Say no to war, free Palestine!
The People’s Summit & Mobilization by the Resist NATO Coalition provides a strong response to the NATO 75th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C., on July 10-11.
The summit in defense of world peace will draw people from every continent around the globe demanding “No to NATO, No to War, Free Palestine!”
The only way to end the carnage and wars threatening to engulf the world is to say “no more” to the domination of the U.S. military-industrial complex and Wall Street.
When it created NATO in 1949, the United States had two purposes. The first was to threaten the Soviet Union and its new Eastern European allies and, if necessary, put down revolutionary movements in Western Europe. The communist parties in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal were widely popular for fighting against the capitalist governments responsible for the Second World War.
NATO is a military arm of the U.S. world empire. The domestic economies of all its member countries, including the U.S., bear the heavy cost of funding NATO. Being a NATO partner means funding U.S. military expansion. The U.S. is in the business of war.
Dwight Eisenhower, the first supreme commander of NATO, said in 1954, “We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea. We keep the security forces to defend a way of life.” That way of life is the increasing market concentration and the accumulation of wealth and economic power in the hands of a relatively small number of transnational corporations and ultra-rich individuals; monopoly capitalism, also called imperialism.
From its start, NATO adopted a strategic doctrine of “Massive Retaliation” – the threat of a total nuclear war against the Soviet Union. NATO’s actions have drawn massive opposition to nuclear weapons and peace demonstrations throughout northern Europe.
An international peace seminar held on May 4 in Guantánamo, Cuba — near the illegal U.S. occupation of the Guantánamo Naval Base — brought together delegates from 30 countries demanding a world free of U.S. imperialist intervention and military bases.
The anti-imperialist meeting echoed the international repudiation of NATO’s war operations under the direction and auspices of the U.S.
Iraklis Tsavdaridis, executive secretary of the World Council for Peace (CMP), noted that the U.S. imperialist military presence and NATO are not only the source of the Russia-Ukraine war but also support Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
Venezuelan researcher Gabriel Aguirre, representing World Beyond War, pointed out that according to public information, “there are 6 or more military bases with nuclear weapons in Italy, Belgium, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey and it is very likely that there are others whose information is not in the public domain.”
He added that “there are more than 900 U.S. military bases in 90 countries which of course turn this imperialist force into the main promoter of wars all over the world.” More than 1.3 million military personnel are at these bases, the largest number of soldiers and bases stationed outside the country’s national territory since the Vietnam War.
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