the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 2, 2013
On this Labor Day 2013, workers’ pensions are on the chopping block.
In Detroit, it’s obvious. But Detroit city workers are not the only ones whose pensions are at risk today. Proportionately, Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore have run up bigger debts to their public pension funds than has Detroit. Illinois is pushing to “reform” its pension system, that is, to reduce what workers get. Philadelphia has announced it cannot pay what it owes for teachers’ pensions.
Detroit is simply the battering ram; its bankruptcy is being used to set a precedent. After Detroit, no worker’s pension is safe.
It’s true the city of Detroit has run out of money–at least when it comes to what people need. For the ordinary people, the city is bankrupt and has been bankrupt a long time.
But why is the city bankrupt? Why? Because it gave away billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, land and infrastructure to some of the biggest corporations and developers in the world.
Every city has done the same. And the bill is now coming due in many cities. Both parties underfunded city pension funds and gave away that stolen money to corporations and the banks.
The only answer to this catastrophe is to take that money back. Take it from the ones who got it–the capitalists and their banks.
Confronting the disastrous attack on the cities and their workforce, the unions could play a big role. They could call upon their own members and the population to fight.
Why not fight so that the resources and assets of the city be used for the workforce and the population? Not just in Detroit, but in every city and county facing the same attacks.
No matter where workers start to fight to defend themselves, they have to fight to put their hands on the wealth their labor created.
The city workers’ unions could organize their members to find out where the money went. City workers in Detroit certainly could do that. Every worker knows something about how the city works. If they put all their accumulated knowledge together, the workers could find billions upon billions of dollars. They could take apart the city’s finances–show that GM, Chrysler, Ford, the big banks, the stadiums, the Detroit Medical Center and so on owe big bucks to the city–to its workers, its retirees and its population.
City workers could show that there IS money–money that could be used to solve the problems the population and the workforce face.
The Renaissance Center in Detroit, for example, was paid for by the city, county and state in enormous tax breaks and public subsidies: when it was first built, again when GM took it over from Ford Finance, and again when GM threatened to move to the suburbs. By all rights, the city owns it. If GM and other companies want to go on occupying the RenCen, let them pay rent–to the city!
And if they refuse? The unions could organize workers to occupy those buildings and hold them until the bill is paid. Workers in the city have enough forces to do that.
The working class has the forces to occupy all those downtown buildings, paid for by the city, but “owned” by developers. Present them with a bill! Occupy their buildings until the bill is paid.
The unions could call on the workers and the population to take back this wealth and use it in the population’s interest–in every city.
But whether or not the unions do it, that’s what must be done. The workers and the population, using their own forces, have to take back the cities, use their resources to serve the population. Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia–it’s all the same.
Take back the wealth of the cities that has been stolen from us!
Sep 2, 2013
Fast food workers in nearly 60 cities went on a one-day strike August 29, the latest in a series that began last November.
The workers’ main demand is for a wage increase to $15 an hour. They are also pushing for an increase in the minimum wage.
The fast food industry has responded with a barrage of propaganda, excuses for why these demands are supposedly unreasonable. A spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, for example, made the claim that only 5 per cent of fast-food workers earn the minimum wage. But that’s only because the minimum wage, at $7.25 an hour, is so low. The median wage for all food preparation workers, which includes those who’ve worked their way up, is only $8.78 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the minimum wage itself had kept up with inflation since 1968, it would be $10.64 an hour–way more than the average fast food worker’s pay today.
Bill Dunkelberg, the chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, claimed that most minimum wage workers are “kids, students, and so on,” who come from “above-median income families.”
That’s a lie, too. Eighty-eight per cent of those on minimum wage are not teenagers, they’re 20 years old or older, with 36% over 40 years old. On average, they earn half of their family’s total income, and 55% are full-time. In the food industry, only 16% of workers are teenagers.
Many fast food workers are forced to work irregular schedules at the whim of their employers, and they often work unpaid hours. Managers make workers continue cleaning or stocking supplies after they have clocked out. A survey of fast food workers in New York found that 84% had experienced some form of wage theft.
The fact that the strikes are nationwide is an indication that some big unions have played at least some role in organizing them–and they should. They should be playing an even bigger role, in fact, since they have the forces to make sure that a strike like this is able to really impact the big financial interests that stand behind the fast food industry.
