Following are the two statements issued by the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France after the January 7 killing of Charlie Hebdo joournalists in Paris. – Dan La Botz, Co-Editor
A Barbarous and Reactionary Act
The attack against the editorial offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo has provoked indignation and anger against this blind murderous violence against journalists and newspaper staff. The attack aims at spreading terror against the freedom of expression and the press in the name of reactionnary and obscurantist prejudice.
We have often debated and polemicized with the journalists and illustrators of Charlie Hebdo as well as engaging in common campaigns with them.
The NPA expresses its solidarity with the family and friends of the victims, the journalists and staff at Charlie Hebdo.
But we will not enter into a national union with the sorcerer’s apprentices who flirt with racism, stoke hatred against muslims and foreigners or will use this trajedy to enact new laws against civic rights. They bear a heavy responsibility for the current xenophobic climate. Both camps are ennemies of democracy, freedom, as well as the working class and all those in solidarity with it
Holland and National Unity – Anger and Indignation Misdirected
François Hollande, once again, even in this dramatic situation, did not have anything to say.
Throughout the country people are expressing their indignation, anger, revulsion against the pure and simple execution of independent, free and satirical, anticonformist, journalists, this putting to death of Charlie Hebdo, and Hollande is praising a united France, calling for national unity. In doing so he justifies the wars that he and his government are carrying out against the peoples in regions of the world where plundering and military interventions organized by the great powers are sowing misery and chaos.
It is because the NPA is fully solidarity with the journalists, the employees, the victims of the barbaric and reactionary attack against Charlie Hebdo and its journalists that we are not joining this national unity, with this coming together of France.
We say no to falling in behind this government, which is waging war against working people; behind Sarkozy who, is saying the same thing as Hollande; or behind Marine Le Pen who is using it to conduct a racist and xenophobic campaign under pretext of fighting against Islamic fundamentalism.
It is their policy, social and democratic regression, social that secretes this obscurantist cruelty, this contemptible violence which aims at sowing terror, against freedom of expression, freedom of the press in the name of reactionary and obscurantist prejudices.
The answer is not national unity but the workers’ movement, working people again the offensive to bring society out of regression, of the chaos into which capitalist policy has plunged it.
We will express our solidarity with the victims of terror in complete independence of their national unity.
Montreuil 7 January 2015
*Keith Mann translated the first document. The second was trasnlated by International Viewpoint.
Cartoon by Lucille Clerc, Paris.
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