Internationalism – Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

CCDS Condemns President Trump’s Aggression Towards Latin America

No war on Venezuela! No Military aggression against Colombia or Mexico! No deadly US assaults on boaters!

CCDS condemns the far-right cabal in the White House for its unprovoked aggression against our Latin American neighbors. We simultaneously condemn the US military’s naked aggression and murders, from September 2 through November 12, 2025, of 75 people on 19 boats off the coasts of Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. These murders by US armed forces are simply piracy that violate international and US law, including Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

We note the Commander of the US Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, announced his early retirement supposedly in response to President Donald Trump’s actions against Venezuela. Nonetheless, we demand the court martial of military brass who’ve overseen the assassination of unarmed civilians on the high seas. We call for international court indictments of those US officials who’ve ordered this policy.

Trump’s assault includes threatening B-52 bomber flights, intervention by the CIA, and the stationing of a full aircraft carrier group with 15,000 troops off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. Without evidence, these actions are based on a fabrication that President Nicolas Maduro is responsible for the operation of a Venezuela drug cartel. Trump has further fabricated a claim that the export of illegal drugs constitutes an act of war.

We demand that Trump cease his threats against Venezuela, and more recently against Colombia and Mexico. Such belligerence is calculated to destabilize those societies. This may very well be a prelude for a much larger military attack and invasion. Imposition of the dominance and will of US foreign policy elites and corporations is the overall goal.

With specific regard to Venezuela, Trump’s assault is based on his avaricious stance toward its vast reserves of oil as well as mineral deposits. Despite the Maduro government’s offer to open up Venezuela’s natural resources to US oil and mining firms, the US has continued to press its assault.

The military threats are also aimed at the growing progressive majority in Venezuela. US elites seek to bring about an end to the Bolivarian Revolution. Through this Revolution, the majority is raising living standards, building housing, providing extensive medical care, and expanding higher education.

CCDS says “Defend the Venezuelan, Colombian, and Mexican peoples!”

“Solidarity with all Latin American people against US attack!”

A Summary Statement in Protest of US Policy in the Middle East

The Committees of Correspondence For Democracy And Socialism (CCDS): The Middle East Wars and United States Imperialism

By the CCDS Peace & Solidarity Committee

Feb 10, 2025

We in CCDS believe there can be no moral, ethical, or ideological justification to excuse the brutality and modern-day barbarity of US supported Israeli actions in Gaza since October 2023.

Palestine is first and foremost a settler occupied land where Zionists, assisted by western colonial and imperial powers, imposed a colonial set of social relations on its majority Arab Muslim peoples. This majority prevailed from the 7th century to the mid-20th century. Then, prior to the state of Israel being declared the Nakba began, that is, clearing the land of Arab Palestinians.

In the 1890s A World Zionist Organization was formed with the overt intent of creating a Jewish homeland in the Palestine region along the lines of a Jewish nation state. But why Palestine, and not any other place? A long Jewish historical association with the land of Palestine, and a firmly established religious and social strife involving Christianity would provide the emotional bonds and a powerful symbol to anchor a Zionist political ideology with global reach and appeal.

The UK, which held the mandate to govern Palestine, gave the green light to the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration. In 1947, in the face of years of terrorizing violence directed at Muslims by Zionist settlers, and an alarmingly increasing resettlement of Jews in Palestine, the United Nations recommended the partition of Palestine into two states. At that time, only 1/3 of the land’s inhabitants were of Jewish background.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and the chairman of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, declared the establishment of a new state of Israel. Palestinians and Arab neighbors viewed this as an occupation of the residents’ historic land. And the first Middle East war between the new Israel supported by the UK and the US, and Arab states ensued.

During, and under the cover of this war, the Zionists intensified the Nakba which has taken various forms over the decades. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes, villages, towns, and country to bring us to a Jewish majority on the ground today.

Subsequent wars followed in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and intermittently from the 1980s to today’s brutal, genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. These wars supported by the West emboldened Israel to extend its territory both within and beyond its borders. Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, the Old City of Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Through settler and state sanctioned violence Palestinians were terrorized and cleared off their lands; villages and towns replaced by new Jewish settlements and the territory of Israel expanded.

These wars, then and now, have been waged by Israelis, with unconditional Western support, against Palestinians and neighboring Arab states. The deeply embedded issues fueling this inimical void are two-fold:

Internally: the legitimacy of the state of Israel; the dehumanizing apartheid and racist policies towards Palestinians; the control and weaponizing of energy, water, airspace, and movement to impose a pervasive repressive regime over Palestinian lives; the transformation of the lived reality of the Palestinians into a veritable open-air prison; a draconian military justice system curtailing civilian life; and an on-going unrestrained settler violence as a prelude to settlement expansion and ultimately the removal of the Palestinian people.

