Ex-Yugoslavia, dress rehearsal for the Coup and the Reign of Terror in the ex-USSR

Ex-Yugoslavia, dress rehearsal for the Coup and the Reign of Terror in the ex-USSR
Thousands of democratic parliamentarians around the world, however, can immediately make possible the rapid formation of a transnational transparty with around fifty thousand members, the minimum necessary for the Party to proceed in 1992. The initial response to the project: significant and encouraging support in the first months.

ABSTRACT: The old demons are beginning once again to threaten and strike the world. A terrible scenario is taking shape, an unprecedented tragedy for humanity and for the very life of the planet. We must try to react and to respond through democracy, nonviolence, and the effectiveness of a new political force capable of avoiding and overcoming a dramatic crisis.
(THE PARTY NEW - SUPPLEMENT TO ISSUE NO.IV - SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1991)


The European Community has by now decided not to continue in the federal path towards the United States of Europe, as was foreseen in the spirit and also in the letter of the constitutive Treaties, as well as in the historical conscience of the very peoples which go to make up the Community (as all the major opinion polls in the last ten years have always confirmed).
The European Community has refused to develop into a democratic lawful State. It has denied fundamental essential powers to the European Parliament, which is elected democratically by the people of the twelve member countries; it has in effect transferred the powers of "European" government from the executive Commission in Brussels to new bureaucracies that originate in the individual countries - that is, in the partycratic national bureaucracies. In this way these powers will only be exercised in the service of multinational lobbies and of the blind and selfish interests of each EEC state.
What has in fact happened is that the twelve member countries have not drawn up a new Treaty, but three or four Treaties for limited sectors, and - to take the most positive view of things - have depended for years on the old "world power" logic of France, Germany and Great Britain, of the old Chancelleries, whilst Spain and Italy are reduced to pseudo-Machiavellian mendicants in search of favours and roles, and Greece, Denmark, Ireland and the Benelux countries are reduced to a secondary and subservient status. Everybody, unfortunately, agrees that if any single country were run according to the rules that the European Community is adopting, and which it has adopted so far, then that country could not be admitted to the Community itself because of a lack of democracy and respect for the political rights of its citizens. With the alibi that national powers, principally those of national parliaments, are being transferred to the Community, parliamentary democracy and the democratic sovereignty of the people i
s being increasingly reduced; for the power taken from "national" democracy is transferred not to European democracy and a lawful European state, but to the national bureaucracies gathered together in the Council, to the national Governments, which are thus able to operate without respect for their own constitutional rules and outside the control of their own Parliaments. In the European Parliament itself, deputies are divided regimentally into bureaucratic groups, and are increasingly oppressed by these groups, whose policies are the paralyzing and paralytic results of the various partycratic origins of their national component parts. In this way institutional debate in the Community has been politically demolished, partly as a result of the subordination of the Parliament to the reactionary, confused, impotent and unseemly designs of so many national leaders. With respect to the manner and the speed of the reunification of Germany, which was carried out without respect for the needs of the Community, as we
ll as for the legitimate interests of the populations which were directly involved; with respect to the fall of the Soviet empire, first in Central and Eastern Europe and then in the USSR itself; in the Middle East crisis the European Community was entirely absent, except as a cover for the contradictory and shabby aspirations of Mitterand's France, still vainly hoping to be a "world power", and for the Thatcherist extremism of Great Britain (though the opposition forces in these countries hardly shone as European and federalist alternatives!), all this thanks to the minimalism and the pseudo-realistic resignation of the President of the Commission, Delors.
This empty Europe, and the lack of democracy in the Community, have led and continue to lead to tragic consequences, reminiscent of those of the Thirties and Forties.
All the movements and all the enthusiasm for a united Europe within the countries that have freed themselves from real socialism have been condemned to isolation and defeat, forced into chaotic and vain "national-democratic" policies, the harbinger of the nationalistic, ethnic, and tribal uprisings that have taken place more or less everywhere, not just in Yugoslavia or in the Caucasian countries. With a rapid passage from single-party authoritarian or totalitarian regimes to partycratic systems, and not to democratic systems on the Anglo-Saxon model, the only one which has resisted for decades, for centuries now, without engendering Fascist, Nazi, Communist, army- and police-run, warmongering, violent monsters.
