(1)

Today, one year after the war addict George W. Bush declared 'the end of major combat operations', the military occupation of Iraq by American imperialism has gone totally bankrupt and collapsed.

Look at the bold resistance spreading like wildfire! In Fallujah Muslims have risen up against US invaders under the leadership of armed Sunnite fighters. In response to this, armed resistance has spread from Baghdad through to southern cities in Iraq, sparked off by the militias of the Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr, an anti-American radical Shiite cleric. Cornered by resistance from Sunnite and Shiite Muslims, the US-led coalition forces had to withdraw from Fallujah in the end. They suffered a crushing defeat.

Concurrently, shocking atrocities inflicted by Anglo-American soldiers of the military police were exposed to the light of day - inhuman abuses and torture carried out systematically at Abu Ghraib prison against thousands of Iraqi detainees under the orders of US commanders and the CIA, with the full exercise of 'American democracy'. This must be seen as the death throes of the USA, the declining militarist empire as the world's 'sole superpower'.

Despite worldwide condemnation against the Zionist Israeli government for its successive assassinations of Palestinian Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel-Aziz Rantissi, the Bush administration gave support to this operation to annihilate the Palestinian resistance movement. Moreover, Bush arrogantly issued a statement giving its approval to mini-Hitler Sharon's plan to retain Jewish settlements in the West Bank and deprive the Palestinian refugees of their rights to repatriation.

It is precisely today's Crusaders and Zionists who are playing a leading part in these cruelties. Because of them, they are totally isolated from the rest of the world. Not only are genocidal attacks by Bush's imperialist Crusaders assailed with a torrent of criticism from working people all over the world; they are also meeting with serious revulsion and successive withdrawals by governments in the 'Coalition of the Willing', which have sent military contingents to Iraq.

New Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Secretary General of the Socialist Labour Party, started to withdraw the country's troops from Iraq as soon as he took office.

The Spanish withdrawal from Iraq was followed by the pullout of troops by Honduras and Dominica, whose units had served under the command of Spanish officers. Nicaragua, Singapore, New Zealand and Norway have also distanced themselves from Bush's America. An irreparable split has occurred within the US-led 'Coalition of the Willing'.

Amid this situation, only the Koizumi government of Japan, another poodle wearing the collar of the US-Japan military alliance, is attempting to incorporate the Japanese military (Self-Defence Forces) into the US occupation forces. It is now acting desperately as a member of a 'Hakenkreuz Alliance' with American and British imperialists.

We, as Revolutionary Marxists, must overthrow this utterly villainous government upon our honour as the Japanese working class.

Comrades! It is my consummate delight to live and strive in the midst of the turbulent contemporary world, the focus of which is the aggressive war against Iraq, at the beginning of the 21st century.

I call on you, working people in Japan and all over the world!

Now is the time to fight for an international upsurge in antiwar struggles against the US occupation of Iraq, in firm solidarity with the persistent resistance of Muslim people waging death-defying battles for their liberation from military occupation by Anglo-American imperialists!

The anti-Stalinist revolutionary left wing in Japan, rallying around us, the Japan Revolutionary Communist League - Revolutionary Marxist Faction, will fight resolutely in the forefront of this struggle!

(2)

Flustered by the kidnapping of Japanese civilians by an armed Muslim group calling themselves 'Saraya al-Mujahideen', which demanded the withdrawal of the SDF from Iraq according to their hostage-taking tactics, the Koizumi government launched, of all things, an unjustifiable frame-up against us, the JRCL-RMF, by saying that the group's statement (to notify the release of hostages) bears 'a close resemblance to expressions used by the Revolutionary Marxist Faction'.

This absurd story, trumped up by the government and spread through the obsequious media, however, has proved the decisive significance and revolutionary nature of our recent struggle against the invasion of Iraq.

