INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE AND THE WAR SYSTEM

 Harry Targ

“2026 Theme: Invest in Peace - For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day

"On 21 September, the world marks the International Day of Peace.

Today, amidst staggering volatility, the search for peace feels overwhelming—but it has never been more urgent.

Peace is more than the absence of war; it is the foundation necessary to collectively tackle humanity’s challenges. It is the lived experience of safety, dignity, opportunities and cooperation in our daily lives.

Under the theme Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day, this year’s International Day of Peace honours the 'everyday architects of peace'—people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability, and building a lasting peace from the ground up.

Remember, peace isn’t just built in conference rooms—it is shaped by everyone, everywhere, every day.

Everyone, everywhere can do their part for peace. Take one small step for peace every day” https://www.un.org/en/observances/international-day-peace

The Capitalist System is a War System

Marx and Engels declared in their famous 1848 manifesto that capitalism was a world system.  Due to cutthroat competition every corporation, every bank, every small business would need to expand, or it would be defeated in the marketplace by more successful competitors. Therefore, competition would lead to consolidation, a shift from many economic actors to declining numbers of them. This process of capital accumulation extended to the entire globe.

Lenin argued that by the dawn of the twentieth century, competition had led to monopolies within countries. States driven by monopolies expanded all across the globe. Competing states often engaged in war. Their expansion also generated resistance, rebellion and revolution around the world. In sum, the capitalist system by its very nature was a war system.

In addition, capitalist economies, particularly imperial powers such as the United States, required natural resources, cheap or slave labor, land, customers for products, and opportunities to invest accumulated profits in overseas corporations, and banks. In the post-World War II period, capitalist expansion even required the establishment of a global debt system that would increase the possibility of penetrating the economies of countries that incurred debts.

The realities that Marx identified in the nineteenth century are relevant today in two ways. First, given technological advances, what economists call neoliberal globalization is the logical extension of his insight that capitalism needs to “establish connections everywhere.”

Second, given episodes of resistance to capitalist expansion, conflict and violence in the global system are likely to occur from time to time among capitalist states (each seeking to enhance their own monopolies), between capitalist states and emerging socialist states that reject the very premises of capitalist economics, and between capitalist states and marginalized people who rebel against capitalist/imperialist intrusion.

In the twentieth century hundreds of wars and covert interventions resulted in deaths exceeding 100 million people. Between 1945 and 1995 the United States alone was involved in wars, civil conflicts, and covert operations that cost more than 10 million deaths. Most of this violence was justified as a response to a demonic Soviet Union and “international communism” threatening “the free world.” The defense of the “free world” usually was fought out in the Global South. In fact, in the twentieth century the vast majority of victims of the capitalist war system were people of color, primarily non-combatants. And adding to the direct human cost have been the devastation of the land, the extraction of basic resources, and the destruction of the environment. 

Impacts of the Capitalist War System in Imperial States

Foreign policy has always been inextricably connected to the struggles for social and economic justice; including worker and human rights. And, as a consequence, foreign policy has always been used as a tool to distract, divide, and cloud the consciousness of working people everywhere. Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party and four-time candidate for president of the United States, was jailed for his speech in Canton, Ohio decrying United States participation in World War I because of its profoundly negative consequences for the working class at home.

Debs pointed out that American “democracy” allowed no real opportunity for workers, the people who fought its wars, to determine whether to go to war or not. Workers were not allowed to hear and read all about the consequences of military participation. Before and during World War I, the United States government created a propaganda arm, The Committee on Public Information, to disseminate information to the citizenry promoting the United States entry into the war in Europe. Opponents of the war, such as Debs, were silenced. 

It was during the war that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and began to establish an alternative to the capitalist war system. President Wilson and his Secretary of State Robert Lansing warned of the danger of this threat to “democracy” and “freedom.” 

As Debs implied, the capitalist war system needed impressionable military recruits to fight the wars in the name of a higher good while banks and corporations expanded their presence on a worldwide basis. But the capitalist war system which recruited foot soldiers also required the accumulation of money capital to pay for the wars and the capacity to develop “connections everywhere.” And after the second world war, during the Cold War, trillions of dollars have been wasted on the establishment of a worldwide network of military bases and outposts; troop deployments; space, drone, aircraft, and nuclear technologies; and a security apparatus that has its electronic and personnel tentacles in virtually every other country.

