Europe protests against social massacre

By Giorgio Cremaschi

And so between the tear gas and cherry bombs, the Greek parliament has approved a new raft of social cuts, imposed by the usurers of the European Troika in return for a bit of credit.

This new installment of spending cuts imposed by all, I repeat all, governments in the European Union amounts to 40% of Greece’s GDP. As if the cuts of the Berlusconi and Monti governments combined amounted to more than 600 billion euros. So far we are at one quarter of this figure and Italy’s provinces have already announced that they will turn off the heating in the schools.

Imagine, therefore, the material condition of the Greek people, even if we find it hard to conceive of a country that just to remain in the Europe of austerity, banks and the euro, it is coming out of the Europe of social rights and is falling into that state that was once called the Third World.

How many elderly people, how many children, how many women, how many poor will see their living conditions degraded  up to risking life itself, because of the elimination of that system of protection – schools, health care, pensions, job contracts, to protections against dismissal – that was built with hard struggle, to take our little Continent out of the Middle Ages? It was the victory against fascism in Europe that built the welfare state and it is the liberal right and the useless and forgetful Left that are demolishing it.

In Italy, the pro-regime media are breathing a sigh of bipartisan relief because the Greek parliament has put millions more people out onto the streets: here in Italy this is not even worthy of discussion, we are arguing about the electoral law and primary elections.

All candidates in the centre left primary elections [for a new leader] are committed to the EU fiscal compact and those European treaties which are destroying Greece…

I don’t know by what percentage, but the responsibility for the Greek massacre – blamed as expected on the government of that country, Draghi, Merkel and Hollande – is also that of  Monti, Berlusconi, [center-left Democrats leade rBersani] and whoever else agrees to be bound by European commitments.

The Greek people are suffering the damage and casualties comparable to those of a war and this is a crime and he who commits it is  a criminal.

You may be criminals because you are consciously evil, or because you do not oppose the crime for reasons of opportunism, fear, ignorance. But the fact remains that there are crimes and criminals among us.

On 14 November there will be the first day of European struggles. It is an important event, rightly taken up by the Spanish indignados and our own, No Monti Day ‘indignant ones’, and despite the fact that the official platform of the European trade union confederation is totally subordinate to the economic crimes. We will go to the streets against all complicity with the massacre of Greece and throughout Europe.

Giorgio Cremaschi is a senior figure in the Italian metalworkers’ union FIOM.

Micromega Nov. 8, 2012

Translation by Revolting Europe