Jorge Costa (Left Bloc
will start with a short quotation to
show how things can go wrong for
the politics that have been ruling the
"Naturally normal people don't want war. It is the leaders of each country that decide the politics... With protests or without them, people can always be taken to accept the will of the leaders. That is easy. It is enough to say to people that they are being attacked and denounce people for lack of patriotism and because they put the country into danger. This works in every country".
This quotation is from Hermann Goering, Marshall in the Nazi army.
I think this says a lot about the mistake our governments have made. It's why they lied to us to take our countries into war. And why they have kept lying to us to try to justify that war in the face of opposition.
Now they go further and create new justifications for this war, like the need to defend the Kurdish people from Sadaam Hussein.
This is a grotesque argument since we know that the oppression of Kurdish people has taken place with the support of the USA. We can go back to 1988 and the massacre of Halabja, the killing of 5,000 Kurds by Iraqi airplanes and remember what the US said about these massacres - that it wasn't fair to accuse Sadaam Hussein, that it was the Iranians. This was when Sadaam Hussein was a friend of the US.
These attempts to give new justifications for the war make us more and more angry and make our movement against the war ever stronger.
So, why this time did they fail to bring people behind them? They failed for two important reasons. One was globalisation.
After the fall of the Berlin wall the ruling classes saw a big chance for a change in the relationship of social forces and started to strike against workers' organisations, pro. moting a rise in unemployment, a rise in job insecurity.
They installed fear in the working class and started destroying class organisations and attacking trade see today.
The goal was to keep up profit rates all sources to make profits. through the economic cycle of crises we've been living in since the late 1970s. They looked for new sources of profit-making -hence the massive scale of privatisation we
They went for education, health, essential services such as water and energy. They gave them to the financial sectors as new
The new factor is that to face these eco- ation. nomic crises and keep political strength on their side, the governments of western capitalist societies have to affirm their own strength. That is the politics of war.
This connection between economic crises, attacks on workers rights and war is the arrival into global politics of people in mass movements against the war in Iraq 15 February 2003 and all the movements that started on a world-wide co-ordinated scale is something new in the history of humanity and should be valued as such.
It goes much further than the move ments organised in the social forums and the anti-globalisation movements that came from Seattle and Genoa
But it would not have happened without the co-ordination and political culture that arose in these forums and movements over the last few years.
The international exchanging of experience and discussing of alternatives gave us the possibility of creating a huge worldwide movement against the war. It also leads us to the question of how we respond to war and neo-liberalism.
How can the movement grow to give answers to new situations?
I believe that the movement should debate socialism. We need a perspective and an idea of a way out of the current situWe can be credible and make socialism credible again, after the negative image that Stalinism gave the idea of socialism. Now is the time to re-introduce socialism into debates in the movement and present it to people as an alternative.