Leaflet (London march)

Anti-war Syria 30th August 2013

“Moral outrage” over Syria would be a sick cynical hypocrisy even if Western funded Egyptian generals were not still cleaning their guns from cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of innocents in Egypt. Responsibility for atrocities lies with the “rebels” set going, funded and armed by the West and stooge Gulf feudalism. These Goebbels lies feed imperialism’s war-drive “solution” to its catastrophic economic crisis failure which will continue until capitalism is overturned. DEFEAT for imperialist war any way possible. Leninism is needed.

 

To celebrate a “strengthening of democracy” and victory for the “anti-war” social-pacifist lobby, after the petty humiliation of the Cameron Coalition on Thursday would be entirely the wrong conclusion.

It is not “Stop the War” protests and “left restraint” that created the chaos in the Commons over Syria but defeats for the British ruling class from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The real story now is not pacifist or “opposition” success (Labour is as stunned by the result as everyone else) but one of war weariness and capitalist crisis collapse and the rising rebellious it is causing domestically as well as abroad.

The insane lies over Syria are so desperately thin because the world ruling class is clutching at straws.

The return of devastating economic meltdown is due any time as Quantitative Easing money printing madness works through the world economy – the inflationary credit bubble ready to burst again like 2008 but ten times more devastatingly.

Setbacks and failures like Iraq and Afghanistan are compounding ruling class desperation and panic at the intractable problems of this unstoppable meltdown economic crisis and refusal of the world’s masses to accept even greater tyrannical exploitation to pay for it.

The disunity and hesitation on show reflects weakness and vacillation by a ruling class that does not know which way to turn in face of the greatest catastrophe in history.

It has been hoodwinking ordinary people with its “war on terror” scapegoating and world terrorising for two decades to distract attention from its crisis.

But it is not working. A decade and a half of blitzing and “world policing” has produced not peace and prosperity, but the sick and ugly mess of endless destruction, killing, torture and civilian massacre imposed on Yugoslavia to Iraq, from Afghanistan to Libya - and threatened against many more – all carried out by the US Empire and its Western imperialist henchmen like Britain under a deluge of propaganda lies about “dictators” and “atrocities” and “saving the world from terrorism”.

Far from settling the world into a path of harmonious growth to a new era of innovation and consumerist nirvana, as promised “once the communist threat” was “dealt with” by the liquidation of the Soviet Union and the alleged reversion to capitalism of China (in fact still a planned workers state, despite dire revisionist leadership) – the world has seen the massive escalation of Third World rebellion against its endless degrading exploitation, disintegration of the entire finance system and the exposure of ever more horrific revelations about the real fascist nature of capitalist dictatorship rule, police state surveillance, torture, blitzing and Guantánamo horrors.

War is increasingly arousing a ferment of rebelliousness.

But the capitalist system cannot afford not to keep war going.

If Thursday’s vote shows the same paralysis that gripped the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s Depression and governments across Europe, as desperate coalitions followed one after the other in short order it is also a warning about the depths capitalism is plunging to.

Political paralysis was the prelude to open fascism and unveiled bourgeois dictatorship (in “emergency rule” wartime Britain as much as in Germany) as the imperialist system dragged the world into all-out war, tearing up the pretences of “democracy” to do it and leaving the true reality of bourgeois dictatorship revealed behind it.

So the ruling class is even more desperate to keep the world war atmosphere rolling, the only way it knows or has ever known to evade responsibility for its disastrous crisis, forcing the world to pay for its incompetence and bankruptcy, and diverting attention from the real cause of the chaos and Slump in the world, the private property capitalist system itself which has reached the end of the road and has nowhere to go.

The world is screaming in agony for a new way to do things – rational socialist planned production – but the indolent greed and power of the ruling class is determined to stop it happening even if it means destroying half the planet - and it will.

Hence the astounding BIG LIES and “righteous” aggression from Washington and its sidekicks over Syria (and Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran to come etc etc etc).

“Agonised” John Kerry reached new heights of breathtaking chutzpah with his cynical theatricalities about protecting “women and children” with a hypocrisy to best Goebbels and a sack full of freshly peeled onions.

As if the Obama presidency does not sign-off now routine slaughter every Tuesday morning, sanctioning drone-carried “Hellfire” missiles to “take-out” anyone in the world who dares stand against the imperialist neo-colonialist tyranny, including routinely numerous women and children who might be in the area.

As if American imperialism had not butchered thousands and thousands of women and children in the last fifteen years in hi-tech blitzings and bombings from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Libya and points in between, (not to mention Palestine and Lebanon) larded with barbaric torture, brutality and atrocities and all on the flimsiest of stunted up and big lie pretexts (eagerly taken up by the craven capitalist media journalists who bear a heavy weight of criminal responsibility for knowingly pumping out these grotesque LIES).

