Let’s throw the American bases into the sea – Gettiamo a mare le basi ameriane

Giovanna Capelli
Member of European Left executive Board
Member of the Secretariat
Rifondazione Comunista, Italy

Thank you for the chance to attend such a significant and timely pacifist and antimilitarist gathering in so crucial a moment, here in Europe, in this so history-laden political space, the hotbed of great revolutions and pioneering ideas – that propagated all over the world, changing it for the better, and still live in the hearts and brains of people –, but also accountable for distorted and inhuman ideologies, for which it carries heavy responsibilities, not least the 19th century shameful colonialism and the barbarous Nazi Party regime.

Today, there really is a lot at stake: in Greece – the best sample, to date, of the effects austerity’s bitter medicine has on nations – Syriza’s victory challenges, for the first time in decades, Maastricht ’s Europe; the stronghold of austerity and neoliberalism, of capital, finance and banks supremacy has been served a blow. Now, the road nations can follow to get out of unemployement’s and recession’s claws becomes clearer; in every country it becomes possible to increase the strength and resilience of mass movemnts against austerity and neoliberalism and moot a political and social alternative to this Europe.

In fact, this is not our Europe, built as it is upon an iron alliance between People’s and Socialdemocratic Parties, subservient to the Troika diktats, to an hegemonic capitalism altogether reneging on democracy and any sort of social justice.

We are an alternative to this Europe: we work politically and socially in order to foster an ever more forceful, eager, compounded anti-liberalst movement and promote the political awareness that an alternative to this society is necessary and possible.

But, at least in Italy, it hasn’t become as yet clear to common sense and even to the awareness of those striving hard to defend their living conditions that, in Europe and in the world at large, a silent and pertinacious superordinating power, hostile to this change, is at work: an expanding political and military alliance hindering and working against this possible outcome, by any means, in spite of any rule, any treaty, any principle.

And by this I mean Nato, Nato’s connection with Usa interests and, although declining, power, and the role it still plays in defence of neoliberalist order.

Thus, I hope this meeting will be a new beginning, a starting point to be spoken of and repeated in other European venues, with the aim of involving and uniting local and national pacifist, anti-militarist, environmental movements, so as to develop, all over Europe, a great mass movement for peace – imbued with rightful indignation against all wars, their human, environmental and social

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consequences, – and, above all, to make finally clear through this movement the close connection between:

• the austerity policies imposed by the Europe of banks and finance on all European countries, forcing cowardly and obsequious governments to cut down welfare, pensions, health care in the name of budgetary equilibrium and of the central role of public debt and

• and the watchdog role of Nato policies in Europe and in the world.

A convincing demonstration that this is not a biased notion, but the sheer truth is the fact that Bruxelles and the EU withhold funds from a Greece going through a humanitarian emergency and try to force Syriza’s government into reneging on Thessaloniki programme, imposing austerity and “social butchery” as usual, but give 1 billion 8 hundred million Euros to the Kiev government in oder to save Ukraine from bankruptcy, thus boycotting a government elected by a vast majority of its people, while helping Maidan putschists, the very Kiev government that outlaws the Ukrainian Communist Party, glorifies Ukraine’s Nazi past and calls independence heroes the Ukrainian Nazis that slaughtered tens of thousand Jews. Kiev’s army is steadily becoming a well integrated part of Nato alliance and dating from last April 24th, a specific agreement has placed it under Nato’s control and command organization.

• The current crisis of neoliberalist globalisation is obviously changing the world’s hierarchies; imperialist countries try resorting to the renovated apparatus of Atlantic Treaty to protect their privileged position in the international division of labour and their political power.

• The crisis of neoliberalist globalisation goes hand in hand with the crisis of USA unipolar power. The cycle begun with the Berlin Wall fall has reached its close with the United States inability to handle unilaterally Syria’s crisis. We are today faced with a multipolar world, reorganizing itself along lines of geopolitical influence.

• In this contest, it’s easy to understand what prompts the USA to bring about a new bilateral treaty for trade liberalization with UE (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), invalidating both post-Resistance Constitutions and the national legislation of European countries, together with the whole Western military policies after the Berlin Wall fall.

• Nato has been expanded and relaunched as the world police officer, to the detriment of UN

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historical task: the frequent wars, originating the theory of ”permanent warfare economy”, the renewed and extended USA military presence in Asia and South America stem as a matter of course from the political, military, strategic, hegemonic choices of the most affluent countries.

