For a true complete secularity
Samuel Paty was a teacher in history and geography in Bois-d’Aulne secondary school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. After having proposed his 13-year students to reflect on the freedom of speech with the caricatures of Mohammed published in Charlie Hebdo, he was brutally murdered by a 18-year young man. We condemn this infamous murder and we express our full solidarity with Samuel Paty’s relatives and colleagues. Obscurantism strikes at education, knowledge, freedom of speech, art. Religious fanaticism does not attack the chief staff of the army, but a teacher, as it previously attacked, in France, metro passengers, cartoonists, Jews while shopping or at school, workers while entertaining in a concert hall, in a stadium, in street cafés or before fireworks…
While his hierarchy was aware of intimidations upon Samuel Paty, while the establishment had received threatening calls, nothing was done for its protection. Yet, teachers are constrained by reactionary programs that lead them to present positively the bourgeois republic in classes of civil and ethical education, and despite the pressure exerted by all sorts of reactionaries and cagots, they strive to protect their educational freedom as well as the freedom of speech in the whole society,.
Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. (Marx, 1875)
It is easy for the Macron-Castex-Darmanin goverment to shed crocodile tears and to proclaim its support to the teachers when it is striving to break up their status, and to the public education that it is determined to destroy. In a competition with the LR and RN parties, the government seized the opportunity for stepping up its racist speech against “separatism”, with its conflation between the Muslims and the terrorists, and for announcing that it will strengthen the right of asylum, already so restricted. Some support them in stating that all Chechen refugees are suspect.
Macron is “Canon of the Latran”, which is a title attributed by the Pope and which was accepted by all the 5th Republic presidents. All the bourgeois parties, from EELV to the RN including LREM and LR, agree to fund the clergies in Alsace and in Moselle. All the bourgeois parties, as well as the PS and the PCF when they were in the government, the LFI leader when he was the Minister of professional education, have funded “private contract-based teaching”, in establishments mainly controlled by the Catholic church, an obscurantist institution that knowingly separates children from each other. In order to maintain the order in poor neighborhoods condemned to mass unemployment and crime, many municipalities have relied on the clerical and girls’ oppressors Muslim Brothers.
Through its alliances with Pakistan and with Gulf’s absolute monarchies that openly spread Sunni fundamentalism across the world and support the jihadist networks behind the scenes, the French state helps to disseminate religious fundamentalism, women’s oppression, discrimination against homosexuals, hatred against the Shiites and the Kurds… Through its military interventions in countries with predominantly Muslim populations (Mali, Libya, Syria…), the French state gives arguments to the jihadist propaganda.
For defending themselves against the fascist threats and exactions by the Islamist fanatics, it is not an option for the education workers and for the whole working class to stand together with Macron, Blanquer and Darmanin, with the bourgeois state, with the French bourgeoisie. The latter will use them on its own behalf in dividing the working class through racism and xenophobia. In so doing, the political and ideological representatives of the ruling class do not defend democracy and freedom, as they pretend, but they defend reaction!
In contrast, all the workers’ organisations, mutuals, unions and parties are responsible for taking a stand for:
Full separation of state and religions: no funding of any worship, ban of “non contractual private teaching” and nationalization of “private contract-based teaching”!
Against the national union! No restriction of the democratic freedoms! Hands off the Muslims! No restrictions to the educational freedom! Stop all the political interferences and the military interventions in the Middle-East and in the Sahel!
This is the basic premise of the workers’ unity, whether they are French or foreigner, whether they are atheist or believer in any religion.