10-03-05, 8:55 am
[PA Editor's Note: Remy Herrera is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs magazine.]
PARIS—The New Orleans tragedy has demonstrated that the Bush administration is showing the same contempt for the poor in its own nation as for the peoples of the South, including Cuba, affirms Remy Herrera, a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France, and a professor at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
'What this drama has demonstrated is that Bush is not only at war with the peoples of the South, he is also at war with the poor of his own country,' the French expert told Granma International in an interview.
'Maybe they thought that the illegal, illegitimate war that the U.S. government is waging in Iraq was going to ‘knit together’ minorities and the poor in the U.S. around their country and flag. But those same minorities and poor will not soon forget how Bush responded to the hurricane disaster: a class reaction, a racist reaction, simply abandoning thousands of poor people – including many Black people – to their fate in Louisiana and Mississippi. The only thing that Bush knew to do was send in the Army to shoot at will at ‘looters’...This is supposed to be the finest democracy in the world?'
According to Herrera, all of the peoples of Latin America are struggling, within their respective national contexts, to achieve democracy. 'But three of them are posing a very serious problem for imperialism: Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia,' he adds.
'Our solidarity should, therefore, go out to all the Latin American peoples, but especially those three: the Colombian people, who are fighting the Plan Colombia; the Bolivarian people, who are resisting attempts at destabilization and on President Hugo Chávez; and the Cuban Revolution, which is fighting the blockade, aggression from Miami, sanctions of all kinds – to which, unfortunately, our European elites are accomplices. I say ‘European elite’ more than Europe, just as you could say ‘U.S. elite’ rather than the United States. Because the Hurricane Katrina drama has clearly revealed the chasm separating the people from the establishment in the United States.'
Europe is often said to be the privileged place of democracy, Herrera noted.
'It is true that here there are spaces for rights and liberties, at times more than in other places that were – it shouldn’t be forgotten – snatched away from capital by the struggles of our comrades of the previous generations. But I do not think that we have anything to teach anyone else, because there is a long road ahead of us before our European elite accepts any debate here on what it has done to the peoples of the world in the past: from slavery to colonial wars; from fascism in Europe to support for neofascist dictators in Latin America.'
The CNRS economist doubts Europe’s alleged democratic virtues.
What the world of finance capital proposes is not a democratic society, says Herrera, who does not hesitate to cite the cases of several European countries.
'Is there democracy in Britain, whose elected government sends its Army to commit crimes in Iraq against the will of its people? Is Italy democratic when it is led by an elected ruler who controls the media and also collaborates in the killing of innocents in Iraq? Or Poland, which is on its knees before its new masters in the United States, giving lessons in freedom to the Iraqis? And Croatia, the Baltic states, which are reviving memories of the old Nazis of World War II?' he asks.
'And the IMF that imposes on the South, from Washington, incredibly violent belt-tightening policies, a dictatorship of the market, an international apartheid, a silent genocide of the poorest?'
Herrera proposes a radicalization of criticism and of struggle. 'Because, in order to advance, one day we must pass from criticizing neoliberalism to criticizing capitalism; from war to imperialism; from simple criticism to the construction of alternatives. One day, it must be proven that there will be no true, participative grass-roots democracy without socialism.'
The well-known researcher invites us to 'fight the lies of the media' regarding the popular struggles in Latin America, especially in Venezuela, Cuba and Colombia, 'just as we have fought the lies related to the referendum campaign in France.'
'We need to learn how to rebuild the bases of solidarity with our Latin American brothers and sisters and a new internationalism. And we must learn how to talk about socialism again, but as a historic need for humanity’s defense against imperialist barbarism.'
Today’s enemies, he says, 'are the say that previously choked the dreams of democracy in Guatemala in 1954; smashed Allende’s newborn democracy in Chile; the same who beat to death the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua; the same that helped, and sometimes trained, during Operation Condor, the French military officers in Algeria; the same torturers in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and El Salvador, in order to impose bloody neoliberal dictatorships.'
Neoliberalism pretends to be democratic, Herrera emphasized.
'But that democracy is a farce. What we have is an alliance of the neoliberal Latin American oligarchies and the European elite with U.S. imperialism, in a declared war on the peoples of the world, against the poor of the South and the poor of the North, even in their own lands. Against those enemies, we must unite and organize ourselves, and do so with tolerance, accepting our differences, with a certain radicalism, a revolutionary spirit.'
'That is why we must keep resisting, trusting and always dream,' he concluded.
From Granma
