Propaganda statement posted to the National Democratic Front Philippines (NDFP or NDF) Website (Jul 22, 2020):
US-led wars and types of weapons in the era of modern imperialism
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson Emeritus, International League of Peoples’ Struggle
Since the advent of modern imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, the monopoly capitalist states have engaged in wars of aggression or counterrevolution of varying scales and such inter-imperialist wars as World War I and II. For the purpose, they have made use of military and private-sector science and technology to research and develop both conventional and nonconventional weapons of mass destruction of various types, including chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological. As one consequence, top US defense corporations emerged bigger and globally dominant and profited from government contracts as well as got “free” technology from government-funded research and development.
Conventional weapons are those weapons deployed primarily for their explosive, kinetic or incendiary potential, especially against combatants in the battlefield. But their scope of destruction can also cause widespread death among the civilians at the same time, such as through carpet bombing, firebombs, and the use of white phosphorous, napalm and cluster bombs. Even if the intended main targets are military force and facilities, the nonconventional weapons of mass destruction have the potential to destroy in one moment entire civilian populations, the social infrastructure and the environment, and damage them in a lasting way.
Because of space constraint, I will give historical backgrounds very briefly and I will try to focus on the wars and weapons of mass destruction for which the imperialist states are responsible in recent times after the Cold War of the US and the now-defunct Soviet Union. The imperialist powers of today, including China, hold the biggest stockpiles of both conventional and nonconventional weapons of mass destruction.
The US stands as the supreme terrorist power in accordance with the Nuremberg principle for having produced both conventional and unconventional weapons of mass destruction and used them for blackmail, military blockade, and wars of aggression in ways similar to or even surpassing those used by Hitlerite Germany. In 2019, the US also remains the number one supplier in the global arms trade.
The US is heir to to the violence and brutality of British colonialism in the conquest of what is the US, which involved genocidal campaigns against the native population. The white settlers used the most advanced conventional weapons of the time and brought smallpox, the bubonic plague, cholera, influenza, chickenpox, scarlet fever, syphilis and other diseases to afflict the Indians. Then they used guns,whips and chains to enslave the African-Americans and to kill them at will with impunity. The ideologues of Nazi Germany admired the white supremacist domination of the Indians and the African slaves.
US imperialism has the distinction of being the first and so far the only power that has used the atomic bomb on the civilian populations of entire cities, such as those of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It has also used chemical, bacteriological and entomological weapons against the peoples of Korea, Cuba and Vietnam and radiological weapons in the more recent wars of aggression under the fascist and neoconservative policy of full-spectrum dominance, which gives full play to US superiority in high-tech weaponry. Extensive US nuclear tests have also damaged the people’s health and environments in many Pacific islands and atolls, while medical tests in its clandestine laboratories have likewise damaged the health of numerous voluntary and involuntary human test subjects.
I shall not be distracted by the ideologues and propagandists of the US and other imperialist powers to ascribe the title of terrorist solely to individuals and small groups that use weapons of no comparison to the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the imperialist terrorists. These super-terrorists circumvent and violate existing international conventions to produce these weapons and use them to threaten and attack their adversaries. Together with the Israeli Zionists, with whom the they share certain weapons of mass destruction, they are also the main suppliers of handy chemical weapons to Al-Nusra, Al Qaida, Salafi and Islamic State (Daesh) as their terrorist agents.
I. World Wars and Wars of Aggression or Counterrevolution of Varying Scales
By themselves, wars fought even without the use of nonconventional weapons have involved the massive destruction of civilian lives, social infrastructures and the environment, creating the conditions for mass hunger and epidemics to arise and spread without sufficient health personnel and facilities to treat the sick and prevent the spread of diseases. In the US-Filipino War from 1899 onwards, US imperialism was responsible for the death of more than 20 per cent or 1.5 million of the Philippine population by torture and gunfire as well as by the spread of contagious diseases due to food blockades, forced relocation of people, mass hunger, and lack of medical care.
In the course of World War I, both the Allies and Central Powers used chemical and biological weapons extensively in addition to conventional weapons. Mustard gas, phosgene gas, and other chemical agents were used to cause lung searing, blindness, death and maiming. The army of the Imperial German government inflicted anthrax and glanders on its enemy. The unchivalric use of such unconventional weapons would lead to the postwar Geneva Protocol of 1925 banning chemical weapons. Nevertheless, the massive disruptions in social life caused by World War I brought forth another horrendous but unintended result—the 1918 influenza pandemic that infected one-third of the world’s total population and killed more than 50 million people.
