Bulletin N° 355
Subject: ON THE STRANGE DEATH OF BIRTH.
30 May 2008
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Shortly after I entered the graduate school program in history at The University of Wisconsin - Madison, in 1968, my thesis advisor
Professor Harvey Goldberg (author of the biography of Jean Jaurès) told me one evening in a café : "When I'm in a good mood the whole world looks Jewish." We laughed together. He had never been a Zionist. In fact, he looked at Zionism as a retrograde nationalist movement, not unlike the "Back-to-Africa" movement led by Marcus Garvey, before he was sent to prison for mail fraud in 1925. This ideology, as Harvey noted, was counterproductive for almost everyone, but, to use a postmodern thought worthy of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Professor Goldberg died of cancer at the age of 65.
The war crimes against the Vietnamese people were never brought to justice and this weighs heavily on all of us today. The U.S. counter-revolution beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 fed off feelings of revenge for the U.S. military defeat in 1974. More decisive displays of American military power, it was thought, were needed if the United States was to instill in the minds and bodies of the world's peasantry and laboring classes the "shock and awe" that would inspire blind obedience to U.S. authority. The military and police industries tested new instruments for such demonstrations of military might in South America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere in order to establish America's reputation for having "the capacity and the will" to inflict suffering on incorrigible peoples.
Meanwhile on the home front, the entertainment industry continues to control the cognitive processes of most people by reproducing
ad nauseam the dominant ideology in which war crimes of the past are either trivialized or entirely ignored, and most of the mass media has replaced serious reports on current events with trite antics and canned laughter. Our history books continue to deliver fragmentary literary devices containing no comprehensive descriptions from which moral lessons can be formulated. As a result, the ideological takeover by
Social Darwinism and extreme forms of
relativism have left the future of our children to be met with only gut-wrenching anxieties about individual status and private advantages. The future of the environment and the evolution of society is absent from this discussion.
Many citizens fear that by manipulating the evolutionary processes --both cultural and natural-- the extinction of many more species, including our own, is increasingly probable. Like the infamous counterrevolutionary "reforms" we see around us, developments in the evolution of the evolutionary processes promise no improvement in our lives, but rather a devolution aiming toward a very impoverished horizon, where human
diversity is drastically reduced and where only a
variety of "nationalisms" populate the cultural landscape.
But still, the environment exists and society (although grossly ignored) still remains the rich matrix from which we can take action. We all have histories of which we are more or less cognizant and from which there is much to learn. The present ideological trajectory toward a one-dimensional understanding of life, with a neo-liberal angle on every thought, can be resisted at many levels. Our insistence on the right to a voluptuous humanist life style involves the capacity of developing broad strategies and not just adopted limited tactics that are linked to prefabricated strategies of some unknown corporate entity. There are many lessons in history that would empower our lives --lessons from those who resisted and lessons from those who did not. George Orwell described the impoverished quality of thought in the lives of those narrow tacticians who have been indoctrinated to listen without hearing, to look without seeing :
- Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-----which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. ...The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Lessons from a history of resistance.
The following excerpts are taken from "The Battle of Moscow" and "The Dead of Leningrad," two chapters in Alexander Werth's classic history, Russia at War, 1941-1945 :
On the eve of the War great harm was done by suggesting that any enemy attacking the Soviet Union would be easily defeated. . . . Many writers and propagandists put across the pernicious idea that any fascist or imperialist state that attacked us would collapse at the very first shots, since the workers would rebel against their government. They wholly underrated the extent to which, in fascist countries, the masses had been doped, how terror had largely silenced the rebels, and how soldiers, officers and their families had all acquired a vested interest in military loot. (p.145)
- There were many tragedies in the Second World War. . . . The tragedy of Leningrad, in which nearly a million people died, was, however, unlike any of the others. Here, in September 1941, nearly three million people were trapped by the Germans and condemned to starvation. And nearly one-third of them died --but not as German captives. [In the words of Harrison Salisbury, one of the best foreign observers of the Russian wartime scene: 'This was the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city, a time of trial, suffering and heroism that reached peaks of tragedy and bravery almost beyond our power to comprehend . . . . Even in the Soviet Union epic Leningrad has received only modest attention, compared with that devoted to Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. And in the west not one person in fifty who thrilled to the courage of the Londoners in the Battle of Britain is cognizant of that of the Leningraders.' (New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1962.)] (p.287)
Already in November (1941), people in Leningrad (in the first placed elderly men) began to die of hunger, euphemistically described as 'alimentary dystrophy'. In November alone over 11,000 people died; the cut in rations on November 20 --the fifth since the beginning of the Blockade-- enormously increased the death-rate. . . .
