ABSTRACT: Two hundred days before the deadline indicated by the Nobel Prize for saving at least five million people from starvation, Jaruzelski's tanks in Poland have moved against life, peace, and hope. A coup d'etat dictated by the logic of Yalta. The Radicals fight side by side with scientists and scholars of inform the people and the powerful of the earth. In Eastern Europe they are demanding the same things that we have demanded from the governments of the West: life rather than death starvation. The European Parliament votes unanimously to confirm the commitments made against extermination from hunger: the direct non-violent action of April 19 (1) will give the lie to the alibi of the East-West split, between military blocks that arm against each other while they trade in grain, the better to divide and oppress other peoples.
(NOTIZIE RADICALI No.6, May 28, 1981).
Two hundred days to go until the deadline indicated by the 72 Nobel Prize winners for saving at least five million of the thirty million that will be exterminated by starvation because of the logic of the governments of the North. And in Poland Jaruzelski's tanks murdered life, peace and the hopes for the future. It was one more proof that the logic of the East-West split, like that of the North-South one, into political, economic and military blocks can only be the death of life and law.
In the face of all this, a movement has been born beginning with the manifesto-appeal of the Nobel Prize winners and supported by the most prominent exponents of the political, cultural, scientific and religious worlds of all nations. All the most important international organisations as well, from the UNO to the European Parliament are opposing this extermination. Every day the Radicals are fighting in the streets and parliaments of our country and all other Western countries, armed with law and non-violence, with the strength of reason and hope, to give substance - with their own substance - to the only real possibility of inverting the course of events. They do so aware that with their effort to save millions of lives from the holocaust they create and direct the only alternative capable of preventing our epoch from being doomed to the catastrophe that seems to await us.
We are those Radicals. We are fighting together with men of knowledge, faith and science; along with them we do not doubt that if the nations know, if we succeed in informing them, if we succeed in gaining the ear of the world's powerful, it will be possible to begin a new international policy that will be the salvation of millions of the dying and of us all.
For the right of all to know, judge and hope, we fight against the habit of resignation and despair imposed by censorship and the lack of information.
These years, in which the Radical Party has been involved in the European fight against death from starvation in the world, have been years in which we have gained general recognition for the importance of our congressional commitments as well as the growth of the party's capacity for action. Our interlocutors are the governments of all Europe, just as the major obstacles are the censorship and lack of information on the part of the state - in all Europe, both East and West. In particular we have taken our initiative to the Eastern European countries to react against the systematic violation of the Helsinki Treaty on Human Rights as well as against the right to life held in contempt by those who do not even pay that token respect which the Western countries reserve for the Third World peoples but rather hide behind the shield of Socialism which, by now, is the Socialism of death in Poland as it is in Khabul and in the Sahel.
We have gone there, with all the humility and the strength of non-violence, to ask firstly for these countries to respect those things which with their "Socialism" they profess to believe in: and we have asked for five million lives. At once. We have gone to present the same demands we have made of the governments of Western Europe so that our own governments will know, will be admonished, that it is now time to give substance - and hence life - to those principles which they have so far had to recognise and take on as commitments, not to us but to the victims of the holocaust and the 72 Nobel Prize winners. Once again we have obtained a little clarification. Three days later, in fact, the European Parliament unanimously approved a motion confirming the commitments they have made against death by starvation in the world, and including this problem among those to be worked out in their relations with the Eastern European countries. Now we know that from April 19 it will no longer be possible to use the E
ast-West European split as an alibi for refusing to commit oneself to the fight against death from starvation, the split between politico-military blocks that arm themselves against each other while trading in the grain which feeds them the better to oppress other peoples. From this date on it is confirmed that the real division of the world is between the North and the South, the division between those who create hunger and those who starve. This is the sense of the resolution passed April 23 by the European Parliament in support of our action: to recall the nations and the governments of East and West to the urgent respecting of the hope for life.
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) The date of a demonstration in the Warsaw Pact capitals against death by starvation in the world and for the respecting of the Helsinki Treaty on Human Rights.