As if the US and all the others had not carried out a worldwide oppression and tyranny since the Second World War in over 400 brutal and barbaric massacres, wars, coups and assassinations, like deposing and murdering the Mossadeq regime in Iran in 1953 (just (!) admitted by the CIA), to install the fascist Shah of Iran and his Savak torture police; like the concentration camp atrocities and horrifying barbarities of Kenyan Mao-Mao rebel prisoners and Malaysian “anti-insurgency” (which Labour fully participated in) including roasting prisoners alive, rape with glass bottles, shootings, killings and beatings; or the scooping out of eyeballs that the CIA training manuals taught at the degenerate School of the Americas, preparing the paramilitaries for the bloody pro-Washington suppression in Latin America that has seen wave after wave of mass killings in the millions, thousands of “disappeared”s, gruesome torture, and foul atrocities.

Oh, but this is “different” say the disingenuous warmakers. Now a moral “Red Line” has been crossed of use of chemical weapons.

What preposterous “red line”??

What difference does it make to the hundreds of thousands of anti-imperialist fighters, many more civilians and innocent women and children “collaterally damaged” whether they are killed, maimed, crippled and bereaved by Hellfire missiles, canister bombs of anti-personnel body piercing flêche darts, or lung-collapsing aerial gasoline bombs, all repeatedly used by the West’s high flying B52s, Stealth bombers, jets and long range artillery against villages, benighted Palestinian townships and the dirt-poorest peoples of the world.

Or if their lives are destroyed by the high explosive destruction of everything around them including basic services, housing and medicine?

Or, if it comes to it, if they simply starve to death, succumb to poverty diseases, (all eradicable with not very great investment in sanitation and nourishment) or get crushed by the thousands in collapsing gerry-built factory buildings??

At least the same number of unarmed civilians have been gunned down in cold blood in Egypt just three weeks ago (how convenient the timing of the new front page headlines??!!!!!) - and not the tiniest little artificial teardrop has fallen from the eyes of the “deeply concerned” Western politicians.

Hypocrisy and cynicism are words too pale for this. Fascist stampeding of hoodwinked masses is more like it.

The US Empire has repeatedly used chemical weapons since the end of the Second World War, most notably on Vietnam where for years on end it dropped tens of thousands of tonnes of Agent Orange containing the deadly dioxin chemical which has caused thousands of horrific birth defects which continue to this day.

The same deadly poison has been poured all over Colombia in the struggle in the laughably misnamed “war on drugs” against the communist FARC insurgency, allegedly to “stop the growth of coca leaves” but causing mass devastation of lives.

Deadly white phosphorus, which burns straight through to the bone, and which is banned by the Geneva convention has been used repeatedly in places like Falluja in Iraq and most of all by the Zionist occupation in Palestine in Operation Cast Lead a few years ago.

There has been not a murmur from the “outraged” Western ruling class let alone preparations for massive “punishment” blitzing and “deterrence” for the Egyptian generals or the Colombian paramilitaries or Jerusalem (itself illegally held with not a twitch from the “neutral” United Nations despite resolution after resolution to “condemn it”).

Depleted uranium dust, a known poison and carcinogen, now devastates the populations of southern Iraq and Libya, left by the Western blitzing operations there (and will undoubtedly be left allover Syrian lands too as invasion proceeds).

Napalm, the deadly sticky petroleum fire that clings to the skin has long been part of its arsenal.

The West invented, refines and stockpiles its own supplies of such weapons anyway, including “nerve gas”.

Not a word of all this is mentioned by the crude opportunism of the Labourites and the fake-“lefts” who hang off them like parasite cleaning fish on a shark.

Far from denouncing this monstrous warmongering as the fascism it is, they have all gone along with it, simply off-loading responsibility for any blitzkrieg onto the United Nations as a “question of evidence”.

The smug “left” opportunist Dianne Abbott was the most duplicitous of all, pretending opposition but quite prepared to go to war “but only if it is sanctioned by the United Nations”.

But Syria is nothing to do with proof because whatever the actual facts in this incident the West is not actually “taking a moral stance”– this is to do with a two year long deliberately induced civil war provoked and fed by Western agents.

Syria’s “rebellion” has been a giant fraud from the beginning, created by the West with one of the most sustained campaigns of propaganda lies in all history, while all the time funding and arming the artificially driven “rebel” movement, pumped up from deliberately inflammatory covert interventions, building a hate atmosphere around existing sectarian tensions and the antagonisms that any capitalist country will have (even if it takes an anti-imperialist stance).

Waiting for “proof” is to avoid exposing the much more important deliberate war stampeding of capitalism, both long term in general and over Libya and Syria, and the gross lies of this particular stunt where war “punishment” demands were being made before anything was known or even could have been known at all, not just about “responsibility” but even if even if there had actually been a gas attack.

(If any assumptions were to be made from past events they would be to point the finger at the “rebels” and the monstrous ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and gruesome executions of unarmed prisoners etc they have carried out over and over again, which is either not reported in the mainstream press or gets quickly buried away after one mention on the inside pages).

Focussing on “proof” is rank opportunism covering-up the Empire’s fascist propaganda. Declaring Assad a tyrant as most of the Trotskyists do is equally craven bolstering the imperialist warmongering lies.

All-out Stalinist-style support for Assad’s regime is no answer for the working class either. But defeat for the imperialist blitzing is crucial wherever it comes from.

Build Leninism Don Hoskins

 

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