In addition, the development of a military capability to maintain and expand the capitalist system became a profitable business in its own right. What President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” is a dense network of profitable connections between huge corporations, banks, universities, think tanks, and manufacturing facilities in virtually every city, town, state, and most importantly, Congressional District. The United States after World War II created what Andrew Bacevich, international historian, called a “permanent war economy.”

Economic Consequences of the Capitalist/War System

Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.

Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures. Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current.  And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists.

“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.” Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.

 The Meaning of the Capitalist/War System for Today’s Progressive Movements: Bringing the Peace Movement Back In

Paradoxically, the left and progressive forces in the United States are intuitively aware of the points long ago proclaimed by Marx, Debs, and King. Libraries are full of analyses and data that corroborate the basic arguments made above. But the recent resurgence of a new socialist left and an energized progressive majority, have not developed analyses and programs that make the necessary connections between capitalism and human misery at home and the war system abroad.

First, many grassroots activists, seeing the need to target their energies to local and state politics, and single issues nationally, have taken the view that adding foreign policy to the agenda, complicates movement building. In fact, the exciting campaigns of Bernie Sanders also dealt only marginally with foreign policy. And Sanders mostly spoke of foreign policy when his opponents raised questions about his visits to Nicaragua and Cuba in the 1980s. In retrospect, it seems obvious that progressives should link the possibility of a financially sustainable health care system or free tuition for college to reductions in military spending.

Second, progressives have tactically avoided pressing necessary conversations about the past and present, and how a progressive United States government could participate in the future international system. For example:

There needs to be a serious discussion of twentieth century socialism: both governments and movements. Sectors of the left in the United States have been unwilling to have a textured analysis of the strengths as well as the weaknesses of socialist regimes, what some refer to as “really existing socialism,” and how distortions of those systems were connected to US imperialism.

There needs to be a serious conversation about twenty-first century developments in Cuba, Vietnam, China, the state of Kerala in India, and what remains of the Bolivarian Revolution in Latin America and the growing prominence of the Global South and  such organizations as the BRICS. As long as such conversations are avoided, the progressive base will be diverted by the twentieth century trope about the “evils of communism.”

There needs to be detailed analyses of military spending. Much of that work is being done by the War Resisters League, The Cost of War Project, and others, but little of it finds its way into grassroots campaigns for progressive politicians or campaigns in support of single-payer health insurance.

Finally, there is a need to address important questions not often discussed. Two stand out: first the doctrine of the inevitability of war which cripples everyone’s political consciousness; and second, the celebration of grotesque violence in popular culture. These are not abstract issues that belong only in the classroom or the church sermon. They need to be highlighted. And the writings and speeches of Marx, Debs, and King would support the view that assumptions about the inevitability of war and the glories of violence are intimately connected to the capitalist/war system.

In short, the emerging socialist movements, the burgeoning progressive campaigns, and the peace movement must reconnect in fundamental ways: theoretically and practically. War, the preparation for war, and human misery everywhere are inextricably connected. And these ideas should be part of our conversations this International Day of Peace.

                                    Veterans for Peace

 

THE UNIVERSITY SHOULD BE A SITE FOR CONTESTED TERRAIN

 Harry Targ

Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university.

Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others.

The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education. In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples,  patriarchy, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted.

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-peoples-historian-dave-zirins-new-book-explores-remarkable-life-of-howard-zinn/

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few.

ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events included Governors  such as Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, and John Kasich. ALEC legislative programs included lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers' unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that denied climate change, and more effectively celebrated the "successes" of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation awarded million of dollars to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws, traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Recipients of the organization’s 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” included Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News.

Associations which lobbied for restricting academic freedom in higher education included David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS has sought to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia.

NAS  former president Peter Wood contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.” Presumably he today would endorse legislation, state and national, that regulates what ideas could be discussed in higher education, for example on questions of class, race, and gender.

Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples, and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university. And today the Trump Administration and its allies in states are transforming the very meaning of higher education, precluding contentious ideas as suggested by scholars like Howard Zinn.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

 

THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY, THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND WARS TODAY

Harry Targ

Within days of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country. On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and continued until 2021.

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March 2003. 

Over the last decades, U.S. military budgets have tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers have died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, have died. Meanwhile the United States has maintained over 800 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras and Venezuela and Ecuador in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. Now the U.S. program includes the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters halfway around the globe.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act extended the prerogatives of government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy and most recently rounding up and kidnapping thousands of men, women, and children deemed "illegal" for deportation. And some who protest the activities of ICE have been shot and killed.

