IRSN Solidarity On the Occasion of African Liberation Day and Palestine Day Date: 20 May 2006 From: International Republican Socialist Network Representative: D. Michele Duarte The revolutionary activists who have come together to forge the International Republican Socialist Network have been proud to stand in solidarity with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in commemorating African Liberation Day for just under a quarter of a century.  We are proud that in formulating the statement of the founding precepts of our organization, we specifically recognized the important contribution of the Pan-African Socialist tendency within international socialism to the working class struggle throughout the world and to note its specific importance to the revolutionary struggle of African working people around the globe, just as we believe our own republican socialist tendency provides a vital analysis to the revolutionary working class movement in those lands where an ongoing struggle for national liberation is combined with a level of economic development which puts the struggle for socialism on the immediate agenda of the working class. Likewise, we in the IRSN take tremendous pride in our long and consistent support for the struggle of the Palestinian people against the Zionist imperialists within the context of our former work with the Irish Republican Socialist Movement and continuing in the network we have forged in order to best defend the revolutionary traditions of republican socialism against the forces of reformism and expand our activism to other struggles best served by a republican socialist analysis.  Moreover, we are proud to reiterate within the context of that support for the people of Palestine, our specific solidarity with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who we believe to represent the most advanced class-consciousness within the Palestinian working class. In coming here today to express solidarity with the revolutionary struggles of the African and Palestinian peoples, brothers and sisters, rafiq and achairde, we are mindful that we find ourselves in times filled with both despair and hope. Within the United States and Britain, within the world at large, we find ourselves in a time of rampant imperialist aggression, ever-starker disparity of wealth among the world’s people; it is a time of brutal and bloody occupation and aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and beyond. It is a time that has seen far too many of the revolutionary movements in the world today press forward in struggle, only to then give away all the gains they had made in negotiations with their enemies that were from the outset nothing more than fool’s errands. In Ireland we have learned this lesson at a devastating cost—three decades of struggle in arms, which was but part of eight centuries of a fight for national sovereignty, were squandered in negotiations with foreign imperialists and native capitalists that yielded nothing but a peace that we had never asked for—the peace of the grave.  In Guatemala the same has happened to the URNG; in Palestine, despite the continued commitment to revolutionary struggle of those like the PFLP, negotiations with the treacherous Zionists and their imperialist allies have cost the Palestinian people dearly. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, what has become of the victory once won by the FMLN and FSLN? What has become of the struggle once waged by the volunteers of the ETA in the Basque lands? Why was the Libyan Revolution left to stand alone against the punishing sanctions of the imperialists? Seemingly throughout the world, working class revolutionaries have been dealt crushing blows by the military might of imperialism and the naivety of their own leaders, coupled with the connivance of the capitalist class they had struggled against. Yet, there is cause for us to have hope today. There are signs on the horizon that speak of our day, the day of revolution, again drawing near. Throughout South America the people have brought to power anti-imperialist movements — in Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and soon in Peru. In the very belly of the beast, within the European Union and the United States, working class people’s discontent is coming to the fore. Not at the ballot box, where reformists and lesser-evils have forever channeled working class discontent into useless gestures of democratic pretense — no, but in the streets, in the unemployment offices, in the factories and finally within the offices of corporate capitalism, discontent is becoming palpable. People are well past tired of the empty promises of reformism and the lying campaign rhetoric of supposed “opposition candidates”. Working people are tired of imperialist adventures. They are tired of a system of production that produces ever-growing wealth for a handful and ever-deeper misery for the masses. They are tired of the idiotic and vile scourges of sexism, racism, Zionism, heterosexism, xenophobia, and religious superstition that have been brought to bear against us, in addition to capitalist exploitation.               International Panel As their anger and frustration grows, they will look to the struggles of Palestine and of Africans around the globe for inspiration and like us, we believe they will find it.  African sisters and brothers, comrades of the Arab Nation, the International Republican Socialist Network conveys to you the solidarity of the working class revolutionaries struggle for national liberation and socialism in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Basque lands, and from the Bretons and Puerto Ricans. Your victory brings us closer to our emancipation; our struggle is one with your own. Let us move forward to victory. Let us change the world. Peter Urban irsp@netwiz.net International Republican Socialist Network Page last updated 21 Dec 2006 Ireland's OWN and Starry Plough Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2006 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.