T.O. Weekly 73 Supplement: Stop the March to Global War! – Gaza – China – OWC (Oct. 2022)

The ORGANIZER Weekly Newsletter

August 17, 2022

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SPECIAL ANTIWAR ISSUE

(U.S. fleet in South China Sea)

IN THIS ISSUE:

LEAD ARTICLE: The March to Global War Must Be Stopped! – by Jean Alain

AFGHANISTAN: The Meaning of the U.S. Killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri ­– by Left Radical of Afghanistan

PALESTINE: “Silence as Civilians Are Being Murdered in Gaza! – by Dominique Ferré

OBITUARY: Elie Aminov (1939-2022), Jewish Activist from Palestine – by Daniel Gluckstein

[OWC] Onward to the Open World Conference (Paris, October 2022): “We Promote the Unity of the Working Class in All Countries!”

FRANCE: No to War on the Chinese People! – by Daniel Gluckstein

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The March to Global War Must Be Stopped!

By Jean Alain

The march to global war took another step forward in early August. The New York Times (August 10) reports that “the Biden administration has pledged to continue sending warships through the Taiwan Strait regardless of China’s recent declaration that these are China’s territorial waters. U.S. officials have made it clear that they will not, however, send the Japan-based aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, believing it would be too provocative.”

The U.S. officials quoted by the New York Times acknowledge that their policy towards China is “provocative.” Not “too” provocative, but provocative, nonetheless.

This was like the provocation organized on August 2 by the leader of the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi, who came on a quasi-official visit to Taiwan [1], violating the U.S. official position since 1979, according to which Beijing is “the sole legal government of China,” including Taiwan. Is Washington aiming to push the Chinese government into a confrontation?

The Biden administration has already done so in Ukraine. In November 2021, it signed a treaty promising Ukraine membership in NATO … knowing full well that this was the “red line” that Putin’s regime could not cross. The latter, with his customary brutality, responded with the murderous war in which he is bogged down, giving NATO a pretext for a financial and military deployment unseen for 30 years.

These provocations are not uncontrolled. They correspond to the strategy of U.S. imperialism, reaffirmed at the NATO summit: escalation against Russia today in order to prepare for confrontation with China tomorrow. In order to overcome their own crisis and preserve their dominant position, U.S. capitalists consider that no market should escape them – neither that of the oligarchs in Russia, nor the Chinese market, which remains dominated by State ownership. As for the arms industry – a sector dominated by U.S. capitalists and which occupies a major place in the world economy – it constantly needs new conflicts in order to sell its stocks and make more profits.

The struggle against war is inseparable from the struggle against capitalist exploitation. The international working class has no interest in the march to world war, and it can stop it by standing up to the war-mongering capitalist governments: Not Biden, nor Putin, nor Macron, nor Scholz, nor Lapid [2]!

This is the meaning of the international rally against war that the POID has called for Saturday, October 22 in Paris. The Independent Democratic Workers’ Party, which initiated this rally, will give the floor to workers’ activists of all tendencies from the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. It is urgent that the broadest possible regroupment takes place in the workers’ movement in order to elevate the strength of millions of workers against the war-mongering governments.

ENDNOTES

[1] The island of Taiwan has always been part of China. When the revolution in 1949 brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, the routed troops of the bourgeois Nationalist Guomindang Party fled to Taiwan. Despite the status quo since 1949, China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory.

[2) Olaf Scholz: German Chancellor; Yair Lapid: Israeli Prime Minister

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AFGHANISTAN: The Meaning of the U.S. Killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri

By Left Radical of Afghanistan

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced that on July 31, 2022, through an airstrike, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, was killed in Kabul, and with this action he spoke about the delivery of “peace and justice.”

The U.S. government, which is the main purveyor of terrorism around the world, can never be the hero of the fight against terrorism. Didn’t Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. Secretary of State, admit that “the people we are fighting today are the people we funded 20 years ago”? Didn’t John Bolton, former U.S. National Security Adviser admit that he organized coups in various countries, including Latin America?

