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May 5 2007
"It is not a question of a spirit of self-sacrifice. . . . soldiers make a point of clearing away all the burned-out vehicles off the road, so that there was a sense of peace, of normalcy; making contacts with the local notables—all that sort of stuff. The idea that Americans are constitutionally incapable of this is just wrong." --Eliot Cohen, leading neo-conservative academic
"The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." --Trotsky in 1940 referring to the Nazi army on the march
"Only 40 percent of Marines and 55 percent of U.S. Army soldiers deployed in Iraq say they would report a fellow serviceman for killing or injuring an innocent Iraqi, a Pentagon report released on Friday [May 4--ed] shows."(1)
In reality, the soldiers claiming they would turn in someone for an abuse are not honest. There would have to be a virtual civil war in the u.$. military if that were true, because 10% of soldiers have already admitted to committing abuses against Iraqis.(1)
Over 40% also supported torture with the argument that it could help in the battle against insurgents to save U.$. lives. In addition, 39% of Marines and 36% of the Army supported torture just to gather information.(2)
MIM has pointed out before in the Iraq conflict that the phony Marxist organizations could not speak out against the U.$. trucker contractors in Iraq; although they are making six digits. These organizations see the white workers as "exploited."
Hitler saw the revolutionary vehicle as the "Aryan race." Few realize how close Trotsky's idea was to that, overlapping 99%. Trotsky also held that white workers are the most advanced in the world, because they work in the richest countries with the best technology. Trotsky's only disagreement with Hitler was that Trotsky opposed 1% of the Aryan race, the capitalist class. Even on that point, Hitler tried to copy, by referring to Jews instead of capitalists, again a tiny minority of oppressor nation people to take all the blame for the exploiter classes and nations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of organizations and individuals calling themselves socialist, communist or Marxist in the imperialist countries agree with Trotsky that 90% of Amerikans are exploited and that contractors and often troops are from exploited backgrounds qualifying them as revolutionary agents of change.
Today in the united $tates, the neo-conservatives literally stem from neo-Trotskyist organizations, the Schachtmanites and Socialist Workers Party.(3) Likewise, crypto-Trotskyist organizations work secretly for the neo-conservatives, as in Iran. The underlying commonality of line that binds various white nationalists is the faith in the white working class as the revolutionary vehicle.
There has been a general shift toward white nationalism even moreso than in the 1960s, because at least in the 1960s, the line on troops was to treat them as monsters in Vietnam. Today "support our troops" is the spoken and unspoken line of neo-conservatives, liberals and phony Marxists alike.
The war crimes in Iraq are not just by a few berserk individuals. They are predictable and belong to a long-standing pattern--a pattern to be expected from exploiter-occupiers of a decadent oppressor nation. Political organizations unwilling to bring this fact to the fore are worthless to the international proletariat.
Notes:
1. "US Marines unlikely to report civilian abuse -study,"
by David Morgan, http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N04345828.htm
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6610052,00.html
3. Other than MIM, we can read about this from libertarian conservatives:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html