All of the imperialist powers claim their military expenditures are purely for defensive purposes, with budgets designated as “defence spending.” This is a grotesque lie.
Hundreds of artists have signed an open letter opposing artistic censorship while Kneecap’s music downloads and ticket sales have rocketed.
The world is now rearming at the fastest rate since the Cold War, with a 9.4 percent increase in military spending around the world – the highest rate in figures going back to 1988.
China is the main target of the relentless war build-up, with the entire parliamentary establishment and corporate media in full agreement.
The Left Party's solidarity with the oligarchic regime in Kiev, which is dominated by far-right forces, goes hand in hand with its support for the reactionary government campaign to exclude representatives of Russia from the commemorative events marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War on May 8.
All of the imperialist powers claim their military expenditures are purely for defensive purposes, with budgets designated as “defence spending.” This is a grotesque lie.
At its core, the deal is the pseudo-legal basis for the neocolonial exploitation of the country’s resources.
Behind the attacks on Trump in the European media lie bitter rivalries between Washington and the European imperialist powers over the plunder of Ukraine and trade war policies.
The statement, published on February 18, 2016, outlines a socialist strategy for the building of an international anti-war movement of the working class to oppose the drive by the ruling elites to a new imperialist world war.
This volume consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 1990–91.
Moderated by WSWS reporters Andrea Peters and Andre Damon, the interview covered the central themes of North’s book and a wide range of topics, from the significance of the dissolution of the USSR and the crisis of the world capitalist system to the pro-imperialist politics of the pseudo-left and the revolutionary role of the working class in the struggle against war.
Someone from the SEP or World Socialist Web Site will contact you promptly.
Beginning in 2012, the Obama administration funneled billions of dollars in arms and other equipment to Islamic fundamentalist proxy forces in Syria, including the Al Nusra Front, a terrorist breakaway organization from Al Qaeda. The illegal US intervention has been aimed at overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, an ally of both Iran and Russia and the Middle East, and installing a puppet regime loyal to Washington.
The illegal US and European intervention in Syria has led to a protracted civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and contributed to the greatest refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War. Since 2012, it has repeatedly brought the US and European powers to the brink of nuclear war with Russia.
The US and European powers launched an intervention in 2011 in Libya, overthrowing the Libyan government and murdering Muammar Gaddafi, and installing an unstable client regime of rival militias loyal to their imperialist backers.
As in Syria, the CIA intervention and arming of Islamist forces—including groups associated with Al Qaeda—was accompanied by a campaign among pseudo-left groups aimed at fraudulently presenting these imperialist interventions as a continuation of the “Arab Spring.”
In March, 2003, the world watched on with horror as the US-led “shock and awe” bombing campaign lit up the nighttime sky of Baghdad with billowing clouds of flame and smoke. This campaign and the bloody ten years of occupation that followed had a devastating impact on what was once among the most advanced societies in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions were made homeless. One million Iraqis are estimated to have died.
The invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, illegal under international law developed in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. The Bush administration employed increasingly brazen lies, centered on the claims that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). The Democratic Party supported the war, while the Obama administration, which came to power in 2008, opposed any prosecution of the war criminals who had prosecuted the illegal war of aggression.
As in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, and in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, the eruption of war in 2003 arises out of deep-rooted contradictions in the world capitalist system.
Whatever the outcome of the initial stages of the conflict that has begun, American imperialism has a rendezvous with disaster. It will not find through the medium of war a viable solution to its internal maladies.
The exposure of the massive lies justifying the Iraq War has not produce condemnation, but new and even more insolent justifications in the media. This situation is telling the American people something important and very disturbing about the nature of the society in which they are living.
The ongoing US aggression in the Middle East raises the most serious questions about the role of the mass media in modern society.
On October 7, 2001, Washington and its NATO allies launched an illegal full-scale military assault against the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda bases in the country. From the outset of the invasion, the WSWS exposed the lies of the Bush administration that its invasion was an act of self-defense in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The war, which has spanned more than 18 years and is the longest-running war in US history, has killed over 175,000 people in Afghanistan, by conservative estimates, with hundreds of thousands more wounded, and millions driven from their homes. The cost of this “endless war” has reached roughly $1 trillion. At its height, the Pentagon was squandering some $110 billion a year, roughly 50 percent more than the total annual US federal budget for public education.
The US and its allies, including Britain and Australia, rapidly utilized the terror attacks to declare a global “War on Terror,” unlimited in scope both geographically and in time, as a pretext to implement longstanding plans to wage war in the Middle East and attack democratic rights of the working class in their own countries.
Beginning in April, 1999, the major imperialist powers launched an unprecedented multilateral war against Serbia. NATO, led by the United States but including forces from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and other allied countries, rained bombs down on the tiny country, the largest fragment of the former Yugoslavia.
The nominal pretext for the war was the conflict in Kosovo, a Serb province with a predominately Albanian population. A separatist movement, closely linked to gangsters and drug smugglers, received backing from the US and Germany and arrogated to itself the grandiose and misleading title of the “Kosovo Liberation Army.”
In December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved by the Stalinist regime led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The destruction of the Soviet Union was the outcome of the anti-socialist and nationalist policies of the ruling bureaucracy, which confirmed the warnings of the Trotskyist movement of the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism.
In the wake of the dissolution of the USSR, US imperialism concluded that it could now offset the challenge that American corporations faced from rivals in Europe and Japan, which had been growing since the 1970s, through the relatively untrammeled use of the US armed forces.
It is now nearly three decades since the deliberate liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the launching of the First Persian Gulf War, which began in January 1991.
In November, 1991, the ICFI held a World Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism, in Berlin. The ICFI's initiative to hold the conference was taken in response to the launching of the First Gulf War by Washington, the declaration by US imperialism of its “unipolar moment,” and the march toward the restoration of capitalism and dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This booklet was written in 1914 during Trotsky’s two month stay in Zurich. It contains an unsurpassed analysis of the driving forces of imperialist war.
David North, the chairman of the WSWS international editorial board, delivered the following lecture at San Diego State University on October 5, 2009, marking the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War.
Three quarters of a century after the end of the war, fascism and war are imminent global dangers once again.
We are publishing here the text of a lecture delivered Saturday, April 8 by Nick Beams, a member of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site. This is the third in a series of five international online lectures being presented by the International Committee of the Fourth International to mark the centenary of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Nick Beams, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) and a member of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, delivered a lecture on “World War Two: Lessons and Warnings” to audiences in Sydney and Melbourne in November, 2009.