The African countries have been condemned to extermination through famine, desertification, wars, and dictatorships (revolutionary, in general!), to poverty and to exploitation by the great military-industrial and agricultural-food production multinationals, and now by anti-prohibitionist drugs policies, and to tribal massacres, with the exportation to these countries, too, of national-state models that go against history and that cannot be governed by anyone. In this way, instead of implementing the great Euro-African (and beyond) design of the four Lomé treaties that constituted the ACP-EEC Community (Africa-Carribean-Pacific and European Community) and of the Conventions born out of the United Nations system (from the FAO to the PNUD), entire populations have been condemned to death or to inhuman migration.
In the Far East there is a continuation of the fatal illusion, already tested with Naziism and Soviet Communism, of exploiting the order imposed by cruel dictatorships over vast populations, as if there were no alternative to the agony of entire peoples, as in Bangladesh or in Cambodia, in the Indian sub-continent or the inhuman, crazed dictatorship in China and in other places.
Meanwhile, even in the prosperous and developed world the immense accumulation of knowledge and science, which has advanced more in the last two decades than in tens of thousands of years of human life, has not managed to find its way into politics and power, into national and international Government, despite the fact that it has been assimilated by millions of people throughout the world and by political theories and ideologies.
In this way the ecological disaster advances at a terrifying rate, causing damage that is already feared to be irreparable to the biosphere, the water and the land in the great megalopoli and also in the Arctic and Antarctic regions; in this way the demographic bomb, entirely unopposed, continues to do even more damage than the nuclear threat, which the whole pacifist world has fought in an ideological and hypocritical manner for decades.
In this way, in the very heart of Europe, Thirties-style wars are breaking out once again and the dominant regions of Europe are reacting exactly as they did towards the stoppable rise of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco and a whole host of other left- or right-wing dictatorships. Fearing the consequences of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the criminal order that it guaranteed - just as people feared disorder after the Treaty of Versailles and stood by as the terms of the Treaty were overturned by Naziism and Fascism - a clear indication of what line to follow is now being given to the Soviet army and the new Jacobin dictators: a line of support (as has happened over the last year) for the racist and militarist coup and the arrogant provocation, in the form of merciless and unjustified war, perpetrated by a paleo-Bolshevik and a racist and national-Communist demogogue like Milosevic against the democratic, anti-totalitarian, European and non-nationalistic choices made by Croatia and Slovenia, against the
human, civil and political rights of the Albanian population in Kosovo, and against democrats in Serbia.
During the August coup, when it seemed that the coup-plotters might triumph, Mitterand, Andreotti and the European Community (and even Bush in the first few hours) had already clearly indicated that their only worry, from a humanitarian point of view, was for the life of Gorbachev, whilst they were ready "not to interfere" in the "domestic affairs" of the USSR, that is, not to condemn the "coup" in any way, granting the coup-plotters full legal status as the representatives of the USSR, its Republics and its peoples. In this way, Europe and the West are proving to the Soviet coup-plotters of the future, to the military army and the army of bureaucrats, to the "saviours of the fatherland" against post-Communist and "democratic" chaos, that what matters to them more than anything is the necessity to impose a new order, immediately and by any means. In this way, explicit encouragement is given to those who may have doubts and fears about dominating the ex-empire, except its outermost regions, at the cost of fur
ther massacres, repressive wars and, if necessary, mass deportation, as happened with the populations of the Volga-Don in the Thirties.
The same Europe and the same West that have been rushing off to Peking in recent months in order to wipe out the effects of international solidarity for the students and the victims of Tien An Men, and have expressed their solidarity with Peking, against the immense Tibet that the whole of China has effectively become. The same Europe and the same West that installed or allowed the installation of Pol Pot in the new order in Cambodia, and that ultimately prefer to stand by and watch as Saddam massacres his own people, after restricting themselves to expelling him from Kuwait.
