A lot of people remember with no small feelings of pride how they
participated in the vast movement of the sixties against U.S.
imperialist aggression on the world scale, especially in South-East
Asia. Under the guise of "containing communism," the U.S.
imperialists committed the most horrendous crimes against the
peoples of the world. One incident which particularly struck the
world's imagination at that time occurred in the village of Mi Lai,
where the world was struck with horror by the base inhumanities
committed against the women and children of Vietnam by the U.S.
imperialists.
Far from learning from their subsequent defeats in Vietnam and
Cambodia, and far from submitting to the will of the world's people
and their aspirations for lasting peace, for non-interference in
the affairs of countries, etc., the U.S. imperialists have followed
their blind, narrow, self-serving path, in spite of what anyone
thinks, including their own allies. Over the years, they have used
every ways and means at their disposal so that what was once
universally condemned became accepted. Several Rambos and several
Forrest Gumps later, and hundreds of military interventions and
coups d'etat later, they think they have succeeded in numbing
people's consciousness and they create a picture in which everyone
agrees with their activities on the world scale, even though their
latest adventurist aggression against Iraq is being opposed by
various countries to a much larger extent than it had been in 1991.
Today, youth and students have the sacred responsibility to
uphold what is right. An aggression is an aggression by any other
name. No matter how many times it is repeated that this is done for
humanitarian reasons, no matter how bad various leaders are made
out to be, it changes nothing to the kinds of relations which must
exist between nations, nothing to how various problems in the world
must be sorted out by the people themselves without interference by
foreign imperialist powers. The real nature of these interventions
can be found in the heart-wrenching and revolting images shown to
the world of the Somalian youth, tortured and humiliated at the
hands of thugs parading as "peacemakers."
Let it be known that such crimes against humanity will not go
unpunished. We have all the struggles of the 20th century against
fascism and nazism, against imperialism and social-imperialism on
our side and we must uphold this heroic tradition if there is to be
any future for humanity in the years to come.
Shawgi Tell
University at Buffalo
Graduate School of Education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
