The Choice

The first years of the 21st century have unleashed the modern day version of the crusades. Of course, the language is now couched in softer terms. No longer is it politically correct to talk about civilizing the savages and heathens and dark-skinned peoples. Such brazen language would not be tolerated. However, while the language may have changed a bit, the mindset has not. The front men for the military-industrial complex still talk about bringing civilization to the darker corners of the earth, and justify it all in the name of doing God's work. The packaging may be slightly different, but the mayhem, carnage and destruction are the same. Oh, excuse the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. That is just collateral damage. (...)

(...) It is amazing how little has changed in the last 100 years or so. One of the most famous writings in opposition to imperialism is the Junius Pamphlet, written by German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 while she was in prison for opposing the First World War. (Four years later she was brutally murdered by German right-wingers.) In this document, Luxemburg argued very convincingly that the stark choice facing humanity was one between socialism or barbarism:

"We stand today...before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism-and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery-or the victory of socialism."

Perhaps she was a bit premature in her dire prophecy. In any case, in the early stages of the 21st century the choice before us is even starker, given the sheer unbridled power of the US Empire and its global reach. If the barbarism of capitalism and militarism is not overcome, our children and our children's children could indeed find themselves in a vast cemetery, a brutal world where Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay serve as models for the treatment of human beings, where environmental catastrophe becomes increasingly inevitable, and where the finest products of human culture are reduced to nothing more than commodities to be sold off to the highest bidder. Rosa Luxemburg put it quite eloquently:

"This madness will not stop, and this bloody nightmare of hell will not cease, until the people...wake up out of their drunken sleep, clasp each others hands in brotherhood and drown the bestial chorus of war agitators and the hoarse cry of capitalist hyenas..."

The choice is as clear as ever.


From The Choice
by Charlie Kaften
ZNet