During World War II, the Allied Powers and Axis Powers had stockpiles of chemical weapons. But the latter were the ones which used chemical weapons in the battlefield and in gas chambers to exterminate Jews and other adversaries in large numbers. To the German, Italian, Japanese and other fascists belong the discredit for the untimely death of tens of millions of people in the countries that they invaded and occupied, as a result of conventional battlefield violence, organized reprisals against civilian resistance, the lack of food and medical care, mass hunger and the spread of diseases.
But on the side of the victorious Allied forces, the US and its European Allies can be taken to account for disproportionate bombing at the expense mainly of the civilian population in Germany. There is however the rationale of the war victors that the so-called strategic bombing campaign was absolutely required to cripple Germany’s cities and industrial belts which produced war materiel and that it was a just punishment for a population that adulated and supported fascist regimes and it was a necessary preemption of the local population from violently resisting the advance of the Allied Forces.
The US, taking advantage of the Allied Forces’ having quickly achieved air superiority in the Pacific theatre by 1943 and in the European theatre by 1944, was the most outstanding in the use of firebombs and carpet bombing of fascist-controlled cities in Europe and Asia. Even the bombs used by its allies had been manufactured mostly in the US. But the most unique and most unnecessary use of violence in the closing year of World I was the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite the offer of surrender already made by Japan. The bombs totally destroyed the two cities and exposed all survivors to lethal radiation that later led to debilitating disease and birth defects.The US argues that the atom bombing was to break decisively the certain resistance of the population to the US invasionary forces and therefore to save the lives of the US troops and ensure their victory.
For a while, the US had a monopoly of nuclear weapons and could use them to blackmail other countries or even as implied umbrella over the deployment of US military bases and forces in various countries of the world. The Soviet Union broke the US nuclear monopoly in 1949. Its arsenal of nuclear bombs was enough to deter the US from using nuclear bombs when it launched wars against the Korean people from 1950 to 1953 and against the Vietnamese and all Indochinese peoples from the 1960s onwards.
The US used extensively and intensively conventional weapons as well as bacteriological and chemical weapons in wars of aggression in Korea and Indochina. For generations, surviving victims of the germ warfare in Korea and Agent Orange in Vietnam have been living witnesses to the dastardly imperialist attacks on the civilian population. In assisting puppet governments in armed counterrevolution in the Philippines and other countries, the US has supplied chemicals to poison wells and streams used by the guerrilla fighters as well as mosquitoes carrying the deadly falciparum strain of malaria to bite them.
Only after learning about the Soviet research in biological warfare did the US become amenable to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention prohibiting offensive biological warfare. Despite the long precedence of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 against the use of chemical weapons under any circumstance, the imperialist powers agreed on the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) on the Prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons and on their destruction only in 1993.
The Soviet Union reached strategic parity with the US in nuclear and other conventional weapons by thelate 1970s during the Brezhnev regime. Between the two superpowers, a situation of nuclear stalemate and balance of terror arose and resulted in a candid recognition of mutual annihilation in case of nuclear war. A series of countries also made their own nuclear weapons: the UK in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, India in 1974 and Pakistan shortly thereafter. Later, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would be known to have their own nuclear weapons. Several other countries are also known to have the technical capacity to build nuclear weapons.
In 1963 the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water (otherwise known as the Partial Test Ban Treaty) was signed by the US, the Soviet Union and the UK. In 1968 the two superpowers agreed to the establishment of the UN Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1996 and would not come into force. The US and its allied imperialist powers are the most insistent on keeping their nuclear stockpiles and the privilege of using them for war. They are most resistant to complete nuclear disarmament.
In May 2020, US President Trump stated publicly his unilateral willingness for the US to restart nuclear weapons testing. The US is continuing also to upgrade its nuclear weapons and delivery systems using the most recent technological advances (related to, for instance, cyberspace integration, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and human-machine interface), while it develops as well new space weapons and related military hardware to be based in space, the Earth’s orbit or outermost atmosphere. Among the biggest profiteering defense corporations making nuclear weapons are Huntington Ingalls Industries (US$28.87 billion in contracts), Lockheed Martin (US$25.1779 billion), Honeywell International (US$16.5488 billion), General Dynamics (US$5.8303 billion), and Jacobs Engineering (US$5.3293 billion).
