Solidarity addresses to the demonstration of 25.11 in Berlin

24/11/2023

European Liaison Committee Against War – Against Social War

Solidarity addresses to the demonstration of 25 November in Berlin

Austria

Vienna 18.11.23

Dear colleagues,

For more than 30 years, we in Central Europe have been lulled into a sense of security. Apparently there was no more war. Those that did and do take place were and are so far away that we could easily suppress them. After all, why should we care about the genocide in Kurdistan, Yemen or Syria?

With the war in Ukraine and even more so now in Palestine, the cruel reality of war, which also existed before, has returned to our minds like a shock due to the proximity of these conflicts. We now have to face this new and yet ancient reality and its effects once again. Apparently – at least this is what our governments argue – more weapons are needed to prevent wars.

Nothing could be more wrong! Peace cannot come about through wars, peace cannot be brought about with weapons.

Especially at a time when the climate catastrophe is becoming more and more obvious, when the health, social and education systems are collapsing and mass impoverishment is on the increase, the horrendous sums that are once again being spent on armaments are not only a perversion of the logic of peace, but also the very means that urgently need to be used for a decent life!

No peace for war! International solidarity without borders instead of location competition and nationalism! Let us follow the example of workers in many parts of the world – from California to Belgium, Italy, Greece and Belarus – and block every arms transport in the tradition of the labour and peace movement.

Let’s fight unconditionally in our organisations against every cent for armament and the preparation of further wars!

Axel Magnus,

Social democrats and trade unionists against emergency policies (Austria) Denmark

Denmark

Statement from Danish followers of “The European Liaison Committee Against War and Social War” in support of the anti-war demonstration in Berlin, Brandenburg Gate on 25 November 2023

In Denmark, the government consistently continues its previous war policy. In March 2023, the government entered into a broad agreement in the Danish Parliament to establish a so-called “Ukraine fund” of many billion kroner, which will go to support Ukraine’s warfare (weapons, training). In September, more funds were added. In addition, in October this year, the Danish state bought an ammunition factory in North Jutland, to start the production of ammunition for Ukraine’s military.

On top of that, it now turns out that a planned combat brigade of 4,000 Danish soldiers, called the “fist”, will be over 20 billion kroner more expensive than expected.

All that money could have gone to rebuild a public social, health, school, and transport system on the brink of collapse and to reduce social inequality in society and to promote peace and development work abroad.

But also on the ideological level, the Danish state is rearming. The war between Israel and Gaza has unleashed a veritable tsunami of propaganda in support of Israel’s terror bombing of Gaza. This is done under the heading “Israel’s right to defend itself”. In Denmark, the government flirts with prosecuting those who try to nuance the debate by insisting that the background for the asymmetric war between Israel and Gaza must also be sought in Israel’s Western-backed racist apartheid policy towards the Palestinians. Right now, on 19 November 2023, 30,000 people are demonstrating in Copenhagen to stop the war in Gaza. The war resistance is growing in Denmark.

Your demonstration in Berlin on 25 November against war and social war is extremely important – not only in a country like Germany, where the resistance to war is already strong, but also in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, where the emerging resistance to war in the general population needs your encouraging initiative.

Anton Schou, retired business school teacher, member of The Liaison Committee ”Against the war – Against social war”

Steffen Larsen, graduated from university.

Magnus Carlsen, university student

France

“Reply from the POI National Office to Kathrin Otte, unanimously accepted ”

Dear Kathrin Otte, the POI national office meeting today wishes you every success for your demonstration on 25 November.

We are leading the struggle in France with the movement La France insoumise (LFI) against Macron, against his imperialist war policy.

France has supplied 3.2 billion worth of weapons for the war in Ukraine. From day one, the POI, together with Jerôme Legavre, the LFI deputy belonging to the POI, has campaigned against the war in Ukraine and the war budgets. The LFI MPs all voted against the 413 billion that Macron wants to spend on armaments and wars over the next seven years.

