Reproduced from the Class Consciousness Project, with thanks.
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Nelson Mandela was once asked, when doing a Q&A on US television, why he still referred to Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Muammar Gadaffi as his comrades. Mandela looked at the man who raised the question (Ken Adelman, a noted CIA stooge) and said simply: “One of the mistakes that political analysts make is to think that their enemies should be our enemies.”
When reading the wild pronouncements of the bourgeois politicians over the last two weeks about the reintroduction of national service in Britain, the need to expand the army, and the inevitability of war with Russia and/or China within five years, I am reminded of Mandela’s words.
The British ruling class has decided that Russia and the Russian government are its enemy. It has decided this because the government of Russia has resisted the US and British attempt to rob them of their vast natural resources and to depose their government in order to be able to do this. This is why we have the war in Ukraine, where Ukrainians are being sacrificed by the hundreds of thousands on the orders of the US and British governments for this exact purpose.
Then we have the rising anti-China hysteria that is being whipped up by tedious old frauds like Iain Duncan Smith and mouth-breathing sycophants such as Keir Starmer.
The British ruling class has decided that China is an enemy because the Chinese have developed their economy to the point where they are outstripping the collective west in terms of innovation and productivity. Rather than invest in rebuilding our own hollowed out shell of an economy, the British ruling class has decided to join the crazed crusade of the US imperialists in trying to destroy China’s instead.
The people who run Britain cannot create anything positive, they can only loot and destroy. They look to do this to other countries, but they are also looting and destroying ours along with it.
Who is it that has held down wages for decades in Britain? It’s not the Russians or Chinese. It’s the British ruling class.
Who has created multiple property price bubbles and destroyed council housing to make owning a home mean a lifetime of debt? Again, it’s our own ruling class which has done that.
Who is behind the ever rising number of homeless people? It’s not people in Beijing or Moscow who’ve done that but the rulers of this country who have.
All of the ills that plague British workers were delivered to us by the ruling class in this country and their sordid collection of political servants in the sewage farm known as Westminster. It is in the City of London and Westminster where our enemies sit. They have been waging a non-stop class war upon us for decades as they pass the costs of the decline of British capitalism onto us.
So why should any worker agree to go and fight Russia or China or anyone else for that matter? If we do so we won’t be fighting for the British nation; we’ll be fighting so the parasites in the City of London can boost their profits by looting someone else’s nation.
The people who run this country are our deadliest enemy. They must be removed from power and have their ill-gotten gains taken off them. No workers’ blood must be shed in the cause of profit for the ruling-class parasites.
Our enemy is at home, and it is time they were defeated for good.