Conventional weapons, which are allowed by international law to be in the hands of the army, air force and navy of each nation-state, are presumed to be more subject to calibrated and precision targetting and thus less destructive to the lives of the civilian population. But with the use of higher technology these conventional weapons have been enhanced to inflict far more casualties among civilians and destruction of the social infrastructure than ever before.
Even in the absence of a global inter-imperialist war, US imperialism together with its allies has been responsible for the death of 25 to 30 million civilians since the end of World War II. The bulk of the victims perished in the imperialist wars of aggression and imperialist-backed counterrevolution from China and Korea, to Indochina, Indonesia and other countries of Southeast Asia, to South Asia and the Middle East, all the way to Africa and Latin America. And since the end of the Cold War, the US and its NATO allies have used a wide range of weapons to inflict the biggest destruction in the shortest period to the civilian population and social infrastructure as in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya and Syria.
They have added to more destructive conventional weapons such new weapons as white phosphorus bombs and depleted-uranium munitions which continue to harm the civilians even after the war. They have also used far more “efficient” delivery systems, like long range as well as intermediate and short-range cruise missiles, supersonic planes, stealth bombers, AWACS surveillance and control planes, tactical drones, and electronic gadgets to trigger planted explosives. While some may consider that they are efficient in hitting their military targets, these systems also target many more unsuspecting civilians in residential, business, and open space locations.
The US cynically dismisses the destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure as mere “collateral damage”, despite the explicit and repeated provision in Protocol I for states to avoid such civilian damage. The unspoken mindset among US imperialist policy planners is to utilize such “collateral damage” to send a warning to civilian populations not to support anti-US forces so as not to be treated as fair game.
Apart from civilian deaths, displacement is also a major direct measure of civilian suffering due to imperialist-instigated wars. According to official figures, the number of people uprooted from their ruined homes and communities steadily rose from 1950 onwards, such that by end-2014 there were 19.5 million cross-border refugees and 38 million internally displaced people. A big bulk of these are from Middle East countries torn apart by US-instigated wars.
II. Nonconventional Weapons of Mass Destruction
As in the research and development of conventional weapons, the imperialist states use science and technology to research and develop nonconventional weapons of mass destruction of various types, including chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological. They have taken advantage of the duality in the use of science and technology to serve contradictory purposes, benign and malign, in a sense like the ordinary knife can be used for preparing food in the kitchen or murdering someone.
Whenever they admit to researching and prototyping or manufacturing an instrument of mass destruction, supposedly more deadly to the civilian population than the conventional weapons, they invoke certain non-offensive purposes such as self-defense, deterrence or developing antidotes. These are the usual terms used for pre-empting, preconditioning and then circumventing laws and conventions that ban or control such weapons.
Among the imperialist powers, the US is supreme in the research, development, and use of chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological weapons of mass destruction. According to its own judgement, it collaborates with one or more of its imperialist allies in research, development and use of these nonconventional weapons through treaties of military alliance, joint scientific research programs, academic exchanges, and naturalization of foreign scientists and technologists as US citizens.
It is a matter of history that the US made use of American and foreign scientists and engineers in the Manhattan Project to research and produce the atom bomb. The US also took advantage of its leading role among victorious Allied powers at the end of World War II to recruit German scientists, some of them with Nazi ties, to jumpstart its own rocket technology. At the same time, the US did a parallel scheme to recruit Japanese germ-warfare scientists based in China under Unit 731, exempting them from war crimes prosecution.
In the entire course of the Cold War, the US sought to maintain supremacy in the production of nuclear weapons, especially after the Soviet Union broke the US nuclear monopoly. As a result of the nuclear stalemate, the US strategic planners headed by Kissinger conceived of the idea of producing tactical nukes, which are low-yield nuclear munitions such as short-range missiles and artillery shells designed for battlefield use. Tactical nukes were supposed to make US nuclear power more credible to peoples engaged in revolutionary struggles for national and social liberation and states which were also without any nuclear power but threatened by the US for asserting national independence and socialist aspirations.
