Every time something major happens in America or America goes to war, Washington says the world will never be the same again. While this may be a White House truism reflecting the jaundiced vision of ‘American internationalism’, there is indeed a growing and new turbulence in world politics.
Who could have imagined that a war on Iraq would trigger such a massive and sustained upsurge of global protests, a movement that the New York Times had to acknowledge as the world’s other superpower? A global upsurge which has been more visible in the West than in the Arab or Islamic world, giving a crushing rebuff to Huntington’s mischievous and racist recipe of clashes of civilisations? Who could have imagined that the unprecedented and overwhelming convergence of global support for the US in the wake of September 11 would be stripped down within a year to a minuscule ‘coalition of the willing’, yet another American Newspeak for ‘coalition of the bully and the bullied’? Who could have imagined that the day after the Anglo-American axis claimed victory in Iraq, thousands of Iraqis would hit the streets in every major city of Iraq demanding an immediate end to foreign occupation?
Propelling the present-day international politics are three powerful contradictions. Principal among these three is the antagonism between imperialism and the developing countries, the third world. The US may try and change governments in the third world – it can engineer coups and massacres like it did to oust President Mossadeq of Iran (1953), President Sukarno of Indonesia (1965), and President Allende of Chile (1973), or it can wage war to depose governments and install puppet regimes as it has done in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. But it can in no way eliminate or defuse the basic contradiction between the third world’s quest for freedom, democracy and development and the imperialist drive for economic, political and military domination.
Just look at Iraq. The country has been at war for nearly the last twenty-five years. It has been subjected to the harshest of economic sanctions by the UN. The country has yet to estimate how much it has suffered in the course of Bush’s and Blair’s war. Yet the people are not accepting the present US occupation lying down – the air in Iraq is already thick with the demand for withdrawal of US troops and complete restoration of Iraq’s sovereignty and independence. The situation in Baghdad today is not defined by the contrived spectacle of American marines pulling down the grand statue of Saddam Hussein, or the US-sponsored loot and destruction of Baghdad’s historical monuments and records, but by the growing protests of ordinary Iraqis against the Anglo-American occupation of their land. The accumulated anger of the Iraqi people is being directed increasingly at the Anglo-American occupation forces and their Iraqi collaborators.
The other two basic contradictions – inter-imperialist rivalry and the contradiction between labour and capital within the imperialist countries themselves have also sharpened considerably.
Bush’s Iraq war has exposed the deep fissures within what is loosely called the West or even Europe. The Americans now talk of two Europes – an ‘old Europe’ revolving around France and Germany, and a ‘new Europe’ comprising largely the ‘reformed’ states of Eastern Europe and of course Britain, the classic empire-builder. The distinction has started acquiring strong cultural overtones with Anglo-American sponsored organised boycotts of French products and an insidious anti-French campaign. While this itself offers yet another stunning refutation of the Huntington hypothesis of clashes of civilisations, we must take a closer look at the Franco-German or “old European” opposition to the war. Unlike the global popular opposition to the war, the stand adopted by France, Germany or for that matter Russia, reflected not a rejection of imperialist war per se but a specific reservation of Bush’s Iraq war emanating from serious conflicts of interest with the Anglo-American axis. Economist Michel Chossudovsky has rightly identified three main areas of conflict between the Anglo-American and the Franco-German axes: (i) Defence and the military-industrial complex, (ii) Control over oil and gas reserves, and (iii) Money and currency systems.
The consolidation of US occupation or domination in post-Saddam Iraq is only going to fuel, and not minimise, the many-sided contention between the Anglo-American and European powers (especially France, Germany and Russia).
And then, there has been this unprecedented global storm of protests against the war. From San Fransisco to Jakarta and from London to Melbourne, in city after city, millions of people have taken to streets opposing the US war against Iraq. In several countries this is historically unprecedented and they are witnessing such large-scale protests for the first time. The sweep of the anti-war movement is indeed breathtaking. Such a large-scale direct participation by the masses has become a new and very positive phenomenon in world politics. In America itself impressive demonstrations have rocked city after city. Thousands of protesters have been arrested in San Francisco, Washington and New York. While this movement has been by and large spontaneous, a whole range of organizations, notably communist and left organisations, trade unions and social movements, have started mobilizing the people and have established very informal networks for coordination. In some advanced capitalist countries, workers organised successful anti-war strikes, rallying around the slogan “stop work to stop the war”.
