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Author: Vijay Prashad

  • Thousands Have Lived without Love, but Not One without Water


    Diego Rivera (Mexico), El Agua, Origen de la Vida (‘Water, Origin of Life’), 1951.

    By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. ‘Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. ‘Israel’, he noted, ‘must stop using water as a weapon of war’. Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair.

    In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said on 10 October, ‘Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell’. On 19 March, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted that Gaza needed ‘spare parts for water and sanitation systems’ as well as ‘chemicals to treat water’, since the ‘lack of these critical items is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis’. ‘Malnutrition crisis’ is one way to talk about a famine.


    Faeq Hassan (Iraq), The Water Carriers, 1957.

    The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is ‘currently facing high levels of acute food insecurity’, according to Oxfam and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with force. A UN report released on World Water Day (22 March) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2 billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that four out of five people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems. As a consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of five die from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to these deficiencies. The UN report notes that, since women and girls are the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school.


    Newsha Tavakolian (Iran), Untitled, 2010–2011.

    A 2023 study by UN Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls:

    Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.

    The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people.


    Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), Les trois amis II (‘The Three Friends II’), 2018.

    Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture. Already, as the UN Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly.

    According to the United Nations, half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, while one quarter faces ‘extremely high’ levels of water stress. ‘Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability’, the UN notes. The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing tens of millions of people into flight and starvation.


    Ibrahim Hussein (Malaysia), The Game, 1964.

    Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so is the rules-based international order. Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in creating the water crisis. For instance, over the past several decades, governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. Consequently, 42% of household wastewater is not treated properly, which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact that only 11% of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused.

    Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of the freshwater available to us on the planet. There are several sensible policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis, such as those proposed by UN Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of nature.

    In March 2018, we launched our second dossier, Cities Without Water. It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed then, six years ago:

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI (IPCC, June 2008) is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this document is that the changes in weather patterns – induced by carbon-intensive capitalism – have a negative effect on the water cycle. Areas where there will be higher rainfall might not see more groundwater due to the velocity of the rain, which will create a rapid movement of water to the oceans. Such high velocity rainfall neither refills aquifers (natural water sources), nor does it allow water to be stored by humans. The scientists also predict higher rates of drought in regions such as the Mediterranean and Southern Africa. It is this technical report that put forward the number that over a billion people will suffer from water scarcity.

    For the past decade, the United Nations Environmental Programme has warned about the growth of water-intensive lifestyles and of water pollution. Both of these – lifestyles and pollution – are consequences of the spread of capitalist social relations and capitalist productive mechanisms across the planet. In terms of lifestyle use, the average resident in the United States consumes between 300 and 600 litres of water per day. This is a misleading figure. It does not mean that individuals consume such high amounts of water. Much of this water is used by water-intensive agriculture and by water-intensive industrial production, including energy production. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends per person usage of 20 litres of water per day for basic hygiene and food preparation. The gap between the two is not accidental. It is about a water-intensive lifestyle – use of washing machines and dishwashers, washing of cars and watering of gardens, as well as the use of water by factories and factory farms.

    Water pollution is a serious problem. In Esquel, Argentina, the people saw that the contaminants from corporate gold mining were ruining their drinking water. ‘Water is worth more than gold’ (El agua vale más que el oro), they said. Ruthless techniques of extraction by mining corporations (by use of cyanide) and of cultivation by agribusiness (by use of fertilisers and pesticides) have ruined reservoirs of clean water. Their blue gold, say the people of Esquel, is more important than real gold. They held a public assembly in 2003 that asserted their right to their water against the interests of the private corporations.

    It is worth pointing out that the amount of water it would take to support 4.7 billion people at the WHO daily minimum would be 9.5 billion litres – the exact amount used every day to water the world’s golf courses. The water used by 60,000 villages in Thailand, for instance, is used to water one golf course in Thailand. These are the priorities of our current system.

    In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing piped water to the thousand children under the age of five who die every day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system.

    The post Thousands Have Lived without Love, but Not One without Water first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Palestinians Will Remain on Palestinian Land


    Nabil Anani (Palestine), In Pursuit of Utopia #1, 2020.

    On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked about ‘Gaza’s waterfront property’, which, he said, could be ‘very valuable’. ‘If I was Israel’, he continued, ‘I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and finishing the job would be the right move’.

    Kushner’s choice of the Negev, or al-Naqab in Arabic, is interesting. Al-Naqab, located in what is now southern Israel, has long been a place of tension and conflict. In September 2011, the Israeli government passed the Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, also known as the Prawer-Begin Plan, which called for the eviction of 70,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their thirty-five ‘unrecognised’ villages. Kushner is now advising Israel to illegally shift even more Palestinians to al-Naqab, many of whom were originally pushed to Gaza from cities in parts of Palestine that are now within Israel. As Kushner might know, both a population transfer to al-Naqab and the seizure of Gaza are illegal according to Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.


    Abed Abdi (Palestine), Massacre in Lydda, 1980.

    The displacement that faced Palestinian Bedouins in 2011 and that faces Palestinians in Gaza today is reflective of the plight that has been inflicted upon Palestinians since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Every year since 1976, Palestinians around the world have commemorated Land Day on 30 March, marking the killing of six Palestinians during a mass action to fight an attempt by the Israeli state to eliminate Palestinians from the Galilee region and carry out Yihud Ha-Galil (the Judaisation of the Galilee). The Israeli regime has tried to annex all of the Galilee and al-Naqab since 1948 but faced fierce resistance from Palestinians, including Palestinian Bedouins. Israel’s violence has failed to intimidate and cleanse the region for the establishment of Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema) from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has not been able to attain its aims. It cannot eliminate either the Palestinians or the Bedouin. Its dream of a pure Zionist state is futile.


    Samah Shihadi (Palestine), Mansaf, 2018.

    On 9 December 1975, the Palestinian population of Nazareth elected Tawfiq Zayyad of the Communist Party (Rakah) with 67% of the vote. Zayyad (1929–1994), a well-regarded poet, was known as ‘The Trustworthy One’ (Abu el-Amin) for his ceaseless role in forging a united front amongst Galilee Palestinians against the Israeli policy of forced evictions. For these activities, Zayyad was arrested on numerous occasions, but he never wavered. Zayyad joined the Communist Party in 1948, became the head of the Arab Workers’ Trade Union Congress of Nazareth in 1952, led the party in his hometown of Nazareth, won a seat in the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in 1973, and then became the mayor of his city in 1976 as the candidate for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. His victory, which surprised the Israeli establishment, was hailed by the Palestinians of Galilee, who had been fighting against the attempts to steal their land and homes since 1948.

    In 1975, the Israeli authorities announced that they would expropriate 20,000 dunums (18 million square metres) of Arab land, mostly in central Galilee or ‘Area 9’, which meant the extinction of the villages of Arraba, Deir Hanna, and Sakhnin. These were not new plans. Beginning in 1956, Israel created cities to displace Arab villages around Nazareth such as al-Bi’neh, Deir al-Asad, and Nahef: first, it created Natzeret Illit (known as Nof Hagalil since 2019), and then, in 1964, it created Karmiel.

    When I visited Nazareth in 2014, I was taken for a walk around the city’s perimeter to experience how the new Jewish-only settlements were designed to throttle the old Palestinian city. Haneen Zoabi, then a member of the Palestinian party Knesset for Balad, told me about how Nazareth, where she was born, has, like the West Bank, been gradually squeezed by illegal settlements, the apartheid wall, checkpoints, and regular attacks by the Israeli military.


    Fatma Shanan (Palestine), Two Girls Holding a Carpet, 2015.

    Before the general strike could get going on 30 March 1976, the Israeli regime sent in a full contingent of armed military and police to ruthlessly beat unarmed Palestinians, injuring hundreds and killing six. Tawfiq Zayyad, who led the strike, wrote that it was ‘a turning point in the struggle’, since it ‘caused an earthquake that shook the state from end to end’. The Israeli regime planned to ‘teach the Arabs a lesson’, Zayyad wrote, but that ‘caused a reaction far greater in its effect than the strike itself. This was demonstrated at the funerals of the martyrs who fell in the strike, which were attended by tens of thousands of people’. That day became Land Day, which is now part of the calendar of the struggle for Palestinian national self-determination.

    The Israeli regime was undeterred by public outcry. On 7 September 1976, the Hebrew newspaper al-Hamishmar published a memorandum written by Yisrael Koenig, who had administered the North District, including Nazareth. Koenig’s thoroughly racist memorandum called for Palestinian land to be annexed on behalf of fifty-eight new Jewish settlements and for Palestinians to be made to work through the day so that they would have no time to think. Israel’s prime minister at that time, Yitzhak Rabin, did not repudiate the memorandum, which also detailed plans for the Judaisation of the Galilee. The plans never ceased.

    In 2005, the Israeli government decided that the deputy prime minister would administer the Galilee and al-Naqab. Shimon Peres, who held that post, said then that ‘[t]he development of the Naqab and the Galilee is the most important Zionist project of the coming years’. The government set aside $450 million to transform these two regions into Jewish majority areas and expel Palestinians, including the Palestinian Bedouin, from them. That remains the plan.


    Fatima Abu Roomi (Palestine), Two Donkeys, 2023.

    Jared Kushner’s statements are easy to dismiss as a fantasy since they contain a measure of ridiculousness. However, to do so would be misguided: Kushner was the architect of Trump’s Abraham Accords, which led to the normalisation of Israeli relations with Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. He also has a close relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who used to stay in Kushner’s childhood bedroom in Livingston, New Jersey).

    Al-Naqab is a hot desert, a place that remains sparsely populated even after the expulsion of many of the Palestinian Bedouin. But Gaza has possibilities as a seaside resort and as a base for Israel’s exploitation of natural gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. This accounts for the sustained attention it has received within the Zionist agenda, represented in Kushner’s blunt statement. But, if history is any judge, it is unlikely that the Palestinians will move from Gaza to al-Naqab or even the Sinai desert. They will fight. They will remain.


    Tawfiq Zayyad in Jaffa in 1974, photographer unknown (courtesy of The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive).

    In September 1965, after he returned to Palestine from Moscow, Tawfiq Zayyad wrote the poem ‘Here We Will Remain’. It was published the next year in Haifa by al-Ittihad Press alongside his classic ‘I Shake Your Hand’, which was put to music by the Egyptian singer Sheikh Imam and memorised by Palestinian children across the world (‘my hand was bleeding, and yet I did not give up’). The events of 1976 strengthened Zayyad’s popularity in Nazareth, where he remained the mayor till his death in 1994. Tragically, he was killed in a car crash as he returned from the West Bank, where he had gone to welcome Yasser Arafat to Palestine after the Oslo Accords. Thinking of Land Day, and thinking of Gaza, here is Comrade Zayyad’s ‘Here We Will Remain’:

    In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    We shall remain,
    Like a wall upon your chest,
    And in your throat
    Like a shard of glass,
    A cactus thorn,
    And in your eyes
    A sandstorm.

    We shall remain,
    A wall upon your chest,
    Clean dishes in your restaurants,
    Serve drinks in your bars,
    Sweep the floors of your kitchens
    To snatch a bite for our children
    From your blue fangs.

    Here we shall remain,
    Sing our songs.
    Take to the angry streets,
    Fill prisons with dignity.

    In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    We shall remain,
    Guard the shade of the fig
    And olive trees,
    Ferment rebellion in our children
    As yeast in the dough.

    The post Palestinians Will Remain on Palestinian Land first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Europe Sleepwalks Through Its Own Dilemmas

    Photograph Source: Dati Bendo – CC BY 4.0

    On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in France’s overseas adventures in the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Somalia. In this article, General Schill wrote that his troops are “ready” for any confrontation and that he could mobilize 60,000 of France’s 121,000 soldiers within a month for any conflict. He quoted the old Latin phrase—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—and then wrote, “The sources of crisis are multiplying and carry with them risks of spiraling or extending.” General Schill did not mention the name of any country, but it was clear that his reference was to Ukraine since his article came out just over two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron said on February 27 that NATO troops might have to enter Ukraine.

    A few hours after Macron made his indelicate statement, the U.S. president’s national security advisor John Kirby said, “There will be no U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine.” This was direct and clear. The view from the United States is bleak, with support for Ukraine diminishing very fast. Since 2022, the U.S. has provided over $75 billion in aid to Ukraine ($47 billion in military aid), far and away the most important assistance to the country during its war against Russia. However, in recent months, U.S. funding—particularly military assistance—has been held up in the U.S. Congress by right-wing Republicans who are opposed to more money being given to Ukraine (this is less a statement about geopolitics and more an assertion of a new U.S. attitude that others, such as the Europeans, should shoulder the burden of these conflicts). While the U.S. Senate passed a $60 billion appropriation for Ukraine, the U.S. House of Representatives only allowed $300 million to be voted through. In Kyiv, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan implored the Ukrainian government to “believe in the United States.” “We have provided enormous support, and we will continue to do so every day and every way we know how,” he said. But this support will not necessarily be at the level it was during the first year of the war.

    Europe’s Freeze

    On 1 February, the leaders of the European Union agreed to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “grants and highly concessional loans.” This money is to allow the Ukrainian government to “pay salaries, pensions, and provide basic public services.” It will not be directly for military support, which has begun to flounder across the board, and which has provoked new kinds of discussions in the world of European politics. In Germany, for instance, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the parliament—Rolf Mützenich—was taken to task by the parties of the right for his use of the word “freeze” when it comes to military support for Ukraine. Ukraine’s government was eager to procure Taurus long-range cruise missiles from Germany, but the German government hesitated to do so. This hesitation and Mützenich’s use of the word “freeze” created a political crisis within Germany.

    Indeed, this German debate around further arms sales to Ukraine is mirrored in almost all the European countries that have been supplying weapons for the war against Russia. Thus far, polling data across the continent shows large majorities against the continuation of the war, and therefore against the continuation of arming Ukraine for that war. A poll conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted in February shows that “an average of just 10 [percent] of Europeans across 12 countries believe that Ukraine will win.” “The prevailing view in some countries,” the poll analysts wrote, “is that Europe should mirror a U.S. that limits its support for Ukraine by doing the same, and encourage Kyiv to do a peace deal with Moscow.” That view is beginning to enter the discussions even of the political forces that continue to want to arm Ukraine. SPD parliamentarian Lars Klingbeil and his leader Mützenich both say that negotiations will need to start, although Klingbeil said it would not happen before the U.S. elections in November, and until then, as Mützenich had said, “I think that the most important thing now is that [Ukraine] get artillery ammunition.”

    Military Not Climate

    It no longer matters whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election in November. Either way, Trump’s views on European military spending have already prevailed in the United States. The Republicans are calling for U.S. funding for Ukraine to be slowed down and for the Europeans to fill the gap by increasing their own military spending. This latter point will be difficult since many European states have debt ceilings; if they are to increase military spending this would be at the expense of precious social programs. NATO’s own polling data shows a lack of interest from the European population in a shift from social to military spending.

    Even more of a problem for Europe is that its countries have been cutting back on climate-related investments and increasing defense-related investments. The European Investment Bank (set up in 2019) is, as the Financial Times reported, “under pressure to fund more projects in the arms industry,” while the European Sovereignty Fund—set up in 2022 to promote industrialization in Europe—is going to pivot toward support for military industries. Military spending, in other words, will overwhelm the commitments to climate investments and investments to rebuild Europe’s industrial base. In 2023, two-thirds of the total NATO budget of €1.2 trillion was from the United States, which is double what the European Union, the UK, and Norway spent on their militaries. Trump’s pressure for European countries to spend up to 2 percent of their GDP on their armies will set the agenda even if he loses the presidential election.

    Can Destroy Countries, but Can’t Win Wars

    For all the European braggadocio about defeating Russia, sober assessments of the European armies show that European states simply do not have the ground military capacity to fight an aggressive war against Russia let alone defend themselves adequately. A Wall Street Journal investigation into the European military situation bore the stunning title, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and Empty Arsenals in Europe.” The British military, the journalists pointed out, has only 150 tanks and “perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces,” while France has “fewer than 90 heavy artillery prices” and Germany’s army “has enough ammunition for two days of battle.” If they are attacked, they have few air defense systems.

    Europe has relied upon the United States to do the heavy bombing and fighting since the 1950s, including in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to terrifying U.S. firepower, these Global North countries are able to flatten countries, but they have not been able to win any wars. It is this attitude that produces wariness in countries such as China and Russia, who know that despite the impossibility of a Global North military victory against them there is no reason why these countries—led by the United States—will not risk Armageddon because they have the military muscle to do so.

    That attitude from the United States—mirrored in the European capitals—produces one more example of the hubris and arrogance of the Global North: a refusal to even consider peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. For Marcon to say things like NATO might send troops into Ukraine is not only dangerous, but it strains the credibility of the Global North. NATO was defeated in Afghanistan. It is unlikely to make great gains against Russia.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post Europe Sleepwalks Through Its Own Dilemmas appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It

    8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has there always been any such day at all. The idea emerged from the Socialist International (also known as the Second International), where Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party and others fought from 1889 to hold a day to celebrate working women’s lives and struggles. Zetkin, alongside Alexandra Kollontai of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, sustained a struggle with their comrades to recognise the role of working women and the role of domestic labour in the creation of social wealth. In a context in which women across the North Atlantic states did not have the right to vote, these women intervened in a debate that was taking place among delegates of the Socialist International over whether men and women workers must be united under the banner of socialism to fight against their shared experience of exploitation or whether women should stay home.

    In 1908, the women’s section of the Socialist Party of America held a mass rally in Chicago on 3 May to celebrate Woman’s Day. The following year, on 28 February 1909, this expanded to National Woman’s Day, held across the US. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, a resolution was finally passed for all sections of the Socialist International to organise Women’s Day celebrations that would take place the following year. Socialist women organised public events in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland on 19 March 1911 to commemorate the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany. In 1912, Europeans celebrated Women’s Day on 12 May, and in 1913, Russian women marked the date on 8 March. In 1917, women workers in Russia organised a mass strike and demonstrations for ‘bread and peace’ on 8 March, which sparked the wider struggles that led to the Russian Revolution. At the Communist Women’s Second International Conference in 1921, 8 March was officially chosen as the date for annual celebrations of International Working Women’s Day. That is how the date became a fixture on the international calendar of struggles.

    In 1945, communist women from around the world formed the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a body that was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day. In 1972, Freda Brown from Australia’s WIDF section and the Communist Party of Australia wrote to the United Nations (UN) to propose that it hold an International Women’s Year and that it advance the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Pushed by WIDF, Helvi Sipilä, a Finnish diplomat and the first woman to hold the position of UN assistant secretary-general (at a time when 97% of senior positions were held by men) seconded the proposal for the International Women’s Year, which was accepted in 1972 and held in 1975. In 1977, the United Nations passed a resolution to hold a Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, which is now known as International Women’s Day and held on 8 March.

    Each March, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research honours this tradition by publishing a text that highlights an important woman in our struggle, such as Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005) of India, Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004) of Ecuador, and Josie Mpama (1903–1979) of South Africa. This year, we celebrate International Women’s Day (though perhaps International Working Women’s Month would be better) with the publication of dossier no. 74, Interrupted Emancipation: Women and Work in East Germany, produced in collaboration with the Zetkin Forum for Social Research and International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR). We have published two previous studies with IFDDR, one on the economic history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the other on healthcare in the DDR. The Zetkin Forum is our partner on the European continent, named after both Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), whose work contributed to the creation of International Working Women’s Day, and her son Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965), a surgeon who helped build the new healthcare system in the Soviet Union, fought as part of the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and became a leading physician in the DDR.

    Interrupted Emancipation traces the struggles of socialist women in East Germany in various women’s platforms and within the state structures themselves. These women – such as Katharina ‘Käthe’ Kern, Hilde Benjamin, Lykke Aresin, Helga E. Hörz, Grete Groh-Kummerlöw, and Herta Kuhrig – fought to build an egalitarian legal order, develop socialist policies for childcare and eldercare, and bring women into leadership positions in both economic and political institutions. These programmes were not designed merely to improve the welfare and wellbeing of women, but also to transform social life, social hierarchies, and social consciousness. As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.

    Women entered the workforce in large numbers, fought for better family planning (including abortions), and demanded the dignity that they deserved. Interrupted Emancipations teaches us how so much was achieved in such a short time (a mere forty years). Leaders like Helga Hörz argued for women’s entry into the workforce not merely to enhance their incomes, but to ensure the possibility of women’s participation in public life. However, changes did not take place at the speed required. In December 1961, the politburo of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’. To transform this reality, women set up committees in workplaces as well as housewives’ brigades to build mass struggles that fought to win society over to women’s emancipation.

    The destruction of the DDR in the 1990s and its incorporation into West Germany led to the erosion of the gains socialist women had made. Today, in Germany, these socialist policies no longer remain, nor do mass struggles retain the level of vitality that they achieved in the four decades of the DDR. That is why the dossier is called Interrupted Emancipation, perhaps a reflection of the authors’ hope and conviction that this dynamic can be brought back to life.

    Gisela Steineckert was one of the women who benefitted from the transformations that took place in the DDR, where she became a celebrated writer and worked to develop the cultural sector. In her poem ‘In the Evening’, she asks, is the struggle worth it? Without much pause, she answers: ‘the heart of the dreamer is always overly full’. The necessity of a better world is a sufficient answer.

    In the evening, our dreams rest their heads against the moon,
    asking with a deep sigh if the struggle is even worth it.
    Everyone knows someone who suffers, suffers more than anyone should.
    Oh, and the heart of the dreamer is always overly full.

    In the evening the mockers come, a smile on their lips.
    Belittle our every asset, turn pounds into chips.
    They like to come at us with their lines, no one’s spared it.
    Oh, and they advise us: Nothing was worth it.

    In the evening, the sceptics come with creased faces,
    leaf through old letters, don’t trust our words.
    They stay away from it all, age ahead of their time.
    Oh, and their pain and suffering are sublime.

    In the evening, the fighters take off their boots,
    eat dinner with relish, hammer three nails into the roof.
    They want to contend with half a book, fall asleep at the end of a line,
    amid captured weapons, next to red wine.

    The post The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It

    8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has there always been any such day at all. The idea emerged from the Socialist International (also known as the Second International), where Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party and others fought from 1889 to hold a day to celebrate working women’s lives and struggles. Zetkin, alongside Alexandra Kollontai of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, sustained a struggle with their comrades to recognise the role of working women and the role of domestic labour in the creation of social wealth. In a context in which women across the North Atlantic states did not have the right to vote, these women intervened in a debate that was taking place among delegates of the Socialist International over whether men and women workers must be united under the banner of socialism to fight against their shared experience of exploitation or whether women should stay home.

