By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
16 October 2010

I wish to thank the promoters of the International Cultural Festival in Berlin this October 16, 2010 for inviting me to attend this event and to express solidarity for all the participants.

I am unable to attend the festival and enjoy your company due to unjust travel restrictions. The Dutch authorities continue to deny me residence and deprive me of my rights despite my legal victory in getting out of the terrorist list of the European Union by virtue of the decision of the European Court of Justice.

But I am able to convey my wholehearted message of solidarity to all of you. I salute and congratulate you for successfully realizing this cultural festival as an event of solidarity. I am happy to know that thousands of people of various nationalities are attending it and diverse groups are expected to exchange their views, make cultural exhibits and stage cultural performances.

Let us celebrate the people’s struggle for greater freedom, democracy, social justice, all-round development and peace against imperialism and all reaction. Let us renew our resolve to fight for a new and better world in which socialism upholds the leadership and power of the working class, serves the needs of the entire people and stands against exploitation, oppression, crises and wars that imperialism unleashes.

We are today in the midst of the most severe economic crisis of the world capitalist system since the Great Depression. The US-dictated policies of “neoliberal globalization” and “permanent global war on terror” have resulted in a chain of monstrous phenomena, prolonged economic and financial crisis, decline of production and chronic mass unemployment, state terrorism and wars of aggression.

The burden of crisis is being passed on to the working people in the underdeveloped as well as in the imperialist countries. As societies are rapidly polarized, imperialism and its reactionary allies do everything in their power to cover up their criminal culpability for the catastrophic crisis. Chauvinism, xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry and other reactionary currents are being whipped up to obfuscate the root causes of the severe crisis in the very nature and processes of monopoly capitalism.

There is an urgent need to arouse the people with the facts and ideas about the real roots of the crisis and with their own immediate needs and demands for fundamental change, to organize them in every possible and necessary way as resolute and militant forces against the ramparts of imperialism and reaction and to mobilize them in their millions, including the spontaneous and still unorganized masses, in order to sweep away the obstacles to fundamental social change.

We must build an international united front of anti-imperialist and democratic forces in order to arouse, organize and mobilize the people. The International League of Peoples’ Struggle is an international united front of mass formations or people’s organizations. It is ever ready and ever willing to engage in a larger and broader united front and cooperate with other international organizations or coordinating bodies, including those with political parties as constituents.###