Another bloody war, and the hope of socialism is being buried again. The workers of Syria and other Arab lands are murdering each other at the bidding of capitalism.
The Western media except for the occasional report forgets that both sides in Syria are using hideous weaponry and committing horrible atrocities, and that the UK/US with its Arab monarchist/religious states are actively aiding one side, while Russia and Iran helps the other.
The American and British administration have declined to make public the evidence and scientific proof of the use of Sarin and they are being allowed to say "trust us" on the issue of chemical weapons use and its consequences. The newspapers and TV news appear to readily accept such claims which is surprising considering their track record of previous misinformation and intelligence errors. Isn’t it true that that liars are untrustworthy?
Jean Pascal Zanders, a leading expert on chemical weapons who until recently was a senior research fellow at the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. “It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack, it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack.”
Greg Thielmann, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Arms Control Association, noted that the White House had a lack of a “continuous chain of custody for the physiological samples from those exposed to sarin.” The statement released by the White House Thursday, "does not eliminate all doubt in my mind,”
Philip Coyle, a senior scientist at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, said that without hard, public evidence, it’s difficult for experts to assess the validity of the administration’s statement. He added that from what is known, what happened doesn’t look like a series of sarin attacks to him. “Without blood samples, it’s hard to know,” he said.
Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, wrote Friday that “the ‘discovery’ that Syria used chemical weapons might be a political ploy.”
Meantime, other informed commentators such as UN representatives suggest that “...there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated. This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”
Many supposed “peace-makers” now call for a “No-Fly Zone”. There is no such thing as a “limited” no-fly zone. It means essentially a declaration of all-out war. Once the US and its allies start a no fly zone they will expand it and intensify it as they take countless other military actions to protect its zones until the Syrian government falls.
During the no-fly zone in Libya, a country with substantially less effective air defences than Syria, the US backed it up with all manner of refueling, electronic jamming, special-ops on the ground. Over the 192 days of patrolling the Libyan no-fly zones, NATO countries flew 24,682 sorties including 9,204 bomb strike sorties. NATO claimed it never missed its target but that was also not true. Hundreds of civilians were killed in Libya by no-fly zone attack aircraft that either missed their targets and emptied their bomb bays before returning to base while conducting approximately 48 bombing strikes per day using a variety of bombs and missiles, including more than 350 cruise Tomahawks.
At a Congressional hearing in 2011, then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explained “a no-fly zone begins with an attack to destroy all the air defenses … and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”
The Socialist Party of Great Britain is part of the World Socialist Movement, companion political parties in the struggle for a socialist society. The call by Marx and Engels in the concluding words of The Communist Manifesto : “Workers of the World Unite!” caught at hearts of people everywhere.
The slogan advocates solidarity in a capitalist world divided into states with opposing and conflicting interests, a world split up, criss-crossed with frontiers and borders. potential explosive powder kegs the world over threatening to blow up civilisation. Nowhere is there security. There is talk of peace while there is preparation for war. The need for disarmament is announced while the countries arm to the teeth. The world hardly recovers from one war and it prepares and then launches another one, that draws in all nations whether they like it or not, which means the wholesale destruction of men, women and children. The stand of the Socialist Party is to hold the capitalist class accountable for every drop of blood shed by people in war. Capitalism has no peaceful, non-violent, socially beneficial way of resolving national conflicts because it has an automatic, built-in limitation: it may not overstep the profit interests of the dominant capitalists. It remains the great and tragic paradox of our age – poverty in the midst of plenty and it is underlined by a social system which cannot satisfy the most elementary needs of the people, squanders its vast resources for war: That is one of the greatest indictment of world capitalism. In a socialist world, that most damnable instance of capitalist greed and inefficiency – war – would be a thing of the past. Socialism could take the vast resources which are available and rather than devote them to destruction, use them for constructive purposes .
There is only one way to avoid this slaughter – a world revolution which will replace the struggle between nations by social co-operation. The task is to put an end to war forever by putting an end to its cause, the capitalist system. Humanity must choose between the continuation of the capitalist system which leads to destruction and the alternative option - a revolution organised on the basis of solidarity and reciprocity through the socialisation of the forces of production. Socialism will make of the world one country, single and indivisible. In each region and district, taking into consideration their cultural and linguistic identities, the “independence” of each “peoples” will be assured and each will by free co-operation work together for the common progress and happiness of all people.
The Party’s task is not to concoct some fashionable means of helping the workers. It is to assist workers in grasping the class relations that underlie exploitation and all oppression and grasping the general and long-term interests of the working class in overthrowing capitalism and ending class society. It has been argued that thee exists the concept of a “good war”. That socialists should defend the democratic liberties which had been won by the working class by allying themselves with their “own” rulers against a more brutal dictatorship. Should a “less reactionary” ruling class be supported against a “more reactionary” one? It is the same question that was asked at the start of the First World War and again at the beginning of the Second World War. It is impossible to protect the democratic liberties of the working class by subordinating the class struggle to agreements and collaboration with the ruling class. Support for war means support to the narrowing down of democratic rights to the point where there is no longer any difference between the democratic and that of a totalitarian country. The way to preserve democratic rights is for the workers to defend these rights against their own ruling class, their own main enemy.
The chief aim of the Socialist Party in event of war must be to warn the workers against allowing themselves to be misled by the lies of the media and the mutual recriminations of capitalist groups, and to remember that the worker in enemy countries is just as much a victim of capitalist oppression as they are —that even though they are compelled by circumstance to fight against each other, that it will not be long before they are again compelled to help each other against the common foe – capitalism – whose machinations have caused war. The capitalists make huge profits out of war and war preparations. War and its mass butchery can only bring hunger, misery and want. We must fight against the real cause of war, and against the people that benefit from it. Our enemy is capitalism everywhere. The fight for socialism is the fight for peace. The enemy is not the men and women of other lands; it is the capitalist class at home. There is only one way to prevent war is by the overthrow of capitalism, the real root from which war springs.
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