1) The slaughtering of thousands of people in office buildings and on airplanes are repugnant acts utterly alien and hostile to all fighters for justice and equality. No Muslim or Arab or Arab-American or immigrant or revolutionary or progressive-minded person should feel that they need to hang their head.
Killing civilians is a weapon --often used-- of the tiny capitalist class, enemy of humanity. It is not, and can never be, a weapon of the oppressed and exploited, majority of humanity.

2) Critical as it is to make clear that mass murder is antithetical to the struggle for justice, it is equally critical that neither revulsion nor political rejection of such methods paint a red-white-and-blue target on Osama bin Laden --not to mention the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, or even Cuba. All military action by Washington is fundamentally aimed at workers and farmers in the U.S. and around the world, just like the death penalty, even when initially used against the perpetrator of a heinous crime.

3) U.S. government tears for innocent civilians wantonly murdered are profoundly false. Recall the 3 million Indochinese who died in U.S. carpet bombings during the Vietnam War; the 800,000 Indonesians slaughtered by the CIA-organized Suharto coup in 1964; the hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans from Guatemala to Argentina to Nicaragua killed by military regimes put and kept in power by Washington; or the 100,000 retreating, unarmed, abandoned Iraqi soldiers who were slaughtered by the U.S. military at the end of the Gulf War --and Washington's previous backing for Osama bin Laden and the ultra-right Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

4) Whoever organized these attacks --and whatever their motivation-- the sole beneficiary is world imperialism, especially the most violent force in the world: the government of the United States.

5) The U.S. ruling class will seize this enormous tragic opportunity to drive forward their every reactionary plan and fantasy. Whether the yardage they will gain is quantitative or qualitative is yet to be seen ... but gain they will.

6) There will be no division within the U.S. ruling class to press forward profound assaults on political rights, and to assert its ability to take any violent act at any time and any place in the name of fighting terrorism.

7) Phrases from the rulers and their propaganda engines like "Pearl Harbor," "a schism in history," and "things will never be the same" reflect their deadly-serious intent to seize this chance to profoundly accelerate towards World War #3 --a war against their own population, a war to rollback all the gains won by workers, women, Blacks and other fighters for peace and justice. A war to burn the Bill of Rights. A war to establish their right and ability to use nuclear weapons against anyone they deem foe, unscathed behind a multi-billion dollar missile shield. A war to crush their imperialist competitors, and a war to invade the world's non-capitalist countries to re-establish the inhuman system of capitalism...under U.S. domination. Driven by an insupportable system --whose normal functioning sooner-or-later produces economic collapse, war, and fascism-- U.S. imperialism can ultimately follow no other course. Therefore the fight to replace their rule with that of the enormous majority i s a life-or-death question for the world's peoples and environment.

8) There will be war, and it will not be small-scale. Nothing can stop it in the short run. Many more innocent thousands will die from the coming U.S. firepower. Even nuclear strikes can not be precluded. The coming war will have, initially, massive support from the U.S. population and beyond. This is the gift to imperialism given by the September 11 terrorist gang.

9) To begin with, we must defend political rights and oppose any and all military action --the two key fronts of U.S. imperialism's offensive.

10) At the same time, we should not waver before the lynch-mob climate of the propaganda offensive surrounding the so-called "Attack on America." The 800,000 Iraqi children killed by U.S. military/economic operations, the hundreds of Palestinians killed by U.S.-supplied weapons, and the millions of Africans murdered by capitalist poverty deserve not one atom less of solidarity than those killed in the September 11th attacks. We can be confident that sober and patient explanation unfogged by patriotism and other deadly illusions will ring true to many ears.

No restrictions on democratic rights!

No money for war!

Written for SeeingRed.com by Steve Eckardt seckardt@aol.com
12 September 2001, revised 17 September.

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