Of mice and men

Neo-con American hawk John Bolton is hitting the headlines again railing against his old boss and saying that Donald Trump’s  behaviour is “erratic, irrational and unconstrained” and that Trump will likely take the US out of NATO if he wins the presidential race in 2024. If only it were true...

Bolton is a career politician. Trump, on the other hand, is a property tycoon. Trump was quite happy to do the bidding of the American Establishment whose views he generally went along with. He didn’t realise that he was just a pawn of the reactionary circles who had propelled him to the White House in the first place. 

When Trump branched out on his own – arguing for cuts in the global US military presence and working for a rapprochement with Democratic Korea – his plans were sabotaged by his own senior advisers.

When Trump sacked them – and that’s something the president can still do – another stepped in to fill the gap.  Men like John Bolton, appointed Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 and sacked in 2019. Bolton has long been a tool of the “deep state”  –  the hidden hand of the most aggressive sections of the American ruling class that want war and “regime change” in countries that dare to stand up to American imperialism.

Bolton said that when Trump was in the Oval Office he undermined Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. E says Trump would betray Ukraine if again returned to the White House.

In the Republican camp some, like Bolton, are trying to derail Trump’s comeback campaign. They don’t particularly favour the others seeking nomination on the Republican ticket. But they clearly see Trump as a troublesome maverick, an unreliable element whose private life and dubious business ethics are an embarrassment even by American standards. They’re working to ensure the re-election of  the Democratic candidate. And Joe Biden is clearly a tool of the deep state. 

At the end of the day it makes no difference who wins the US presidential elections. Bourgeois elections are held so that the smallest number of people  can manipulate the largest number of votes. There can only be one winner in that sort of race…

For whom the bell tolls…

 Last weekend millions in Japan and throughout the world paused to remember those who died in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of the Second World War. On 6th August 1945 Hiroshima was destroyed by an American atom bomb. Nagasaki was hit three days later. Some 250,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed instantly in the atomic blasts. Many more would later perish from flash burns and radiation sickness.

The claim that the atom bombs forced Japan to surrender is an enduring myth of the Second World War. The Americans say they had to use the atom bomb to force Japan to surrender and bring the global conflict to an end. But the Japanese were begging for an armistice as their armies folded under the hammer blows of communist-led guerrillas  and the Red Army. 

But two Japanese cities were still wiped out to show the world, and the Soviet Union in particular, what US imperialism was capable of doing.

The fight for peace is inexorably linked to the struggle for justice. The campaign must inevitably challenge world imperialism, the greatest threat to peace. and present an alternative to the capitalism that is the root cause of all conflicts in the world today.