1- International Neutrality Project
Since the end of the Cold War, wars of aggression for the purpose of grabbing valuable resources have been waged by the USA and its NATO and other allies in gross violation of international laws and the UN Charter. All wars of aggression have been illegal under international laws including the Kellogg-Briand-Pact, August 27, 1928, which was a multilateral agreement attempting to eliminate war as an instrument of national policy.
The UN Charter opted for a more pragmatic system of ‘collective security’, a bit like the Three Musketeers – one for all and all for one. The three musketeers became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, sometimes known as the five policemen, who were tasked with maintaining or enforcing international peace. The US was the most powerful country in the world at the end of WW 2. It had used atomic weapons unnecessarily mainly against Japanese civilians to demonstrate its power to the rest of the world. By any standards this was a serious war crime. The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949 demonstrating the reality of a bipolar international power system.
The reality was and is that the possession and use of weapons of mass destruction is a form of global terrorism. In 1950 the US took advantage of USSR’s temporary absence from the UN Security Council (UNSC) to push through UNSC resolution 82 which had the effect of the UN declaring war on North Korea, and that war was fought under the UN flag. This precipitated the Cold War, as well as corrupting the role of the UN and especially the role of the UN Security Council, from which it has never recovered. The rule and abuse of force had superseded the rule of international law.
This situation could and should have been resolved peacefully after the end of the Cold War in 1989, but the leaders of the US perceived the US to be once again the unipolar most powerful country in the world and moved to take full advantage of this. Instead of retiring the now redundant NATO, as the Warsaw Pact had been retired, US-led NATO ignored promises made to Russian leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries.
The problem now is that the US, backed by UK and France, have a majority of the five permanent members of the UN security Council (UNSC) who hold the power of veto over all UNSC decisions. Because China and Russia can also veto any UNSC decisions this means that the UNSC is almost permanently deadlocked when important international peace decisions are needed. This also allows these five UNSC permanent members (the P5) to act with impunity and in breach of the UN Charter that they are supposed to uphold, because a deadlocked UNSC can take no punitive actions against them. Since the end of the Cold War the main perpetrators of such abuses of international laws have been the three NATO P5 members, US, UK and France, in cahoots with other NATO members and other NATO allies.
This has led to a series of disastrous illegal wars including the war against Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan 2001 to 2021, Iraq 2003 to 2011 (?), Libya 2011. They have taken the rule of international law into their own hands, and become the greatest threat to international peace. Instead of providing genuine security for Western Europe that it was established to do, NATO has become an international protection racket. The Nuremberg Principles outlawed wars of aggression, and the Geneva Conventions on War sought to regulate how wars are fought, as if wars were just a sort of game. In the words of Carl von Clausewitz, “War is the continuation of politics by other means”. Such views on war must be rejected, and the huge amounts of resources spent on war and preparations for wars must be transferred towards genuinely creating and maintaining peace.
In theory, only the UN Security Council can authorize military actions against member states of the United Nations and then only for the purposes of maintaining genuine international peace. The get out excuses that many countries are using include claiming that their wars of aggression are necessary for the self-defence of their countries or to protect their national interests, or bogus humanitarian interventions.
Armies of aggression should not exist in these dangerous times for humanity where abusive militarism is doing untold damage to humanity itself and to humanity’s living environment. Genuine defence forces are necessary to prevent the war lords, international criminals, dictators and terrorists, including state level terrorists such as NATO, from committing huge human rights abuses and destruction of our Planet Earth. In the past Warsaw Pact forces engaged in unjustified aggressive actions in eastern Europe, and European imperial and colonial powers committed multiple crimes against humanity in their former colonies. The Charter of the United Nations was meant to be the foundation for a much-improved system of international jurisprudence that would put an end to these crimes against humanity. The replacement of the rule of law by the rule of brute force by the US and NATO, will almost inevitably be copied by those countries who feel that their sovereignty and security is being threatened by NATO’s ambitions to become a global enforcer.
