THE appalling death of up to 950 people fleeing the war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa has prompted the political representatives of European capitalism to rush to Luxembourg for an emergency meeting to discuss this ‘humanitarian’ crisis.
Most of them support the ‘Australian solution’ – that the boats should be turned back at gunpoint as soon as they set sail, and to hell with the poor, the oppressed and the hungry!
Do-gooders talk about a natural disaster or a humanitarian crisis, made worse by the foul deeds of ‘people traffickers’. It is much more than that!
What is taking place is a crime against humanity whose cause is the historic world crisis of capitalism, and whose agency is the imperialist powers that have turned the Middle East and North Africa into one gigantic killing zone from which millions are seeking to flee.
There were no refugees fleeing Iraq, Libya or Syria until US imperialism, supported by its European hangers-on, took it upon themselves to devastate this part of the planet in order to secure for itself complete domination of the oil and mineral wealth.
The 2003 invasion, and subsequent occupation of Iraq by US and British imperialism, smashed up a modern advanced country and reduced it to rubble in which sectarian violence – which had been unknown under Saddam – was deliberately encouraged.
From Iraq, the imperialists moved on to Libya, another advanced country, where their bombing campaign led directly to the overthrow of Gadaffi in 2011 by their allies the jihadists, who are now demonised as the main terrorist threat to the world.
Syria was next to be plunged into an imperialist-inspired and financed brutal war to overthrow Assad.
The inescapable fact is that what is happening in the Mediterranean this weekend is the response of imperialism to its world crisis.
Imperialist war is not just confined to this one region of the world, and neither is the capitalist crisis.
As capitalism faces banking and financial crashes across the entire globe, with Greece threatening to bring down the whole of the Eurozone, setting off a worldwide collapse, the ruling class is preparing for civil war against the working class at home to impose savage austerity while simultaneously waging war abroad to reconquer the planet.
We can see this in Ukraine, where the war preparations against Russia to regain the lands denied to capitalism by the Russian Revolution of 1917 have fuelled fascist-led coups and civil war as the imperialists drive towards the encirclement of the first workers state.
However, the lesson of the 1917 revolution is that imperialist wars, in this case the 1914 world war, can only be stopped by revolution!
The first imperialist war of 1914-18 was hated by every worker in every country as it descended into barbaric slaughter. What ended the slaughter was not good-will or common sense prevailing but the reality of the working class of Russia, under the leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik party, seizing power.
The enthusiastic support of ‘their own’ workers for the revolution made it impossible for the imperialist powers to carry on with their war!
This is the only way to end imperialist wars – through socialist revolutions to put an end to imperialism for good.
This is not some future dream but an immediate lesson and necessity for the working class today.
In order to deal with the immediate crisis facing the millions fleeing from new imperialist slaughters, workers in Britain and Europe must take action to force the borders of every country be thrown open to allow the refugees to seek safety.
These refugees are not the enemy of the working class. In fact the enemy is at home. It is the UK ruling class that played a big part in levelling Iraq, Libya and Syria, and is now seeking to do the same to our Welfare State.
The only solution to this world crisis is to smash capitalism and imperialism worldwide with socialist revolutions, and replace them with a world socialist republic where production will be planned to satisfy the needs of the people and capitalism will be consigned to exhibits in the Natural History Museum.
