> Italy: Anti-American Manifesto
>
> About 500 Italian intellectuals, political activists, artists have so far
> signed the following manifesto:
>
> The clash between us and the Islamic peoples is not a military clash. It
> is a cultural one, a religious one. Truth stays not in the middle, but
> only on one side.
> Oriana Fallaci
>
> The West has to be aware of the superiority of its civilization. A
> civilization which granted to peoples widespread wellness and respect of
> human and religious rights, respect lacking in Islamic countries.
> Silvio Berlusconi
>
> Anti-Americanism, if left-wing or right-wing, catholic or secular, feeds
> itself of particularly blameworthy cases, just to show a more general
> aversion towards all that which characterizes a liberal-democratic
> society: individualism versus collectivism, capitalism versus state-
> controlled economy, economic development versus pauperism, technological
> primacy versus philosophical speculations, widespread wellness versus
> austerity, pragmatism versus ideologies, modernity versus past back-
> looking tendencies. The United States are guilty not for what they do,
> but for what they are.
> Piero Ostellino
>
> It is ridiculous to establish a comparison between the democratically
> elected president of the most ancient democratic country and Hitler. We
> Germans do not forget we have been freed by the United States. The
> identification of the good with the American soldiers goes back to my
> childhood. And after all they protected us from communism during the cold
> war.
> Joschka Fischer
>
> Anti-Americanism coincides with a position of revaluation and defense of
> the national state as an anti-imperialist trench; to this temptation also
> yielded some sectors of the movement of movements as we could see at
> Porto Alegre. To take this position would really be mistake.
> Toni Negri
>
>
> The USA are going to occupy – with or without the UN – Iraq, to
> control the Middle East and to forge their worldwide Empire. With the
> same arrogance they are tearing into pieces the ABM treaty and Kyoto
> protocols, blackmailing the world, threatening it with their atomic
> weapons. With unbounded haughtiness they plan bombardments and tricks,
> and create new oppressive situations just to keep the old ones. They
> exalt their imperial right, while trampling on the others rights. They
> are the greatest producers (and users) of mass destruction weapons and
> the biggest war-mongers; they are the most dangerous terrorists on earth.
> And they want to keep their monopoly of weapons, war and terror. They
> rule the UN, while trampling on its charter; they have servile allies
> they humiliate; they are destroying peoples whose will they pretend to
> interpret. For all these reasons we have to be and are part of the huge
> mass movement opposing US planned aggression against Iraq.
>
> This war, which in the US plans is but a step towards their world
> absolute dominion, is based on the paranoid presupposition according to
> which the United States have a “special mission� to fulfill - namely
> to impose on the world their liberalist system and their trade-funded
> culture. This claim, supported in the most obscurantist cultural milieu,
> does not conceal its strict relationship with the Zionist theses of the
> “elected people�. Even in Europe whoever opposes this totalitarian,
> imperialist and racist ideology is labeled as �anti-American� and
> pointed out to public scorn. This virulent and invasive ideological and
> cultural campaign, directed against all expressions of critical thinking,
> is aimed to prove that Bush‘s American Empire is the last and biggest
> bulwark of human civilization and its fall will precipitate humanity into
> barbarism. All of sudden right-wing and left-wing intellectuals, after
> having decreed the end of ideologies and history and having embraced the!
> most nihilistic cultural relativism, converted themselves into Manichean
> fundamentalists, volunteering in the stars and stripes crusaders´ army,
> shouting out the USA are, after all, on the right side, while all their
> enemies are on the wrong one. Old times liberalist skepticism has been
> replaced by blind fideism, by a real pagan religion whose irradiation
> center are the USA and the Emperor himself its Supreme Pontiff.
>
> The dogmas of this new cult are money, consumerism, individualism, social
> Darwinism, technology, -scientism. Values as social justice, freedom,
> brotherhood, solidarity are thrown out as useless ballast. Pro-Americans
> are trying to remove the reality of growing inequalities and gradual
> impoverishment of billions of human beings, of a neocolonialism which
> wants to take possession of all resources; they are using the same
> primordial racist theories used by colonialists to justify the genocide
> of natives and slavery. Oppressed peoples “have not a soul�, and if
> they refuse to be “developed�, if they do not accept to be
> Americanized, they can go to hell: they deserve to be bombed. This
> liberalist fundamentalism speaks the language of criminalization,
> repression, permanent and global preventive war against all its
> opponents; it is the signal that bourgeois civilization has abandoned the
> enlightened pretension of its claimed universalism and is now victim to a
> compulsive death drive!
> . Even if the ministries of this totalitarian ideology will never admit
> it, the result of their action is exactly the one they are painfully
> trying to deny: a hateful crusade against the Islamic world, a war
> between civilizations.
>
> We have to oppose and defeat this deliberate and intoxicating
> falsification of facts. Without forgetting the historical fight of south
> American peoples against Yankee imperialism in the name of a free
> America, we claim the right to be anti-Americans, to speak and feel as
> anti-Americans against a new millennium nazism, a stars and stripes
> nazism. Americanism is not only a product of big US capitalistic
> interests; it is also the expression of a wider reactionary and
> colonialist social bloc, cynically aware that US opulence is feeding
> itself on others misery, on the pillage of our biosphere and that it has
> to be protected by all means, by force and violence. Americanism is then
> not only the political ideology of those who believe that the worldwide
> armed tyranny of Yankee imperialism has to be justified, is legitimate
> and necessary. Americanism is the last ideological bulwark of liberalist
> thinking, an allegory of capitalism. We are “anti-Americans� as we
> were anti-fascists bet!
> ween the wars. We are anti-Americans because we oppose the racist idea of
> an “elected nation� and defend the right of peoples to fight against
> the empire which is swallowing them.
>
> We denounce the dreadful loss of mind growing in the bourgeois sectors;
> we oppose the subordination of life to a pure economical computation; we
> refuse the conception of richness as pure abundance of material goods; we
> challenge the pretension stating the capitalist world is the only
> possible world. We believe time has come to proclaim those universal
> values on which we can found a new anti-capitalist politics conceived as
> the art of promoting social change through direct and mass action.
> Against all false liberalist syllogism we affirm: that personal freedom
> is inviolable but it can only be effective when exploitation of man on
> man is defeated; that democracy is not the one championed by Bush and it
> implies equal rights for all peoples and respect of national sovereignty;
> that wellness and happiness are just ethical ends only if they are not
> supported by immense accumulation of goods; that socialization is
> possible and that it does not necessarily cause pauperism; that scie!
> ntific progress is necessary but that we have to refuse a fetishist
> subjection to technological scientism; that modernity and development are
> positive values only when they are compatible with our ecosystem and do
> not offend human innate spiritual drives; that politics has to rule over
> economy, as ethics have to orient science; that the future of human
> beings depends on the downfall of American imperialism and on the
> possibility of finding a way out of capitalism laying the bases of a new
> community based on the universal principles of liberty, equality and
> fraternity.
>
> List of endorsers:
> www.antiimperialista.com/view.shtml?category=all&id=1050575490&keyword=+
>
>
>
>
> ************************************
> Antiimperialist Camp
> PF 23, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
> camp at antiimperialista.org
> www.antiimperialista.org/en
> ************************************
>
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-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy