Anti-imperialist conference: Nato’s war drive threatens to engulf Europe

We reproduce below the joint statement issued by participants in the international conference, held under the title of ‘The rising tide of global war’ and organised by the World Anti-Imperialist Platform in Belgrade on 17 December.

The statement was delivered to a demonstration organised by the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which took place in the city immediately following the conference.

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It must be clear for anyone with eyes to see that the Nato imperialist bloc is losing its proxy war in Ukraine. Yet, rather than admitting defeat, it is doing everything possible to prolong and extend the war. Clearly, it hopes to find a way to wear down its opponent – if only the conflict can be stretched out for long enough, and if only enough men and material can be found to hurl into the inferno.

Unable to accept a world in which their ability to dominate is shrinking, the imperialists will be satisfied with nothing less than the complete destruction of Russia as an independent state, its dismemberment into hostile and controllable parts, the subjugation and superexploitation of its people, and the free looting of its resources by imperialist corporations.

For decades now, the USA and its allies have been grooming peoples across eastern Europe to be ready to serve as their willing foot soldiers in this mission. Just as in Ukraine, workers from every former socialist state have been fed an unremitting diet of pro-imperialist Russophobia and anticommunism. At the same time, they have been divided by ultranationalist poison and persuaded to blame this or that group of workers for the impoverishment that followed the fall of socialism in the USSR and eastern Europe, the restitution of unbridled gangster capitalism, and the reimposition of economic recolonisation by the west.

In Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Moldova, Yugoslavia and elsewhere the same tactics have been employed as have served imperialism so well in Ukraine – and which have been the ruin of the Ukrainian people. Laws have been passed declaring communism a crime and rehabilitating the fascists and collaborators of World War 2 as ‘national heroes’ and ‘defenders of the people’. From kindergartens to universities, from museums to public memorials, history has been falsified, fratricidal nationalism has taken the place of socialist fraternity, and every means possible used to confuse and divide the working class.

With opposition to this anti-worker agenda ruthlessly crushed, a significant proportion of workers in eastern Europe have been fooled into believing that serving as cannon fodder in the imperialists’ proxy war against Russia is somehow in their interest. They are preparing themselves to die, and their countries to be destroyed, not in the cause of their own freedom, but in order to defend the waning hegemony of US imperialism.

Here in the former Yugoslavia, people are faced with a most blatant example of imperialism’s destructive drive for dominance over the region: Nato’s occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo. Ever since the bloody war of destruction against independent Yugoslavia in 1999, Kosovo has been a hotbed of violence, where crime and drug trafficking flourish, under the military domination of Camp Bondsteel – the USA’s largest military base outside its own territory.

The conflict in Kosovo is being endlessly stoked, creating the potential for its eruption at any time. Meanwhile, the puppet authorities of the so-called ‘Republic of Kosovo’ (a Serbian province broken by force from Yugoslavia) continue to terrorise the remaining Serbian population in the territory they control, creating an ethnic apartheid regime much like the one against which the people of the Ukrainian Donbass rose up in revolt.

Just as in Europe, so in Asia the tide of war is rising as the USA and its allies try to inflict the same fate on China as they want for Russia. Meanwhile, their attempts to keep down the rising people and to retain control of the world’s resources is causing them to interfere in country after country across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Truly, as their economic crisis deepens, the imperialists’ desperate quest to save their system by any means necessary threatens to engulf the whole world in flames.

Here in Belgrade, as elsewhere, we declare that the workers have no interest in serving this cause. Our task is to join together with all those who oppose the imperialists and work with them for the defeat of the Nato alliance, and for an end to this bloodthirsty and rapacious system, which offers nothing but poverty and war to the masses of the world.

Defeat to the Nato-led imperialist alliance!
No cooperation with imperialist war!
Victory to the resistance!