A Letter from Europe

All over the world, incomparable numbers of people have participated in protests against the U.S. war in Iraq. Protestors of every social, national, and ideological category share an awareness that our destructive potential is now so dangerous, we must reject absolutely the idea of war if we are to safeguard the human race. Species survival is a motivation of such vast and profound resonance that it appeals to every human being who is not insane or criminal.

At the root of the collective opposition, however, is the acceptance of values proposed by the structures currently in power and their uncritical and voluntary application to the current state of international affairs. Thus, the shared sense of the absurdity of this war also takes shape within the ideological apparatus broadcast by the very aggressors who enjoy an almost total monopoly of conventional information: the self-determination of peoples, the possibility to live together in peace, democracy, respect for human rights and the rights of the individual, respect for international law, the primacy of legality.

One example among many: from the day of the attack, the expression "illegal war" has been used extensively. Yet as every jurist knows, legality in the sphere of international relations is a contradiction in terms. While at the institutional level legality has an instrumental function, since institutions operate by definition on the terrain of legality, in the sphere of a popular movement legality issues a countercommand to the reiterated commitment against preemptive war. In addition to the folly of applying criteria of legality or illegality to war, the concept of illegal war implies, in this specific case, that no opposition would be admissible if the U.S. government had succeeded (or should now succeed) in obtaining the approval of the Security Council of the United Nations—the semblance of so-called international legality. The use of this expression implies a profound conformism according to which legality and the compliance with codified rules should be the measure of behavior at the levels of states, nations, classes, and individuals. According to this criterion, personalities like Thomas Münzer, George Washington, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Mao Zedong would all be bandits, and as such they were indeed labeled. Similarly, Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon caused a scandal because it violated what were then the rules of painting. We forget, to the peril of a politically creative and effective opposition, that every creative act—in science, philosophy, and art, as well as in politics—shatters existing structures.

The basic features of an imposed ideological apparatus passively accepted—the pensée unique—are the omission of social conflict and the substitution of ethical and psychological judgments for political ones. Contradiction and class conflict are replaced by the notion (extended internationally) of rich and poor. These categories are proposed to be outside of history. They are presented as natural phenomena, and as such, appear attenuable and combatable only as we combat an (inevitable) physical illness. As the space of nations is replaced by that of international, imperial, or religious organizations (that govern, or fail to govern, tribes and ethnic groups), countries are arbitrarily imagined as absolutely different from other countries and as having no internal differences, contradictions, or conflicts. Significant attention to internal differences has facilitated, in the last two centuries, a recognition of oppressive structures that have tended to cross national borders (even if they did not reach the globality of our time) and, as a consequence, facilitated the formation of solidarity groups with deep and transversal ideologies. First proclaimed in 1848 and blossoming with the Paris Commune until the end of World War I, this solidarity burst into the universal (socialist) consciousness of the common interests of the workers, which was opposed to the interests of the capitalists, who were also the colonizers.¹

Through the current ideological lens, the conflicts racking the world appear dimly, as unintelligible, desperate chaos. Every instance of struggle is regarded as either senseless violence or...