Didn’t we witness war and bloodshed and terrorist operations by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan just a few years ago? Didn’t the U.S. create Islamic fundamentalism and Mujahideen parties during the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviets, and then didn’t they create the Taliban?

Isn’t ISIS the new version of Al-Qaeda produced by the U.S.? Were there not more than 20 Islamic terrorist groups created in Afghanistan during the occupation of Afghanistan by the United States? So, isn’t the U.S. talking about “justice delivery” and fighting against terrorism ridiculous and demagogic?

Diverting the attention of the American people

The truth is that on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Taliban coming to power and the defeat of the U.S. in Afghanistan, the Biden administration, with the full support of the Democratic Party, launched the operation to kill the leader of Al-Qaeda in order to divert the attention of the American people. This was all more necessary because of the economic crisis and unprecedented inflation in the United States and the decline in the popularity of the Biden administration.

The people of Afghanistan will never forget and will never forgive how the U.S. handed over power to the most brutal, anti-women and anti-science group called the Taliban during a deal in February 2020 in Doha, The U.S. has enabled the Taliban to dominate the fate of 40 million people, including 20 million Afghan women.

The people of Afghanistan will never forget how the U.S. planes dropped dozens of young people who wanted to escape from the hell created by the U.S. in Afghanistan. Today, the disastrous situation in Afghanistan and the deprivation of education and work, as well as the torture of women by the Taliban, is the result of the self-interested policy of the U.S. and its major allies such as England, France and Germany.

Capitalism is ready to commit all kinds of crimes for the sake of profit and maintaining U.S. hegemony over the world. In Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalist parties and the Mujahideen were used in the war against the Soviet Union and Najibullah’s government (1979-1992), and then the Mujahideen were ousted from power by the Taliban in 1996. In 2001, the U.S. attacked Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government under the pretext of the Taliban’s support for Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The United States both benefits from creating and supporting terrorist forces, and when they destroy them, it advertises itself as anti-terrorist.

When, contrary to its prediction, the war in Afghanistan turned out to be long and expensive for the U.S., it became disgusted with its own corrupt and puppet government in Kabul. It set out to enter into a deal with the Taliban and the Haqqani network in order to achieve its own agenda against Russia, Central Asia, China and Iran.

The U.S. ignored the actions of the Taliban as an extremist, terrorist, anti-science and mesogynistic religious group, and delegated power to it. It gave them political legitimacy. Sirajuddin Haqqani – the leader of the Haqqani network and responsible for organizing 1,100 suicide attacks in Afghanistan for whom the United States had set a $10 million reward for his identification, arrest or murder – easily acts as the Taliban’s interior minister. But 71-year-old al-Zawahiri, who had not engaged in any serious anti-American activities in the past 20 years, was considered most dangerous and was eliminated by special operations!

This U.S. terrorist operation in Kabul proved that U.S. intelligence and military forces are still present in Kabul defending U.S. interests at a lower cost. “According to research by the Airwars, over the last 20 years and after more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven war zones, at least 22,679 and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians have been killed by the U.S. strikes.”

This clamor to kill a person from the terrorist network will not be beneficial to the American and Afghan people. What’s involved here is neither the “elimination of terrorism” or “justice delivery.” The U.S. terrorist action cannot deceive the peace-loving and anti-war and anti-capitalist people of the U.S. –and nor will it alleviate the suffering people of Afghanistan.

Peace and justice are only possible with unity and solidarity between the workers and toilers of the world and their joint struggle against the capitalist system. It is only by abolishing private ownership and communalizing the means of production that justice and equality can be ensured and a world free from war and the threat of religious and state terrorism can be brought to humanity.

Left Radical of Afghanistan (LRA)

August 4, 2022- Afghanistan

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PALESTINE

“Silence as Civilians Are Being Murdered in Gaza!