Interestingly, the anti-war movement has been relatively stronger in the developed countries. Could there be a stronger refutation of Washington’s mischievous and racist propaganda about saving the “Endangered West” from the designs of “Demonic Islam”? Leave alone Europe or the West, the ultra-nationalism and chauvinism being whipped up by the American rulers have had only limited impact on the American people and the working class. The growing depth and intensity of the anti-war movement in advanced capitalist countries has opened up the possibility for real cooperation and coordination between direct struggles against imperialist domination in the third world countries and the anti-imperialist, anti-war popular movement in the developed countries. The solidarity with the third world liberation movements is objectively getting strengthened among the masses in the developed countries.
Box 1
Is this ‘Liberation’?
The fiction created by the US defence establishment and the media is that the US troops are benign liberators of the Iraqi people. But the Iraqi people refused to cooperate with this lie: daily, there have been hundreds of protesters facing the US marines’ rifles to tell the US to quit Iraq. Because it is clear to them that, far from ‘liberation’, what they face is starvation, massacre, occupation, vandalism and loot.
There is no doubt that Saddam’s was a totalitarian dictatorship. But, equally, there is no doubt that Saddam used the oil wealth to create a modern secular society with a large, prosperous middle class. Noted journalist John Pilger notes that before 1990, Iraq was the only Arab country with 90% clean water supply and free education, and a highly efficient food distribution system. Health care reached 97% of the urban population and 78% of rural people. The sanctions imposed in 1991 destroyed all this. The UN Assistant Secretary General and Humanitarian Aid Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest, saying that the sanctions were “terrifying, illegal and immoral…destroying an entire society”.
In the present invasion, the target was not the Iraq of 1990-91, relatively well-off. It was a society crippled by 13 years of sanctions. The invading US army deliberately targeted existing food, water and power supply, sanitation and hospitals – Iraq’s already fragile civilian infrastructure.
Among the earliest targets of bombing were electrical power systems. These in turn disabled water and sanitation systems. The destruction of this infrastructure is paralyzing life in Iraq. But of course, companies like Halliburton and Bechtel (closely related to the Big Bosses of US administration and defence) are waiting to mint millions ‘reconstructing’ Iraq. In other words, the US smashed up the essentials of Iraq’s survival, and now the same US will make Iraqi people pay for ‘reconstructing’ what they destroyed!
Doctors’ and peace activists’ records show over 2000 Iraqi civilian casualties. The war-time death toll is now increasing by the day with more and more Iraqis killed daily by occupation forces. These include several families, including children shot at point-blank range at checkpoints, where no warning shots were fired. At one such checkpoint, children in an ambulance were shot dead. US bombings targeted three hospitals in Najaf, one in Baghdad and two in Basra, killing upto 500 people in these attacks. Two Red Cross workers were shot dead by US soldiers. One disoriented old man was shot dead in a Baghdad street. And hundreds of children lie in hospitals, with no painkillers or anaesthetics (thanks to sanctions), their limbs cut off, their bodies covered in shrapnel which causes pain the “equivalent of swallowing acid”.
The aim of the US was not just to occupy Iraqi territory, massacre people and loot Iraqi oil. Like all invaders, their aim was also to rob Iraq of its priceless cultural heritage. Iraq is the cradle of human civilization – the whole of Iraq was rich in sites where, 5000-6000 years ago, the first villages and cities grew, and humans first learnt to write. Iraq’s museums and archaeological sites contained treasures of ancient art and monuments that were the irreplaceable heritage of humankind. After Gulf War I, the inadequate protection to the sites during US occupation “allowed” organized looting and vandalism. During the US occupation of southern Iraq, the museum in Basra was pillaged, statues, art objects and ancient manuscripts were stolen, and many rare pieces reappeared in 1992 in the art market in the US and Switzerland. Cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals also appeared later in American and European antique markets. This time, Americans occupy all of Iraq. Under their patronage, organized looters and arsonists, having first “cheered” the “fall of Saddam” for CNN cameras, went on to plunder the Baghdad National Museum of Antiquities. One after another, treasure-houses of irreplaceable antiques were looted, and some wantonly burnt down. Who could doubt that this, too, was part and parcel of the US assault on Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld’s lie, that it was the irresponsible Iraqis who were plundering their own past, that “free people are free to loot”, was exposed by the arrest in customs of an ‘embedded’ American journalist smuggling back Iraqi antiques. No doubt, this time too, Iraq’s past will soon be on sale in the black markets of America and Europe. Colonialism’s nature has not changed – from the loot of India’s Koh-i-noor Diamond to the recent pillaging of Iraq’s treasures.
