Stop the Slaughter of the Innocent
More barbarity, more innocent blood shed in Europe. We are distressed and outraged for the 22 victims, including a girl who was just 8 years old, and the 100 and more wounded in the attack made in Manchester by Salman Abedi, “soldier of the Caliphate,” born in England to Libyan parents. As we have done in other similar occasions before, we do not want to let horror overcome us, but rather try to analyze and understand the reasons that generated it.
The “explanation” foisted on to us by imperialist propaganda through mass media, about Islamic terrorists who hate the “values of the West,” about the “clash of civilizations” or the “religion war,” actually does not explain anything, as it hides the key of the problem, i.e. the war of aggression waged by the imperialist holy alliance—the US-led international coalition, that has been invading and bombing the Middle East for more than a decade to grab and split its resources, recently joined by Russia wishing to safeguard its interests in the area, on the Islamic State, as it obstructs their aims.
The Manchester attack, just like the London attack on 22 March, is nothing else than the terrorist reprisal from the IS on Britain. Over the last few years, Britain has increased its war effort in Syria and Iraq, largely outdoing its effort in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is said also by the Islamic State itself in its claim of the attack, made, as they say, “in response to their abuses on the homes of Muslims,”
that is against the bombings that are destroying and slaughtering Mosul, Raqqa and the rest of IS-held territory. This is, of course, an incorrect and unacceptable counter-attack, as it targets innocent civilians, but this is the truth, and it is impossible to understand what is going on if we overlook it.
On the contrary, people risk ending up prisoners of imperialist propaganda spread by mass media, which uses young victims to counterpose Western “civilization” and Islamic “barbarity,” but in order to do so, it hides the fact that bombs are falling on hospitals, homes and civilians in the Middle East. Such manipulated is this kind of propaganda that the US strike against Mayadin along the Syria-Iraq border in the night of 26 May, resulting in 100 fatalities, including 42 children, almost went unreported. In addition, in the same day as Manchester was attacked, 34 refugees with many children died in the Strait of Sicily and were denied the honour to appear on the news, as if migrants dying on the sea was some ordinary matter.
To understand how imperialist governments are miserable and only interested in gaining resources to enrich domestic capitalists, just know that the famous Chilcot Inquiry in Britain on Tony Blair’s decision to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, revealed in 2016 that British national security services warned that starting a war in the Middle East would have led to an increase in terror attacks in Europe. These warnings were ignored, or downgraded to “a small price to pay for being a superpower,” as reported by the former US Defense Department advisor Richard Shultz in an article on the “Weekly Standard” in 2004.Children in Manchester were victims to the same conflict that kills children in Syria and Iraq, who often knew nothing else than hunger and war in their short life. Nothing is farther from us than dividing between primary deaths and secondary deaths, as we are proletarian internationalists. However, this is the proof that there is no other way to put an end to this bloodshed than stopping the war against the Islamic State.
This is not the direction taken by the powers of the imperialist holy alliance. Everyone of their summits, like the NATO meeting in Brussels and the G7 gathering in Taormina, confirm that the destruction of the Islamic State is their top objective, to the joy of arms producers and dealers and military lobbies. The same is true for Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, where he secured the commitment by theocratic monarch Salman to “cancel” the IS. The Saudi regime, mistakenly considered as the main financer of the Islamic State, is actually under the latter’s attack in Yemen, the country that the Saudi military has invaded and laid waste to with the tacit approval of the US and the EU.
In order to finally stop this bloody spiral of barbarity, we need to break the imperialist war/terrorist attack spiral. This is why a mass mobilization for pace is urgent, starting with our country, where we must ask loud and clear to Gentiloni to pull Italy out of the war against the Islamic State to prevent its terrorist reprisals, otherwise inevitable.
21 luglio 2017