As it turned out, the bulk of tactical nukes were deployed in NATO areas facing the former Soviet Union and other Warsaw Bloc countries, supposedly to enhance superiority in case of a shooting war. But then there could only be a short leap from the use of tactical nukes to strategic nukes. Thus, the US adjusted to the battlefield use of depleted-uranium-tipped bombs delivered by planes and artillery, which were used extensively in the Balkan wars and the Middle East under the neoconservative policy proclaimed by the US after the Cold War. The US has openly boasted of possessing and using depleted uranium and lasers as weapons although it denies using caesium which it has in abundant stock.
Under the false pretext of self-defense to circumvent the treaties banning the use of chemical and biological warfare, the US has always maintained research laboratories for developing and producing chemical and biological weapons in the US and abroad. It has been notorious in the widespread use of germ warfare in the Korean War and in the use of Agent Orange and other defoliant chemical agents in the Vietnam War.
The use of chemical weapons is attractive to the imperialists because of the low cost of producing them and also the because of instant effects on the fatal victims and the maimed survivors as well as the shock effect on the entire population, whether the weapons be napalm bombs, white phosphorous bombs and aerosol-delivered toxins or pathogens. The US has most recently used these as covert weapons in the hands of its own personnel and terrorist agents like the Islamic State (Daesh) in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, and then twists the story by blaming its adversary states as the culprits.
The use of biological weapons is attractive to the imperialists because they are the easiest to develop and produce and likewise they are easiest to ascribe to other states or small groups acting clandestinely as assets of the US, and to further smokescreen their deployment as naturally occurring or accident-caused “viral outbreaks”. Biological weapons are in the form of microbes as pathogens, mainly in the form of bacteria and viruses. The only restraint on the user of these weapons is the problem of ensuring the immunity of his own forces from the epidemic.
COVID-19 is the latest type of viral contagion, which has rapidly affected and alarmed the entire world because it is as easily transmitted as the common cold by people who are already infected but show no obvious symptoms for several or even many days. COVID-19 may likely cause severe illness or even death especially among people who are elderly or immuno-compromised. Based on the latest scientiific findings, mortality rates in most countries for people below 60 are comparable to or lower than seasonal influenza, and almost nil for people below 20.
It is also potentially far more deadly in poor countries with megacities or congested slum communities with poor nutrition, healthcare and hygiene systems. It is more easily transmitted in community and from country to country and it is potentially far more deadly than any previous epidemic. It has become pandemic and it is still running its course in infecting millions of people and killing hundreds of thousands on a world scale.
It remains to be seen whether it can be promptly checked by a vaccine and to what extent it can be compared to the so-called Spanish flu of 1916 to 1918 which killed at least 50 million up to 65 million people, according to various reports. There is a distinct trend among reactionary states of bloating or misdirecting the real dangers to public health and fanning a parallel pandemic of fear to further their own narrow interests.
The chief imperialist rivals of today are accusing each of other of being culpable for originating and spreading SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19. China was the first to claim that the virus came from Fort Detrick in Maryland, USA and that the US military athletic delegation to the World Military Games brought it to Wuhan in October 2019. US President Donald Trump and his State Secretary Mike Pompeo have countered in public that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread in Wuhan and that China suppressed the information, thus allowing Chinese and foreign travellers to pick up virus in Wuhan and further spread it to many other countries.
Both sides claim to know the general state and pertinent details of biological research and development through previous exchanges of biological scientists and experts in four decades of close US-China cooperation as the main partners of neoliberal globalization. There are third parties that point to either country as the culprit or describe the COVID-19 virus as strictly zoonotic in origin, mutating from previous coronaviruses and probably resulting from the imperialist plunder of the environment and disturbing the ecological balance among organisms in their drastically decreased and degraded forest habitat.
Various scientific studies claim that 60 to 70 percent of recognized emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic or originating from forest-dwelling animals. COVID-19 is supposedly traceable to bats as the “ultimate incubator” for the virus because of their strong immune system which make them an excellent host to viral strains that mutate into pathogens that are highly infectious and deadly to humans. There is the claim that the virus leaped from the bats to humans who consumed bat soup or meat at the Wuhan wet market.
Meanwhile, due to the demand of Australia and an overwhelming number of other countries for an independent investigation of the origin and development of COVID-19, the recent assembly of the World Health Organization has resolved that an independent investigation is to be conducted. China and the US have agreed to the investigation. Nevertheless, a recently-revealed secret 15-page research dossier shared among the U.S.-led “Five Eyes” Security Alliance that includes Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand claims that the virus was leaked from a Chinese biodefense lab and that China suppressed information on the spread of the virus since December 2019.