But whether or not they do, the experience these workers gained, and the courage they found to stand up, can allow them to continue this fight–and be a catalyst for other fights.
Sep 2, 2013
School has started back up in Chicago. For students from the 49 elementary schools Rahm Emanuel closed last spring, this means a new, much longer walk to school.
In a huge dog-and-pony show, Emanuel expanded the so-called “Safe Passage” program, positioning more than 1200 workers (paid $10 an hour) along 92 routes between the schools, supposedly to protect children from gang violence. Emanuel said, “The ultimate goal of all efforts–both in the building, on the way to the building and at home–is so kids will think about their studies, not their safety.”
What a crock! If Emanuel were truly concerned about the kids’ safety OR their studies, he and his hand-picked school board would not have closed those 49 schools in the first place!
The Board announced the closing of those elementary schools last spring after months of protests by parents and teachers. The school closings are in overwhelmingly poor, working class and minority neighborhoods. Sometimes families and neighbors had been attending the same school for generations and participating in extracurricular activities there after school. The schools truly were the hearts of these neighborhoods, and their closing rips out those hearts.
Now Emanuel and his Board are forcing children–some as young as four years old–to travel miles to a different public school. Or, to attend a charter school closer to home. They’re driving students out of the public schools, and into charters!
The Board says it closed those schools because they are “underused.” Underused? Elementary schools whose class sizes have finally gotten down to 17 students are underused? How will it be better for young children to be crowded into classes with more than 30 students in them?
Underused? Of course the schools are underused–after the district has gotten rid of gym classes, music and art programs, libraries, and nurses’ stations, of course there is space not being used in those schools. That space SHOULD be used! Not closed down!
Parents are rightly upset over the closing of their neighborhood schools. But in the face of that anger, Emanuel chooses to focus on “Safe Passage” zones, blaming gangs–blaming kids themselves–as the problem.
It’s the height of disgusting cynicism.
Sep 2, 2013
California’s state prisons have been so notoriously overcrowded, even the extremely reactionary U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population.
So Democratic Governor Jerry Brown proposed to relocate 10,000 prisoners to prisons run by private companies, to the great profit of companies like the Prison Corporation of America. To pay for this, Brown would take one billion dollars from the reserved fund earmarked for education and social services.
This is capitalist society’s only answer: increase profits at the expense of education and social services and conditions in the prisons–laying the groundwork for even more crime.
Sep 2, 2013
The Los Angeles City Council recently approved a plan to replace the Jordan Downs public housing complex with 1,800 “stylish” new apartments and chain stores.
Jordan Downs, located in the Watts district of Los Angeles, consists of 700 old units that provide housing for low-income working class people. According to the plan, the current residents who are “in good standing” will be able to stay at their current units and move to their new homes when the construction is completed.
The reality will be something else. To get an idea, look at what one of the developers of the project, the Michaels Organization, did in Chicago.
Michaels was part of a real estate team that “redeveloped” Robert Taylor public housing in Chicago. Robert Taylor had 4,321 units that housed 27,000 people. By the end of 2005, all these low-income residents were removed and the buildings were demolished. Now there are only 281 units in their place, of which 137 are available for low-income families. The Chicago Housing Authority, which manages the new housing, says that when the project is finally done there will be 2,400 units in total–sometime far off in the future!
But when the dust cleared, only a tiny fraction of low income people who lived in Robert Taylor could keep their public housing. The majority were irreversibly dislodged from the area to pave way for construction of “stylish” homes which are sold at “market prices.”
So, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Detroit, all over the country, so-called developers are making tons of money by uprooting people, demolishing low-income units, constructing units that are offered at higher prices, and managing them after they are built. The most sumptuous feature for the developers is that it is funded by our tax money!
Yes, we need new, better modern homes. But developers whose aim is profit do not provide them for ordinary workers.
Sep 2, 2013
This article is from the August 19th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Two years ago, a powerful wave of demonstrations forced the general staff of the Egyptian Army to abandon General Mubarak, who fell from power after 30 years. The leaders of the imperialist countries—the United States above all—loudly cheered the end of the military dictatorship that they had supported, financed, and armed as long as it proved capable of maintaining order. They made speeches about an “Arab Spring” that would pave the way for democracy and for a new era for the Egyptian people.