Domestically, the decades since 9/11 has been characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. employment, and health care benefits. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, is being threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality.

Support for war overseas and at home is stoked by a so-called “war on terrorism” and an anti-government ideology, made popular earlier by the Reagan administration that lionizes Adam Smith’s claims that only the market can satisfy human needs. Following 9/11, the “beast,” government, has been starved even more resulting in increased demand on workers and institutions with reduced resources, offering “proof” that government never works.

Not all have had to sacrifice during this ten-year “war on terror” and its attendant domestic programs. The rich have gotten richer while the income and wealth of 90 percent of the population have experienced economic stagnation or decline. Media monopolization has facilitated the rise of a strata of pundits who simplify and distort the meaning of events since 9/11 by claiming that war is necessary; the terrorist threat is a growing global threat; as a nation and individually we need to arm ourselves; and subliminally it is people of color who constitute the threat to security and well-being.

Trump and the "New" Imperialism

A factional dispute among foreign policy elites began to emerge in the 1970s about the best strategies and tactics which should be pursued to maximize the continued global economic, political, and military dominance of the United States in the international system. The dispute was not over whether the United States should continue to pursue empire but rather how to continue to achieve it. 

The debates were occasioned by the rise of the countries of the Global South, the societally wrenching experience of the Vietnam War, the growth of power and influence of the former Soviet Union, and since its collapse, the emergence of China as a new global economic, political and military power. In addition, the new international economy was becoming more global, that is to say more interconnected. 

Debates about strategy, tactics, surfaced between the neoliberal globalists who emphasized so-called free trade, financial speculation, and the promotion of a neoliberal agenda that advocated for the privatization of all public activities by states and the development of austerity policies that would shift wealth from the many to the few. The international debt system would be the vehicle for pressuring poor and rich countries to transform their own economic agendas. This faction dominated United States foreign policy making for generations, particularly from Reagan to Clinton to Obama. In political/military terms, they have sought to push back challengers to neoliberal capitalism: Russia, China, populist Latin American countries, and they have advocated advancing US economic interests in Asia and Africa. Many of the institutions of the neoliberal globalists, sometimes called the “deep state” included the CIA, NSA, and other security agencies.

The other faction represented by President Trump and some of his key aides prefer economic nationalism, restricted trade, building walls, avoiding diplomacy, and they are driven by a deeply held white supremacist ideology. They believe, as political scientist Samuel Huntington argued, that we are engaged in a civilizational conflict with Islam, a fourth world war. The neoliberal globalists undermined Ukraine, put more NATO troops in Eastern Europe and want to depose Putin and weaken Russia. This is not on the Trump agenda.

The forbearers of the current generation of Trumpian economic nationalists, came from the so-called “neo-conservatives,” historically organized around the 1990s lobby group, The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and in the 1950s and 1970s of The Committee for the Present Danger (CPD). Both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives share a common vision of a global political economy controlled by the United States but the former prefer selective use of military force and greater use of economic and diplomatic pressure and covert interventionism while justifying policy on humanitarian grounds, including expanding democracy. Since, they say, the United States represents the hope of democracy in the world, it is as Madeleine Albright called it. “the indispensable nation.” 

The neoconservatives, in a sense more frank, argued that with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the United States was the hegemonic power. With that power PNAC argued, the United States should have imposed a world order and state regimes that comported with US interests and ideology. Over the years, the policies of the two factions converged; hence economic penetration, covert interventions, occasional wars, and support for expanding military spending. But, often for reasons of domestic rather than international politics, conflicts between the two factions resurface.

Now the United States, under President Trump, has relaunched trade wars, advocated a trillion-dollar military budget, kidnapped the President of Venezuela and taken over the entirety of its economy, escalated the brutal economic blockade of Cuba and supported Israel's genocidal war on the Palestinian people and has launched brutal bombing of Iran. "Humanitarian interventionism" has been supplemented by the militarism proposed by the neoconservatives of the 1990s. While we mourn the tragic deaths of 9/11, we must remember that the "war on terror" since then has been rationalized by it.

