The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) urges students to attend our upcoming campus meetings, which will advance the socialist perspective necessary to oppose the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran, the drive to World War III and the turn to authoritarian rule in every country.​​ Details at the bottom of the page.

In the early hours of February 28, the United States and Israel launched a joint assault on Iran that is a flagrant violation of the US Constitution and international law. The opening blows included the assassination of Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior leaders, together with devastating strikes on cities such as Tehran, Qom and Isfahan. Schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure have been hit, with hundreds of schoolgirls killed in bombings that constitute crimes against an entire society and its cultural and intellectual life.​

This has nothing to do with any supposed “imminent” danger posed by Iran, but is a premeditated war of imperialist conquest and regime change. The onslaught on Iran is directed against a historically oppressed country of some 90 million people threatening to claim hundreds of thousands or millions of lives. Imperialism is seeking to behead the existing regime and terrorise the Iranian masses to clear the way for imposing a pliant, Western-backed puppet government in Tehran, opening Iran’s resources and labour to unrestrained exploitation by global finance capital and the energy conglomerates.

It has been launched without congressional authorisation, without a UN Security Council mandate and under the cover of sham “negotiations,” exposing the diplomatic process as a smokescreen for aggression. The war against Iran is part of an interconnected global offensive, already underway against Russia in Ukraine and in an advanced stage of preparation against China.

The reckless assault on Iran carries the very real danger of an all-out nuclear third world war. Under conditions in which Washington is simultaneously escalating confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and encircling China, a widening of operations in the Middle East threatens to trigger a global conflagration that would engulf humanity.

Australian imperialism plays a frontline role in these plans. The Albanese Labor government has been among the most explicit and rapid US allies in backing the illegal war on Iran, politically supporting a historic crime that threatens to set the entire Middle East and the world ablaze. Materially, Australia is integrated into the onslaught through the Pine Gap spy base and the broader US military-intelligence apparatus, providing surveillance and targeting information for American operations. 

Labor’s support for the war on Iran is inseparable from its alignment with Washington’s drive to militarily encircle and subjugate China. The same government is transforming Australia into a key base for a US-led war against China through AUKUS, vast expansions of US basing and the largest build-up of the Australian military since World War II, including plans for nuclear-powered submarines designed for offensive operations in the Indo-Pacific. A US-led world war—against Iran today and China tomorrow—would inevitably involve nuclear weapons, conscription and the subordination of every aspect of social life to the war machine.

To wage such wars, the ruling classes are turning to authoritarian forms of rule as a means to suppress growing hostility among workers and youth to militarism and the erosion of social conditions.

In the United States, the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal agents, illegal detentions and police killings in Minneapolis and other cities show that bourgeois democracy is being transformed into a military-police state. In Australia, Labor has responded to the mass movement against the Gaza genocide and the broader war by unleashing police violence on peaceful protesters in Sydney, pushing draconian anti-protest laws and promoting an “Antisemitism Education Taskforce” to smear and silence opposition to Zionism and imperialist war on and off campuses.​

The IYSSE insists that the only social force capable of stopping war is the international working class completely independent of all capitalist governments and their parties. Our meetings will elaborate the necessary socialist and revolutionary perspective to end war on Iran and halt the slide to a disastrous nuclear third world war. 

This program includes the immediate and unconditional cessation of all US and Israeli military operations against Iran, withdrawal of all US and allied forces from the Middle East, an end to sanctions and economic warfare, and the fight to replace the outmoded and predatory capitalist nation-state system with workers’ governments that reorganise the world economy on socialist lines.​

We call on students and young workers to attend these meetings, help build IYSSE clubs on every campus and take up the fight to unify workers and youth internationally against imperialist barbarism and the looming danger of nuclear world war.

NEWCASTLE
Register to attend
When: 5 p.m. Thursday, March 5
Where: VG07 University of Newcastle (Callaghan campus)
Or register to join on Zoom

MELBOURNE
Register to attend
When: 2:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12
Where: Building 189, Ground Level, Room G02, University of Melbourne (Parkville campus)
Or register to join on Zoom

BRISBANE
Register to attend
When: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 12
Where: Room 67-343, University of Queensland (St Lucia campus)

SYDNEY
Register to attend on Zoom
When: 12 p.m. Tuesday, March 17