Box 2
What stand should the Government of India have adopted with regard to Bush’s war on Iraq ?
This is one war which has been far from sudden. It had been building up for months and even years together. In fact, Gulf War I had never stopped, it had merely been continuing in the form of lethal economic sanctions, periodic strafing and enforced destruction of Iraqi weaponry. The whole world had ample time to take a stand and most of the world had indeed taken a stand long before Bush’s March 16 “moment of truth” warning. Among the permanent members of Security Council, France, Russia and China were clearly opposed to the Anglo-American insistence on application of force. At least six of the nine non-permanent member countries including Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan had also made it abundantly clear that they would not support a US-led war. This despite the fact that some of these countries are major trading partners or strategic allies of the US and that the US had exerted tremendous pressure, including bugging the telephones and e-mails of their envoys in the UN headquarters, to secure their support. Even a US ally like Turkey showed the courage to refuse permission to the US to station its troops for invading the northern region of Iraq. (It is another matter that Turkey’s refusal, dictated by the Turkish parliament, fell short of a complete denial and Turkey did allow its airspace and subsequently also allowed the movement of supplies for the US troops.)
Iraq has been a traditional friend of India in the Arab world who has often supported India’s positions and shared India’s concerns on matters pertaining to South Asia and the third world. In India’s hour of oil shock, India could always rely on Iraq. India has a large number of workers and professionals working in the Gulf region and their remittances constitute one of the biggest foreign exchange earners for the country. A war in the Gulf would force most of these people to return to India. Most importantly, having been a British colony for two hundred years India knows only too well what imperialist wars and foreign occupation feel like. Apart from feeling solidarity for the people of Iraq, India should be wary of the geo-political consequences of a strong US military presence in and domination of the Middle East. The majority of Indian people were naturally against the idea of yet another war on Iraq. According to some opinion polls more than 80% people opposed the war and wanted the government to adopt a similar stand.
Now let us look at the other side of the picture – the track record of the Indian ruling classes and especially of the Vajpayee government which happens to be the most pro-US government India has ever had. India under Vajpayee was the first and among a very few countries to have welcomed the Bush administration’s belligerent missile defence plans. After 11 September India was again among the first few countries to have offered unconditional assistance, including multifarious military cooperation. It is another matter that the US really needed Pakistan’s support and hence it politely refused to involve India in the Afghanistan war. The only effective foreign policy consideration for the Indian ruling classes and especially the Vajpayee government is to prove India’s relevance to Washington as a key ally in Asia in terms of both regional and international affairs with the fond hope that India can at least beat Pakistan in this race. How could one really expect such a government to condemn and oppose the war?
The result was what Vajpayee called the middle path. His government did not agree to the idea of adopting a parliamentary resolution opposing the war before it actually started. ‘How can we oppose the war when it is yet to start?’, wondered Vajpayee. And then when it really started, the government said it was prepared at best to deplore the war for it didn’t want to risk antagonising the US. And eventually, nearly three weeks into the war, on the eve of the fall of Baghdad, the government agreed to a parliamentary resolution ‘condemning’ the war in Hindi and ‘deploring’ it in English! Clearly, the government wanted to tell Washington that it had been trying its best to accommodate the sentiment of the Indian people without causing any embarrassment or inconvenience to the US.
While speaking on the so-called ‘anti-war resolution’, the Indian foreign minister went on to claim that Pakistan was a more fit case for pre-emptive strike than Iraq. The defence minister too made similar noises till Colin Powell told them that any comparison between Iraq and Pakistan was completely misplaced. Following the American snub, the Indian Prime Minister made a visit to Srinagar and renewed India’s offer to have a dialogue with Pakistan!