The international law concept of neutrality was introduced in the 1800s to protect smaller states from such aggression, and The Hague Convention V on Neutrality 1907 became and still remains the definitive piece of international law on neutrality. In the meantime, the Hague Convention on Neutrality has been recognized as Customary International Law, which means that all states are bound to comply with its provisions even if they have not signed or ratified this convention.
It has also been argued by international law experts such as L. Oppenheim and H. Lauterbach that any state that is not a belligerent in any particular war, is considered to be a neutral in that particular war, and is therefore bound to apply the principles and practices of neutrality during the course of that war. While neutral states are forbidden from participating in military alliances there is no prohibition on participation in economic or political alliances. International laws on neutrality apply only to military matters and participation in wars, with the exception of genuine self-defence.
There are many variations in the practices and applications of neutrality in Europe and elsewhere. These variations cover a spectrum from heavily armed neutrality to unarmed neutrality. Some countries such as Costa Rica have no army at all. The CIA fact book lists 36 countries or territories as having no military forces, but only a small number of these would qualify as fully independent states. Countries such Costa Rica rely on the rule of international law to protect their country from attack, in a similar way that citizens of various countries rely on the rule of national laws to protect themselves. Just a police forces are necessary to protect citizens within states, an international policing system is needed to protect smaller countries against larger aggressive countries. Genuine defence forces are needed for this purpose.
With the invention and spread of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destructions, no country, including the US, Russia and China, can any longer be assured that they can protect their countries and their citizens from being overwhelmed. This has led to what is a truly mad theory of international security called Mutually Assured Destruction, appropriately abbreviated to M. A. D. This theory is based on the arguably mistaken belief that no national leader would be stupid or mad enough to start a nuclear war, yet the USA did start a nuclear war against Japan on 6th August 1945.
Switzerland is considered to be the most neutral country in the world, so much so that it did not even join the United Nations until as recently as 2nd September 2002. Some other countries such as Austria and Finland have neutrality enshrined in their Constitutions but in both cases, neutrality was imposed on them after the end of World War 2, so both may now be moving towards ending their neutral status. Sweden, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta are neutral as a matter of Government policy and in such cases, this can be changed by a government decision. Constitutional neutrality is the better option because it is a decision made by the people of that country rather than by its politicians, and any decisions to abandon neutrality and go to war can only be made by a referendum, with the exception of genuine self-defence.
The Irish Government acted in serious breach of international laws on neutrality by allowing US military to use Shannon airport as a forward air base to wage its wars of aggression in the Middle East. Cyprus neutrality is compromised by the fact that Britain still occupies two large so-called Sovereign Bases in Cyprus that Britain has used extensively to wage its wars of aggression in the Middle East. Costa Rica is an exception as one of the few genuinely neutral states in Latin America and a very successful neutral one at that. Costa Rica ‘squanders’ a lot of its financial resources on health care, education, looking after its most vulnerable citizens, and is able to do this because it has no army and is not engaged in wars with anyone.
After the end of the Cold War, the US and NATO promised Russia that NATO would not be expanded into the eastern European countries and other countries on the borders with Russia. This would have meant that all the countries on Russia’s borders would be considered neutral countries, including existing neutral Finland, but also the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, etc. This agreement was quickly broken by the US and NATO, and moves to include Ukraine and Georgia as members of NATO forced the Russian Government to defend what it considered to be its national strategic interests by taking the Crimea and the provinces of North Ossetia and Abkhazia under Russian control.
There is still a very strong case to be made for neutrality of all states close to the borders with Russia, and this is urgently needed to prevent escalation of the conflict in Ukraine. History demonstrates that once aggressive states develop more powerful weapons that these weapons will be used. The US leaders who used atomic weapons in 1945 were not MAD, they were just BAD. The possession of nuclear weapons should be categorised as a crime against humanity. Wars of aggression are already illegal, but ways must be found to prevent such illegality.
In the interests of humanity, as well as in the interest of all living creatures on Planet Earth, there is now a strong case to be made to extend the concept of neutrality to as many countries as possible. A recently established peace network called Veterans Global Peace Network www.VGPN.org is launching a campaign to encourage as many countries as possible to enshrine military neutrality in their constitutions and we hope that many other national and international peace groups will join us in this campaign.
