AND Editorial – Imperialism is Gearing up for New Times of War
We hereby share an unofficial translation of the latest editorial from A Nova Democracia (AND).
When US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, address all active-duty generals and top military commanders, it is yet another indication that we are experiencing times of war, not peace. On September 30, far-right extremists demanded new physical fitness requirements from their officers to “reshape the warrior spirit” of the command and troops; and at the same time, they made references to the “internal enemy.” The objectives are several: first, to demonstrate a “willingness to fight” in a world where other imperialist powers and even the atomic superpower Russia seek to “take advantage” of the complex challenges facing the US in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, and the Indo-Pacific; secondly, it seeks to accelerate the march toward absolutist presidentialism, seeking to reshuffle command positions and strategic functions in the Armed Forces, aiming to “purge” the Democratic Party mafia from the State apparatus and inject more far-right elements into it.
In any case, the ridiculous spectacle of Mr. Pete Hegseth speaking like a coach to a crowd of generals and officers who are experts in war crimes and interference in the affairs of other countries is, for that very reason, a sign of weakness. Trump, as a phenomenon, demonstrates the fragility of Yankee imperialism, like a reaction that seeks to reaffirm itself because it is questioned, and with resentment. Through such a reaction, including performative ones, they aim to neutralize new offensives by their opponents, saying that “no nation or enemy should dare to challenge and threaten” the US. In a scenario of growing popular revolt and with increasing deployment of federal troops to the states and cities of their electoral opponents, Trump and the far right point to the “internal enemy,” demonizing immigrants, and in a sense betting on the promotion of calculated institutional and social disorder, after which the federal executive branch will emerge even stronger in relation to the states. No, gentlemen, this is not yet fascism: this is Yankee bourgeois democracy, aging, increasingly reactionary, which absorbs measures, policies, and even a spirit that had a leading role or emerged in fascism, but puts them at its service, in the mechanism of bourgeois democracy itself. Those who seek to rail against “fascism” when they see the reactionary turn of bourgeois democracy are, objectively, contributing to the embellishment of bourgeois democracy.
Fragility, however masked, remains a fact. Russia, China, and the European imperialist powers, especially France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, are launching their initiatives. The atomic superpower Russia is the main military problem for the US, and the key strategic plan of the Yankees is to subdue Russia, as an unavoidable condition to ward off the danger of being dethroned and consolidate their position, which is in decline, forcing it into an endless arms race, wearing down its economy by all means and with the war in Ukraine, since it cannot defeat it, it seeks to keep it permanently at war, even if the war in Ukraine ends, whose only solution tends to be its partition. At the same time, Trump is trying to exploit the contradictions between Russia and China to undermine their collusion (“BRICS”), which he knows to be unsustainable, to attract the former and distance the latter, on which his world hegemony will also depend. The European imperialist States, for their part, are betting on the Yankee collapse and taking advantage of the “Russian danger” – now through curious incidents with drones in Poland, Romania, Denmark, etc. – to escalate their militarization and, especially in the case of France and Germany, increase their military presence in Northern, Central, and Southeastern Europe, as well as establish spheres of influence in other regions such as the Middle East.
In this explosive scenario, Trump’s harangue of “we don’t want wars” is just his usual clamor, this time to cover up the preparations of the Yankee imperialist bourgeoisie for the new world situation of worsening inter-imperialist contradictions over the division of the world—and, above all, the main, most comprehensive, and most acute contradiction in the world today, between oppressed nations and peoples and imperialism.
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The “peace plan,” or rather, the capitulation plan proposed by Donald Trump for the “solution” to the war in Gaza, is nothing more than a ploy to aggravate the contradictions within the Palestinian National Resistance and, perhaps, to aggravate the contradiction between the Palestinian leadership and the popular masses. In this, they will undoubtedly fail, because the masses are mobilized in the war of resistance, and this is an irrefutable fact. Only when the masses are disorganized and immobilized can such blackmail succeed.
Thus, this “plan” envisages transforming Gaza into a buffer zone “free of armed groups” (except for the genocidal Zionist and imperialist armed forces), governed by a “Peace Council” (cynicism!) composed of “Palestinian technocrats” (lackeys), “international experts” (imperialist and “Israeli” emissaries), and headed by the very proponent of the plan for the total subjugation of the Palestinian nation and people. The Nazi-Zionist Führer Netanyahu, despite his eagerness to apply the “final solution” in occupied Palestine, accepted his master’s proposal and seeks to sell it to internal dissidents as an “Israeli victory,” since in practice it is also a plan to maintain the occupation, even if it justifies by other means the perpetuation of its military presence in Palestinian territory, although it demonstrates the degree of demoralization of “Israel,” which has no legitimacy whatsoever to speak of “peace,” since it is recognized worldwide as a genocidal force. The media monopolies with their “hack writers” (mediocre and unethical journalists on the payroll), in turn, until now then spokesmen and accomplices of the Nazi-Zionist Holocaust and its crimes against humanity (such as Rede Globo in Brazil), now propagate the “efforts to negotiate peace in Gaza” and ask Hamas to “accept the agreement to end the suffering of the Palestinians (sic).” Hateful and laughable.
Noteworthy was watching the hypocrite Mahmoud Abbas, head of the “Palestinian Authority” (a creation of the capitulationist Oslo Accords of 1993), who in his nauseating speech at the UN condemned the Palestinian National Resistance (which, unlike the “PA,” enjoys broad popular support) and almost kissed Trump’s feet for his “tireless efforts for peace.” It was a repugnant scene starring this supposed “Palestinian leader,” willing to trade his people for thirty pieces of silver and perhaps become the puppet of a future and hypothetical Palestinian State engineered by the imperialists, which would be anything but Palestinian.
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In their dreams of “ending world disorder,” the imperialists’ shot tends to backfire, for revolution is the main historical and political trend in the world today, and instead of closing in on oppressed peoples, as they imagine, the imperialists will find themselves increasingly surrounded by anti-imperialist struggles, national liberation wars, and people’s wars in this new period of revolutions that is opening up in the history of the world, a situation that requires revolutionaries in Brazil and around the world to prepare to lead them, breaking with the illusion of “times of peace” and equipping themselves subjectively and objectively for times of revolutionary turmoil.
