Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 1, January 4, 2003
One of the darkest poem prophecies of world literature begins like this (in Jesper Jensen's Danish translation):
On July 12 in the year 2003
The globe received the message from radio and television:
A fleet of planes from our air police
Are now to exterminate mankind
(…)
On July 13, thousand planes took off
Completely loaded with gas and bacteria on board
And carried out the last order of the World Government:
The total, global genocide
The lines above were written by the German Erich Kastner in 1930.
In 1930, no state possessed the means for mass extermination of mankind. In 2003, the technology to do so has been developed long ago, and the science fiction scenario from both before Hitler's assumption of power and the development of the atomic bomb does no longer sound impossible. Today, the world's most aggressive powers - the US superpower and its closest allies, Zionist Israel and the old colonial power, the UK - possess all the atomic, chemical and bacteriological weapons to carry out "the total, global genocide".
One thing is certain: The year 2003 will be a year of war, the third year in the global war proclaimed by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001. The war against Afghanistan is far from over with the US-Western occupation of the country. Also Danish soldiers are participating in the continuous bombardments and occupation, while the Afghan freedom fighters have taken up arms for putting an end to the invasion. But the next big target of the "War against Terrorism" has been selected long ago, and the preparations for a big war against Iraq, with the purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and getting US control over the huge oil resources of Iraq and the region, are now so advanced that it will break out when the US President gives the order. On the whole, the troop build-up has been finished. A.P. Moeller (the biggest Danish capitalist, translator's note) has made his contribution for the billions of blood money that his company receives for transporting troops and equipment to the new slaughter at the Persian Gulf.
The war on Iraq would have been going on now, and Baghdad maybe already conquered,
if it had been up to Bush and Co. alone. Their plans for war in autumn, or at
Christmas 2002 at the latest, were thwarted by an anti-war movement of a magnitude
not seen hitherto on the world scale before the bombs have started falling.
This does not mean that the concrete threat of war has been averted - only that
it has been postponed for a short time, and now, at the turn of the year, the
danger of war against Iraq is as acute as ever.
The dominant fact at the commencement of the new year: The world is in a deep
economic crisis; mass poverty is spreading more quickly than ever among the
world's billions of people; illnesses and hunger are ravaging the globe; the
number of refugees is increasing, and the only "offer" that the ruling
have in this situation is looting war.
For the last years, world opinion has been rooted to the so-called "terror
threat" even though the total number of victims of terrorist actions in
the world in 2002 was lower than the number of traffic fatalities in Denmark.
New enemy pictures are replacing each other in accordance with the Wild West
concept: Now, Osama Bin Laden is again called Saddam Hussein, and later this
year, there will be another name.
To the humanist Kastner, it was hard to see any way out of the surrealistic
universe of capitalism, and he let the absurd logic of capitalism find its inevitable
end.
To a new generation who is taking to the streets against the wars of capitalism,
in defence of life, and for creating a future for the human beings, the choice
is becoming still more clear: The old world, the world of capitalism, is not
working. It has failed in all fields. The dreams and hopes for another world
are growing more and more. With the new catastrophes of capitalism, it will
also be still clearer that another world means revolution and socialism.
Either that or the end of the world.
December 30, 2002