We have exposed to the world that the massacres of Shiite Muslims at their Ashura rituals executed simultaneously in Iraq and Pakistan (March 2nd), as well as the bloody blasts on trains in Madrid, which took the lives of numerous Spanish people including workers in an instant (March 11th), were nothing but an evil state conspiracy, organized and carried out by the imperialists of the Bush administration, by mobilizing US intelligence organizations, to conceal the total bankruptcy in its military occupation of Iraq. It is indeed only the JRCL in the world that resolutely revealed, right after the incidents, who masterminded these atrocities and why.

We have also laid bare the extremely miserable realities of the 'anti-establishmentarians': not only have social democrats and converted Stalinists all over the world been engulfed in the chorus, spread by the power holders of the US and other imperialist countries, calling for the 'war on terrorism'; what is worse, they have branded heroic struggles against American imperialism by Muslim fighters, starting with the September 11 attacks, merely as 'terrorism'. We, Revolutionary Marxists, have firmly criticized their ideological degeneration.

Facing up to these degenerate leaders of the official left wing, we, the JRCL, have been fighting in solidarity, based on proletarian internationalism, with Muslim people resisting the brutalities of the militarist 'superpower' US.

We have been calling on Muslims in Iraq fighting against US imperialism and its occupation, on Palestinian people waging their resistance against the Israeli occupiers under their 'anti-US, anti-Zionist' banner, and on all the people in the Arab world, to firmly organize resistance based on Islamic inter-nationalism.

We, the Japanese revolutionary left, together with militant workers and students rallying under our revolutionary banner, have been striving for a revolutionary upsurge in the struggle against the war in Iraq, by overcoming the 'UN-dependent' distortion of struggles by the central leadership of the Japanese Communist Party, which still styles itself the leader of the Japanese peace movement.

Precisely because our steady struggles have delivered a hard blow to the Koizumi government, it resorted to a dirty trick this time, namely the above-mentioned frame-up, to destroy the organization of the JRCL, branding us 'supporters of terrorism'.

(3)

Muslim people in Iraq are now stirring up the flames of resistance to finally kick the Anglo-American occupation forces out of their land. People in Palestine are boldly waging for the overthrow of the hateful Sharon regime under the banner of 'anti-US, anti-Zionism'.

The ongoing wars, launched against the Iraqi people by the contemporary version of a Crusade led by Anglo-American imperialists, and against Palestinians by the Israeli rulers led by Zionist Sharon, are ideologically significant as being present-day religious wars.

At this ungodly time at the beginning of the 21st century, 'Gods' have been reinstated to cause wars on earth. The root cause of these wars lies in the historic bankruptcy of Stalinism, i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which formed a nodal point of world history at the end of the 20th century.

It is only the JRCL, the Japanese anti-Stalinist movement, that has been making strenuous efforts to overthrow this Stalinism by revealing its anti-proletarian, anti-revolutionary nature.

(4)

IIn the prewar stage and in the very process of aggression against Iraq, a conflict came to the fore - in opposition to the allies of the US, Britain and Japan, a rival axis has been formed between France, Germany and Russia. Today's world has started to move around its centre made up of three poles - i.e. the former (the 'Hakenkreuz Alliance'), the latter (the 'Chirac-Schroder Axis' plus Putin), and a third group led by China - which altogether form the motive power of the contemporary world. China, led by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, is scheming today to be the leader of Asia with the ambition to be a superpower in this century, while maintaining a relative independence from the former two.

This 'tripartite or quadripartite (the Hakenkreuz Alliance, the Franco-German Axis, China, and Russia) structure', now emerging in the present-day world, is the very explicit expression of a transformation in contemporary world history, brought about with the three US-led wars launched between 1999 and 2003 - the aerial bombings of Yugoslavia and Kosovo by NATO allies, the bombings in Afghanistan and the aggressive war against Iraq - marking a turning point.