The same Europe that the Radical Party, that we militants of democracy and nonviolence have denounced through our battles as favourable to the papier-maché Moscow empire, to the Yalta alibi, against the people of Berlin who rebelled against the Pankow regime, against the Hungarians of Nagy and Maleter, against the Czechoslovakians of the Prague "spring", against the millions of people who have been deported, persecuted and exterminated in the USSR.
The same Europe of the Mitterands and the Majors of the past, who allowed the Milosevics of the past in Italy, Germany and Spain to wage their wars and their coups. With the European Community of the time, the Society of Nations, reduced to a cowardly and hypocritical cover for their choices, pro-Nazi, pro-Fascist, pro-Franco, and pro-Communist, for the people of Italy, Germany, Spain, the USSR and - not long after - of half of Europe. The premise to the French Parliament's decision, by vast majority, to grant full powers to Marshal Petain.
I am perfectly aware that the scenario that I am tracing may seem, and may well be, too simplistic, apocalyptic, and incomplete.
But it would be enough if were possible, not necessarily probable. That it contained grains of truth, not the complete and already-enacted truth. I dearly hope so.
No-one, however, seems to be taking action against this possibility, no-one seems to be making a real effort to deny it, to discuss it. Just as happened, in fact, in the Twenties and Thirties, and then in the Fifties and beyond. In the pre-war years there were Italians, Germans and Spaniards, forced into exile or into silence at home, who tried to make their political leaders and the powerful "democrats" of the world understand that it was no longer possible to be "national" and a-democratic in the evaluation of events. But their words went unheard, partly due to cowardice and to pacifist stupidity (and not, unfortunately, to nonviolence, which we are only now trying to organize politically) and its influence, until the shameful Munich agreement between Hitler and Mussolini on one hand and Daladier and Chamberlain on the other; and the (more natural) Pact between Hitler and Stalin, known as the Ribbentrop-Stalin Pact.
At that time - let it be repeated - no-one objected when the Kingdom of Italy annexed Albania; at that time, as is happening now, it seemed that any tragedy, in the Adriatic or Balkan regions, was welcome in "Europe".
-------------
The Federal Council of the Radical Party, attended by more than 50 of its members, parliamentarians and democratic elected representatives from 20 European countries, recently met for four days in Zagreb as the city was threatened by the "Serbian" military attacks (though the Serbs are the prime victims of this action), between one air-raid warning and the next. The choice of Zagreb was a nonviolent initiative of fraternity and solidarity. I take the opportunity here to draw the attention of the sixty thousand democratic elected representatives from almost all over the world, and to the leading representatives and forces of peace, liberty, science and culture to whom this newpaper is also addressed, to the fact that the President of the Council of the Republic of Croatia, the Vice-President of the Council, two Ministers, one liberal and the other Catholic, the Dubrovnik deputy, Presidents and Vice-Presidents of many parties, and the President of the Parliament of Kosovo decided to enrol formally and publical
ly in the Radical Party, with its symbol of Gandhi, as a transnational, democratic, and federalist transparty - all of them, moreover, men of long and varied political experience who had known about this Party for many years - whilst the Federal Council itself was expressing words of fraternity and friendship towards the Serbian people and their rights. I do so in the aim that those who read these words take every possible action to prevent Europe from reliving those abominable and tragic years of the occupation of the Rhineland, the Sudeten, the Anschluss with Austria, Spain, Albania, Ethiopia and then Poland, the Baltic countries, and later Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria... To prevent an acceptance of the Serbian "model" and the conduct of Europe towards it from becoming the premise and the spur for a similar solution for the USSR.
------------
I am certain that if we join forces immediately in the Radical Party, no longer hundreds, as at present, but thousands of democratic parliamentarians and tens of thousands of men and women of goodwill from all over the world - before the human, intellectual and financial resources that we have painstakingly gathered for this purpose run out, and by increasing these resources - if we organize together the great and simple project to work at the same time and with the same parliamentary texts on constant and common objectives, in our Governments, or at the wider level of nonviolent initiative outside embassies and outside the seats of international bodies, in dozens of countries throughout the world, then we will be able to turn this action into a spark that will set off the flames of peace, liberty, democracy and, above all, of concrete government and the solution to the tragedies and the immense problems of our times.
Thank You - Shalom