THE STRUGGLE for a planet without war goes beyond the struggle against Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Conflict and instability are all the norm in our capitalist profit system that is riven by crisis.
The big imperialist powers have always gone to war to defend the profits of their rich elites, as was summed up by a US Strategic Planner in 1948 when he said of the US:
“We have 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period…is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality…we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.”
This is true not only of the US but of all the capitalist powers. This war has revealed the United Nations for what it is. Far from representing the ‘international community’ it represents the major capitalist powers, which are all routinely engaged in open bribery and vote buying to further their own profit interests.
Even those who’ve opposed the war have done so partially in response to the mass movements against the war but also for their own capitalist, power-play interests.
After all, the permanent members of the Security Council were all prepared to go along with UN sanctions against Iraq for over a decade.
The sanctions were described by Dennis Halliday, the former co-ordinator of the UN’s Humanitarian programme in Iraq, as “satisfying the definition of genocide”.
On average, between 1991 to 1998, 5,200 under-fives a month died as a result of the sanctions.
In contrast to the UN, the anti-war movement has shown the possibility of a real ‘international community’.
To permanently end the threat of war and terror, and to build an international community based on genuine democracy and cooperation, we have to fight for the end of capitalism and for the establishment of a democratic socialist world, run in the interests of the billions instead of for the profits of the billionaires.
