "eugenics" movement. British colonialism and imperialism established an admirable record of mass murder throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries.**
** The bosses love to sing the praises of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as a great statesman and "savior" of Western civilization. Well, Churchill helped concoct the idea of mass terror bombing against civilians in the Middle East during the 1920's, when air warfare was in its infancy. France, the birthplace of "The Rights of Man," systematically tortured and exterminated civilians throughout its colonial history in western and northern Africa. For years, apartheid regimes in South Africa carried out racist havoc while their U.S. pals looked the other way. U.S. supplies Israel with billions of dollars worth of arms with which to slaughter masses of Palestinians, such as the murder by Sharon-led Lebanese fascists of thousands in refugee camps in the early 1980's. During the Cold War, dozens of fascist butchers throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America used U.S. weapons and "foreign aid" to back the U.S. rulers' anti-communist crusade.**
The examples are so numerous because imperialism knows no exceptions. Imperialism = mass murder and atrocity. The biggest of all the big lies would have us believe that the killings of Iraqi and Afghani POWs and the shooting of women and babies represent "exceptional behavior."
The truth is that in its imperialist form, the profit system is the bloodiest, cruelest, most genocidal type of social organization in history. Its "peace" is the peace of the grave, and its wars can never serve a purpose other than determining the international pecking order among the world's biggest gangsters and thugs. Turning these wars into their opposite -- mass armed struggle for communism and a revolutionary new society -- will take generations. But it remains the only goal worth fighting and, if need be, dying for.
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