    In 1908, the women’s section of the Socialist Party of America held a mass rally in Chicago on 3 May to celebrate Woman’s Day. The following year, on 28 February 1909, this expanded to National Woman’s Day, held across the US. At the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen in 1910, a resolution was finally passed for all sections of the Socialist International to organise Women’s Day celebrations that would take place the following year. Socialist women organised public events in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland on 19 March 1911 to commemorate the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany. In 1912, Europeans celebrated Women’s Day on 12 May, and in 1913, Russian women marked the date on 8 March. In 1917, women workers in Russia organised a mass strike and demonstrations for ‘bread and peace’ on 8 March, which sparked the wider struggles that led to the Russian Revolution. At the Communist Women’s Second International Conference in 1921, 8 March was officially chosen as the date for annual celebrations of International Working Women’s Day. That is how the date became a fixture on the international calendar of struggles.

    In 1945, communist women from around the world formed the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a body that was instrumental in establishing International Women’s Day. In 1972, Freda Brown from Australia’s WIDF section and the Communist Party of Australia wrote to the United Nations (UN) to propose that it hold an International Women’s Year and that it advance the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Pushed by WIDF, Helvi Sipilä, a Finnish diplomat and the first woman to hold the position of UN assistant secretary-general (at a time when 97% of senior positions were held by men) seconded the proposal for the International Women’s Year, which was accepted in 1972 and held in 1975. In 1977, the United Nations passed a resolution to hold a Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, which is now known as International Women’s Day and held on 8 March.

    Each March, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research honours this tradition by publishing a text that highlights an important woman in our struggle, such as Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005) of India, Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004) of Ecuador, and Josie Mpama (1903–1979) of South Africa. This year, we celebrate International Women’s Day (though perhaps International Working Women’s Month would be better) with the publication of dossier no. 74, Interrupted Emancipation: Women and Work in East Germany, produced in collaboration with the Zetkin Forum for Social Research and International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR). We have published two previous studies with IFDDR, one on the economic history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the other on healthcare in the DDR. The Zetkin Forum is our partner on the European continent, named after both Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), whose work contributed to the creation of International Working Women’s Day, and her son Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965), a surgeon who helped build the new healthcare system in the Soviet Union, fought as part of the International Brigades in defence of the Spanish Republic (1931–1939), and became a leading physician in the DDR.

    Interrupted Emancipation traces the struggles of socialist women in East Germany in various women’s platforms and within the state structures themselves. These women – such as Katharina ‘Käthe’ Kern, Hilde Benjamin, Lykke Aresin, Helga E. Hörz, Grete Groh-Kummerlöw, and Herta Kuhrig – fought to build an egalitarian legal order, develop socialist policies for childcare and eldercare, and bring women into leadership positions in both economic and political institutions. These programmes were not designed merely to improve the welfare and wellbeing of women, but also to transform social life, social hierarchies, and social consciousness. As Hilde Benjamin, the DDR’s minister of justice from 1953 to 1967, explained, it was essential that laws not only provide a framework to guarantee and enforce social rights, but that they also ‘achieve further progress in the development of socialist consciousness’.

    Women entered the workforce in large numbers, fought for better family planning (including abortions), and demanded the dignity that they deserved. Interrupted Emancipations teaches us how so much was achieved in such a short time (a mere forty years). Leaders like Helga Hörz argued for women’s entry into the workforce not merely to enhance their incomes, but to ensure the possibility of women’s participation in public life. However, changes did not take place at the speed required. In December 1961, the politburo of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) condemned the ‘fact that a totally insufficient percentage of women and girls exercise middle and managerial functions’, blaming, in part, ‘the underestimation of the role of women in socialist society that still exists among many – especially men, including leading party, state, economic, and trade union functionaries’. To transform this reality, women set up committees in workplaces as well as housewives’ brigades to build mass struggles that fought to win society over to women’s emancipation.

    The destruction of the DDR in the 1990s and its incorporation into West Germany led to the erosion of the gains socialist women had made. Today, in Germany, these socialist policies no longer remain, nor do mass struggles retain the level of vitality that they achieved in the four decades of the DDR. That is why the dossier is called Interrupted Emancipation, perhaps a reflection of the authors’ hope and conviction that this dynamic can be brought back to life.

    Gisela Steineckert was one of the women who benefitted from the transformations that took place in the DDR, where she became a celebrated writer and worked to develop the cultural sector. In her poem ‘In the Evening’, she asks, is the struggle worth it? Without much pause, she answers: ‘the heart of the dreamer is always overly full’. The necessity of a better world is a sufficient answer.

    In the evening, our dreams rest their heads against the moon,
    asking with a deep sigh if the struggle is even worth it.
    Everyone knows someone who suffers, suffers more than anyone should.
    Oh, and the heart of the dreamer is always overly full.

    In the evening the mockers come, a smile on their lips.
    Belittle our every asset, turn pounds into chips.
    They like to come at us with their lines, no one’s spared it.
    Oh, and they advise us: Nothing was worth it.

    In the evening, the sceptics come with creased faces,
    leaf through old letters, don’t trust our words.
    They stay away from it all, age ahead of their time.
    Oh, and their pain and suffering are sublime.

    In the evening, the fighters take off their boots,
    eat dinner with relish, hammer three nails into the roof.
    They want to contend with half a book, fall asleep at the end of a line,
    amid captured weapons, next to red wine.

    The post The Struggle for Women’s Emancipation Will Always Be Worth It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Conquest, War, Famine, and Death Hit You Straight in the Heart


    Heba Zagout (1984–2023), Gaza Peace, 2021.

    On 4 March, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini presented his startling report on the situation in Gaza (Palestine) to the UN General Assembly. In just 150 days, Lazzarini said, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children. Those who survive continue to face Israel’s attacks and are afflicted with the traumas of war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other.

    ‘Hunger is everywhere’, Lazzarini said. ‘A man-made famine is looming’. A few days after Lazzarini made his blunt assessment, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that child malnutrition levels in the northern part of the strip are ‘particularly extreme’. The UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick said that ‘hunger has reached catastrophic levels’ and ‘children are dying from hunger’. By the end of the first week of March, at least twenty children had died due to starvation. Among them was ten-year-old Yazan al-Kafarna of Beit Hanoun (northern Gaza), who died in Rafah (southern Gaza) on the same day that Lazzarini spoke at the UN. The image of Yazan’s emaciated body tore into the already battered conscience of our world. Story upon ugly story pile up alongside the rubble produced by Israeli bombing. Dr Mohammed Salha of Al-Awda hospital, where Yazan died, says that many pregnant women suffering from malnutrition have birthed stillborn foetuses or have required caesarean operations to remove them – without anaesthetics.


    Mohammed Sami Qariqa (1999–2023), from the exhibition ‘Gaza International Airport’, 2022.

    A ceasefire is nowhere on the horizon. Nor is any real commitment to get aid into Gaza, particularly in the north where hunger has taken the greatest toll (on 28 February, UN World Food Programme Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told the Security Council that there is a ‘real prospect of famine [in northern Gaza] by May, with over 500,000 people at risk if the threat is allowed to materialise’). A round 155 trucks of aid are entering Gaza per day – well below the 500-truck daily capacity at the crossing – with only a few of them going to northern Gaza. Israeli soldiers have been ruthless. On 29 February, when aid trucks arrived at the Al-Nabulsi roundabout (on the southwestern edge of Gaza City, in northern Gaza) and desperate people rushed to them, Israeli troops opened fire and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. Airdrops of food are not only inadequate in volume, but they have resulted in their own heartbreaks, with some parcels landing in the Mediterranean Sea and others crushing at least five people to death.

    As if from nowhere, US President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address on 7 March that his country would build a ‘temporary pier’ in southern Gaza to facilitate the entry of aid through the sea. The context for this decision, which Biden omitted, is clear: Israel is not permitting the bare minimum of humanitarian aid to pass through land crossings, Israel destroyed the Gaza harbour on 10 October, and Israel pulverised the Gaza airport at Dahaniya in 2006. This decision is certainly not from nowhere. It also comes in the midst of the campaign for democrats in the US to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the ongoing primaries to make it clear that the US’s complicity in the genocide will negatively impact Biden’s re-election effort. Although one loaf of bread is better than none, these loaves of bread will come to Gaza stained in blood.

    There is a hollowness to Biden’s pronouncement. Once aid arrives at this ‘temporary pier’, how will it be distributed? The main institutions in Gaza capable of any mass-scale distribution are UNRWA – now defunded by most Western countries – and the Hamas-led Palestinian government – which Western countries have set out to destroy. Since neither will be able to distribute humanitarian aid on the ground (and, as Biden said, ‘no US boots will be on the ground’), what will become of the aid?


    Fathi Ghaben (1947–2024), Ray of Glory, n.d.

    UNRWA has been at work since shortly after UN resolution 302 (IV) was passed in 1949, since which time it has been the main organisation to provide relief to Palestinian refugees (of which there were 750,000 when UNRWA began its operations and of which there are 5.9 million today). UNRWA’s mandate is precise: it must ensure the well-being of Palestinians but cannot operate to permanently settle them outside their homes. That is because UN resolution 194 affords Palestinians the ‘right to return’ to their homes from which they were ejected by the Israeli state. Although UNRWA’s main work has been in the field of education (two thirds of its 30,000 staff work for UNRWA schools), it is also the organisation most equipped to handle aid distribution.

    The West allowed for the creation of UNRWA not because of any particular concern for Palestinians, but because – as the US Department of State noted in 1949 – the ‘conditions of unrest and despair would provide a most fertile hotbed for the implantation of Communism’. That is why the West provided funds for UNRWA (although, since 1966, this has come with severe restrictions). In early 2024, most Western countries cut their funding to UNRWA based on an unsubstantiated accusation tying UNRWA employees to the 7 October attack. Though it has recently come to light that the Israeli army tortured UNRWA employees, such as through waterboarding and beatings, and forced them to make these confessions, most of the countries that cut their funding based on these grounds have failed to reinstate it (with the exception of Canada and Sweden, which have recently resumed their funding). Meanwhile, several Global South countries – led by Brazil – have increased their contributions.

    Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees who ran UNRWA from 2010 to 2014, recently said that if ‘UNRWA is not permitted to work, or is defunded, I can hardly see who can substitute [it]’. No humanitarian relief programme for Palestinians in Gaza is possible in the short run without UNRWA’s full partnership. Anything else is a public relations sham.

    Majd Arandas (1994–2023), ‘My Grandmother’, 2022.
    Majd Arandas (1994–2023), My Grandmother, 2022.

    Reading about the famine in Gaza, I remembered a poem written by Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) about the Szebnie concentration camp in Jasło (southern Poland), which held Polish Jews, Romani people, and Soviet prisoners of war from 1941 until the camp was liberated by the Red Army in September 1944. Brutal, horrible violence was inflicted by the Nazis at Szebnie, particularly against the thousands of Jews who were killed there in mass executions. Szymborska’s poem, ‘Starvation Camp Near Jasło’ (1962), does not flinch from the wretchedness surrounding her, nor from the possibility of humanity for which she yearned.

    Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
    on ordinary paper: they weren’t given food,
    they all died of hunger. All. How many?
    It’s a large meadow. How much grass
    per head? Write down: I don’t know.
    History rounds off skeletons to zero.
    A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
    That one seems never to have existed:
    a fictitious foetus, an empty cradle,
    a primer opened for no one,
    air that laughs, cries, and grows,
    stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
    no one’s spot in the ranks.

    It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
    But the meadow’s silent, like a witness who’s been bought.
    Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,
    with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink –
    a view served round the clock,
    until you go blind. Above, a bird
    whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings
    across their lips. Jaws dropped,
    teeth clattered.

    At night a sickle glistened in the sky
    and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.
    Hands came flying from blackened icons,
    each holding an empty chalice.
    A man swayed
    on a grill of barbed wire.
    Some sang, with dirt in their mouths. That lovely song
    about war hitting you straight in the heart.
    Write how quiet it is.
    Yes.

    The paintings and photograph in this newsletter were created by Palestinian artists killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocide. They have died, but we must live to tell their stories.

    The post Conquest, War, Famine, and Death Hit You Straight in the Heart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times

    Red Books Day event at the May Day Bookstore in Delhi (India), 2024.
    A Red Books Day event at the May Day Bookstore in Delhi (India), 2024.

    It is nearly impossible to think of joy while Israel continues its genocidal violence against Palestinians and while the terrible war escalates in the eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced in Gaza and near Goma (DRC). In both these places, the immediate demand must be to end the violence, but rising alongside it is the need to end the root of this violence (such as ending the occupation of Palestine). When there are conflicts of this kind, we get trapped in the present, unable to think about the future. Increasingly, the deterioration of everyday life, with famine stalking large parts of the planet, has made it impossible to dream of another world. The demands from Gaza, Goma, and tens of thousands of places across the word are the same: one less bomb, one more piece of bread.

    Even in the bleakest times, however, humans seek joy and promise, looking for a horizon that is not merely framed by the immediate indignities of life. Nearly a decade ago, I spent an afternoon at the Jalazone camp, north of Ramallah (Palestine), where I attended a session at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school. Outside the UNRWA school, in the West Bank, the quotidian tension of the occupation was sharpened by a series of killings of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

    In an art class at the UNRWA school, I watched young Palestinian children draw a story depicting a recent dream they had. The teacher allowed me to walk around the classroom and interact with the children. Many of them drew what children often draw: a house, the sun, a river beside the house, children playing on a swing or a slide. There were no signs of apartheid walls, no checkpoints, and no Israeli soldiers. Instead, there was merely the simplicity that they wanted to experience. This is how they portrayed happiness.

    Red Books Day event at The People’s Forum in New York City (United States), 2024.
    A Red Books Day event at The People’s Forum in New York City (United States), 2024.

    Now, when I ask my friends in Gaza about their children, they say that the sound of the war, the dust of the bombed landscape, and the fear of death envelops them. Saleem, in Rafah, says that his two young daughters often sit on the floor of their uncle’s apartment, drawing on any scrap of paper they can find. ‘Next year’, he says, ‘we will do Red Books Day in Gaza City, inshallah’. ‘What book will you read’? I ask him. ‘For you’, he said, ‘we would read Darwish, the great Palestinian poet’. And then, he recites these lines, from the poem ‘Memory for Forgetfulness’:

    What are you writing in this war, Poet?
    I’m writing my silence.
    Do you mean that now the guns should speak?
    Yes. Their sound is louder than my voice.
    What are you doing then?
    I’m calling for steadfastness.
    And will you win the war?
    No. The important thing is to hold on. Holding on is a victory in itself.
    And what after that?
    A new age will start.
    And will you go back to writing poetry?
    When the guns quiet down a little. When I explode my silence, which is full of these voices. When I find the appropriate language.

    Israeli jets had begun to bomb the edges of Rafah, and yet Saleem took time to talk about Red Books Day. For him, as for his children, the present is not sufficient. They want to imagine what lies beyond the horizon, what lies beyond the unfolding genocide.


    A Red Books Day event at the Simón Bolívar Institute in Caracas (Venezuela), 2024.

    This year, from Indonesia to Chile, a million and a half people participated in Red Books Day, which is becoming a fixture on the calendar of the international left. In 2019, the Indian Society of Left Publishers began to look into holding a celebration on 21 February, the publication date of The Communist Manifesto in 1848. This book, one of the most widely read in the world, has inspired billions of people over the past century and a half to build a process of socialism that will transcend the stalled problems created by capitalism (such as hunger, illiteracy, poverty, genocide, and war). The book continues to inspire millions in our time, its words more relevant than ever to solving the struggles of the present.

    Since this date is also shared by International Mother Languages Day, the idea was for writers, publishers, bookshops, and readers to go into public places and read the manifesto in their own languages. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, 30,000 people from Venezuela to South Korea participated in the first Red Books Day in 2020, with its epicentre in India. Soon, it became clear that the point was not to read the manifesto alone, but any ‘red book’ on that day. Engaging more deeply with left ideals, many decided to hold festivals of different sizes to rescue collective life and promote the cultures of the left.

    Chemm Parvathy dances to ‘The Internationale’ in Thiruvananthapuram (India) in preparation for Red Books Day.Chemm Parvathy dances to ‘The Internationale’ in Thiruvananthapuram (India) in preparation for Red Books Day.

    This year, the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP) initiated Red Books Day festivities in early February with the release of a powerful dance video by the young artist and communist cadre Chemm Parvathy. She performed to the French version of ‘The Internationale’, dancing through the markets and workshops of the workers of Thiruvananthapuram. The song culminated with Parvathy at the beach, holding a communist flag as the red sun sunk into the horizon behind her. The video went viral and set the tone for Red Books Day. This year’s events were accompanied by a series of original commemorative posters designed by artists from around the world to encourage more and more people to organise readings and performances in their regions.

    It was clear that the scope of events held in 2024 would eclipse our previous attempts given the width and depth of participation. Public events were organised by socialist forces in Indonesia and East Timor while the Havana Book Fair in Cuba set aside 21 February for a special day of events. Readings of red books were held by the Socialist Movement of Ghana and the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST), as well as by Red Ant in Australia and the Workers’ Party in Bangladesh. Communists in small villages in Nepal convened meetings in the high mountains to discuss the importance of study and struggle. In New York City, The People’s Forum held a celebration on the life and writings of the communist Claudia Jones, while in Chile speeches of Salvador Allende were read at La Cafebrería and in South Africa a discussion was held at The Commune about how the imperialist powers use the concept of human rights. The Communist Party of Ireland organised readings and a workshop in the cultural centre Aonach Mhacha, and the UK Young Communist League and a group from the Students’ Federation of India organised a film screening of The Young Karl Marx at the University of Southampton.


    A Red Books Day event organised by the Socialist Movement in Accra (Ghana), 2024.

    Red Books Day is now rooted in the cultural landscape of India’s left. This year, Red Books Day also became a forum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In Kerala, half a million people met to read and discuss EMS Namboodiripad’s Leninism and the Approach to the Indian Revolution in 40,000 places. The largest of these events was in Thiruvananthapuram, where Communist Party of India-Marxist, or CPI(M), Kerala State Secretary MV Govindan inaugurated the festival. The Purogamana Kala Sahithya Sangham (PuKaSa or the Progressive Arts and Literary Organisation) held seminars across Kerala on the contemporary relevance of the manifesto, and VKS Singers Group of the Pukasa Nattika Mekhala committee prepared a music video on The Communist Manifesto. In Karnataka, CPI(M) Politburo member MA Baby delivered a lecture on ‘Lenin and Culture’ while in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, workers, peasants, and youth discussed Lenin’s life and writings (including through a webinar organised by Mana Manchi Pustakam).

    In Maharashtra, a webinar was held on Godavari Parulekar’s Jevha Manus Jaga Hoto (‘The Awakening of a Man’). In many parts of India, such as Assam, the Students Federation of India organised readings of The Communist Manifesto. In both West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, people read the Bangla and Tamil editions of The Political Marx, written by Aijaz Ahmad and me. In the same state, G. Ramakrishnan of the CPI(M) inaugurated a reading session in central Chennai, and crowds read and discussed the short booklet Lenin: The Polestar of Revolution.

    Students at Hyderabad Central University and The English and Foreign Languages University ran with the idea of turning the day into a broader cultural spectacle and organised a poster exhibition and a book festival. At New Delhi’s May Day Bookstore, there were songs and dances as well as a street play by Jana Natya Manch, readings of the manifesto in various Indian languages, and a poetry recital in solidarity with Palestine.


    A Red Books Day event organised by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brasília (Brazil), 2024.

    Building toward Red Books Day 2025, the IULP will release a poster on their social media channels every month that will culminate in a Red Books Day calendar at the end of the year. The idea is that Red Books Day will not only be about the day alone but will also be defined by activities through the year that build toward the main events on 21 February.

    Red Books Day is part of the broad cultural struggle to defend the right to write, publish, and read red books and to fight against obscurantist ideas that stand in for reason these days (such as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that ancient India excelled in plastic surgery because the Hindu Lord Shiva, who replaced the head of his son Ganesh with an elephant’s head, as we wrote in our latest dossier). Though Red Books Day is anchored by the IULP, which includes over forty publishers from around the world, it is not solely organised by the union. The general hope is that this day will go beyond the IULP and become a key part of the calendar of the left. It was remarkable to see Red Books Day spread beyond our left networks. This is precisely the objective of Red Books Day: for it to become an integral part of public culture and to struggle to establish rational and socialist ideas as the foundational ideas of society. By the end of the decade, we estimate that over ten million people will participate in Red Books Day. Next year, in Gaza.

    The post There Will Be Reading and Singing and Dancing Even in the Darkest Times first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Remarkable Decline in the Global North’s Leadership

    Photograph Source: European Commission (Dati Bendo)

    A group of young people in Paris are enjoying a drink in a café on an unseasonably warm evening. The conversation drifts into politics, but—as one young woman says—“Let’s not talk about France.” The others nod their assent. They focus on the U.S. presidential election, a slight bit of Gallic arrogance at play as they mock the near certainty that the main candidates will be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden is 81 years old and Trump is 77. A Special Counsel in the United States has called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” hardly the words required to inspire confidence in the president. Trying to defend himself, Biden made the kind of gaffe that is fodder for online memes and affirmed the report that he tried to undermine: he called President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt the “president of Mexico.” No new evidence is required, meanwhile, to mock the candidacy of Trump. “Is this the best that the United States can offer?” asks Claudine, a young student at a prestigious Parisian college.

    These young people are aware enough that what appears to be comical on the other side of the Atlantic—the U.S. presidential election—is no less ridiculous, and of course less dangerous, in Europe. When I ask them what they think about the main European leaders—Olaf Scholz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France—they shrug, and the words “imbecilic” and “non-entity” enter the discussion. Near Les Halles, these young people have just been at a demonstration to end the Israeli bombing of the Rafah region of Gaza. “Rafah is the size of Heathrow Airport,” says a young student from England who is spending 2024 in France. That none of the European leaders have spoken plainly about the death and destruction in Gaza troubles them, and they say that they are not alone in these feelings. Many of their fellow students feel the same way.

    The approval ratings for Scholz and Macron decline with each week. Neither the German nor the French public believes that these men can reverse the economic decline or stop the wars in either Gaza or Ukraine. Claudine is upset that the governments of the Global North have decided to cut their funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN Palestine agency, although another young person, Oumar, interjects that Brazil’s President Lula has said that his country will donate money to UNRWA. Everyone nods.

    A week later, news comes that a young soldier in the United States Airforce—Aaron Bushnell—has decided to take his own life, saying that he will no longer be complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians. When asked about the death of Bushnell, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the President is “aware” and that it is a “horrible tragedy.” But there was no statement about why the young man took his life, and nothing to assuage a tense public about the implications of this act.

    Eating an ice cream in New York, U.S. President Joe Biden said that he hoped that there would be a ceasefire “by the beginning of the weekend” but then moved it to “by next Monday.” The meandering statements, the pledge for a ceasefire alongside the prevarication, and the arms deliveries do not raise the confidence of anyone in Biden or his peers in Europe.

    With the Emir of Qatar beside him, France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “lasting ceasefire.” These phrases—“lasting ceasefire” and “sustainable ceasefire”—have been bandied about with these adjectives (lasting, sustainable) designed to dilute the commitment to a ceasefire and to pretend that they are actually in favor of an end to the war when they continue to say that they are behind Israel’s bombing runs.