So now Nato has no bounds and displays a lot of activity:

• it is still present in Afghanistan, owing to the country’s strategic importance – wedged as it is between Russia and China –, where the war is continued by means of Special Forces, drones and bombers (in March only, there have been 52 attacks);

• in Western Asia, indirect actions against Syria and monitoring of Iran are relentless and it is not just by chance that all the organization’s landforces are at present stationed at Izmir, in Turkey. Meanwhile, Nato also steps up its cooperation with the Gulf monarchies and military partnership with Saudi Arabia (the latter dropping all the while clusterbombs, bought from USA, on Yemeni rebels and let’s mention in passing the fact that in 2008 the Oslo Convention banned the use, production and storage of such weapons).

• In East Asia, Nato signed an anti-Chinese and anti-Russian compact with Japan and Australia.

• In Africa, after contributing its share to the Lybian division and ungovernability, Nato lends military assistance to the South African Union.

• Nato has opened a new intervention front even in South America, by means of the so called ”Security compact”, a bilateral cooperation treaty Columbia describes as aiming at ”greater efficacy in the action against transnational crime”. But neighbouring countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia have harshly criticized the compact, maintaining it is just Colombia’s first step towards a full-fledged Nato membership, that will jeopardize regional stability and, in particular, that of progressive and socialist governments striving to break free from neo-liberalist fetters and to restore its shape, voice, sway to popular sovereignty.

• Nato is displaying a renewed aggressiveness even in the heart of Europe. Square Maidan putsch, that came to pass after a long training by Nato of Ukrainian, and also neonazi, forces, has brought Europe back to Cold War times.

The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, who promised to re-enter negotiations with Moscow, has instead agreed to the opening, in Riga, of a Nato Centre of excellence for strategic communications, tha will carry out the new Cold War operations with highest innovative skills. Direct contributors to this centre are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, together with Poland, Germany, United Kingdom and Italy.

Italy, moreover, is a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and has always been a major contributor to expenses and war missions.. For decades, Italy has been the threatening outpost of USA presence in the Mediterranean and, after the Berlin Wall fall, instead of helping to dismantle a superannuated organization that had lost its original purpose (defense against the Warsaw Pact nations), it has been assisting in the transformation of its structure and strategic functions into those of a military umbrella for the protection of the neo-liberalist order. It was from Nato’s Italian bases that the planes attacking the Republic of Yugoslavia took off on March 24th, 1999. A tragic moment for Europe, as, for the first time since the II World War end, conflict was cropping up again in the centre of Europe, purportedly a ”humanitarian war”. A regression for Italy, too, as the Art. 11 of its Constitution:

Italy rejects war as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples and as a means for settling international controversies; it agrees, on conditions of equality with other states, to the limitations of sovereignty necessary for an order that ensures peace and justice among Nations; it promotes and encourages international organizations having such ends in view.

was violated at the hand of a former communist leader.

• In short, I come from a country with limited sovereignty, heavily conditioned in its own history and economic development pattern by its being a Nato member. Nato presence hampered the peoples’ and workers’ movements growth. And this also by means of the illegal and anticonstitutional machinations that are part of our recent history. In spite of this, Italy was a hotbed of great pacifist mass movements fighting against Nato: I mention a few of them, because it is our own history, big chunks of our lives.

• Starting from the collecting in 1949 of 6 million 300 thousand signatures against the ratification of the Atlantic Treaty, achieved in just three months, under heavy police repression and in spite of the employers’s and Vatican’s hostility (the latter strongly advocating the treaty against the ”infernal fiend”: socialism), up to the mobilizations against the nuclear arms race in the Sixties, the Vietnam War in 1968, the Cruise nuclear warheads in the Eighties, the2001 huge alter-globalization movement challenging Genua G8 summit and exposing the true geopolitical reason of the war against Iraq.

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• Now we need to work at building from the already existing anti-militarist and pacifist European movements a broader network of mass mobilization and counterinformation.

Let me finish by quoting a few lines of a beautiful Italian pacifist song of the Seventies, still applying to Italy and Europe, because future history may change, if we focus on the big questions concerning the lives of men and women all over the world, if we ”disarm” our brains, if we help every man and woman to understand there will never be work, earnings, freedom and equality in Europe unless Nato bases leave the European territories. Let’s get rid of them, then: ”Gettiamo a mare le basi ameriane, cessiamo di fare da spalla agli assassini, giriamo una pagina lunga di tanti anni, andiamo a conquistare la nostra libertà…” (Let’s throw the American bases into the sea/ let’s stop being the murders’ stooges/ let’s turn a decades long leaf/ let’s go and conquer our freedom.)

PEACE ALERT