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- (The low rations of calories represented) only a tiny fraction of the human body's requirements. . . . According to the official Russian figures quoted at the Nuremburg Trial, 632,000 people died in Leningrad as a direct result of the Blockade --a figure which is undoubtedly an under-estimate. . . .
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- The real number of dead due to starvation during the German siege of Leningrad approaches 1,000,000. Apart from hunger,people also suffered acutely from cold in their unheated houses. People would burn their furniture and books --but these did not last long.
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- To fill their empty stomachs, to reduce the intense sufferings caused by hunger, people would look for incredible substitutes: they would try to catch crows or rooks, or any cat or dog that had still somehow survived; they would go through medicine chests in search of castor oil, hair oil, Vaseline or glycerine; they would make soup or jelly out of carpenter's glue (scraped of wallpaper or broken-up furniture). But not all people in the enormous city had such supplementary sources of 'food'.
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- Death would overtake people in all kinds of circumstances; while they were in the streets, they would fall down and never rise again; or in their houses where they would fall asleep and never awake; in factories, where they would collapse while doing a job of work. There was no transport, and the dead body would usually be put on a handsleigh drawn by two or three members of the dead man's family; often, wholly exhausted during the long trek to the cemetery, they would abandon the body half-way, leaving it to the authorities to deal with it.(p.310-311)
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And Werth records another witness :
It was almost impossible to get a coffin. Hundreds of corpses would be abandoned in cemeteries or in their neighborhood, usually merely wrapped in a sheet. . . . The authorities would bury all these abandoned corpses in common graves; these were made by the civil defence teams with the use of explosives. People did not have the strength to dig ordinary graves in the frozen earth. ... On January 7, 1942 the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet noted that corpses were scattered all over the place, and were filling up morgues and cemetery areas; some were being buried any old way, without any regard for the elementary rules of hygiene.
Later, in April, during the general clean-up of the city --which was absolutely essential to prevent epidemics, once spring had come-- thousands of corpses were discovered in shelters, trenches and under the melting snow, where they had been lying for months. As the Secretary of the Leningrad Komsomol wrote at the time: "The job of disposing of these corpses was truly terrifying; we were afraid of the effect it might have on the minds of children and very young people. A dry matter-of-fact communiqué would have read something like this: 'The Komsomol organization put in order all trenches and shelters.' In reality this work was beyond description." . . .
- There is some conflicting evidence about the effect of the famine on people; on the whole, people just died with a feeling of resignation, while the survivors went on living in hopes: the recapture of Tikhvin and the slight increase in rations on December 25 had a heartening effect. Nevertheless, Karasev talks of numerous cases of 'psychological trauma' produced by hunger and cold, German bombing and shelling, and the death of so many relatives and friends. There are no exact figures of the number of children who died of hunger; but the death-rate among these is believed to have been relatively low, if only because their parents would often sacrifice their own meager rations.(pp. 311-314)
Lessons from a history of collaboration.
A study of non-resistance is offered by Christopher Browning's extraordinary anatomy of mass murderers and collaborators with genocide in Poland during WW II. In Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland he introduces his thesis this way:
- In mid March 1942 some 75 to 80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while 20 to 25 percent had perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the percentages were exactly the reverse. At the core of the Holocaust was a short, intense wave of mass murder. The center of gravity of this mass murder was Poland, where in March 1942, despite two and a half years of terrible hardship, deprivation, and persecution, every major Jewish community was still intact, and where eleven months later only the remnants of Polish Jewry survived in a few rump ghettos and labor camps. In short, the German attack on the Jews of Poland was not a gradual or incremental program stretched over a long period of time, but a veritable blitzkrieg, a massive offensive requiring the mobilization of large numbers of shock troops. This offensive, moreover, came just when the German war effort in Russia hung in the balance --a time period that opened with the renewed German thrust toward the Crimea and the Caucasus and closed with the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad.(pp. xv-xvi)
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Professor Browning goes on to quote the famous French historian,
Marc Bloch, who was active in the resistance and wrote not long before he was captured and tortured to death by the Nazis :
- When all is said and done, a single word, "understanding," is the beacon light of our studies.(p. xx)
For true understanding, Browning argues, rigorous analytical thinking is required, in order to avoid the pitfalls of facile ideological reproductions, which more often than not obscure reality with quickly constructed smoke screens promoting self-serving mental constructs that frame the "them-and-us" dichotomies which serve as the context governing every aspect of our behavior.