Not only did this “spring” fail to deliver basic necessities like bread to the poor masses, to the destitute peasants, and to the workers in the cities, but in addition, rather than liberty spreading, the army has returned to the streets. This time, it has the approval of a part of the population disgusted by the policies of Mohammed Morsi, the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was elected president barely a year and a half ago and then removed from power by the army. Today, Egypt is in chaos, its cities filled with tanks, soldiers, and policemen firing on unarmed protestors. One thousand deaths were reported—but the real figure is undoubtedly closer to two thousand. Whole neighborhoods are in flames, and a civil war is beginning to take shape.
This civil war is just as bloody as it is fruitless from the point of view of the interests of the poor majority of the population. On one side, there is the army, the general staff, and the caste of higher officers, who have imposed a regime of ferocious repression for more than half a century while their representatives succeed one another at the head of the government. The social order that the army protects preserves above all the material interests of the big bourgeoisie, especially of the international bourgeoisie. It guarantees the pillage of the country by the big Western companies, as well as the strategic role of the Egyptian regime in the Middle East.
In opposition to the army, there is the Muslim Brotherhood. Their representative certainly came to power through the ballot box, but the Brotherhood wants to impose another kind of authoritarian regime on the population, one marked by religious bigotry, by violence against those who don’t share their beliefs, and by the oppression of women. These two forces are rivals, but they are both determined to keep the poor masses under control.
The tragedy of the Egyptian people is that it is torn between these two political forces, both of them unable even to guarantee simple democratic freedoms. What’s more, neither is able to put an end to the underdevelopment of the country and the immense misery of its working classes. These problems are intimately linked. How could the exploiters concede democratic freedoms to the exploited in a place where social inequalities are so glaring and where poverty is so enormous?
The fall of Mubarak changed nothing about this. The situation of the working class has not stopped deteriorating. This is because of the economic crisis, because of worsening unemployment—notably with the collapse of tourism—and because, in its war to preserve its profits, the big bourgeoisie is merciless toward the workers in poor countries. While Obama and the other world leaders talk on and on about a “democratic transition,” the capitalist companies continue to plunder Egypt, to push the working masses over the cliff, and to fund and train the Egyptian army. General al-Sisi, the new candidate for dictator, was trained in a U.S. military academy. The protests of Western heads of state against the army’s violence hide their own hypocritical complicity.
Even if the army is targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and pretends to defend secularism and women’s rights and the Christian minority, it will still try to terrorize the poor classes, all with the approval of the imperialist powers.
The masses have shown their ability to mobilize twice in two years, first against Mubarak and more recently against Morsi. However, the events in Egypt also show that the power of the exploited masses can be led astray and wasted when it is not guided by a proletariat conscious of its class interests, fighting with its own organizations and under its own banner. There will only be a true revolution in Egypt when the exploited masses realize that they can change their condition only by putting an end to the state power of the bourgeoisie—both local and international—and its grip on the economy.
Egypt may be far away, and not only in terms of miles. However, the lesson of the tragic events taking place there is useful not only for Egypt’s working class, but also for us, the workers of this country.
Sep 2, 2013
The debt of European states continues to expand, threatening the cohesion of the Euro-zone and the existence of the single currency. The Chinese economy slows and brings on fears of a brutal turnaround that would affect the whole world’s economy. But Wall Street is beating all the records.
In six months, from the beginning of January to the end of June, the Dow Jones index, made up of the stocks of the largest American businesses, jumped by 19 percent. The big banks top the list. Thus the five biggest American banks, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, made accumulated profits of 21 billion dollars in just three months, from April to June.
The considerable enrichment of these financial institutions, enrichment from which the whole capitalist class benefits, is the fruit of speculation. Yet the official growth of the American economy was under two percent, that is, nearly ten times less than the growth of Wall Street.
The rapid expansion of Wall Street’s new speculative bull market is, in reality, maintained by the American state itself. For nearly five years now, the rate at which the big banks can obtain credit from the central bank, the body responsible for issuing money, has remained at rock bottom. And each month, through the intermediary of this same central bank, nearly 80 billion “new” dollars are injected, by way of buying up bad loans that wouldn’t otherwise find a taker. It’s this politics of easy money for finance that continually feeds speculation.
