Have the Back of the Afghan People!
Stop the War on Innocent People!
Watch Your Back!
The State’s on a Repressive Rampage!
The United States is on a rampage. While simultaneously raining cluster bombs down upon millions of innocent Afghans they are legislating police state measures of Orwellian proportions on the people at home. People are dying overseas for acts they had nothing to do with. People at home are being rounded up and interned for being Arab or Muslim, working to support their family abroad, or having a common Middle Eastern sounding name. Is this system which we are being asked to defend a real democracy? Is it worth all this madness and suffering?
Bush says he is leading a fight against terrorism by attacking Afghanistan. But to truly fight terrorism he would have to turn inward to the core of the U.S. imperialist nation-state. Throughout U.S. history the acts of this government and its military have been nothing short of terrorism. From the extermination of millions of Native Americans, to the horrific act of Black slavery, to the FBI’s war on political movements at home, to the disastrous Vietnam war, to the funding of the Contras and other Latin American death squads in the 1980s, to the bombing of Vieques island in Puerto Rico today, and to the death grip on the flow of food and medicine in Iraq that causes the death of 6000 children every month. This system, this government, needs to be exposed for its own heinous acts of mass violence and brutality.
Bush and company say they’re against the Taliban of Afghanistan. But why did they recently give them $43 million earlier this year? Why have they sat back and turned a blind eye while the basic human rights of the Afghan people were squashed under both the Taliban and the U.S. newly found allies in the equally abusive Northern Alliance?
The U.S. war machine is also claiming it is concerned about the brutalization of women under the Taliban. But when women were being excluded from education and stoned, where were they? The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan has exposed the U.S. government’s hypocrisy of simultaneously claiming to be helping the women of Afghanistan while bombing their homes and supporting the equally oppressive Northern Alliance. For the likes of Bush, Ashcroft, and any other member of the U.S. ruling class to claim they’re for defending the rights of women is nothing less than laughable. These same politicians have sat idly by while women suffer from eating disorders and sexual assault in the U.S., insulting wages and dehumanizing working conditions in U.S. corporate factories, as the population of women prisoners in this country sky rockets, and as women’s access to reproductive freedom is narrowed. The U.S. government is simply using the oppression of women as a way to galvanize support for their murderous actions in Afghanistan.
All along Bush and the entire U.S. ruling class has said this is a war to defend freedom, to defend democracy. But there is bitter and sad irony in such a disgusting claim. Since the tragedies of September 11th the ruling circles of the U.S. government have seized on the opportunity to pass some of the most repressive laws this system can come out with right now. The recent, so-called anti-terrorist, “Patriot Act” will give the cops and courts even more leeway and power to arrest, interrogate, detain, and convict people with only the slightest bit of evidence, if any. The supposed rights granted to people under the Constitution are being completely and utterly ignored.
But there’s more. Over 1100 people have already been the victim of these police-state measures. Hundreds of Arabs, who this system even admits had nothing to do with the events of September 11th, have been detained and held without being allowed to contact their family, friends, or even a lawyer. Stories abound of Arab men not returning home only to be snatched up by the FBI or police agents in a frenzied witch-hunt. Many are still in prison as we write this. The media has been silent on this, but has been more than willing to whip up a frenzy of anti-Arab paranoia. Local Muslim Imam’s have been attacked, Somali money exchanges have been raided, and the media continues to portray Arab and Muslim people as less-than-human. All this government repression and yellow journalism is a breeding ground for more racist attacks on Arab and Muslim people. These detentions are nothing short of racist internments. The media’s role of not questioning any information given to them by those in power exposes their role as mere propaganda mills for the ruling class. Both must be exposed and opposed.
This war on the people of Afghanistan abroad and these attacks on Arab people at home are the work of the same system, the U.S. nation-state. They do not protect the people of the U.S. in any way. It was this system’s international crimes of brutality that put people in harm’s way on September 11th and all these attacks do nothing to change that. As Chilean anarchists have said: “We know that the task of stopping barbarism is not one of governments, who play with us like chess pieces, who aren’t interested in the human cost of this macabre game. This responsibility belongs to the actions of solidarity of the people in reviving a new internationalist spirit.”
What is needed in the short term is a broad-based anti-war movement. This movement must simultaneously work to stop the war while defending Arab and Muslim people here in the U.S. who are being attacked and repressed by this system. It should take up a variety of tactics while connecting everyone who opposes this war. Youth, workers, anti-racists, peace activists, people of all nationalities must resist this war together. United this force can stop the U.S. government’s war plans here and abroad.
But ultimately it is going to take something much deeper and fundamental to stop the U.S. war machine from committing atrocities like those they’re committing today in Afghanistan. It is going to take a social revolution of a profound nature to halt the destructive path of the nation-state, capitalism, and imperialism. It is going to take dumping this system and all its harmful symptoms and replacing it with one that is truly democratic, cooperative, and collectively run where we decide for ourselves what’s in our interests and what we need. The U.S. nation-state has nothing to offer the world but more misery, oppression, and exploitation. We should reject any war we are asked to fight that is not against the real enemies of freedom and for our own liberation.
No War between Nations! No Peace between Classes!
No More Internments of Arabs!
Stop the War on Afghanistan!
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