Ardent advocates of imperialist globalisation (in short, Americanisation) are of course aghast at this official display of ‘stupidity’. The India Today editorially lambasted the government for this unpardonable lapse. India should have ideally stood by the US and gone the whole hog to support the war, at the least the government should have maintained a studied silence. By entertaining the whole debate over condemning the war just before its formal conclusion, the government, the editorial said, had bid goodbye to both idealism and pragmatism. Instead of bothering about the politics of war, India should rather focus on grabbing a part of the great Iraq ‘reconstruction’ bonanza!
The war over, the government has of course gone back to its policy of silence. There has been no official call for withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq or for multilateral supervision till an elected government takes its place. The focus, as advised by the ‘experts’ and the capitalists alike, is indeed on grabbing India’s share of spoils from the Iraqi booty.
Meanwhile, a classified report commissioned by the US Defence Department has made it clear that US wants access to Indian bases and military infrastructure with the United States Air Force specifically desiring the establishment of airbases in India especially for ‘having access closer to areas of instability’. The report also highlights the need for strategic Indo-US naval cooperation. According to it, “India can provide ports and support for operations in the Middle East. India not only has a good infrastructure, the Indian Navy has proved that it can fix and fuel US ships. India is a viable player in supporting all naval missions, including escorting and responding to regional crises.” (Josy Joseph, Rediff Special, April 21, 2003)
The more India gets identified as a US lackey in Asia, the more will she get isolated from the rest of the world. India’s regional neighbours will start viewing India with even more suspicion and, more crucially, India will become ever more vulnerable to US designs. It is American allies and US-friendly regimes across the world which have had to pay some of the biggest prices for courting America. To borrow an analogy from the Indian market of arranged marriages, a US ally is supposed to bring in an ever growing dowry and any failure invites nothing short of a dowry death.
Clearly for the Indian people to resist the US global design, the battle begins at home.
Box 3
Inter-Imperialist Rivalry and the Dialectics of War and ‘Truce’
The Franco-German opposition to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq has suddenly revived talks of renewed inter-imperialist rivalry and the possibility of the world returning from a unipolar static equilibrium to a multipolar dynamic equilibrium world. When there are several imperialist powers in various stages of development and consolidation, it is but natural that they will be engaged in mutual rivalry or what is known as inter-imperialist contradiction. But since almost six decades have elapsed since the last World War, many had started arguing that inter-imperialist rivalry has got muted. Some even started considering it a thing of the past and described the pronounced convergence of interests among advanced capitalist interests in the era of globalisation as the eventual arrival of something like ultra-imperialism.
This argument was essentially a rehash of the Kautsky-Lenin debate during the First World War. Kautsky, the renowned German socialist leader and a noted Marxist thinker in his early days, had started theorising about a phase of ultra-imperialism or superimperialism, a phase of ‘the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital’, all this when the imperialist powers of the day were actually engaged in World War I! This is like reading Hardt and Negri’s theory of amorphous supra-national Empire in the middle of the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Lenin tore asunder Kautsky’s ultraimperialist fable not because he thought imperialist powers could never have an all-embracing alliance, but because such ultra-imperialist alliances are “inevitably nothing more than a ‘truce’ in periods between wars.” “Peaceful alliances,” Lenin pointed out, “prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imeprialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.” He takes Kautsky to task for separating one link of a single chain from another, for presenting the workers with a lifeless abstraction, for consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism, for distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present times, and directing it towards illusory prospects of an imaginary ‘ultra-imperialism’ of the future.
Many analysts had seen the heightened drive for imperialist globalisation in the wake of the Soviet collapse as the surest proof of a new phase of pan-imperialist or ultra-imperialist unity. Now with hindsight some of them have started realising that actually it was the existence of the Soviet Union and the Soviet camp that had been serving as an inhibiting or retarding factor, keeping inter-imperialist contradiction in check. Contrarily, the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, the reintegration of these countries into the world capitalist economy and the resultant possibility of forging a new world order were bound to open up a new chapter of heightened inter-imperialist contradicions.
