NATO No 2014 Unity!

continued from page 1 Today we are witnessing the decline of another empire — that of the United States. The main task of the peace movement is to manage that decline without resort to war at a time when the US still possesses overwhelming military power.

The omens are not good. The US is leading a deliberate campaign to destabilise Ukraine and expand Nato and the EU up to the borders of Russia. In the Asia-Pacific a new network of US military bases and alliances is being built to confront China.

And in the Middle East, the rapid advance of Isis has exposed once again the abject failure and irresponsible folly of the Anglo-American wars in

Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — wars that were intended to eliminate terrorism but, as we predicted, ended up spreading it across vast swathes of Africa and the Middle East.

There are alarming similarities between the run-up to World War One and the international crisis today and the way in which these events are linked in the pursuit of empire.

The peace movements needs to focus on the growing danger of a major war in eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific drawing in neighbouring states.

The Obama administration is trying to use its military might to confront this crisis on three fronts and halt the development of its rivals — above all China and Russia?

We need a clearer understanding of US policy and the “pivot” to Asia and why it is a threat to peace? Understanding the role of Nato and the EU is key to interpreting recent developments in Ukraine and Venezuela? And for Britain’s peace movement the role of nuclear weapons is central to how we best can we build the peace and solidarity movement?

ALAN MACkINNON IS SECRETARy Of SCOTTISh CAMPAIgN fOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT This is an edited version ofan article in the Morning Star

If not you, who, if not now, when?

Six reasons why you should join the Communist Party

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The crisis working class political Imperialism and war Capitalism is representation A Labour government is predatory – seeking to own, control, plunder the only electorally viable alternative to the Tories, and exploit the people of the world. Imperialism, but the organised working class needs to develop invasion, economic sanctions, destabilisation etc a force capable of real political representation. are the result – just another day at the office for We do not see ‘a new workers’ party’ being born capitalism. Competing capitalist interests create

By MOz gREENShIELDS out of the various bickering groups of the ultraconflict and war, seeking to defend their territory Class, politics and economy Communists left! Communists don’t set themselves apart from against other imperialisms, or to undermine them the movement and class of which we are a part. in order to enrich themselves. Communists oppose the state monopoly capitalist system where economy and politics is dominated by a tiny We fight in our workplaces, local communities and oppose all imperialisms, and seek the defeat of nationally to strengthen the unity of Trades our own in its role as main ally of US imperialism, number of privately-owned profit-driven Councils and the People’s Assembly – and we and its role in the EU where we now see the conglomerates. The state defends these giant monopolies’ interests and their neo-liberal system. have played a leading role in developing these, not seeds of another European war. as a vehicle in which to simply promote ourselves, The Communist Party stands for ending that but as a vehicle for building a genuine movement capitalist system and to put the working class in Tactics, strategy and a sense of against austerity and for working class power. power in state and society. direction! Party organisations bring together The state, using our tax money, rescued the comrades to regularly discuss and analyse the big banks and protected the fortunes of the rich as Unity and Solidarity ‘Divide and Rule’ lies political issues, and also the everyday problems capitalism went into crisis. It’s state bodies, the and struggles we face in our political work. We at the very heart of capitalism’s war on Treasury, Bank of England, tax and benefits aim, together, to come up with directions, tactics workers. The party fights for unity and solidarity agencies that impose the burden of austerity. and is organised internally and in the movement to and strategies that we think the class need to Capitalists – bosses, bankers, top state overcome divisions. The Women’s Commission is move forward, in order to put such ideas forward bureaucrats and politicians – are linked by amongst our workmates, communities, unions, active and we play a strong role in the National networks of family, financial and business interests. Assembly of Women and the Charter for campaign organisations etc.

