Communist Party (Italy) Speech In Belgrade Conference: Nato’s war drive threatens to engulf Europe

Dear comrades,

the situation in the world, and particularly in Europe, is becoming more and more serious.

The dangers of war soar, while the European popular classes pay for the warmongering follies of US-led Western imperialism. Military spending, the cost of living, unemployment are increasing. Only a few companies, that do business with energy and arms, are favored.

Having provoked confrontation in Ukraine and bogged down in a hopeless conflict, they are now fueling provocations in Serbia, the only country that has so far resisted NATO diktats in subsidizing the criminal Ukrainian Nazi regime.

Even on the other side of the world, US imperialism is sharpening its claws. The provocations against the People’s Republic of China are becoming more and more acute, also involving the other satellite countries in this desperate race towards war.

The European Union comes out of this situation in pieces. While the scandals overwhelm it, the political subordination to NATO by now without any possibility of autonomous action, does justice to all the opportunist policies that have seen in this imperialist conglomerate the possibility of having an autonomous international role.

As Lenin said in 1915 in On the Slogan of the United States of Europe:

“Political changes of a truly democratic nature, and especially political revolutions, can under no circumstances whatsoever either obscure or weaken the slogan of a socialist revolution. On the contrary, they always bring it closer, extend its basis, and draw new sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the semi-proletarian masses into the socialist struggle. On the other hand, political revolutions are inevitable in the course of the socialist revolution, which should not be regarded as a single act, but as a period of turbulent political and economic upheavals, the most intense class struggle, civil war, revolutions, and counter-revolutions.

But while the slogan of a republican United States of Europe – if accompanied by the revolutionary overthrow of the three most reactionary monarchies in Europe, headed by the Russian – is quite invulnerable as a political slogan, there still remains the highly important question of its economic content and significance. From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism – i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers – a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.”

So here are two fundamental points that Lenin pointed out to us over a hundred years ago, in a situation in which the socialist camp did not yet exist.

1. The struggle and dissemination of the socialist perspective must never be obscured. We have to explain that under capitalism, it will never be possible to have a definitive solution to the crises and the malaise of the broad popular strata.

2. On the other hand, we cannot make of our battle only a propaganda detached from the real conditions in which our countries find themselves. Political agitation must be aimed at unmasking the illusions of both the bourgeoisie and the opportunists not only towards the proletariat, but also towards all those intermediate strata who today are suffering as never before from the economic crisis and no longer have political representation. Which range from sterile abstentionism, to voting for a right that is tinged with “sovereignty”, but which then – as in Italy – as soon as it is in government, follows the Euro-Atlantic diktats even more pronely. We must explain to everyone that only popular unity against NATO and against the European Union can save the country. We have to offer them a credible and acceptable political perspective.

In March 1999 NATO, without a UN mandate, began 78 days of bombing of Belgrade. The Italian government also participated in that wicked action, without having any mandate from Parliament and without any constitutional cover. An undeclared act of war. An indelible shame for the history of Italy.

Today history repeats itself in the worst way. The war is being waged against the Russian Federation through “proxies” but without any shame.

5/6 of the world are terrified by what is happening and are trying to escape from the maelstrom into which American imperialism wants to plunge the entire planet. Unfortunately, Italy, and with it the European Union, is complicit in this strategy.

Let’s stop them!

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The World Anti-imperialist Platform