When I was little I thought that when countries go to war there is a good side and an evil side, and usually the good one wins. Moreover, we always happened to be the good guys, thank God! And that frame of mind didn’t just belong to me, but to the majority of people.
Growing up, by reading history books, I started questioning these dynamics because I had a feeling that things weren’t that simple. Later in life, by traveling, I was able to confront myself with people from different countries, who often shared very similar stories and doubts, from their own perspectives. More and more, it felt odd that those people were to be considered my enemies, in any circumstance...
By the time the first Gulf War happened, and even more so with 9/11, years later, the official explanations didn’t make any more sense to me. It was clear that those events were revealing something different, something that the current establishment would never be ready to talk about, because it would undermine its own foundations.
Looking for better answers, I found the WSWS, where I learned about the contradictions of the capitalist system, and how they lead to horrible events such as local and world wars, which ultimately no one wants. The WSWS’s scientific standpoint was an eye opener for me and many others, who simply couldn’t find an acceptable explanation to the dualism between imperialistic expansion and the need to rely on foreign labor, or the fact that profit is private while debt is public, and many other dichotomies.
One true thing we’ve been told though: that we are all living in a very delicate era, a period of crisis. But no one besides the WSWS has ever elaborated on that to the point where it’s the actual worldwide economical and political system to be put in discussion, in order to understand and solve the issue. And thanks to this site we can all access precious information and build a worldwide working class consciousness, opposing it to the prevailing one which only defines good and bad on the basis of national, racial, sexual differences and so on.