Whatever is the outcome of the aforesaid investigation called by the WHO, the US and other imperialist states will continue to engage in bio-warfare research and development under such pretexts as self-defense, deterrence and production of the antidotes. Bio-warfare and pandemics will continue to be potent weapons as the crisis of the world capitalist system worsens and the contradictions among the imperialist powers, those between the imperialist powers and the oppressed peoples and nations and those between the proletariat and the monopoly bourgeoisie in imperialist countries intensify.
Furthermore, to the extent that bio-warfare and pandemics may spin out of control and endanger the entire system especially in the imperialist homelands, monopoly capitalist blocs and financial oligarchies will attempt to further entrench and expand their interests in big infotech, biotech, nanotech, space tech and other high-tech industries as the growing core of their respective military-industrial blackholes—which in turn will further sharpen all the contradictions among the imperialist powers and within the entire world capitalist system..
III. Far-Reaching Consequences and Prospects
The COVID-19 pandemic and the various state-enforced lockdowns on vast areas of the world have a strong impact on the world capitalist system, on the imperialist countries and client-states and the relations of the ruling classes, the governments and broad masses of the people. The pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have telescoped so many basic contradictions and defects of global capitalism into one monster storm of global scale. They have disrupted the usual mode of existence of the ruling systems and the population, brought down drastically the level of production and unemployment, caused widespread hunger and disease and generated more social uncertainty and unrest.
It has aggravated what has become the chronic crisis of the world capitalist system which has continued to lurch from one level of economic stagnation and financial volatility to a deeperlevel since the financial crash of 2008. It has been moving in the direction of a plunge comparable to or even worse than the Great Depression from 1929 onwards, generating on a global scale anti-imperialist and democratic struggles as well as prodding the monopoly bourgeoisie and the reactionaries to adopt fascism and war as desperate ways to overcome their problems.
The imperialist states and their client states have used the COVID-19 pandemic as opportunity for taking and exercising emergency powers, imposing lockdowns, tightening control of the people and institutionalizing repressive measures. In various countries, the lockdowns have been used to suppress the right to free assembly and expression and to unleash harsher campaigns of military suppression where the oppressed peoples and nations are engaged in people’s war.
In most of the imperialist countries and in all the client-states, the people are actually deprived of community-based medical surveillance, the effective, prompt and free testing testing for COVID-19 and the timely and adequate treatment of the virus and other diseases in violation of the supposedly medical reason for the lockdown. In the course of the lockdown, the people are deprived of public transport and the means of livelihood. And yet they do not get the food and economic relief that have been promised to them by their governments. They suffer hunger and lack access to medical testing and treatment, and basic household supplies as well, especially in poor countries and impoverished or migrant communities.
They also have to cope with difficulties of dealing with sudden and imposed physical restrictions and social deprivation especially in Western countries where many elderly people live alone or in institutional homes. The lockdowns have created many instant refugee shelters for migrant workers and other stranded people who are unable to proceed or return home and left to their own devices to survive. The lockdowns have also drastically disrupted production and distribution chains, leading to shortages in many basic goods and services.
The extremely damaging consequences to the 99.9% of the world’s population of 7.5 billion of more than four decades of neoliberal economic policy are exposed. They include lack of savings for the overwhelming majority of the people to tide them over the crisis, the lack of job security and the prevalence of precarious means of livelihood and the scarcity of social services. The public health system is exposed as too thin or close to nil or skewed in favor of more lucrative fields of medicine, as COVID-19 cases mount and overload it. There are inadequate personal protection gears even for the doctors, nurses and other health workers, no sufficient bed spaces, face masks, respirators, medicine and disinfectants.
While the broad masses of the people suffer, the imperialist and reactionary states assure the big bourgeoisie of financial bailouts and stimulus packages to cover their temporary losses from the stoppage or sharp reduction of production and sales of their production. The ensuing global economic depression also provides a most golden opportunity for the biggest predatory corporations to buy at hefty discounts troubled companies with choice assets and further consolidate their already-awesome economic power. And of course the class exploiters, their political agents and law enforcers enjoy the expanded opportunities for vulture capitalism and corruption yielded by the lockdown as well as the prolonged vacation in the wide spaces of expensive homes and resorts.