The neutrality we would like to promote would not be negative neutrality where states ignore conflicts and suffering in other countries. In the interconnected vulnerable world that we now live in, war in any part of the world is a danger to us all. We wish to promote positive active neutrality. By this we mean that neutral countries are fully entitled to defend themselves but are not entitled to wage war on other states. However, this must be genuine self-defence and does not justify spurious pre-emptive strikes on other states or bogus ‘humanitarian interventions’. It would also oblige neutral states to actively promote and assist with maintaining international peace and justice. Peace without justice is just a temporary ceasefire as was demonstrated by the First and Second World Wars.
Such a campaign for international positive neutrality will begin by encouraging the existing neutral states to maintain and strengthen their neutrality, and then campaign for other states in Europe and elsewhere to become neutral states. VGPN will actively cooperate with other national and international peace groups to achieve these objectives.
There are some important variations on the concept of neutrality, and these include that of negative or isolationist neutrality. An insult that is sometimes thrown at neutral countries is a quote from the poet Dante: ‘The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’. We should challenge this by responding that the hottest places in hell should be reserved for those who wage wars of aggression.
Ireland is an example of a country that has practised positive or active neutrality, especially since it joined the United Nations in 1955, but also during the interwar period when it actively supported the League of Nations. Although Ireland has a very small defence force of about 8,000 soldiers it has been very active in contributing to UN peacekeeping operations since 1958 and has lost 88 soldiers who have died on these UN missions, which is a high casualty rate for such a small Defence Force.
In Ireland’s case positive active neutrality has also meant actively promoting the decolonising process, and assisting newly independent states and developing countries with practical aid in areas such as education, health services, and economic development. Unfortunately, especially since Ireland joined the European Union, and especially in recent decades, Ireland has tended to be dragged into the practices of the EU larger states and former colonial powers in exploiting the developing countries rather than genuinely assisting them. Ireland has also seriously damaged its neutrality reputation by allowing the US military to use Shannon airport in the west of Ireland to wage its wars of aggression in the Middle East. The US and NATO members of the EU have been using diplomatic and economic pressure to try and get the neutral countries in Europe to abandon their neutrality, and are being successful in these efforts. It is important to point out that capital punishment has been outlawed in all EU member states and this is a very good development. However, the most powerful NATO members who are also members of the EU have been unlawfully killing people in the Middle East for the past two decades.
Geography can also play an important role in successful neutrality and Ireland’s peripheral island location on the extreme western edge of Europe makes it easier to maintain its neutrality, combined with the reality that unlike the Middle East, Ireland has very little oil or gas resources. This contrasts with countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands that have had their neutrality violated on several occasions. However, international laws must be enhanced and applied to ensure that the neutrality of all neutral countries is respected and supported. Geographical factors also mean that different countries may have to adopt a form of neutrality that suits its geographical and other security factors.
The Hague Convention (V) respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land, signed on 18 October 1907 can be accessed at this link:
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/ART/200-220001?OpenDocument
While it has many limitations, the Hague Convention on neutrality is regarded as the foundation stone for international laws on neutrality. Genuine self-defence is allowed under international laws on neutrality, but this aspect has been very much abused by aggressive countries. Active neutrality is a viable alternative to wars of aggression. Since the end of the Cold War NATO has become the greatest threat to international peace. This international neutrality project must be part of a wider campaign to make NATO and other aggressive military alliances redundant.
Reformation or Transformation of the United Nations is also another priority, but that is another day’s work.
Peace organisations and individuals in all regions of the world are invited to participate in this campaign either in cooperation with Veterans Global Peace Network or separately.
For more information, please contact Edward Horgan edwardhorgan45@gmail.com mobile phone 00353858519623
2- Imperialism and Militarism Project
Imperialism, a consequence of capitalism
The capitalist mode of production is based on obtaining an economic profit through the production of consumer goods, investing capital that will be returned in the form of profits after the sale of the goods produced.
