With characteristic ruthlessness and with extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy, the United States and its capitalist allies have launched a murderous bombing campaign against the Yugoslav Federation.
This assault is designed to demonstrate the power of the imperialist war machine and its readiness to punish any state or people that does not accept its domination.
The United States and its allies are supremely indifferent not only to the fate of the masses of the Serbian people, who are not responsible for the policies of their rulers, but to the fate of the Kosovar Albanian people in whose name this campaign of blind destruction has been launched.
It is the duty of all Americans who respect democratic and humanitarian values to oppose the actions of the government that claims to speak in their name.
The military action launched by the United States and its allies against Yugoslavia represents a grave escalation of intervention by the Western capitalist powers into the conflicts created by the decay of Stalinism and the process of capitalist restoration in the former Soviet bloc. It poses a real threat of a chain reaction of major wars.
It is clear that the capitalist powers are going to try to intervene in the growing chaos of the former Soviet bloc, given their historic stake in assuring that the process of capitalist restoration continues. This process itself is fueling greater and greater conflicts, as it leads to the impoverishment of these countries and destroys their economic autonomy.
There is thus no way that Western intervention can mitigate these conflicts. By its attempts to impose the capitalist system, with its inequalities and competition, the West can only exacerbate the problems. It cannot promote democracy by fostering a system that defends exploitation and sets people to fighting each other for increasingly scarce goods.
The fight against the intervention of the capitalist powers in Eastern Europe is also important for defending the coming workers’ struggles against capitalist restoration that are the only hope for peace, democracy, and economic progress in that part of the world.
The revival of socialist perspectives in the noncapitalist countries is also vital for the more and more desperate populations of the underdeveloped world and the workers of the advanced countries themselves, threatened by the lengthening shadow of world depression.
However, the kind of mass movement necessary to stop capitalist intervention cannot be built in association with decaying Stalinist forces and their various chauvinist, fascist-like allies, such as the Serbian tribalists and cheerers for genocide that have put their poisonous imprint on the first demonstrations in the United States against the bombing of Yugoslavia.
Thus, in San Francisco, the International Action Center organizers of the first demonstration against the bombing led a chant from the platform, apparently in deference to their Serbian allies, of “Kosovo is Serbia.”
The banner at the front of the crowd was the flag of the Yugoslav monarchy and the counterrevolutionary Chetnik forces of the World War II period.
It is scandalous that anyone claiming to be a socialist or a fighter against imperialism would associate themselves with such elements. The movement against imperialist intervention is too important to let it be discredited and destroyed by sectarian hangovers of Stalinism.
We must build a mass, independent movement unconditionally opposed to the U.S. and NATO war effort and in solidarity with the right of self-determination of oppressed peoples-including the people of Kosovo.
