En Passant

Genocide against Aboriginal people is one theme that runs through the history of the last 225 years. The failure to recognise that genocide is another ongoing theme. ANZAC Day, the supposed symbol and celebration of the ‘nation’ denies this most obvious truth – Australian society was founded on the genocide of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and that genocide continues today.

Revolution won’t come about by us wishing and waiting writes Nick Everett in Socialist Alternative in Australia. We need to fight for change. Socialism – a society that organises production to meet human need, not corporate greed – is not only possible, but urgently necessary.

Eric Ruder in Socialist Worker US reports on a new weapon of choice in U.S. wars around the globe – the drone.

What is relevant is that the destruction of whole countries by imperialism that continues to this day is justified and glorified in the disguise of remembering. Lest we forget, there is a struggle to end war by challenging the rulers and the system that cause it. That won’t come from burning a poppy but it will come from the same sort of mass movement that ended the First World War.

For 40 years I have been raging against the capitalist machine in all its manifestations – war, genocide, poverty, human rights abuses, working class exploitation, economic crises and the racism, sexism and homophobia which act as a glue for the system and the Labor party and trade union leadership which are its staunchest defenders and the rock on which it survives.

If recent calls in Australia for the further criminalisation of dissent mean that I’ll have to write my blog from a prison cell then so be it. I won’t be the first and I certainly won’t be the last revolutionary imprisoned for their views.

If James Holmes is a barbaric mass murderer for allegedly killing 12 innocent people (which he is if he is not insane and assuming he pulled the trigger) who will feel the full force of American justice (which he will), why isn’t the barbaric mass murderer Barack Obama going to receive the same treatment?

The defeat of Australia in Afghanistan won’t be identified as such but after more than a decade what does the Australian ruling class have to show other than 32 dead Australian soldiers and many more Afghan civilians? Nothing, except continuing the close relationship with US imperialism.

War is integral to capitalism and the battle between competing blocks for dominance. Ending war means ending the system that creates it. One step in that direction is to campaign against the wars the Australian ruling class involves itself in.

Tom O’Lincoln’s important new book Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth stands in the grand tradition of debunking ruling class lies.

O’Lincoln shows that the Second World war and the war in the Pacific were a consequence of imperialism and the needs of late blooming German and Japanese capitalism to expand and in doing that to challenge the established imperial order of a declining Britain and a surging United States.

When production is organised democratically to satisfy human need, we, the producers of society’s wealth, will have no interest in killing each other. Then every day will be Christmas.

What does Labor stand for? Nothing I believe in or want,  even this side of the revolution. War? Yes, from East Timor to Afghanistan Labor is a party of warmongers. Imperialism? Yes. Its support for the US Alliance is a logical bourgeois analysis of what is in the best interests of Australian capitalism. Attacking aborigines? Yes, [...]