There is no other planning in production than the pursuit of profit in competition with other agents willing to do the same. The stimulus of the search for profit has exponentially developed the productive forces, with the consequence of the necessary expansion of the model: always new consumers, always new territories, new raw materials. It is the logic of the system itself, which leads it to its self-destruction.
However, the owners of capital only want to see their capital reproduced and expanded and are not willing to consider the possibility of organizing life in response to the primary needs of the people.
The great world capitals have no homeland, their owners are spread all over the world; however, the vast majority of them come from the countries of the North Atlantic environment, in which capitalist accumulation has had an earlier development: Western Europe and the United States.
The US, the standard-bearer of capitalist interests
The US assumed leadership in the defense of the interests of capital since the Bretton Woods agreements (1943) and the derived institutions (IMF, WB, WTO). Since then, US put all the mechanisms of power of the state, including its armed forces, towards that defense of capital.
NATO appeared very soon to give legitimacy to the US military project and to link in the effort to the European partners, old colonial powers with interests spread all over the world.
The US decided to put pressure on the USSR, which had shown the ability to organize its society differently, with the intention of subduing it. Two obvious signs were the attack with the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against a virtually surrendered Japan and the refusal to allow its entry into NATO, whose justification was to preserve peace in Europe, as one more ally against the Axis powers.
The mechanisms designed from the Bretton Woods conference would mark a whole period of nominal liberation of the European colonies, while new neocolonial forms of dependence were established with the co-optation of local elites, the imposition of extortion conditions to obtain credits and the penetration into the armed forces of the newly liberated countries.
In many cases there were enormously bloody wars of liberation: Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Angola…, which generally ended with the final withdrawal of Western forces.
All these processes took place while there was the counterweight of the USSR in the United Nations Security Council and while the US and NATO were limited by their inability to impose themselves in the face of the risk of a fatal nuclear war for all.
Vietnam’s failure led to substantial changes in the way the US approached wars: elimination of compulsory conscription, covert operations, and tertiarization of war; all to evade public scrutiny.
Saur’s revolution in Afghanistan, on the very borders of the USSR, gave the US the excuse to throw the mujahideen against it and lure the USSR into the hornet’s nest of its “own Vietnam”. Political Islam appears as a force for destabilization. The war in Afghanistan and the US-stimulated arms race would lead the USSR to collapse.
The end of the USSR and the strengthening of NATO
NATO, publicized as a defensive alliance against the Warsaw Pact, was not dissolved with the extinction of this alliance; it would continue its expansion to the East with the successive incorporation of all the countries that had belonged to the Warsaw Pact, thus betraying the commitment made by Reagan with Gorvachev.
With the USSR’s counterweight in the UNSC gone, the US and its NATO allies succeeded in imposing on the UN the concept of the “responsibility to protect” peoples allegedly abused by their own governments, in order to authorize UN-mandated military operations.
NATO would unleash the first offensive war to dismember the former Yugoslavia, after fueling all inter-ethnic rivalries and generalizing the use of Islamist mercenaries, who would prove very useful for proxy warfare and to justify further military interventions.
War needs an enemy, which is tailor-made. With the disappearance of the USSR as an existential enemy, the attacks on the Twin Towers, claimed by Al Qaeda (an organization that had been greatly strengthened in the war in Afghanistan and the role of the US intelligence agencies themselves in its preparation is still much debated) would provide the pretext for the US to launch its “global war on terror”, dragging all its allies into the war against the new enemy.
Under that pretext, the US would return to Afghanistan, accusing it unfoundedly of being the refuge of Al Qaeda and dragging NATO behind it in the first operation outside its natural space.
It also invaded Iraq again in 2003, in an operation not authorized by the UN, on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction that never appeared and of Saddam Hussein’s alleged collaboration with Al Qaeda. Thus ended a sequence of wars that had begun with the confrontation between Iraq and Iran (1980/1988), favored by the US to weaken both contenders, followed by the defeat of Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait and by a trade embargo against Iraq that caused an estimated one million deaths up to 2003. Resistance against the occupiers would lead to the emergence of the Islamic State.
