The communist Workers World Party (WWP) on April 12 will stage another anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. through its International ANSWER front group. This time, they are targeting “Corporate Profiteers, Fox News and the Pro-War Media.” They plan to march past the Washington offices of Fox News, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, along with various corporate and government offices.
It is ironic that the WWP would target “pro-war media” such as Fox News, the Washington Post and the New York Times, when the latter two news organizations have gone out of their way to avoid exposing the communist nature of the WWP and its use of front groups. Attacking these news organizations is a form of intimidation, designed to make sure that the nature of the communist campaign against America is not exposed by the major media.
Holding an anti-war rally at this point may strike some as almost as laughable as the Iraqi Minister of Information, who described Iraqi military conquests with American tanks encircling him. But the WWP understands that the war is not over. Indeed, former CIA director James Woolsey says we are involved in a World War against terrorism and Arab/Muslim regimes that could last decades. Does the U.S. have the stomach for such a fight? Or the will to win?
It is obvious that there has been a rise in the forces of anti-Americanism. Walden Bello, a radical professor at the University of the Philippines and former member of the Communist Party there, has written an article noting that the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-war movement, and Islamic fundamentalism are all providing “diplomatic and material weight to the containment of the U.S.” Bello, a major thinker on the anti-American left, cites other developments and makes other predictions:
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The opposition by France and Germany to a U.S. war on Iraq has “accelerated the decline of the Atlantic Alliance of the Cold War era.”
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There is a rebirth of “balance of power politics, with the lesser powers moved into active cooperation to contain” U.S. influence.
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China and Russia have joined France and Germany against the U.S.
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Developing countries like Brazil and perhaps even South Korea will eventually join the anti-U.S. coalition.
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Other “movements of global resistance” to the U.S. have emerged, including “the Islamic fundamentalists, [who] have made tremendous gains among the Arab and Muslim masses owing to the U.S. mailed-fist response to September 11 events and its alliance with Israel.”
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The war on Iraq will weaken “the so-called moderate regimes in the Arab and Muslim world” and force their replacement by “governments uncompromising in their resistance to U.S. interventionism.”
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There will be a possible emergence of “Radical Islamic regimes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.”
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Elements of this anti-American movement will be assuming “state power in a number of countries in the coming years,” having already done so in Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador.
A German friend of mine and author, Hilmar von Campe, has an interesting perspective on all of this. Now living in the U.S., he says that, “We are living through a worldwide anti-American campaign with huge demonstrations for ‘peace’ that is being organized by Communists and Socialists internationally.” The demonstrations, he notes, “have nothing to do with peace, which only serves as a pretext. They are motivated by envy, hatred and ignorance and meant to weaken the United States and strengthen her enemies.”
Born in Germany in 1925, von Campe has described how the German people themselves failed to stop the rise of Nazi Germany. He faults the German churches and German Christians in particular for failing to stand up to Hitler and the lies promoted by a corrupt Nazi regime. He witnessed first hand the terrible consequences of self-deception, while the world was plunged into war and his own nation and family were destroyed.
Von Campe praises the Bush decision on Iraq. “The build-up of terrorist infrastructures and capabilities by enemy states cannot be tolerated,” he says. “It gets more dangerous the more time they get. Hostility of the global left is not the result of that decision-it was in place long before the war began.”
The war itself, he contends, had a positive side effect even before American troops were greeted with American flags and flowers in Baghdad. It highlighted our friends and enemies in the world. On April 12, our enemies will be in the streets once again. They are not going away. Our media should expose rather than appease them.
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