Time for Outrage!

Toward a Peaceful Insurrection

I have noticed-and I am not the only one-the Israeli government’s reaction to the citizens of [the West Bank village of] Bil’in, who protest the wall each Friday by simply marching to it, without throwing rocks or using force. The Israeli authorities have described these marches as “nonviolent terrorism.” Not bad… One would have to be Israeli to describe nonviolence as terrorism, and above all one would have to be embarrassed by how effective it is in gaining the support and understanding of every enemy of oppression in the world.

The Western obsession with productivity has brought the world to a crisis that we can escape only with a radical break from the headlong rush for “more, always more” in the financial realm as well as in science and technology. It is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail. For we are threatened by the most serious dangers, which have the power to bring the human experiment to an end by making the planet uninhabitable.

Still, it remains the case that there has been important progress since 1948: decolonization, the end of apartheid, the destruction of the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first ten years of the twenty-first century, in contrast, were a period of retreat, explicable in part by the American presidency of George W. Bush, September 11 and the disastrous conclusions that the United States drew from it, such as the invasion of Iraq . We have had an economic crisis, but we have not initiated a new politics for economic development. Similarly, the Copenhagen Climate Conference of December 2009 did not result in genuine political action to save the planet. We are at a threshold between the horrors of the first decade of the century and the possibilities of the decades to follow. Yet we must keep up hope-we must always hope. The previous decade, the 1990s, brought great progress: UN conferences like the one in Rio on the environment in 1992 and in Beijing on women in 1995. In September 2000, the 191 UN member states adopted the declaration on the eight Millennium Development Goals, initiated by Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which they agreed to cut worldwide extreme poverty in half by 2015. My deep regret is that neither President Obama nor the European Union has come forward with what should have been their contribution to a constructive phase based on fundamental values.

How should I conclude? By recalling again that on the sixtieth anniversary of the Program of the National Council of the Resistance, we veterans of the Resistance movements and the fighting forces of Free France from 1940 to 1945 (Lucie Aubrac, Raymond Aubrac, Henri Bartoli, Daniel Cordier, Philippe Dechartre, Georges Guingouin, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Lise London, Georges Séguy, Germaine Tillion, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Maurice Voutey and myself) addressed an Appeal to the young generation on March 8, 2004, in which we said, “Nazism was defeated, thanks to the sacrifices of our brothers and sisters of the Resistance and of the United Nations against fascist barbarity. But this menace has not completely disappeared, and our outrage at injustice remains intact to this day.”

No, this menace has not completely disappeared. In addition, we continue to call for “a true peaceful uprising against the means of mass communication that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, contempt for the least powerful in society and for culture, general amnesia and the outrageous competition of all against all.”

To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,

TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.

TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.