In 2005, the Pentagon’s project to redraw the borders of the “Greater Middle East”, using proxy armies if possible, was announced. It was based on the premise that the world economy was “globalizing” and in order to remain the world’s leading power, the US would have to adapt to financial capitalism. The best way to do this would be to ensure that developed countries could exploit the natural resources of poor countries without political obstacles.
On that premise, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine divided the world into two sectors: on the one hand, the globalized economies – including Russia and China – destined to be stable markets. On the other side, all the other countries, where the structures and institutions that make up the States would have to be destroyed, thus plunging them into chaos in order to guarantee transnational corporations the possibility of exploiting the wealth of these countries without encountering resistance.
To achieve this, the non-globalized peoples must be divided along ethnic lines and ideological domination is imposed.
The first region where this doctrine would be put into practice would be the Greater Middle East, from Morocco to Pakistan. Unlike previous wars, which were designed to enable the United States to monopolize natural resources, the new war would place resources within the reach of all globalized states. The United States would no longer even be interested in capturing natural resources, but would tend above all to divide up the work on a planetary scale and make the others work for it.
All this implied that it was no longer a question of winning, but of imposing a “war without end”, in which mercenary armies and Salafist militias would provide the cannon fodder, while justifying the permanent tutelage of Western forces, ready to intervene in extreme cases. Under this pretext, the US would come to have 800 military bases spread all over the world and would develop its special forces under the concept of “Signature reduction”, which today has an estimated 60,000 troops.
In March 2007, General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander from 1997 to 2001, revealed in an interview that when he was part of George Bush’s administration, in 2001, he was informed of the plan to occupy or destroy seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and finally Iran. With Afghanistan and Iraq already occupied, the plans have been executed under the pretext of the so-called “Arab Spring”, according to the strategy outlined by Gene Sharp in his manual “From Dictatorship to Democracy” for soft coups and resorting to all the techniques of propaganda, use of social networks, financing of NGOs for the training of opposition leaders and infiltration of agents provocateurs. The same strategy that had been used in the “color revolutions” against the former Soviet republics.
The turning point: the Libyan war
NATO’s war against Libya in 2011 would mark the end of Russia’s and China’s support for US interventions in the UNSC, in view of the fact that their Resolution to defend the civilian population was used by NATO to destroy all state structures, leaving Libya in chaos.
From that moment on, Russia and China do not trust. The US and the EU provoked a coup d’état in Ukraine to force its disengagement from Russia; the recovery of Crimea by the Russian Federation after a referendum would thereafter be marked as an “annexation”, a sign of Russian aggressiveness.
The turmoil provoked in Syria in 2011, in the wake of the “Arab Springs”, gave rise to a war in which the NATO powers tried to intervene directly against its government. The veto of Russia and China in the UNSC prevented it, but the door was opened to the intervention of thousands of Salafist mercenaries, exponents of the most radical Islamism, poured into the conflict by the main US allies in the region: Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, with the covert participation of the Zionist state. It would give rise to the Islamic State as a splinter of Al Qaeda, which at the same time provided the excuse for an intervention by NATO powers to supposedly prevent the spread of terrorism.
The failure of the attempts to destroy the Syrian state was due to the resistance of the Syrian people, the forces of the axis of resistance (Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah) and the entry on the scene of the Russian armed forces at the request of their government. The direction of the war has changed radically since then, with a very slow and painful recovery of control over practically the entire national territory by the Syrian army.
Since the inflection of the Libyan war, reality has demonstrated the growing inability of the US and its allies to impose their will anywhere: their hegemony is irremediably crumbling, while China and Russia have strengthened their alliance towards a multicentric and pluripolar world, with capabilities that surpass in economic and military terms those of the US and its allies.
In the emergence of these new powers, it should be noted that, being also capitalist economies, their model of expansion differs substantially from that of their counterparts in the USA and the former European colonial powers: China’s penetration throughout Eurasia and even in Africa has never been by force, it has never prepared coups, destabilization or changes of government; its influence has grown through trade agreements with different countries, agreements in which both parties win. The model is unbearable for Western imperialism, which cannot compete in the fair game of free competition, but only through extortion, threat and war. That is why they are today its great enemies.
