A VERY young toddler was washed up on a Turkish beach on Wednesday, while his mother was also among those drowned at sea trying to reach safety in Greece from the war in Syria.
Yesterday, European workers were shocked to see Czech police writing numbers on the arms of refugee families, seeking to get to Germany where they are welcome, awakening in everybody’s consciousness that what these millions of refugees are going through is another Holocaust.
Then in Hungary, a distraught father grabbed his child and wife and flung themselves onto a railway track to spell out that they were not going to go to any camp to be registered, and would prefer to die under a train.
In the face of this critical situation in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, only the ultra-cold-blooded British ruling class and their current leaders Cameron and Osborne could dismiss providing refuge to these masses of refugees as dealing with just the appearances of the problem and not with its essence. They then went on to suggest that the real way to deal with this ‘problem’ issue was to resolve the crisis in Syria, meaning igniting an even bigger war to overthrow the Syrian government of President Assad and degrade the Syrian people, by turning Syria back into being a colony of the West!
To prove their point, the ‘caring’ Osborne and Cameron have in the last four years accepted just 130 Syrians as refugees. At the same time, they supported the imperialist war to smash Syria as a modern state, along the lines of what had been done to Iraq and Libya by the Anglo-American axis, and sought to join the US in its bombing campaign. They were defeated in the House of Commons on this issue.
However, they thought that they would be able to ‘imprison’ millions of Syrian refugees in camps in Turkey and Jordan, and keep them at arms length from the UK. Now the dam has burst and hundreds of thousands are streaming west from Iraq, Libya and Syria, countries that the imperialist powers, with the US and the UK in the lead, sought to smash.
Now Cameron and Osborne want to stand on one side from the crisis that they played a big part in creating, and allow the Czech and Hungarian governments to deal with the refugees as if they were back in the 1940s, while they get ready, along with the USA, to renew the war on Syria.
In fact, the millions of refugees and the working class of the world (and the UK) have a common interest.
They are both under attack by the bosses and the bankers and their governments like the Cameron- Osborne government. Abroad, the Tories are seeking to reorder the world and helping to turn millions into refugees, while at home they are making war on the Welfare State, the benefit system, the NHS and the trade unions, seeking to return the working class back to the 19th century.
The workers of the world and the masses of refugees and the oppressed nations are therefore in the same trench and face the same enemy – capitalism and imperialism. Young children are being drowned in the Med and at home, thousands of ill people have died just weeks after their benefits have been stopped and they have been told that they are fit to work!
Our enemy is at home. The millions of refugees and the oppressed nations are our allies – they are no threat at all to us. The issue of the hour is that the working class in the industrialised nations, such as the UK, must join hands with the oppressed nations, now in the form of the millions of refugees. The TUC and the trade unions must become the champion of both.
At its September conference, it must organise to take action against the Cameron government. It must call an indefinite general strike to smash the Tories and their plans to destroy the NHS, the Welfare State and the trade unions, and to allow all refugees who wish to, to gain entry to the UK.
This strike must bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
This workers’ government will open the door of the UK to all refugees. It will also work with the workers of the world to smash capitalism and imperialism on a world scale to bring in a World Socialist Republic.
This is the only way forward for humanity.
