March 20, 2022
On the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution…
Revolutionary day of action about the Ukrainian question
Presentation of the day
by Paula Medrano of the Editorial Committee of “The International Workers Organiser
“Putin massacred in Syria and crushed the workers' strike in Kazakhstan, doing imperialism's 'dirty work'. Now in the Ukraine, he seeks to defend the office that he has as a murderer and jailer of the peoples of Eurasia.”
We meet today in the middle of the war that is taking place today in Ukraine and 11 years after a heroic revolution such as is the Syrian revolution.
Just two days ago, the anniversary of the Syrian revolution was celebrated and thousands and thousands of revolutionaries and sons of the martyrs who started that great revolution took to the streets. A revolution that we have been denouncing from the beginning as the most massacred, the most sullied and a thousand times betrayed, especially by the world Left.
It's not by chance. In Syria Putin was also massacring, supporting the fascist al-Assad, and after crushing the strike of the steel and oil workers in Kazakhstan, he continues to do the dirty work for imperialism, now in the Ukraine.
Now Putin is seeking to defend his office as a murderer and jailer of the peoples of Eurasia.
Imperialism and its armed wing, NATO, under US imperialists command, consider that they have used their Russian jackal Putin enough and now they want to go after Moscow. That is why they need a massacred Ukraine, as we have all seen on television with the demolished cities, handed over by the cowardly bourgeoisie of Kyiv, and by NATO itself. This entire scenario is what imperialism needs because it is the one that would best open the way for it to advance in political, economic and military control of all of Europe. The US imperialists are just handing over Ukraine as if it were a pawn in a chess game for then to take Moscow and go after the whole of Russia.
8 For 11 years, imperialism and NATO left the skies open in Syria for al-Assad and Putin to bomb recklessly, destroying all the cities, massacring more than a million workers, leaving more than 15 million refugees, without the cowardly bourgeoisie of the FSA, supported by Turkey, firing a single shot, and instead giving in one by one the battles of the working class. Nothing different from what the ultra-reactionary government of Zelensky is going to do for Moscow.
In Syria, never in 11 years was there a single military clash between Turkey and the US against Putin or al-Assad. They let them kill at will. All of them signed a deal at the Geneva conference by which they split and occupied Syria.
Today the imperialist oil companies, guarded by the YPG, the "libertarian" friends of the traitorous left, are taking all the oil from northern Syria to Turkey and from there to New York….
11 years have passed since the start of the revolution and a brutal counterrevolution. Putin, after massacring in Syria, goes to Ukraine, and the miserable left, those who remained neutral in the face of the Syrian genocide, those who were partners with the PKK (the Kurdistan Stalinists), all those who invented the ISIS telltale and who said “the problem is ISIS, so we are going to set up an anti-terrorist front”, all of them have covered up the massacre in Syria. Now they must show their faces! Now they have to explain! They have to explain to the new generations of workers why they supported al-Assad and Putin, or in other cases why they supported Turkey and the US imperialists! They have to explain why they were never really in the same trench as the massacred Syrian working class, just as they are not alongside the Ukrainian one now.
They were in charge of leaving the Syrian working class isolated and fenced that revolution, so that the world working class, the only allies that the Syrian people had, would not come to their aid.
11 years of revolution and counterrevolution, and the resistance has not given up.
We fought there, from the beginning. 15 of our comrades fell. They are part of those 600-700 thousand, although the number of exploited murdered by the fascist al-Assad is no longer well known.
They are martyrs of the world working class!
Today's event is a way to honor all of them and draw lessons so that the working class does not have to go through this ordeal once more.
Today here in Europe you see millions of refugees coming from Ukraine, as more than 15 million Syrian refugees are today on the borders of Europe. The Mediterranean Sea is the grave of all the exploited who want to come to Europe to seek a better life. We can't keep allowing that!
We workers have to prevent there being, as there has been here, a distinction between first class and second class refugees. We are all refugees! The trade unions and workers' organizations of Europe should go out and demand Europe's borders to be opened, that Ukrainian, Syrian and African workers earn the same as the salary of a European worker and that there be housing, food, papers, work for everyone.
Today, 11 years after the start of the Syrian revolution, its combats are taking place in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as it was before in Iraq, the Caucasus or Palestine, while in Russia thousands are also taking to the streets against the butcher Putin.
The combat is class against class and much more so when it is expressed in a labyrinthine way in the national question.
Reformism only seeks collaboration with different agents of imperialism together with whom it hides the imperialists' looting.
The unity of the Ukrainian and Russian workers to destroy Putin's counter-revolutionary war machine is the only way by which Ukraine can be freed from invasion, only with the working class taking the military leadership of the national war, together with the soldiers' committees and the workers' and peasants' alliance.
The intervention of the Europea working class in support of Ukraine, which is being invaded, is essential. It is the way to defeat NATO and the imperialist Maastricht.
The unity of the US working class with the revolted masses of Iraq and Sudan, with the resistance of Yemen, Syria, Palestine and Iran would open all fronts and would pose that US imperialism can be strangled.
After 11 years of an enormous revolution, the masses have not surrendered, just as the Palestinian masses have not surrendered, just as the Yemeni masses are not surrendering, nor are the Sudanese ones. Only their leaders surrendered, who long ago renounced the socialist revolution.
This talk is also meant for that, with those revolutionary lessons from yesterday, we can prepare the new Syrian revolution. This will be an inseparable part of the fight of all the exploited in the Middle East and in particular with the Palestinian masses for crushing Zionism and imperialism. So that this time it will not be the Africans who are looking for a better life who die in the Mediterranean; nor the thousands after thousands of displaced Syrians who are dying with their children in the concentration camps (refugees) that are on the borders of Europe; and that it is not the desperate Ukrainian workers who have to get on a train to save the lives of their children; rather, it is the capitalists and all the exploiters who will have to take refuge from the hatred of the masses.
Comrades, we wanted to start this meeting by reaffirming that for us the fight is for the socialist revolution in Syria and throughout the Middle East.
Russian troops out of Ukraine!
For the disarmament of NATO!
We need a general strike across Europe! |
