Today we commemorate 66 years since the launching of atomic bombs by the USA on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6th. and 9th. August 1945, causing hundreds of thousands of victims.
With this atrocious action and defrauding the legitimate aspiration of the peoples for a world of peace following the defeat of Nazi-fascism after World War II, the USA – the only country to use the nuclear weapon – announced to the world its ambitioned military supremacy and the beginning of its “cold war”, that is, its policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union.
To remember the nuclear holocaust that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not forgetting the hundreds of thousands of children, women and men killed and wounded – including those who continue to directly or indirectly suffer its consequences – and, in their memory, act so that mankind will never again have to suffer a nuclear holocaust.
66 years later, the nuclear threat remains, now with the capacity to destroy all mankind. The USA and its NATO allies (with the EU as its “European pillar”), holders of the most significant part of the present nuclear arsenal, continue and reaffirm their nuclear doctrine, accepting the use of nuclear weapons in their offensive strategic concepts, adopted in 2010 in Lisbon, in a NATO summit that was widely questioned by the Portuguese.
66 years after World War II, together with the exploiting offensive by big business, once again imperialism, dilapidating huge resources that ought to have been channelled for development, intensifies militarism and wars of aggression and occupation – like the one under way against the Libyan people -, with which it tries to face capitalism’s crisis, that is deepening in the USA, in the EU and in Japan, its main centres.
Despite the huge campaigns of ideological intoxication and misinformation that it actively promotes, imperialism cannot conceal its own responsibilities in the continuation and worsening of the main conflicts felt around the world, as in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa or the Korean Peninsula, nor hinder the resistance of the peoples and its increasing isolation regarding the wars it promotes, as is the case of Iraq and Afghanistan.
In evoking the Hiroshima and Nagasaki tragedy, the PCP alerts the Portuguese people to the serious dangers to international peace and security resulting from the exploitative and aggressive escalade by imperialism and calls for the intensification of the struggle for peace, against imperialist interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, for disarmament and, in particular, for nuclear disarmament.
A patriotic and internationalist party, the PCP considers that the greatest contribution that Portugal can give to the cause of peace is to break away from the policy of submission to the USA, NATO and EU carried out by successive governments, a policy which is ruining the country, dangerously involving it in imperialism’s aggressive operations, and even jeopardizing the independence of Portugal. The struggle to impose the abidance of the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the Republic and execute a policy of national independence, peace and cooperation with all peoples, is an integral part of the struggle for a patriotic and left-wing policy, indispensable to solve the serious problems of the workers, the people and the country.
