Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 21, October 26, 2002
On October 26, the international day of mass protest against a new war against
Iraq will take place. In Washington and San Francisco, in Berlin, in Sweden
and South Korea, and in a series of other countries around the world, there
will be large-scale demonstrations against the war, which is an acute threat
hanging over not only the Iraqi people, but over all the peoples of the world.
The threat has a name: the plan of US imperialism to ensure world hegemony.
This project is far from being just a dream of ultra-reactionary Americans;
it is a concrete project into which the Bush administration is pumping the enormous
political, economic, propagandist, and, not at least, military resources of
the US. It is the dream of the US monopolies even though it is Bush, Rumsfeld
or Cheney, who are the voices and faces.
The contemplated criminal aggressive war against Iraq is just one war in an
endless series of wars that the US is intending to unleash in order to ensure
its world hegemony, a world hegemony that has been unambiguously formulated
in the notorious Bush doctrine, "The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America".
Now, only the massive resistance of the peoples can hinder the war against Iraq. Only the revolutionary struggle of the peoples can put an end to the dreams of US imperialism of ensuring world hegemony by using an unprecedented military force. In the twentieth century, the world saw Hitler's Germany, a ferocious aggressive imperialist power, which also had the goal of conquering world hegemony by military means. But even the ambitions and military strength of Hitler fade in comparison to US imperialism at the beginning of the new millennium. The American millennium is, if possible, an even bigger threat and challenge for the peoples than Hitler was.
In Denmark, there will be demonstrations in four cities on October 26; in front
of the US Embassy and the national parliament in Copenhagen, in Aarhus, Odense
and Esbjerg. In Copenhagen, the creation of the initiative "No War Against
Iraq" which includes 43 parties, organizations and movements, as well as
hundreds of individuals, has resulted in a broader unification against a concrete
war than has been seen for a long time, and this even before the war has been
initiated. This broadness is the expression of the massive opposition in the
Danish population against a new war against Iraq and against any form of Danish
participation in that war. It expresses the still stronger rejection of the
war policy of the Bush administration and US imperialism and of the obedience
of the Danish government. It is a big step forward for the Danish anti-war movement
that such coalition has been created, and the Workers' Communist Party of Denmark
(APK) sees this only as the first step in a long struggle against the latest
American war project. The coalition must be enlarged if the war is postponed
or breaks out.
In Denmark, as in many other places in the world, the youth has been at the
head of trying to stop Bush's wars. Now also the working class and other broad
popular strata, including the progressive intellectuals, are beginning to reject
the war.
As a party and through its participation in anti-war movements like "Stop the War Against Terror" in Copenhagen, the APK has contributed actively and considerably to the creation and strengthening of these mass initiatives. This is a fact that we are proud of and find necessary to point out. It is the initiative of a genuine communist party, which has built a basis upon which a broad anti-war movement can arise. This is also a fact, which not only the bourgeois media, but also many of the leftist organizations which like to describe the APK as "sectarian" and impossible to cooperate with, will pass by in silence. We are seeking to prove, in practise, that the opposite is true: a communist policy creates and unites broad popular movements; opportunist policy, hanger's on policy, parliamentary daydreams split and paralyse.
This issue of Kommunistisk Politik (Communist Policy, translator's note)
is a bit of a special issue with the objective of reflecting the broadness of
the anti-war movement, internationally and in Denmark itself. Therefore, also
many non-communist voices will be heard in the issue. At the same time, this
issue is a presentation of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist
Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO) of which the APK is a member. The ICMLPO
is an international communist grouping which was created in the beginning of
the 1990s with the aim of strengthening the revolutionary conscience, direction
and activity, underlining that it is not Marxism-Leninism, revolutionary communism,
which has failed, as bourgeois propaganda is alleging, but the deviation from
Marxism-Leninism, modern revisionism, which has caused catastrophes both for
socialism and in the capitalist countries.
Therefore, the founding declaration (from Quito, Ecuador in 1994, translator's
note) and the latest joint resolution of the ICMLPO, "Stop a New Imperialist
War Against Iraq", have been reprinted.
October 22, 2002