The January 7th attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo, in which Al Qaeda-affiliated gunmen shot 12 people to death, has been the impetus for a number of critical political developments. Amid genuine sorrow and shock demonstrated by millions in French demonstrations last week, state leaders and media conglomerates have utilized the events to pursue and deepen bloody imperialist wars of aggression in Africa and the Middle East, and destroy basic democratic rights in their home countries.

The claim that US and European heads of state support “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” in their home countries is an outright lie. Since 2003, under the narrative of a “war on terror,” US and European governments have rolled back virtually every democratic right, suppressing any and all opposition to their illegal and unpopular wars. These leaders have bombed and decimated Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and several other countries, killing, wounding and displacing multiple millions of people, while reducing these countries to social wastelands.

Journalists who have challenged the official narratives of these wars have been hounded and even killed for exposing the brutal realities of these illegal operations. Figures like Julian Assange, Chelsea Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden have exposed – in the best sense of journalistic exposures – massive crimes over the last six years. They have been pursued from country to country or imprisoned by these same supposed defenders of a “free press” for their efforts.

The events in France also underscore an even more sinister component of the “war on terror”: that in order to offset potential economic and political rivals on the world scene, such as Russia and China, European and North American leaders are lurching rapidly to right, constructing the skeletal framework of a police state. This is being done in anticipation of the need to suppress popular opposition to their anti-democratic assaults and imperialist wars. This lurch to the right is nakedly on display in France, as the deeply unpopular French President Francois Hollande invited for the first time the neo-fascist political leader Marine Le Pen of the National Front to the Elysee Presidential Palace to discuss a “unity coalition.”

Students and youth should take these developments as a warning. As they did in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, state leaders and their media outlets are utilizing backward and right wing elements to attack the rights and conditions of workers both abroad and at home. These assaults can only be opposed by a massive organization of workers and students in opposition to imperialist war, and for the conscious struggle for revolutionary socialism.

The next meeting of the of IYSSE at the University of Michigan will address these developments in more detail, and we encourage all interested students to attend.