Labour and Tory ministers alike leave office to join Women. The uncontrolled flow of capital and The party has a vibrant Trade Union monopoly firms. Both parties recruit from those Coordinating Committee – and Commissions on labour is designed to maximise profits through firms to join their governments. economic, social and political issues – which bring lower wages – and our rulers are happy to see Austerity, privatisation, the assault on pay and xenophobia and racism promoted as part of this. comrades together to develop policy and action. conditions are designed to restore and increase Convinced? If so, contact us The IMf, World Bank, ECB and the EU undermine profit. The Party works to strengthen the power to discuss membership. If not national sovereignty and impose austerity and antiof the working class, both within capitalism – and you, who? If not now, when? union laws. Communists stand for exiting the EU in a new Socialist society. and for working class solidarity across Europe – and between workers in Britain and abroad.

MOz gREENShIELDS IS A MEMBER Communist campaigning is co-ordinated In the workplace The Communist Party Of ThE COMMUNIST PARTy argues that trade unions must be at the heart internationally across more than fifty countries.

ExECUTIVE COMMITTEE of opposition to austerity and work place attacks.

In the end the strength of the working class will I want to join the Communist Party o young Communists o more information o please tick be determined by how well organised, determined and active we are in workplaces up name and down the country and in communities.

Communists advocate a union-organising address approach which goes beyond boosting density levels, to creating internal democratic structures, post code education programs and vibrant networks of members, workplace activists and stewards to email make us strong and to develop the ideas a new return to Communist Party Ruskin House 23 Coombe Road Croydon CR0 1BD socialist society would depend upon. e mail office@communist-party.org.uk or call 02086861659 H NATO 2014

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www.communist-party.org.uk Communist Party

* NATO 2014 Unity!_Layout 1 26/08/2014 18:46 Page 1

Unity!

New war danger By

ALAN MACkINNON

hE PARALLELS between the onset of war caused by imperial rivalry in 1914 and today’s geopolitical conflicts are alarming. David Cameron celebrates “British values” by spending £55 million to commemorate the centenary of the first world war.

This money is being carefully used to present a particular account of that conflict. Out is the popular narrative of the war as useless industrial-scale slaughter to feed human greed. In its place, WWI is presented as a “necessary sacrifice” to defeat german militarism.

Britain, it is argued, even in the heyday of empire, was a beacon of tolerance and fair play and simply wanted to spread the benefits of civilisation and democracy.

The truth, of course, was very different.

Our colonial empire was far from civil and the very antithesis of democracy. It was ruled, garrisoned and policed with ruthless efficiency. The slightest hint of dissent was crushed mercilessly.

WWI was a war between the great powers to redivide the world. Although Britain’s global power had already started its slow decline, the immediate outcome of the war was the expansion of its vast empire, especially in the Middle East and Africa. Indeed, the seeds of virtually all the current problems in the Middle East go back to that conflict.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) claims it has abolished the borders left by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which — in the middle of WWI — carved up the crumbling Ottoman empire between Britain and france in the event of victory for the Triple Entente. striking distance of the US, to defend Lines were drawn on the map which Cuba in 1962, the White house disregarded tribal identity and ignored threatened all-out nuclear war to have deep ethnic differences between kurds them removed. and Arabs and Shia and Sunni. france NATO was set up when the British government was lying about US bombers would get Lebanon, Syria and a part of Turkey, while Britain would control three visiting here on temporary ‘training’ and eastern Ottoman provinces (now Iraq) as goodwill purposes'. Some 66 years later, well as Transjordan and Palestine (now they are still here at US controlled sites Israel, the West Bank and gaza). originally designated as ‘RAf’ bases to The following year (1917) Lord Balfour fool the public. pledged British support for a zionist The late 1940s was also the period Jewish state in Palestine making it clear when the post-war Labour government that Britain had no intention of honouring was developing Britain's own atomic its promises of post-war selfbomb, an operation initially kept secret determination to the Arabs whose from most Cabinet ministers. uprising was crucial for the British victory. from the 1950s, it was claimed that Then, as now, careless and arrogant NATO had been formed in order to military intervention in pursuit of empire counter the Soviet threat to Western freedoms posed by the Soviet Union and was to have huge and unforeseen impacts on millions of people in the Middle East its allies, who had launched an arms race for generations to come. against the West. continued overleaf continued overleaf

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NATO No The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed in 1949 on the basis of a pack of lies argues ROBERT GRIFFITHS

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HE PEOPLE of Britain were told that this military alliance was simply a mutual selfdefence pact, not aimed at any other country and so did not contravene the UN Charter.