    In London, the UK Parliament had a comical collapse in the face of a Scottish National Party (SNP) resolution for a ceasefire. Rather than allow a vote to show the actual opinions of their members, both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party went into a tailspin and the Parliament’s speaker broke rules to ensure that the elected officials did not have to go on the record against a ceasefire. Brendan O’Hara of the SNP put the issue plainly before the Parliament before his words and the SNP resolution was set aside: “Some will have to say that they chose to engage in a debate on semantics over ‘sustainable’ or ‘humanitarian’ pauses, while others will say that they chose to give Netanyahu both the weapons and the political cover that he required to prosecute his relentless war.”

    Global desire for an immediate stop to the Israeli bombing is now at an all-time high. For the third time, the United States vetoed a UN resolution in the Security Council to compel the Israelis to stop the bombing. That the United States and its European allies continue to back Israel despite the widespread disgust at this war—exemplified by the death of Aaron Bushnell—raises the frustration with the leadership of the Global North.

    What is so particularly bewildering is that large sections of the population in the countries of the North want an immediate ceasefire, and yet their leaders disregard their opinions. One survey shows that two-thirds of voters in the United States—including majorities of Democrats (77 percent), Independents (69 percent), and Republicans (56 percent)—are in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. Interestingly, 59 percent of U.S. voters say that Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to return to their homes in Gaza, while 52 percent said that peace talks must be held for a two-state solution. These are all positions that are ignored by the main political class on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The qualifications of “lasting” and “sustainable” only increase cynicism among populations that watch their political leadership ignore their insistence on an immediate ceasefire.

    Clarity is not to be sought in the White House, in No. 10 Downing Street, or in the Élysée Palace. It is found in the words of ordinary people in these countries who are heartsick regarding the violence. Protests seem to increase in intensity as the death toll rises. What is the reaction to these protests? In the United Kingdom, members of parliament complained that these protests are putting the police under “sustained pressure.” That is perhaps the point of the protests.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post The Remarkable Decline in the Global North’s Leadership appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • If I Understand the World, I Can March to Change It


    Students display a butterfly they made at the Madu Adu (science, or ‘let’s do it’) corner. Credit: Photographs and collages by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

    In 1945, the newly formed United Nations held a conference to found the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). The main concern of the delegates, particularly those who came from the Third World, was literacy. There needs to be a ‘world crusade against illiteracy’, said Dr Jaime Jaramillo Arango, the rector of the National University of Colombia. For him, and several others, illiteracy was ‘one of the greatest outrages to human dignity’. Abdelfattah Amr, the Egyptian ambassador to the United Kingdom and a champion squash player, said that illiteracy was part of the broader problem of underdevelopment, as evidenced by ‘the shortage of technicians and the scarcity of educational materials’. These leaders found inspiration in the USSR, whose Likbez (‘liquidation of illiteracy’) programme virtually eradicated illiteracy between 1919 and 1937. If the USSR could do this, then so could other largely agricultural societies.

    In December 2023, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a stunning report showing that, since 2018, literacy in reading and mathematics has declined amongst the world’s students. Importantly, they noted that this situation could ‘only partially be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic’: scores in both reading and science had been on the decline before the pandemic began, though they have only worsened since. The reason, the OECD notes, is that there has also been a decline in the time and energy that teachers and parents devote to assisting their students and children. What the OECD does not mention is that this decline in support over the past fifty years is a result of the austerity regimes that have been imposed on most societies in the world. Education budgets have been cut, which means that schools simply do not have enough resources or staff to begin with, let alone enough teachers to provide the extra support that struggling students need. As part of school funding cuts, states have insisted that corporate education providers generate textbooks and learning modules (including online systems) that disempower teachers and demoralise them. As parents work in increasingly uberised professions, they simply do not have the time nor the energy to supplement their children’s education.


    Students from Siddapura and nearby villages participate in a rally to inaugurate the 2023 Joy of Learning Festival in Siddapura.

    Why have states across the world been unwilling to adequately fund public education? In the Global North, where there is significant social wealth, leaders are reticent to tax the highest income earners and wealth holders, tending instead to use the remaining precious resources to fund the military establishment rather than social services such as education, health, and elder care. Global North countries that are within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation system spend trillions of dollars on weapons (three quarters of total global military spending) but miniscule amounts on education and health care. This is evident in the OECD’s report, which notes precipitous declines in mathematical knowledge in countries such as Belgium, Canada, and Iceland – none of them poor countries. The OECD report suggests that this is not merely because of funding levels, but also because of ‘the quality of teaching’. However, the report does not point out that this ‘quality’ is the outcome of austerity policies that rob teachers of the time needed to teach and support students, of having a say in the materials in the curriculum, and of the resources needed for additional training (including sabbaticals).

    In the Global South, the declines are attributed more directly to the collapse of funding. Studies over the past few years, and our own analysis of International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff assessments, show that the organisation has pressured poorer nations to cut public sector funding. Since the wages of most teachers make up part of the public sector wage bill, any such cut results in lower teachers’ salaries and higher teacher to student ratios. An ActionAid study of fifteen countries, from Ghana to Vietnam, showed that the IMF forced these states to cut their public sector wage bills for several budget cycles (up to six years) to the tune of $10 billion  – equivalent to the cost of employing three million primary school teachers. Another study, produced by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, shows that the IMF has enforced budget cuts in 189 countries that will remain in place until 2025, by which point three-quarters of the world is projected to remain under austerity conditions. A UN Development Programme report noted that twenty-five poor countries spent 20 percent of their revenues in 2022 to service external debts – more than twice the amount spent on social programmes of all kinds (including education). It would seem that it is more important to satisfy wealthy bondholders than children that need their teachers.

    This horrendous situation condemns Sustainable Development Goal no. 4 (ending illiteracy) to failure. To meet this objective, the world would need to hire 69 million more teachers by 2030. That is not on the agenda of most countries.


    A group of students present the map they made after touring a village as part of the Uru Tiliyona (‘let’s find out about the village’) corner activity.

    In 1946, the UK’s Minister of Education Ellen Wilkinson served as the president of the first UNESCO conference. Wilkinson, who was known as ‘Red Ellen’ (and was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920), led the fight for the unemployed in the 1930s and was a champion of the Spanish Republic. During World War II, she said, we witnessed ‘the great fight put up against this monstrous wickedness [of the ‘narrowest nationalism’ and ‘subservience to the war machine’] by the intellectual worker, by men and women of integrity of mind’. Red Ellen explained that the fascists knew that reason and literacy were their enemies: ‘In every land which the totalitarians over-ran, it was the intellectual who was picked out first to face the firing squad – teacher, priest, professor. The men who meant to rule the world knew that first they must kill those who tried to keep thought free’. Now, these teachers are not put before the firing squad; they are simply fired.

    But these intellectual workers did not surrender then, and they are not surrendering now. Our latest dossier, How the People’s Science Movement Is Bringing Joy and Equality to Education in Karnataka, India, shines a light on intellectual workers who are finding innovative ways to bring scientific and rational thought to children in Karnataka, such as through their movement’s Joy of Learning Festivals, neighbourhood schools, and ‘guest-host’ programme. This is taking place in a context in which the government of India has decided to cut evolution, the periodic table, and the sources of energy from the curriculum and school textbooks – despite the alarm raised by nearly 5,000 scientists and teachers who signed a petition drafted by the Breakthrough Science Society calling upon the government to reverse its decision.

    The petition and Joy of Learning Festivals alike are part of a broader movement to democratise knowledge and dismantle wretched social hierarchies. The Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti (Indian Science Knowledge Association or BGVS) holds Joy of Learning Festivals to promote scientific learning and rational thought across the Indian state of Karnataka, which has a population 65 million – about the same as France. Our dossier shows how the BGVS has brought joy to science education for millions of young children in India.


    Students participate in activities at the Kagadha Kattari (crafts, or ‘paper and scissors’) corner.

    Imagine you are a young child who has never been exposed to the laws of science. You find yourself at a BGVS festival in a rural area of Karnataka, where there is a stall with a dismantled bicycle. The teacher at the stall says that if you can assemble the bicycle, you can have it. You run your fingers through the chain, the gears, the frame of the bicycle. You imagine what a fully assembled bicycle looks like and try to put the pieces together, at the same time coming to an understanding of how energy is generated by pushing the pedal, which, through the gears, amplifies the movement of the wheels. You begin to learn about the laws of motion and torque. You learn about the simplicity of machines and their immense utility. And you laugh with your friends as you struggle with the puzzle of all the pieces of the bicycle.

    Such an activity not only brings joy to the lives of a million children in Karnataka; it also enhances their curiosity and challenges their intelligence. This is the heart of the work of the BGVS and its Joy of Learning Festivals, which are run by government schoolteachers recruited and trained by the science movement. This kind of festival not only rescues the collective life but is a mechanism to lift up the work and leadership of local teachers and affirm the importance of scientific thinking.

    Cubans celebrate at the closing march of the literacy campaign in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, December 1961. Photograph by Liborio Noval.

    In 1961, the Cuban singer Eduardo Saborit wrote the beautiful song Despertar (‘The Awakening’) as a tribute to the Cuban literacy campaign. ‘There are so many things I can already tell you’, he sings, ‘because at last I have learned to write. Now I can say that I love you’. Now, I can understand the world. Now, I can no longer feel diminished. Now, I can confidently put one foot before the other and march to change the world.

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  • A Word Like Peace Is Faster Than the Bullet of War


    Erik Bulatov (USSR), Horizon, 1971–72.

    On 26 January, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) announced the start of a massive military exercise called Steadfast Defender 2024 that will continue until the end of May. Over 90,000 troops from NATO countries (and one partner country, Sweden), including fifty naval groups and more than eighty air platforms, will deploy in thirteen countries to demonstrate the alliance’s capacity and ‘send a robust message about its readiness to protect all Allies in the face of emerging threats’. Of the thirty-one NATO member states, six share borders with Russia (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Norway). This NATO exercise comes just as the European Union announced that it will provide Ukraine with €50 billion in financial support between now and 2027, a reduction compared to the North Atlantic support over the past two years. As public support for the war in Ukraine declines in the Global North states, governments have decided to ramp up tensions along the Russian border through NATO.

    Following the announcement of the Steadfast Defender 2024 exercise, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg travelled to the United States and met US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon. Interestingly, their public comments did not express a shred of concern for the Ukrainian people. Stoltenberg referred instead to the Global North’s anxiety about Russia and China, saying that support for Ukraine is ‘an investment in our own security because the world will become more dangerous if President Putin wins in Ukraine’, warning that the result of this conflict ‘is also closely watched in China’. So, it is not the Ukrainians and their wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity for the Global North to see Russia (and by implication, China) ‘weakened’, as Austin said in Kyiv two years earlier.

    To shed light on this conflict, its global implications, and the possibility of peace, the rest of this newsletter is dedicated to No Cold War’s briefing no. 12: The War in Ukraine Must End.

    Two years ago, on 24 February 2022, Russian forces entered Ukraine. This act was not the start of the war in Ukraine. Rather, it was the acceleration of a conflict that dates back to at least 2014. That year, at the behest of the United States, a new government was imposed on Ukraine, aiming to bring the country closer to the European Union. This initiated the sustained persecution of the country’s Russian-speaking population. The conflict moved swiftly, with Crimea de facto becoming part of Russia once again and the Donbass region of Ukraine becoming a frontline in the conflict between Ukrainian far-right nationalists and Russian speakers. In May 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took office and pledged to end the battle in the Donbass. Instead, due to pressure from NATO, the conflict intensified, eventually leading to the Russian intervention three years later. It is imperative for the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the world that the war be halted and that the issues be transferred from the battlefield to the negotiating table.


    Tuyo (Germany), Elephant, 2021.

    What has been the impact of the war?

    In any conflict, casualty figures become a matter of dispute. However, there is little disagreement that over 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have died or been injured in this war, that over six million Ukrainians have fled the country, and that over seven million Ukrainians have been internally displaced (out of a pre-war population of nearly 44 million). If the war is not brought to a halt, tens of thousands more will be killed and tens of millions more will suffer.

    Ukraine’s economy has been devastated, shrinking by 29% in 2022 alone, according to the World Bank. The impact of the war ricocheted across the globe, causing wheat prices to rise by 21% and some fertilisers to rise by 40% within the first month of the conflict. Global South countries were hit particularly hard by sharp increases in food and energy prices in many regions while the European economy inches towards a recession. In other countries, astronomic amounts of resources have been diverted to the war which instead could have been used for social and economic spending. The US and Europe have already spent well over $200 billion on the war. In December 2023, the head of the Ukrainian armed forces asked US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin for a further $350–400 billion to pursue ‘victory’.

    In reality, no amount of money will lead to a military triumph. It is clear, particularly after the failure of the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’, that there has been no significant change in the military situation, nor is there a credible prospect of one. The continued payment of such huge human and economic costs would be purposeless.


    Alexey Kryukov (Russia), Безмолвие. Саур-Могила (‘Silence – Saur-Mogila’), 2017.

    What issues need to be resolved?

    1) The position of Ukraine regarding military blocs. At the end of the Cold War, Europe had an opportunity to pursue peaceful economic development. A coherent and balanced economy with enormous potential could have been formed by reducing military spending while combining Western Europe’s high value-added manufacturing and service industries with the former Soviet Union’s energy, raw materials, agriculture, and high-technology industries such as space. In East Asia, which overcame a period of even greater Cold War division and conflict (as seen in the Korean and successive Vietnam and Indochina wars), a focus on mutually beneficial economic development and an avoidance of military and political blocs led it to become the world’s most rapidly growing economic region. This is evidenced by the fact that, since 1990, the GDP of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has grown by more than 400%. However, in Europe, the US insisted that such policies not be followed and that, instead, the region was to expand the NATO military bloc into Eastern Europe, breaking the commitment it had made at the time of German reunification that NATO would not advance ‘one inch eastward’ towards Russia. The US was fully aware that NATO’s expansion would greatly inflame tensions with Russia and across Europe. Of particular sensitivity was the possibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which would bring the nuclear-armed bloc within immediate striking range of Moscow. Numerous experts on Eastern Europe and Russia strongly and repeatedly advised against such expansion of NATO. Most famously, George Kennan, the original architect of US Cold War policy, predicted in 1997 that, ‘expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. In December 2021, Russia proposed an agreement that Ukraine would not become a NATO member. In negotiations in March 2022, Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status in exchange for security guarantees, inspired by NATO’s collective defence clause, which could have involved Poland, Israel, Turkey, and Canada as guarantors. This was blocked by NATO, directly conveyed by way of an urgent visit from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Ukraine in May 2022, thereby preventing a rapid end of the war.

    2) The position of the Russian-speaking minority in the territory of the Ukrainian state (as it was formed in 1991). A 2001 census found that nearly 30% of Ukraine’s population considered Russian to be their native language. States with large linguistic and ethnic minority populations can only maintain their unity if the rights of such minorities are respected. The policies of the Ukrainian government after 2014, which included suppressing the official use of the Russian language in numerous spheres, were therefore bound to lead to an explosive crisis within the Ukrainian state. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which certainly cannot be accused of being pro-Russian, stated: ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’. There are only two ways to resolve this situation: restoration of the full linguistic and other rights of the Russian-speaking minority within the borders of the old Ukrainian state or the secession of these regions from Ukraine. Which outcome is realised will be a key subject of the negotiations. Nonetheless, it is clear that any attempt to maintain the Russian-speaking minority within the Ukrainian state while continuing to deprive them of their rights will not succeed, nor will any attempt by Russia to impose another state on the Ukrainian-speaking population of western and northern Ukraine.

    All efforts to resolve these issues by military means will continue to be futile and will only result in further intense suffering, above all for the Ukrainian people. These realities will become increasingly obvious if the war continues – which is why it must be brought to a halt as rapidly as possible and negotiations must commence.


    Mahamoudou Zinkone ‘Babs’ (Burkina Faso), Maquis Las Palmas, 2015.

    In 1961, the Soviet poet Volodymyr Mikolayovich Sosiura wrote a song on the power of words. Sosiura was born in Debaltseve (which is today in Donetsk) in 1898 within the Tsarist empire and died as a member of the communist party in Kyiv in 1965. He wrote several poems that oscillated between his patriotic love for Ukraine and his commitment to the Soviet Union and to the communist struggle. Above all else, Sosiura – who fought in World War I in Bakhmut and then later joined the Red Army – had a great disdain for war. He recognised the importance of the war against the Nazis, but – like many of his generation – bemoaned the terrible loss of life incurred by this war, such as the 27 million Soviet citizens who died in the fight to defeat the Nazi armies, amongst them 19 million civilians. This was the context of Sosiura’s beautiful poem about words:

    I know the power of the word.
    It is sharper than a bayonet
    and faster than even a bullet,
    Faster than an airplane.

    …

    Oh, weapon of happiness: word!
    I am used to living beside you.
    You are a flower in love,
    you are a bayonet in hate.

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  • There is No Place for the Palestinians of Gaza to Go

    On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

    Catastrophe

    The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order).

    Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza—said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further.

    Safe Passage

    Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?”

    Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks.

    Domicide

    On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity.

    The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

    As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.”

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

     

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  • Dawn Is Breaking out All Over, and the World Is Waking Up


    Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Venezuela), Hema ahu (Spider Web with Dew in the Morning), 2021.

    On 2 February 2024, the people of Venezuela celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolivarian Revolution. On that day in 1999, Hugo Chávez took office as the president of Venezuela and began a process of Latin American integration that – because of US intransigence – accelerated into an anti-imperialist process. Chávez’s government, understanding that it would not be able to govern on behalf of the people and address their needs if it remained tied to the 1961 Constitution, pushed for deeper and deeper democratisation. In April 1999, a referendum was held to set up a Constituent Assembly, tasked with drafting a new constitution; in July 1999, 131 deputies were elected to the assembly; in December 1999, another referendum was held to ratify the draft constitution; and, finally, in July 2000, a general election was held based on the rules set out in the newly adopted constitution. As I remember, it rained hard on the day that the new constitution was put before the people. Nonetheless, 44% of the electorate turned out to vote in the referendum, with an overwhelming 72% choosing a new start for their country.

    Under the new constitution, Venezuela’s old Supreme Court – which the country’s oligarchy had used as a mechanism to prevent any major social changes from taking place – was replaced by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia) or TSJ. Over the course of the past quarter century, the TSJ has been disturbed by several controversies, largely stemming from interventions of the old oligarchy, which refused to accept the major changes that Chávez pushed through in his early years. Indeed, in 2002, the judges on the TSJ acquitted the military leaders who attempted a coup d’état against Chávez, an act which outraged the majority of Venezuelans. This ongoing interference eventually led to the expansion of the bench (as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had done in 1937 for similar reasons) as well as more legislative control over the judiciary, as exists in most modern societies (such as in the United States, where Congressional oversight of the courts is institutionalised through instruments such as the ‘exceptions clause’). Nonetheless, this conflict over the TSJ provided an early weapon for Washington and the Venezuelan oligarchy as they attempted to delegitimise the Chávez government.


    Oswaldo Vigas (Venezuela), Alacrán (‘The Scorpion’), 1952.

    More people will go to the polls across the world in 2024 than in any previous year. About seventy countries, collectively making up almost half of the world’s adult population, have either already held elections or will hold elections this year. Amongst them are India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, the United States, and Venezuela, which is slated for presidential elections in the second half of this year. Well before the Venezuelan government was expected to declare the date for the elections, the country’s far-right opposition and the US government had already begun to intervene, attempting to delegitimise the elections and destabilise the country with the return of financial and trade sanctions. At the heart of the current dispute is the TSJ, which, on 26 January 2024, refused to overturn a June 2023 decision to disqualify far-right political figure María Corina Machado – who has called for sanctions against her own country and for the United States to intervene militarily against Venezuela – from holding elected office in Venezuela until at least 2029 if not 2036. In the proceedings, the TSJ looked at the case of eight individuals who had been barred from holding public office for a variety of reasons. Six of them have been reinstated, and two of them, including Machado, have had their disqualifications upheld.

    The TSJ’s decision evoked fire and brimstone from Washington. Four days after the court decision, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller released a press statement that said that the US disapproved of the ‘barring of candidates’ from the presidential elections and would therefore punish Venezuela. The US immediately revoked General Licence 43, a treasury licence that had permitted the Venezuelan public sector gold mining company Minerven to conduct normal commercial transactions with US persons and entities. In addition, US State Department warned that if the Venezuelan government does not allow Machado to run in this year’s election, it will not renew General Licence 44, which allows Venezuela’s oil and gas sector to conduct normal business and is set to expire on 18 April. Later that day, Miller told the press that ‘absent a change in course from the government, we will allow that general licence to expire, and our sanctions will snap back into place’.


    Elsa Gramcko (Venezuela), R-33 Todo comienza aqui (‘R-33, It All Begins Here’), 1960.

    The United Nations Charter (1945) permits the Security Council to authorise sanctions under chapter VII, article 41. However, it emphasises that these sanctions can only be implemented by way of a UN Security Council resolution. That is why US sanctions on Venezuela, which were first imposed in 2005 and have deepened since 2015, are illegal. As UN special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures Alena F. Douhan wrote in her 2022 report, these unilateral measures are prone to overcompliance and secondary sanctions as a result of countries’ and firms’ fear of being punished by the US. The illegal measures imposed by the US have resulted in tens of billions of dollars of losses since 2015 and have served as collective punishment against the Venezuelan population (forcing over six million of them to leave the country). In 2021, the Venezuelan government formed the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter to bring countries together to defend the integrity of the charter and stand against the use of these kinds of violent, unilateral, and illegal measures. Trade amongst members of this group has been increasing, and many of them (particularly Russia and China) have provided Venezuela with options other than the financial and trade system dominated by the United States and its allies.


    Jacqueline Hinds (Barbados), The Sacrifice of the Builders of the Panama Canal, 2017.

    Last month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a landmark study, Hyper-Imperialism, and dossier, The Churning of the Global Order, in which we analysed the Global North’s decline in legitimacy, the new mood in the Global South, and the violent mechanisms used by the Global North to desperately hold onto its power. Last year, the governments of the United States and Venezuela met in Bridgetown, Barbados, under the sponsorship of Mexico and Norway to sign the Barbados Agreement. Under the terms of this agreement, Venezuela would allow the disqualification of some opposition candidates to be challenged in the TSJ and the US would begin to lift its embargo against Venezuela. This was an agreement that the US signed not from a position of strength, but due to the isolation that it faces from the newly buoyant OPEC+ (made up of Global South nations that, in 2022, accounted for 59% of global oil production) and due to its failure to fully assert authority over Saudi Arabia. In an effort to hedge these challenges, the US has sought to bring Venezuelan oil back into the world market. After refusing to participate in the terms set by the Barbados Agreement, Machado challenged her disqualification at the TSJ, whose authority she claimed to honour. But when the verdict went against her, Machado and the United States went into their toolbox and found that all that remained was force: a return to sanctions and a return to the threat of military intervention. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yvan Gil called the US reaction ‘neo-colonial interventionism’.

