April 9, 2023
Palestine in the Plaza of the Revolution. photo: Bill Hackwell
By Fidel Castro on August 4, 2014, written like it was yesterday
I think that a new and repugnant form of fascism is emerging with remarkable force at this moment in human history, when more than seven billion inhabitants are striving for their own survival.
None of these circumstances has anything to do with the creation of the Roman Empire around 2,400 years ago or with the North American Empire which in this region of the world, barely 200 years ago, was described by Simón Bolívar when he exclaimed that: “… the United States seem destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Liberty”.
England was the first real colonial power to use its dominions over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America and many of the West Indian islands in the first half of the 20th century.
I will not speak on this occasion of the wars and crimes committed by the empire of the United States over more than a hundred years, but only record that it wanted to do with Cuba, what it has done with many other countries in the world and only served to prove that “a just idea from the bottom of a cave can do more than an army”.
The story is much more complicated than all that has been said, but this is, roughly speaking, how the inhabitants of Palestine knew it and it is equally logical that the modern media reflect the news that arrive daily, as has happened with the shameful and criminal war in the Gaza Strip, a piece of land where the population of what has remained of independent Palestine, until barely half a century ago, lives.
The French news agency AFP reported on August 2: “The war between the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and Israel has caused the death of nearly 1,800 Palestinians […] the destruction of thousands of homes and the ruin of an already weakened economy”, although it does not point out, of course, who started the terrible war.
Then he adds: “… by midday Saturday the Israeli offensive had killed 1,712 Palestinians and wounded 8,900. The United Nations was able to verify the identity of 1,117 dead, mostly civilians […] UNICEF counted at least 296 minors killed.”
“United Nations estimated […] (some 58,900 people) homeless in the Gaza Strip.”
“Ten of 32 hospitals were closed and eleven others were affected.”
“This Palestinian enclave of 362 km² also lacks the necessary infrastructures for the 1.8 million inhabitants, especially in terms of electricity and water distribution.
“According to the IMF, the unemployment rate exceeds 40% in the Gaza Strip, a territory subjected to an Israeli blockade since 2006. In 2000, unemployment affected 20% and 30% in 2011. More than 70% of the population depends on humanitarian aid in normal times, according to Gisha.”
The Israeli government declares a humanitarian truce in Gaza at 07:00 GMT this Monday, however, within hours it broke the truce by attacking a house in which 30 people mostly women and children were wounded and among them an eight year old girl who died.
In the early hours of that same day, 10 Palestinians were killed as a result of Israeli attacks throughout the Strip, bringing the number of Palestinians killed to almost 2,000.
Such was the extent of the slaughter that “French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on Monday that Israel’s right to security does not justify the ‘massacre of civilians’ it is perpetrating”.
The genocide of the Nazis against the Jews reaped the hatred of all the peoples of the earth. Why does the government of that country believe that the world will be insensitive to this macabre genocide being committed today against the Palestinian people? Is it expected to ignore how much complicity there is on the part of the American empire in this shameless massacre?
The human species is living through an unprecedented stage in history. A collision of military planes or warships closely watching each other, or other similar events, could unleash a conflict with the use of sophisticated modern weapons that would become the last adventure of the known Homo sapiens.
There are facts that reflect the almost total inability of the United States to deal with the world’s current problems. It can be stated that there is no government in that country, no Senate, no Congress, no CIA or Pentagon that will determine the final outcome. It is sad indeed that this should happen when the dangers are greater, but so are the possibilities of moving forward.
During the Great Patriotic War, Russian citizens defended their country like Spartans; underestimating them was the worst mistake of the United States and Europe. Their closest allies, the Chinese, who like the Russians won their victory on the same principles, are today the most dynamic economic force on earth. Countries want yuan and not dollars to acquire goods and technologies and increase their trade.
New and indispensable forces have emerged. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, whose links with Latin America, most of the Caribbean countries and Africa, which are struggling for development, constitute the force that in our time are ready to collaborate with the rest of the countries of the world without excluding the United States, Europe, Japan.
To blame the Russian Federation for the destruction of the Malaysian airliner in mid-flight is an anonadic simplism. Neither Vladimir Putin, nor Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, nor the other leaders of that government would ever make such a nonsense.
Twenty-six million Russians died in the defense of the Homeland against Nazism. The Chinese fighters, men and women, children of a people of millennia-old culture, are people of privileged intelligence and invincible fighting spirit, and Xi Jinping is one of the most steadfast and capable revolutionary leaders I have ever met in my life.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – Buenos Aires