Hands Off Syria protest in London on the eve of latest British bombing
Protesting is only a part of the movement that is needed if we are really to stop imperialist war.
Well done to everyone who joined us to demonstrate against a further escalation of the war in Syria on Friday. Our party comrades also held demonstrations on Sunday 15 April in Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, and Manchester.
Although touted as a ‘one-off’ strike to chide Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and his popular government for an alleged ‘chemical attack against their own people’ in Douma (near the capital, Damascus), we know this attack was in reality one part in a long series of aggressions against not just the Syrian people, but against all those countries that dare to stand outside the control of western imperialism.
The imperialist war machine is propelled by an enormous lie machine, which is fronted by politicians and journalists whose untruths would make Goebbels blush. These mercenary hacks mislead the workers in return for well-paid careers, selling their souls for a few paltry crumbs from the imperialists’ table.
Despite their best efforts, though, it is clear that a wide section of the British population is becoming increasingly skeptical of the bourgeois government and media, as the Syrian people’s victories and the information being brought out by a few brave reporters have begun to blow serious holes in the warmongers’ narrative.
This is angering and terrifying the imperialists, as they sense the possibility of losing their grip on the minds of the workers who keep the cogs of the war machine turning. This explains their increasingly hysterical attacks on such independent reporters as Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett, and the latest Times headline about ‘Assad apologists in Britain’s universities‘, carefully timed to coincide with the dropping of ten British cruise missiles in Syria.
We know that, unfortunately, the solution to war is not to be found in a big enough demonstration, a strongly-enough worded petition, or the prospect of an ‘anti-war’ government (something totally impermissable while we live under the heel of imperialism). War is built into the fabric of the imperialist system, and ultimately we will only stop it by abolishing that system and replacing it with one that is not driven by exploitaion and the neverending quest for profit.
Even to stop this particular war, a feat that is eminently achieveable within the confines of the present system, would take a concerted mobilisation of the organised working class. Still, the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition are focusing all their attention on a chimera: the election of an imperialist Labour ‘anti-war government’ is now their entire programme.
So, instead of mobilising for a mass campaign of non-cooperation to halt the war machine in its tracks, the coalition calls a bare minimum of toothless protest and continues to promote imperialist propaganda that justifies the war from its platforms (‘Assad is gassing his own people’, ‘the Russians are bombing civilians’, ‘the Russians are a threat to world peace’, the Nato-backed invading jihadists are really a ‘democratic opposition’, etc).
These charlatans and false friends of the people are increasingly being exposed for what they are, however: the ‘left’ wing of a bourgeois establishment that has but one concern: Save British imperialism, by any means necessary!
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