In the
Afterword of his book, Browning cites Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's best-selling book,
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, in which the author suggests "a three-dimensional analysis of anti-Semitism." Goldhagen argues that anti-Semitism varies: Firstly, according to the alleged source or cause of "negative" character traits (for example, race, religion, culture, or environment). Secondly, it varies in degree of priorities or intensity (how important anti-Semitism is to the anti-Semite). And thirdly, it varies in degree of threat (how endangered does the anti-Semite feel by the alleged Jewish threat). In his review of Goldhagen's book, Christopher Browning writes,
- That anti-Semitism can vary in its diagnosis of the alleged Jewish threat and along continuums of priority and intensity would suggest not only that anti-Semitism changes over time as any or all of these dimensions change, but that it can exist in infinite variety. Even for a single country like Germany, I think we should speak and think in the plural --of anti-Semitisms rather than anti-Semitism.(p.194)
However, Browning goes on to express regret that Goldhagen does not apply these categories to his study, but rather employs concepts which produce the opposite conclusion: namely that :
- all Germans who perceived Jews as different and viewed this difference as something negative that should disappear --whether through conversion, assimilation, emigration, or extermination-- are classed as 'eliminationist' anti-Semites, even if by Goldhagen's prior model they differ as to cause, priority and intensity.(p.194)
Christopher Browning cites the work of two renown American psychologists in his attempt to refute Goldhagen's thesis that in the 1930s and 40s German character flaws of a historic nature were at the origins of "demonological antisemitism," that the national culture had produced cognitive structures in the minds of all Germans which produced "Hitler's Willing Executioners." But Browning points out that :
- before the Final Solution was implemented (beginning on Soviet territory in the second half of 1941 and in Poland and the rest of Europe in the spring of 1942), the Nazi regime had already found willing executioners for 70,000 to 80,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans, tens of thousands of Polish intelligentsia, tens of thousands of noncombatant victims of reprisal shootings and more than 2 million Russian POWs. Clearly, as of September 1939, the regime was increasingly capable of legitimizing and organizing mass murder on a staggering scale that did not depend on the anti-Semitic motivation of perpetrators and the Jewish identity of the victims.(p.203)
Philip Zimbardo's famous
Prison Experiment at Stanford University in 1971 is a stunning example of the social and psychological effects of peer-group pressure and other "situational and institutional factors," such as "specialization," "bureaucratization," "deference to authority," and "role adaptation" have on human behavior.
And
Stanley Milgram's research into the psychology of aggression and obeisance has also produced insights into the systemic properties of violence and organized mass murder.
Browning continues by attempting to identify layers of motivations which could better explain this wide collaboration with crimes against humanity. From the beginning, before "Operation Barbarossa" in June 1941, Nazi troops, when entering Polish villages, would routinely gather the villagers together and officers would command the
kommissars and the Jews to step forward. (By
kommissars, the Nazis meant any village leaders, such as mayors, school teachers, postal workers and anyone else who might belong to the Communist Party.) After several people stepped forward, Nazi officers would go into the crowd and tell others, if you know of any Jews or
kommissars who have not stepped forward, you can have their belongings when we take them away. Quickly the number of prisoners marked for immediate execution increased.
The Nazis were efficient in soliciting cooperation in Poland, and from abroad they recruited "volunteers,"
Hilfswilligen, from anti-Communist and anti-Semitic cultures in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia .
By collapsing the distinctions within his own analytical model, Daniel Goldhagen, Browning concludes,
- moves seamlessly from a variety of anti-Semitic manifestations in Germany to a single German 'eliminationist antisemitism' . . . . Thus, all Germany was 'of one mind' with Hitler on the justice and necessity of the Final Solution.(p.194)
- All differentiations become irrelevant and layers of behavior that are important for understanding genocide are minimized or denied, and what is left is a grossly distorted picture of the causes of mass murder because "the part is mistaken for the whole.(p.222)
The reality, writes Browning, is more complex:
If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances,
what group of men cannot.(p.189)
The 5 items below are critical assessments of the evolution of our culture to date, in this era of political repression, of blatant criminality of business and political elites, and of mass murder in the guise of "national security".
