[OccupyComms] Appeal to the Peoples of Europe

[Mark Barrett]

** Common Appeal for the Rescue of the Peoples of Europe
**

*
<http://www.europeagainstausterity.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/theodorakis1.jpg>Mikis
Theodorakis amd Manolis Glezos have issued this Appeal to the peoples of
Europe*

*65 years after the defeat of nazism and fascism, European people are today
confronting a dramatic threat, this time not military, but a financial,
social and political one. A new “Empire of Money” has been systematically
attacking one European country after another in the last 18 months, without
facing any substantial resistance.*

*European governments not only fail to organize a collective defence of
European people against the markets, but, instead, try to “calm” the
markets by imposing policies that remind us of the way governments tried to
confront nazism in the ’30s.*

They organize “debt wars” between the peoples of Europe, just like when
they were driven from the belle époque to World War 1. The offensive of the
markets initiated a war against Greece, an EU member-state, whose people
have played a decisive role in the resistance against barbarity and the
liberation of European World War 2. In the beginning, this war was a
communicative war, which reminded us of the campaigns against hostile,
outcast countries, likeIraqorYugoslavia. This campaign presented Greece as
a country of lazy and corrupted citizens, while attempting to blame the
“PIIGS” of Europe and not the international banks for the debt crisis.

Shortly, this offensive evolved into a financial one, which caused the
submission of Greece under a status of limited sovereignty and the
intervention of the IMF to the internal affairs of the Eurozone.

When they got what they wanted fromGreece, the markets targeted the other,
smaller or larger countries of the European periphery. The aim is one and
common in all cases: The full guarantee of the interests of the banks
against the states, the demolition of the European welfare state, which has
been a cornerstone of European democracy and culture, the demolition of
European states and the submission of the remaining state structures to the
new “International of Money”.

The EU, which was presented to its peoples as a means for collective
progress and democracy, tends to become the means for terminating
prosperity and democracy. It was introduced as a means of resistance to
globalization, but the markets wish it to be an instrument of this
globalization.

It was introduced to German and other European peoples as a means of
peaceful increase of their power and prosperity, but the way that all
peoples are abandoned to be the pray of financial markets, destroys the
image of Europe and turns the markets into actors of a new financial
totalitarianism, into the new bosses of Europe.

We are facing the danger of repeating the financial equivalent of World War
1 and World War 2 in our continent and be dissolved into chaos and
decomposition, in favor of an international Empire of Money and Weapons, in
the economic epicentre of which lies the power of the markets.

The peoples of Europe and the world are facing a historically
unprecedented concentration of financial but also political and media power
by the international financial capital, ie by a handful of financial
institutes, rating agencies and a political and media class redeemed by
them, with more centers outside, than inside Europe. These are the markets
that attack today in one European country after another, using the leverage
of debt to demolish the European welfare state and democracy.

The “Empire of Money” now requires a fast, violent, brutal transformation
of a Eurozone country, Greece, into a country of the third world, with a
so-called program of “rescue”, in fact the “rescue” of banks who lent the
country. In Greece, the alliance of banks and the political leaderships
imposed -through the EU, the ECB and the IMF – a program that equals to
“economic and social murder” of the country and its democracy, and
organizes the looting of the country before the bankruptcy to which it
leads, wishing to make it the scapegoat of the global financial crisis and
use it as a “paradigm” to terrorize all European peoples.

The policy that is currently conducted in Greece and attempts to spread, is
the same applied in Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia or Argentina and
will have the same results, if not discontinued immediately. As a result of
a program that supposedly intended to help the country,Greeceis now on the
verge of economic and social disaster; it is used as a guinea pig to study
people’s reactions to social Darwinism and terrify the entire European
Union, with what can happen to one of its members.

The markets may also be pushing and using the leadership of Germany in
actions of destruction of the European Union. But it constitutes an act of
extreme political and historical blindness for the dominant forces of the
EU and first of all, forGermany, to think that there can be any project of
European integration or even simple cooperation, on the ruins of one or
moremembers of the Eurozone.

The planned demolition of major, globally significant political and social
achievements of the European peoples, can not establish any kind of
European Union. It will lead to chaos and disintegration and it will
promote the emergence of fascist solutions in our continent.

In 2008 private banking giants of Wall Street forced the states and state
banks to bail them out of the crisis they themselves created, by paying
with the taxpayers’ money the cost of their enormous fraud, such as
mortgages, but also the operational cost of an unregulated
casino-capitalism, imposed in the last twenty years. They turned their own
crisis into a public debt crisis.

Now they are using the crisis and debt, which they themselves created, to
deprive the states and the citizens of the few powers they still hold.

This is one part of the debt crisis. The other is that financial capital,
together with the political forces supporting it globally, imposed an
agenda of neoliberal globalization, which inevitably leads to the
relocation of production outside Europe and the downward convergence of
social and ecological standards of Europe with those of the Third World.
For many years they hid this process behind loans, but now they use the
loans to complete it.

