Editors’ Note: The following excerpts come from subversive anti-war flyers distributed at mass demonstrations; the first comes from an FE collective member in Tennessee, the second from the Chicago Surrealists, and the third from comrades in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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The new ultra-right doctrine of global domination that Bush has made his mantra is seen by some liberals as dramatic deviance from American principles. However, while imperial chickenhawk cowboys killing children and reaping the military-industrial profits may seem distasteful to most, it resembles American foreign policy verbatim since the dawn of the last century. Throughout the 1900s, the monsters of money and might wrought misery for millions.
Now, using fear as a pretext, the international policemen have gone public with their piranha-like plans to pillage and plunder the planet. Don’t be fooled that the American elite has ever wanted anything less than total domination. Neither the scourge of neoconservatism nor the lie of neoliberalism can save us: both are vapid, necrophilic pseudo-ideologies that love money more than life itself
All over the world, people have risen up to resist global capitalism, abolish universal wage slavery, and fight fundamentalism in all its forms. Millions in the streets in every corner of the planet have looked to Americans for solidarity in the struggle against institutionalized injustice and multilateral misery. Will we have the courage to challenge the crooked corporate charlatans masquerading as our leaders?
Let’s unite to stop the war, but don’t stop there. Celebrate the wild mother earth not the wicked oil economy; yes to imagination not domination; choose life, not death. Another world is not only possible, it is necessary. Will we make it real?
Another Stupid War
Make no mistake: The proposed “regime’ change” in Baghdad is solely about replacing a fractious death-squad subcontractor with a more passively compliant one. A New World Order “police action” aimed at Iraq would provide US capital with easy access to twenty-two percent of the world’s available petroleum, meaning less dependence upon the doddering feudal oil oligarchy of Saudi Arabia. It is no accident that the “interim” government in Afghanistan that replaced the Taliban ruling clique is led by a former consultant to the Unocal oil company who is protected round-the-clock from assassination by a contingent of US Green Berets.
We say: Neither ruling-class war nor imperial peace! The grubby, counter-revolutionary opportunism of “realistic” realpolitik is no excuse for industrialized mass murder. When the U.S. government’s stooges of Capital try to blackmail us with the pseudo-choice of being “either with us or against us,” we wholeheartedly refuse. In this as in all inter-capitalist rivalries, we support neither side.
We say:
No to Bush’s war-plans and globalization’s death industry! No to the outlawing of workers’ movements! No to “austerity programs” and the “structural readjustment” dictates of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank! No to misery and miserabilism in all their forms!
Yes to revolt! Yes to freedom now! Yes to international working-class solidarity! Yes to life, imagination, the Earth and their marvelous possibilities!
Insubordination
If we talk to the representatives of this warmongering social order, we are still granting them the final say. Such participation is simply participation in our continued slavery. Instead, those of us exploited, excluded, or simply disgusted by this social order need to talk with each other and about how we can actively refuse the state’s war, encouraging non-compliance, disobedience, and revolt—in short, total insubordination to the efforts of the masters of this world to once more send us out to shed each others’ blood in their interests.
As long as the state exists and Capital rules the world, war will continue killing us. Only insubordination and total revolt can bring this to an end, and open the possibility of a world where no one can order anyone else to go out and kill.