Now, if the speculative bull markets permit astronomical gains for the capitalists, they don’t create wealth. On the contrary, in attracting capital with the goal of rapid profits, they dry out investments in the rest of the economy and aggravate the crisis. Moreover, this speculation can reverse itself from one day to the next. The smallest piece of bad financial news can cause a brutal collapse in the price of the most sought after stocks, transforming them into scraps of paper without value. That can then lead to a chain of bankruptcies, and in the end, unemployment for millions more workers.
The world economy is constantly at the edge of the abyss, a hair’s breadth from economic collapse. This is the sharpest expression of the aberration and the danger that capitalist organization of the economy represents.
Sep 2, 2013
In early August, the U.S. military escalated its dirty war in Yemen, by launching close to a dozen drone attacks over a period of two weeks. These U.S. missile strikes were in support of the Yemen military, which was battling rebels in oil fields and ports in the south of the country. Out of fear that its instigated war in Yemen could spill over to a broader attack, the U.S. State Department ordered its embassies throughout the region closed for a period of two weeks.
The United States has been firing missiles into Yemen since 2009, from drones, ships, and planes, wreaking death and destruction throughout the country, in order to try to buttress another of those corrupt and brutal dictatorships that the U.S. uses against populations around the world.
Until recently, the dictator of Yemen was Ali Abdallah Salih, who had held onto power for almost two decades, pitting the different ethnic and tribal groups against each other. But that didn’t stop the authority of his government from “crumbling,” from at least three separate armed insurgencies that left big parts of the country outside the government’s control.
In 2011 during Yemen’s Arab Spring, major demonstrations broke out against the Salih regime along with protests against the vast unemployment, impoverishment and corruption. The government tried to squash the movement. In one attack, police snipers shot and killed more than 50 protestors. But this only inflamed the movement more. Salih was driven out of office–only to be replaced by his deputy, Abd Rabbih Mansur Hadi.
The U.S. government has been supporting this dictatorship with vast amounts of military aid, along with U.S. Special Forces. For U.S. big oil, the stakes in Yemen are high. Yemen, a small impoverished country, which is located at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, is a crossroads for the entire region. Every day, three million barrels of oil pass through the Gulf of Aden off the Yemen coast, with ships traveling either north to the oil refineries of Saudi Arabia or to the south and the shipping lanes of the Asian markets. At one place, these shipping lanes are so narrow, they are considered a “choke point” just like the Strait of Hormuz at the base of the Persian Gulf. And inside Yemen itself, major oil companies, like Shell, Hunt Oil and Total, make big profits exporting oil and natural gas.
Under the guise of fighting “a war on terror” in Yemen, the U.S. is fighting to impose its control against the people of Yemen in another dirty war for oil.
Sep 2, 2013
United Nations troops were responsible for the spread of cholera in Haiti, according to a new study by Yale University. This epidemic has already caused the deaths of 8,000 people and infected 650,000 more. After the earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010, the U.N., which was already in the country, sent extra military troops, officially to help the population.
The first cases of cholera appeared in October 2010, after the country had been free of it for more than a century. The population quickly suspected that Nepalese U.N. peacekeepers were the cause, since their camp was set up next to a river that runs through the country and their sanitary system was poor. However, the U.N. continued to deny the responsibility of its troops, even after an independent investigation in 2011 showed that the cholera bacteria from this epidemic were the same as those found in Nepal.
Even with this proof given by the Yale study, the U.N. still refuses to compensate the victims. Or to say it more clearly, the club of the world’s biggest governments never agrees that it owes anything to one of the poorest populations on the planet!
However, the U.N. Secretary-General is dedicating himself to do everything “to help the Haitian people overcome this cholera epidemic,” although “carrying out this goal won’t be easy, but it’s possible.”
What a bunch of hot air! At the end of 2012, the U.N. launched a “plan to eliminate cholera” in ten years, costing 2.2 billion dollars. The result to help wipe out cholera? After eight months, only 23 million dollars has been spent–one percent of what the U.N. promised!