(Faces of the 16 children killed by the Israeli raids since August 7)

By Dominique Ferré

“It is 10 p.m. in Gaza on August 7, 2022,” writes Palestinian academic Ziad Medoukh. “The provisional death toll is 43 Palestinians, including 15 children, three elderly people and five women, 320 wounded, 250 raids in three days.” On the third day of the new Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip, “ten buildings were targeted, 17 houses totally destroyed, a hospital hit, agricultural land and popular neighborhoods bombed,” he adds. “And it continues with impunity! Silence as civilians are being murdered in Gaza!”

This new Israeli aggression is the deadliest since the one in May 2021, which killed nearly 300 people. This time, the State of Israel claimed that this was a “preventive attack” after having arrested an Islamic Jihad leader in the West Bank on August 1.

The Gaza Strip is an overpopulated territory of more than 2 million inhabitants that has been strangled for 15 years by the blockade imposed by the State of Israel, with the help of the Egyptian military regime, which controls the Rafah crossing in the south, with the total complicity of the major powers.

The horror of the bombings is compounded by the horror of the blockade. The director of the Al-Chifa hospital (Gaza), where the wounded arrive “every minute,” sounded the alarm: “We urgently need to open the borders to bring in medicines and fuel for electricity.” Gaza’s only power plant was shut down on August 7 due to a lack of fuel, four days after Israel closed its crossings with Gaza for “security reasons.” Due to lack of fuel and electricity, operating rooms and fans were slated to stop working as of August 9.

The same major powers, led by the United States, which shed crocodile tears over the Russian bombing in Ukraine, approved this aggression, as usual. In an August 7 statement, the U.S. president reiterated his “longstanding and unwavering support for Israel’s security, including its right to defend itself against attack. In recent days, Israel has defended its people from indiscriminate rocket attacks by the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad.”

Will Biden dare to say that the 15 murdered children, and the dozens of others injured, were “terrorists”? Biden also praised the reactionary Arab regimes of Egypt and Qatar for brokering a “cease-fire” agreement.

The cause of democracy, peace, and the right of peoples to self-determination requires the immediate halt to Israeli aggression and the unconditional lifting of the blockade of Gaza.

–      August 9, 2022

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OBITUARY

Elie Aminov (1939-2022), Jewish Activist from Palestine

(Elie and Nitza Aminov, sign reads, “No to Occupation!”)

By Daniel Gluckstein

Elie Aminov died on August 5. He was born on April 20, 1939 in Mandatory Palestine [under British colonial rule] to a poor family of Jewish immigrants, with a Kurdish father and a Polish mother.

In his early twenties, he joined the ranks of Matzpen (Socialist Organization in Israel), an organization that criticized Israeli policy but was in favor of what would later be called the “Two-State” solution. In 2011, he recalled:

“The fact that Israel is an Apartheid State has been clear to me since I was an activist in Matzpen in the 1960s, when I began to study the regime’s treatment of the Arab population. The burning issue at the time was the expropriation of land from four Arab villages in the Galilee in order to build the city of Carmiel. The military governor expropriated the lands of the villages of Ba’ana, Dir El-Asad, Nahef and Camane. This blatant injustice prompted hundreds of Israeli Jews to join the protests at the time.”

This realization led him to break with Matzpen and to join the ranks of several groups claiming to be Trotskyists.

For Elie, Trotskyism was the position of the Fourth International in 1947-1948 against the partition of Palestine. In the mid-1980s, he was one of a handful who, against the tide, formed the Committee for a Secular and Democratic State. Neither the Oslo Accords of 1993 nor the numerous appeals of those who sought to preserve discrimination in the name of a so-called “bi-national state” would challenge his commitment.

After the emergence of the second Intifada, Elie was, on March 15, 2002, one of the six members of the initiative committee composed of “Jewish and Arab activists from Palestine” who launched the review Dialogue published (in Arabic, Hebrew, English and French) under the responsibility of comrade Pierre Lambert, leader of the Fourth International. On December 4, 2004, Elie took the floor, along with many Palestinian activists, at the International Conference for the Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees organized by the magazine in Paris, for which I was one of the three rapporteurs.