The “International of Money”, that wishes to eliminate any notion of state
in Europe, threatens Greece today, Italy or Portugal tomorrow; it
encourages the confrontation among European peoples and puts the European
Union before the dilemma whether to transform into a dictatorship of the
markets or to dissolve. It aims at makingEuropeand the world to regress in
a state like the one before 1945, or even before the French Revolution and
the Enlightenment

In ancient times, the abolition, by Solon, of the debts which forced the
poor to be slaves of the rich, the so-called Seisachtheia reform, laid the
foundations for the birth, in ancientGreece, of the ideas of democracy,
citizenship, politics andEurope, the foundations of European and world
culture.

Struggling against the class of wealth, the citizens of Athens led the way
in the constitution of Pericles and the political philosophy of Protagoras,
who declared that “Man is the measure above all money”.

Today, the wealthy classes are attempting to avenge this spirit of man:
“The markets are the measure above all men” is the motto that our political
leaderships willingly embrace, in alliance with the devil of money, as
Faust did.

A handful of international banks, rating agencies, investment funds, a
global

concentration of financial capital without historical precedent, claims
power in

Europe and the world and prepares to abolish the states and our democracy,
using the weapon of debt to enslave the peoples of Europe, putting in place
of the incomplete democracy we have, the dictatorship of Money and Banks;
the power of a totalitarian empire of globalization, the political center
of which is outside continental Europe, despite the presence of powerful
European banks at the heart of the empire.

They started fromGreece, using it as a guinea pig, to move then to the
other countries of the European periphery, and gradually to the center. The
hope of some European countries to eventually escape, just proves that
today’s European leaders face the threat of a new “financial fascism”, not
better than the way they faced the threat of Hitler during the inter-war
period.

It is not by accident that a big part of the media controlled by bankers
chose to attack against the European periphery, by naming these countries
as “pigs”, and also turned to a contemptuous, sadistic, racist campaign of
the media they own, not only against the Greeks, but against the ancient
Greek heritage and the ancient Greek civilization.

This choice shows the deeper, underlying goals of the ideology and the
values of financial capital, which promotes capitalism of destruction.

The attempt of a part of the German media to humiliate symbols such as the

Acropolis or the Venus de Milo, monuments which were respected even by
Hitler’s officers, is nothing but an expression of the deep disdain of
bankers, who control these media, not so much against the Greeks, but
mainly against the ideas of freedom and democracy, which were born in this
country.

The financial monster produced four decades of tax exemption for the
capital, all kinds of “market liberalization”, widespread deregulation,
abolition of all barriers to the flows of capital and commodities, constant
attacks against the state, massive acquisition of political parties and
media, ownership of the global surplus from a handful of vampire-banks of
Wall Street. Now, this monster, a true “state behind the States”, is
revealed claiming the completion of the financial and political “permanent
coup d’ etat”, carried out for over than four decades.

Facing this attack, the political forces of the European right-wing and
social democracy seem compromised after decades of “entryism” by financial
capital, the most important centers of which are non-European. On the other
hand, trade-unions and social movements are still not strong enough to
block this attack decisively, like they repeatedly did in the past. The new
financial totalitarianism seeks to take advantage of this situation, in
order to impose finite, irreversible conditions across Europe.

There is an urgent need for an immediate, cross-border coordination of
action by intellectuals, people of the arts and literature, spontaneous
movements, social forces and personalities who comprehend the importance of
the stakes; we need to create a powerful front of resistance against the
advancing “totalitarian empire of globalization”, before it is too late.

Europecan survive only if we promote a united response against the markets,
a challenge bigger than theirs, a new European «New Deal».

   - We must immediately stop the attack againstGreeceand other countries
   of the EU periphery; we must stop the irresponsible and criminal policy of
   austerity and privatization, which leads directly to a crisis deeper than
   the one of 1929.
   -  Public debts must be radically restructured across the Eurozone,
   particularly on the expense of the private banking giants. Banks must be
   re-controlled and the financing of European economy must be under national
   and European social control. It is not possible to let the financial keys
   ofEuropein the hands of banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, UBS, the
   Deutsche Bank etc. We must ban the uncontrolled financial derivatives,
   which are the spearhead of the destructive financial capitalism, and create
   real economic development, instead of speculative profits.
   - The present architecture, based on the Maastricht Treaty and the WTO
   rules, has established a debt production machine inEurope. We need a
   radical change of all Treaties, the submission of the ECB under political
   control by the European peoples, a “golden rule” for minimum social,
   fiscal, environmental standards inEurope. We urgently need a change of
   paradigm; a return to the stimulation of growth through the stimulation of
   demand, via new European investment programs, a new regulation, taxation
   and control of international capital and commodities flows; a new form of
   smart and reasonable protectionism in an independent Europe, which will be
   the protagonist in the fight for a multipolar, democratic, ecological,
   social planet.

We appeal to the forces and individuals who share these ideas, to converge
into a broad, European front of action as soon as possible; to produce a
European transitional program, to coordinate our international action, so
as to mobilize the forces of the popular movement, to reverse the current
balance of power and overthrow the current historically irresponsible
leaderships of our countries, in order to save our people and our societies
before it is too late for Europe.

Athens, October 2011
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