US President, Barak Obama, has issued his ultimatum to the British ruling class – stay in the EU or else!
In a lengthy article in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper, Obama invoked World War II as justification for his unprecedented intervention in the domestic politics of the UK, claiming that Britain and America’s ‘special relationship was forged as we spilled blood together on the battlefield’.
He added: ‘The tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are. And the path you choose now will echo in the prospects of today’s generation of Americans as well.’
Obama went on to state that the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU ‘have turned centuries of war in Europe into decades of peace, and worked as one to make this world a safer, better place.’
Try telling that to the millions of Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians who have seen their countries ripped apart by US and European imperialism, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees who are daily discovering that Europe is being turned into an armed fortress.
The Ukrainian working class will not recognise Obama’s depiction of a peaceful Europe going hand-in-hand with the US to make the world a safer place. Neither will the working class of Greece, whose lives have been smashed up by the EU and central banks, agree that the world is a better place under this regime of bankers and capitalists.
It was the EU and US governments who organised and financed the fascist-led coup in Ukraine just as it is the NATO powers that are driving their armies and missiles to the borders of Russia, as imperialism seeks to regain for capitalism the land and resources denied them by the 1917 October Revolution.
In the interests of historical accuracy, it must also be noted that the entry of America into the Second World War in 1941, while tipping the military balance in the west of Europe, did not win the war against fascism.
The German army was broken by the sacrifice of millions of Soviet workers and the Red Army, but Obama and Cameron are not going to acknowledge this as a blood debt. On the contrary, in his article Obama talks of countering Russian ‘aggression’, meaning war preparations by imperialism against Russia.
Behind all the flannel about shared sacrifices, Obama is issuing a threat when he writes: ‘The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe ensures that Europe takes a strong stance in the world, and keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies on the other side of the Atlantic. So the US and the world need your outsized influence to continue – including within Europe.’ It couldn’t be clearer.
The ‘special relationship’ between the US and British capitalism that is so prized by bourgeois politicians is nothing more than a relationship between master and servant. Britain is important to the US only in so far as it acts as a compliant agent for US interests within the EU, a useful tool for American capitalism and nothing more.
If Britain leaves the EU, then that relationship will be unceremoniously broken. Instead, the US will seek different willing servants with the threat that British capitalism will be pushed outside any trading agreements and left to sink on its own as the world crisis of capitalism explodes.
The EU is not about protecting workers’ rights as the Labour and TUC leaders claim.
Obama’s article makes it quite clear, the EU exists solely as a capitalist club with the capitalist class desperate to stay in as their only chance of surviving the rapidly developing economic crash while the US is only interested in using Britain as its compliant vassal. There can be only one way forward for the working class, to vote ‘Out’ on June 23 and break with the EU.
This will certainly bring down Cameron and accelerate the demise of the Tory party opening the way for a workers government that will join hands with the working class of Europe to fight for a Socialist United States of Europe. Obama’s threats are part of the death agony of capitalism. In fact, the future lies with Socialism.