Interviewed in 2016, Elie explained:

“What threatens the possibility of Jews and Arabs living together is Zionism and the UN partition plan. … That is why my view is that the central issue for the liberation and reunification of the Palestinian people has always been the constitution of a single secular and democratic State. The partition of Palestine was decided when 2 million people lived there: 1.3 million Palestinians and 650,000 Jews. But no one proposed that a referendum be held. ‘One State? Two States?’. No one proposed it. Imperialism wanted to establish a vassal state, and Stalin, for his own reasons, supported it. A Secular and Democratic State is the only framework in which the Palestinian nation, the Palestinian people, can realize their rights – the only framework in which 5 million refugees will be able to exercise their inalienable right to return.”

 And he was more specific. “This objective,” he continued, “can only be realized if a Constituent Assembly is finally convened, with absolutely equal representation of all those who live today under the domination of the current State of Israel.”

Elie was a fighter to the end. A few weeks before his hospitalization last January, he was demonstrating – together with his wife Nitza – alongside the residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood (in Jerusalem) against the evictions. We send our affection to Nitza and his comrades and salute the memory of this revolutionary activist.

(Daniel Gluckstein was a rapporteur at the December 2004 International Conference for the Right of Return of Palestinian Refugees.)

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OWC

Onward to the Open World Conference (Paris, October 2022): “We Promote the Unity of the Working Class in All Countries!”

(Banners of the Fourth International at the tomb of Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son)

At the end of May 1940, when the Second World War had just begun, a conference of the Fourth International adopted a Manifesto of Alarm addressed to “the workers, the oppressed and the exploited” of the world. It begins by stressing that,

“Technology is infinitely more powerful now than at the end of the war of 1914-1918, whereas mankind is much more poverty stricken. The standard of living has declined in one country after another.”

This contradiction – even more glaring today – between the development of technology and the decline of human civilization does not fall from the sky. The Manifesto continues:

“The present war derived its origin inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables designed to drug the people, the chief cause of war as of all other social evils – unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression – is the private ownership of the means of production together with the bourgeois state which rests on this foundation.

“With the present level of technology and skill of the workers, it is quite possible to create adequate conditions for the material and spiritual development of all mankind. It would be necessary only to organize the economic life within each country and over our entire planet correctly, scientifically, and rationally, according to a general plan. So long, however, as the main productive forces of society are held by trusts, i.e., isolated capitalist cliques, and so long as the national state remains a pliant tool in the hands of these cliques, the struggle for markets, for sources of raw materials, for domination of the world, must inevitably assume a more and more destructive character.”

Since then, the global crisis of the capitalist system has reached an even greater level in 2022, with an ever-increasing development of speculation. The arms industry is experiencing unimaginable growth. More than ever, the struggle against the war that is spreading throughout the world is bound up with the struggle to finally end the regime of private ownership of the means of production. That is why we make our own the words of the 1940 Alarm Manifesto:

“We explain to the workers the irreconcilability between their interests and the interests of bloodthirsty capitalism; we mobilize the toilers against imperialism; we promote the unity of the workers in all warring and neutral countries.”

This is the struggle that the Fourth International is waging today as it prepares throughout the world, with militants, groups and organizations of all tendencies, the World Conference Against War and Exploitation, for a Workers’ International, in October 2022 in Paris. 

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FRANCE

La Tribune des Travailleurs (Workers Tribune)Issue No. 352  –  August 17, 2022  –  Editorial

No to the War on the Chinese People!

By Daniel Gluckstein

On July 27, the National Assembly’s Defense Committee heard from Admiral Pierre Vandier, Navy Chief of Staff. After discussing the war in Ukraine, he went on to talk about what he considered “the crucial matter”: defining “objectives” adapted to “the prospect of a global confrontation, which we must now look at with lucidity.” [1]

World war is announced here not as a hypothesis, but as an almost-certainty, and the enemy is clearly identified: “Against the Chinese navy, we will win if we fight together, in coalition.” To do this, the Admiral calls for resources: “It is what we have in reserve in the later stages of the war that allows us to win it.”

