Black Left Unity Network on Syria

Some of Us Still Oppose U.S. Militarism: Statement from The Black Left Unity Network on Syria

It is both an irony of history and a reflection of the right-wing trajectory of U.S. politics and culture that on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington where African Americans and progressives took a stand for social justice, that U.S. warships are positioning themselves for yet another attack on a nation in the global South. This latest imperialist adventure being ordered by the country’s  first “black” President.

The pending attack on Syria by the U.S. along with the second rate colonial powers of Britain and France are demonstrating once again that international law, morality and even commonsense are meaningless in the blind and desperate desire to maintain Euro-American global dominance.

We in the Black Left Unity Network, vigorously opposed the decision to wage war on the people of Syria. We remind the supporters of this action of the consequences of U.S. and NATO attacks on the sovereign state of Libya supposedly to save lives, with the result being the death of over 50,000 people!

It is only in the imagination of individuals whose consciousness has been infected with the disease of white supremacy and U.S. exceptionalism, that the idea that the United States, still the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, as Dr. King so accurately stated, would have the moral authority to inflict a punitive strike on Syria for supposedly killing its own people.

We are clear that the war on Syria has nothing to do with any supposed concern for the lives of the people of Syria. If there were real “humanitarian” concerns for people facing oppression in the so-called middle-east then the U.S. would intervene in Palestine to “save” the Palestinians from Israel, liberate the people from the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, stand with the people fighting for democracy in Bahrain, cut off aid to the generals in Egypt and cease funding Al-Qaeda linked Jihadist groups in Syria.

The ten year U.S. imperialist led war in Iraq made clear, that the U.S. is not above lying in charging governments that it wants to invade with using or having weapons of mass destruction. Not only were there no weapons of mass destruction, According to the Cost of War Project, “the U.S. war against Iraq killed at least 190,000 people, including men and women in uniform, contractors, and civilians and will cost the United States $2.2 trillion.”

And in the U.S., August 29th marks the eight anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States forever altering the lives of thousands of black working class and poor people forever, because the federal and state governments failed to allocate funds to repair substandard levees.  Yet under Bush and Obama they found hundreds of billions to bail out the corporations. In New Orleans more than a hundred thousand majority black people who were transported and forced to flee out of the city in a blatant program of ethic cleansing never made it back to the city eight years after. In California thousands of largely black and Latino prisoners are refusing food to protest the inhumane conditions that many have suffered for decades and across the country a black person is gunned down by an agent of the U.S. police force every 28 hours as part of the continuous domestic War on black America.  These are just a few of the “humanitarian concerns” that could be addressed right in the borders of the U.S. if there was a real concern for ending human rights abuses and protecting people.

But we are not naive, we know that the war being waged against black and brown people’s globally by the white West has one objective – to maintain the global structure of Western imperialism by controlling and dominating  the populations of the world by force. That is why it is not ironic  that across the U.S. funds are being cut for critical public services and social programs, claiming a lack of resources, while millions of dollars can be found to support whatever military mission is identified that advances the interests of the Euro-American oligarchy.

That is why opposing the corporate/State war machine of U.S. imperialism is not only a moral necessity but a strategic imperative that unites all who can still see though the ideological fog of a false humanitarian that conceals the true enemies of humanity – The U.S., its white supremacist Western allies and the oppressive governments they support.

Historically the U.S. black left has always taken a stand against U.S. imperialism from Haiti and Cuba through to the Philippines, Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela and all of the countries in between. Today we continue that principled stand with clarity and an unshakable commitment to our belief in the possibility of a new global order liberated from the savageries of U.S. and Western imperialism.

As we fight against the U.S. War on Black America and build the Black liberation movement to strengthen this fight, we must mobilize opposition to all U.S. imperialist wars!

www.Blackleftunity.org     
www.blackleftunity.blogspot.com
www.blackactivistzine.org
www.jblun.org                   

Contact: Saladin Muhammad -252-314-2363-