Externally: Palestine is centered in a web of geopolitical interests. Control of the region’s oil economy is vital for Western corporate and cartel capitalism’s global economic hegemony. So is Palestine’s geopolitical location along a historical bridge connecting Western Europe and North Africa to Asia. Israel also features prominently in the US led capitalist empire’s quest for control of the territory and its resources from the Red Sea to the Adriatic Sea and control of the Mediterranean Sea. For these Western interests, Israel is the vital outpost to ensure geopolitical control. It performs the role of destabilizer and attack force.

Various organizations like the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah emerged to challenge and resist the Israeli state and its land expansion over the last fifty years. The United States, Britain, France, the former Soviet Union, and neighboring Arab states have all played significant roles in the development of this conflict.

Emerging from World War II as the most powerful economic and military power on the globe, the United States cultivated a special relation of support for Israel that refuses to falter even in the face of starkly evident genocidal actions against humanity. Israel has the most powerful military in the region suited up with the latest in military technology and weapons from the US; is a nuclear power and boasts a powerful global intelligence network. The United States, through finance; technology and intelligence sharing; military support; and its veto privileges in international institutions, has aided and abetted every aspect of this abominable state.

In the very period of Israel’s genocide, between October 2023 and October 2024, the US provided Israel with $17.9 billion, and devastating bombs that make a mockery of nuclear scares. The US provides Israel with enough military material to defend itself from any other country’s intervention. And today, the US president openly advocates for the total disappearance of Palestinians in Palestine to be replaced by others from or favored by the US. We therefore hold the United States equally culpable for all of Israel’s crimes against humanity. The United States is also deeply enmeshed in the expansionist drama unfolding in Syria. Even further it is involved in imperialist regime change and secession programs in many parts of the world.

Today, pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States support continued military and economic aid to Israel. Israel, with United States support, opposes serious negotiations with the legitimate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. That the countries of the world, for multiple and strategic reasons, have not been able to militarily intercede in this genocide in Gaza may result in a hardening of Israeli opposition to any serious negotiation in the aftermath of signing a temporary cease-fire. Israel and the pro-Israeli United States appear untroubled by the global tide of criticism from the real international community and its demand for a just peace.

We in CCDS believe there can be no moral, ethical, ideological, or other justification to excuse the brutality and modern day barbarity of US supported Israeli actions in Gaza since October 2023. This is first, a crime against Palestinians; then it is a crime against all of humanity – a crime against all of us. We condemn the actions of the US for its complicity and partnership in Israel’s genocidal actions.

We call on our fellow US citizens and residents, institutions, and political organizations to stand firm against the genocidal and expansionist actions in Palestine and beyond.

We demand in the name of peace, justice, democracy, and freedom for all the world’s peoples,

an end to Israeli support

an end to legislative endeavors to curtail just criticism of Israeli actions

an end to imperial designs

an end to regime change

an end to our military presence around the world

an end to hybrid wars

an end to support for terrorists and assassins

Let us stand for a just and shared future for all in the world.

WAR AND OCCUPATION OPENED THE DOOR TO IRAQ’S VIRUS PANDEMIC

Union leader Falah Alwan, president of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq, and leather goods factory workers argue with the plant manager about their union rights in 2003.

Solidarity, Then the Virus

Many U.S. union activists remember Falah Alwan. As the occupation of Iraq unfolded in the summer of 2005, he and several Iraqi union leaders traveled here to make clear the impact of sanctions and invasion on his country’s workers. From one union hall to another, on both coasts and through the Midwest, Alwan and his colleagues appealed for solidarity.

In the end, the war’s damage went virtually unhealed, but the ties forged between workers and unions of the two countries have remained undiminished. Last week, as both face the coronavirus pandemic, Alwan wrote to the friends he made in those years. “The news from New York is horrible,” he commiserated. “I believe the days to come will be much worse than they are now, not only in Iraq but for you also.”

In 2005 the Iraqis effectively dramatized the human cost of U.S. policy. Today, as both countries face the coronavirus, the devastating situation of Iraq’s people calls for revisiting that question of responsibility.

On paper, the virus’s toll in Iraq today stands at 1,031 officially confirmed cases, with 64 deaths. While Iraq’s per capita count is still much smaller than that in the U.S. – 22 cases per million people to the U.S.’ 910 – the numbers don’t tell the real story. In Iraq very few people can access medical treatment, and the number of infections and deaths is much higher than that given in official statements.

This past week Reuters reported that confirmed cases numbered instead between 3000 and 9000, quoting doctors and a health official – a report that led the Iraqi government to fine the agency and revoke its reporting license for three months. The higher figure would give Iraq a per capita infection rate higher than South Korea, one of the virus’ early concentrations.

Unions and civil society organizations must now try to make up for Iraq’s political paralysis and the partial dysfunction of its government. “Because of our ruined healthcare institutions,” Alwan explains, “the government hurried to impose a general curfew [a stay-at-home order] to stop the outbreak and a rapid collapse in the whole situation.”

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