Javier Giraldo

in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 8 (October 1986)

After Yalta, there are two dynamisms that are developing and that are undermining the sovereignty of national states, still conceived as contractual associations of owners: one is the dynamism of the transnational economy.
Multinationals have, in effect, a power superior to that of the nation-states. The latter were stripped of their competence, either to nationalise or to plan the economy. The multinationals monopolise the market, the conquest and monopoly of which had been the reason for the creation of the nation-states.
The power of multinationals does not derive from their large-scale production capacity, but from their ability to invest in the most favourable regions: where there are low wages, weak trade unionism, benevolent taxation; it derives from their ability to transfer their activities from one country to another to escape the effects of a strike, from their ability to concentrate research and development in vital locations, from their cunning in evading national constraints such as: currency fluctuations, anti-trust legislation, tax requirements, etc.
Already at the end of 1971, multinationals controlled twice the total international reserves of the central banks.
The other dynamism is that of total war.
First, war was conceived as the exclusive concern of armies confronting enemies external to each nation: it was limited warfare.
After World War I, General Ludendorff proposed that, in wartime, war should be “total”, in the sense of involving all the nation’s citizens and all the nation’s resources. The distinction between civilian and military, and between civilian and military budgets, would thus disappear.
With the Second World War, another aspect of the totality is advanced: war must involve all states, there must be no neutral states. The distinction between combatant states and neutral states was thus erased.
The revolutionary wars then show that war involves all fields of human existence, all dimensions of the human person; all human acts fall under the direct or indirect influence of war.
Finally, the cold war erases the last difference, the last redoubt that escapes totality: time. The difference between wartime and peacetime disappears; all time is now wartime.
And the world lives in war. And the world lives for war.
We know that every minute the world’s military budget absorbs 1.3 million dollars, while every minute 30 children die of hunger.
There is, on the other hand, a legal structure that supports this whole absurd reality: the sovereignty of states, which have become representatives of capital-owning republics, the very entities that once claimed to embody the sovereignty of people associated in sovereign nations.
This power dynamic has led to the establishment of a political ethic, or rather an antithetical one, that has been able to legitimise the most horrendous war crimes, such as those committed in Vietnam, without any international body feeling vested with the authority to prosecute the criminals.
It is precisely at this juncture that the genius of Bertrand Russell convenes, no longer in the name of any constituted power, but in the name of the ethical conscience of humanity, the first independent Tribunal to try the greatest power and condemn it for crimes against humanity.
This experience was repeated in the Second Russell Tribunal, which, between 1974 and 1976, tried dictatorships in Latin America under the same investiture.
The International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples is the fruit of this experience of the Russell Tribunals I and II, and in Algiers in 1976, it took up the experience and dynamism of the Liberation Movements.
The world picture, as we have just described it, shows us that the gap left between “Peoples” and “States” when the liberal model took shape has become unbridgeable, despite the fact that this gulf has been filled with the ideological veil of individual freedom.
But the growing violation of individual rights began to coexist with states that sought their legal basis in national sovereignty and signed all human rights acts and treaties. The annual reports of Amnesty International have been showing us that in all sovereign nation-states, torture, political assassination, arbitrary detention, denial of citizens’ guarantees, are their daily practice.
Within this dark world picture, Liberation Movements emerge.
They are the bearers of the old communitarian utopia of humanity, which became the banner of so many peoples massacred in the triumphant history of the merchants; they have revealed to us the true depth of violence; they have shown us that violence begins its cycle and sinks its foundations in structural and institutional violence.
It is in this space opened by the Russell Tribunal, by the Liberation Movements, and by the awareness of the abyss that separates the States from the Peoples, within the liberal model of society, that the field of militancy of the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples opens up.
The very magnitude of the problems we face necessarily places us in the realm of utopias. In no way can we assume triumphalist or messianic attitudes. We believe in the value of modest, everyday actions:
– in a letter, which is written in the only moments reserved for rest,
– on a sticker, affixed with fear and risk on the walls that passers-by will hurriedly glance at,
– in a protest march, which overcomes, in a few, the inertia of scepticism, laziness or fear,
– in a song-message, which awakens, from time to time, the heart of a new activist of humanity,
– in a film, a talk… a bulletin that will strike, by chance, an alienated conscience.
A few words of Lelio Basso, the founder of the International League, serve to conclude, and reflect deeply the meaning of our struggle and our hope:
“Those who, in the uncertainty of the present, still find a reason, not to resign themselves, but to fight and to hope….
They all share the certainty that reality can be changed by the conscious action of men….
We ask all of them to act with us, so that the multitude of those who refuse to accept that the destiny of man is definitively marked by the fatality of his birth, and that the destiny of peoples is decided by the balance of power between superpowers and by the borders between zones of influence, may grow daily”.
Giraldo, Javier
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 8 (October 1986)