Commons Initiative launches campaign “for peace, freedom and the welfare state”

“We need to be clear in our words,” João Rodrigues, an economist and one of the members of the Commons Initiative on the manifesto “for peace, freedom and the Social State”, tells VISÃO. He does not hesitate to call what is happening in Palestine “genocide” and calls on everyone to join the demonstrations that will take place this Saturday in Lisbon and Porto, but which, as Rodrigues notes, are “part of an international and internationalist movement” against the massacre of Palestinians and against the arms race in Europe.

“The word genocide is particularly important,” argues João Rodrigues, noting that “there are still progressive sectors that do not use the word,” but that it is already widely used by several international experts on the subject to describe a war that has already killed 50,000 children. “We need to be aware of the scale. There are no precedents,” he stresses, explaining that it is important to take to the streets to pressure the political powers to act and to counter a narrative that tries to justify the slaughter in Gaza with Hamas terrorism.

Without fear of words, João Rodrigues says that “what is happening is a deliberate act of physical elimination of a people, which is signing up to a program of sponsorship of an arms race, which is the pretext for yet another attack on the Social State.

“We cannot allow authoritarianism and war to take over our lives”

The manifesto that serves as the motto for this Saturday's demonstrations gathered around 600 signatures in just two days, including people with links to the PCP, BE and PS, artists, journalists and even prosecutor António Cluny.

But the idea is that this petition and the protests it calls for are just the beginning of a wider campaign. “This manifesto is a step towards making clear the connection between war, the liquidation of the welfare state and the destruction of democratic freedoms. In addition to showing this dangerous and deadly trend, this initiative will also lead to a series of actions for peace, freedom and the welfare state. We cannot allow authoritarianism and war to take over our lives”, Nuno Ramos de Almeida, journalist and one of the members of the Commons Initiative, told VISÃO.

The text of the manifesto is, moreover, a warning about the way in which the rhetoric of war is used to erode rights and freedoms in democracies.

“We live in a time when governments instigate fear and xenophobia to increase the arms trade and naturalize the imposition of a permanent state of war that liquidates our social rights and restricts democratic freedoms,” reads the manifesto, which rejects the target assumed by the Portuguese Government, which committed to NATO to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP in ten years.

“We do not need 5% of GDP for war, but more investment for a more just society and world”, argue the signatories of the text, who want to “stop the war in the Middle East and the ongoing genocide in Palestine, promote and build peace, prevent the arms race, refuse limitations on democracy and freedom”.