By Richard Mellor
Yes, the hypocrisy is nauseating I can barely read the news here in the US. What’s happening in Ukraine is horrible but the US has been doing this for decades throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia and it also bombed Serbia.
The pictures the capitalist mass media are showing here, of communities being reduced to rubble, occurs throughout the world as the US and in particular its proxies in the Middle East, Israel and the Saudis, are the perpetrators. The US wouldn’t condemn the Zionist regime for shooting unarmed youth protesting the siege of Gaza on their own land.
We are supposed to forget what the US did in Iraq, killing more than a million people. Prior to that, during the US imposed sanctions on Iraq some 500,000, mostly Iraqi women and children died because of them. Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton’s Undersecretary of State, was asked on US TV about these deaths and she responded that the deaths were, “worth it”. Worth it for US capitalism, the oil companies, the defence corporations and those capitalists who control them, basically a minority of the US population who are all linked together through their economic activity and ownership of these industries.
US took revenge on the city of Fallujah
When the residents of Fallujah, Iraq, killed three US mercenaries, the US government sent in the Marines and did to Fallujah what the US mass media is now criticizing Russia for doing in Ukraine. The US used white phosphorous in Fallujah and depleted Uranium in the invasion of Iraq. Children are still being born with deformities due to this US activity.
Fallujah will forever be remembered in the Arab world and the Muslim world in particular as a shrine to honour the sacrifice and resistance of the people of a city to a hostile invading force. The US is not the only nation state that is a “home of the brave”.
Drone Wars
President Obama, nicknamed the drone king, ignored the appeals from the US drone operators who felt sick about what they were doing. Sitting in a room in front of a computer screen killing people 6,000 miles away, not knowing who they were or what they had done. They were just Muslims on camels. In part, the letter they addressed to Obama stated: “This Administration and its predecessors have built a drone program that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.
When the guilt of our roles in facilitating this systematic loss of innocent life became too much, all of us succumbed to PTSD. We were cut loose by the same government we gave so much to, sent out in the world with no adequate medical care, reliable public health services or necessary benefits. Some of us are now homeless. Others of us barely make it.
We request that you consider our perspective, though perhaps that request is in vain given the unprecedented prosecution of truth-tellers who came before us like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden For the sake of this country, we hope it is otherwise.” You can download the PDF of that letter here.
And let us recall the massive response to Colin Kaepernick’s “taking a knee” to draw attention to racism and police brutality in US society. The mass media and the billionaires who own it and the football teams, protested themselves, “politics should not be brought in to sport”, they demanded, as Kaepernick was demonized. Athletes should keep their mouths shut.
Common to say we should ‘never talk politics’.
And millions bought that lie. It is common in the US to argue that we should never talk politics. But politics is life; it is exactly what we should talk about. The drone letter never got anything like the publicity that the Kardashians get. The sex lives of the parasitical Hollywood crowd is more important.
The US ruling class cares nothing about Ukraine, or its own working class, as the treatment of the drone operators’ concerns shows; they are US citizens. The US population knows very well that if you have no money here you are nothing. You can be a war hero one minute, a homeless veteran the next. The military brass wants us to forget about Pat Tillman, who became a threat to them after he realized he was being conned and now he’s dead, under mysterious circumstances.
After the US drew the old Soviet regime in to a war in Afghanistan, our tax money was used to arm and supply rural, 7th-century peasants and their backward religious fanaticism. These same arms have been used to kill young US workers whose lack of opportunity drew them to the military as their best option.
Decades later, the Pentagon and its friends in Washington are eager to save face after its catastrophic exit from Afghanistan and a $3 trillion bill; driven out by a bunch of religious fanatics in sandals and no planes. What could have been accomplished with that money is staggering.
There is a global crisis as major capitalist powers, west and east are competing for domination of our planet and the resources and wealth they extract from it. US capitalism, still the most powerful of these forces, is losing its influence in particular with the rise of China; Russia less so, but a weakened Russia would, for a moment, be something to cheer about – for the US ruling class.
The Ukraine conflict is a no-win for workers everywhere
While it is important to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demand an end to it and the withdrawal of Russian troops, this conflict is a no-win for workers: Ukrainian workers, Russian workers, workers anywhere. It is yet another of many conflicts that are a product of the laws of the system, not personal struggles between men or women. Capitalism cannot avoid these crises; they are endemic to it.
The taking of Russian billionaires’ property and wealth gives us an idea of how powerful the state apparatus (government) is for those in charge. Taking into public ownership all of the crucial industries that produce social necessities, the means of sustaining life as we know it, must be our goal.
There are many differences of opinion about how to proceed. For most of us it’s impossible to tell, to uncover the details, as we are not on the ground and the media on both sides is primarily propaganda. It is the media of ruling classes. The details are important but the big picture is the key.
The elephant in the room, or the elephant not in the room, is the voice and immense power of the working class internationally. There is no mass media expressing the economic and political interests of working people. We have the potential to do this. The workers of Europe are organized. They have unions and political parties. The Russian workers have a revolutionary history. Throughout the world, the indigenous are in the forefront of the war to save their and our lives and the environment from the ravages of the market and the capitalists’ rapacious quest for profits at all costs.
Workers in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia and other countries, an industrial working class that has grown significantly as western capital shifts production to take advantage of cheaper labour-power and regimes hostile to unionization, have been waging huge struggles against global capitalism. Brothers and sisters, we have allies.
Unions are led by those who see no alternative to capitalism
In the US we have no political party of our own. Our unions, like those in Europe and elsewhere, are led by individuals who have the same world view as the bosses. They see no alternative to capitalism; they do not see the working class as a force for change, let alone one that can govern; and when capitalism goes in to crisis, they move to bail it out at our expense and part of that involves – intentionally or not – pitting workers in one country against workers in another, workers in one US state against workers in another.
The only time the US ruling class, echoed by the heads of organized labour in the main, call for us to unite is when they need our children to fight their wars. In other words, to unite with the capitalists in their war for profits with other capitalists against workers in other countries who are asked to do the same.
For US workers, our goal, at the very least, is to reject the idea that politics is not our game. Capitalist politics isn’t but working class politics and the politics of all exploited people is. It is important to read our own history and by that, I mean the struggles against a brutal, violent ruling class, from the genocidal wars against the native people, the institution of chattel slavery and the poor of Europe and their children who worked the factories and mines of this settler state that has become the world’s most dangerous force.
Workers here in the US must recognize that our real enemy is the US ruling class. Workers that don’t look like us, dress like us, worship in a different way are no threat to us; they are our allies and with them we can change the world can ensure our children and grandchildren have a future
It is this united force that is needed to end the war in Ukraine, Yemen, and other global conflicts that are the result of the madness of the market. The alternative is the end of life as we know it.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
