The war against us all

As we march, men, women and children cower in their homes in Iraq. Bombs explode, bullets fly and the number of dead and maimed increase. It’s easy to see the human cost in terms of suffering and death. That’s why we are here today. Under cover of the war, the state here and in the USA is preparing other attacks on us all.

• Legislation to make strikes illegal. The fire fighters are to be forced to accept the pay deal they’ve been fighting for so long. The state can’t face major industrial unrest at a time of war. It needs the troops to kill Iraqis.
• Ecological disaster. The US claims it is occupying the oil fields to stop “ecological disaster”. This comes from the government that is planning to ravage Alaska, voted down the Kyoto agreement and is trying to make us all eat GM foods.
• More GM. The British government plans to sneak legislation on GM foods through while our attention is turned away.
• Sanitised language. The first casualty is truth. The news uses ‘safe language’ – ‘pockets of resistance’, ‘Saddam loyalists’, ‘suppressing enemy positions’, ‘precision weapons’. This language tries to make us forget what is happening. They want us to forget real humans are dying. It brutalises us all.
• The expense. A cruise missile costs $750,000. They shot off 1000 in one day. That’s over 20 times more than people raised on Red Nose Day!
• The USA wants another $75 billion to fight the war. That’s 40 times the annual UN budget to fight AIDS. Meanwhile our hospitals can’t treat sick people, our schools are crumbling, pensions are slashed and taxes will have to rise to pay for the war.
• This is not the only war going on right now. Don’t forget Chechnya, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Kashmir, Afghanistan ….

This is the perfect time to turn the screws on the state and the bosses.  Strikes in World Wars 1 and 2 were common and led to massive pay rises, yet these are not the only things we seek. Most of all we need freedom, freedom to express ourselves, freedom to change the world and most of all freedom to think.  This is the time to keep up the pressure over the government. All they care about is money, power and dominance, the dominance to do what they please.

When this war is over, where will be next? A ‘democratic’ coup in Saudi Arabia, regime change in Iran or more and more help to the Columbian state to arm its death squads? 

War will continue as long as we allow ourselves to be divided by nations, states and religions. We need to group together whatever our backgrounds to fight this oppression in the world. If we come together we can build a society that is not founded on lies and power, we can build a world that is truly free.