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Saturday, November 25, 2023

I have no country to fight for; my country is the Earth, and I am a citizen of the World

 Marxist Colorado State Rep. Replaces U.S. Flag on His Desk with Palestinian Flag.

We'd do well to remember:

'Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry' (Arundhati Roy, c. 2008).

With regards to Marx, he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848):

'The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.   The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.'

And again, in 1866:

‘…The poor have no country, in all lands, they suffer from the same evils, and they, therefore, realise that the barriers put up by the powers that be the more thoroughly to enslave the people must fall’ (International Working Men’s Association).

From  a speech given by the Marxist Eugene Debs in Chicago on July 4, 1901:

 '..Arouse, ye slaves! Declare war, not on the capitalist, but on the capitalist system, and if it should be your fate or your fortune to suffer in years to come, that suffering will not be the result of your own deliberate act. I am for the freedom of the working class. Though my heart yearns for the freedom of men, I am powerless. Only the working class itself can achieve its emancipation. The workingman who is not yet awakened, who has not yet realized all his class interests, is a blind tool, the willing instrument of his own degradation, and thousands of them on the 4th of July, when reference is made to the capitalist flag that symbolizes the triumph of capitalism only, thousands of these wage slaves will applaud their own degradation. What is wanted is not a reform of the capitalist system, but its entire abolition...'.  

During the mass capitalist slaughter of World War I he stated:

‘I have no country to fight for; my country is the Earth, and I am a citizen of the World’ (1915).

The Socialist Party, September 1939:

‘.. [no] policy for settling minority problems and international rivalries within the framework of capitalism is capable of bringing peace and democracy to the peoples of the world. Another war would be followed by new treaties forced on the vanquished by the victors, and by preparations for further wars, new dictatorships and terrorism. The Socialist Party… reiterates the call it issued in 1914: “Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism“’.

We are Marxist-Lennonists:
'Imagine there’s no countries; It isn’t hard to do; Nothing to kill or die for; And no religion, too' (Imagine, John Lennon, 1971).

And can agree here with Chomsky:
‘Presupposing that there have to be states is like saying, what kind of feudal system should we have that would be the best one? What kind of slavery would be the best kind?’ (Manufacturing Consent, 1988).

As well as Finkelstein:
'If you ask my personal preference, I would say that I don’t believe in two states; I don’t believe in one state; I happen not to believe in any states'   (2014).

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