From The American Left History Blog Archives(2002) - On American Political Discourse –A CALL TO ALL ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS-WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMING!!! (2002)

 

A CALL TO ALL ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS- WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMING!!! (2002)

Markin comment:

In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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A CALL TO ALL ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS-

WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMING!!!

THIS IS NOT OUR WAR -DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST U.S./UN AND ALLIED IMPERIALIST ATTACK!

SUPPORT EFFORTS BY IRAQI LEFTISTS, WORKERS, PEASANTS, KURDS AND OTHERS TO OVERTHROW THE HUSSEIN REGIME!

DOWN WITH THE UN STARVATION BLOCKADE!

As the United Nations Security Council vote on November 8, 2002 graphically points out the war-crazed Bush-led United States government is leading the world to war. Tens of thousands of American and British troops are getting positioned for a full-scale attack on Iraq, while other powers from Australia to Turkey elbow each other for a role in the slaughter and share of the loot. The White House has already revealed plans for a post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq. One look at the war chest of nuclear weapons that the United States has and threatens to use today and it is clear that the fate of life on this planet is threatened by the continued existence of this American led “ world disorder”.We must act.

In the coming war against Iraq working people and anti-imperialist youth in the United States and elsewhere we must stand for the military defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the Hussein regime. Hussein is a bloody oppressor of Iraqi workers, leftists, Shiite Muslims, the Kurdish people and others. As such he was in the past a close ally and client of the American government for a full two decades before he made a grab for Kuwait in 1990. Now the American government wants a more pliant regime and tighter control of the oil spigot, not the least to put economic rivals like Japan and Germany, who are more dependent on Near East oil, on rations. However, every victory for the American government and its allies in their predatory wars encourages further military adventures, every setback serves to assist the struggles of the working peoples and the oppressed of the world.

Historically, in wars between the imperialist predators and plunderers and their colonial and semicolonial victims anti-imperialists have a side. As Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 which stands as one the greatest antiwar movements ever, stressed in his 1915 pamphlet SOCIALISM AND WAR: “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Tsarist Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just,’ and ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers.”We must continue that tradition.

The tremendous military advantages of the United States against neocolonial Iraq- a country that has already been bled white through 12 years of United Nations sanctions which have killed more than one and one half million civilians- underscores the importance of class struggle in the imperialist centers as the chief means to give content to the call to defend Iraq. Every strike, every labor mobilization against war plans, every mass protest against attacks on workers and minorities, every struggle against domestic repression and against attacks on civil liberties represents a dent in the imperialist war drive. To put an end to war once and for all, the capitalist system that breeds war must be swept away. However, our immediate task is to stop the imperialist war drive.

The American ruling class manipulated the grief and horror felt by millions at the criminal and demented attack on the World Trade Center to wage war on Afghanistan. But the patriotic consensus in the United States is wearing thin and elsewhere there is massive opposition to a war against Iraq. War demands

civil peace and from Los Angeles to London the imperialist war makers are revealed as vicious union-busters and strikebreakers. Declaring that a strike could “threaten national security,” the Bush administration has brought down the force of the capitalist state to coerce the powerful American dockers union, the ILWU, to work under the dictates of the union-busting employers association. Across the seas, British firefighters are threatened with strikebreaking by the army. Plunging stockmarkets rob millions of workers of their pensions while public scandals expose insatiable corporate greed. Tens of thousands of working people, including the entire workforce at a number of Fiat auto plants in Italy, face a future of crisis. Civil liberties have been shredded and the capitalists have intensified their assault on social welfare and other gains wrested through decades of workers struggles.

In the United States, not even the dizzying flag-waving or the heavy fist of state repression has induced the masses to embrace war with Iraq. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers and anti-imperialist youth have demonstrated their opposition to this war. The problem is that the anti-war protests in Europe have generally l been channeled into a national-chauvinist direction of getting one’s “own” rulers to stand up to the Americans. In America, many antiwar liberals and leftists plead, “Money for jobs, not for war” and so fuel the notion that fundamental priorities of the capitalist rulers can be altered to serve the interests of working people. The time for such illusions ran out long ago.

The truth is that this whole capitalist system is based on the extraction of profit for the owners of the means of production through the exploitation and subjugation of the workers who produce the wealth of society. War is a concentrated expression of this, as competing capitalist ruling classes scramble to steal natural resources and to carve out new markets for export of capital and fresh sources of cheap labor. Therefore, it is necessary to draw a distinction between bourgeois pacifism, which lulls the masses into passivity and embellishes capitalist democracy, and the yearning for peace of the masses.