But it soon became clear that NATO was at the core of a string of US-led military alliances to encircle the Soviet Union, alongside SEATO and CENTO. US, British and NATO forward military bases stretched from Alaska, Canada and Iceland across to Scandinavia, Britain and Western Europe (including fascist Portugal), the Mediterranean, Turkey, the Indian Ocean, South-East Asia, South korea, Japan and the Pacific. This ensured that Soviet cities could be hit by short and medium range as well as inter-continental nuclear missiles.

When the Soviet Union attempted to site its own short range missiles within

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continued from page 1 yet the Warsaw Pact was not established until 1955, six years after NATO, and then only because the latter had rearmed and enrolled West germany in its ranks. Meanwhile, in the arms race, both the atom and hydrogen bombs were developed first by the US, as were nuclear bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Soviet attack on Western Europe never remotely looked like materialising before the Warsaw Pact was would up in 1993. But instead of this being the signal for NATO to dissolve itself, new enemies were invented such as the 'rogue states' led by gaddafi, Saddam hussein, Milosevic and the Iranian ayatollahs to justify NATO's continuation.

NATO forces have since bombed or invaded Bosnia (199295), Serbia and kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (from 2002) and Libya (2011).

Breaking pledges given to ex-President gorbachev, NATO has driven eastwards to the borders of Russia and with new capabilities to hit China. Twelve Soviet and Warsaw Pact states have been enrolled with new US bases also established in Tajikistan, kyrgyzstan, georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Plans to incorporate georgia and Ukraine into NATO and the EU have led to civil wars and to military confrontations with Russia. NATO proposals for a European 'missile defence shield' in eastern Europe would ensure that it could attack Russia without fear of effective retaliation.

Since the Berlin Plus agreement in 2002, the European Union has become increasingly enmeshed in NATO, reflected in the militarisation programme outlined in the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty.

Moving into such policy areas as international piracy and cyber crime is designed to extend NATO's reach across the globe. This same ambition has led to the conclusion of a strategic pact with Colombia, whose right-wing governments act as a Trojan horse for US disruption of anti-imperialist unity in Latin America.

As Communist MP Phil Piratin warned in 1949, far from upholding the authority of the UN, NATO undermines it.

Always in line with US foreign policy, NATO picks and chooses which UN decisions to enforce and which to ignore (such the US trade embargo of Cuba or Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territories). When the UN fails to fall into line, NATO goes ahead to take military action anyway.

The NATO powers now account for more than 70 per cent of global military spending.

NATO has no democratic structures, nor is it accountable to any. It undermines the UN, promotes militarism and is the world's single biggest menace to peace and stability.

Britain should withdraw from NATO and the EU to pursue an independent foreign and defence policy which rejects military aggression and nuclear weapons.

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ROBERT gRIffIThS IS gENERAL SECRETARy COMMUNIST PARTy

Of ThE

Morning Star

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Unity!

NO TO INTERVENTION By

ANDREW MURRAy

of Kurdistan, forever looking for the F CREDIT were given where it is opportunity to upgrade their autonomy to the foundations of an independent Kurdish due, the black banners of the state, took advantage of the chaos to seize Islamic State now flying over Mosul, Fallujah and Ramadi would be control of Kirkuk and the surrounding oil field, a position which they will not emblazoned with portraits of Blair voluntarily relinquish. A de facto and Bush. independent Kurdish state based in Iraqi For the sudden and stunning military Kurdistan is now becoming a reality. As triumphs of the fighters of the IS with the erasure of the Iraqi-Syrian border (previously known as known as ISIS) is

by IS, the nefarious work of the Versailles both the consequence and the collapse of Treaty in the Middle East is gradually the policy launched with the AngloAmerican aggression against Iraq in 2003. coming unglued.