    Washington’s return to sanctions comes just as the Associated Press published a report based on a secret 2018 US government memorandum that provides evidence that the US sent spies to Venezuela to target President Nicolás Maduro, his family, and his close allies. ‘We don’t like to say it publicly, but we are, in fact, the police of the world’, former US Drug Enforcement Agency official Wes Tabor told the Associated Press in clear disregard of the operation’s violation of international law. This is the attitude of the United States. That kind of thinking, which calls to mind the clichés of Hollywood Westerns, governs the rhetoric of US high officials. It is in this tone that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin threatens militias in Iraq and Syria, saying that while they might ‘have a lot of capability, I have a lot more’. Meanwhile, Austin declares that the US will respond to the strikes on its military base in Jordan ‘when we choose, where we choose, and how we choose’. We will do what we want. That arrogance is the essence of US foreign policy, which calls upon Armageddon when it feels like it. ‘Target Tehran’, says US Senator John Cornyn, unconcerned about the implications of a US bombardment in Iran or anywhere else.


    Mario Abreu (Venezuela), Mujer vegetal (‘Vegetable Woman’), 1954.

    Of course, there is a fine line between persecuting political opponents and disqualifying those who want their country invaded by a foreign power, in this case ‘the police of the world’. It is true that governments often disparage their opponents by alleging that they are agents of a foreign power (as US Senator Nancy Pelosi did recently to those in the United States who are protesting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, calling them agents of Russia and asking the Federal Bureau of Investigations to monitor them). Machado, however, has openly made statements calling for the United States to invade Venezuela, which in any country would be considered out of bounds.

    In December 2020, I met with a range of opposition leaders in Venezuela who had turned against the regime change positions of people like Machado. Timoteo Zambrano, a leader of Cambiemos Movimiento Ciudadano, told me that it was no longer possible to go before the Venezuelan people and call for an end to Chavismo, the socialist programme set in place by Hugo Chávez. This meant that large sections of the right, including Zambrano’s social democratic formation, have had to acknowledge that this standpoint could not easily win popular support. The far right, comprised of people like Juan Guaidó and María Corina Machado, do not have the stomach for actual democratic processes, preferring instead to ride into Caracas on the backs of an F-35 Lightning II.

    Not even a few months after promising sanctions relief to Venezuela, the US has returned to its hyper-imperialist ways. But the world has changed. In 2006, Chávez went to the United Nations and asked the world’s peoples to read Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival and then mused, ‘Dawn is breaking all over… It is that the world is waking up. It is waking up all over. And people are standing up’. On 31 January 2024, Maduro went to the TSJ headquarters, where he said, ‘We do not depend on gringos or anyone in this world for investment, prosperity, progress, advancement, [or] growth’. Channelling Chávez from eighteen years ago, Maduro said, ‘Another world has already been born’.

    The post Dawn Is Breaking out All Over, and the World Is Waking Up first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is the Right to Dream


    Malak Mattar (Palestine), Gaza, 2024.

    On 26 January, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ called upon Israel to ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts’ that violate the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Although the ICJ did not call explicitly for a ceasefire (as it did in 2022 when it ordered Russia to ‘suspend [its] military operation’ in Ukraine), even a casual reading of this order shows that to comply with the court’s ruling, Israel must end its assault on Gaza. As part of its ‘provisional measures’, the ICJ called upon Israel to respond to the court within a month and outline how it has implemented the order.

    Though Israel has already rejected the ICJ’s findings, international pressure on Tel Aviv is mounting. Algeria has asked the UN Security Council to enforce the ICJ’s order while Indonesia and Slovenia have initiated separate proceedings at the ICJ that will begin on 19 February to seek an advisory opinion on Israel’s control of and policies on occupied Palestinian territories, pursuant to a UN General Assembly resolution adopted in December 2022. In addition, Chile and Mexico have called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes committed in Gaza.

    Israel’s reaction to the ICJ’s order was characteristically dismissive. The country’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, called the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ and claimed that it ‘does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people’. Strangely, Ben Gvir accused the ICJ of being ‘silent during the Holocaust’. The Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its allies against European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and communists took place between late 1941 and May 1945, when the Soviet Red Army liberated prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof. However, the ICJ was established in June 1945, one month after the Holocaust ended, and began its work in April 1946. Israel’s attempt to delegitimise the ICJ by saying that it remained ‘silent during the Holocaust’ when it was, in fact, not yet in existence, and then to use that false statement to call the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ shows that Israel has no answer to the merits of the ICJ order.

    Malak Mattar, Gaza (detail), 2024.

    Malak Mattar (Palestine), Gaza (detail), 2024.

    Meanwhile, the bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza continues. My friend Na’eem Jeenah, director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, has been reviewing the data from various government ministries in Gaza as well as media reports to circulate a daily information card on the situation. The card from 26 January, the date of the ICJ order and the 112th day of the genocide, details that over 26,000 Palestinians, at least 11,000 of them children, have been killed since 7 October; 8,000 are missing; close to 69,000 have been injured; and almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. The numbers are bewildering. During this period, Israel has damaged 394 schools and colleges, destroying 99 of them as well as 30 hospitals and killing at least 337 medical personnel. This is the reality that occasioned the genocide case at the ICJ and the court’s provisional measures, with one judge, Dalveer Bhandari of India, going further to say plainly that ‘all fighting and hostilities [must] come to an immediate halt’.

    Amongst the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors. One of the striking features of Palestinian life over the past 76 years since the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948 has been the ongoing richness of Palestinian cultural production. A brisk walk down any of the streets of Jenin or Gaza City reveals the ubiquity of studios and galleries, places where Palestinians insist upon their right to dream. In late 1974, the South African militant and artist Barry Vincent Feinberg published an article in the Afro-Asian journal Lotus that opens with an interaction in London between Feinberg and a ‘young Palestinian poet’. Feinberg was curious why, in Lotus, ‘an unusually large number of poems stem from Palestinian poets’. The young poet, amused by Feinberg’s observation, replied: ‘The only thing my people have never been denied is the right to dream’.


    Malak Mattar (Palestine), Gaza (detail), 2024.

    Malak Mattar, born in December 1999, is a young Palestinian artist who refuses to stop dreaming. Malak was fourteen when Israel conducted its Operation Protective Edge (2014) in Gaza, killing over two thousand Palestinian civilians in just over one month – a ghastly toll that built upon the bombardment of the Occupied Palestinian Territory that has been ongoing for more than a generation. Malak’s mother urged her to paint as an antidote to the trauma of the occupation. Malak’s parents are both refugees: her father is from al-Jorah (now called Ashkelon) and her mother is from al-Batani al-Sharqi, one of the Palestinian villages along the edge of what is now called the Gaza Strip. On 25 November 1948, the newly formed Israeli government passed Order Number 40, which authorised Israeli troops to expel Palestinians from villages such as al-Batani al-Sharqi. ‘Your role is to expel the Arab refugees from these villages and prevent their return by destroying the villages… Burn the villages and demolish the stone houses’, wrote the Israeli commanders.

    Malak’s parents carry these memories, but despite the ongoing occupation and war, they try to endow their children with dreams and hope. Malak picked up a paint brush and began to envision a luminous world of bright colours and Palestinian imagery, including the symbol of sumud (‘steadfastness’): the olive tree. Since she was a teenager, Malak has painted young girls and women, often with babies and doves, though, as she told the writer Indlieb Farazi Saber, the women’s heads are often titled to the side. That is because, she said, ‘If you stand straight, upright, it shows you are stable, but with a head tilted to one side, it evokes a feeling of being broken, a weakness. We are humans, living through wars, through brutal moments… the endurance sometimes slips’.


    Malak Mattar (Palestine), Two Gazan Girls Dreaming of Peace, 2020.

    Malak and I have corresponded throughout this violence, her fears manifest, her strength remarkable. In January, she wrote, ‘I’m working on a massive painting depicting many aspects of the genocide’. On a five-metre canvas, Malak created a work of art that began to resemble Pablo Picasso’s celebrated Guernica (1937), which he painted to commemorate a massacre by fascist Spain against a town in the Basque region. In 2022, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) published a profile on Malak, calling her ‘Palestine’s Picasso’. In the article, Malak said, ‘I was so inspired by Picasso that, in the beginning of my art journey, I tried to paint like him’. This new painting by Malak reflects the heartbreak and steadfastness of the Palestinian people. It is an indictment of Israel’s genocide and an affirmation of Palestinians’ right to dream. If you look at it closely, you will see the victims of the genocide: the medical workers, the journalists, and the poets; the mosques and the churches; the unburied bodies, the naked prisoners, and the corpses of small children; the bombed cars and the fleeing refugees. There is a kite flying in the sky, a symbol from Refaat Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ (‘you must live to tell my story… so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye… sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks there is an angel there bringing back love’).


    Zulfa al-Sa’di (Palestine), King Faysal I of Iraq, 1931.

    Malak’s work is rooted in Palestinian traditions of painting, inspired by a history that dates back to Arab Christian iconography (a tradition that was developed by Yusuf al-Halabi of Aleppo in the seventeenth century). That ‘Aleppo Style’, as the art critic Kamal Boullata wrote in Istihdar al-Makan, developed into the ‘Jerusalem Style’, which brightened the iconography by introducing flora and fauna from Islamic miniatures and embroidery. When I first saw Malak’s work, I thought of how fitting it was that she had redeemed the life of Zulfa al-Sa’di (1905–1988), one of the most important painters of her time, who painted Palestinian political and cultural heroes. Al-Sa’di stopped painting after she was forced to flee Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba; her only paintings that remain are those that she carried with her on horseback. Sa’di spent the rest of her life teaching art to Palestinian children at an UNRWA school in Damascus. It was in one such UNRWA school that Malak learned to paint. Malak seemed to pick up al-Sa’di’s brushes and paint for her.

    It is no surprise that Israel has targeted UNRWA, successfully encouraging several key Global North governments to stop funding the agency, which was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949 to ‘carry out direct relief and works programmes for Palestine refugees’. In any given year, half a million Palestinian children like Malak study at UNRWA schools. Raja Khalidi, director-general of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), says of this funding suspension: ‘Given the long-standing precarious nature of UNRWA’s finances… and in light of its essential role in providing vital services to Palestine refugees and some 1.8 million displaced persons in Gaza, cutting its funding at such a moment heightens the threat to life against Palestinians already at risk of genocide’.

    I encourage you to circulate Malak’s mural, to recreate it on walls and public spaces across the world. Let it penetrate into the souls of those who refuse to see the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

    The post The Only Right That Palestinians Have Not Been Denied Is the Right to Dream first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The International Court of Justice Censures Israel for Its Genocidal War

    On January 26, 2024, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released their 29-page order that found “plausible” (paragraph 54) evidence that Israel was conducting a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. The court intervened in that war due to South Africa’s application that Israel had violated its obligations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). South Africa came to the ICJ two months and three weeks into Israel’s brutal military bombardment against the Palestinians. The 84-page indictment from South Africa, presented to the ICJ on December 29, 2023, included statements made by Israel’s high officials calling for the total annihilation of the “human savages” in Gaza and included details of how Israel was acting on such statements.

    The ICJ agreed with South Africa’s claims and called upon Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts” that are genocidal (paragraph 78). The order is not a final verdict since there was no trial. These are “provisional measures.” It would take the ICJ several years to adjudicate whether Israel is actually committing genocide against the Palestinians. The ICJ did not directly call for a ceasefire or a “cessation of hostilities” (as it had done in March 2022, when it ordered Russia to “suspend the military operations”). However, it is hard to read paragraph 78 in any other way than that it calls on Israel to silence its guns.

    Twenty years ago, the ICJ studied the building of a wall around the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). In July 2004, the ICJ found that “the construction of the wall by Israel… is contrary to international law.” There has been a relentless battle over the jurisdiction of the ICJ to rule over Israel’s behavior in the OPT, including in 2022 when a legal opinion was sought by several states over the finding of a UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry chaired by the South African judge Navi Pillay. Pillay’s report found “reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli government’s de-facto annexation policies.” Israel contested the ICJ’s jurisdiction in the case. Now, with this charge of genocide, the court established its jurisdiction and Israel accepted it by participating in the proceedings.

    Provisional Measures

    The ICJ was set up by the United Nations as a dispute settlement mechanism between states. South Africa took its dispute with Israel to the ICJ, accusing Israel of violating an international treaty. Having looked at the dispute, the ICJ found for South Africa and offered “provisional measures” to defend the rights of the Palestinian people. The order by the ICJ has no appeal. It is final. The ICJ gave Israel one month to show that it has taken measures to protect the Palestinians. If Israel either fails to respond or does not respond satisfactorily, then the ICJ will send its order to the UN Security Council (UNSC) for enforcement. The UNSC will be bound by the UN Charter to enforce the order.

    Israel has already rejected the order. That means that the order will be sent, a month from now, to the UNSC. At that point, it will be interesting to see how the three veto-power Global North countries (France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) will react to the order. On January 25, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson Vedant Patel said that the U.S. government believes that “the allegations that Israel is committing genocide [are] unfounded.” Patel said that Israel should “take feasible steps, additional steps to prevent civilian harm,” but that there is no genocide being conducted by Israel. This will set up a showdown at the UNSC. Algeria, a member of the UNSC at this time, has asked for a meeting to be held to discuss the verdict and to have the UNSC call for an immediate ceasefire.

    The Reputation of the Court

    Alongside the ICJ order, Judge Xue Hanqin wrote a separate opinion, in which she noted that 60 years ago, the governments of Ethiopia and Liberia had brought South Africa to the ICJ for its role in South-West Africa (now Namibia). The ICJ, she wrote, rejected the case, and this “denial of justice gave rise to strong indignation” against the ICJ “severely tarnishing its reputation.” Judge Xue came to the ICJ in 2010, and—due to her seriousness of purpose—was elected to be the court’s vice president in 2018. In March 2022, Judge Xue voted against the provisional order that called upon Russia to suspend its military operation in Ukraine (by the time of that order, just over a thousand civilians had been killedin the war, whereas by the time the ICJ took up the Israeli bombing, more than 25,000 civilians had been killed). In the case of Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinians, Judge Xue raised the issue of erga omnes (“towards all”), which implies that this is a case where Israel’s actions harm the world community and Israel must be impelled to stop its war on behalf of all of humanity. “For a protected group such as the Palestinian people,” Judge Xue wrote, “it is least controversial that the international community has a common interest in its protection.”

    There are three Asian judges on the court, with Judge Xue joined by Judge Iwasawa Yuji of Japan and Judge Dalveer Bhandari of India. Judge Bhandari has had a distinguished career in India on the Delhi High Court (1991-2004), on the Bombay High Court (2004-2005), and on the Supreme Court (2005-2012) before he was elevated to the ICJ. Only five judges appended their opinion to the order, one of whom was Judge Bhandari. In his opinion, Judge Bhandari went over the legal merits of South Africa’s case, but made sure to put on the record his view that other international laws than the Convention on Genocide apply to this war and that all parties must adhere to these laws. While the order itself did not directly call for a cessation of hostilities, Judge Bhandari did so. “All participants in the conflict,” he wrote, “must ensure that all fighting and hostilities come to an immediate halt and that remaining hostages captured on 7 October 2023 are unconditionally released forthwith.” It is likely that Judge Bhandari affixed his own opinion to the court in order to register the necessity of asking directly for such a direct ceasefire.

    The Reaction of Israel and Its Allies

    Israel’s reaction to the order by the ICJ was characteristic. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said that the ICJ was an “antisemitic court” and that it “does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people.” Strangely, Ben Gvir said that the ICJ was “silent during the Holocaust.” The Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its allies against European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and Communists took place between late 1941 and May 1945 (when the Soviet Red Army liberated the prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof). The ICJ was established in June 1945, a month after the Holocaust ended, and it began work in April 1946. To try and delegitimize the Court by saying that it remained “silent” when it was not in existence, and then to use that false statement to call the ICJ an “antisemitic court” shows that Israel has no answer to the merits of the ICJ order.

    What is interesting is that the Israeli judge at the ICJ, Aharon Barak, joined the majority of the judges in a vote of 16-1 to say that Israel is not allowing in humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, and that Israel must “prevent and punish the incitement of genocide.” It is hard for Israeli high officials to consider Barak “antisemitic” or to disparage his credentials. Barak has held high positions in Israel, such as Attorney General (1975-1978), Justice on the Supreme Court of Israel (1978-1995), and President of the Supreme Court (1995-2006). Barak did vote against the claim that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide by the Israeli government. “Genocide,” he wrote in his own opinion, “is more than just a word for me; it represents calculated destruction and human behavior at its very worst. It is the gravest possible accusation and is deeply intertwined with my personal life experience.” While Barak, the Israeli nominee on the ICJ for this case, did not vote on the accusation that genocide is being conducted in Gaza, Judge Barak nonetheless agreed that there was “incitement of genocide.” The difference between the two hangs on a thread, haunted by the ghost of the dead 30,000 Palestinians (nearly half of them children).

    Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in trouble politically within Israel, welcomed the fact that the ICJ did not order a ceasefire and then said that his War Cabinet will continue to prosecute its war. This spin on the verdict is implausible. It will not convince anyone, least of all the judges of the ICJ who have found the accusation of genocide “plausible” and have called upon Israel to stop its genocidal war.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post The International Court of Justice Censures Israel for Its Genocidal War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess

    Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.
    Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.

    ‘The West is in danger’, warned Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In his dangerously appealing style, Milei blamed ‘collectivism’ – that is, social welfare, taxes, and the state – as the ‘root cause’ of the world’s problems, leading to widespread impoverishment. The only way forward, Milei declared, is through ‘free enterprise, capitalism, and economic freedom’. Milei’s speech marked a return to the orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who pushed forward an ideology of social cannibalism as the basis for their neoliberal agenda. Since the 1970s, this scorched earth policy has devasted much of the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund, but also created factory deserts in the West (what Donald Trump, in his inauguration address in 2017, called the ‘American carnage’). Therein lies the confounding logic of the far right: on the one side, calling for the billionaire class to dominate society in their interest (which produces the social carnage) and then, on the other side, inflaming the victims of said carnage to fight against policies that would benefit them.

    Milei is right in his overall judgment: the West is in danger, but not because of social democratic policies; it is in danger because of its inability to come to terms with its slow demise as the dominating bloc in the world.

    From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights (GSI) come two important texts on the changing global landscape: a landmark study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage, and our seventy-second dossier, The Churning of the World Order (the dossier is an ‘executive summary’ of the study, so I will be referring to them as if they were one text). We believe that this is the most significant theoretical statement that our institute has made in its eight-year history.

    In both Hyper-Imperialism and The Churning of the World Order we make four important points:

    First, through a deep analysis of the concepts of the Global North and the Global South, we show that the former acts as a bloc, while the latter is merely a loose grouping. The Global North is led by the United States, which has created several instruments to extend its authority over the other countries in the bloc (many of which are historic colonial powers and settler-colonial societies). These platforms include the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (initially set up in 1941 between the US and UK, the network has now expanded to Fourteen Eyes), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949), and the Group of Seven (G7, set up in 1974). Through these and other formations, the United States and its political allies within the Global North are able to exercise authority over their own countries and the countries of the Global South.

    In contrast, the countries of the Global South have historically been much more disorganised, with some, looser alliances and linkages around regional and political affiliations. The Global South has neither a political centre nor an ideologically driven project.

    The analysis in the texts is detailed, relying upon public databases and databases built by GSI. The bottom line is that there is one world system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc. There are no multiple imperialisms, no inter-imperialist conflict.


    Mahmud al-Obaidi (Iraq), Untitled, 2008.

    Second, the platforms of the Global North exercise power over the world system through a number of vectors (military, financial, economic, social, cultural) and through a range of instruments (NATO, the International Monetary Fund, information systems). With the gradual decline of the Global North’s control over the international financial system, raw materials, technology, and science, this bloc mainly exercises its power through military force and through the management of information. In these texts, we do not go over the question of information, although we have previously written about it and will take it up again in a study on digital sovereignty. The focus of these texts is largely on military spending, where we show that the US-led bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending and that the US spends 12.6 times more than the world average on a per capita basis (Israel, second to the US, spends 7.2 times above the per capita world average). To put this into perspective, China accounts for 10% of world military spending and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.

    Such enormous spending on the military is not innocent. Not only does it come at the cost of social spending, the Global North’s military power is used to threaten and intimidate countries, and – if they are disobedient – to punish them with hellfire and brimstone. In 2022 alone, these imperialist nations made 317 deployments of their military forces to countries in the Global South. The highest number of these deployments (31) were made to Mali, a nation strongly seeking sovereignty, and which was the first of the Sahel states to stage popular-backed coups (2020 and 2021) and eject the French military from its territory (2022).

    Between 1776 and 2019, the United States carried out at least 392 interventions worldwide, half of them between 1950 and 2019. This includes the terrible, illegal war against Iraq in 2003 (at this year’s WEF meeting, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani asked for Global North troops to leave Iraq). This vast military spending by the Global North, led by the United States, reflects the militarisation of its foreign policy. One of the little remarked aspects of this militarisation is the development of a theory in both the United States and United Kingdom of ‘defence diplomacy’ (as it was noted in the UK Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998). In the United States, strategic thinkers use the acronym DIME to reflect on the sources of national power (diplomacy, informational, military, and economic).

    Last year, the European Union and NATO – the institutions at the heart of the Global North – jointly pledged to ‘mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’. In case you did not catch it, that power – mostly military power and military diplomacy – is not to serve humanity, but to serve only their ‘citizens’.

    António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.
    António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.

    Third, Part IV of our Hyper-Imperialism study is called ‘The West in Decline’, and looks at the evidence for this trend from a perspective that rejects Milei’s ‘the West is in danger’ fearmongering. The facts show that since the start of the Third Great Depression, the Global North has struggled to maintain its control over the world economy; its instruments – monopolies over technology and raw materials, as well as dominion over foreign direct investment – have fundamentally eroded. When China surpassed the United States’ share of global industrial output in 2004, the United States lost hegemony in production (by 2022, the former held a 25.7% share versus the 9.7% held by the latter). Given that the United States is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which reached $1 trillion in 2022, the US has little internal capability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies. Owners of capital in the United States have siphoned off their profits from the country’s exchequer creating the economic conditions for the social carnage that afflicts the country. The old political coalitions rooted around the two parties in the United States are in flux, with no space within US political system to develop a political project to exercise hegemony over the world economy through legitimacy and consent. That is why the US-led Global North resorts to force and intimidation, building its massive military apparatus by increasing its own public debt (since there is little domestic consensus to use that borrowing to build the infrastructure and productive base of the country).

    The root of the New Cold War imposed by the United States on China is that China has outpaced the United States in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Every year since 1992, China has been a net exporter of capital, this surplus of capital creation has made it possible to finance international projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old.


    El Meya (Algeria), Les Moudjahidates, 2021.

