(The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge—who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group’s newsletter)
“November 3, 2015
“Dear Comrades,
“I hope your horse came home. One two-legged creature I hope doesn't is Abbott, yapping away on the other side of the world while his mortal enemy Malcolm smooches voters with populist policies. But both hate unions and support `free trade' and share a love affair with nuclear, including storing nuclear waste, when no country anywhere has been able to safely and permanently dispose of such nuclear excreta. It's an industry that's rotten to the core and threatens our health and our very survival.
“Nuclear is not the answer to climate change. Why choose a
dirty, corrupt, unsustainable non-solution when we have sunshine and wind in abundance that should be developed and harnessed to provide our energy needs?
“It also shows the moral bankruptcy of our ‘leaders’ that
having turned Australia into a quarry, they now tell us our future lies in filling up the holes with other people's lethal rubbish for later generations to manage.
“Fukushima. It’s against international law to dump
radioactivity into the sea, but Fukushima's highly radioactive water has been flowing out of the complex into the Pacific Ocean for four years straight and no one knows how to stop it.
“Homo sapiens is out of control, shrinking the space for
every other form of life. Constant growth means more people buying more things that can only be achieved through the increased exploitation of the planet's natural resources, a system that is destroying Mother Earth and all the things we love: the mountains, the trees, the animals, the flowers and the diversity of people. Between 30 and 50 percent of all known species are expected to be extinct by 2050 if current trends continue. People power needed, not apathy, which we have in abundance, like rampant corruption.
“ Just one country has a genuinely sustainable economy.
Cuba. Cuba has met the basic needs--food, housing, health and education--for all its citizens in an ecologically sustainable manner and has revitalized community-based economic development through a combination of worker owned co-ops, small private enterprises and star-owned businesses.
“While most Cubans do not have the materialistic lifestyle
of people in wealthy nations, they are also immune to the extreme poverty, misery and death that plague the capitalist model. And at the latest UN vote, only two supported the US blockade of Cuba, the US and Israel, with no fence-sitters. Trust the US of A to treat Cuba with respect? Not bloody likely.
“News flash in and flash out of our consciousness catering
to our diminishing attention-span thanks to the proliferation of electronic devics frying our brains, especially young brains. Already fading from view, the merciless attack on the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital at Kunduz in the early hours of October 3 by a US gunship armed to the teeth with the most up-to-date weaponry, killing more than 22 people--some burned to death in their beds while conscious--injuring dozens more and with an unknown number of patients and staff still missing.
“ US military authorities were given precise GPS coordinates only four days before the attack and as shells rained down MSF staff frantically called US officials in Kabul and Washington. `Collateral damage' and a`mistake' said the Pentagon blaming the Afghan government. A `bombing gone wrong' said America's corporate media, desperately trying to bury the issue.
“People on the ground knew better. That the US military has
been targeting hospitals and ambulances
deliberately for decades and painting a red cross on the
roof of a hospital is an invitation to be bombed. Hideous enough to attack a hospital but to attack it with weapons designed to slaughter as many people as possible is almost beyond comprehension.
“If a medical facility protected under international
humanitarian law run by a charity that won the Nobel Peace prize can be destroyed, then no one is safe. Obama knows this is a war crime which might explain why he has refused MSF's demand for an independent investigation into the atrocity.
“Tony Blair is an unprincipled, lying yob and a leaked memo
proves it. He gave George Bush an unqualified pledge to sign up to the Iraq War a year before the invasion when he was telling British voters `we're not proposing military action.' He also agreed to convince a skeptical public that Saddam had `Weapons of Mass Destruction.,' when there were none, acting as a frontman for Washington before any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.
“A war that has spread and spread and keeps spreading…all
the way to Syria, but a conflict engineered far away directly aimed at Iran and beyond. Moscow knows that the collapse of Syria as a functioning nation-state will lead to a chain reaction that will affect countries along Russia's borders and then everything within them.
“ Now we hear that the US has sent a ‘small number’ of
Special Operations Forces into Syria, a `shift' not a `change'. And an A321 Russian airliner has crashed 22 minutes after taking off from Sharm El Sheikh after splitting in two and killing all 224 on board. Islamic State has claimed responsibility. Many questions remain.
“Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled
private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth, less than 0.0001 percent. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), the capitalist elite of the world who dominate nation-states through international `trade' agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements. Hundreds of private military contractors now play a vital role in TCC security in the evolving 21st century's nightmarish world.
“ The 99 percent of us without wealth and private police
forces face a looming threat of overt
repression and complete loss of human rights and legal
protections. This is a fight for our survival. Unless we collectively challenge the Empire, we face a future evolving into a new dark age of neo-feudal totalitarianism unlike anything we have ever seen. So fight we must, joining millions of others around the world.
“Joan Coxsedge”
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