Bin Salman is responsible for, among other things, the torture and murder of opponents of the Saudi royal family, most infamously the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A Saudi journalist who worked for the Washington Post, Khashoggi was tortured, murdered and dismembered on October 2, 2018, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
Sánchez did not hesitate to present Bin Salman as a pacifist, however, saying: “I expressed my gratitude to him for his commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East.” In fact, Bin Salman led a brutal, NATO-backed war against Yemen that had claimed 377,000 lives by the end of 2021.
Long a regional rival of Tehran, Saudi Arabia was cultivated by successive US and European powers as an ally of Israel in a US-led anti-Iranian alliance. This August, Washington announced that it would resume the sale of offensive weaponry to Riyadh, as it prepared for all-out war with Iran.
While PSOE and Sumar are leading much of the current militarist escalation, many of these measures were in fact approved and initiated under the previous PSOE-Podemos government. Sumar’s militarism merely continues that of Podemos, which now postures as the “left-wing” opposition to the government, while effectively supporting the minority PSOE-Sumar government in parliament.
According to a Delàs Center study, under the PSOE-Podemos government, military spending increased relentlessly, reaching €27 billion in 2023, or 2.17 percent of GDP—already above the 2 percent that NATO demands of its members. Now PSOE and Sumar, to cope with growing numbers of weapons programmes, are modifying the limits on Spanish military research and development spending, to raise committed spending for 2024-2026 by 20 billion euros.
In the coming weeks, negotiations of the new budget will begin. Podemos, which in its four years in government strengthened military and commercial ties with the Zionist regime, is now, in a fresh act of cynicism, demanding that “the government immediately break commercial and diplomatic ties with the genocidal State of Israel.” This is just another maneuver by Podemos to conceal its key role in the rearmament of Spanish imperialism and promote illusions that the PSOE-Sumar government might reverse its pro-war, pro-genocide policies.
Appeals to these rotten pro-capitalist parties of the affluent middle class and to the PSOE will achieve nothing: both are in the service of capitalism and the major Spanish corporations. The only way to stop the war is to develop an international workers’ movement against the real cause of war: imperialism and the capitalist profit system.
WSWS Review
What is the pseudo-left?
This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.
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Publish date : 2024-10-22 16:18:00
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