Thus the scene is set for a tripartite The overthrow, by means of illegal division of Iraq – an effectively invasion, of the dictatorial regime of independent Kurdistan which would be a Saddam Hussein in Iraq spawned an pole of attraction to Kurds in other states, increasingly sectarian, authoritarian and including Turkey, Iran and Syria; a corrupt state which is now on the brink of fundamentalist-ruled IS in the north (also disintegration along more than one axis.

Now the US appears to be doubling-down incorporating much of Syria, where dislodging it would require as a minimum with a further military intervention, cooperation with the Assad government) allegedly to stop IS advances, fuelled by and a Shia-based authoritarian US satrapy the barbaric murder of James Foley. The in the south. Democracy could perhaps only certainty is that this new military knit it together again, bombing certainly incursion will not solve the crisis in Iraq will not. and the wider Middle East but will most It is cold comfort to say that precisely likely end up exacerbating it. this fracturing was a clearly foreseeable So far the US has limited itself to supporting military operations by Kurdish outcome of the invasion of 2003, joining the long list of warnings ignored by the Peshmerga fighters, who had been losing hubristic and messianic Blair. ground to the IS. Clearly this will not Undoubtedly the most humiliating aspect defeat IS on its own, since the Kurds are not likely to carry the fight far outside their for London and Washington is the triumph of IS across not only much of Iraq but a own territory.

The other initiative taken by Washington large slice of Syria as well, where they have benefitted from western and Saudi is to shuffle aside the incurably sectarian premier Maliki and replace him with what support for the rebellion against Assad.

So here is the finale of the “war on they hope will be a more inclusive regime.

Again, it can be stated with a fair degree of terror” – an Islamist terror group ruling across the heart of the Arab world as a confidence that this will not restore the direct result of western intervention. Add corrupt, sectarian and dysfunctional Iraqi state to anything like a condition in which that to the growing power of the Pakistani Taliban – unknown in 2001 – and it is fair it can confront IS with confidence. The to describe the Bush-Blair war as a Iraqi army created by the USA after its strategic disaster almost beyond measure. occupation liquidated the existing armed For Blair, of course, none of this is his forces, had its sectarian character fault. Bizarrely, he argued on his Faith enhanced by Maliki to the point where it seems uninterested in fighting outside “its Foundation website – the faith in question seems to be his own omniscience – that the own” territories in Baghdad and to its rise of ISIS could have been avoided had south.

The leadership of the autonomous region the west intervened militarily in Syria.e

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‘The new order is full of danger of new and expanding wars, but also of the possibility of the defeat of imperialism on a world scale’

Yet the intervention in Syria he was urging – he likes an uncommon amount of Middle East wars for a Middle East peace envoy – would have been against the Assad government, not IS; so it could only have left the Islamist insurgents even stronger.

So Obama is left contemplating the virtual disintegration of the Bush-created surrogate state in Iraq. Bombing IS is likely to prove of only limited effectiveness if translated into action, for the reasons outlined above. It would also be deeply ironic if he now bombed those in insurrection against the Syrian government when this time last year he was gearing up to bomb the troops of that self-same government.

Seldom have the contradictions of imperialism’s policies been so nakedly displayed, highlighting the difficulties the great powers now have in assembling an acceptable cast of surrogates to preserve their interests in the region.

Contradictions abound. Iran now appears to be cooperating with the US in propping up the government in Baghdad, over which it exercises considerable influence. And will Turkey stand indifferent while a Kurdish state emerges, or will it claim the right to protect the Turkoman population around Kirkuk as the Iraqi state disappears?

In total, the picture is a more vivid indictment of Blair’s war policies than anything likely to emerge from the elephantine gestation of the Chilcot report.

