The NPA expresses its total solidarity with the victims of the massacre perpetrated tonight in Nice, and to their families as well. Once again, it is men, women and children who suffer, innocent victims, scapegoated for crimes they did not commit. This ugly violence is creating an irreversible spiral of terror and violence by sowing hatred and fear.
The only response that our government can imagine is to tighten security measures: it is prolonging the state of emergency for three months, which of course was already in effect and has prevented nothing. Its only purpose was to increase pressure police used against protesters opposing the El Khomri anti-labor law. Despite all this, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has the audacity to call for “national unity.”
French President François Hollande wants to mobilize the military reserves and intensify the war in Syria. But isn’t it the barbarity of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Africa that is spawning the social and political chaos, the misery upon which the Islamic State feeds? Haven’t these wars set the killers in motion, animating their apocalyptic and bloody ideology?
This latest attack will be used to justify any and all sorts of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, ant-Muslim, racist, nationalist, and xenophobic rhetoric. The NPA will stand against this and will continue to put forward internationalist solutions to the imperialist wars that refugees above all else. We will continue to mobilize our peoples for a progressive world based on solidarity, freed from the barbarity that capitalism produces.