From genocide in Gaza, turning back refugees, cutting benefits, building walls and deporting asylum seekers, to ongoing imperialist wars and military interventions, we are living through a tsunami of inhumanity.
The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is taking place in full world view. Israel remains unapologetic and unmoved. The lame excuses, the funding, the arms and the continued political support, keeps coming from the US, the EU and the UK.
Human rights are blatantly and unapologetically ignored as withholding food, water, fuel and humanitarian supplies are used as weapons of war.
The European Union presents itself as a benign power and a force for global good. But the reality is a different story. Take the experiences of African, Asian and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees. The EU routinely demonises, marginalises and expels them, dismissing its own responsibilities in the process.
The EU now has almost twenty external steel walls or razor-wire fences, running to a combined length of almost 1300 miles . Twenty years ago, there were no walls around the EU. Fortress Europe has been established.
The Supreme Court this week ruled against plans to send almost 25,000 asylum seekers to Rwanda saying that it would breach the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman treatment. What was the Tory government’s response? “The policy will go ahead”
The ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign demonstrates even further contempt for humanitarian responses to refugees and asylum seekers and sees far right and fascist policies becoming accepted as mainstream.
Homeless people are literally being swept off the streets. Funding for projects like Women’s Aid is being withheld. Voluntary and charitable organisations cannot keep up with the increasing calls on their services and the queues at food banks grow longer daily.
Tax breaks for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the most vulnerable in our society re-enforce that reality. Working class people are forced to pay the price of bailing out the banks and bear the brunt of the energy and cost of living crisis while multi-national companies profits soar to obscene and previously unreached levels.
None of this occurs by accident, nor by a twist of fate. It’s the inevitable outcome of the social and economic system which governs and directs our lives.
Too many people manage to struggle through life, to one extent or another, without ever knowing what it is they are struggling against.
Events that effect and shape our lives are presented as stand-alone unrelated issues. We are not encouraged or facilitated to look at the bigger picture. The main stream media manages to do a very good job in diverting attention and at making sure that that conversation seldom gets off the ground.
However, the reality is that the current capitalist economic and social system is based on class division and the accumulation of private wealth to the detriment of the public good. That’s what dictates every aspect of our lives.
No amount of tinkering, modifying or management of that capitalist system will change its nature, or the consequences it has for working class people the world over.
Now, more than ever, it is indisputable that only a socialist society and a socialist economy can restore the stolen humanity, the dignity and the futures of working people everywhere, and finally begin to turn the tide.
Workers Party of Ireland 