Let us note that in the pre-Soviet world Lenin too was faced with a similar context of a single capitalist world and he had linked the question of inter-imperialist friction and conflicts to this fundamental factor, whether the capitalist system would remain intact or not. Let us quote this long passage from Lenin’s “Imperialism” which sounds so topical in the present context of Franco-German opposition to the Anglo-American axis:
“Let us consider India, Indo-China and China. It is known that these three colonial and semi-colonial countries, with a population of six to seven hundred million, are subjected to the exploitation of the finance capital of several imperialist powers: Great Britain, France, Japan, the USA, etc. Let us assume that these imperialist countries from alliances against one another in order to protect or enlarge their possessions, their interests and their spheres of influence in these Asiatic states … Let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the ‘peaceful’ division of these parts of Asia; this alliance will be an alliance of ‘internationally united finance capital’. There are actual examples of alliances of this kind in the history of the twentieth century – the attitude of the powers to China, for instance. We ask, is it ‘conceivable’, assuming that the capitalist system remains intact – and this is precisely the assumption that that Kautsky does make – that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?” (emphasis added).
Box 4
The Bonanza of Iraqi Reconstruction
Who profits from the massacre and devastation in Iraq? Whichever way you look at it, it is the American corporations which emerge as the unchallenged winners in the Iraq war. For these corporations, WAR always spells PROFIT. In the first place, US arms manufacturers reap a bumper harvest in every war.
Not only that, the non-stop, obscene spectacle of “War TV” provided an ad campaign for the lethal new missiles, rockets, airplances and “smart bombs” being churned out by the arms industry.
Once the war is over, “reconstructing” what those weapons have destroyed is another highly profitable business.
The preliminary estimates of the costs of ‘reconstructing’ Iraq comes up to a 100 billion dollars. According to James Arnold of the BBC, “tidal wave of cash has sharpened appetites among corporate conractors.”
The war began in late March; bidding for reconstruction contracts began in February itself.
Even as the drama of UN negotiations, diplomacy and weapons inspections was being performed on the world’s stage, bidding for juicy post war ‘reconstruction’ contracts had begun behind the stage! Whether WMDs were found or not, whether Saddam stepped down or not … war was needed; after all, without a war to destroy Iraq, how would the American companies ‘reconstruct’ it? And without the ‘tonic’ of arms sales and ‘reconstruction’ contracts, how would the crisis-ridden US economy revitalize itself?
Like the war itself, the ‘reconstruction auction too was ‘fixed’, ‘rigged’ – its results a foregone conclusion. It was no surprise that all plum contracts were awarded to companies which are part of the ‘extended family’ of the US Defense Establishment and the Republican Party leadership. After all, massive donations to the Republican Party, the US government is clearly a ‘Government Of the Corporations, By the Corporations and For the Corporations’!
It is well known. The oil company Halliburton (Kellogg, Brown and Root) has intimate links with US Vice President Dick Cheney; Bechtel, whose CEO George Schulz, used to be the US Foreign Secretary, has equally close links with the Defence Policy Board of Donald Rumsfeld. Other recipients of contracts, like Fluor, or the International Resources Group, are noted for their massive donations to the Republican Party.
Donald Rumsfeld is fond of announcing that the US is selfless, its motive is merely to ‘help Iraqis’ till they elect a democratic government. But this claim is belied by the scope of the ‘reconstruction’ project. It is not just bridges, schools, electricity etc… that the US wants to reconstruct. Jay Garner, director of the Pentagon Office of Reconstruction, will oversee the “political side of reconstruction, public health, law enforcement, immigration, foreign affairs, economic development and the justice system” (John de Boer, March 14). In other words, Garner will “oversee” the tasks which belong to the Iraqi Government! No only that, the Iraqi Government, bureaucracy, courts, police will all be on the US payroll. Does this mean that the US will generously bear its cost? Of course not; the entire cost of “reconstruction” will be paid out of Iraq’s frozen assets and its oil revenues. However, these funds will be controlled and dispensed by the US, not the Iraqi Government. So, ‘reconstruction’ will kill two birds with one stone. With one stroke, it will achieve both loot and colonization. Iraq’s revenues and resources will be siphoned off as contracts to US companies. And the Iraqi Government will be reduced to a puppet regime totally controlled by the US. No one can miss the parallels with British colonialism; John O’Sullivan (Editor, UPI) has commented that this is exactly like the British who controlled Iraq for two centuries by hiding “behind the veil of local authority”.