Today, as LFI, we are putting all our energies into mobilising against the genocide of the Palestinians. The Macron government has not only supported the unleashing of the Israeli war machine and that of the US against the Palestinians, but also denounces the political forces that do not rally behind it. Together with the LFI, we refused to take part in the National Union demonstration organised by the leaders of the French state on 12 November. This demonstration, fraudulently called in the name of the “fight against anti-Semitism“, was in reality a demonstration in support of Israel’s war policy. Racist views came to light there and even racist behaviour was registered. All the parties linked to the institutions found themselves in the convoy behind the Prime Minister: the RN (Le Pen’s party), the far right, the right, the Macronists, the Socialist Party, the Ecology Party and the Communist Party. Only the movement La France insoumise (LFI) has resisted this manoeuvre and refused to join the march.

Our campaign for a ceasefire, for the lifting of the blockade of Gaza, a halt to the bombing and an immediate peace has met with a very strong response from young people and the working population but is being attacked in all the media.

Despite the unleashed campaign, the situation is changing. More and more voices are calling for a ceasefire. In France, more and more trade unions are now demanding it, as well as a lifting of the blockade of Gaza.

We will continue to fight relentlessly for a ceasefire in Palestine and for the lifting of the blockade – despite the outbursts against Mélenchon and the LFI.

Greece

We salute the very important gathering you are holding today, we salute the working class, the youth and the people of Germany who are opposing NATO policy, a policy that is destroying Ukraine, increasing the risks of nuclear and/or climate catastrophe and undermining European independence, the economy, the welfare state and even democracy itself in the West. For it is certainly not democracy that we have, if the opinion of a significant part of the population is not taken into account, nor is it democracy if almost all of the mass media are turned into instruments of propaganda for a single opinion.

Those of us who criticised NATO’s approach from the outset now feel vindicated. But there is no satisfaction in that. Ukraine has suffered an unprecedented catastrophe, its chances of winning the conflict are non-existent, the sanctions our governments have imposed on Russia have damaged the European economy, and Europe’s reputation in the rest of the world is at an all-time low. We have run and continue to run the gravest risks of nuclear and climate holocaust. Our governments, the governments of the collective West, know all this, but, for the sake of prestige alone, they do not want to admit it. They are continuing on a course which, while doing nothing to help the Ukrainian people, is causing great damage to Europe and exposing humanity to the risk of world war and other disasters.

As if that were not enough, the collective West has also chosen in the Middle East the path of supporting the State of Israel in an ethnic cleansing, which has already begun to develop into genocide of the Palestinian people, ignoring both the dangers of a regional nuclear conflagration, so prophetically pointed out in the past by your great poet Günther Grass, and the real long-term historical interest not only of the Palestinian people but also of the Jewish people itself. To their credit, the world’s leading genocide and holocaust experts of Jewish descent have written the most informed political and legal critiques of Israel’s policies, speaking of the “danger of genocide” and of “war crimes”.

And let us not forget the War Party in the United States, which argues that only war can ultimately solve the problem of China’s economic rise.

Europe still has, but will not always have, two roads ahead of it, as it has done at other times in its history, as it did on the eve of both the First and Second World Wars. One is to continue to follow the party of War which now dominates both American parties, NATO, the European Commission and Israel. Such a course is reminiscent of the course that led our continent into the two world wars. It will destroy what is left of our democracy and will favour the rise of irrationalism and open fascism, as the tragic example of Argentina showed us a few days ago. Moreover, a victory for the West is impossible, as Ukraine has shown.

We are at the most dangerous point in human history, because we have developed productive forces and technologies that can destroy life itself on the planet. Persistence on the path of war will most likely lead to one result: the destruction of civilisation and subsequently of humanity itself.

But as one of your own great poets, once again, Hölderlin, said: Wo aber die Gefahr, wächst das Rettende auch, where danger increases, that what saves also increases. And that is the other, second way that Europe can still take. It is the way of De Gaulle, who envisioned a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals and said No to the Vietnam War. It is the way of Willy Brandt and his Ostpolitik. It is the way of Olaf Palme, who made Sweden a beacon of humanity to all mankind. It is the way of Andreas Papandreou and the Six Nation Peace Initiative. It is the way of Dominique de Villepin, who expressed all civilised humanity by speaking at the UN Security Council against the US and British invasion of Iraq.

By opposing the war hysteria of US and NATO, we are not only preventing the worst. We are also laying the foundations for a democratic, social, ecological and independent Europe, an equal member of a multipolar world, which will play a leading role in the struggle for a new and very different world peace order, which will contribute with the inexhaustible reserves of European culture and the many resources available on the European continent to the struggle for the survival of Mankind, finally abandoning the barbarity of its prehistory.