HORRIFIC MOMENTS IN UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY

 Harry Targ

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Image from Dr. Martin Luther King.net.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967

Political upheaval in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia is reshaping migration trends in Europe. The number of illegal border-crossing detections in the EU started to surge in 2011, as thousands of Tunisians started to arrive at the Italian island of Lampedusa following the onset of the Arab Spring. Sub-Saharan Africans who had previously migrated to Libya followed in 2011–2012, fleeing unrest in the post-Qaddafi era. The most recent surge in detections along the EU's maritime borders has been attributed to the growing numbers of Syrian, Afghan, and Eritrean migrants and refugees. Jeanne Park, “Europe’s Migration Crisis,” CFR Backgrounder,  September 23, 2015, www.cfr.org/migration/eurpes-migration-crisis)

The Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder recognized the massive crisis of migration brought on by upheavals all across the Global South. It identifies the massive migrations from Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the Horn of Africa. But, interestingly enough the title suggests that the focus of concern was not as much about the pain and suffering of the people forced to migrate as the problem migration presented to the countries of the European Union.

A dispassionate analysis of the causes of this twenty-first century wave of migration should inevitably lead to what may be referred to as “horrific moments in United States foreign policy.” These horrific moments, since the late 1940s, are central to understanding the pain and suffering of millions of people around the world. Horrific refers to human tragedies of such magnitude that they have left millions killed, injured, displaced, or unable to sustain life because of forces external to their ideas and actions. Moments refers to key policy decisions that reasonable persons can view as instrumental to the development of these human tragedies. United States foreign policy suggests that the United States has made policy decisions that have been inextricably connected to the human tragedies of the last sixty years.

Six such horrific moments in United States foreign policy need to be recognized for their consequences for humankind. First, in 1950 the United States embarked on global military operations in response to conflicts on the Korean peninsula. Korean political life was in disarray after World War II and the United States and the former Soviet Union stepped into the fray to “temporarily’ occupy the North and South. The growing conflict between Koreans was not started by the two powers but was the result of internal political struggle among the Korean people. The point here is that after North Korean troops invaded South Korea, the United States, officially supported by the then pro-US United Nations, launched a large-scale military response. And, in violation of the UN resolution, the United States took the war to the North. 

The end result of the expanded Korean War was that it set the precedent for United States sending troops anywhere in the world. The war justified dramatic increases in military spending. And it made military spending a permanent fixture of US economic and political life. Most importantly, it destroyed the Korean peninsula, particularly the economic infrastructure in the North; led to millions of Koreans killed, wounded, and displaced; and 37,000 US soldiers killed. The Korean War was the first instance of many in which the United States and the Soviet Union would be fighting the Cold War in the Global South.

Second, the Korean War established the principle that the US would engage in major wars elsewhere as circumstances were seen as necessary. The next war was in Vietnam. The war began in 1950 and the “moment” continued until 1975.  The long agonizing experience involved repeating decisions escalating war: from funding the French colonial overseers of Vietnam; to creating and training a new government in South Vietnam; to sending thousands of specially trained counter-insurgency fighters; to transferring over 500,000 US soldiers to Vietnam; to massive bombing; the dropping of napalm; the killing of 3-4 million Vietnamese people; and unleashing genocidal violence in neighboring Cambodia.

Third, following multiple military and covert operations, the Reagan Administration embarked on a war against Central American peoples leading to about 200,000 deaths, injuries, and thousands set afoot seeking economic and military survival through desperate migrations to the north. Nicaragua was targeted for attack because the President’s neoconservative policy advisors regarded that country as a surrogate of the dreaded Soviet Union. US money and military advisors were allotted to help a dictatorship try to defeat a peasant guerrilla movement in El Salvador. The United States funded Guatemalan militarists who were engaging in a genocidal policy against the indigenous people of that country. Honduras was armed and became the military base for the wars of Central America. And the brutal blockade of Cuba, begun in 1960, continues to this day.

Fourth, in the twenty-first century the Bush administration waged war against Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Taliban, who came to power in the 1990s after a long civil war in Afghanistan which began in 1979, created relative stability but were alleged to be partners to the crimes of 9/11. President Bush ordered the Afghanistan government to release Osama Bin Laden to US authorities or face war. When they refused the US attacked that country and thus created permanent instability. The war on Afghanistan was to become América’s longest war. And Afghanistan is poorer and more devastated, now than in October, 2001, when the war started.

The lies about why the United States had to make war on Iraq are common knowledge. Even if morality and international law are not brought to the analysis, everything the United States did in Iraq was wrong. After nearly a decade of war, The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) emerged with powerful military force and some popular support and challenged the Iraqi government, the Kurds, the Turkish government, the Syrian government, and any other outside forces.

