On the first weekend in February, 2012, they will be meeting again in the Munich Hotel Bayerischcr Hof: War strategists, mainly from NATO and EU countries, high-ranking military men, representatives of governments and of arms and other corporations. They will be forging coalitions for war and coordinating military strategies for their worldwide plans for intervention.
Under their banner of "security and human rights", they wage wars in order to force through their commercial and hegemonic interests. With arms exports, they aid and abet worldwide murder and oppression.
While they are discussing the rules of the game of their “world order”, we will take to the streets and demonstrate.
War and profit-oriented world trade drives billions of people to flight and starvation. “Every five seconds, a child dies of malnutrition or of easily curable diseases. These children do not simply die, they are murdered.” (Jean Ziegler, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food). They are murdered by a world order that murders tens and hundreds of thousands for the sake of profit, by an economic system that plunders natural resources systematically, thus ruining the foundations of life on this planet. The rich nations seal their borders against refugees of war, poverty and climate change..
Germany is the military hub for the US and NATO wars of aggression. In violation of its own constitution, Germany is involved in every war, in order to implement its own economic and power-politics interests. And the lethal weapons that kill thousands throughout the world are also manufactured here. Here and in the other NATO countries, the lies that justify wars of aggression as “humanitarian interventions” are invented and propagated. The Munich Security Conference is one of the most important propaganda forums for this purpose.
Their “Security Conference” is an Insecurity Conference – it also stands for profit-making, exploitation, and war
Lies serve to launch wars and invade countries, but bring no “security”. Wars such as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya show that war means mass rape, death, torture, and masses fleeing. The victims of these wars are the majority of humanity, nature, and a culture of common solidarity.
The world economic and political power elite claim for themselves the right to “unhindered access to markets and raw materials” (to quote the Bundeswehr’s Defence White Paper,). They push through their economic interests and global pretensions to power, even by force of arms.
The consequences of such policies of violence are global impoverishment, the undermining of democratic and social rights, downgrading of education, and the destruction of vital natural resources.
We are experiencing an increasing militarization of society, surveillance and disciplining of the people in the name of preventive counter-insurgency.
With their propaganda of hopelessness, those responsible for the above policies try to silence people’s protest through fear-propaganda: fear of unemployment, fear for children’s future, fear of terrorism.
More and more people are searching for alternatives to capitalism and are beginning to resist in many countries
Many Rulers are arming themselves – even here in Europe– against this resistance. They are expanding the surveillance state, arming the police still further, and planning the deployment of the military at home (against strikes, for example). A preliminary stage in this development is exemplified by military support for the police at the Heiligendamm G-8 summit and at European demonstrations against shipments of spent nuclear fuel.
But we will not let ourselves be intimidated, and will reject insinuations that serve as a pretext for police repression – and for restricting our freedom of assembly.
But we will not let ourselves be intimidated, and reject insinuations that serve as a pretext for police repression – and for restricting our freedom of assembly.
We are against a system oriented solely to profit-making, a system that ignores costs in human lives, both in peace-time and in war. We oppose such a world order with our protests, determined resistance, and solidarity of action.
Humankind needs neither NATO nor any other military alliance, but peace, disarmament, and social justice..
Come to the mass rally on Saturday, February 4th, 2012 – committed, creative, and loud
AKTIONSBÜNDNIS GEGEN DIE NATO-SICHERHEITSKONFERENZ
(“Action Alliance Against the NATO Security Conference”)