International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

On the night of December 2, 1984, unknown poisonous gases (released by the runaway reaction of water with methyl isocyanate, or MIC) burst out from a Union Carbide pesticide plant located in a densely populated, working poor vicinity of the city of Bhopal in central India. The plant, scheduled for possible closure, was understaffed, not maintained adequately, and had already seen prior deaths from exposure to leaks.

Five months ago 43 students from the rural teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa in Mexico’s Guerrero state disappeared. The Mexican state bears responsibility for these disappearances. The Fourth International expresses its full solidarity with the parents and friends of the Mexican students as well as with the tens of thousands of persons who have mobilized throughout the country, thus avoiding the case being closed by the authorities under the pretext of a purported definitive “historic truth”. The official version seeks in reality to hide a state crime and convince public opinion that the students were killed and incinerated by killers hired by organized crime.

Argentinian prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita announced in February 2015 that he would pursue charges against President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The allegations were supposedly prepared by Alberto Nisman, a special prosecutor who died by a gunshot to the head under mysterious circumstances the previous month. Kirchner’s center-left government has come under increasing fire from opposition forces for her handling of both Nisman’s death and his investigation into a 1994 terrorist attack on a Jewish cultural center. However, many people feel the issue is being used by the right wing as a cover to discredit the government.

The following statement on Ukraine was agreed by the International Committee of the Fourth International in Amsterdam in February 2015.

The following editorial was published on the Russian leftist website Open Left in response to the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday 27 February 2015.

The Left Party is fighting for “a society in which no child has to grow up poor, in which all men and women can live a self-determined life in peace, dignity, and social security and can democratically shape social relations.” In order to achieve this, it demands “a different economic and social system: democratic socialism.” That is how the Left Party formulated its programmatic approach in its new Erfurt Party Programme of 2011.

The time I saw Charb in Paris was January 24, 2010, the day of the crowded commemoration of the French philosopher and activist Daniel Bensaïd at La Mutualité. During the speeches, Charb kept drawing and projecting vignettes about his comrade Daniel, whose book, Marx: Mode d’Emploi, he had illustrated a year earlier. In the deep sadness that filled the big room his vignettes constantly reminded us of Bensaïd’s subtle humor, of his little malicious smile with which he used to charm us all, slowly helping us to heal the loss. Director of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Charb was one of the ten cartoonists and journalists killed, together with two policemen, in the ferocious attack of January 7, 2015.

We are NOT Charlie Hebdo!

Neither do we condone the bombings and murder of journalists at their headquarters, however much we are repulsed by their racist, chauvinist and hateful Islamophobic caricatures of oppressed people. Neither do we condone the subsequent murders at the Paris Kosher supermarket.

The Jan. 7 Paris bombings and shootings afforded French and allied capitalist heads of state—some 50 presidents and prime ministers plus top U.S. officials, all complicit with mass murder—the opportunity for an unprecedented show of unity under the call of “I am Charlie Hebdo.” We note the hypocrisy of the perpetrators of war and systematic violence coming together to pose as defenders of “free speech, liberty, fraternity, and democratic rights.” Virtually all have led in suppressing, if not murdering, opposition currents in their own nations and everywhere on earth where their troops engage in the ruthless murder of oppressed people.