Which of the two paths described above Europe will follow, may be of crucial importance for the future of humanity. That is why we believe that what you are doing today, and we believe it is only the beginning, is not only a struggle to stop the war in Ukraine; it is a struggle for the whole of Europe and for the very future of humanity as a whole.

The Greek people, having suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the forces of international finance, which have made their country a guinea pig in the construction of global totalitarianism, are now going through one of the worst and most depressing phases in their history. Yet the majority of the Greek people do not support either NATO’s policy in Ukraine or the massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, however, most of our political parties often express not what the people think and what they want, but what the powers that be want in a West that is losing almost all its democratic characteristics. This is precisely what makes your struggle and our struggle not only a struggle against war, but also a struggle for democracy and for European independence.

Your struggle is also our struggle. Long live peace, long live democracy.

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, Delphi Initiative/DefendDemocracy.Press
Vaggelio Sotiropoulou, member of the “anti-NATO Action”

Ireland

Peace and Neutrality Alliance
Comhaontas Na Neodrachta Agus Síochána

Norway

“Support for arms to Ukraine and support for Israel are connected”

by Marielle Leraand „Fred og Rettferdighet“ (Peace and Justice)

Israel is the only country in the world which in our century has been allowed to lock up 2.3 million people in a single large concentration camp, without access to electricity, water and food, and which will slowly but surely thirst and starve the population to death.

Israel is the only country in the world that is allowed to bomb hospitals with critically injured patients.

Israel is the only country in the world that is allowed to bomb UN schools, churches, mosques where tens of thousands of refugees have sought refuge.

Israel is the only country in the world that is allowed to kill and injure several hundred UN-employed nurses and doctors.

Israel is the only country in the world that is allowed to kill dozens of journalists.

All this in just over a month.

And why can they do it without anything happening?

The US donates 3.8 billion dollars each year in aid to Israel, most of which is arms support. After Israel had started bombing Gaza, Joe Biden presented a proposal to Congress for a new weapons package which he argued was necessary to “strengthen US security”. In the same proposal, 16 billion dollars were for Ukraine and 14 billion dollars for Israel. So when Biden himself in the argument brings forward the importance of seeing Israel and Ukraine as part of “American security”, then perhaps it is time that we also see these two countries in context?

Israel’s goal is to annex the entire West Bank and Gaza. This is clear, among other things, from maps that Israel itself has published on its own official social media websites, where Israel is drawn in as the only country, and Gaza and the West Bank no longer exist. The Israeli administration, by map, administrative division, has since 1967 called the West Bank “Judea and Samarra”. They have erased the Palestinians conceptually and administratively as an existing people with their own lands seen through the eyes of the state of Israel.

But the prerequisite for being able to fully annex all the Palestinian territories, and thus remove Palestine completely from the map, is nevertheless also that the Palestinians must be physically expelled to neighboring countries. This has also been revealed as Israel’s plan with the ongoing Gaza plan and is consistent with both the total destruction of all civilian buildings and infrastructure being carried out, and the total evacuation order given, initially to the residents of the northern half of Gaza.

Both Israel’s goals and the means by which the war is carried out are obviously in violation of international law. The fact that a state proceeds in this way will have to lead to the complete breakdown of respect for International Law as a guideline for behavior between states. Then we will either have a fight of all against all, or what is preferred by Israel and the USA, a hegemony model where the rules still apply to all other countries, but where some countries, at the top of the hierarchy, can place themselves outside and above international law.

The ideological basis for the hegemony model is implicitly, if not explicitly, racist. It presupposes the idea that some states represent a superior civilization/culture, and that it is good for the world that these have the dominant position in the world order, even if it must mean that they must sometimes (or in reality quite often) be able make exceptions for themselves from the same international legal rules they also set themselves as enforcers of.

In Ukraine, it is Russia, not the US (or Israel) that has broken the UN Charter. IF it had succeeded (which it has not, and will not) to beat Russia back through offensive NATO support to the Ukrainian government army, the implication of this would NOT, however, have been that international law based on the UN Charter as the overarching guideline for the world community would have been strengthened . Since a Russian withdrawal here would not be the result of any multilateral negotiation process, but on the contrary a result of the US-led western military use of force, the result would be a strong strengthening of the hegemony model. The implication would be that the difference between civilization and barbarism is not a force of the UN, but a force of the US and NATO, which can put all “barbarians” in their place, when necessary.