Over the past period there have been opportunities to organize class struggle in opposition to imperialist war and for the international workers movement to break out of narrow nationalist and economist limits. During the 1999 U.S./NATO war against Serbia, Italian COBAS unions organized a one-million-strong political general strike against that war. Fiat workers, who today battle plant closings in Italy, organized a campaign of material aid- a campaign supported by all partisans of the international working class- for the workers of the Yugoslav Zastava auto plant, which had been bombed by the imperialists. In 2001, Japanese dockworkers at Sasebo pointed the way forward by “hot-cargoing”(refusing to handle) Japanese military goods for the war in Afghanistan. These types of actions here can concretize our opposition to this war.

Moreover, U.S. military bases across Europe and Asia, as well as high-tech spy installations such as Australia’s Pine Gap, have become deserving targets of antiwar protests by leftists and trade unions. It would be a good thing if the U.S. were deprived of its international launching pads for war against Iraq. For all of German chancellor Schroder’s electioneering against war in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that he will interfere in any way with the key American air bases and military installations across Germany which house some 70, 000 American troops. What we need is not an “antiwar movement” of social-chauvinist support to one’s own ruling class but an internationalist working class opposition to U.S./NATO bases

What is essential is to draw the class line and unshackle the working people and anti-imperialist youth from capitalist politicians, their agents in the trade unions and others who channel their justified hatred of war into illusory calls for parliamentary reforms of the profit-driven system that breeds war and, in West Europe, into support for their own ruling classes against the Americans. Here, in the heart of the beast the workers and anti-imperialist youth united front can point the way forward building an internationalist perspective in the antiwar protests. Our demands should be: Struggle against the bosses and their government here at home- “the main enemy is at home”! Defend Iraq against imperialist attack! Down with the United Nations starvation blockade! All U.S./ UN and allied troops out of the Persian Gulf and Near East!

JOIN AND BUILD THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/ YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST THE COMING UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ!

THE COMMITTEE FOR AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/ YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ

CHECK BOSTON. INDY MEDIA. ORG CALENDAR MA-ACT SECTION FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MEETINGS AND EVENTS

Labor Donated

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- The People Are War-Weary, Very War Weary Although There Is No End In Sight- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan!

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

Recently my old back in the 1960s days friend, Peter Paul Markin, himself a war veteran, were comparing notes about the virtual “under the radar” place that American imperial war policies (there is no other name for it with over 1000 bases in the world and over 700 billion plus dollars eaten up by the war budget each year) has taken in this year’s presidential campaign. And, additionally, the almost total lack of organized public outcry about those policies, most notably the lingering death sore of Afghanistan. The reason for our comparing notes on this subject was simple enough. Between us we have attended over the past several months in various capacities a whole series of parades, only one of which I will mention more on later, that was specifically a peace parade. We have come agree though that, without a doubt, there is a vast war-weariness that if not organized runs pretty deep amount the plebeian masses.

For those who do not know, Peter Paul, over the past several years since before the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 has attempted to move might and main along with his fellow Veterans For Peace (VFP)to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and lately to urge no war with Iran) to no avail. I, although not a veteran, have attempted in various journalistic endeavor to make those same basic points to no avail as well. Those “no avails” though have never stopped us from continuing to push the rock up the mountain when the cause is righteous. And the struggle against these particular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is righteous and has brought us closer together of late. That has not always been the case, as Peter Paul tends to take a harder anti-capitalist look at the wars and I more from an anti-imperialist perspective. We united on one idea earlier this year and that was the need to continue to get the anti-war message out to the general public.

That is where the parades notion came in. Where the parades notion kind of hit us in the face actually as a way to bring any kind of peace message to the folks whom we do not normally run into in our rarified big city radical circles. Of course the main target started out last year in 2011 with Peter Paul’s chapter of Veterans for Peace in Boston, the aptly names (“war is a racket”) Smedley Butler Brigade, attempts to march in the “official” South Boston Allied War Council’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Without going to all the particulars of the denial (involving reams of material from a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting such exclusions for “private “ parades) VFP was shut out of the official parade. Needless to say these resourceful vets just created their own peace parade to follow the official parade and to let those in South Boston know there was another voice to be heard from on the questions of war and peace.