Box 5
American Workers Against War
Statement by Denis Mosgofian, former President and current SF Labor Council delegate, at a press conference on March 12:
“…..Many workers are much more afraid of the Bush regime then of the Hussein regime. Hussein does not have 10,000 nuclear bombs; Bush does. The Hussein regime did not hand our federal tax dollars to the rich; Bush did. Hussein did not force 170,000 federal workers to give up their right to a union; Bush did. Hussein is not threatening to privatise our Social Security system; Bush is…Bush’s war is for oil and empire. At home, the Bush regime’s war is a pretext for reducing the standard of living of the American people…It is a cover for creating a surveillance society.
…..Since the Bush regime took power, we have lost nearly 3 million jobs, 318,000 lost just last month. In the 28 days of February, there was a loss of 11,400 jobs every day of the month…”
Box 6
We Shall Overcome
(excerpts from a speech made by Gene Bruskin, spokesman, US Labour Against the War (USLAW) in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Easter March for Peace on April 21, 2003)
When Bush came into office he immediately began to attack the rights of workers and unions. He packed the Labour Department and related agencies with anti-union appointees.
But it wasn’t until the tragedy of 9/11 that Bush came into his own. This was a traumatic event for people in the US where, unlike Europeans, we have been largely sheltered from wars on our territory, since our Civil War in 1860s. The intensity of the attack, the callousness, the obvious hatred connected with it, was terrifying to Americans; everyone suddenly felt vulnerable everywhere, and this fear is still in the hearts of many Americans. Their fear is understandable, and these terrorist acts were deplorable.
With the events of 9/11, and fear in the hearts of many Americans, Bush saw an opening and took it.
The Democratic Party was paralyzed, not wanting to appear unpatriotic and, in fact, sharing many of Bush’s sympathies. The Labour movement was paralyzed as well, feeling like our nation was under attack, and we needed to support our president. It soon became clear, however, that Bush’s plan would hurt a lot of people in the US, as well as internationally, especially unions and immigrants. He began questioning and rounding up immigrants all over the country, mostly Arabs, and putting them in prison without bringing charges against them. He passed a bill called the U.S. Patriot Act, which gave the government expanded powers to spy on anyone for almost any reason. Now Bush is working on a Patriot Act II, which will make it possible to lock up even U.S. citizens and deny them legal protections and even possibly take away their citizenship without an explanation.
In the fall and winter of 2002, US unions at the national, local and regional level, representing more than 5 million workers, passed resolutions against the war and began to take their members to demonstrations and doing local teach-ins. In response to this grassroots movement, the AFL-CIO – the 13 million-member national umbrella organization of unions — criticized Bush’s rush to war. This was extremely significant because the AFL has a long tradition of supporting U.S. foreign policy and military policy. In the middle of this, US Labour Against the War was formed to represent the anti-war voices being heard in unions all across the US.
This level of Labour opposition to our government’s foreign policy was historic. There was a crack in what had been an automatic response of patriotism on behalf of the Labour movement for most of the 20th Century, including the Vietnam War. The unions in US Labour Against the War represent janitors, health-care workers, truck drivers, autoworkers, teachers, social workers, communication workers, postal workers, government workers.
Our movement in the US has been a grassroots movement in union halls across the country. At the same time, the city councils in hundreds of communities passed resolutions against the war. Movie stars, scientists, religious leaders, even New York fashion models came out against the war. We have not seen a movement before like this in the United States; especially one that developed in a few short months.
Now, the people of Iraq have taken to the street to demand an end to the U.S. occupation — we must join them in that demand. Two weeks ago, there was a large demonstration at the port in Oakand, California, and the dockworkers refused to cross a picketline at the dock. The picketline was set up to protest an anti-union company, SSA, that is getting a huge contract from Bush to rebuild ports in Iraq. The police fired on the demonstrators with rubber and wooden bullets and tear gas and shot 40 people, including nine dockworkers. The Labour movement and the peace movement are outraged. George Bush already is preparing for the next war — perhaps with Syria, maybe with Iran or North Korea.
We, the billions who support the global peace movement, are living in an historic moment in history. We are fighting to determine the shape of our world in the 21st century. We want this world to be shaped based on human needs, justice, compassion, environmental sustainability, equality, human solidarity, and friendship between nations. We have a serious struggle ahead of us.
But it is our world. The US government, or any government, does not own it; multinational corporations do not own it. We are all determined to shape it the way we want it. … We are determined and will not stop until we achieve our goal.
WE SHALL OVERCOME !
