EXCERPT:
The pretense that this was a war to protect civilians has been exposed as a moral obscenity, with the death toll in Tripoli alone climbing into the thousands and NATO bombs and missiles continuing to fall in heavily populated areas.
One has to go back to the 1930s when, as today, world capitalism was gripped by a desperate economic crisis to find fitting parallels. Then, mankind was stunned by the savage aggression unleashed in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler's backing of the Sudeten Germans to achieve the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, and the dispatch of the German Condor Legion to bomb Spain on behalf of Franco's fascist insurgency.
At that time, these violent acts of aggression were seen as part of world capitalism's descent into barbarism. Today in Libya, similar acts are proclaimed to be a flowering of "humanitarianism" and "democracy."
During that period, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to the democratic sensibilities of the American people-while no doubt positioning the US for the pursuit of its own imperialist aims-by demanding a "quarantine" of fascist aggression.
He declared in 1937, "Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.
Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others. Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane consideration."
Those words from three quarters of a century ago read like an indictment of the Obama administration and the governments of Cameron, Sarkozy and Berlusconi.
The Nuremberg trials after the Second World War established aggressive war as the "supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
This conception was incorporated into the United Nations, which barred "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
Yet today within the political establishment there is virtually no criticism of the aggressive war carried out by the NATO allies. The scoundrels of the media have fully integrated themselves into the imperialist war machine, literally stepping over corpses and concealing the camera-shy Western dogs of war to better fashion their propaganda about "revolution" and "liberation" in Libya.
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