Fifth, if the regional instability brought on by the Afghan and Iraq wars were not enough, the Obama administration, with NATO collaboration, led a massive bombing assault that destroyed the relatively stable Libyan regime setting in motion, internal violence, instability, and emigration.

Sixth, and throughout this time, the United States has transferred billions of dollars to Israel. And after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the latter launched a genocidal war on all Palestinian people and targeted populations in Lebanon, Syria, and more recently Iran. Israel’s attack on Iran was coupled with a Trump Administration war on Iran, which now has evolved into a regional war with global economic consequences.

Several lessons can be drawn from these “horrific moments in United States foreign policy.” The pursuit of United States hegemony has generated violence across the globe. This violence has destabilized stable political regimes, led to mass slaughter of the peoples of these countries, created opposition forces which now are targeting American citizens and institutions in the affected areas. In addition, the United States and other arms merchants have increased the flow of armaments to Asia, the Persian Gulf the Middle East, and Latin America. The overwhelming casualties of war since the end of World War II have been citizens of the Global South, people of color. In addition, these horrific moments have cost Americans billions of dollars and probably almost one million deaths and injuries sustained by United States soldiers. 

Finally, referring to the migration problem that the Council of Foreign Relations Backgrounder referred to above, much of it is due to the horrific moments in United States foreign policy. The Korean and Vietnam Wars legitimized war strategies and military interventionism to achieve US global goals. These strategies continued in Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Iran creating a worldwide and desperate population of people fleeing war, ethnic hatreds, and poverty.

 

w

https://www.warresisters.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/anaconner.png

REMEMBERING 9/11s: a revised repost

 Harry Targ

9/11 in Chile

On the bright and sunny morning of September 11, 1973, aircraft bombed targets in Valparaiso, Chile, and moved on to the capital, Santiago. Following a well-orchestrated plan, tanks rolled into the capital city, occupied the central square, and fired on the Presidential palace. Inside that building, President Salvador Allende broadcast a final address to his people and fatally shot himself as soldiers entered his quarters.

Thousands of Allende supporters were rounded up and held in the city’s soccer stadium and many, including renowned folk singer Victor Jara, were tortured and killed. For the next fifteen years, Chilean workers were stripped of their right to form unions, political parties and elections were eliminated, and the junta led by General Augusto Pinochet ruled with an iron fist all but ignored outside the country until Chileans began to mobilize to protest his scheme to become President for life.

9/11 in the United States

 

Of course, 9/11/01 was different. The United States was attacked by foreign terrorists, approximately 3,000 citizens and residents were killed at the World Trade Center in New York, over a rural area in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon. People all over the world expressed their sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks as the American people experienced shock and dismay.

But then everything began to change. Within days of the terrorist attacks, members of President Bush’s cabinet began to advocate a military assault on Iraq, a longstanding target of the Washington militarists of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Now is the time, they said, to take out Saddam Hussein, seize control of Iraqi oil fields, and reestablish United States control over the largest share of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf region. Cooler heads prevailed for a time, however. We cannot attack Iraq, critics said, because Iraq had nothing to do with the crimes in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

So it was decided that a war would be waged on Afghanistan, because the headquarters of the shadowy organization Al Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, was said to be in that country (even though the Taliban government had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack). On October 6, 2001, that war was initiated and continued until August 2021 (even though Bin Laden was killed in May, 2011).

Shortly after launching the war on Afghanistan, the neo-cons in the Bush administration began a campaign to convince the American people that we needed to make war on Iraq. Lies were articulated that the Iraqi dictator was really behind the global terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He was part of a global Islamic fundamentalist cabal. At last, despite evidence to the contrary, the mobilization of millions of Americans against war, growing global resentment against the Bush Doctrine justifying preemptive wars, the United States attacked Iraq in March, 2003. That war too continued for years.

Over the last two decades, U.S. military budgets tripled, thousands of U.S. soldiers died or sustained irreparable injuries, and an estimated one million Afghan and Iraqi people, mostly civilians, died. Meanwhile the United States maintained over 700 military installations around the world, declared the great land and sea area around the globe at the equator the “arc of instability,” and engaged in direct violence or encouraged others to do so, from Colombia to Honduras in the Western Hemisphere, to Ethiopia and Somalia in the Horn of Africa, to Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, and Afghanistan in East Asia. Every president from Bush on declared that United States military overreach to be in the national interest of the country and to serve the humanitarian interest of the world. In recent years U.S. military programs have included the use of computer operated aircraft, drones, that can target and kill anywhere based on decisions from command headquarters halfway around the globe. And the United States continues to have close ties with Israel and share in the launching of the war on Iran in February 2026.