A Western military victory via proxy in Ukraine would also bring Ukraine into NATO, and thus also strengthen the American/Western hegemony purely physically and geopolitically. The next step would be to incorporate the states of the Caucasus into NATO, and the next step further, could be the states of Central Asia, where most of the world’s uranium mining takes place.

Serbia

Belgrade 18.11.23

Dear colleagues,

We would like to send the greetings and support of the Serbian Committee Against War to your demonstrations. From the actions that the ruling classes everywhere are taking we are feeling that there is a huge danger of escalation and pouring over of the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine to the rest of Europe and the world. This is why we find it immensely important for the working class and peoples of the Europe to stand against this tendency of the ruling class and show that we are not going to accept this, that we are going to fight against the war, military budgets and all other initiatives that could expand and push us all towards even larger bloodshed. Internationalist solidarity of the workers is only thing that can provide adequate response to warmongering activities of our masters. Let us unite and present strong answer to this tendencies.

In solidarity,

Serbian Committee Against War

Report:

Dear colleagues,

This is to inform you that on Wednesday 15th of November Serbian Committee Against War was formed on the meeting held in Belgrade. A group consisting of people of various ideological and political backgrounds from different Serbian cities, many with lots of activist experience, all gathered around the points of the European Liason Committee Against War, has decided that there is a need for enhancing the European and world struggle against the war in our Balkan region. We will primarily concentrate on the role of Serbian state in the current war in Ukraine, but also try to respond to any questions of the day regarding the spreading of the war. We will also try to involve as many anti-war activists from the region with the hope to have a Balkan antiwar committee functioning soon. First activity of our committee will be organizing of public talk in Belgrade on 25th of November which will question NATO and Serbia relations, specially in the light of the visit of NATO General Secretary that will be visiting Serbia in those days. We hope to stay in touch and actively participate in European coordination.

In solidarity,

Serbian Committee Against War

Spain

To the German Coordination Committee against the war, against the social war

Dear colleagues,

Last Thursday, 16 November, the coordination committee of the “No to war!” campaign met. A campaign that we launched shortly after Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine. And which today has hundreds of supporters, including many members of workers’ organisations and trade unions, as well as several MPs and other elected representatives. You also remember that on 26 June 2022 we organised a European meeting in Madrid against the war on the eve of the NATO summit.

On 30 September, we took part in the meeting at which the European Liaison Committee “Against War! Against the social war!” was founded.

A few weeks ago, we received and widely publicised the call from 150 political and trade union activists and leaders from Germany calling for a demonstration in Berlin on 25 November against military spending, sanctions against Russia and the militarist policies of the current German government in general.

In the Spanish state, we agreed that we would organise actions in the same direction around that date, especially against the monstrous military spending carried out by the Spanish government – the government in office at the time. Today, the new government has been formed under the leadership of Pedro Sánchez of the PSOE and has declared that it will continue with the previous Atlanticist policy.

In the meantime, as you know, world politics has changed qualitatively. Since 7 October, the situation in Palestine, in particular the massacre organised by the Israeli army, has been at the centre of workers’ and peoples’ concerns… although the war in Ukraine continues with the same or even greater intensity.

In our country, Spain, not a single day goes by without demonstrations against the bombings and the blockade of Gaza. For example, on Thursday 16 November there was a strike in university institutes and faculties with demonstrations in all cities… Even the main trade union organisations, UGT and CCOO, are calling for a ceasefire. We, our committee, have of course taken part in these mobilisations, without forgetting Ukraine.

On 20, 21 and 23 November, we are organising demonstrations in Bilbao, Valencia and Barcelona in front of the central government offices, demanding, among other things, an end to arms supplies to Ukraine and no increase in military spending in the next budget, which will be debated in the Chamber of Deputies in the coming weeks.

We would like to warmly greet you at your demonstration on 25 November and express our willingness to continue the work of the European Liaison Committee and to continue the exchange of information and proposals for joint actions in each country and at continental level.

Coordinating Committee of the “No to War!” Campaign Spain (18 November 2023)