Vol. 76/No. 5      February 6, 2012

Working people should strongly oppose and condemn the relentless campaign of sanctions by Washington and its imperialist allies against Iran—a campaign of economic deprivation, unemployment and hunger designed to impose hardship on Iran’s working people in order to force Tehran to submit to imperialist dictates.

Iran, a country oppressed for centuries by imperialist domination, has every right to acquire the energy sources it needs, including nuclear power, used by most advanced nations, for economic and social advances.

While imperialism is tightening the economic noose, the situation is moving away, not toward, military conflict. Both sides are actively seeking to avoid any confrontation that could lead to negative consequences for all, including working people of the region.

But Iran is a sovereign country that has been the target of Washington’s wrath since workers and farmers there overthrew the U.S.-backed monarchy in 1979 in a massive popular insurrection. It has every right to defend itself should that be necessary, and the working people in the U.S. have a fundamental class interest in supporting Iran in a confrontation with imperialism.

At the same time, our eyes are on our fellow workers and farmers of Iran. While a counterrevolutionary bourgeois regime was eventually consolidated in Iran in the early 1980s, working people there were never broken. Imperialist pressure and threats serve to close the space our class needs to organize and fight, along with toilers in the broader region—from North Africa to the Middle East.

The working class has no interest in possessing nuclear weapons, as Cuban leader Fidel Castro recently pointed out. Communists reject them outright as detrimental for the defense of national sovereignty and working people.

Nuclear weapons can only be used to slaughter the innocent. Washington maintains the distinction as the only government to have used them, killing hundreds of thousands in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

“We have never considered producing nuclear weapons, because we don’t need them,” Castro said in a 2005 speech. For more than five decades, the Cuban Revolution has defended itself from the unremitting hostility of U.S. imperialism with the mobilization, political consciousness and military preparedness of millions of workers and farmers—a virtually invincible “war of the entire people.”

“We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear power,” Castro added, “and it is the magnitude of the justice for which we are struggling.”
 
 
Related articles:
Iran: imperialists tighten economic noose, back off military threats  
 
 
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