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Workers Hammer No. 238 |
Spring 2017 |
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Anti-Trump protests whitewash racist British imperialism The election of reactionary billionaire Donald Trump as US president sparked protests in the US and internationally. In Britain, everyone from the Tories to the fake socialists have joined in promoting blood-soaked British imperialism as a “humanitarian” alternative to Trump’s anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-woman administration. A widely touted petition calling on Parliament to cancel the official state visit arranged for Trump by Prime Minister Theresa May declares: “Donald Trump’s well-documented misogyny and vulgarity disqualifies him from being received by Her Majesty the Queen or the Prince of Wales.” Since practising Hitler salutes in her childhood, the Queen — head of state of British capitalism — has always displayed the warmest sympathy for bloody dictators and war criminals. The monarchy is the pinnacle of reaction in the “United Kingdom”, a regime based on the national oppression of the Irish, Scots and Welsh, racist repression against blacks and Asians and the vicious exploitation of the multiethnic, multinational working class.
The Stop the War Coalition, a prominent builder of the anti-Trump protests in Britain, issued their own petition calling on May’s government to “end the special relationship” and pleading: “Collaboration or support for US foreign policy at this moment should be unthinkable.” British capitalism stands on a pile of corpses — from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the subjugation of a vast colonial empire in Asia, Africa and the Near East to the bombing of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. As a “responsible” party of government for the British bourgeoisie, the Labour Party presided over manifold imperialist atrocities, not least the blood-drenched partition of India; and when it comes to racist misogyny, it was a Labour government that introduced degrading virginity tests for Asian women entering the country at Heathrow airport in the 1970s. Whether in alliance with the US or on its own, British imperialism has always been an enemy of working people and the oppressed in the British Isles and around the world.
In London, the Remainers were out in force at anti-Trump protests, with placards and chants equating Brexit with Trump’s election. No! The vote for Britain to leave the EU was a blow against the bosses and bankers of Europe. The EU is an imperialist consortium to increase the exploitation of workers and to plunder dependent member states like Greece, Ireland and countries in Eastern Europe. At the 4 February anti-Trump protest in London, the Spartacist League highlighted our opposition to the EU and to the nasty, brutish British ruling class as part of our perspective to sweep away British imperialism through workers revolution.
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