The pandemic and its resultant lockdowns have encouraged a stronger fascist trend in many countries, such as imposing stricter police-state measures in the guise of tighter public-health surveillance against new outbreaks; population control measures especially directed against migrant labor and refugees as “carriers of new diseases”; and steamrolling unpopular legislation and budget priorities in the guise of resetting society into a “new normal.”
Both pandemic and lockdown have also produced deep cultural and ideological impacts. On one hand, the imperialists and other ruling classes have learned to weaponize the public’s fears of a “new, unknown and unseen enemy,” reminiscent of the post-9/11 hysteria against “terrorism” and the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War era. On the other hand, they are now tightening their state-public or corporate-private hold on the digital or online channels of communication, mass media and entertainment which have proved to serve a critical social-control function and enjoyed massive expansion of user base in the last three months.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a health crisis and has seriously aggravated the crisis of the world capitalist system. It has exacerbated inter-imperialist rivalry, especially between the US and China. While the US remains as the No. 1 imperialist power especially with regard to military strength, Russia and China are formidable opponents and continue to develop their military capabilities.
The inter-imperialist rivalry is more fraught then ever with the danger of regional wars and even that of direct inter-imperialist war. As Lenin has pointed out, imperialism means war. There is no peace in the world while imperialist powers ride roughshod over the proletariat and the people and they themselves are driven to struggle for a redivision of the world and enlarge their respective shares of economic territory and client states.
Even while the lockdowns are in effect, the broad masses of the people and their organized anti-imperialist and democratic forces have found ways to discuss the implications and consequences of the situation at various levels, draw up conclusions on the most important issues, make collective decisions and carry out concerted actions to make protests and demands. They have electronic and non-electronic means of communications at the level of local communities, countries and the entire world. They have used noise barrages from their homes and yards to make protests and demands.
They have used various Internet platforms such as independent progressive news sites and blogs, the social media and videoconferencing to spell out their position on the pandemic, unjust lockdowns and other issues involving their rights and the violations of these by the rulers who are daily exposed as incompetent, corrupt and repressive.
While the closing of schools and workplaces created conditions for many wasted hours in forced isolation, it also created conditions for intense study, online group interaction, cultural creativity and technical innovation especially among the youth, intellectuals and professionals who lent their talents and time in the service of people and public facilities in dire need, including embattled health workers in the frontlines against COVID-19.
Even under strict lockdown rules or more relaxed quarantine rules, the people in various countries have engaged in mass protest action of varying scales. The masses of Hong Kong have gone back to the streets in great number to fight for democratic autonomy and other demands. Most remarkable of all the mass protests currently are those being held nationwide by African-Americans and the people of all races in the US against racism, police brutality and the unjust economic system as a result of the brazen murder of George Floyd by the police. Mass actions of solidarity have spread worldwide.
For sure, after the lockdowns are lifted and mass assemblies are permitted, the broad masses of the people will rise even more extensively and intensively against their oppressors and exploiters. Since last year, they have been rising up on a world scale to condemn and oppose the most predatory and brutal manifestations of modern imperialism, such as neoliberalism and fascism. Having come under more oppression and exploitation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, excessive lockdowns and states of emergency, they are impelled to undertake ever more resolute and militant acts of protest and demand for the solution of basic social, economic, and political problems.
We can be certain that the proletariat and people in the imperialist countries will carry out all possible forms of struggle to win the battle for democracy against imperialism and all reaction, prevail over the worsening crisis of capitalism, end the rule of unbridled neoliberal greed and fascism and the threat of inter-imperialist wars and to aim for the victory of socialism. The revolutionary struggles of the oppressed peoples for national and social liberation will also grow in strength and advance towards the goal of socialism. This is only way to end imperialism and all reaction in any country and in the whole world.
The imperialist and client-states reject and suppress the people’s demands for national liberation, democracy, and socialism. But by doing so, they unwittingly arouse the people to wage revolutionary resistance, which is the most effective counter to imperialism and war. They undermine their own position in using tyrannical power, state terrorism and armed counterrevolution, in getting enmeshed in inter-imperialist conflicts and unleashing wars of aggression.
As the crisis of the world capitalist system becomes worse, the imperialist and client-states will escalate the oppression and exploitation of the people, and further plunder and degrade the environment. It is therefore necessary to fight for social, racial, and environmental justice in the comprehensive people’s struggle for national liberation, democracy, all-round development and socialism. ###
https://ndfp.org/us-led-wars-and-types-of-weapons-in-the-era-of-modern-imperialism/
