Emergency Statement by the Editorial Board of theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
Today, 7 April 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
This is not political bluster. This is the public declaration of genocidal intent by the head of state of the most heavily armed military power in history — a power that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has already been bombing Iran for forty days.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated today in its emergency perspective: “Every word Trump said implicates the government of the United States in a crime of Hitlerian proportions. He says openly what the Nazi leaders discussed behind closed doors.” Trump has already threatened to destroy every power plant, every bridge, every desalination facility — the entire infrastructure of civilised life for 93 million people. He has declared this will be accomplished “over a period of four hours.” He was asked by a reporter whether this constitutes war crimes. His answer: “No, not at all.”
Iran is the heir to one of the oldest and most profound civilisations in human history. Thousands of its civilians — including 168 children killed in a US missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school on the first day of the war — have already been slaughtered. Hospitals, universities, residential districts and schools have been systematically bombed. The logic of escalation, as the WSWS has warned, is inexorable: from intensified bombing to ground invasion, to the occupation of Iranian cities, and ultimately — in the face of mounting US casualties and military failure — to the resort to nuclear weapons.
This is not a hypothetical. This is the trajectory of a war that has been underway for forty days, escalating each week, with no serious force within the capitalist political system placing any brake upon it.
The Democratic Party of the United States — which funded the war with its own vote for the $839 billion defence budget — now calls Trump a “madman” and “unhinged.” But not a single Democrat has proposed concrete action to halt the war. They are complicit. They are terrified that any genuine mass mobilisation against the war would not stop at the war — it would raise the entire question of the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the social order both parties exist to defend.
The parliaments of Europe, the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — all are implicated. Australia has secretly deployed SAS commandos, Wedgetail battle-management aircraft and its Pine Gap intelligence station to the war. Britain hosts the Hormuz summit. Germany rearming. The United Nations Security Council paralysed. International law demolished.
The capitalist state system has proved, beyond any doubt, that it cannot stop this war. Only the international working class can.
theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lank and South Asia (SLLA) aligned with the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers, youth and all those in opposition to this criminal war:
Strike: Workers in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and across the world must take immediate industrial action — in ports, airports, logistics hubs, defence manufacturing plants and transport networks — to deny the war machine the means to function. The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the TUC and every major trade union federation has maintained criminal silence. Workers must act through their rank-and-file committees, independently of the bureaucracy, to halt the flow of arms, fuel and supplies to this war.
Occupy: Workers and youth must occupy workplaces, campuses and public spaces — not to petition governments that have proven themselves servants of the war, but to assert the independent political power of the working class. The eight million who marched on 28 March in the United States alone must be transformed from a protest movement into an organised political force with a program, a strategy and a leadership.
Organise internationally: The war on Iran is not a national question. It is a world question. Workers in Sri Lanka, workers in South Korea, workers in Japan — whose governments are cutting separate deals with Iran to secure oil supplies even as the bombs fall — must join this struggle. The IRGC’s warning that it will “deprive the US and its allies of the region’s oil and gas for years” is a measure of how close the world stands to an economic and military catastrophe of civilisational proportions. The only answer is international working-class solidarity, organised through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Trump’s threat today must be understood for what it is: a declaration of war not merely against Iran, but against all the accumulated gains of human civilisation — against international law, against the prohibition on targeting civilian infrastructure, against the most fundamental norms of humanity that were codified after the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. As David North stated at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice: this war meets every legal and political criterion established at the Nuremberg Trials for a “crime against peace” — the supreme international crime.
If today, 7 April 2026, becomes the date on which Iranian civilisation is destroyed, it will also be the date that the capitalist world order signs its own death warrant in the eyes of humanity. It must instead become the date on which the international working class rises to say: Not in our name. Not with our labour. Not with our silence.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) sections of the ICFI are organising this resistance. We call on all workers, youth and socialist-minded people in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally to join them.
Demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from the Middle East.
Build rank-and-file committees. Strike. Organise. Fight for socialism.
Solidarity With the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba — International Working Class Unity!
Hands Off Iran — Stop Imperialist War!
No More Genocide — Stop Trump’s War Machine!
Workers’ Power Against War and Austerity!
Ports Closed to War — Workers Unite!
Not One Penny for War — Fund Hospitals, Schools, Jobs!
Imperialist and Zionist Troops Out from the Middle East!
Stop the War Criminals — Nuremberg for Imperialist Aggression!
