The basic debate is about whether the right to rebellion of the peoples exists in the world and who defines when it is exercised. The reality is that those who autonomously decide to exercise it are also those who enforce it. In this struggle of the peoples for autonomy, independence, sovereignty, culture and self-determination, new rules, customs, norms of coexistence are developed that allow the development of different ways of building society; different from those normalized and standardized by the globalized culture of capitalism, different from the dominant hegemony built over centuries.
In the legal discussion on the evaluation of whether we make retentions or kidnappings, what the representatives of the oligarchy tell us is that we must assume their institutional legal baggage and their norms of validation or not of the actions of war, norms of war that they pass by the belt and extrapolate them to criminal actions; case of the self-defense groups, paramilitary, clans, cooperatives to live together, forced displacement, preventive detentions, preventive attacks, indiscriminate bombings, tortures and other atrocities. At the time, they allowed their allied extra-institutional forces (paramilitaries) to do and undo, and then extradited their leaders to the United States. In this so-called “dirty war”, which is part of the Colombian internal war, the Colombian oligarchy in general recognized the paramilitaries in Congress and passed over all the war crimes committed together with the Colombian State.
The double standards used by the media directed by the big economic and communication conglomerates, generators of thought, qualify as terrorists those who defend their right to live in a territory, but they never condemned the US for dropping nuclear bombs in Japan where thousands of civilians died, nor did they ever condemn the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of its culture or the overthrow of many governments in South America. Colombia under former President Gaviria re-initiated a military, legal, ideological and political offensive to wipe the insurgency off the map, “his total war”. He justified the gringo intervention in the name of the fight against drugs, where today Colombia continues to be the main exporter of cocaine in the world. In the midst of this crusade, he began to deny the right to rebellion, which at least was written as a crime in Colombian legislation, and disconnected all related crimes. The insurgents after the attack on the Twin Towers in the United States were declared “terrorists” in the world. They are only recognized if their intention is to bow to the establishment.
We would like today’s world to recognize the norms that have been built globally in the instances of confluence of nations, however the duality in which the world is immersed, the contradictions that are woven between uni-polarity and multi-polarity, prevent the existence of a single, global standard, accepted by all, where all parties have identity on what is good or bad, beyond even the ethics preached by each one. The Russians attack civilian targets that have been shown to be used by the Ukrainian forces to camouflage the combatant forces, they are accused before the international criminal court as “terrorists”, for violating the International Humanitarian Law. Israel and the USA do something similar, the argument is self-defense, as if the end justifies the means, as if the qualification of the acts depended on those who commit them. The ways in which the constituted States exercise violence against the population hide old fascist, genocidal practices, forms of conquest from the Middle Ages.
So, “In reality the debate is not legal or technical”, it is the forces in conflict who generate concepts that they pretend to universalize within the framework of the ethical, the legal, the legitimate, ignoring the reality of what they exercise and the ways in which they impose their truth, their power on the world, preventing the historically subjected peoples from even trying to express their opinion, to oppose and on a larger scale to rebel. Attempting to build a new society from any angle implies exercising the right of peoples to rebellion and self-determination.
To fight for justice, dignity, equality, fraternity and all the rights that the peoples have been building through their struggles is a possibility that we, the excluded, have to claim our right to exist. Even if the oligarchies of the world in their practice deny all their ethical and legal rules, they end up with their actions and words justifying all the aberrations that are necessary for them to maintain their control over all humanity. Israel massacres, displaces and murders the Palestinian population. It denies territory to a people who have historically been there. Just as in Colombia the indigenous people, says the oligarchy, have no right to the valleys, nor to the plains in their ancestral territories.
To recognize the peoples of the world that we must unite, meet, assume the practical debate of solidarity, brotherhood, integration in spirit, thought and action is a moral duty and a necessary practice for the construction of another possible world, to learn from those who advance on this path, to learn from those who struggle and require strengthening is to lay more foundations for the strengthening of the necessary internationalism among the peoples, their struggles, their fragmented construction of embryos of power. May the habit of some to confront oppression become an inalienable right practiced by those who defend the just causes of the peoples. Among the peoples we must take the necessary steps to strengthen the processes that strengthen the construction of popular power in its different expressions.
The peoples of America and the world must transcend the double standards imposed by the hegemony of the planet to maintain its dominion over the world. Says a president of a world power in conflict with the hegemony of the USA, “in Latin America (Our-America) we breathe airs of sovereignty, it is an untamed land where men like Fidel, Bolivar, Chavez and Che were born”, leaders who have been up to the needs of their peoples, leaders who contributed in the processes of emancipation of those peoples, individual and collective leaders that the world requires today to transform itself and humanity to survive.
By: International Work Front.
Elvia Builes and Leonardo Zapata
ELN Statement
source: https://eln-voces.net/el-derecho-a-rebelarnos/