arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

When the peoples of the world see the faces of the families who lost their loved ones in the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001, they understand their human suffering because they have long suffered terror bombings, genocide, and economic exploitation by the governments representing the very companies which had head offices in that building.
Why do the US, Britain and other imperialist countries remember, with all the hype and media fanfare that the richest regimes of the world can afford, only the victims of September the 11th and not the millions upon millions who have died at the hands of imperialism? Where are the monuments to and the remembrance ceremonies for those who have died owing to US and British Imperialism? This imperialism which is a nexus between the richest industrialists, financiers and military companies who can only maintain their monopoly of the world's wealth by exploitation and complete domination of the majority of the world. Can those people really say, who are interested in equality for the peoples of the world like ourselves, that we can commemorate one without the other?
The answer has to be 'no'. Further, can we say that one should join in this memorial today even if the oppressed had some representation in it? Is there moral equivalence, or an equal scale of suffering between those 2838 people who died on September 11th 2001 and the millions of victims of the US and British regimes? If we are to respect the peoples of the world and historical facts, the answer must be 'no' again. To say otherwise would display an infection, to some degree, of slave mentality towards oppression and exploitation and to treat the lives of the peoples in the oppressed countries as less than those of the oppressor countries.
The greatest single acts of terrorism in the history of the world were conducted by the US Imperialists against the Japanese people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. Monuments have yet to be erected for these victims of US terrorism. There are no national one minute silences for the 30,000 children who die every day (a holocaust every 200 days) because of lack of clean drinking water, which is caused precisely by the system of imperialist looting. When will those who constructed the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, and all the supporters of their work around the world, compensate the people of Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, Laos, Afghanistan and many other countries which have been bombed and invaded by the US and Britain? (For more crimes of US and British Imperialism, see the list appended to this statement).
The imperialists use resources and the most advanced human scientific knowledge, which could provide for clean drinking water for all the worlds people, instead for the development of the greatest killing machines. With this military weaponry they intimidate the people and frequently discharge these weapons all across the world, crossing every national border, on those who resist their dictates. For once in history, a group of young people from one of these oppressed countries - Saudi Arabia - decided to cross national borders and return this treatment momentarily into the two symbols and institutions of US Imperialism.
There are nearly 200,000 US troops on lands which do not belong to them, including 60,000 in Europe, 40,000 in south Korea, and 15,000 in Saudi Arabia. These numbers are growing, and the number of lands which are being occupied are growing. The storm of resentment and resistance to these forces and their policies came back to hit the US on September 11th 2001.
The oppressed of the world have no weapons to match the US and Britain. They have no F-16s, tanks and helicopter gunships. However, the united will to resist imperialism is stronger than any weapons. If the USS Cole war ship in the Middle East was invincible against any attack, then the resistance of the Arab peoples blew a hole in their apparent invincibility. The masses of the world have shown that all imperialist occupations have been defeated by the might of the organised force of the peoples.
The eye of this storm of resistance is the Arab lands with the peoples of Colombia, Turkey, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Philippines close by in their anti-imperialist resistance.
The people in the oppressor countries must stand with the oppressed. The people in the imperialist countries need full employment, decent homes, free universal education, an end to discrimination and a pension deserving of a lifetime's commitment to ones country; they do not need the wealth from their work being siphoned off into the pockets of the rich for further exploitation and war. It is to this latter end that we are being asked to join the memorial to the victims of September 11th.
The real democrats of the US and Britain are people like Paul Robeson, Arthur Scargill, James Connolly, Shapurji Saklatvala and Claudia Jones. These people championed (and in the case of Arthur Scargill, still champions) the interests of the British and US people for their rights and for friendship with the peoples of the world.
To say these things means being repressed under new repression laws which have been brought in to tighten up the imperialist state apparatus. In Britain's case, the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 are the new anti-popular weapons in their armoury. These laws are attacks on all anti-imperialists and all those who stand for peace in the world. The right to freedom of speech and expression have been removed completely and freedom to organise politically has been criminalised.

We refuse to be criminalised for telling the truth and building solidarity between the oppressed people of the world. We refuse to be slaves under this decadent and parasitic system of imperialism. We urge all progressive people to unite with the just struggle to end imperialism once and for all, thereby abolishing war, poverty and misery.
For anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship.

Che-Leila Youth Brigades (Britain), Sept 11th 2002.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bloody and terrorist record of Anglo-American imperialism

The words quoted immediately above, coming as they do from the organs of one
of the most blood-thirsty imperialist powers, spoken as they are in the name
of the two foremost imperialist powers, who between them have an unbroken
record going back at least two centuries of unbridled aggression, the
slaughter of tens of millions of people abroad and denial of national right
of other peoples take the biscuit for their breathtaking hypocrisy. If there
is any logic in these words, it is the logic of colonialist and imperialist
brigandage, according to which powerful imperialist countries, armed to the
teeth with the most up-to-date killing machines that modern science and
technology are capable of furnishing, may attack any country which in the
slightest stands in the way of imperialist plunder, while it is the destiny
of weak countries and nations to suffer these outrages with resignation. If
this war were truly to be aimed at terrorism, it would have to begin in the
US, Britain and Israel - the world's biggest terrorist countries. The truth
is that US imperialism has terrorised the peoples of the world since the end
of the 2nd world war to maintain its own hegemony and in an attempt to
maintain the continued existence of decadent, parasitic and moribund
capitalism. Since the end of the 2nd world war, it is reliably estimated
that 30 million people have died in the wars waged by the three principal
imperialist powers (US, Britain and France) against oppressed nations or in
imperialist-inspired civil strife, and the organisation of economic
blockades, undertaken by US imperialism. Here is a brief - and incomplete -
list of the crimes and terrorism practised by US imperialism from the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the present war of aggression against
Afghanistan.

