Enter key words or concepts
then select the 'search' button to search the Socialist Action web site
|
Socialist Action /October 2001
The Terrorist Bombing: Where We Stand
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!
Socialist Action /October 2001 |