    Fourth, we analyse the emergence of new organisations rooted in the Global South, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), the BRICS10 (2009), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021). These interregional platforms are in an embryonic stage, but they provide evidence for the growth of a new regionalism and multilateralism. Although these formations do not seek to operate as a bloc to counter the Global North’s bloc, they reflect what we have previously called a ‘new mood’ in the Global South. The new mood is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-capitalist, but is shaped by four main vectors:

    • Multilateralism and regionalism centred on the creation of Global South-anchored platforms for cooperation.
    • New modernisation centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.
    • Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.
    • Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.

    The analysis in these texts goes deep beneath the surface, providing a historical materialist assessment of our present crises. Documents produced by the institutions of the Global North, such as the WEF’s Global Risks report for 2024, provide a list of the dangers that we face (climate catastrophe, social polarisation, economic downturns) but cannot explain them. Our approach, we believe, provides a theory to understand these perils as the outcome of the world system managed by the hyper-imperialist bloc.

    In thinking about these texts, my mind wandered to the work of the Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996). When all seemed futile, al-Haydari wrote that ‘the sun will not rise’ and that ‘at the bottom of the house, already dead, are the steps of my children, reduced to silence’. But even then, when we ‘were without power’, there remains hope. His civilisation drowns, but then ‘you arrived with the paddle’, he sings. ‘Such is the history of our yesterday, and its taste is bitterness’, he concludes, ‘such is our slow walk, the procession of our dignity: our only good until the hour when will rise, finally, a free paddle’.

    That anticipation defines a classic by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), ‘Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone’ (1966):

    I’ve had a dream that someone is coming.
    I’ve dreamt of a red star,
    and my eyes lids keep twitching
    and my shoes keep snapping to attention
    and may I go blind
    if I’m lying.
    I’ve dreamt of that red star
    when I wasn’t asleep.
    Someone is coming,
    someone is coming
    someone better.

    The post We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Entry of a New German Left Party Shakes up the Country

    Photograph Source: Martin Heinlein – CC BY 2.0

    In October 2023, 10 members of the German parliament (Bundestag) left Die Linke (the Left) and declared their intention to form their own party. With their departure, Die Linke’s parliamentary group fell to 28 out of the 736 members of the Bundestag, compared to the 78 members of the far-right Alliance for Germany (AfD). One of the reasons for the departure of these 10 MPs is that they believe that Die Linke has lost touch with its working-class base, whose decomposition over issues of war and inflation has moved many of them into the arms of the AfD. The new formation is led by Sahra Wagenknecht (born 1969), one of the most dynamic politicians of her generation in Germany and a former star in Die Linke, and Amira Mohamed Ali. It is called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for Reason and Justice (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, BSW) and it launched in early January 2024.

    Wagenknecht’s former comrades in Die Linke accuse her of “conservatism” because of her views on immigration in particular. As we will see, though, Wagenknecht contests this description of her approach. The description of “left-wing conservatism” (articulated by Dutch professor Cas Mudde) is frequently deployed, although not elaborated upon by her critics. I spoke to Wagenknecht and her close ally—Sevim Dağdelen—about their new party and their hopes to move a progressive agenda in Germany.

    Anti-War

    The heart of our conversation rested on the deep divide in Germany between a government—led by the Social Democrat Olaf Scholz—eager to continue the war in Ukraine, and a population that wants this war to end and for their government to tackle the severe crisis of inflation. The heart of the matter, said Wagenknecht and Dağdelen, is the attitude to the war. Die Linke, they argue, simply did not come out strongly against the Western backing of the war in Ukraine and did not articulate the despair in the population. “If you argue for the self-destructive economic warfare against Russia that is pushing millions of people in Germany into penury and causing an upward redistribution of wealth, then you cannot credibly stand up for social justice and social security,” Wagenknecht told me. “If you argue for irrational energy policies like bringing in Russian energy more expensively via India or Belgium, while campaigning not to reopen the pipelines with Russia for cheap energy, then people simply will not believe that you would stand up for the millions of employees whose jobs are in jeopardy as a result of the collapse of whole industries brought about by the rise in energy prices.”

    Scholz’s approval rating is now at 17 percent, and unless his government is able to solve the pressing problems engendered by the Ukraine war, it is unlikely that he will be able to reverse this image. Rather than try to push for a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine, Scholz’s coalition of the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, say Dağdelen, “is trying to commit the people of Germany to a global war alongside the United States on at least three fronts: in Ukraine, in East Asia with Taiwan, and in the Middle East at the side of Israel. It speaks volumes that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock even prevented a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the Cairo summit” in October 2023.

    Indeed, in 2022, Thuringia’s prime minister and a Die Linke leader, Bodo Ramelow, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the German federal government must send tanks to Ukraine. When Wagenknecht calledGaza an “open-air prison” in October 2023, the Die Linke parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch said that he “strongly distanced” himself from her (the phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza is used widely, including by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967). “We have to point out what is happening here,” Dağdelen tells me, “It is our duty to organize resistance to this collapse of Die Linke’s anti-war stance. We reject Germany’s involvement in the U.S. and NATO proxy wars in Ukraine, East Asia, and the Middle East.”

    Controversies

    On February 25, 2023, Wagenknecht and her followers organized an anti-war protest at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin that drew 30,000 people. The protest followed the publication of a “peace manifesto,” written by Wagenknecht and the feminist writer Alice Schwarzer, which has now attracted over a million signatures. The Washington Post reported on this rally with an article headlined, “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in Germany.” Dağdelen tells me that the bulk of those who attended the rally and those who signed the manifesto are from the “centrist, liberal, and left-wing camps.” A well-known extreme right-wing journalist, Jürgen Elsässer tried to take part in the demonstration, but Dağdelen—as video footage shows—argued with him and told him to leave. Everyone but the right-wing, she says, was welcome at the rally. However, both Dağdelen and Wagenknecht say their former party—Die Linke—tried to obstruct the rally and demonized them for holding it. “The defamation is intended to construct an enemy within,” Dağdelen told me. “Vilifying peace protests is intended to put people off and simultaneously mobilize support for repugnant government policies, such as arms supply to Ukraine.”

    Part of the controversy around Wagenknecht is about her views on immigration. Wagenknecht says that she supports the right to political asylum and says that people fleeing war must be afforded protection. But, she argues, the problem of global poverty cannot be solved by migration, but by sound economic policies and an end to the sanctions on countries like Syria. A genuine left-wing, she says, must attend to the alarm call from communities who call for an end to immigration and move to the far-right AfD. “Unlike the leadership of Die Linke,” Wagenknecht told me, “we do not intend to write off AfD voters and simply watch as the right-wing threat in Germany continues to grow. We want to win back those AfD voters who have gone to that party out of frustration and in protest at the lack of a real opposition that speaks for communities.”

    The point of her politics, Wagenknecht said, is not anti-immigration as much as it is to attack the AfD’s anti-immigrant stand at the same time as her party will work with the communities to understand why they are frustrated and how their frustration against immigrants is often a wider frustration with cuts in social welfare, cuts in education and health funding, and in a cavalier policy toward economic migration. “It is revealing,” she said, “that the harshest attacks on us come from the far-right wing.” They do not want, she points out, the new party to shift the argument away from a narrow anti-immigrant focus to pro-working-class politics.

    Polls show that the new party could win 14 percent of the vote, which would be three times the Die Linke share and would make BSW the third-largest party in the Bundestag.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post The Entry of a New German Left Party Shakes up the Country appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Global South Takes Israel to Court

    Tarek al-Ghoussein (Palestine), Untitled 9 from the series Self Portrait, 2002.

    On 11 January, Adila Hassim, an advocate of the High Court of South Africa, stood before the judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and said: “Genocides are never declared in advance. But this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts”. This statement anchored Hassim’s presentation of South Africa’s 84-page complaint against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Both Israel and South Africa are parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention.

    The filing by the South African government documents many of the atrocities perpetrated by Israel as well as, crucially, the declarations of intent to conduct genocide made by senior Israeli officials. Nine pages of this text (pp. 59 to 67) list ‘expressions of genocidal intent’ made primarily by Israeli state officials, such as calls for a ‘Second Nakba’ and a ‘Gaza Nakba’ (Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homes that led to the creation of the state of Israel). These chilling declarations of intent have appeared repeatedly in the Israeli government’s speeches and statements since 7 October alongside racist language about ‘monsters’, ‘animals’, and the ‘jungle’ to refer to Palestinians. In one of many such instances, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on 9 October 2023 that his forces are ‘imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly’.

    Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another advocate from South Africa, described these words as a ‘language of systematic dehumanisation’. This language, alongside the character of Israel’s assault – which has thus far claimed over 24,000 Palestinian lives, displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza, and plunged 90% of the population into acute food security – should provide a sufficient basis for the accusation of genocide.

    It is fitting that Adila Hassim’s first name means righteousness or justice in Arabic and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi’s first name means trustworthy in Xhosa.

    John Halaka (Palestine), Memories of Memories, 2023.

    At the ICJ hearing, Israel was unable to respond credibly to South Africa’s complaint. Tal Becker, a legal advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spent his entire presentation trying to indict Hamas, which is not a party to the dispute. It was Hamas, Becker said, that created the ‘nightmarish environment’ in Gaza – not Israel.

    After Israel made its case, the fifteen ICJ judges began their deliberations. The presentations on 11–12 January were merely the prima facie hearing to ascertain whether there is sufficient evidence to proceed to a trial, which – if it happens – would likely take years. However, South Africa asked the court to apply ‘provisional measures’, namely an emergency order from the ICJ judges calling on Israel to stop its genocidal attack on Palestinians. This would be a significant blow to Israel’s already diminished legitimacy as well as the legitimacy of its major backer, the United States of America. There is considerable precedence for this measure. In 2019, Gambia was able to get the court to order provisional measures against the government of Myanmar for its attacks on the Rohingya people. The world awaits the court’s verdict.

    Ibrahim Khatab (Egypt), Do What You Want Under the Trees, 2021.

    The day before the hearings began, the US released a statement saying ‘allegations that Israel is committing genocide are unfounded’. Once more, the US government fully backed Israel, intervening on its behalf not only in words but by providing arms and logistical support for the genocide. That is why South Africa is now preparing a filing against the United States and the United Kingdom to be submitted to the ICJ.

    In November 2023, when the genocidal character of the war was already widely accepted across the globe, US Congress passed a $14.5 billion package in military aid to Israel. While the ICJ held its hearing, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told the press that the US will ‘continue to supply [Israel] with the tools and capabilities they need’, which it did – again – as recently as 9 and 29 December, when it transferred additional arms to Israel. When asked about loss of life concerns within Congress, Kirby said that ‘we still see no indication that [Israel is] violating the laws of armed conflict’. Kirby, a former admiral, acknowledged that ‘there are too many civilian casualties’. However, rather than calling to end attacks on civilians, he said that Israel must ‘take steps to reduce that’. In other words, the US has given Israel the green light and carte blanche support, and arms, to do whatever it would like to Palestinians.

    When the people of Yemen, led by Ansar Allah, decided to block the movement of ships to Israel through the Red Sea, the US formed a ‘coalition’ to attack Yemen. On the day of South Africa’s presentation at the ICJ, the US bombed Yemen. The message was clear: not only will the US provide unconditional support for the genocide; it will also attack countries that try to put a stop to it.

    Shaima al-Tamimi (Yemen), So Close Yet So Far Away, 2018.

    The atrocities perpetrated by Israel, as well as the resistance of the Palestinian people, have moved millions across the world to take to the streets, many of them for the first time in their lives. Social media, in almost all the world’s languages, is saturated with content decrying Israel’s terrible actions. The focus of attention does not seem to be diminishing, with 400,000 people marching on the US capitol last weekend in larger numbers than ever in the country’s history. The increasing fervour and scale of these demonstrations have provoked concerns in the Democratic Party that US President Joe Biden will lose not only the Arab American vote in such key states as Michigan, but that liberal-left activists will not support his re-election campaign.

    Chie Fueki (Japan), Nikko, 2018

    Over the course of the past two years, from the start of the Ukraine War until now, there has been a rapid decline in the West’s credibility. This drop in legitimacy did not begin with the Ukraine War or genocide in Palestine, though both events have certainly accelerated the decline in the authority of the NATO countries. Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammed al-Bukhaiti posted a video of a pro-Palestine march in New York that is perhaps indicative of the mood in most of the world and wrote: ‘We are not hostile to the American people, but rather to the American foreign policy that has caused the death of tens of millions of people, threatens the security and safety of the world, and also exposes the lives of Americans to danger. Let us struggle together to establish justice among people’.

    Since the start of the Third Great Depression in 2007, the Global North has slowly lost its control over the world economy, technology and science, and raw materials. Billionaires in the Global North deepened their ‘tax strike’, siphoning a large share of social wealth into tax havens and unproductive financial investments. This left the Global North with few instruments to maintain economic power, including the ability it once held to make investments in the Global South. Later this month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will release a new dossier, The Churning of the Global Order, and a study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, which detail the maladies of the present and the new mood created by the rise of the Global South. The ICJ complaint filed by South Africa and backed by several Global South states is an indication of this mood.

    Athier Mousawi (Iraq-Britain), A Point to A Potential Somewhere, 2014.

    It is clear to most people in the world that the Global North has failed to address planetary crises, whether the climate crisis or the consequences of the Third Great Depression. It has tried to substitute reality with euphemisms such as ‘democracy promotion’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘humanitarian pause’, and, from UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the ridiculous formulation of a ‘sustainable ceasefire’. Empty words are no substitute for real actions. To speak of a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ while arming Israel or to speak of ‘democracy promotion’ while backing anti-democratic governments now defines the hypocrisy of the Global North’s political class.

    On 12 January, the German government released a statement saying that it ‘firmly and explicitly rejects the accusation of genocide that has now been made against Israel’. In line with the new mood in the Global South, the government of Namibia reminded the Germans that they had ‘committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904–1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions’. This is known as the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Germany, said the government of Namibia, ‘is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil’. Therefore, Namibia ‘expresses deep concern with the shocking decision’ of the German government to reject the indictment of Israel.

    Israel, meanwhile, says that it will continue this genocide for ‘as long as it takes’, though its already tenuous justifications continue to deteriorate with increasing rapidity. Behind this violence is the waning legitimacy of the NATO project, whose sanctimonies sound like nails being dragged across a bloodied chalkboard.

    PS: Please do not miss the panel discussion based on our recent dossier, Culture as a Weapon of Struggle: The Medu Art Ensemble and Southern African Liberation, which widens the focus from South Africa to Palestine, featuring Wally Serote (poet laureate of South Africa and the founding chairperson of the Medu Art Ensemble), Judy Seidman (cultural worker and member of the Medu Art Ensemble), Clarissa Bitar (award-winning Palestinian oud musician and composer), and Niki Franco (cultural worker). The event will be hosted by our very own Tings Chak as well as Hannah Priscilla Craig of Artists Against Apartheid and livestreamed on 21 January via The People’s Forum YouTube page at 20:00 (Johannesburg), 18:00 (London), 15:00 (São Paulo), and 13:00 (New York). Register here.

    The post The Global South Takes Israel to Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s War on Palestine and the Global Upsurge Against It

    Hundreds of millions of people across the world have been deeply moved by the atrocity of the Israeli war on Palestine. Millions have attended marches and protests, many of them participating in such demonstrations for the first time in their lives. Social media, in almost all the world’s languages, is saturated with memes and posts about this or that terrible action. Some people focus on the Israeli attack on Palestinian children, others on the illegal targeting of Gaza’s health infrastructure, and yet others point to the annihilation of at least four hundred families (more than ten people in each family killed). The focus of attention does not seem to be diminishing. Holidays in December went by, but the intensity of the protests and the posts remained steady. No attempt by social media companies to turn the algorithm against the Palestinians succeeded, no attempt to ban the protests—even the display of the Palestinian flag—worked. Accusations of antisemitism fell flat and demands for the condemnation of Hamas were dismissed. This is a new mood, a new kind of attitude toward the Palestinian struggle.

    Never before in the 75 previous years has there been such sustained attention to the cause of the Palestinians and of Israeli brutality. Israel has launched eight bombing campaigns on  Gaza since 2006. . And Israel has built up an entire illegal structure against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank (an apartheid wall, settlements, checkpoints). When Palestinians have tried to resist—whether through civic action or armed struggle—they have faced immense violence from the Israeli military. Ever since social media has been available, images from Palestine have circulated, including of the use of white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza, and including the arrest and murder of Palestinian children across the Occupied Palestine Territory. But none of the previous acts of violence evoked the kind of response from around the world as this violence that began in October 2023.

    Genocide

    The Israeli armed violence against Gaza since October has been in a qualitatively different form than any previous violence. The bombardment of Gaza was vicious, with Israeli aircraft hitting residential areas with no concern for civilian life. The number of dead increased day by day at a rate not seen before. Then, when Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, they effected an illegal mass eviction of the Palestinian civilians from their homes and pushed them further and further south toward the border with Egypt. The Israelis violated their own promises of “safe zones,” hitting areas more densely packed than before because of the internal displacement. It was this scale of violence that provoked an early use of the term “genocide” to describe what was happening in Gaza. By early January, more than 1 percent of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza had been killed, while over 95 percent had been displaced. The kind of violence used here was not seen in any contemporary war, neither in Iraq (where the U.S. disregarded most laws of war) nor in Ukraine (where the death toll of civilians is far smaller despite the war now lasting two years).

    The momentum of mass protest pushed the government of South Africa to file a dispute in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel for the crime of genocide. Both countries are parties to the 1948 Convention Against Genocide, and the ICJ is the venue for dispute settlements. The 84-page filing by the South African government documents many of the atrocities perpetrated by Israel, and also, crucially, the words of Israeli high officials. Nine pages of this text (pp. 59 to 67) list the Israeli officials in their own words, many of them calling for a “Second Nakba” or a “Gaza Nakba,” a use of the term “Nakba” or Catastrophe that refers to the 1948 Nakba of the Palestinians from their homes that led to the creation of the State of Israel. These words are chilling, and they have been widely circulated since October. Racist language about “monsters,” “animals,” and the “jungle” shape the speeches and statements by these Israeli government officials. Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on October 9, 2023, that his forces are “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” This, along with the character of the Israeli military strikes, is sufficient as a benchmark for the accusation of genocide. At the hearing at the ICJ, Israel was unable to respond credibly to the South African complaint.

    It is a combination of the images from Gaza and the words of these Israeli high officials—backed fully by the United States government and many of the governments of European states—that provoked the sustained anger and desolation that has driven these mass protests.

    Legitimacy

    Over the course of the past two years—from the start of the war in Ukraine until now—there has been a rapid decline in the legitimacy of the West, notably the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States. These wars are not the cause of this drop in legitimacy, but they have accelerated the decline in the legitimacy of the NATO countries, particularly in the Global South.

    Since the start of the Third Great Depression in 2007, the Global North has slowly lost its control over the world economy, over technology and science, and over raw materials. Billionaires in the Global North deepened their “tax strike” and withdrew a large share of social wealth into tax havens and into unproductive financial investments. This left the Global North with few instruments to maintain economic power, including by making investments in the Global South. That role was slowly taken up by China, which has been recycling global profits into infrastructural projects across the world. Rather than contest China’s Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, through its own commercial and economic project, the Global North has sought to militarize its response with massive spending (three-quarters of global military spending is by the NATO states). The Global North has used Ukraine and Taiwan as levers to provoke Russia and China into military conflicts so as to ‘weaken’ them rather than contest growing Russian energy power and Chinese industrial and technological power through trade and development.

    It is clear to the majority of people in the world that it is the Global North that has failed to address the crises in the world, whether the climate crisis or the consequences of the Third Great Depression. It has tried to substitute a language of euphemism for reality, using terms such as “democracy promotion,” “sustainable development,” “humanitarian pause,” and—from UK Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron and Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock—the ridiculous formulation of a “sustainable ceasefire.” Empty words are no substitute for real actions. To speak of a “sustainable ceasefire” while arming Israel or to speak of “democracy promotion” while backing anti-democratic governments now defines the hypocrisy of the Global North’s political class.

    The Israelis say that they will continue this genocidal war for as long as it takes. As each day goes by of this war, the legitimacy of Israel deteriorates. But behind that violence itself is the much deeper end of the legitimacy of the NATO project, whose sanctimonies sound like nails being dragged across a bloodied chalkboard.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post Israel’s War on Palestine and the Global Upsurge Against It appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Why I Believe What I Believe About the Chinese Revolution

    Liu Hongjie (China), Skyline, 2021.

    Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.

    **

    The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.

    We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than perhaps any period since 1991. The war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are illustrative of the dangers before us. In the interim, I worry about the US trying to draw Iran into the conflict, with Israel threatening to escalate tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and then draw Tehran into making a step that would allow the US to bomb Iran. The New Cold War against China will take these conflicts to another level. Taiwan is already the lever. I hope that sober minds will prevail.

    All socialist projects, as you well know, are formed in the process of the class struggle and through the development of the productive forces. Not the least China. You recall Bill Hinton’s book The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China, 1978–1989, published in 1990. I was with Bill in Concord, Massachusetts a year or so before he died in 2004 and had several discussions with him about China. No one in the US knew China as well as Bill, his entire family (including his sister Joan and her husband Sid Engst, who modernised dairy farming in China), and, of course, their friends Isabel Crook, Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, and, later, the translator Joan Pinkham, the daughter of Harry Dexter White.

    In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was great trepidation about China. When I visited the country decades earlier, I was confounded by the poverty in rural areas. But at the same time, I was taken by the dignity of a people inspired by the great history of the struggles that created the Chinese Revolution of 1949 who knew that they were building a socialist project. Bill held fast to Maoism, clear about the contradictions of the socialist project, as he wrote in Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution.

    Inequality had risen to high levels during the Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) years. In Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), I wrote about the Chinese Revolution with some of that pessimism, despite understanding the difficulties of building socialism in a poor country (the only place, after Russia, to try and do so since revolutions failed in the West). A few years after that, I read Ezra Vogel’s terrific assessment of Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which placed Deng’s decisions in 1978 in the context of the entire revolutionary process. That book gave me a better understanding of the Deng reforms. One of the key lessons I took away was that Deng had to confront the stagnation of the economy, allowing the market to advance the productive forces. Without that, it was clear that China – a poor, backward country – would slip into a socialism of despair. It had to pioneer a new approach. Of course, the Deng reforms turned toward market forces and opened the door to a very dangerous situation. Bill’s pessimism was a response to that reality.

    Sheyang Farmers Painting Institute (Jiangsu, China), part of the ‘farmers painting’ project, 2017.

    By the late 1990s, discussions began – including in the journals of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – to tackle rising rates of inequality and poverty through mass action. At the fifth plenum of the 16th CPC congress in October 2005, the party announced a ‘great historic mission’ to ‘construc[t] a new socialist countryside’, using the new phrase the ‘three rurals’ to refer to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. This mission sought to improve rural infrastructure through state investment, provide free and compulsory education, and develop cooperative medical services while retreating from the market reforms in the medical sector, the latter of which became a nationwide policy across China from 2009. It interested me that the campaign was run with a mass character and not bureaucratically, with thousands of CPC cadre involved in carrying out this mission. This was a forerunner of the poverty eradication campaign that would come a decade later.