Let’s give the Admiral credit for not hiding the reasons for such a war: “The problems we face are global. Our trade is global. Our energy will have to be imported from outside the continent in the long term, which is a new fact. Our prosperity depends on global economic factors. Therefore, our security is global.” In other words: France will engage in a war on China in order to guarantee the capitalists the tiny share of the market and access to natural resources that their “allies” – especially the U.S. – will see fit to concede to them.

And war can be very profitable … for the weapons merchants. The transition to a “war economy” is the means, the Admiral argues, to develop “industry’s capacity to boost the performance of current weapons systems and to respond to new operational needs in a short time-frame.”

Of course, the threat of a world war does not mean that its outbreak is certain. But the clouds are gathering. Day by day, militarization is taking over social life. Resources for schools and hospitals? Priority to aircraft carriers and armaments. More Canadairs [water bomber aircraft] and firemen to fight fires? Priority to Rafales [fighter aircraft] and the recruitment of fighter pilots!

The workers and young people of France refuse to consider the Chinese people as their enemy. Nor the Russian people. Or any other people.

And don’t tell us that this is about defending democracy against a totalitarian power! Who else but U.S. imperialism, with whom French imperialism is allied, organized the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan? Who else supports the most violently anti-democratic, obscurantist, and reactionary regimes in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

It is not the U.S. (and French) warmongers that will establish democracy; it is the Chinese workers’ own action of imposing recognition of their labor organizations that are independent of the State, the ruling party, and the multinationals.

War will only bring destruction and desolation to all peoples, as has been the case for nearly six months for the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, and for even longer for the peoples of Africa, who have been subjected to foreign military interventions, particularly by France.

We would have liked to see at least one Member of Parliament stand up to the Admiral on July 27 and say to him: “Admiral, do not count on me to support your preparations for war against China. On the contrary: you will find me everywhere in your path, mobilized with the voters who have mandated me, to block this murderous escalation.”

Not one MP attending the National Defense Committee on 27 July used this language. All of them, including the three speakers from NUPES [2], respected the framework set by the Admiral. Speaking on behalf of France Unbowed, Aurelien Saintoul stated notably: “We had noted that the format of our Navy is not yet appropriate to its needs” (what “needs” – the war needs defined by the Admiral?) Deploring “capability gaps” and delays regarding the “ATL 2 replacement program” (3), “supply ships,” “mine warfare,” “munitions,” “naval cruise missiles,” and “Alouette IIIs” [4], the MP asked: “How is it that so many capability gaps affect our security? How can we try to fill them? Could the next Military Planning Law provide an answer?”

At the same time, [France Unbowed leader] Jean-Luc Melenchon recalled that Taiwan is an integral part of China and that the conditions for returning to the unity of China over its entire historical national territory are the sole responsibility of the Chinese people. Melenchon is right.

But can the same party at the same time denounce the preparations for war and associate itself with them?

What is urgently needed is to respond to the majority aspiration in the country, and to bring together in a common front of the labor and democratic organizations ready to mobilize together around the slogans: No to war, no to the war economy; Money for the people and not for weapons!

ENDNOTES

[1] All of the passages quoted in italics are drawn from the official record on the National Assembly website.

[2] Translator’s note: The New Popular, Ecological and Social Union (NUPES) was the electoral coalition for the June 2022 legislative elections headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of France Unbowed. The coalition included France Unbowed, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and Europe Ecology-The Greens.

[3] Translator’s note: The ATL2 is a maritime patrol aircraft manufactured by the French aerospace company Dassault.

[4] Translator’s note: The Alouette III is a light utility helicopter, developed by the French aerospace company Sud Aviation, often used for reconnaissance missions.

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