That is where the recognition of war-weariness came in. Now for those not familiar with South Boston (“Southie”) this is, or was, according to Peter Paul, the last bastion of Irish-centered working class pro-war (or at least don’t question war policy) sentiment left in the world ( a little hyperbole from him, but I am used to it). This spring when we marched (yes, I marched with Peter Paul like in olden times) the response by those same plebeian masses was cordial to say the least. And that is how the Breslin-Markin antiwar “spring offensive” (with, ah, a little help from VFP and others) took off. A Dorchester Day Parade just south of Southie in the more ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Boston (although neighborhoods like Southie that product more than their fair share of troops) produced an even more cordial response. Ditto several Memorial Day services. More recently parades in affluence Rockport and working- class Portsmouth, New Hampshire on confirmed the cordiality, and the weariness. That last one, by the way, held in a town that depends (read: would not survive) without naval appropriations at the huge naval base there.

So the disconnect between governmental war policy and the genuine war-weariness of the masses is real enough. But real enough as well is any sense of being able to do anything about it is in the cards other than patiently waiting for due dates. And that is where my simple suggestion comes in. I, as well as other knowledgeable anti-warriors have recognized that we have not had any effect on Bush-Obama war doctrine in Iraq and precious little thus far in Afghanistan. There is one place, and one thing that we can do to turn that around right now. Call of President Obama to pardon Private Bradley Manning now being held in pre-trail detention in Fort Leavenworth Kansas pending charges that could amount to a life sentence for the young soldier. For the forgetful Private Manning allegedly passed sensitive information onto Wikileaks who then passed it on to a candid world. Thus Private Manning is the “poster person” for opposition to all that failed, all that was wrong, all that was atrocious, and all that was criminal in Bush-Obama war policy. So raise the cry with us-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan! President Obama Pardon Private Manning!

***Looking For A Few Good Men…And Women For Peace- A Stroll In The Boston Common On Veterans Day, Circa 2011- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran!-Hands Off The World!

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace website for the latest news.

Looking For A Few Good Men…And Women For Peace- A Stroll In The Boston Common On Veterans Day, Circa 2011- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran!-Hands Off The World!

Markin comment:

Last year when I wrote what amounted to a paean to the Veterans For Peace and their Boston Common anti-war activities on Veterans Day 2010 in the entry, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day, where I said the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.”

And this year I expected to say roughly the same thing, except now that I have worked with them in some actions here in Boston, down in Washington D.C. in front of the Winter Palace (oops, the White House) in some civil disobedience actions, and in front of the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia in defense of the heroic Army private, Bradley Manning, that copy-cat approach doesn’t seem adequate. And here is why.

For an anti-war war veteran there are two kinds of ways to call oneself a veteran. The obvious one is to have “gone into the service,” as my grandmother (and probably many, too many, other grandmothers as well) used to say. The other is to be a veteran of the kind of anti-war actions described above. And, in the old days (the VVAW days) we used to say that kind of veteran service with a certain knowing snicker. A snicker like it was good to know, know finally, that you were on the side of the angels. And so to put paid to this piece let me finish with a story, a story about how a few god men and women kept on the right side of those angels just recently here in Boston.

Everybody with a pulse knows that there is a populist movement that has swept part of America (and the world) this fall looking for a little social justice and an end to the 1% takes all system we have lived under all our lives, the Occupy movement. An attentive news reader also knows that part of the publicity generated around the movement centers on establishing encampments in cities, large and small, in order to dramatize the pressing needs of the great majority of people. Here in Boston that started on September 31, 2011 with successful occupation of a section of the Rose Kennedy Greenway at Dewey Square near South Station. On October 10th elements within the movement attempted to expand the encampment another block and pitched tents accordingly. This “affrontery” set Boston Mayor Thomas Menino into spasms and he ordered out his Cossacks (a. k. a. cops) to disband the rabble, forthwith. At a General Assembly (the decision-making body that drives the camp and the political perspectives) that evening the overwhelming majority of those present and voting voted to defend the second site. As result in the dead of night (about 2:00 AM) the Mayor’s horde descended on the campsite in full combat regalia to arrest the peaceful assembly waiting to defend the site. Some one hundred and forty people were arrested that early morning.

That is the back story, and is more or less widely known by now. What is less well known is that a contingent of veterans, almost all veterans of previous civil disobediences actions, had determined one more time to defend something. This time not the mythical home and country but “family,” a family of mainly younger people who were not as well- versed in cop madness, or the niceties of the nightstick as these veterans. And so as is called for when an encampment is set up in enemy territory that contingent set up a perimeter on the pathway in front of the camp in the direction from which the attack was expected. And it came. The veterans, some of who were arrested and others who were merely pushed aside, or to the ground, “defended” the camp, honorably . And you now know why anything I expected to say about this years Veterans Day anti-war gathering on November 11th pales in comparison. A few good women and men, indeed. And I say that without a snicker today.

Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran!-Hands Off The World!