Sep 2, 2013
The following appeared in the July-August 2013 Workers’ Fight, journal of the revolutionary workers group of the same name active in Great Britain.
At 9:40 a.m. on August 26, 1913, Dublin’s streetcar workers in the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) responded to the firing of union members by going on strike. This was to spark the famous five-month Dublin lockout, which pitted 20,000 locked-out workers against the Dublin bosses.
At the time, after more than 700 years of direct British rule, the conditions for workers in Ireland were far worse than in Britain. In Dublin, 20,000 working-class families lived in single rooms. The annual death rate was appalling, higher even than in Calcutta, with its plague and cholera infestations. Meanwhile, an increasingly affluent Irish capitalist class was exploiting Irish workers on behalf of British capital.
Up to the launch of the ITGWU, most organized Irish workers had been affiliated with British trade unions, without getting much in return. This changed following the arrival in Belfast in 1907 of James Larkin. Born in Liverpool of Irish parents, Larkin was angered by the poverty he saw all around him and decided to use his experience as a trade-union activist on the docks in Britain. In December 1908 he was one of the organizers of the ITGWU—an Irish-based union open to all unskilled workers. Two years later, Britain’s 1910 strike wave spread across the Irish Channel and, in 1911, there were four major strikes in Ireland, mostly involving the ITGWU. By 1912, the ITGWU membership had risen to 41,000.
At this point William Murphy entered the ring. A Catholic nationalist, he was then the richest businessman in Dublin. His empire spanned the manufacture of streetcars, the running of public transport in Irish towns, as well as newspapers, hotels and finance. His workers were low paid, spied upon and subjected to fines and instant firings. Larkin rightly described him as a “foul and vicious blackguard, a modern capitalistic vampire.”
Murphy had vowed to “smash” the rising ITGWU. On August 15, he had fired 60 newspaper workers in the union and 200 streetcar workers who refused to handle his newspapers. Murphy urged his fellow employers to renege on their agreements with the ITGWU, which responded in kind by calling streetcar workers to strike.
Workers were locked out and Larkin was arrested with other ITGWU leaders, though soon freed. On Saturday, August 30, following police baton attacks on 6,000 demonstrators, rioting developed. As the rioting spread, inhabitants from nearby slums reinforced the rioters. The lockout saw its first fatalities. James Nolan and John Byrne were killed by police batons. Three days later, Nolan’s coffin was followed by a mile-long procession.
The next day, a planned rally on Sackville Street was banned. Thousands nonetheless turned up hoping to see Larkin—who appeared disguised as an old man. But he was quickly arrested and the police went on a rampage, injuring 460 workers within a few minutes. As news spread, rioting broke out all over the city in working-class areas. Police then targeted the poorest tenements, smashing anything they could with their batons. Sunday, August 31 became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Hoping that the situation would resolve itself, the British government waited another three weeks. Then it called in George Askwith, who had negotiated with the unions during the 1910 strike wave in England. While Askwith condemned the employers’ attack on workers’ rights, Murphy boasted that he would continue eating three square meals a day. If the workers chose to starve, it was their own choice.
In the aftermath of “Bloody Sunday,” Larkin called for the setting up of a workers’ militia, capable of protecting demonstrators against the attacks of the police. This militia came into being at the end of September, in the form of the Irish Citizens’ Army (ICA), which trained by night in Croydon Park.
By October, Larkin was again free and touring Britain to mobilize support. In front of crowds of 25,000 he called on workers to refuse to handle Dublin’s “tainted” goods. Workers responded with protest strikes in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. But the last thing the British TUC leaders wanted was any kind of collective action, leading Larkin to note that the TUC leaders were “about as useful as mummies in a museum.” Using the excuse that the lockout was “purely Irish,” they defused the spontaneous wave of solidarity that was growing among British workers. Instead, they offered their financial assistance to the Dublin workers and funded food ships for the strikers, leaving British workers in the role of passive spectators.
For the Dublin workers, however, this support was a double-edged sword. In January 1914, the TUC leaders felt it was now safe to turn off their funding. In the end, having been isolated by the TUC leadership from their only natural ally, the British working class, the Dublin workers were starved back to work.
