Texts

It is not the “specter that is haunting Europe” (that would demand much more) but everyone is talking about it.  The number of people who don’t turn out to vote is increasing, while the economic crisis, with its inevitable ups and downs, is deepening and spreading and everywhere (from Spain to Egypt, from France to Venezuela, from Hungary to Italy and so on, all around the world) election days, people’s consultations of all descriptions, democratic rituals of all types are proliferating – from the collection of signatures for one problem or another, right up to the huge, multi-million-dollar show of the U.S. Presidentials.  “Democratic mobilitation” is unceasing:  it echoes from country to country, amplified in all the media, creating a deafening noise and resorting to all sorts of brain conditioning, raising an immense cloud of dust that settles over everything, hiding reality from the eye.  At the same time, dazed by scandals large and small, revelations and disappointments, family quarrels and the rebounding of accusations and curses, faced with this huge World Festival of Democracy, the “people” turn out to vote in decreasing numbers, in line with a trend that was already evident in the “world’s greatest democracy”, the United States of America (save for the trend being suddenly reversed on one occasion or another, amidst general rejoicing).  

The second world slaughter ended with the world being divided up amongst the triumphant  imperialist thieves.  The famous photo showing Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, smiling and satisfied in Yalta in February 1945, is the most eloquent symbol of this.  Two areas in particular drew their attention, because of their potentially critical importance for “painlessly” opening up a new cycle of accumulation:  central Europe (and Germany in particular) and the Middle East.  The former would be divided in two and occupied by the victorious armies for fear of the revolutionary uprisings of the early post-war period repeating themselves (a similar “division”, this time of a more political-ideological nature, was made in Italy, where Togliatti’s “communist” party with its affiliations to Moscow and the newly-fledged, US-affiliated Christian Democrats literally shared out the territory, inside and outside Parliament); in the latter were planted the stakes of the new state of Israel, acting as the local police force and bound hand and foot to western imperialisms (but not only: the first State to recognize its existence, after having made active efforts to support its foundation and having provided the financing for arming it, was, not by chance, Stalin’s Russia) (1).

Writing about the umpteenth massacre by a more or less adolescent and more or less solitary killer in a small town in the United States is a bit like shooting apples in a barrel at this point.  As expected, the twenty-eight victims (the great majority children) shot down between New Jersey and Connecticut in mid-December 2012 provided one more macabre opportunity for a fireworks show of interpretation by sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, politicians and politologists, priests and policemen.  There were those who brought up the Frontier as the historical source of this recurrent violence (and what bourgeois nation has not had its own “frontier” to use as target practice?  England in India, Ireland and half of Africa, Belgium in the Congo, France in Indo-China and Algeria, Italy in Libya and Ethiopia… the list could go on).

A German-speaking reader has asked us to “explain very briefly” our position on the “revolts in North Africa”.  Here is our “brief reply”.  We remind readers that we have devoted numerous articles to this issue over the past two years.