 Nato was founded in 1949 to unite and centralise the military-political power of western imperialism under the leadership and domination of the US (which had emerged from WW2 as the strongest imperialist power) – as a weapon to intimidate the USSR and other European socialist countries.
In response to the integration of West Germany into Nato in 1955, and seeing through Nato’s obviously aggressive designs, the USSR and other east European socialist countries founded the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955 – as a defensive bulwark against imperialist military threats.
Although it was formed much earlier, the lying propaganda of the Nato countries asserted to its peoples that Nato was a defensive alliance to counter the Warsaw Pact and to stop the allegedly aggressive designs of the Soviets on western Europe!
When the USSR and the eastern socialist bloc collapsed, the fig leaf for the existence of a warmongering alliance was suddenly removed. Nato, left without an official role, seemed overdue for the scrapyard. Now the new imperialist tune was that Nato must exist precisely because the Warsaw Pact was gone – to ‘ensure peace’, naturally!
The ‘new world order’
In 1993, the US outlined its objective of world domination in brutally clear terms. It wanted to ensure that “no rival power is allowed to emerge in western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union”, and that “no collection of nations can aspire to regional dominance, because that would put them on the path to global rivalry with the American superpower”.
And so, instead of the ‘peace dividend’ promised by imperialist politicians, what Nato brought us in the post-cold war era was more military spending, endless wars, and the encirclement of Russia.
It is no coincidence that the first war actually fought by Nato – against Yugoslavia in 1999 – took place after the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact and after the collapse of the socialist bloc.
That war was waged with nauseating cynicism and hypocrisy. Pretending to want to ‘stop ethnic cleansing’, the Nato warmongers oversaw a gigantic exercise in ethnic cleansing. In the name of ‘halting a genocide’, Nato perpetrated a genocide. Alleging a desire to ‘avert a humanitarian disaster’, Nato created the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe since 1945. Posing as the protectors of ‘human rights and democracy’, the Nato Nazis perpetrated an extraordinary violation of human rights and democracy.
The truth is that it was a war for loot, aimed at seizing territory, markets, raw materials, and avenues of investment. It was a war to establish – through the imposition of puppet regimes in the various parts of former Yugoslavia – an oil monopoly stretching from the Middle East to the Black and Caspian Seas. It was a war to establish military bases, to isolate Russia and to crush independent, sovereign Yugoslavia.
In other words, it was an imperialist war for domination – an opening shot in US imperialism’s new strategy of intervening in the affairs of any sovereign state that might refuse to go along with its diktat.
It was a harbinger of more predatory wars, from Afghanistan to Libya, and set the precedent for the use of Nato as a tool for gaining imperialist world supremacy – stamping underfoot the fundamental rights of nations and principles of international law.
Nato dropped 80,000 tonnes of explosives on Yugoslavia. It targeted schools, hospitals, farms, bridges, roads, railways, TV stations, historic monuments, museums, factories, refineries and residential areas. For 78 days, a coalition of 19 of the richest countries in the world, with a combined military budget of over $500bn, waged a total war to force tiny Yugoslavia to submit to the imperialist ‘new world order’.
The enemy within
The Yugoslav war, just like WW1 in 1914, revealed the moral depravity, corruption, mercenary cynicism, and utter shamelessness of both the corporate media presstitutes and most so-called ‘labour movement’ leaders in Britain.
It gave new proof – as did the later wars waged against Iraq, Libya and Syria – of the rottenness and bankruptcy of the Labour party and union leaders, and all the rest of the ‘liberal’ warmongers and stock-exchange ‘socialists’ who pretend to have some concern for the working class and some affinity with its interests.
When imperialism says jump, that is exactly what these ‘working-class leaders’ do. With the odd honourable exception, instead of opposing Nato’s blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia, they fell over themselves to reinforce media lies that painted Yugoslavia’s leader as a ‘new Hitler’ and the barbaric bombing as a ‘humanitarian intervention’.
For the vast majority of the careerist spivs who mislead workers in Britain, no crime is bad enough to make them question their subservience to our rulers. Their comfortable careers and lifestyles are paid for out of loot that comes from British imperialist plunder of the whole world – and their services in keeping British workers on side are well worth this small bribe.
That is why we communists always point out the urgent need to fight such opportunism in the working-class movement. We will get nowhere in our struggle for freedom until we have kicked such traitors out of our ranks.
Since 1999, twelve east European countries have been incorporated into Nato, including the former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim has been to bring Nato to the borders of Russia in order to encircle and enfeeble it, thus eliminating any possible challenge to imperialist domination.
This is precisely what lies behind the current dangerous crisis in Ukraine. In response to Nato’s relentless advance, however, Russia has in no uncertain terms served notice on the warmongers, saying: this far and no further.
It is clear that US imperialism dreams of subjugating Russia, overwhelming the People’s Republic of China and achieving world domination. It is equally clear that it will ultimately be no more successful than were the original Hitlerites.
As surely as the Nazis of yore came a cropper, US imperialism is travelling at breakneck speed towards the buffers. The people of the world will give the US and other imperialists a joyous burial.
We workers in the imperialist countries have a duty to fight for the disbandment of this predatory, warmongering neo-Nazi alliance, which brings death, destruction and misery to our brothers and sisters all over the world.
We must fight for the removal of all foreign military bases, and refuse to cooperate with the imperialist war machine.
And, above all, we need to fight for the complete overthrow of imperialism, which has for so long drenched humanity in blood.
Disband the neo-Nazi Nato alliance!
Death to imperialism! Forward to proletarian revolution!
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