Nei­ther war nor state of war

France was at war long before the attacks on Novem­ber 13. How­ever, those attacks have greatly served as a pre­text to inten­sify mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Since the begin­ning of the 21^st cen­tury, wars of plun­der for con­trol of resources have not been lack­ing: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, the Cen­tral African Repub­lic,
to name a few. These con­flicts have to be labelled for what they are, wars of impe­ri­al­ist inter­ven­tion. France has no «pos­i­tive role» in these inter­ven­tions despite claims drawn from a colo­nial past.
These mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions by the French state go largely unre­ported in the media. The lit­tle that is men­tioned imposes a ratio­nal­ity based on secu­rity, with or with­out human­i­tar­ian pack­ag­ing. The hawk­ish lan­guage is intended to anaes­thetise or paral­yse the pop­u­la­tion. Yet how is it pos­si­ble not to recall the dis­as­ters that war cre­ates, the mil­lions of dead, wounded and dis­placed, the mis­ery and despair that force pop­u­la­tions to flee while those prof­it­ing from war, the multi­na­tional arms deal­ers, get ever richer? France is the fourth most impor­tant arms man­u­fac­turer in the world. The colos­sal cost of war diverts pub­lic money from vital social, cul­tural and eco­log­i­cal needs. Fur­ther­more, the state, which car­ries out these wars like a pyro­ma­niac fire­man, drags us into a mon­strous spi­ral of ever more hatred lead­ing to ever more attacks. Rafale air­craft kill civil­ians just as inno­cent as those at Bat­a­clan (the­atre).

These bomb­ings are time bombs

War has become a means to gov­ern and to gov­ern by fear. Declar­ing that a state of war exists jus­ti­fies fur­ther losses of free­dom and leads to other mea­sures taken directly from the extreme right such as the with­drawal of nation­al­ity. Although the sit­u­a­tion is extremely seri­ous, it is pre­sented as mat­ter of course by the dom­i­nant polit­i­cal opin­ion, as if to triv­i­al­ize war and have us grow accus­tomed to a mil­i­ta­rized secu­rity state. Because the state of emer­gency seeks to sti­fle anger and protest, this war is also a social war.
We are opposed to wars of inter­ven­tion and plun­der and there­fore to all forms of impe­ri­al­ism.
How­ever we are in France and it is here that we can begin fight­ing against our own impe­ri­al­ism. We can do this con­cretely with­out any form of abstrac­tion or procla­ma­tion because the geopo­lit­i­cal issues that are being played out thou­sands of kilo­me­tres away have strong reper­cus­sions here in our own neigh­bour­hoods. For these rea­sons, our collective’s strug­gle is the strug­gle against all forms of racism, par­tic­u­larly anti-​Muslim racism, the strug­gle against inequal­ity and dis­crim­i­na­tion, the sup­port of migrants and undoc­u­mented immi­grants. We oppose the spe­cial restric­tions and gen­eral pop­u­la­tion con­trols that tar­get mainly Mus­lims or those assumed to be and of work­ing class neigh­bour­hoods and social move­ments.
We have to organ­ise and fight back with a force equal to what we are sub­jected to, equal to the wars being waged against pop­u­la­tions, against us and in our name. We have decided to found a col­lec­tive against war
– to demand an imme­di­ate end to French mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion, the with­drawal of mil­i­tary bases and an end to treaties and alliances (NATO), etc.);
– to denounce the arms mar­ket, which sup­plies arms to the worst dic­ta­tors;
– to fight the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of soci­ety, the sur­veil­lance of ter­ri­to­ries and minds by the military-​security com­plex;
– to sup­port the right of peo­ple to self-​determination and to extend our sol­i­dar­ity to resis­tance and lib­er­a­tion move­ments.
We would like all organ­i­sa­tions and indi­vid­u­als who rec­og­nize them­selves in this strug­gle to joins us.
To con­tact us and add your sig­na­ture: antiguerre16@gmail.com