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Editorial

By VVAW

No one needs to be told that the system is in crisis; already, we're out of work, no jobs, disability payments sliced, food priced out of reach while food stamps are cutback--the list goes on and on. The system is going straight to hell, and we're told that the best we can do is to "sacrifice."

Our sacrifice in buying gas at 70 cents (or more!) a gallon isn't going to save the system; we know that, and so do the people who run this system. Sure, they are going to try lying a while longer, talking about the light at the end of the tunnel, and how there will be a lessening of the rate of inflationary increase so that food prices will only go up 13% instead of 15%, and all the rest of the gobbledygook that official Washington spews out. But they know there is only one sure way to preserve their system, at least temporarily--and that is war.

War is good business. The people who make super-profits by exploiting working people here in the US and around the world have a long history in the war business. Whenever their system is in deep crisis, they can manufacture all kings of reasons why a war is necessary. Maybe it's to prevent "strangulation" by oil-producing countries as Kissinger recently said. Or it's to prevent a "communist" takeover in Southeast Asia, the supposed reason for the Vietnam war. Of course, the exploiters won't be there fighting the war.

Signs are all around us. The most recent is the Vinnell Corporation hiring mercenaries (mostly unemployed vets) to train "internal security" forces in Saudi Arabia. We don't know when they have the next war planned--tomorrow or a year down the road. But we do know that the system of imperialism needs war to survive, and that we want no part of it. Many of us in VVAW/WSO have already been through one imperialist war--we see what it did, and is still doing, in Vietnam, and what it is doing in the US.

Vietnam Veterans Day, March 29th, was designed by the government to glorify that imperialist war. We say that we won't fight their imperialist wars--that we've had enough of their system and the wars it needs to continue to survive. We see its scheme and will fight until that system is smashed.