Enlisting soldiers in struggle against DU
Opportunity for anti-war movement
Following are excerpts from a talk by John Catalinotto of
the International Action Center at the Rosa Luxemburg
Conference in Berlin Jan. 13. The conference's theme was
"Human-Rights Imperialism and Resistance," with speakers from
Cuba and the progressive movements in Africa, South America,
the Middle East and Germany.
The daily newspaper Junge Welt organizes this conference
annually when tens of thousands of people from all over Germany
come to Berlin to pay tribute to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht.
These two founders of the Communist Party of Germany were
murdered by the German military on Jan. 15, 1919, just days
after the communists took responsibility for the Berlin
workers' abortive attempt to seize power earlier that
month.
The two revolutionaries are famous and beloved for their
courageous opposition to Germany's role in World War I. At the
time, the majority of the Social Democratic Party leadership
betrayed their promises to fight against their country's role
in that murderous war.
After this much talk it's time to come back to what we have
to do. And also to come back to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht, whose memory we are commemorating this weekend, and
to Eugene V. Debs, who led the fight of the socialists in the
U.S. against World War I.
How can we continue to build solidarity between the German
and U.S. anti-war movements? How can we broaden this to build
solidarity between the working classes of both countries?
When Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Debs said the main enemy was
their own ruling classes, the countries they lived in were at
war with each other. That may seem unlikely now, if for no
other reason than that the U.S. is too powerful.
But a more pressing task for the anti-war movements today is
to work out a joint solidarity with those who are under attack
by U.S. and German imperialism--whether this is by the banks or
the armies or the intelligence services.
When U.S. or German imperialism wages an all-out propaganda
attack on a country or a leader, it means that they are
planning war. We have to be ready to respond even if we don't
know all the facts. We have to anticipate the war and stand up
to it. We have to be ready to defend the people--whether they
are in Iraq or Yugoslavia or Belarus or Zimbabwe--and to defend
the governments of those countries if they are resisting
imperialism.
We have to be capable of answering what I call the "Racak
attack." You know, what happened in Kosovo in January 1999. The
U.S. agent William Walker called a gunfight a massacre. This
signaled that Washington was about to launch the war.
Two of the people who worked with the Berlin tribunal that
put NATO on trial for its crimes in that war, George Pumphrey
and Doris Pumphrey, wrote a wonderful paper exposing what
really happened at Racak. We used this paper at our NATO war
crimes tribunal in New York.
But I'm not talking about how we analyze events later. It's
how we first react quickly and then quickly gather enough facts
to support our convictions, and then how we spread this truth
around the world.
Now can we find a way of working together to respond even
more quickly and with even more solidarity to the next
aggression? Can we possibly do it to stop the aggression before
it starts? The imperialists seem so powerful today. But they
have a weak point. It's called the Vietnam syndrome.
During the Vietnam War I helped build the American
Servicemen's Union that fought against the war. The soldiers in
the imperialist army are not automatons who just follow orders
out of a stupid loyalty to their masters. A few may be willing
to kill for their masters. But almost no one is willing to die
for them.
In any war we must remember to reach out to the soldiers. I
know there were people here in Germany--I met Tobias Pflueger
and heard of others--who appealed to the troops not to fight in
the illegal NATO war against Yugoslavia. This was an important
step and we must find a way to take it again.
How will we reach out to the soldiers? Right now we have an
opportunity. There is the crisis over depleted uranium. We can
defend the rights of the soldiers now in the Balkans to get out
of the dangers there from DU. We can demand a full
investigation. We can demand that DU be banned.
And at the same time we can reach out to the other victims
of U.S./NATO aggression. We can demand that NATO be responsible
for removing DU waste from Yugoslavia, and that the United
States pay to clean up Iraq.
We can demand, for example, that the scientists and doctors
from Iraq be allowed to come to Europe and the United States to
take part in the investigation of DU poisoning. They have the
experience. But they have been isolated for 10 years by the
sanctions. We can invite them to come and speak of their
experiences.
There is no contradiction between helping the soldiers to
organize for their rights and helping the Iraqis break the
sanctions and demanding that the imperialists pay for cleaning
up the Balkans and Iraq.
Right now we see contradictions somewhere else. Between Rome
and Washington, between Paris and Washington. Perhaps between
Berlin and Washington.
We--the anti-war movements--should remain in solidarity with
each other. But we can take advantage of the contradictions
among our enemies--our own ruling classes.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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