Despite its defeat, the Irish working class had demonstrated its ability to fight, regardless of religion or sect, using its own organizations, the ITGWU and ICA, for its own class interests—and not just against the British—but also against the Irish capitalists who claimed to represent the “Irish nation.” As Lenin wrote in the early days of the lockout, “The Dublin events mark a turning point in the history of the labor movement and of socialism in Ireland. Murphy threatened to destroy the Irish labor unions. He only succeeded in destroying the last remnants of the influence of the nationalist Irish bourgeoisie over the proletariat in Ireland.”
And even if this tradition was largely drowned in blood, first by the British after the 1916 Easter Rising and then by their Irish stooges after the partition between the north and the south, the struggle of the Dublin workers remains an example of class independence for today’s and tomorrow’s battles.
Sep 2, 2013
The Obama administration, along with the entire political apparatus and the press, were saber-rattling over Syria. Threats of bombing by drones, what President Obama calls a “narrow, limited” intervention, have been parried and countered with proposals for larger actions, up to and including troops on the ground.
This entire political barrage followed in the wake of the horrific killings of more than 1,400 Syrian citizens, including more than 400 children, by chemical warfare. According to the press, U.S. sources insist that the attack was carried out by the Assad regime, which is engaged in a civil war with an opposition that has cost the lives of more than 100,000 people.
Maybe, maybe not, but remember “weapons of mass destruction,” which never appeared in Iraq? How about surgical strikes to end terrorism that supposedly originated in Afghanistan, oops, Saudi Arabia. Before that, Panama, Libya, Grenada, Iran. We should not fall for some rhetoric we have heard dozens of times in our lifetimes, rhetoric used to justify U.S. imperialism’s wars.
It is a deadly mistake to be comforted by illusions deliberately planted by the U.S. government and military that paint the use of drones or missiles as being more humane or allowing “surgical” strikes that hit only their intended targets of “terrorists” as defined by the military. Bombing raids and drone strikes are killing civilians; men, women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen.
Obama stepped back from authorizing bombing raids to wait for Congress to join him in decision-making. Why? In a situation that could further destabilize the Syrian government of Assad; in a situation where Egypt and Lebanon are destabilized; with open war in Iraq and a secret war in Yemen, the U.S. and the European imperialisms’ first concern is to protect their oil interests. They may be having second thoughts about throwing out Syria’s dictator.
But whether by open intervention on the ground or attacks by drones or a continuation of policies that prop up dictators in the region, U.S. policies in the region put the people of the Middle East, including Syria, at risk.
STOP U.S. wars, drones and conventional bombing in the Middle East!
All U.S. forces–including the CIA and Special Forces–get OUT!
Sep 2, 2013
For over a year, President Obama has repeated that if the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, it would cross a “red line” and that the Western powers would have to intervene.
The pictures of victims of poison gas in the Damascus suburb of Ghoula show all the horror of these weapons. It is monstrous that more than a thousand women and children were massacred, dying after terrible suffering.
It’s important to remember that these weapons were first used by the same big powers that today are so indignant against Syria. During World War I, poison gas was widely used by both sides in the fighting. After that war, the use of poison gas was forbidden, but that didn’t prevent the European states and the U.S. from continuing to make it and store it. Even today, all armies that have the resources carry out research on biological, chemical and other types of warfare, which are just as deadly as the mustard gas used from 1914 to 1918.
It’s no comfort for the civilian population that the big powers prohibit the use of chemical weapons, since they have also developed weapons that are easier to manipulate and are more precise. The British first used napalm incendiary bombs in the civil war in Greece after World War II, and then the U.S. and France used it in their colonial wars, especially in Viet Nam and Algeria. Vietnamese villagers were burned alive, and those who survived still carry the after-effects. And on a much greater scale, the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most murderous weapons of mass destruction used so far in world history.
The great powers crossed the “red line” a long time ago.
Sep 2, 2013
Bradley Manning made a powerful statement to the court when sentenced to 35 years in prison. Certainly Manning doesn’t see the role imperialism plays in the world, but knows very well its effects on soldiers and on populations.
It was not at all easy to find the statement in the bourgeois press, so we present part of it here.
“I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend our country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time that I realized that in our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
“In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
“Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically-based dissension, it is usually an American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American internment camps—to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
“As the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’ ”