"Philanthropic imperialism"

Article by Rui Paz, Collaborator of the International Department

The USA is becoming more and more restless with the liberating winds that blow in Latin America. That was the reason the Pentagon decided to reactivate the IV th war Fleet and detach it to the Caribbean and the South American seas. As the " Figaro – online" describes, on the 30.05.2008, the aircraft – carrier "USS Boxer" stationed off the S.Salvador shores, is already being used as an example for the /kind of "humanitarian operations", with which the North– American navy claims to justify its presence in a continent, where it does not dispose of any pretext to endeavour a military aggression. That same warship, turned into a floating hospital, is at the disposal of the peasants who are in need of going under surgery for cataracts in the eyes. So much generosity and concern over the health of the people of S. Salvador, is surprising, knowing that more than 40 millions of North-American citizens do not have any health service rights, in their own country.

At the beginning of the nineties, the German army, the " Bundeswehr", had begun its headway beyond the boarders, with the setting up of a military "humanitarian" hospital in Cambodia. Since then, the article 26,of the Constitution – which expressly forbids Germany’s participation in aggression wars and places the responsible for those acts under imprisonment – was thorn apart, with the well known results of the generalized military operations and the conversion of the European Union into an imperialist political – military block. Nowadays, any pretext, including the help to populations, struck by natural catastrophes, is an excuse to promote militarism and war.

Alike the North – American model, in which the Pentagon, in synchrony with the great monopolist groups, decides the fundamental, and once more, the purpose, is the conversion of the political institutions to a merely notarial function. In the capitalist countries, the dismantlement of the so-called "State of Law" by those who constantly invoke it is much more advanced than what can be supposed by the more distracted constitutionalists.

But so much "humanitarian" war and "capitalist" generosity cost money that the workers and the people are obliged to pay for the benefit of the great imperialist powers.

Capital needs to impose its strategy, even if only to invocate uncontrollable and infallible supranational powers, under which the people have to obey and submit in silence. That is the principle function of the European Union. It is deeply regrettable that Socrates has turned his back to the people of his Country, turning himself into an "servant carrier" of the EU German presidency, to the extent of Angela Merkel treat the Portugal’s prime-minister by "oh José", as if he were the chancellery gardener.

On intensifying the liquidation of the social and labour rights, and on joining to war and militarism, the Government and the Socialist Party leadership, do, what Karl Marx confirmed, 160 years ago, synthesized in his " Manifest of the Communist Party", when explaining that " the bourgeois socialism resumes to the statement, that the bourgeois are bourgeois – in the interest of the working class".

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