The rivalries between imperialist powers for markets, resources and influence are sharpening today. They’re producing new border skirmishes, Jew-hating violence and an escalating arms race, all leading inexorably toward a third world war.
As capitalism’s economic and political crisis deepens, sections of the ruling class will turn to fascist thugs — as they did in the 1930s — to target Jews, communists and militant workers to try to prolong the domination of their crisis-ridden system.
The only progressive class with the power to prevent imperialism’s march toward fascism and another world war is the working class. With a proven leadership, workers are capable of taking power from the capitalist warmakers.
The second imperialist world slaughter only ended after Washington used nuclear weapons to annihilate 200,000 people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Aug. 6-9, 1945 — 80 years ago. Those atrocities were consistent with the tactics of the U.S. imperialists and their allies in the U.K. throughout the war. This included the systematic carpet-bombing of working-class neighborhoods in German cities like Dresden and Hamburg, and Tokyo in Japan.
The slaughter inflicted on humanity during that war will be magnified many times over in conflicts today, given the spread of nuclear weapons to capitalist rulers across the globe.
Since World War II, Washington has considered using nuclear weapons on several occasions, including against Korea, Cuba and Vietnam. As pressures grow, new, more far-reaching conflicts will break out. The goal of the U.S. imperialists is to defend the “world order” they established after emerging as the victor in World War II, to impose a Pax Americana to advance their own predatory interests.
“The fight against US imperialism and its wars necessitates building a revolutionary working-class party, uncompromisingly independent of and opposed to the propertied rulers’ government and their political parties,” explains a June 25 statement by the Socialist Workers Party National Committee. That statement, “Defend Israel’s battle to prevent another Holocaust! US troops, bases and warships out of the Mideast!” is available on the Militant’s website.
Building parties capable of leading workers and the oppressed to take state power in the U.S. is the road to “joining hands with international working-class struggles that will create a new world built on cooperation, not dog-eat-dog capitalism. A socialist world,” the statement says.
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