By Bill Van Auken
March 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
In a speech delivered
Thursday announcing that the number of confirmed
coronavirus infections worldwide had risen to
200,000, the director of the World Health
Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated
that “the only way we can defeat this pandemic, as
we have always been saying, is through solidarity.
Solidarity, solidarity, solidarity ... We’re one
human race, and that suffices actually. This is an
invisible enemy against humanity.”
The solidarity of humanity across the planet is
not merely a noble ideal, but a life-and-death
necessity in combatting a deadly virus that
threatens to infect hundreds of millions of people
as its spreads to every corner of the globe. This
ideal, however, stands in stark opposition to the
reality of a world capitalist society riven by
unprecedented levels of social inequality and
characterized by the pursuit of geo-strategic
interests through the means of murderous violence.
Alongside the “invisible enemy against humanity”,
the coronavirus, there stands another quite visible
one, world imperialism.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
increasingly desperate conditions confronting Iran
and its population of nearly 83 million. The country
has the third highest number of fatalities after
Italy and China, and nowhere is the mortality rate
greater, as the number of infections continues to
rise sharply each day.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman Kianush
Jahanpur announced Thursday that 149 people
had died over the previous 24 hours,
bringing the death toll from the virus to
1,284. During the same period, another 1,046
cases of infection were reported, raising
the total number to 18,407. Both numbers are
believed to be serious underestimations of
the ravages of the disease.
“Based on our information, every 10 minutes one
person dies from the coronavirus and some 50 people
become infected with the virus every hour in Iran,”
the spokesman said.
Rather than human solidarity, Washington’s
response to this crisis has been a deliberate
attempt to intensify it at the cost of countless
lives of Iranian working people. The pandemic,
rather than being seen as an enemy to be eradicated
in every country, is viewed by the White House, the
Pentagon and the CIA as a new weapon of war that
must be integrated into imperialist planning.
This is the inescapable conclusion from the Trump
administration’s imposition Thursday of yet another
round of punishing economic sanctions against Iran,
targeting companies based in the United Arab
Emirates that are accused of buying petroleum from
the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). This
follows by only two days, another set of sanctions
announced by Washington’s bully-boy Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo against nine separate entities in
China, Hong Kong and South Africa. The blacklisted
companies were charged with engaging in “significant
transactions” involving Iranian petrochemicals.
Casting the pandemic in nakedly aggressive and
xenophobic terms, Pompeo told a State Department
press conference, “The Wuhan virus is a killer and
the Iranian regime is an accomplice.”
In the same breath, he claimed that Washington
was prepared to carry out “humanitarian efforts” to
“help the Iranian people stay healthy.”
The level of lies and hypocrisy is breathtaking,
even by the Trump administration’s standards. US
sanctions, which have blacklisted the country’s
central bank, make it impossible for Tehran to buy
basic medicines and medical supplies supposedly
allowed under the “maximum pressure” regime. This
has condemned tens of thousands to early and
preventable deaths well before the outbreak of the
coronavirus pandemic. Now, according to one estimate
by an Iranian physician, the country’s death toll
from COVID-19 could reach as high as 3.5 million.
This human suffering is not collateral damage
from Washington’s “maximum pressure” sanctions
regime, it is its direct purpose. Through brutal
collective punishment, hunger and the spread of
disease, US imperialism seeks to foment regime
change in Tehran with the aim of eliminating a
regional obstacle to its hegemony over the oil-rich
Persian Gulf while, in turn, preparing for war with
China. The coronavirus pandemic is seen as yet one
more weapon in the US arsenal.
As the January 3 drone missile assassination of
Gen. Qassem Suleimani at Baghdad’s international
airport made clear, US imperialism is prepared to
carry out a direct war of aggression to achieve its
aims. With the same order authorizing the illegal
murder of Suleimani, Trump authorized the Pentagon
to carry out bombing raids against Iranian ships,
air defense systems and other targets, paving the
way to a catastrophic military confrontation.
The level of desperation of Iran’s
bourgeois-clerical government as it confronts the
spread of the coronavirus is expressed in its appeal
to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with which
Tehran has not had relations for more than four
decades, for a $5 billion emergency loan to pay for
urgently needed medical supplies.
With Washington holding the deciding vote within
the IMF, the loan request will likely be rejected. A
similar request from Venezuela, another oil-rich
country that has faced a tightening noose of
“maximum pressure” sanctions as it confronts the
spread of the coronavirus, was turned down. The IMF
board cynically claimed it could not release the
money because it did not have “clarity on
recognition” of the government of President Nicolas
Maduro. As if the US puppet Juan Guaidó and the
small band of CIA-backed, right-wing conspirators
who surround him could organize efforts to contain
and mitigate the disease! Meanwhile, Washington’s
right-wing allies in Latin America have rejected any
collaboration with Venezuela in combating the spread
of the coronavirus, again with the hope of using
countless thousands of deaths to topple the existing
government and impose a US puppet regime.
The effects of these criminal policies will not
be confined to the targeted countries. The
coronavirus has already spread from Iran into much
of the Middle East and South Asia. The Pentagon has
even been forced to lock down occupation troops in
Afghanistan for fear that their return home could
spread the virus.
In its March 17, 2020 statement “How to fight the
COVID-19 pandemic: A program of action for the
working class”, the National Committee of the
Socialist Equality Party (US) raised the demand to
“End all sanctions and trade war measures.” It
stated: “The response of Iran, Venezuela and other
countries is being crippled by economic sanctions
that prevent them from acquiring basic medical
equipment. Trade war measures implemented by the
United States and European countries must be halted.
The coronavirus is a global disease that requires a
globally coordinated response.”
The worldwide coronavirus pandemic has exposed
once again in the most clear-cut manner that the
most basic interests of the working class and the
very survival of humanity are incompatible with
imperialism. The solidarity required to defeat this
disease and save the lives of millions around the
planet can be forged only through the unification of
the working class across national boundaries in a
common fight for socialist internationalism.
Copyright © 1998-2020 World Socialist Web Site
- All rights reserved "Source"
Do you agree or disagree? Post
your comment here
|