Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Storm Clouds Over the World
New Worker: The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Week commencing 14th April 2017

The Republican Party leader who threatened to withdraw US troops from Japan and south Korea unless they paid more towards the costs of their own occupations, and implied that he’d only defend members of the NATO pact who’d greatly increased their own arms budget, now talks about expanding the imperialist alliance. The great ‘deal-maker’ who was going to usher in a new page in relations with the Russia now shows with his missile attack on Syria and his armada sailing towards north Korea that the only deals he believes in are conducted at the point of gun. It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to renege on what’s left of his election promises.

Donald Trump has now shown himself to be as much a pawn of the war-lobby as the Democrat opposition he so publicly scorned during the presidential campaign. This doesn’t come as any surprise to us. The primary contradiction in the world today is between United States imperialism and the rest of the world it seeks to dominate. The Trump administration, like all its Cold War predecessors, exists to serve the most reactionary and aggressive sections of the American ruling class.

Slumps and wars are part and parcel of the capitalist system that continues to dominate our world. Humanity has suffered these miseries time and again. Now we are experiencing slump and war at the same time. The current slump, which began in 2008, has deepened the political and economic crisis of the imperialist world. The struggle for markets and spheres of influence has become acute, so much so that the aggressor countries, in their need to win the battle for markets and minerals, turn to war and crude methods replace diplomacy and negotiations. The United States, which leads the western pack, is the major imperialist power, and it is keeping to its aims of provoking war and building up its military machine.

The American people and the world peace movement are largely ignored — as was former President Eisenhower when he warned of the danger of the military industrial complex. It is precisely that section of the US ruling class that has gained the upper hand and is responsible for the foreign policy of the USA.

The USA is also demonstrating its power to restrict the right of their people to know what is going on. The bourgeois press and the pundits who pose as experts in the mainstream media glibly peddle the fake news concocted by the CIA and British intelligence. War correspondents are no longer allowed to go into the field of battle and have to rely on reports from imperialist military sources who sanitise war and its horrors inflicted on subject peoples by US troops and their puppets.

The imperialists claim to uphold ‘universal human values’ and talk glibly about the concepts of peace, freedom, social progress, equal rights and human dignity as if they had invented them. But when the interests of the ruling class are challenged they show their true face — which is duplicity, oppression and aggression.

The chief American war-lord and his minions in Britain and the rest of the European Union pose as champions of ‘human rights’. They shed crocodile tears over Syrians killed by those they covertly arm and fund to justify their own imperialist intervention. They brand Russia, Democratic Korea, Iran and Syria as threats to peace whilst openly taking the world towards the brink of another world war.

But people see through their propaganda. There is a limit to the number of times you can repeat the same old lies, such as the alleged Syrian poison gas attack that was used as a pretext for the US missile onslaught, without being exposed.

The Achilles Heel of imperialism lies in its own working class suffering from unemployment and economic stagnation. The masses cry out for massive cuts in military expenditure and a halt to neo-colonial aggression. The money saved should be switched from war to peaceful and civil purposes and creating jobs. The struggle for peace is the front-line in the confrontation with the war-mongers and oppressors.

Building pressure for nuclear disarmament and peace amounts to a fight to defeat imperialism, and socialism seeks the elimination of the causes of war, militarism, unemployment and poverty — the two go hand-in-hand.

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