 |
Calling on Beelzebub
Off Haiti the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, enables military
helicopters to transport food, water and medical supplies to people on
the island who desperately need them. USAF air traffic controllers
guide planes from all over the world carrying other supplies and
equipment to land safely at the airport at Port-au-Prince. A US
hospital ship and naval vessels from other countries wait offshore.
Socialists are perhaps not alone in seeing the irony of organisations
that normally deal in death and destruction being called in to deal
with a situation caused by a Nature that has wreaked death and
destruction. For armed forces are just that – bodies of trained men and
women whose mission is to kill and maim people and to destroy and
demolish buildings. Just as at the very same moment other military
helicopters and planes from other aircraft carriers are doing in
another part of the world, Afghanistan.
Still perhaps we should at least be grateful for small mercies and not
complain when, for once, the armed forces put aside their weapons and
do something useful for a change. In any event it is what the people of
the world want. It is clear that people all over the globe do genuinely
feel for their fellow humans when they are hit by an earthquake as in
Haiti or by a tsunami as in and around the Indian Ocean five years ago.
They want to help and they do help in whatever small way they can. A
sign that, deep down, people do consider themselves as members of a
single human community, as people of the planet Earth.
Only a callous buffoon of an American money-seeking bible preacher
could say that the earthquake was an act of a god angry at the people
of Haiti for some sin they are supposed to have committed. The scorn
with which his claim was greeted shows how far removed we now are from
the times when this would have been the standard explanation, accepted
even by the victims.
Humans are not able to prevent earthquakes but, quite apart from the
fact that much that could be done to mitigate their consequences is not
done for reasons of cost, a united socialist world provides a better
framework than capitalism for dealing with these inevitable Acts of
Nature. That today armed forces have to be (partially) diverted from
their normal destructive activities to deal with these natural
disasters brings out that under capitalism, with its division of the
world into competing states, there is no permanent international rescue
service of trained men and women, having its own helicopters, landing
craft and, yes, even aircraft carriers. As there could and no doubt
will be in a socialist world. Without guns of course.
Top Introducing the
Socialist Party Contents
|
|
|
The Socialist Party is
like no other political party in Britain.
It is
made up of people who have joined together because we want to get rid
of the profit system and establish real socialism.
Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for
themselves, organising democratically and without leaders, to bring
about the kind of society that we are advocating in this journal.
We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists
for socialism.
We are not a reformist party with a programme of policies to patch up
capitalism.
We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We
publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other
informative material.
We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies,
meetings and demos; run educational conferences; host internet
discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and contest
elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in Arabic,
Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish,
Swedish and Turkish as well as English.
The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be
able to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to
draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement
which you will be able to bring us.
The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no
leader and there are no followers.
So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you
agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you
understand the case for socialism. |
|
