Oppose US Mideast wars, attacks on political rights

In response to the Sept. 17 attacks in New York and Minnesota, Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president, released the following statement.

Claiming to act to protect the population in the wake of Sept. 17 attacks on civilians in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota, the U.S. government, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, state authorities and the lapdog capitalist media are demanding deeper restrictions on political rights. They say “we” have to further expand government spying. They say the attacks justify Washington’s endless wars in the Middle East. And they give the green light to attacks on Muslims and their mosques.

Bombs set off on busy city streets, at sports or social events, stabbing attacks on shoppers in a mall have nothing to do with fighting against Washington’s bloody wars abroad or the rulers’ attacks on workers here. They are acts that can only be committed by forces who despise the working class. They set back working-class struggles and hand the ruling class a pretext to divide and set us against each other.

The ruling class uses working-class revulsion at such terror attacks to crack down on democratic rights we sorely need to educate and organize against the capitalist rulers’ exploitation and brutality.

In response to the attacks, Clinton, Trump and the ruling capitalist class they represent try to make workers think “we Americans” — workers and capitalists — have the same interests. “We” need to back restrictions on our rights and special measures that single out immigrants and refugees from the Middle East.

But the working class and the boss class have 100 percent counterposed class interests. They seek to maintain their class dictatorship and defend their appropriation of the vast majority of the wealth our class produces, here and around the world. They use their war machine to enforce this abroad and their cops, courts and criminal “justice” system to do so at home.

And those of us who become the cannon fodder in their wars or trapped in their prisons get killed or maimed and tossed aside as broken things that are no longer useful to their class.

The Socialist Workers Party fights to organize the working class to replace the crisis-ridden dictatorship of capital and end the wars and oppression endemic to its rule. Working people in the U.S., the Middle East and around the world can look to the Cuban Revolution as an example of the way forward. The leadership of the workers’ and farmers’ battle for power there insisted on proletarian moral values as they fought to take power and implement a revolutionary program.

Join the Socialist Workers Party and sister Communist Leagues around the world in the fight to strengthen the labor movement, fight racist brutality and all forms of discrimination that divide us, and oppose imperialist wars. This is the road for workers and farmers to take political power and organize society to meet human needs, not profits.

Related articles:
Washington-Moscow truce in Syria unravels
US seeks deal to protect imperialist interests
US rulers: NY bombs mean less rights, more spying

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