The Editorial Board of Revolution Permanente

Translated from French

A hundred people killed at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France : a real carnage. On Friday, November 14th, several attacks were carried out almost simultaneously in the streets of five Parisian neighborhoods and near the Stade de France, in Saint Denis. The provisional death toll is high : at least 118 people were randomly killed while dozens of others have been critically wounded. Ten months after the attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Vincennes, terrorists – Islamists, according to the press – chose to replicate, barbarously and asymmetrically, the imperialist barbarism that has descended upon Syria and Iraq for over a year and a half, in the name of liberty and human rights in the struggle against Daesh (ISIS). Last night, France found out what Beirut went through on November 12th and what the populations of war-torn Syria, Iraq, and Yemen live everyday.{}

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A little before 9:30 PM a deadly synchronized terror reigned in the streets of Paris : strafing attacks against restaurants, hostages at the Bataclan, one of the most popular Parisian concert venues, grenades near the main sports stadium where the French President François Hollande was attending the soccer game between France and Germany. Among the victims, everyday people uniquely, killed randomly. Emotions are high in the capital in the light of this deadly attack. We firmly condemn these vile attacks and we declare our solidarity with the victims and their loved ones.

For the government, supported by almost all of French political parties, the situation is one of extreme crisis. Hollande and his ministers have responded by exceptional measures allowed by the declared state of emergency. Just before midnight the President announced in a brief speech that the army was ready to intervene in collaboration with special police forces. A state of emergency concerning the whole country was declared for the first time since the end of the Algerian War – and not only in the Parisian region as it was during the 2005 suburban revolt. This gives police chief officers and their teams special prerogatives to suspend circulation, close down certain establishments, and last but not least, to raid people’s homes without a warrant, in and around the capital. The country’s borders have also been closed.

Hollande is preparing a very reactionary tidal wave by using these traumatic events in order to reinforce executive prerogatives and revive a Bonapartist turn. Politically speaking, he knows that Sarkozy and the Le Pen family will be on his heels, both hoping to also profit from the situation on the eve of the regional elections – although some parties have already announced the suspension of their campaigns. Abroad, we can expect, with the sound of army boots in the background, an intensification of imperialist military operations led against “Islamic terrorism”. Indeed, this is what stands out in Barack Obama’s first declaration.

Hollande has called for unity, as he did after the January attacks, and has asked us to “trust security forces”. Not only are these insecurity forces incapable of preventing this kind of attack, but they also exert their own “terrorism” against the working and lower classes and refugees. Also, French imperialist operations abroad, on average two per year since Hollande’s election in 2012, pave the way for Islamic terrorism – which is the enemy of peoples’ liberation from the Imperialist and Zionist yoke, and ultimately, the deformed reflection of war-mongering Western barbarism.

It’s only by firmly opposing this Bonapartist, racist, and reactionary turn that we’ll be able to resist all forms of terrorism, even the most institutional. We refuse the wave of racism and Islamophobia that is to come and all the amalgams against the refugees, who some medias accuse of importing terrorism into Europe. This means that the organizations of our class, of the labor movement and the youth, must this time completely refuse the “post-Charlie blackmail”. It is the very precondition for a possible resistance, by refusing to stand with the government and its allies, all war-mongers and responsible for the misery, unemployment, xenophobia and exploitation throughout the world.