    As this mission unfolded, I was very interested in the fact that places with ‘red resources’ were highlighted for action (such as Hailufeng in Guangdong Province, which was the heart of China’s first rural Soviet). It is telling that scholars in the West did not focus on these new shifts, fixated as they were on the country’s Pacific coastline rather than studying the conditions in China’s rural interior. Among the few exceptions are sincere people such as Professor Elizabeth Perry and Professor Minzi Su (the author of China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the ‘New Socialist Countryside’, 2009), who are ignored by most commentators on China.

    This push for a new socialist countryside enlivened the CPC and a tacit movement to counter pure free-market forces, which created the dynamic that led to Xi Jinping’s election as party leader in late 2012. Xi’s concern for the country’s rural areas comes from spending part of his youth in China’s underdeveloped northwest and from his time as the party secretary of the Ningde Prefecture in the late 1980s, which was then one of the poorest regions in Fujian Province. A widely acknowledged element of Xi’s leadership during this period is that he helped decrease poverty in that area and improve social indicators, making youth less prone to migrate to cities.

    Did China’s growth need to come at the expense of nature? In 2005, while in Huzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi laid out the ‘Two Mountains’ theory, which suggested that economic and ecological development must go hand in hand. This is evidenced by the fact that, from 2013 to 2020, particulate pollution in China decreased by 39.6%, increasing average life expectancy by two years. In 2023, Xi announced a new ecological strategy to build a ‘beautiful China’, which includes an environmental plan for rural areas.

    I was struck by some of your claims, in particular that ‘forcible return to the countryside is now state policy’, which I think bears special reflection due to it being part of the broader ‘new socialist countryside’ policy. It is true that President Xi has been talking about the need for rural revitalisation since 2017, and it is also true that various provinces (for instance, Guangdong) have action plans for college graduates to go to the countryside and participate in making the rural as attractive as the urban. However, this is not done by force, but by innovative programmes.

    Zhang Hailong (China), Horses and Herdsmen Series 3, 2022.

    At the frontlines of these programmes are youth, many of whom were among the three million cadres who went to villages as part of the policy to abolish extreme poverty (it is worth noting that 1,800 cadres died while carrying out this task). Xi is very sensitive, as Mao Zedong was, to the importance of party members experiencing the reality in rural China, given China’s vast rural landscape, and was himself sent to China’s rural northwest during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on this experience, Xi wrote in 2002: ‘At the age of 15, I came to Liangjiahe village perplexed and lost. At the age of 22, I left with a clear life goal and was filled with confidence’. There is something of this attitude in China’s policy. Is it bad for party members, many of whom might have jobs in the state apparatus, to spend time in the countryside? Not if you want them to better understand China’s reality.

    I have been to China many times over the past ten years and have travelled extensively in both rural and urban areas. The dual circulation strategy that Xi has pursued (driven by this ‘new socialist countryside’ policy) is of interest, and I have been working with a range of scholars to build up a detailed, empirical understanding of the Chinese project from within and through their own categories. That is the basis of the work we have been doing, some of it published in Wenhua Zongheng and some of it in the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study on the eradication of extreme poverty in China. Is it propaganda? I hope not. I hope that we are getting closer and closer to being able to offer a theoretical assessment of the Chinese Revolution as it proceeds forward. Is the revolution perfect? Not at all. But it requires understanding rather than clichés, which abound in the West when it comes to China.

    Abdurkerim Nasirdin (China), Young Painter, 1995.

    Take, for instance, the allegations of the oppression of Chinese Muslims (25 million or 1.8% of the total population). I remember being in Central Asia in the 2000s when al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a serious impact on the region, including through the offices of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU formulated a policy to take over the entire Xinjiang region, which is why some Uygurs moved to the leadership of Juma Namangani.

    The Turkistan Islamic Party, led by people close to al-Qaeda (such as Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s shura), was born out of those sorts of contacts. Bombings of public places became commonplace, including in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani, who in 2010 took over leadership from Abdul Haq (the engineer of the 2008 bombings in Beijing during the Olympics), was responsible for the Kashgar attacks in 2008 and 2011 and the Hotan attack in 2011. In 2013, this group moved to Syria, where I met a few of them on the Turkish-Syrian border. They are now based in Idlib and are a key part of the al-Qaeda formation there. This is their characteristic feature: not mere Turkic nationalism, but Islamic fundamentalism of the al-Qaeda variety.

    At the time, several approaches could have been taken to the insurgency. The one that the US and its allies in the region favoured was to use violence, including by attacking areas suspected of being run by these insurgents and arresting them en masse, with some of them ending up in US-run black sites. Many of the members of this group, including Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor, were killed by US drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Interestingly, China did not follow this approach. Some years ago, I interviewed former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who had turned away from violence and the ideology of al-Qaeda. Their group, the controversial Quilliam Foundation (based in London), was led by people such as Noman Benotman who followed the approach of the Egyptian ‘repentance’ and the Algerian ‘reconciliation’ projects. These programmes essentially tried to adopt both cognitive and behavioural approaches to deradicalisation (changing the ideology and stopping the violence, respectively). The former Libyan jihadis were eager to bring this approach to play both in Libya (which failed) and in the West (where many of them resettled), rather than the alternative of targeted violence and mass arrests. They were rebuffed (except in Germany, where the Hayat Programme was established in 2012). The problem with the violent approach that the West opted for instead was that it demonised all Muslims rather than merely trying to deradicalise those drawn into a toxic politics.

    In the case of China, rather than waging a frontal war against the radical groups in Xinjiang and then the society in which they lived and demonising all Muslims, the government sought to conduct forms of deradicalisation. It is useful to recall the meeting between the Chinese Islamic Association and the CPC in Beijing in 2019 that built on the Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam and sought to make Islam compatible with socialism. This is an interesting project, although it suffers from a lack of clarity. Making Islam Chinese is one part of the project; the other is to make the practice of Islam consonant with the socialist project. The latter is a sensible sociological approach for the modern world: to make religion – in a broader sense – compatible with modern values, and, in the case of China, with ‘core socialist values’ (such as combating gender discrimination).

    Liu Xiaodong (China), Belief, 2012.

    The former is harder to understand, and I have not truly grasped it. When it comes to the idea that religion must be aligned with modern values, especially socialist values, I am fully on board. How should this happen? Does one, say, ban certain practices (such as headscarves in France), or should one begin a process of debate and discussion with the leaders of religious communities (who are often the most conservative)? What does one do when confronted by an insurgency that has its roots outside the country, such as in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and even Syria, rather than inside the country, such as the contradictions in Xinjiang? These are all pressing dilemmas, but the ludicrous statements about genocide and so on pushed by US State Department and its cronies – including by dodgy people who work for dodgier ‘think tanks’ near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia – cannot be allowed to define our discussion within the left. We need a greater understanding of the matters at hand so as not to fall into the Biden-Netanyahu line of questioning, which boils down to the ‘do you condemn Hamas’ sort of debate.

    Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li (China), Mother on the Construction Site, 1984.

    In your email, you write that ‘there is no question that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people, especially city-dwellers, have improved dramatically over the last decades’. In fact, all the data – and my own travels – shows that this is not only the case ‘especially’ for city-dwellers but across the country and increasingly in the areas of the far west and far north. International Labour Organisation data, for instance, shows that China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7%, far and away above that of other countries in the Global South, and certainly higher than in India (1.3%) and the US (0.3%) In just eight years, from 2013 to 2021, the disposable per capita income of China’s 498 million rural residents increased by more than 72.6% while that of the 914 million residents of urban areas increased by 53.5%. Meanwhile, the gap of disposable income between rural and urban areas declined by 5% during this period, and the growth rate of disposable income of rural residents has outpaced that of urban residents for twelve consecutive years (2009–2021).

    Between 2012 and 2020, targeted poverty alleviation lifted 98.99 million people in rural areas out of extreme poverty and enabled every single family suffering from extreme poverty to receive assistance. As part of this innovative process, the CPC combined the training and development of grassroots cadres with digital technology, thus enhancing modern governance capabilities at the local level and enabling party members and cadres to serve the people more accurately and efficiently.

    For comparison, using the Gini index, which does not cover public services (ignoring items like subsidised rentals for rural homes), income inequality in India is 24% higher than in China.

    Those who look at the data on inequality in China often focus on China’s billionaires. That was clear in your email, which noted that China ‘is awash with state-subsidised millionaires and even billionaires. Indeed, a mounting class of super-bourgeoise, many of whom “invest abroad”’. Certainly, the reform era produced the social conditions for some people to get rich. However, that number is in decline: in 2023, of the 2,640 billionaires in the world, about 562 were in China, down from 607 in the previous year, and the last few CPC congresses have made it a priority to reverse the engine of this billionaire-production process. Of the 2,296 delegates to the 20th National Congress, only 18 were private sector executives, most of whom are from small and medium-sized enterprises, down from 34 who participated in 18th National Congress in 2012.

    As you might know, in 2021 Xi called for a policy of ‘common prosperity’ (a term first used by the CPC in 1953), which alarmed many of these billionaires. They have since sought to run for the hills (‘invest abroad’, as you say). However, China has very strong capital controls, allowing only $50,000 to be remitted overseas. A range of illegal operations have opened up in the past few years to assist the rich in exiting their cash, including through the more porous region of Hong Kong. But the state has been cracking down on this, as it has cracked down on corruption. In August 2023, the police arrested the leaders of an immigration firm in Shanghai that facilitated illegal foreign exchange transfers. The pressure on Jack Ma (fintech company Ant Group), Hui Ka Yan (property developer Evergrande), and Bao Fan (investment bank Renaissance Holdings) is indicative of the CPC’s current position regarding billionaires.

    You write that while living standards have improved in China, ‘socialism is not on the agenda in that country’. If not for the socialist agenda pursued by the CPC, how has China been able to abolish extreme poverty and bring down inequality rates, especially in times of rising global inequality when the social democratic agenda in the capitalist Global North and in large parts of the Global South has failed to come anywhere close to these achievements? It helps that large banks in China are under the control of the state so that large-scale capital can be managed efficiently to solve social problems, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. The class struggle continues in China, of course, and that class struggle impacts the CPC (with its extraordinary membership of 98 million).

    Wang Zihua (China), When the Wind Blows Through the Summer, 2022.

    I have tried not only to provide some facts to guide our discussion but also to thread them into the theory of socialism that I believe is most attractive. According to that theory, socialism is not an event but a process, and this process – rooted in the class struggle – goes in zigs and zags, a back-and-forth tension that is often accentuated by the urgent need to increase the productive forces in poor countries. It is important to accompany such processes rather than taking an omniscient standpoint.

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  • We Need to Reverse the Culture of Decay and March on the Street for a Culture of Humanity

    Michael Armitage (Kenya), The Promised Land, 2019.
    Michael Armitage (Kenya), The Promised Land, 2019.

    The final months of 2023 pierced our sense of hope and threw us into a kind of mortal sadness. Israel’s escalating violence has killed more than twenty thousand Palestinians to date, wiping out entire generations of families. Horrifying images and testimonies from Palestine have flooded all forms of media, stirring a deep sense of anguish and outrage among large sections of the global population. At the same time, in keeping with the zigs and zags of history, this collective sorrow has been transformed into collective strength. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have taken to the streets day after day, week after week, to express their vehement opposition to Israel’s Permanent Nakba against Palestinians. New generations around the world have been radicalised by the struggle for Palestinian emancipation and against the hypocrisy of the NATO-G7 bloc. Any remaining credibility held by Western ‘humanitarian’ rhetoric died on 8 December when the United States’ deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Robert Wood, raised his lonely hand in the United Nations Security Council to cast the sole vote against a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, using the US’s veto power to block the measure (this was the third time that the US has blocked a resolution calling for a ceasefire since 7 October).

    Meanwhile, south of Palestine, in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), the states of the world met for the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) on climate change from 30 November to 12 December. The official meetings seemed to be garrisoned by transnational energy companies, who stood alongside the former colonial powers in making solemn pronouncements while refusing to commit to reducing excess carbon emissions. None of the agreements reached in Dubai have the status of law; they are merely benchmarks that countries are not compelled to reach. ‘We didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era’, said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell. COP28, he continued, ‘is the beginning of the end’.

    After twenty-eight years of mediocrity, it would be fair to ask if Stiell was referring to the end of the world rather than the fossil fuel era. The former interpretation is supported by UN Secretary General António Guterres’s announcement in July that ‘The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived’. No protests were possible at Expo City Dubai, where COP28 was held. As COP28 ended, the centre had to be hastily emptied because Winter City needed to be set up in this desert port, where Santa and his reindeers, bathed in fake snow, invite Christmas shoppers to join their ‘vital eco-mission activities’. Far away from Dubai, protestors hold up signs that read, ‘The ocean is rising and so are we’.

    Emilio Vedova (Italy), Contemporary Crucifixion no. 4, 1953.
    Emilio Vedova (Italy), Contemporary Crucifixion no. 4, 1953.

    These protests for Palestine and for the planet bang at the door of modern civilisation, which is suffused with decay. The banality of social inequality and the normalisation of war belie the assumption that mass suffering and death are insurmountable and acceptable. It is not only political leaders who speak with iron in their voice, but also those who produce elements of our culture, whether in the entertainment or education industry. Concepts such as freedom and justice are treated as abstractions that can be bandied about here and there, mutilated by people who make war in their name. In politics, in entertainment, in education, and in other areas of modern life, these concepts are taken out of history and treated as products, just like the goods produced by workers are taken out of their context and treated as commodities. Freedom and justice are not abstractions but ideas and practices born of the brave struggles of hundreds of millions of people throughout history, ordinary people who sacrificed themselves for the good of future generations. They produced these words not for textbooks and courts of law, but for us to continue to refine and expand their meaning in our own fights and turn them into reality.

    We protest to give these concepts, freedom and justice, meaning and return them to their authentic history. We understand with great joy that humanity will only be redeemed through praxis, what Karl Marx defined as the ‘free, conscious activity’ that allows us to create and shape the reality around us. Standing up for one’s beliefs is not just about trying to change a policy, whether to stop a war or lessen social inequality; it is to radically refuse the culture of decay and affirm the culture of a possible humanity. Praxis does not take place as the noble activity of the individual, the lonely vigil conducted for moral reasons that are as abstract as the ahistorical use of the terms freedom and justice. Praxis can only inaugurate a new culture if it takes place collectively, producing as it marches a joyous set of new relationships and certainties.


    Antonio Jose Guzman (Panama) and Iva Jankovic (Yugoslavia), photograph of the work Transatlantic Stargate, 2023.

    The purpose of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is not to be the archivist of a decaying civilisation, but to be part of the great current of humanity that – through its praxis – will return genuine hope to the world. Our institute, which was launched in March 2018, has built a considerable body of work, including over seventy monthly dossiers, never missing a deadline. Last month, you received our seventy-first dossier, Culture as a Weapon of Struggle: The Medu Art Ensemble and Southern African Liberation, which celebrated and highlighted the necessity of cultural production rooted in praxis. The efficiency of the team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is remarkable. They work day and night to bring you the kind of material that is absent from our global dialogue. This coming year we plan to bring you twelve dossiers on the following topics:

    1. The new mood in the Global South and the churning of the global order, in collaboration with Global South Insights.
    2. The People’s Science Movement in Karnataka, India.
    3. Nepal and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, in collaboration with Bampanth (‘The Left’) magazine.
    4. Forty years of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil.
    5. Northeast Asia and the New Cold War, in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre and No Cold War.
    6. The Congolese struggle to control their own resources, in collaboration with the Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin.
    7. Multipolarity and Latin American development models.
    8. The cultural politics of the Telangana movement.
    9. Why the right is advancing in Latin America.
    10. The struggles of landless workers in Tanzania, in collaboration with the Movement of Agricultural Workers (MVIWATA).
    11. Transnational corporate corruption in Africa.
    12. The situation of the working class in Latin America.

    Your feedback, as always, is essential.

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  • The World’s Economic Centre of Gravity Is Returning to Asia

    Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963.

    Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963.

    In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following a modest post-pandemic recovery of 6.1% in 2021, economic growth in 2023 fell to 2.4%, below pre-pandemic levels, and is projected to remain at 2.5% in 2024. The global economy, UNCTAD says, is ‘flying at “stall speed”’, with all conventional indicators showing that most of the world is experiencing a recession.

    The latest notebook from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, questions the use of the term ‘recession’ to describe the current situation, arguing that it acts as ‘a smokescreen meant to hide the true nature of the crisis’. Rather, the notebook explains that ‘the prolonged and profound crisis that we are experiencing today is… a great depression’. Most governments in the world have used conventional tools to try and grow their way out of the great depression, but these approaches have placed an enormous cost on household budgets, which are already hit hard by high inflation, and have curbed the investments needed to improve employment prospects. As UNCTAD notes, central banks ‘prioritise short-term monetary stability over long-term financial sustainability. This trend, together with inadequate regulation in commodity markets and continuous neglect for rising inequality, are fracturing the world economy’. Our team in Brazil explores these matters further in the recently launched Financeirização do capital e a luta de classes (‘Financialisation of Capital and the Class Struggle’), the fourth issue of our Portuguese-language journal Revista Estudos do Sul Global (‘Journal of Global South Studies’).

    There are some exceptions to this rule, however. UNCTAD projects that five of the G20 countries will experience better growth rates in 2024: Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. There are different reasons why these countries are exceptions: in Brazil, for instance, ‘booming commodity exports and bumper harvests are driving an uptick in growth’, as UNCTAD writes, while Mexico has benefited from ‘less aggressive monetary tightening and an inflow of new investment to establish new manufacturing capacity, triggered by the bottlenecks that emerged in East Asia in 2021 and 2022’. What seems to unite these countries is that they have not tightened monetary policy and have used various forms of state intervention to ensure that necessary investments are made in manufacturing and infrastructure.

    Farhan Siki (Indonesia), Market Review on School of Athens, 2018.

    Farhan Siki (Indonesia), Market Review on School of Athens, 2018.

    The OECD’s Economic Outlook, published in November 2023, is consistent with UNCTAD’s assessment, suggesting that ‘global growth remains highly dependent on fast-growing Asian economies’. Over the next two years, the OECD estimates that this economic growth will be concentrated in India, China, and Indonesia, which collectively account for nearly 40% of the world population. In a recent International Monetary Fund assessment entitled ‘China Stumbles But Is Unlikely to Fall’, Eswar Prasad writes that ‘China’s economic performance has been stellar over the past three decades’. Prasad, the former head of the IMF’s China desk, attributes this performance to the large volume of state investment in the economy and, in recent years, to the growth of household consumption (which is related to the eradication of extreme poverty). Like others in the IMF and OECD, Prasad marvels at how China has been able to grow so fast ‘without many attributes that economists have identified as being crucial for growth – such as a well-functioning financial system, a strong institutional framework, a market-oriented economy, and a democratic and open system of government’. Prasad’s description of these four factors is ideologically driven and misleading. For instance, it is hard to think of the US financial system as ‘well-functioning’ in the wake of the housing crisis that triggered a banking crisis across the Atlantic world, or given that roughly $36 trillion – or a fifth of global liquidity – is sitting in illicit tax havens with no oversight or regulation.

    What the data shows us is that a set of Asian countries is growing very quickly, with India and China in the lead and with the latter having the longest sustained period of rapid economic growth over at least the past thirty years. This is uncontested. What is contested is the explanation for why China, in particular, has experienced such high rates of economic growth, how it has been able to eradicate extreme poverty, and, in recent decades, why it has struggled to overcome the perils of social inequality. The IMF and the OECD are unable to formulate a proper assessment of China because they reject – ab initio – that China is pioneering a new kind of socialist path. This fits within the West’s failure to comprehend the reasons for development and underdevelopment in the Global South more broadly.

    Over the past year, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has engaged with Chinese scholars who have been trying to understand how their country was able to break free of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ cycle. As part of this process, we collaborate with the Chinese journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横) to produce an international quarterly edition that collects the work of Chinese scholars who are experts on the respective topics and brings voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into dialogue with China. The first three issues have looked at the shifting geopolitical alignments in the world (‘On the Threshold of a New International Order’, March 2023), China’s decades-long pursuit of socialist modernisation (‘China’s Path from Extreme Poverty to Socialist Modernisation’, June 2023), and the relationship between China and Africa (‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’, October 2023).

    The latest issue, ‘Chinese Perspectives on Twenty-First Century Socialism’ (December 2023), traces the evolution of the global socialist movement and tries to identify its future direction. In this issue, Yang Ping, the editor of the Chinese-language version of Wenhua Zongheng, and Pan Shiwei, the honorary president of the Institute of Cultural Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, contend that a new period in socialist history is currently emerging. For Yang and Pan, this new ‘wave’ or ‘form’ of socialism, following the birth of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe and the rise of many socialist states and socialist-inspired national liberation movements in the twentieth century, began to emerge with China’s period of reform and opening up in the 1970s. They argue that, through a gradual process of reform and experimentation, China has developed a distinct socialist market economy. The authors both assess how China can strengthen its socialist system to overcome various domestic and international challenges as well as the global implications of China’s rise – that is, whether or not it can promote a new wave of socialist development in the world.

    Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), The Call of the Wild//Yawareté Tapuia, 2023.

    Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), The Call of the Wild//Yawareté Tapuia, 2023.

    In the introduction to this issue, Marco Fernandes, a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes that China’s growth has been sharply distinct from that of the West since it has not relied upon colonial plunder or the predatory exploitation of natural resources in the Global South. Instead, Fernandes argues that China has formulated its own socialist path, which has included public control over finance, state planning of the economy, heavy investments in key areas that generate not only growth but also social progress, and promoting a culture of science and technology. Public finance, investment, and planning allowed China to industrialise through advancements in science and technology and through improving human capital and human life.

    China has shared many of its lessons with the world, such as the need to control finance, harness science and technology, and industrialise. The Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old, is one avenue for such cooperation between China and the Global South. However, while China’s rise has provided developing countries with more choices and has improved their prospects for development, Fernandes is cautious about the possibility of a new ‘socialist wave’, warning that the obstinate facts facing the Global South, such as hunger and unemployment, cannot be overcome unless there is industrial development. He writes:

    this will not be attainable merely through relations with China (or Russia). It is necessary to strengthen national popular projects with broad participation from progressive social sectors, especially the working classes, otherwise the fruits of any development are unlikely to be reaped by those who need them the most. Given that few countries in the Global South are currently experiencing an upsurge in mass movements, the prospects for a global ‘third socialist wave’ remain very challenging; rather, a new wave of development with the potential to take on a progressive character, seems more feasible.

    This is precisely what we indicated in our July dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory. A future that centres the well-being of humankind and the planet will not materialise on its own; it will only emerge from organised social struggles.

    Philip Fagbeyiro (Nigeria), Streets of Insignificance, 2019.

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  • Transnational Corporations Provoke a Single Scream of Horror that Runs through the Vertebrae of the World

    Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.

    Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.

    Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and about the fact that discussions regarding regulations have been dominated by Global North countries (notably those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, an intergovernmental platform largely made up of the richest countries in the world). In October of last year, the government of Nigeria spearheaded a resolution in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that advocated for an international tax cooperation treaty and proposed that the UN take over jurisdiction of the debate about tax regulation. In December 2022, the UNGA passed the resolution, which asked Guterres to move forward with a report on the topic and develop a new international tax agenda.

    Guterres’s August 2023 report affirmed the need for an ‘inclusive and effective’ tax treaty, arguing that the two-pillar solution laid out in the OECD and G20’s Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting is insufficient. The second pillar in this solution discusses the development of a global minimum effective tax on ‘excess profits’. However, this tax would be levied on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, which would open the entire process to chaos. Furthermore, even though the OECD-G20 policy has been developed by a minority of countries, it is intended to become the global norm for all countries. Even when the OECD and G20 ask for inputs from other countries, Guterres writes, ‘many of those countries find that there are significant barriers to meaningful engagement in agenda-setting and decision making’. This, Guterres said, is unjust. The UN should be the site where a new international taxation treaty is created – not a site for arbitrary bodies such as the OECD and the G20 to impose their agendas.

    Arturo Rivera (Mexico), El Encuentro (‘The Meeting’), 2016.

    Arturo Rivera (Mexico), El Encuentro (‘The Meeting’), 2016.

    To be fair, the OECD has developed a number of important proposals, including a global tax deal in 2021 that was agreed upon by 136 countries. However, due to pressure from transnational corporations (and the United States government), the implementation of this agreement was delayed until 2026. Nonetheless, leaks from illicit tax havens (such as the Paradise Papers, beginning in 2017, and the Luxembourg Leaks, beginning in 2014) brought the issue of regulating of financial flows to the fore, pressuring the OECD and the G20 to act on its promises. An outcome statement from the OECD in July 2023 put the issue back on the table, with the two-pillar tax regime coming into effect in 2024. This regime institutes a global tax of at least 15% on transnational corporations’ profits that exceed €750 million in each jurisdiction. Even here, the regulations offer transnational corporations a safe harbour until June 2028 through practices such as a simplified effective tax rate, a routine profits test, and a de minimis test – all instruments that require some accounting training to properly understand. In other words, the system designed to regulate transnational corporations merely creates business opportunities for global accounting firms that help these companies continue to shield their profits. In 2022, the main four accounting firms earned between $34 and $60 billion each in revenues, and Deloitte alone earned $64.9 billion in 2023 (a 9.3% increase since last year).

    The Tax Justice Network’s annual report, published in July 2023, noted that the entire debate over taxes ‘boils down to one number: $4.8 trillion. That is how much tax we estimate wealthy corporations and individuals will avoid and evade over the next decade under the current direction of OECD tax leadership’. The data shows that ‘higher income countries lose the greatest amounts of revenue in absolute terms and also that they are responsible for the greatest share of the problem, globally’. The top ten contributors to global tax theft are, in descending order, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Bermuda, the United States, Singapore, Ireland, and Hong Kong (it is worth noting that both the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are British territories). Lower income countries, however, ‘incur the most intense losses, losing by far the greatest share of their current tax revenues or public spending needs’. For instance, as the OECD report Tax Transparency in Africa 2023 shows, the continent loses up to $88 billion each year due to illicit financial flows. In its report, the Tax Justice Network issued a clarion call:

    Countries have a choice to make: forfeit the money now, and with it our future, to the wealthiest handful of people in the world, or claim it, and with it a future where the power of the wealthiest corporations and billionaires, like the kings and barons before them, is reined in by the march of democracy. A future where tax is our most powerful tool for addressing the challenges our societies face and for building a fairer, greener, and more inclusive world.

    Wifredo Lam (Cuba), El Tercer Mundo, 1965–1966.

    Wifredo Lam (Cuba), El Tercer Mundo, 1965–1966.

    In 1975, the United Nations established the Information and Research Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). Two interconnected events led to its inception: first, the UNGA’s passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974, and second, the coup against the Popular Unity government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in September 1973. By 1972, Allende had taken leadership of the process to create the NIEO to allow countries such as Chile sovereignty over their raw materials. Allende spoke forcefully on these issues at the UNCTAD III meeting in Santiago in April 1972 and at the UNGA in December 1972 (which we discuss in more depth in our dossier The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973). The coup against Allende strengthened the will in the Third World to oversee and regulate transnational corporations such as the former telecommunications giant International Telegraph and Telephone Company (ITT) and copper firm Anaconda, both of which played a decisive role in the coup in Chile. The UNCTC was, therefore, the child of both the NIEO and the coup.

    The UNCTC’s mission was straightforward: build an information system about the activities of transnational corporations, create technical assistance programmes that help Third World governments negotiate with these firms, and establish a code of conduct that these firms would need to abide by with respect to their international activities. The UNCTC, with thirty-three employees, did not begin its work until 1977. From the start, it found itself under pressure levied by the International Chamber of Commerce as well as various US-based think tanks, which lobbied the US government to prevent it from functioning.

    Nonetheless, in its fifteen years of existence, UNCTC staff produced 265 documents that covered areas such as bilateral investment treaties and the social impact of transnational corporations. The UNCTC’s work was slowly inching toward creating a code of conduct for transnational firms, which would have hampered the ability of these firms to create a system of financial plunder through illicit financial flows (including transfer pricing and remittance of profits). In 1987, the UNGA urged the UNCTC to finalise the code of conduct and hold a special session to discuss the code.

    That same year, the Heritage Foundation, based in the US, argued that the UNCTC had a ‘deliberate anti-West and anti-free enterprise motive’. In March 1991, the US State Department sent a démarche to its embassies to lobby against the code of conduct, which it saw as a ‘relic of another era, when foreign direct investment was looked upon with considerable concern’. The session to finalise the code of conduct never took place. The US pushed the incoming UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to abolish the UNCTC, which he did as part of a broader UN reform agenda. This was the sunset of tax regulation. When the OECD picked up the mantle, it did so almost to ensure that a patina of liberalism would remain in place while transnational corporations operated in a largely lawless global environment.

    In 1976, the radical Peruvian poet Magda Portal (1900–1989) wrote ‘A Poem for Ernesto Cardenal’ (a Nicaraguan poet). The poem acknowledged that inequality and misery had been in our towns for centuries, but that what the ‘transnational corporations and their henchmen’ are doing is worse. As she wrote:

    On this side of America, you can feel the nauseating and toxic breath of those who only want our mines, our oil, our gold, and our food.
    …
    Never was more torment spread over the sleepless earth.
    It was not more execrable to continue living without shouting at the top of
    our lungs in a howl, the protest, the rejection, the demand for
    justice. To whom?

    How can we continue living like this on a daily basis,
    ruminating on food, loving and enjoying life when
    hundreds of thousands of condemned people on
    Earth are drowning in their own blood? And in Black Africa, with its apartheid
    and its Sowetos, and in Namibia and Rhodesia, and in Asia,
    in Lebanon and in Northern Ireland, on the rack
    of the executed? Can we continue living like this
    when a single scream of horror runs through
    the vertebrae of the world?

    The post Transnational Corporations Provoke a Single Scream of Horror that Runs through the Vertebrae of the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Suffocation of Democracy in India

    Photograph Source: Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs – GODL-India

    On December 18 and 19, 141 members of the two houses of India’s Parliament were suspended, as of December 19, by the Speaker of the lower house, Om Birla. Each of these members belongs to the parties that oppose the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government said that these elected members were suspended for “unruly behavior.” The opposition had shaped itself into the INDIA bloc, which included almost every party not affiliated with the BJP. They responded to this action by calling it the “murder of democracy” and alleging that the BJP government has installed an “extreme level of dictatorship” in India. This act comes after a range of attempts to undermine India’s elected opposition.

    Meanwhile, on December 18, the popular Indian news website Newsclick announced that India’s Income Tax (IT) department “has virtually frozen our accounts.” Newsclick can no longer make payments to its employees, which means that this news media portal is now close to being silenced. The editors at Newsclick said that this action by the IT department is “a continuation of the administrative-legal siege” that began with the Enforcement Directorate raids in February 2021, was deepened by the IT department survey in September 2021, and the large-scale raids of October 3, 2023, that resulted in the arrest of Newsclick’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its administrative officer Amit Chakraborty. Both remain in prison.

    Organs of Indian Democracy

    In February 2022, the Economist noted that “the organs of India’s democracy are decaying.” Two years before that assessment, India’s leading economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen said that “democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes. And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.” India’s most respected journalist, N. Ram (former editor of the Hindu), wrote in the Prospect in August 2023 about this “decaying” of Indian democracy and the fear of discussion in the context of the attack on Newsclick. This attack, he wrote, “marks a new low for press freedom in my country, which has been caught-up in a decade-long trend of uninterrupted down sliding in the ‘new India’ of Narendra Modi. We have witnessed a state-engineered McCarthyite campaign of disinformation, scaremongering, and vilification against Newsclick.” The world, he wrote, “should be watching in horror.”

    In May 2022, 10 organizations—including Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders—released a strong statement, saying that the Indian “authorities should stop targeting, prosecuting journalists and online critics.” This statement documented how the Indian government has used laws against counterterrorism and sedition to silence the media, when it has been critical of government policies. Use of technology—such as Pegasus—has allowed the government to spy on reporters and to use their private communications for legal action against them. Journalists have been physically attacked and intimidated (with special focus on Muslim journalists, journalists who cover Jammu and Kashmir, and journalists who covered the farmer protests of 2021-22). When the government began to target Newsclick, it was part of this broad assault on the media. That broader attack prepared the journalist associations to respond clearly when the Delhi Police arrested Purkayastha and Chakraborty. The Press Club of India noted that its reporters were “deeply concerned” about the events, while the Editor’s Guild of India said that the government must “not create a general atmosphere of intimidation under the shadow of draconian laws.”

    Role of the New York Times

    In April 2020, the New York Times ran a story with a strong headline about the situation of press freedom in India: “Under Modi, India’s Press Is Not So Free Anymore.” In that story, the reporters showed how Modi met with owners of the major media houses in March 2020 to tell them to publish “inspiring and positive stories.” When the Indian media began to report the government’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Modi’s government went to the Supreme Court to argue that all Indian media must “publish the official version.” The Court denied the government’s request that the media must only publish the government’s view but instead said that the media must publish the government’s view alongside other interpretations. Siddharth Varadarajan, editor of the Wire, said that the court’s order was “unfortunate,” and that it could be seen as “giving sanction for prior censorship of content in the media.”

    The Indian government’s “administrative-legal siege” on Newsclick began a few months later because the website had offered independent reporting not only on the COVID-19 pandemic but also on the movement to defend India’s constitution and on the movement of the farmers. Despite repeated searches and interrogations, the various agencies of the Indian government could not find any illegality in the operations of Newsclick. Vague suggestions about the impropriety of funding from overseas fell flat since Newsclick said that it followed Indian law in its receipt of funds.

    When the case against Newsclick appeared to go cold, the New York Times—in August 2023—published an enormously speculative and disparaging articleagainst the foundations that provided some of Newsclick’s funds. The day after the story appeared, high officials of the Indian government went on a rampage against Newsclick, using the story as “evidence” of a crime. The New York Times had been warned previously that this kind of story would be used by the Indian government to suppress press freedom. Indeed, the story by the New York Times provided the Indian government with the credibility to try and shut down Newsclick, which is what they are now doing with the IT department’s decision.

    Upside Down World

    The 141 members of Parliament are accused of trying to justify a breach of the parliament building that took place on December 13. Two men jumped from the press gallery into the hall and released smoke canisters to protestthe failure of the elected officials to debate issues of inflation, unemployment, and ethnic violence in Manipur. The men received passes to enter parliament from Pratap Simha, a parliamentarian of the BJP. He has not been suspended. The BJP used this incident to suspend the opposition parliamentarians because they either did not condemn the incident, or they came out in defense of colleagues who were suspended.

    Neither of the people who threw the smoke bombs into parliament nor those who planned that action have a political background, let alone any linkage to the opposition. Manoranjan D lost his job in an internet firm and had to return to assist his family work their farm; Sagar Sharma drove a taxi after he had to drop out of school due to financial problems at home. Azad had an MA, an MEd, and an MPhil, but could not find a job. These are young people frustrated with Modi’s India, but with no political connections. They tried to use normal democratic means to be heard but were not successful. Their act is one of desperation, a symptom of a broader social crisis; the suspension of the parliamentarians and the attack at Newsclick’s finances are also symptoms of that crisis: the suffocation of democracy in India.

    The post The Suffocation of Democracy in India appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • We Fight with Our Eyes. We Plant Seeds with Our Hands. We Will Watch the Wheat Fill the Valley

    Medu Art Ensemble (Botswana), Shades of Change, 1982. This two-man play, set in a prison cell, was written by Mongane Wally Serote. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

    In the ancient time of national liberation, when partisans walked among the people in rural hamlets or small towns, they carried their message forward in the palms of their hands, their rifles slung over their shoulders, newspapers and pamphlets in their bags. Given the prevalence of illiteracy in the colonised world, partisans often gathered people around small fires and read these texts aloud (it is fitting that the Latin word for ‘fire’ is focus). This literature of national liberation shared theories of exploitation and oppression that made sense to the people and encouraged them to join the struggle in their own way.

    The newspapers and pamphlets shared not only information, but also important analyses of the ongoing struggle, with original poems, plays, stories, and drawings woven throughout. Such imaginative works were published alongside texts of didactic instruction in periodicals like El Moudjahid (‘The Fighters’), the newspaper of the National Liberation Front of Algeria, Cờ Giải Phóng (‘Liberation Flag’), the newspaper of the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, and Al Hadaf (‘The Goal’), the magazine of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

    In Al Hadaf and in his novel Umm Sa’ad about a Palestinian woman who encourages her son to join the fedayeen (‘guerrillas’), Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972) showed that there can be no head without a heart. There can be no conceptualisation of the revolutionary tomorrow without a leap of the imagination to make the journey. Culture is the space not only to transmit the message, but also to visualise the future.

    Medu members Lulu Emmig and Thami Mnyele (seated at the table in the front, from left to right), and others attend a Woman’s Day function at the Swedish Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, 1981. Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Park

    Medu members Lulu Emmig and Thami Mnyele (seated at the table in the front, from left to right) attend a Woman’s Day function at the Swedish Embassy in Gaborone, Botswana, 1981. Credit: Sergio-Albio Gonzalez via Freedom Par

    Culture is a vital centre of struggle. It is where people see who they are, learn what they are capable of, and dare to imagine what they would like to build in this world. Art itself does not change the world, but without bringing imagination to life through art, we would resign ourselves to the present. Radical artists allude to reality, trying to raise the consciousness of people who might otherwise not have considered this or that aspect of their relationship with others. It is the role of art to focus the people’s attention and build their confidence to struggle against the misery inflicted upon the global majority. Building this focus and confidence paves the path for people’s organisations to carry this new consciousness forward and build a better world. The nineteenth century slogan of ‘art for art’s sake’ is a cry of despair against the actual purpose of art in our society: to breathe in the ugliness that surrounds us and breathe out the beauty that inspires us to change that dreadfulness.

    The latest dossier from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Culture as a Weapon of Struggle: The Medu Art Ensemble and Southern African Liberation, adopts this stance toward art and culture. Medu (which means ‘roots’ in Sesotho) was a collective built by artists involved in the southern African liberation struggles from 1979 to 1985. Among the sixty or so artists who belonged to the Medu collective were the influential poets Keorapetse William Kgositsile (South Africa’s first poet laureate) and Mongane Wally Serote (South Africa’s current poet laureate), writer Mandla Langa, musicians Jonas Gwangwa and Dennis Mpale, and visual artists Thamsanqa ‘Thami’ Mnyele and Judy Seidman. The dossier weaves together original interviews with many of the surviving artists and research that brings in the voices of those who did not survive the brutality of the apartheid regime. Based in Gaborone (Botswana), these artists came from a variety of political traditions, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, the African National Congress, and the South African Communist Party and were inspired by the broad tradition of national liberation movements from Vietnam to Chile. Together, the Medu collective built on Frantz Fanon’s idea that ‘it is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives. And this dual emergence, in fact, is the unique focus of all culture’.

    December 16 – Heroes Day, 1983. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

    Medu Art Ensemble (Botswana), December 16 – Heroes Day, 1983. Credit: Medu Art Ensemble via Freedom Park

    Medu, like other artists’ collectives rooted in national liberation, drew their inspiration from popular struggles, such as the fights to win control of the land, create an international anti-colonial project (the Pan-African movement), and build a national liberation project (as articulated in South Africa’s 1955 Freedom Charter). These were the resources that gave confidence to the artists in Medu as they painted and sang amongst the people who took part in the Durban strikes of 1973 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976.

    From this energy and from their own practice, Medu produced a theory of art centred on three key principles: art is a necessary weapon of struggle; art must be produced in collectives that work in communion with the people; art must be made to be understood by the people. These three principles were articulated in their internal debates and in gatherings such as the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts (held in July 1982 in Gaborone), which brought together hundreds to thousands of cultural workers from inside and outside South Africa to advance the cultural battle against South African apartheid. Together, Medu built up a distinct body of thought and theory of socialist art.

    Then, on the night of 13 June 1985, a military detachment of the South African apartheid state crossed the border into Botswana and descended upon the homes of many exiled South African artists and activists. Two of the twelve people assassinated that night were Medu members, including the key visual and poster artist Thami Mnyele. The group’s ability to continue their work and advance their thinking was destroyed.

    Apartheid regimes fear the inspirational power of the arts and the imagination. They respond with violence.

    Organisers prepare for the first session of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts, Gaborone, Botswana, 1982. Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

    Organisers prepare for the first session of the Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival of the Arts in Gaborone, Botswana, 1982. Credit: Anna Erlandsson via Freedom Park

    Thirty-eight years later, this war against art and culture continues, as we are witnessing in apartheid Israel’s genocidal rampage against Palestinians. Amongst the many painters and artists killed during this bombardment are the painter Heba Zagout (1984–2023), the muralist Mohammed Sami Qariqa (1999–2023), the poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada (1991–2023), and the poet Refaat Alareer (1979–2023). Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’, written in 2011, has resonated deeply with people across the world since he was assassinated by the Israeli Occupation Forces on 7 December.

    If I must die
    let it bring hope
    let it be a tale.

    The Israelis know the power of words. General Moshe Dayan once said that reading a poem by Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) was like ‘facing twenty enemy commandos’. In her poem ‘Martyrs of the Intifada’, Tuqan wrote of the Palestinian stone throwers. The poem itself is a stone thrown at Israel:

    They drew up the map of the road to life
    they paved it with precious stones and with their young hearts
    they raised their hearts as stones on their palms
    embers and flame
    and with these they pelted the monster of the road,
    now is the time to show courage and strength,
    their voice was heard strong everywhere
    it reverberated everywhere
    and there was courage and strength
    they died standing
    blazing on the road
    shining like stars
    their lips pressed to the lips of life.

    The post We Fight with Our Eyes. We Plant Seeds with Our Hands. We Will Watch the Wheat Fill the Valley first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Your Enemies Destroyed One Palestine; My Wounds Populated Many Palestines

    Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

    Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.

    The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the debris from the first rounds of Israeli bombs could be cleared, the bombing resumed just as viciously as before.

    The word ‘humanitarian’ has been severely bruised by the West. You might remember another phrase, ‘humanitarian intervention’, that was used as cover for the destruction of Libya in 2011 after the legitimacy of Western military intervention had been eviscerated by the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003. To rehabilitate this legitimacy, the West pushed the United Nations to hold a conference that resulted in a new doctrine, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which, while purporting to ‘ensure that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, instead provided the West with a UN Security Council mandate (under Chapter VII of the UN Charter) for the use of force. The attack on Libya in 2011 took place under this doctrine. The guise of humanitarianism was used to destroy the Libyan state and throw the country into what appears to be a permanent civil war. There has never been even a whiff of R2P when it comes to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza (not in 2008–09, not in 2014, and not now).

    It does not seem to matter that more Palestinians have been displaced and killed by Israel since 7 October than were displaced and killed in the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948. If the word ‘humanitarian’ meant something in 1948, it certainly does not mean much now.

    Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

    Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), The Looting of the Museum of Art, 2003.

    As the numbers of the dead and displaced increase, a sense of numbness grows. It began with a hundred dead, then a hundred more, and is rapidly escalating into the tens of thousands. In Iraq, approximately a million people were killed by the US onslaught, the sheer scale of death and the anonymity surrounding it forcing a sense distance from the rest of the world. It is difficult to wrap one’s head around these numbers unless there are stories attached to each of the dead and displaced.

    Part of the problem here is that the international division of humanity makes for unjust accounting of human life: were the Palestinians killed in Gaza treated with as much dignity as the Israelis killed on 7 October? Are their lives, and deaths, assigned equal worth? The uneven response to these deaths, alongside the uncritical acceptance of this unevenness, suggests that this international division of humanity remains in place and is not only accepted, but also perpetuated, by Western leaders, who make allowances for the killing of more brown bodies than white ones, the latter seen as precious, the former seen as disposable.

    Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

    Abdel Rahman al-Muzayen (Palestine), Untitled, 2000.

    During the ‘humanitarian pause’, a hostage transfer took place through which Hamas and the Palestinian factions released 110 Israelis while Israel released 240 Palestinian women and children. The stories of the Israeli casualties, many of them residents of settlements near the Gaza perimeter fence, and other hostages such as the Thai and Nepalese fieldworkers are now well-known. Less frequently discussed and much less understood are the stories of the Palestinian casualties. Equally disregarded is the fact that after 7 October, Israel launched a mass campaign to detain over 3,000 Palestinians, including nearly 200 children. There are more Palestinians in Israeli prisons now than before 7 October. During the first four days of the truce alone, Israel arrested almost as many Palestinians as it released through the hostage transfer.

    It is of note that most (more than two-thirds) of the Palestinians released from Israeli prisons are never charged with any crime and have been held in ‘administrative detention’ in the military’s legal system, meaning that they are held without a time limit, ‘without trial [and] without having committed an offence, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future’, as defined by the human rights organisation B’tselem. Some of them have been lost in the maze of the Israeli incarceration system indefinitely, unable to exercise even the most basic right of habeas corpus, with no court appearance, no access to a lawyer, and no access to the evidence against them. Israel currently holds more than 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of them associated with left-wing factions (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). More than 2,000 of these prisoners are being held in administrative detention.

    Many of these Palestinian prisoners are children. Many of them spend years in the Israeli system, often under administrative detention, unable to make a case for their release. The Defence for Children International (Palestine) reports that 500–700 children are detained each year, and a chilling report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2015 showed that Israel is in full violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990). Article 37 of the convention says that the ‘arrest, detention, or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’. As multiple cases show, Israel uses arrests as a measure of first resort and holds children for long periods of time.