The latest episode of this criminal record has been the abandonment of Afghanistan to hand it over to those from whom power was seized, the Taliban, after 20 years of occupation, countless casualties, widespread chaos and corruption, being the world’s leading producer of heroin and with ⅓ of its population addicted and with a huge military arsenal almost intact. In the absence of perspective to assess its consequences, everything seems to indicate that it is, once again, about chronifying the war, with the added incentive of doing so now on the borders of those it has defined as its most recent enemies: China, Russia and Iran. This action is complemented by the recent agreement to build nuclear submarines in Australia to complete the encirclement of China, while NATO in Europe is entrusted with the harassment of Russia.
The decline of the US on a planetary level has led it to a brutal offensive against the countries of the American continent that are striving to preserve their sovereignty: the attempts to destroy the structures of the state in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Bolivia, are being deployed in every conceivable way, with Colombia as an enclave for destabilization and control, in the same way as the Zionist state does in the East.
The new weapons of imperialist war
The so-called military-industrial complex has turned out to be, since President Roosevelt’s warning in 1961, the most interested promoter of war. It has ended up being the main sector of industry that the US has not offshored to the East and it is the main engine for the transfer of public resources to private industry, which, with a captive and insatiable market, has made it the main object of the financial institutions; it has close links with the military and intelligence hierarchy in a closed circuit of mutual favors, with enormous influence on the political class, captive also of the financial sector, and also shares interests with the media and entertainment conglomerates, which become effective amplifiers of all the propaganda issued by the centers of power in favor of war and imperialist intervention.
In all this scenario, economic sanctions play a major role in the attempts to subjugate rebellious countries. They are veritable weapons of war, used to starve populations into submission and to make them rebel against their governments. The Charter of the United Nations forbids their use, unless expressly authorized by the UNSC; after the fall of the USSR, the absence of a counterweight within the UNSC led to the abuse of sanctions against Iraq, which caused an estimated one million innocent victims.
The opposition of Russia and China to this type of measures has led first the USA and then the EU to use the mechanism of unilateral coercive measures, or sanctions outside the control of the UN. Today, the US, the UK and the EU are no longer concerned about keeping the forms. Violations of International Law have ceased to cause scandal and the application of economic sanctions has become generalized, with an astonishing acquiescence of public opinion, which has been persuaded that they only punish those supposedly responsible for the bad government and do not produce innumerable victims among the populations.
The current economic crisis, which all the agents of capitalism have tried to attribute to the coronavirus, is the consequence of a terrible world in the unlimited exploitation of people and natural resources. To get out of this situation, capitalism is making a new effort to instill in the population vain hopes of a return to a supposed normality. To this end, they promise huge investments of public resources to be allocated to the implementation of a 4th industrial revolution, based on renewable energies and technological development. Nothing is said, for the moment, about what will happen when the public subsidies are extinguished and the huge accumulated debt has to be faced. Nor about the unquestionable fact that energy resources are running out. Nor that it is the poor countries that will bear the brunt because, being the least responsible for the depletion of resources and global warming, they will be the most punished for not “transforming” their economy to the new paradigm of the Green New Deal.
The implementation of this model of recovery will not be easy to accept by the majority of the world’s populations, especially those of so many countries that are condemned to sink into their own underdevelopment.
This is why a powerful mechanism of force is required to control and repress the gigantic resistance that will appear. This is the meaning of the next NATO Summit, in June 2022, in Madrid: to orient the organization towards the control of everything that opposes the free exploitation of resources by the big corporations, enormously widening the scope of military intervention to spaces commonly considered civil (communications, cybersecurity, natural catastrophes, control of information…) or unalterable (outer space, the Arctic, nuclear weapons…), reserving the use of military force as a last argument against the definitive enemies: Russia and China.
Conclusions
– Imperialism results from capitalism’s intrinsic need for expansion.