Every charge made against the invasion in 2003 by the anti-war movement – including the danger of sparking a wider regional conflict – has been confirmed in spades.

Of course, there will be those keen to double down on disaster, and the familiar neo-con personalities on both sides of the Atlantic are urging an Anglo-American return to Iraq in force. The large-scale deployment of land forces seems unlikely.

But we have already embarked on the familiar route of “mission creep” in which supposedly humanitarian intervention against the barbaric depredations of IS morphs into a full-scale renewed war. The anti-war movement must mobilise against this. Britain owes the Iraqi people the obligation, after a century of disastrous and bloody intervention, of now doing nothing.

One thing is clear. In Mosul, in eastern Ukraine and in the South China Sea the 1991 world order is breathing its last. The new order is full of danger of new and expanding wars, but also of the possibility of the defeat of imperialism on a world scale.

ANDREW MURRAy IS DEPUTy PRESIDENT Of ThE STOP ThE WAR COALITION

Austerity and war hand in bloody hand Odessa Ukraine, May2 2014

By

BILL gREENShIELDS

ON MAY 2 2014, Ukrainian fascists attacked and burned the trade union building in Odessa, chanting, singing and cheering the deaths of those they had trapped inside, and who were shot by them as they tried to escape.

Their action copied that of the Nazis on May 2 1933 occupying and destroyed trade union buildings, arresting, torturing and murdering trade unionists, socialists and communists. The Ukraininan fascists were again undertaking the Nazi task of eliminating resistance.

Now, their putschist government is supported, financed, directed and used

by US and European capital and their international organisations - NATO and the European Union in the lead - aiming to consolidate and accelerate their imposition of ‘austerity’ across Europe in order to re-establish their rate of profit.

Austerity is a vicious aspect of the class war, as recognised by TUC general secretary frances O'grady at the founding conference of the People’s Assembly in June last year.

Throughout Europe, workers are being subjected to versions of the same ‘austerity’ treatment which is reflected in disguised and statistically manipulated unemployment, in privatisation, in legal and organisational attacks on unions, in increased exploitation at work, in pay and pension cuts, in attacks in attacks on health and safety and other working conditions, in the deprivation and demonisation of those most vulnerable, in orchestrated “divide and rule”, in public service cuts, in poverty and the wealth gap.

It’s also reflected in the beatings, bullets and flames of the Ukraine as European and US capitalism sets sights on securing their interests in Eastern Europe, cynically imposing austerity and total privatisation in the name of ‘democracy’, but really to maximise profit.

Resistance is buildiing here in Britain,

both in the trade unions’ growing use of co-ordinated strike action – yet to grow into generalised strike action - and in the People’s Assembly, now having adopted the People’s Charter and identifying the nature of the crisis and the ruling class attack. ‘Austerity’ is working for the ruling class, and capitalism requires a decisive defeat of the working class in order to re-establish the rate of profit.

We urgently need a strategy to inflict a decisive defeat on the ruling class - the defeat of any austerity government, and its replacement with one committed to People’s Charter policies.

Simple protest and resistance are not enough. Strikes and civil disobedience are not aims in themselves, but weapons with which to achieve those victories. If a decisive defeat of our class is a necessity for capitalism, and if our resistance is limited to “protest”, we are inviting the kind of response that capitalism and its institutions are inflicting on the trade unionist, socialist and communist resistance in Ukraine, and that they have inflicted before around the world when they have felt it necessary.

We need a strategy to win, and win decisively.

Our unions, the peace movement and the People’s Assembly needs a strategy for winning and unity is the key. Every anti-austerity and anti-war demonstration is important. Even more important is what happens now as the People’s Assembly strives to put down deep roots into communities around Britain, trade unions work to organise and activate whole memberships, understanding that only we ourselves – the working class - can secure progressive economic, political and social advance and stop the drive to war.

BILL gREENShIELDS IS ChAIR Of ThE

COMMUNIST PARTy Unity!