Because today's China under the Jiang-Hu leadership - now taking its own political position between the Hakenkreuz Alliance and the Franco-German Axis, each conflicting with the other - is looking after its own interests with a scheme to form an 'East Asian Economic Sphere' under its hegemony, it seems to assume indifference towards the aggressive war against Iraq. Or rather, its foreign policy at present must be called that of 'stay-at-home diplomacy'.

If it were the Mao era in the 1960s, the Chinese leadership would have resolutely appealed to all the communist parties and toiling masses in the world to advance international armed struggles based on its strategy against American imperialism.

Chinese working people! You cannot possibly have forgotten this strategy! Now is the time to start struggles from below to denounce the chicken-hearted leadership of your Chinese Stalinist Party.

(5)

Stuck in the mire of total bankruptcy in its military occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration revealed to the toiling masses of the world that the so-called 'democratization of Iraq' is merely another name for cruel genocide and torture by US troops, and that the so-called threat of weapons of mass destruction was a total fabrication. Because the 'just cause' put up by this government at the beginning of the war has lost all credibility, US rulers, together with Tony Blair, have started to shamelessly implore that Iraq be placed under UN trusteeship. In this sense, they are suffering the agonies of death.

We shall never forget Bush justifying his aggressive war against Iraq, saying it was a 'Crusade', a challenge of civilization against barbarous Muslims. Never shall we forgive the innumerable barbarities committed against the Iraqi people by this stupid President based on his unilateralism!

We appeal to every member of the US working class, the US people!

Never harbour any illusions about the leadership of the AFL-CIO, which supports the Democratic Party!

Comrades! We will never forget your faces clouded with humiliation and anger when the Sweney leadership issued a statement, right after warmonger Bush announced the launch of the attacks, that it 'clearly supports our troops'.

Remember! Against Bush's war, our comrades in Japan, young students of the Zengakuren delegation, rallied together with you in America, sharing the pains of militant US workers who courageously stood up against the betrayal of the AFL-CIO leadership (February-March, 2003).

Let us strengthen the international solidarity of militant workers and students!


(6)

The military occupation of Iraq by the US militarist empire, the 'sole superpower' in the world, has collapsed. US allies in the 'Coalition of the Willing' are starting to run away in disarray. In spite of it all, the Koizumi government in Japan alone is groping for its way to hell as an accomplice of the doomed US forces in the occupation of Iraq.

Worse still, this neo-fascist government is launching reactionary offensives all at once so as to actually transform this country into 'an ordinary country that can wage war'. Seven emergency-related bills have been brought up together for discussion in the present session of the Diet. Preparations for a reactionary revision of the Constitution are underway - in fact, in the proposal for constitutional revision drafted by a project team of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the state's 'exercise of the right to self-defence' and the 'maintenance of military forces' are clearly specified. This means a total nullification of the war-renouncing Article 9.

We, the JRCL, fight in Japan for a revolutionary upsurge in the struggle against the US-led war in Iraq. We, revolutionary Marxists in Japan, take it very seriously that Muslims are fighting against imperialist coalition forces, against the genocidal attacks by the US-led occupation forces, at the risk of their lives. We understand the significance of their resistance based on Islamism. At the same time, however, we are advancing sincere ideological and organizing struggles inside and outside our organization to criticize and overcome the limitations of their ideology and militant fights by applying Marxism. These struggles bear an important meaning that concerns our ideas of making Marxism indigenous to Japan, or a profoundness that can be shared with those poets called a 'Man'yo-hearted poet of our time' (Okano Hirohiko) or an 'exclamatory tanka poet' (Fukushima Yasuki), deep in their hearts.

Workers, people all over the world!

Let us confidently advance ideological and organizing struggles to create international solidarity among the working class for a radical overturn of the dark 21st-century world, by arming ourselves with Revolutionary Marxism!

The Japan Revolutionary Communist League - Revolutionary Marxist Faction is determined to take the lead in these struggles! Let us fight together!

May 1st, 2004