Tragedy Must Not Be Turned Into War!
No U.S. Bombing Anywhere! Stop U.S. Intervention! End Racist Attacks on Arab and Muslim Communities! Defend Civil Liberties and Civil Rights for All!
The following statement was issued by the Socialist Action Political Committee on Sept. 17.
The government that spends trillions on war, has sent more troops to police the world in the interest of corporate profits than any other in history, and has plundered and ruined the economies of numberless underdeveloped countries is again preparing for war.
There can be no justification for the horror unleashed on working people of every nationality by the terror bombing of New York and Washington. We mourn the dead, and extend our deepest feelings of solidarity to all those whose friends and loved ones perished in this barbaric deed.
The terror bombing, which took the lives of thousands of innocent people, now serves as the justification for a Congressional declaration of war against unnamed nations and individuals. President Bush has demanded that the person he describes as the “suspected” perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, be delivered to the U.S. “dead or alive.
Any country that refuses to aid the “crusade” is presumably to be labeled the enemy, and then bombed and destroyed at will. History’s tragic irony records that Bin Laden himself was among the stable of CIA-trained and financed operatives when it suited imperialist ends.
A poisoned media and warmongering bipartisan Congress fuels the flames of racism, leading to mounting attacks on Arab Americans and Muslims as well as those who, in the racist mind, resemble people of the Middle East and Asia.
Today, we are witness to a president proclaiming the United States the bastion of “freedom” in a world that has been subject to countless inhuman, illegal, genocidal, and terrorist acts at U.S. government hands:
- Four million Vietnamese were murdered by the U.S. in its 12-year racist, counterrevolutionary war.
- Over 250,000 Iraqis were killed in two weeks in the 1991 Gulf War, when the “enemy” fired barely a single shot in its defense. More than one millionIraqi children have died since asa result of U.S. sanctions
- Some 250,000 were incinerated instan-taneously in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear holocausts.
- Led by the U.S., an imperialist alliance reduced the cities of Yugoslavia to ruin, with large civilian casualties.
- Hundreds of thousands were executed at the hands of U.S.-trained and installed dictators-from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, Gua-temala, Argentina, and Chile to Iran, the Congo, and the Middle East.
- The Palestinian nation was forcefully dismembered and destroyed and its people expelled from their homelands while the apartheid Zionist state of Israel was established to police U.S. and imperialist interests in the Middle East. U.S.-financed Israeli troops and death squads daily fire missiles into local villages and assassinate leaders who resist.
- The Cuban people have been subjected to U.S.-sponsored terror bombing, invasion, and illegal blockade-and destruction of their agriculture and livestock via U.S.-delivered biological and chemical weapons of war.
As a product of their war policy, government witch hunters now propose to resort to wiretapping, informers and agents, additional thousands of La Migra border patrols, and other police measures-in violation of our fundamental human and democratic rights. We must stand united against the threat of frame-up trials and arbitrary search and seizure, and against attacks on our rights to due process, free speech and assembly, and the presumption of innocence.
American working people and their allies among all the oppressed and exploited, the youth, and all others who cherish justice must now prepare to oppose U.S. militarism and intervention everywhere. The organization of broad-based, united-front, mass demonstrations to stop the warmongers must be the top priority of all who struggle for social justice.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed shortly before his murder that “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” It is this violence and terror that has produced the handful of fanatics today who blindly and in opposition to the interests of all the world’s people replicate on an infinitely smaller scale the deeds of yesterday’s brutal and racist colonizers and today’s world powers.
The terror, war, and barbarism inherent in globalizing world capitalism will not be ended until the world’s people unite to build a new social order in which human solidarity, love, economic, political and social association for the common good replace the rampaging horses of the capitalist apocalypse-war, racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, and disease.
The answer to terrorism lies in building a world free of oppression and war, in a society that champions human life and solidarity as opposed to capitalist barbarism. Socialism is the name of that society!