Item A. is an article by Robert Scheer from Information Clearing House on the politics of torture and the manipulation of "useful" information by the Bush Administration.
Item B. is an article by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship on honoring the war dead during Memorial Day weekend in the USA.
Item C. is an article from the London Guardian, sent to us my Professor Sheila Whittick, which describes former President Jimmy Carter's campaign in Europe on behalf of the Palestinian people.
Item D. is an article (in French) by Alexander Cockburn on "Les mouvements anti-guerre aux Etats-Unis d'hier et d'aujourd'hui."
Item E. is a letter addressed to ATTAC by Professor Elisabeth Chamorand, in which she petitions this association to organize public opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And finally, Information Clearing House offers CEIMSA readers access to the short animation,
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université de Grenoble-3
Grenoble, France
http://www.ceimsa.org/
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A.
from Robert Scheer :
Dat: 28 May 2008
Subject: The Politics of Torture.
TruthDig
Where Is the Outrage?
by Robert Scheer
Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of the detailed 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture, issued last week by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Because the report was widely cited in the media and easily accessed as a pdf file on the Internet, it is fair to assume that those of our citizens who remain ignorant of the extent of their government’s commitment to torture as an official policy have made a choice not to be informed. A less appealing conclusion would be that they are aware of the heinous acts fully authorized by our president but conclude that such barbarism is not inconsistent with that American way of life that we celebrate.
But that troubling assessment of moral indifference is contradicted by the scores of law enforcement officers, mostly from the FBI, who were so appalled by what they observed as routine official practice in the treatment of prisoners by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo that they risked their careers to officially complain. A few brave souls from the FBI even compiled a “war crimes file,” suggesting the unthinkable that we might come to be judged as guilty by the standard we have imposed on others. Superiors in the Justice Department soon put a stop to such FBI efforts to hold CIA agents and other U.S. officials accountable for the crimes they committed.
That this systematic torture was carried out not by a few conveniently described “bad apples” but rather represented official policy condoned at the highest level of government was captured in one of those rare media reports that remind us why the Founding Fathers signed off on the First Amendment.
“These were not random acts,” The New York Times editorialized. “It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners.”
One of those top officials, who stands revealed in the inspector general’s report as approving the torture policy, is Condoleezza Rice, who in her capacity as White House national security adviser turned away the concerns of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as to the severe interrogation measures being employed. Rice, as ABC-TV reported in April, chaired the top-level meetings in 2002 in the White House Situation Room that signed off on the CIA treatment of prisoners “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called water boarding. …” According to the report, the former academic provost of Stanford University came down on the side of simulated drowning.
As further proof that women are not necessarily more squeamish than men in condoning such practices, the report offers examples of sexual and religious denigration of the mostly Muslim prisoners by female interrogators carrying out an official policy of “invasion of space by a female.” In one recorded instance observed by startled FBI agents, a female interrogator was seen with a prisoner “bending his thumbs back and grabbing his genitals … to cause him pain.” One of the agents testified that this was not “a case of a rogue interrogator acting on her own.” He said he witnessed a “pep rally” meeting conducted by a top Defense Department official “in which the interrogators were encouraged to get as close to the torture statute line as possible.”
That was evidently the norm, according to FBI agents who witnessed the interrogations. As The New York Times reported, “One bureau memorandum spoke of ‘torture techniques’ used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.”
In the end, what seems to have most outraged the hundreds of FBI agents interviewed for the report is that the interrogation tactics were counterproductive. Evidently the FBI’s long history in such matters had led to a protocol that stressed gaining the confidence of witnesses rather than terrorizing them into madness. But an insane prisoner is the one most likely to tell this president of the United States what he wants to hear: They hate us for our values.
Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” will be released June 9 by Twelve.
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B.
from Truthout :
Date: 26 May 2006
Subject: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Memorial Day
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, writing for Truthout, say: "We honor our war dead this Memorial Day weekend. The greatest respect we could pay them would be to pledge no more wars for erroneous and misleading reasons; no more killing and wounding except for the defense of our country and our freedoms."
