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CAPITALISM & WAR VS. PEACE & SOCIALISM: NO to National Missile Defence!
Statement by the Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada, June 12/2000
The Pentagon's adventurist military plan for a ballistic missile shield seeks to ensure U.S. imperialist global domination. So far the plan lacks support from any government in the world, yet it has its backers in the Liberal Government of Canada.
Washington may approve the National Missile Defence plan after another test launch of an experimental NMD rocket. It needs no encouragement from Canada.
The NMD would undermine Canadian and global security, perhaps fatally. By creating a sense of false confidence, the system could make a nuclear war more possible, not less likely.
The military-corporate backers of the NMD are led by the most reactionary sections of the U.S. monopoly-capital class, those who support a nuclear war-fighting strategy. These warmongers want to make the possibility of nuclear war less unthinkable for the U.S. public, opening the way for other military adventures all over the world.
The U.S. government is prepared to approve NMD with or without support from Canada or NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance which is responsible for over 55 per cent of world military spending.
Already NATO (whose member countries include just 15% of the world's population), officially rejects international law and gives itself the "right" of first-use of nuclear weapons in a war. Approval of the NMD would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty between the Russian Federation and the United States.
NMD cannot replace international law or cast aside past accomplishments of arms control and disarmament without seriously undermining global security. NMD backers are ignoring world opinion, including U.S. public opinion, that supports unequivocal steps for nuclear weapons disarmament.
Not least, an NMD system would spark an even larger arms race, costing tens of billions of dollars, depriving millions of people of food, jobs and housing.
For a broad and powerful arms control and disarmament movement!
It is time for public organizations to speak out in support of arms control and disarmament!
"We the people" need to uphold and strengthen the ABM treaty, and urge other countries to sign it.
We need to join in the world condemnation of National Missile Defence, and any violation of the ABM treaty.
We need to demand the conclusion of an early treaty setting out a timetable for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, as an urgent and immediate goal.
We need to repudiate the threat or use of force in settling differences or disputes in international relations.
We need to ensure global, common security through respect of international law, promotion of sustainable development, and above all, by curbing the power of transnational corporations.
We need to reduce world and NATO military spending. We need to pull Canada out of NATO and NORAD, to ensure that our country has an independent foreign policy that reflects the interests of the large majority of Canadians.
We need to support measures between states to reduce the probability of the accidental outbreak of war, and to prevent the deliberate fabrication of armed incidents that can develop into international crises, genocides and wars.
<Headline 18 helv>Socialism and disarmament
<Body text> Ten years ago, when socialist governments collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, pro-capitalist political parties said that the arms race would end and people would get a "peace dividend."
But today, one-third of the global labour force is jobless or under-employed. Millions more are thrown into poverty every year. Transnational corporations are often behind the growing number of new and brutal wars in the world's poorest and most exploited nations. The arms race continues.
A social system that relies on military force to prop itself up is a dying system. The process of capitalist globalization, pushed ahead by transnational finance capital with the aim of dominating all the markets of the world, is leading to unequal, distorted and aggressive relations between all nations.
Only a social system that puts people and nature ahead of profit can ensure global disarmament and the survival of life on earth. That system is socialism, a society where war will be banned forever and the true history of humanity will begin.
(From the rief of the Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada to the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs.)
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