. Its war of aggression in Korea (1950-1953) claimed the lives of 4 million
Koreans;
. That in Vietnam claimed the lives of 3 million Vietnamese;
. The overthrow of the progressive nationalist Sukarno regime in Indonesia
in 1965 by the bloodthirsty tyrant Suharto resulted in the cold-blooded
murder of 1 million Indonesians. The CIA not only inspired and aided the
Indonesian military coup, but they also supplied lists of the Indonesian
communists and other progressives earmarked for liquidation to the military
junta;
. When in 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor and killed 600,000 East Timorese
within just two months of this invasion, it received the full support of US
imperialism, it being the boast of its then ambassador to the UN, Moynihan,
that he had rendered the UN "utterly ineffective";
. The Gulf War against Iraq, the subsequent bombings that continue up to the
present day, and the cruel sanctions against that country have prematurely
sent 1.5 million innocent Iraqis to their deaths;
. In the short period of just over three years since the overthrow of the
tyrannical and corrupt Mobutu kleptocracy, more than 3 million Congolese
have been massacred, thanks to the intervention by Rwanda and Uganda at the
instigation, and on behalf, of US imperialism;
. The overthrow on 11 September 1973 (exactly 28 years before the events of
11 September 2001), organised by the CIA and Henry Kissinger - who now
fulminates against 'terrorism' - of the democratically-elected Chilean
regime of Salvador Allende by the Pinochet military clique resulted in the
deaths and disappearances of thousands of people;
. The counter-revolutionary wars waged by Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in
Angola, both fully backed by US imperialism, have devastated the economies
of these two countries and claimed more than 3 million lives;
. For years the US gave its full backing to Operation Condor, aimed at the
assassination of opponents of the Chilean and Argentinean military regimes,
resulting in the murder and disappearance of thousands of communists, trade
unionists and other progressives;
. The US support of the Contras in Nicaragua and El Salvador, paid for
through drug trafficking, and its support for countless dictatorial regimes
in Latin America has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives;
. Close to 1.5 million people were exterminated in Afghanistan consequent
upon the war inspired, instigated and funded by US and British imperialism;
. Only yesterday the warmongering neo-Nazi NATO alliance subjected tiny
Yugoslavia for 76 days to terror bombing, which killed several thousands of
people, caused material damage worth at least $100 billion, destroyed
hospitals, bridges, railway lines, television studios, power stations and
residential districts and left the country strewn with depleted uranium -
just as in the case of Iraq;
. the US fully backed, as did Britain, King Hussein of Jordan's massacre of
30,000 Palestinians during Black September (1970);

. US imperialism continues, as it has done all along, to give full
political, diplomatic and material support to the murderous Zionist settler
regime in Israel, with its fascistic and racist ideology, in the latter's
onslaughts on the Palestinian and Lebanese people, not to mention the
support given by it to Israel during the 1967 and 1973 Middle East wars;
. It fully supports the Turkish regime's repression and mass killings of
Kurdish and Turkish workers;
. While supporting every tyrannical regime and tinpot dictator - from
Suharto of Indonesia to Marcos of the Philippines and the medieval Gulf
autocracies - US imperialism has targeted regimes which either stand in the
way of its imperialist plunder or which are truly progressive and mobilise
their people and organise production for satisfying the needs of the masses
rather than attending to the greed of the few at home and abroad. Socialist
countries such as Cuba and North Korea (DPRK), which have suffered from
decades of US economic blockade, are two most important examples of the
latter category of countries.

British imperialism's record is equally hideous. Since the end of the 2nd
World War, Britain's armed forces have been involved in nearly 100 military
interventions abroad, nearly 30 of these in the Middle East alone. The last
statistic is not to be surprised at, since the Middle East is the repository
of 60% of the world's proven oil reserves. Oil is not merely the staple diet
of modern industry, but on it depends the health and fabulous riches of the
giant imperialist oil companies (two of which, BP and Shell, are British and
Anglo-Dutch), as well as the armaments manufacturers, with whom the oil
companies are inextricably linked through investment and interlocking
directorships. No wonder, then, that nearly half of the British Forces are
stationed abroad in close to 30 different countries, in strategic locations
from which they are available at short notice to intervene in the interests
of British imperialism. Britain's human rights record, from Ireland to the
Middle East and the Far East, is one of the worst.

Thus, far from being the defenders of freedom and democracy, Anglo-American
imperialism are the worst possible enemies of democracy, executioners of
other people's liberties, and the protectors of medievalism all over the
world. Far from being the enemies of 'terrorism', they are the chief
perpetrators of terrorism and the principal patrons of every terrorist
regime. For US and British imperialism now to pose as the friends of
democracy, for Bush and Blair to now strut about as the warrior against
'international terrorism' is tantamount to the practitioners of cannibalism
trying to pass themselves off as the champions of vegetarianism. When the
imperialist propaganda organs refer to the events of 11 September as "the
worst terrorist attack in history", they only do so through a convenient
lapse of memory about the bloody crimes and terror committed by imperialism.

(Taken from the November 2001 issue of Lalkar, available at www.lalkar.org).