From Turkey to Nigeria to Iraq... Imperialist Strategy Drives Atrocities

On May 13, 301 miners died in a preventable disaster in western Turkey. Like the girls taken captive this month in Nigeria, or the garment workers killed a year ago in Bangladesh, or the workers slain by U.S. imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were victims of capitalism and its relentless drive to maximize profits. For capitalist bosses in the U.S. and around the world, the lives of workers have no value except for surplus value — the difference between the value that workers produce and what they are paid. Since the ruling class holds absolute state power and controls the factories and other means of production, the working class is enslaved by the profit system. This will change only when we smash these bosses, eliminate the profit system, and seize state power. Only under communism will workers become society’s first concern.
U.S. imperialists, the worst mass murderers in history, condemn or ignore atrocities according to their strategic needs. When Turkish bosses killed the miners of Soma, spurring militant protests, U.S. media — serving their ruling-class owners — covered the story in self-righteous detail. After Islamic forces kidnapped more than 250 girls in Nigeria, Michelle Obama took over her husband’s weekly video address to express her “outrage and heartbreak.” But a mounting wave of sectarian bombings in Iraq, where nearly five thousand civilians have been slaughtered so far this year, has received hardly any mention by the rulers or their pressrooms. If anything, they have encouraged violent defiance of the Shiite regime in Baghdad by allowing ExxonMobil to make oil production deals with Kurdistan and the Sunni Nineveh province.
Why the discrepancy in reporting? It’s explained by the sharpening rivalry among the world’s leading powers: a declining but still preeminent U.S. empire; a resurgent Russian ruling class; and a rising Chinese military and economy. Ultimately headed for global conflict, this imperialist dogfight reaches far beyond the hot spots in Ukraine and the South China Sea.
Profits Throw Safety Out the Window
Profit-hungry Turkish coal barons were exposed in the energy industry bulletin OilPrice.com (5/16/14), which reported that mine owner Alp Gurkan “boasted in 2012... that his company had reduced the cost of coal production from $140 to $24 per ton.” Gurkan managed the feat by throwing safety measures out the window. But as the U.S. media plays agonizing images of bodies emerging from the Soma coal pit, their aim is less to blame Gurkan than to undermine Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s president. Although Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, it declined to join the U.S.-led protest against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and even increased its energy imports from Russia. With a faltering Turkish economy and mass protests in the street, U.S. rulers now consider Erdogan’s corrupt regime unreliable.
Last year, Foreign Affairs, the arch-imperialist journal representing U.S. finance capital and its Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, complained that Turkey made “a fateful decision to choose a Chinese HQ-9 T-LORAMIDS missile defense system over Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin’s Patriots” (5/15/14). Erdogan also cancelled a NATO-sponsored naval modernization drive. In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs (and its main backers, ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase) worried that Turkey had “no reassuring plan to counter Russia’s expansion of the Black Sea fleet.”
Turkey’s loyalty to NATO is of huge importance to U.S. strategists. Shortly before Chuck Hagel was named Secretary of Defense, as head of the Atlantic Council think tank he published a 2013 report that named Turkey, Brazil, India and Indonesia as “democratic” military counterweights to Russia and China in coming decades. In other words, Turkey fills the Middle East slot on the Pentagon’s roster for global war.
Finance Muslim Millionaire,
Attack Muslim Immigrants
There’s a reason why images of an Erdogan aide kicking a Soma protester played endlessly in U.S. newspapers and on television networks. Yet U.S. cops beat working-class black and Latino youth hundreds of times a day with no media attention. Cop attacks on Muslim immigrants, amid the rise of anti-Muslim racism, is ignored. But with U.S. rulers possibly readying to oust Erdogan, Turkey is a different case. According to the Economist, Erdogan’s critics, “now led by Fethullah Gulen, Turkey’s most influential Muslim cleric, who commands an empire of schools and media outlets from self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, will seize on the Soma tragedy” in Turkey’s presidential election in August (5/17/14).
U.S. bosses have patiently nurtured Gulen’s movement as a pro-U.S., moderate Islamic force. CIA bigwigs got Gulen his green card; a former high-ranking Turkish intelligence official described the movement as a CIA front that sheltered more than one hundred U.S. agents in Central Asia in the 1990s. Today the U.S. Department of Education pours millions in grants into Gulen’s vast charter school network. Back in Turkey, Gulenists have infiltrated the security apparatus. Meanwhile, undercover police are sent into mosques in New York and New Jersey to terrorize Muslims into becoming informants for the bosses’ fraudulent “war on terror.”
Africa Command Humanitarian?
Who’s Kidding Who?
In Nigeria, U.S. rulers are manipulating the Boko Haram kidnap crisis with similarly cynical motives. The mass abduction opens the door for military action in Africa’s most populous and oil-rich nation. The U.S. imperialists’ hidden agenda is to plant Africom, the Pentagon’s Africa Command, in a country that has been reluctant to embrace it. Africom military “advisors” arrived in Nigeria in mid-May to “save the girls,” even as they launched drone strikes in other Muslim countries and killed innocent children.
Of course, U.S. rulers hide the fact that their Middle East allies are financing Boko Haram: “The French intelligence services pointed out last week that their reports have long since ‘pointed out that...Boko Haram had received the backing of the oil monarchies.’” (le Canard enchaîné, 5/21).
The bosses’ public relations crusade in Nigeria is at odds with their exploitation of women in the U.S. and worldwide. Women are paid less than men for comparable work. They are treated as sex objects in the popular media and in the U.S. military, where sexual attacks are epidemic. U.S. companies freely exploit women garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. And the U.S. government uncritically backs Middle Eastern oil kingdoms that not only oppresses women citizens, but also force women migrants from Asia into virtual slavery as domestic workers, creating a multi-fractured working class entrenched in sexism.
Africa is vital to U.S. imperialist interests. In March 2007, just after President George W. Bush authorized Africom, Foreign Affairs called its creation “long overdue in light of U.S. dependence on Africa’s oil, its concern over radical Islamist groups targeting the region, and the continent’s identity as an arena for intense diplomatic competition with other states with global ambitions, like China” (5/3/07). The command was conceived as a blueprint for an imperialist task force.
In short, U.S. bosses’ crocodile tears over murdered miners and kidnapped teenagers are a cover for their incursions into Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. (While the U.S. has launched thousands of killer drones, the Pentagon has barely flown a single search mission over Nigeria.) With little U.S. working-class support for the rulers’ so-called War on Terror, they need workers and especially the youth — their prospective soldiers — to buy into this humanitarian sham and back a pro-imperialist movement.
Remember the “humanitarian” U.S. mission in Yugoslavia that bombed and killed tens of thousands and devastated the region’s infrastructure? It also established a permanent military base in Kosovo with 14,000 troops on hand for future forays to protect U.S. bosses’ profits. Or how about the two wars for “democracy” in Iraq that killed or displaced more than five million Iraqis? The payoff was control for Exxon
Mobil over the vast West Qurna oil field.
Build an International PLP
Progressive Labor Party is fighting to build an international communist movement that will build solidarity with the victims of imperialism in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and throughout the world. Fighting to destroy the profit system is the way to show real concern for exploited workers and their children, from the mines of Turkey to the forests of Nigeria.  
We must build PLP into a force that can destroy capitalism and erect a communist society free of bosses and profits, of racism and sexism and imperialist wars that murder millions. This is the road to ending the murder of miners and the kidnapping of schoolchildren. Join PLP and the fight for our lives and our future generations!