FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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“NATO and Russia have not fully resolved their fears about how a nuclear war might arise, or how it might be fought.” —Prof. Tom Nichols, US Naval War College, 2012.
“The new DF-41 ICBM ensures that China’s nuclear deterrent can reach the entire continental U.S. China is moving definitively toward a more robust, survivable second-strike capability.” —Robert Farley, National Interest (8/10/14).
Most of us don’t want to believe that imperialists would launch a nuclear World War III. But, as Red Flag has explained, the profit-driven logic of capitalist competition leads to world war. Whether we believe it or not, the imperialist powers are planning for it.
Inter-imperialist competition and war preparations are behind the attacks on workers’ standards of living everywhere. The international working class can win this class war by mobilizing to defeat capitalism-imperialism with communism.
Let’s understand how high the stakes are. In World War I, over 20 million people died, 40% of them civilians. Another 30 million died in the flu pandemic immediately afterward.
In World War II, at least 70 million died (perhaps 100 million). Over 60% were civilians. Probably 300,000 – almost all civilians – were killed by two US nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nobody anywhere would be safe from the far more massive casualties of World War III. This gives even greater urgency to our task of mobilizing for communism inside the military.
Start Your War – We Will Finish It
In 1955 Mao Zedong declared that “the Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail.” One reason was nationalist: China was too large for the US to destroy. Whether true or not, this is not an argument communists make today.
More importantly, Mao said, “As a result of World War I, the tsar, the landlords and the capitalists in Russia were wiped out; as a result of World War II, Chiang Kai-shek and the landlords were overthrown in China.”
The result of World War III, Mao predicted, “would be the elimination of the ruling classes in the United States, Britain and the other accomplice countries … the sooner they make war the sooner they will be wiped from the face of the earth.”
The socialism of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China led to the re-emergence of those countries as capitalist- imperialist powers. Workers today must eliminate those nuclear-armed ruling classes too. We must fight for communism and nothing less, led by one mass International Communist Workers’ Party.
End of START: Start of the End?
“Strategic” nuclear weapons are the big ones that supposedly exist only to deter another government from using them. NATO (mainly the US) negotiated a “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty” (START) with Russia in 1991.
START expired in 2009 and was replaced with “New START” in 2011. This was supposed to leave each side with 1550 deployed nuclear warheads in 2018, with more in reserve. So-called “non-strategic” (or “tactical”) nuclear weapons are not regulated. Some of these are as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.
In January 2015, Russia Times suggested that Russia might revise or withdraw from New START due to “growing US antagonism” particularly around Ukraine.
The Guardian (1/15/15) reported that US imperialism threatens to redeploy its own cruise missiles in Europe after a 23-year absence. This, says The Guardian, is in response to Russian development of a new cruise missile. Other reasons include the rebuilding of Russia’s nuclear-armed submarine fleet.
China, a growing nuclear power, has not been party to any strategic arms limitation talks. Its expanding nuclear program may influence nuclear-armed India and Pakistan to follow suit. The United Kingdom, France, Israel, and North Korea also have nuclear weapons.
US imperialists openly debate how best to spend their nuclear-war dollars in this period with their empire in decline. We will write more about this later. But all seem to agree that “the status quo is not an option.” (Blechman and Rumbaugh, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014)
Some want to modernize the “tactical” nuclear arsenal: weapons that are meant to be used, and may have already been secretly used in Afghanistan. Others argue for retiring “tactical” nuclear weapons. They want to rely on a combination of conventional military superiority and huge “strategic” nuclear bombs.
The imperialists seemingly don’t question “whether” there will be nuclear war. They are discussing “when,” “where” and “how.” As Blechman and Rumbaugh state, US “strategic nuclear capabilities are intended to deter and, if necessary, respond to a nuclear attack on either the U.S. homeland itself or U.S. allies.”
We say there is no question about “whether” or “where” communist revolution is necessary: it is, everywhere! The discussion in workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and barracks must be about “how.” As for “when” – the sooner the better!
