Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!


Thousands of ordinary people were killed when hijacked passenger planes flew into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September. The death of civilians is mourned, while the world waits for the US and Britain to unleash their ‘War on Terrorism’ on the poor of Afghanistan. Within hours of the attack US President Bush declared this as ‘the first war of the 21st century’. Ironically, on the same day in London there were protests against the British arms fair, where delegates had come to shop for the latest weapons of mass destruction to fuel the 40 wars already raging around the world. In reality Britain and the USA create, train and arm the terrorists and tyrants they claim to oppose.

The self-proclaimed leaders of the ‘free world’ have whipped up the patriotic frenzy necessary to gain the moral consent from the public for the inevitable military backlash. ‘This is a war against democracy and civilisation itself’ roar the politicians and the corporate press, exploiting the shock and sense of vulnerability of ordinary people.

We are seeing the imperialist war machine in motion. The rest of the world ceases to exist as newspapers print maps of terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and horror stories about bogus asylum seekers smuggling biological warfare through the Channel Tunnel to attack British cities. The media frenzy criminalising refugees and Muslims has given a green light to a racist backlash. Within one week: the East London Mosque had received telephone death threats, a taxi driver, an Afghani refugee, was left paralysed from the neck down after being attacked in west London by racists, an eighteen year old Muslim women wearing a veil was beaten with baseball bats, and a Mosque was burnt down in Bolton. The racist backlash has not been confined to Britain: in Australia, a school bus was attacked and a Mosque fire-bombed, in the United States a Sikh was shot and murdered, and in Canada a Hindu Temple was burnt down.

This shows that these vile racist attacks will not stop at the Islamic community, just as the racist hysteria against asylum seekers does not stop at refugees. It will affect all minority ethnic groups. Britain is the only country in Europe to send asylum seekers straight into goals under the Labour Government’s racist Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. Now they face further persecution under the pretext of combating terrorism. Many of these people are fleeing from brutal regimes, like Turkey, which are supported by British capitalism.

The War on Terrorism has provided the British government with the justification it needs to further erode our civil liberties. There is talk of introducing identity cards, increasing surveillance and clamping down on all forms of dissent. The fight against racism and all forms of injustice will become much harder, especially the struggle against state racism, the victimisation of asylum seekers and the cover up of police brutality and deaths in custody. Blair weeps crocodile tears for the victims of New York, but he will not meet the families of the over 1,500 people who have died in custody in Britain since 1990.

Since the Second World War, 30 million people have been killed in conflicts. Britain has been involved in most of these, and the Labour Party has supported the imperialists every time, except during Suez Crisis where it took the side of the United States. The US-British ‘special-relationship’ is forged in the infliction of terror and death. 5,000 Iraqi children die every month as a result of the US-British enforced blockade. And since the attacks, the US-sponsored Israeli regime has intensified its brutal programme of annihilation of the Palestinian people. Tony Blair and Jack Straw have made it clear that Britain remains a loyal partner to the US in its war of vengeance.

In reality, the biggest killer in the world is poverty. 14 million children die every year from malnutrition and diarrhoea, let alone easily preventable diseases like typhoid and malaria. That is one child every two seconds! As Cuban president Fidel Castro pointed out, it is the equivalent to a Hiroshima bomb being dropped on the children of the world every three days. The poor people of the world are at war with poverty and they are losing.

We need a truly anti-imperialist movement that will combat the root cause of that poverty, and of the insidious system that creates and arms terrorists like bin Laden; that is capitalism. To confront capitalism we must build a mass movement here in Britain, a unity of activists, working class and oppressed people with the poor and exploited of the world, who face the wrath of imperialist military might itching to restore its control over the ‘new world order.’ We must build an opposition to the war hysteria, the racist backlash and attacks on basic civil rights. It must be an anti-imperialist, anti-racist opposition.

• Stop the war drive!
• Stop scape-goating Muslims and asylum seekers!
• Justice for the victims of racist attacks, police brutality and deaths in custody!
• Oppose the racist Immigration and Asylum Act!
• Oppose the racist Labour government!

Contact us, get a copy of our newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
call: 020 7837 1688 or email: rcgfrfi@easynet.co.uk or write to the address below.




For more information about the racist, imperialist history of the Labour Party read: Labour: a party fit for imperialism, and about the imperialists role in the Middle East read: The new warlords: from the Gulf War to recolonisation of the Middle East. Now available for (including p&p) £2.50 or £5 for both.
Larkin Publications, BCM Box 5909, London, WC1N 3XX, 020 7837 1688, rcgfrfi@easynet.co.uk , www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk