Revolutionary Worker #1001, April 11, 1999
NATO's attacks against Yugoslavia once more showed what the people of the world have been experiencing throughout the 20th century: the imperialists can only rule the world by means of gangsterism. Clothed in their business suits, they consume human flesh to accumulate wealth. In their military khakis, they wipe out tens of thousands of people with their arsenals of death and destruction. When not waging open wars, the imperialists protect their bloody rule by waging hidden wars and other kinds of armed suppression against the people in their semi-colonial countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and even against the populations of their own countries, using secret police, anti-riot police, international police--in short, every type of police.
It is clear that the biggest terrorists of the world are none other than the imperialist powers themselves. The Western imperialist powers created NATO as a vehicle for waging world war against their social-imperialist rivals in the Soviet Union. Now after the fall of the East, they are using this massive military machine to bolster their dominant position in the world. First it was Iraq that was turned into a graveyard of civilians and children. And now Yugoslavia. These reactionary wars serve many purposes for the imperialists, not least of all to remind the people of the world that these gangsters will resort to any kind of savagery in order to maintain their world order (this time called a "new world order"), and also to convey the message that the people have no choice but to lay down before them. But the people cannot and must not accept this hideous world order!
For the people the world over, it is necessary to begin to draw some conclusions: as Mao Tsetung said, the imperialists will never put down their butcher knives. Any illusions that those whose hands are dripping in blood will ever do anything good for the people must be cast aside. The duty of the class-conscious proletarians and progressive strata of the people in NATO countries is to oppose and resist this war.
The Serbian rulers Milosevic & Co. are fascist butchers themselves. Their regime is based upon the brutal oppression of national minorities within the country's boundaries. But haven't the British imperialists followed the same policy for hundreds of years in Ireland? Didn't the U.S. kill millions in Indochina? And inside the U.S. itself, will NATO protect Blacks and immigrants from being murdered in record numbers by U.S. cops? Aren't Turks, whose backs built so much of post-war Germany, being burned in their sleep by fascist thugs in Germany? Isn't the treatment of the so-called Arab problem on the streets of Paris often reminiscent of ethnic cleansing? So what is it that makes these NATO regimes any better than the Yugoslav one? Nothing! Who would want to rely on these NATO powers to be protected? Only the ignorant! Any oppressed people is perfectly able to free itself from oppression. Indeed, relying on international gangster powers will only bring about perpetual slavery.
These gangsters claim the purpose of their war is to stop Serbia's rulers from butchering the Kosovans. But we should not forget the hypocritical lies the U.S. and its pack have used to justify the bleeding of Iraq. They claim the imperialist-imposed starvation is to protect the rights of the Kurdish people. Yet at the same time Turkey's U.S.-trained NATO army, which has waged a bloody war against the Kurdish people there for years, has once again been unleashed against them. The latest chapter of "protecting Kurds" was kidnapping the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and delivering him to Turkey's torturers.
There can be no doubt that any genuine revolutionary movement in the Balkans must strenuously oppose the reactionary chauvinism of the Milosevics. Only by vigorously opposing all forms of national oppression and assuring the right of self-determination will it be possible to unite the proletariat and peoples of Yugoslavia and all the Balkans against their real enemies of capitalism, imperialism and all reaction. To think that the world's biggest reactionaries will bring any progress or light to this corner of the world scarred by generations of imperialist rivalry is worse than an illusion.
It is high time the U.S. and Western European "civilizers" were soundly rebuffed. Rise up against this sickening hypocrisy! NATO has always been a tool for oppression. And the biggest promoters of reactionary nationalism are not petty tyrants like Milosevic, but the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and Russia. It is they who hold the whole world hostage to their national interests. The proletarians and people in these countries must rise up against these reactionary imperialist national interests. Remember the historic struggles waged by the masses of France against the Algerian war and in the U.S. against the Vietnam war, and the bold struggles of the youth in Germany in the mid-1980s against NATO's nuclear missiles, and many others. This glorious legacy must be proudly reclaimed and its lessons learned. The internationalist spirit of opposing the military adventures of one's own bourgeoisie must be consciously upheld, practiced and raised to a whole new level.
Oppose all NATO oppression in Yugoslavia, Iraq or elsewhere, no matter what the pretext! Down with the "New World Order"!
| March 31, 1999 |
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