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Memorial Day
http://www.truthout.org/article/memorial-day
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Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered Since The U.S. Invaded Iraq "1,213,716"
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html
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Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America'sWar On Iraq 4,082
http://icasualties.org/oif/
===
The War And Occupation Of Iraq Costs
$522,890,139,197
See the cost in your community
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
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C.
from Sheila Whittick
Date: 26 May 2008
Subject: Carter on Gaza and European Collaboration with Israel.
The Guardian
Carter urges 'supine' Europe to break with US over Gaza blockade
Ex-president says EU is colluding in a human rights crime
Jonathan Steele and Jonathan Freedland
Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU's position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as "supine" and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as "embarrassing".
Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: "Why not? They're not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US."
The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia - the so-called Quartet - after the organisation's election victory in 2006, was "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth," since it meant the "imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees". "Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing," Carter said.
He called on the EU to reassess its stance if Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. "Let the Europeans lift the embargo and say we will protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, and even send observers to Rafah gate [Gaza's crossing into Egypt] to ensure the Palestinians don't violate it."
Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory.
Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week.
Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said.
While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said.
Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers.
"The Quartet's final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed," he said.
Earlier, Carter, told Sky News that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle to become Democratic presidential candidate after the last round of primaries in early June. Like many superdelegates, he has yet to declare his support for either Clinton or Barack Obama, but he suggested the outcome of the race was a foregone conclusion. "I think that a lot of us superdelegates will make a decision ... quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3," he said. "I think at that point it will be time for her to give it up."
Last night, before a packed crowd at Hay, Carter spoke of his "horror" at America's involvement in torturing prisoners, saying he wanted the next US president to promise never to do so again.
He left an intriguing hint that George Bush might even face prosecution on war crimes charges once he left office.
When pressed by Philippe Sands QC on Bush's recent admission that he had authorised interrogation procedures widely seen as amounting to torture, Carter replied that he was sure Bush would be able to live a peaceful, "productive life - in our country".
Sands, an international legal expert, said afterwards that he understood that to be "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely".
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D.
from Le Monde Diplomatique :
Date: 1 July 2007
Subject: Les mouvements anti-guerre aux Etats-Unis d'hier et d'aujourd'hui.
Actifs pendant la guerre du Vietnam, peu présents aujourd’hui
Mais que font les pacifistes américains ?
A la direction d’ATTAC France
66-72 rue Marceau
93100 Montreuil-sous-Bois
Le 19 avril 2008
L
’Afghanistan et l’Irak connaissent l’occupation par des forces étrangères depuis des années sans qu’il y ait le moindre espoir de voir ces conflits cesser, car si les armées d’occupation ne peuvent « gagner les cœurs et les esprits », elles sont dotées d’un équipement militaire tellement supérieur à celui des Afghans et des Irakiens qui les combattent que la guerre ne peut que s’éterniser et conduire à plus de pertes en vies humaines et de destructions.
A la fois aux Etats-Unis et en Irak où des enquêtes d’opinion ont été récemment menées, la MAJORITE des habitants souhaite le retrait des troupes américaines.
En Afghanistan, pays dévasté par la guerre depuis près de trente ans, la situation militaire, politique et sociale n’a jamais été aussi mauvaise depuis 2001, de l’avis des stratèges américains ; c’est alors que le Président français décide d’envoyer un renfort supplémentaire de soldats français .
Comme à l’époque de la guerre du Vietnam, il est important que l’opinion internationale et en particulier l’opinion française qui s’était montrée hostile à l’invasion de l’Irak, soutiennent les Américains qui souhaitent voir rentrer au pays les troupes américaines en cette période cruciale des primaires. Ce serait rendre un service au peuple américain qui en a assez de cette guerre qui le déshonore et l’affaiblit. En même temps, il est important que la gauche en France ne laisse pas l’équipe de Sarkozy nous enliser dans un conflit au Moyen-Orient alors qu’en 2003 le Président Chirac avait su nous tenir à l’écart de la coalition belliciste, à la satisfaction de la grande majorité des Français.
C’est aux partis et organisations de gauche qu’il incombe d’organiser une grande manifestation unitaire pour exiger le retrait des troupes américaines d’Irak et d’Afghanistan et des troupes françaises d’Afghanistan.
ATTAC a un rôle important à jouer dans la mobilisation des forces de gauche en Europe et peut grâce à son réseau européen lancer une grande campagne avec manifestations dans diverses villes européennes contre ces guerres au Moyen-Orient.
Elisabeth Chamorand
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