– It is the cause of most of the conflicts and of the bloodiest ones, in addition to instability and internal disorder in much of the world.
– It is hegemonized by the USA, with the consent of its NATO allies and other organizations over which it has a great capacity of influence.
– The military-industrial complex is its main driving force, given the huge transfers of public resources to private hands in the military industry. It includes large financial interests and corporate media conglomerates.
– It needs to make a continuous display or threat of the use of military force, for which it requires the most powerful armies, bases all over the world and outrageous budgets.
– To consolidate its actions, it needs the consent of the population, for which it counts on the determined contribution of the communications complex to sustain and reinforce the ideological-cultural hegemony.
– It needs the existence of an absolute and terrible enemy that threatens the security of the population and justifies the whole system; since such a real enemy does not exist, it is created by means of the propaganda of the communicational complex.
– It seeks to destroy the state structures of the countries that seek their own development with sovereignty and resist imperialist impositions.
– It uses proxy warfare (armies of allied or extorted countries, mercenaries, criminal and drug trafficking organizations, militias based on supremacist or religious fundamentalist ideas) as a means of bringing chaos to regions of interest for the extraction or transit of resources and which question US hegemony.
– The spread of jihadist terrorism, fed by its main allies in the Muslim world, is functional to imperialism, which modulates its response to it according to the conditions of each time and place and uses it to justify its presence and action wherever it acts.
– It manifests itself against any expression of resistance to capitalist expansion, with the same script everywhere: criminalize, isolate and attack, through threats, sanctions, destabilization and, in the last resort, war, direct or, preferably, proxy.
– The sharpening of the contradictions of capitalism has accelerated the race of imperialism in a headlong flight forward that is encountering growing resistance in a large part of the planet.
– For the first time in history, capitalist expansion is confronted with a productive model that does not differ in essence from that represented by the Euro-Atlantic alliance. This exposes the great lies about the defense of the free market and generates many tensions among its partners due to the enormous trade dependencies they have with the emerging powers.
– In order to avoid possible fissures in the organization of the developed world, the structures of military intervention, fundamentally the Pentagon and NATO, have been stimulating a psychosis of a state of war, developing a strategy of harassment that includes the deployment of more and better nuclear weapons against powers that have equivalent military capabilities for their own defense.
– All this is taking place in the midst of a saturation propaganda campaign that portrays these powers, which have neither invaded nor attacked anyone, as the enemies that threaten our survival.
– The offensive unleashed by imperialism leads to multiplying the suffering of ever larger portions of the world’s population and places the entire world on the brink of nuclear extinction, whether deliberately or accidentally.
Unity is more necessary than ever to stop imperialism in its tracks; the counter-hegemonic forces, whatever they may be, need all the support and internationalist solidarity in defense of their sovereignty as nations and their right to self-determination as peoples.
Against the repeated violations of International Law by the US, we proclaim the need to recover the ideal contained in Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations:
- All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
- All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Consistent with this, we, veterans of the armed forces of various countries of the world, while recognizing the need for armies to defend against aggression, proclaim our willingness and commitment to work for the construction of a multicentric and pluripolar world, encouraged by the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations, in whose organization all nations have a place on equal terms, with a firm commitment to refrain from using war as an instrument of international policy.
In this regard, we will work to bring to the attention of all the governments of the world the need to adopt the renunciation of war of aggression as a fundamental norm in their constitutions, the status of neutrality as established in the Hague Convention of 1905, as well as to eradicate the use of sanctions against states outside the control of the United Nations in which its Security Council is not conditioned by the right of veto of its five permanent members.
Finally, we will demand the assumption of responsibility by the aggressor states for the war reparations that may be due for the calamities suffered by their victims and we will advocate the establishment of the mechanisms necessary to make them effective.
We call upon the conscience of all the military personnel of the world to assume the enormous part of responsibility that corresponds to them as the only legitimate agents for the use of arms, which must necessarily be restricted to war in legitimate self-defense.
For more information, please contact Manuel Pardo pardomatilla@yahoo.es