Meanwhile at home, the Patriot Act extended the prerogatives of the government to launch a program claiming to be essential to protect the people from domestic terrorists: spying on Americans; incarcerating people from virtually anywhere deemed to be a security threat; and establishing a political climate that intimidates critics of United States foreign policy. And now ICE targets political opponents, immigrants, and others for kidnapping or murder.

In addition, domestically, the decade since 9/11 was characterized by sustained assaults on the basic living standards of the bottom 90 percent of the population in terms of wealth and income. Unemployment rose dramatically. Job growth ground to a halt. Health care benefits declined while costs skyrocketed. Virtually every public institution in America, except the military, was threatened by budget cuts: education, libraries, public health facilities, highways and bridges, fire and police protection, environmental quality. And over the two decades of war and military spending, these domestic problems have persisted, and with the pandemic people have been made more vulnerable. As the Cost of War summarized recently:

 An estimated 3.6-3.8 million indirect deaths have occurred in post-9/11 war zones, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as of 2023. The total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown. Some people were killed in the fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease and malnutrition. 

https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/overview-true-costs-post-911-wars

Where Do We Go From Here
So, the United States 9/11 event was not the first. The Chilean 9/11 preceded the U.S. one by 28 years. Its people experienced a brutal military coup. And in the United States mass murder was committed by 19 terrorists. But in both cases the 9/11 event was followed by violence, threats to democracy, and economic shifts from much of the population to the wealthy and political/military elites. In both cases, draconian economic policies and constraints on civil and political rights were defined as required by threats to the “homeland.”

As the anniversary of the U.S. 9/11 is remembered, it is critical to reflect upon how the murder of 3,000 citizens and residents was defined as an opening salvo in a perpetual “war on terrorism:” how this war trumped traditional civil liberties afforded by the constitution; and how this war, it was said, must be waged at whatever cost to the lives and economic resources of the country. And, as with the Cold War, military spending took priority over every other activity for which the government had a role. 9/11/73 caused the Chilean people pain and suffering that they are still working to overcome. Unless the American people mobilize to challenge the policies, foreign and domestic, that were justified by the tragedy of 9/11, the United States will continue to move down a similar path the Chilean people traveled after their 9/11.

 

LABOR DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES

Harry Targ

(This essay was written a decade ago. However, the need for solidarity among a newly rising global working class is needed now more than ever to combat war, white supremacy, neo-fascism, and climate disaster. The spirit of such as May Day globally and Labor Day in the United States survive everywhere as people seek to work with others to secure empowerment. Give support and thanks to workers of all kinds who are rising everywhere and who are saying “no” to exploitation and imperialism.

Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy

During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present) enormous changes have occurred and are occurring in the global political economy. First, the United States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change. In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of racism and patriarchy in public and private life.

As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus, capitalist investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt. Now, the Trump Administration is using trade as a weapon to force allies to comply with US economic needs. 

Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor countries. Beginning in the late 1970s wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization.

Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border interactions-economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to transform the world into one integrated global political economy. 

And today the new system of artificial intelligence and attendant financial supports, the construction of data centers, and the articulation of dystopian visions of the future advocated by Silicon Valley elites are driving further transformation of the system of monopoly capitalism into new uncharted and dangerous directions for humankind and the environment.

In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the United States has played a leading role: creating a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization.

Should We Be Thinking About Socialism Today?

A rich and vital set of images of a socialist future comes down to us from the utopians, anarchists, and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, the marchers of the first Labor Day and the variety of experiments with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons why individuals and movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is, that capitalism historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a system borne and fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers, tactics of division based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for the natural environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization are merely extensions of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental driving force of the capitalist mode of production.

Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist future that has four main dimensions.

First, we need to build institutions that are created and staffed by the working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense, the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90 percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.

Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the people.

Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.

Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry, singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving with others in humanly sustainable communities.

Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation, enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not labeled as such, represents human survival.

Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless we can make a contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to play.

We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working classes participate in all political decisions.

We need to work on campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages, single payer health care, climate change etc. Our contribution can include making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We must remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require building socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a single payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a broader socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our debates about single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about equality for example?

We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the context of a sharing and cooperative society.

By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.

“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong”

From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eK9ZXf-Ow