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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 35, 31 August 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
One year ago, on September 1, the Japanese Government signed the articles of surrender that brought an end to the Second World War. But there has been no peace since then.
Today, on the first anniversary of the close of the most terrible slaughter in all history, the capitalist rulers are preparing a still worse slaughter. They are jockeying for position in a Third World War that can mean the end of civilization and even the extinction of mankind.
In China, Wall Street is feeding the flames of civil war. The Chinese people are gathering their forces to rid themselves of the hated, bloody, despotic regime of Chiang Kai-shek. But American imperialism wants to keep this dictator in power. Consequently Wall Street is throwing its vast financial, economic and military power squarely behind Chiang Kai-shek in the ever-widening civil war.
In Yugoslavia, Wall Street has precipitated a crisis of such tenseness that in any previous decade it would have meant the outbreak of war. Why were American planes flying over distant Yugoslavia if not to provoke an “incident”? Such incidents are used by the war-mongers to whip up propaganda in preparation for war and for no other reason.
In Palestine, the Allied powers have deliberately torn up all the promises made the Jewish people. Instead of a land of their own, the Jewish immigrants have found only concentration camps. The crimes of Hitler against these people are being repeated by the Allies.
India is rumbling and seething like a volcano before it erupts. The Indian people want the freedom they were promised. They want to be rid of the hated foreign ruler. But the British maintain their troops in India in the face of the most bitter resentment and protest of the Indian people. Last week 4,000 victims were killed in Calcutta as the result of Britain’s deliberate policy of divide and rule.
In Indonesia, Indo-China and Korea, the Allied powers have hurled all the instruments of modern warfare at these colonial peoples. The “crime” of these tens of millions of human beings was an attempt to gain their freedom. The “Four Freedoms” promised the peoples of the earth by the writers of the Atlantic Charter proved to be nothing but lying war propaganda.
In America itself, militarism is growing with mushroom speed. The Truman Administration is driving forward to convert all Latin America into a vast armed camp as part of the military might of Wall Street. American imperialism seeks permanent military bases in the Atlantic from Iceland to the Azores down to Brazil. In the Pacific, they seek military bases fanning from Australia through the Philippines to Korea.
The purpose of this unbridled militarism is to conquer the entire world for Wall Street – to conquer the Soviet Union and build an empire that will make the efforts of the Roman Caesars, of Napoleon, Hitler and the Mikado look like feeble amateur affairs.
The Paris “ Peace” Conference and the United Nations are simply sounding boards on which the capitalist war-mongers magnify their provocations and propaganda against the prospective enemy – the USSR.
Already the capitalist press is filled with wild incitement for another war. “All hell could break loose at any minute,” says the August 20 N.Y. World-Telegram. “This is a time to keep our powder dry.”
And wide publicity was given atomic-bomb scientist Harold Urey when on August 18 he openly and brazenly advocated that the United States launch an immediate atomic war “before any other nation has atomic weapons.”
In the year since V-J Day, the capitalist world has proved it has no other aim and no other perspective but a Third World War.
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Last updated on 20 June 2021