    Defence for Children International studied sworn affidavits from 766 child detainees from the occupied West Bank arrested between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022. The following data emerged from their analysis:

    75% were subjected to physical violence.
    80% were strip-searched.
    97% were interrogated without a family member present.
    66% were not properly informed of their rights.
    55% were shown or made to sign a paper in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand.
    59% were arrested at night.
    86% were not informed of the reason for their arrest.
    58% were subjected to verbal abuse, humiliation, or intimidation during or after their arrest.
    23% were detained in solitary confinement for interrogation purposes for a period of two or more days.

    Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

    Sliman Mansour (Palestine), Prison, 1982.

    There are thousands of untold stories of the brutality inflicted upon Palestinian children. One of them, Ahmad Manasra, was arrested on 12 October 2015 at the age of thirteen in occupied East Jerusalem on the charge that he stabbed two Israelis: Yosef Ben-Shalom, a twenty-year-old security guard, and Naor Shalev Ben-Ezra, a thirteen-year-old boy, who survived the attack. The Israeli courts initially found Ahmad guilty of the stabbing but then changed their opinion to say that his fifteen-year-old cousin Hassan Khalid Manasra, who was shot dead at the scene, had stabbed the two Israelis. There was no evidence of Ahmad’s complicity, yet he was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison.

    Still in prison, Ahmad Manasra (now 21) has been held in solitary confinement for months on end. Khulood Badawi of Amnesty International said in late September that Ahmad ‘was taken to the mental health unit at Ayalon prison after spending the better part of two years in solitary confinement. The Israeli Prison Service has requested an extension of Ahmad’s isolation for another six months in brazen violation of international law. Prolonged solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment’.

    Ahmad’s case took place during a wave of what were called ‘knife attacks’, when young Palestinians were accused of rushing at Israeli military posts with knives and were then shot dead. At that time, I investigated several of these attacks and found them to be based on little more than the word of Israeli soldiers. For instance, on 17 December 2015, Israeli soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint shot fifteen-year-old Abdullah Hussein Ahmad Nasasra to death. Eyewitnesses told me that the boy had his hands in the air when he was fatally shot. One of them, Nasser, told me that there was no knife, and that he ‘saw them kill the boy’. Kamal Badran Qabalan, an ambulance driver, was not allowed to retrieve the body. The Israelis wanted control over the body and the story they would tell about it.

    Another story is that of twenty-three-year-old Anas al-Atrash in Hebron. Anas and his brother Ismail returned home from a week of work in Jericho, their car filled with fruits and vegetables. At a checkpoint, Anas got out of the car when instructed to do so and an Israeli soldier shot him dead. The next morning, Israeli media reported that Anas tried to kill the Israeli soldiers. The journalist Ben Ehrenreich, who reported the story with a fierce determination for the truth, sought out the family’s version. Anas had no interest in politics, they told him. He was studying accounting and hoped to get married soon. The Israeli soldiers and intelligence officials kept asking Ismail if his brother had a knife. There was simply no knife. Anas had been killed in cold blood. ‘This is a savage country’, an eyewitness told Ehrenreich. ‘They have no shame’. He meant the Israeli soldiers.

    Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

    Hakim Alakel (Yemen), from the series The Eye of the Bird, 2013.

    The grammar of the Israeli occupation is to put pressure on Palestinians until an act of violence takes place – a knife attack, say, or even a fabricated knife attack – and then use that event as an excuse to deepen the displacement of Palestinians with more illegal settlements. The events that have followed 7 October maintain this logic. Israel has used people like Anas, Abdullah, and Ahmad, and the fabricated narratives surrounding their alleged crimes, as the raison d’etre to increase the demolition of Palestinian homes and expand illegal Israeli settlements, accelerating the Permanent Nakba.

    Ten years ago, I met with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who teaches at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shaloub-Kevorkian studies how the occupation produces an everyday form of victimhood that stretches from the streets to Palestinians’ most intimate of spaces. Her book Security Theology, Surveillance, and the Politics of Fear (2015) provides a glimpse into the industry of fear that is produced and reproduced in the everyday violence inflicted upon Palestinians by settlers and the military, including the difficulties that Palestinians face in giving birth and burying their dead. The depth of the violence and uncertainty, Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes, moves Palestinian women to speak of ‘being choked, suffocated, or gagged’ and has led many of their children to lose their will to live. There is widespread social trauma in Palestine or what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls ‘sociocide’: the death of society.

    More than fifty years of an occupation and war have created a strange dynamic. Both Ehrenreich and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work offer windows into this madness. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who lives in Jerusalem, told me that she is part of a group of women who walk Palestinian children to school each day, since it is too dangerous for them to confront the police and the settlers on their own, or even in the company of their Palestinian family and friends. ‘Bikhawfuni!’ (‘They scare me!’), one girl, Marah (age 8), told her.

    The children draw pictures at school. One of them drew a clown, a Palestinian clown. When Shalhoub-Kevorkian asked the child (age 9) what a Palestinian clown is, he explained, ‘This is a Palestinian clown. Clowns in Palestine cry’.

    Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

    Abdul Rahim Nagori (Pakistan), Sabra and Shatila, 1982.

    The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who moved to Beirut to edit the magazine Lotus in the aftermath of the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, wrote with horror about the plight and struggles of the Palestinians:

    Tere aaqa ne kiya ek Filistin barbaad
    Mere zakhmon ne kiye kitne Filistin aabaad.

    Your enemies destroyed one Palestine.
    My wounds populated many Palestines.

    Faiz’s poem ‘A Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, written during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reflects the reality facing Palestinian children today:

    Don’t cry children.
    Your mother has just cried herself to sleep.

    Don’t cry children.
    Your father has just left this world of sorrow.

    Don’t cry children,
    Your brother is in an alien land.
    Your sister too has gone there.

    Don’t cry children.
    The dead sun has just been bathed and the moon is buried in the courtyard.

    Don’t cry children.
    For if you cry,
    Your mother, father, brother, and sister
    And the sun, and the moon
    Will make you cry ever more.

    Maybe if you smile,
    They’ll one day return, disguised
    to play with you.

    The post Your Enemies Destroyed One Palestine; My Wounds Populated Many Palestines first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ExxonMobil Wants to Start a War in South America

    On December 3, 2023, a large number of registered voters in Venezuela voted in a referendum over the Essequibo region that is disputed with neighboring Guyana. Nearly all those who voted answered yes to the five questions. These questions asked the Venezuelan people to affirm the sovereignty of their country over Essequibo. “Today,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, “there are no winners or losers.” The only winner, he said, is Venezuela’s sovereignty. The principal loser, Maduro said, is ExxonMobil.

    In 2022, ExxonMobil made a profit of $55.7 billion, making it one of the world’s richest and most powerful oil companies. Companies such as ExxonMobil, exercise an inordinate power over the world economy and over countries that have oil reserves. It has tentacles across the world, from Malaysia to Argentina. In his Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012), Steve Coll describes how the company is a “corporate state within the American state.” Leaders of ExxonMobil have always had an intimate relationship with the U.S. government: Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond (Chief Executive Officer from 1993 to 2005) was a close personal friend of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and helped shape the U.S. government policy on climate change; Rex Tillerson (Raymond’s successor in 2006) left the company in 2017 to become the U.S. Secretary of State under President Donald Trump. Coll describes how ExxonMobil uses U.S. state power to find more and more oil reserves and to ensure that ExxonMobil becomes the beneficiary of those finds.

    Walking through the various polling centers in Caracas on the day of the election, it was clear that the people who voted knew exactly what they were voting for: not so much against the people of Guyana, a country with a population of just over 800,000, but they were voting for Venezuelan sovereignty against companies such as ExxonMobil. The atmosphere in this vote—although sometimes inflected with Venezuelan patriotism—was more about the desire to remove the influence of multinational corporations and to allow the peoples of South America to solve their disputes and divide their riches among themselves.

    When Venezuela Ejected ExxonMobil

    When Hugo Chávez won the election to the presidency of Venezuela in 1998, he said almost immediately that the resources of the country—mostly the oil, which finances the country’s social development—must be in the hands of the people and not oil companies such as ExxonMobil. “El petroleo es nuestro” (the oil is ours), was the slogan of the day. From 2006, Chávez’s government began a cycle of nationalizations, with oil at the center (oil had been nationalized in the 1970s, then privatized again two decades later). Most multinational oil companies accepted the new laws for the regulation of the oil industry, but two refused: ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil. Both companies demanded tens of billions of dollars in compensation, although the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) found in 2014 that Venezuela only needed to pay ExxonMobile $1.6 billion.

    Rex Tillerson was furious, according to people who worked at ExxonMobil at that time. In 2017, the Washington Post ran a story that captured Tillerson’s sentiment: “Rex Tillerson got burned in Venezuela. Then he got revenge.” ExxonMobil signed a deal with Guyana to explore for off-shore oil in 1999 but did not start to explore the coastline till March 2015—after the negative verdict came in from the ICSID. ExxonMobil used the full force of a U.S. maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela both to cement its projects in the disputed territory and to undermine Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo region. This was Tillerson’s revenge.

    ExxonMobil’s Bad Deal for Guyana

    In 2015, ExxonMobil announced that it had found 295 feet of “high-quality oil-bearing sandstone reservoirs”; this is one of the largest oil finds in recent years. The giant oil company began regular consultation with the Guyanese government, including pledges to finance any and every upfront cost for the oil exploration. When the Production Sharing Agreement between Guyana’s government and ExxonMobil was leaked, it revealed how poorly Guyana fared in the negotiations. ExxonMobil was given 75 percent of the oil revenue toward cost recovery, with the rest shared 50-50 with Guyana; the oil company, in turn, is exempt from any taxes. Article 32 (“Stability of Agreement”) says that the government “shall not amend, modify, rescind, terminate, declare invalid or unenforceable, require renegotiation of, compel replacement or substitution, or otherwise seek to avoid, alter, or limit this Agreement” without the consent of ExxonMobil. This agreement traps all future Guyanese governments in a very poor deal.

    Even worse for Guyana is that the deal is made in waters disputed with Venezuela since the 19th century. Mendacity by the British and then the United States created the conditions for a border dispute in the region that had limited problems before the discovery of oil. During the 2000s, Guyana had close fraternal ties with the government of Venezuela. In 2009, under the PetroCaribe scheme, Guyana bought cut-price oil from Venezuela in exchange for rice, a boon for Guyana’s rice industry. The oil-for-rice scheme ended in November 2015, partly due to lower global oil prices. It was clear to observers in both Georgetown and Caracas that the scheme suffered from the rising tensions between the countries over the disputed Essequibo region.

    ExxonMobil’s Divide and Rule

    The December 3 referendum in Venezuela and the “circles of unity” protest in Guyana suggest a hardening of the stance of both countries. Meanwhile, at the sidelines of the COP-28 meeting, Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali met with Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves to talk about the situation. Ali urged Díaz-Canel to urge Venezuela to maintain a “zone of peace.”

    War does not seem to be on the horizon. The United States has withdrawn part of its blockade on Venezuela’s oil industry, allowing Chevron to restart several oil projects in the Orinoco Belt and in Lake Maracaibo. Washington does not have the appetite to deepen its conflict with Venezuela. But ExxonMobil does. Neither the Venezuelan nor the Guyanese people will benefit from ExxonMobil’s political intervention in the region. That is why so many Venezuelans who came to cast their vote on December 3 saw this less as a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana and more as a conflict between ExxonMobil and the people of these two South American countries.

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post ExxonMobil Wants to Start a War in South America appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Dangerously Appealing Style of the Far Right

    Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina), Arlequín (‘Harlequin’), 1928.

    Before he won Argentina’s presidential election on 19 November, Javier Milei circulated a video of himself in front of a series of white boards. Pasted on one board were the names of various state institutions, such as the ministries of health, education, women and gender diversities, public works, and culture, all recognised as typical elements of any modern state project. Walking along the board, Milei ripped off the names of these and other ministries while crying afuera! (‘out!’) and declaring that if elected president, he would abolish them. Milei vowed not only to shrink the state but to ‘blow up’ the system, often appearing at campaign events with a chainsaw in hand.

    The reaction to Milei’s viral video and other such stunts was as polarised as the Argentinian electorate. Half of the population thought that Milei’s agenda was madness, the sign of a far right out of touch with reality and rationality. The other half thought that Milei displayed precisely the kind of boldness required to transform a country mired in poverty and skyrocketing inflation. Milei did not just win the election; he won it handily, defeating the outgoing government’s finance minister, Sergio Massa, whose stale, centrist promises of stability did not sit well with a population that has lived with instability for decades.

    Milei’s proposals to solve the downward spiral of the Argentinian economy are not unique, nor are they practical. Dollarisating the economy, privatisating state functions, and suppressing workers’ organisations are pillars of the neoliberal austerity agenda that has plagued the world for the past several decades. To debate Milei on this or that policy misses the point behind the ascendancy of the far right across the world. It is not what they say they will do to solve the world’s actual problems that matters so much as how they say it. In other words, for politicians like Milei (or Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and former US President Donald Trump), it is not their policy proposals that are attractive, but their style – the style of the far right. People like Milei promise to take the country’s institutions by the throat and make them cough up solutions. Their boldness sends a frisson through society, a jolt that masquerades as a plan for the future.

    Fátima Pecci Carou (Argentina), Evita Ninja, 2020.

    There was a time when the general mood of the international middle class centred on guaranteeing convenience: they hated the inconvenience of being stuck in traffic jams and queues, of being unable to get their children into the school of their choice, and of being unable to buy – even if by credit – the consumption goods that made them feel culturally superior to each other and to the working class. If the middle class was not inconvenienced, then that class – which shapes the electorate of most liberal democracies – would be content with promises of stability. But when the entire system convulses with inconveniences of one kind or another – such as inflation, the rate of which was 142.7% in Argentina at the start of the elections in October – then the assurance of stability holds little weight. The political forces of the centre, such as of Milei’s opponent, are trapped in a habit of speaking about stability while their country burns. They promise little more than incremental destruction. In this context, timidity is not always attractive to the middle class, let alone to workers and peasants, who require a bold vision rather than a fixation on mild cost-of-living increases alongside taxation holidays for big businesses.

    This timidity is not merely about the character of the political force that seizes the moment. If that were the case, then merely shouting louder should win the centre-left and left votes. Rather, it reflects the increasing timidity of the centre-left and its political platform, deflated by the immense stresses and strains that have damaged society at the neurological level. The precariousness of employment, the state’s retreat from providing care for its people, the privatisation of leisure, the individualisation of education, and other strains have, together, produced overwhelming social problems (not to mention the impact of the climate catastrophe and brutal wars). The political horizon of large sections of the centre-left has been reduced to merely managing this decaying civilisation (as our latest dossier, What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America?, points out). The persistent failure of governments to solve the problems of society has made politics itself foreign to large sections of the public.

    Two generations of people have been raised in the world of austerity, sold falsehoods by technocratic experts who promise to improve their social condition through neoliberal economic growth. Why should they believe any expert who now cautions against the economic cannibalism promoted by the far right? Besides, the erosion of education systems and the reduction of the mass media into a gladiatorial contest have meant that there are few avenues for serious public discussion about the troubles facing our societies and the solutions needed to address them. Anything can be promised, anything can be implemented, and even when neoliberal agendas create catastrophic outcomes – as with Modi’s demonetisation scheme in India – they are touted as successes and their leaders are celebrated.

    Neoliberalism has increased not only the precariousness of the global majority, but also sentiments of anti-intellectualism (the death of the expert and expertise) and anti-democratisation (the death of serious, democratic public education and discussion). In this context, Milei’s triumph is less about him than it is a product of a broader social process, one that is not exclusive to Argentina but holds true around the world.

    Raquel Forner (Argentina), Mujeres del Mundo (‘Women of the World’), 1938.

    Pillars of neoliberalism such as the privatisation and commodification of state functions created the social conditions for the rise of twin problems: corruption and crime. The deregulation of private enterprise and the privatisation of state functions have deepened the nexus between the political class and the capitalist class. Granting state contracts to private enterprises and cutting back on regulations, for instance, has provided immense avenues for bribes, kickbacks, and transfer payments to proliferate. Simultaneously, the increased precarity of life and the evisceration of social welfare increased the volume of petty crime, including through the drug trade (as demonstrated by a Tricontinental research project on the war on drugs and imperialism’s addictions, which will bear fruit soon).

    The far right has fixated on these problems not in an effort to address the roots of the problem, but to achieve two results:

    1. By attacking the corruption of state officials but not of capitalist enterprises, the far right has been able to further delegitimise the state’s role as a guarantor of social rights.
    2. Using the general social malaise around petty crime, the far right has used every instrument of the state – which they otherwise decry – to attack the communities of the poor, garrison them under the guise of crime prevention, and rob them of any self-representation. This attack is extended against anyone who gives voice to the working class and the poor, from journalists to human rights defenders, from left politicians to local leaders.

    The far right’s misleading representation and weaponisation of corruption and crime has placed the left at a deep disadvantage. On these issues, the far right has an intimate relationship with old social democracy and traditional liberalism, who generally accept the content of the far-right agenda, objecting only to their brash approach. This leaves the left with few political allies when it comes to these core battles, forcing it to defend the state form despite the corruption that has become endemic to it through neoliberal policy. Meanwhile, the left must continue to defend working-class communities from state repression, despite the real problems of crime and insecurity that confront the working class due to the collapse of employment and social welfare. The dominant debate is framed around the surface-level realities of corruption and crime and is not permitted to probe deeper into the neoliberal roots of these problems.

    Diana Dowek (Argentina), Las madres (‘The Mothers’), 1983.

    When the election results came in from Argentina, I asked our colleagues in Buenos Aires and La Plata to send me some songs that capture the current mood. Meanwhile, I buried myself in Argentinian poetry of loss and defeat, mostly the work of Juana Bignozzi (1937–2015). However, this was not the mood they wanted to put forward in this newsletter. They wanted something robust, something that reflects the boldness with which the left must respond to our current moment. This mood is captured by the rapper Trueno (b. 2002) and the singer Víctor Heredia (b. 1947), crossing generations and genres to produce the moving song Tierra Zanta (‘Sacred Earth’) and an equally moving video. And so, from Argentina:

    I came into the world to defend my land.
    I am the peaceful saviour in this war.
    I will die fighting, firm as a Venezuelan.
    I am Atacama, Guaraní, Coya, Barí, and Tucáno.
    If they want to throw the country at me, we’ll lift it up.

    We Indians built empires with our hands.
    Do you hate the future? I come with my brothers and sisters
    from different parents, but we don’t stay apart.
    I am the fire of the Caribbean and a Peruvian warrior.
    I thank Brazil for the air that we breathe.

    Sometimes I lose, sometimes I win.
    But it is not in vain to die for the land that I love.
    And if outsiders ask what my name is,
    my name is ‘Latin’ and my surname is ‘America’.

     

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Are There Any Paranoids in the Stadium Tonight? Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters

    Photograph Source: Fronteira – CC BY-SA 4.0

    No one does a stadium show like Roger Waters. The music, of course, is resplendent, but so too are the soundscape, the images, the giant sheep and pig, the lasers, the films, the energy of the fans who—despite the language differences—sing along… “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” It is a riot of emotions. The quiet calm of Santiago is broken by familiar sounds and necessary feelings: yes, we are here; yes, we exist; yes, we must resist.

    Santiago is a city blistered by social inequality. For two nights, Roger Waters played at the Estadio Monumental in Macul, a commune of Santiago that is more middle-class than the rest of the city although still not immune from the sharp divides that produced the massive social unrest of 2019. Then Roger sang a version of Víctor Jara’s El derecho de vivir en paz, with new lyrics for the new moment:

    I can hear the Cacerolazo
    I can smell you, Piñera
    All fucking rats smell the same.

    The Cacerolazo is the banging of pots, a social protest that resounded from Buenos Aires (2001) to Santiago (2011 and then again from 2019 to 2022). There is a good reason to walk on the streets and bang pots every day given the permanent condition of austerity reproduced by people like Chile’s former president Sebastían Piñera, one more of the “fucking rats” that make life hell. There is the austerity, the demise of social welfare and decent work, and the rise of poverty and social despair. Then there are the sharpened contradictions, the anger that sometimes gives rise to hope in madmen (Argentina’s incoming president Javier Milei is one of them) and at other moments, it gives rise to disorganized and organized forms of dissent.

    A sheep flies over the tens of thousands of people in the stadium. It is the physical cognate of the song that flies off the stage, a paean to the atomization of people in society by this State of Permanent Austerity and of the necessity of resistance.

    Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
    Master the art of karate
    Lo, we shall rise up,
    And then we’ll make the bugger’s eyes water

    Why not? Why not rise up? Sure, run like hell, run as fast as you can from the forces of repression that want to manage the contradictions of austerity. But then—as Roger does, as that sound of the hammer battering down your door quietens—take off the shirt that says, “run like hell” and put on one that says, “Resist.” The guitars tear through the night, the lasers flash to infinity, and the desire increases to rip off one’s fear of the State of Permanent Austerity and to rush into protest. But the images are chosen carefully. This is not a call for action without strategy. “Master the art of karate,” sings Roger. Like the karateka, dedicated study is needed, and the battlefield must certainly be approached with care to “make the bugger’s eyes water” and to do that with careful strategy.

    The hammer’s sound is both that of the march of the police—in Chile the hated Carabineros—and the banging of the tools of the people, including the pots and pans. The stadium is engulfed by the madness of the electric guitar (particularly when Dave Kilminster has his eyes closed and his fingers aflame), heartbeats symphonized drawing people into Roger’s bar, a bottle of mezcal on the piano, Roger with his arms in the air, the night sky clear and hopeful because not far away is the dawn.

    Universal Human Rights

    About five kilometers from the Estadio Monumental is the Estadio Nacional, where Víctor Jara was assassinated by the coup regime of Augusto Pinochet 50 years ago. A few days before Roger’s show in Santiago, Victor’s wife, Joan Jara died, but their daughter Amanda was there to listen to Roger recognize the assassination of Víctor Jara and to Inti-Illimani open the show with a tribute to Víctor, including singing a full-throated version of El derecho, itself a tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese fighters.

    Donde revientan la flor
    Con genocidio y napalm
    (Where they burst the flower
    With genocide and napalm)

    Jorge Coulón from Inti-Illimani belted out those lines with a kufiyah around his neck. Roger, with his acoustic guitar and kufiyah and with the haunting voice of Shanay Johnson alongside him, sings, lay down Jerusalem, lay your burden down.

    If I had been god
    I would not have chosen anyone
    I would have laid an even hand
    On all my children everyone
    Would have been content
    To forgo Ramadan and Lent
    Time better spent
    In the company of friends
    Breaking bread and mending nets.

    “Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head.

    Roger was born in England in 1943 to a communist mother, Mary Duncan Whyte (1913-2009). His father—Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, also a communist—was killed in Italy in 1944 (immortalized in my favorite song, The Gunner’s Dream from Final Cut, 1983). Five years later, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics.

    “Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us is supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights, including the rights of the Palestinians. We know that to be true because that is what he says, and he acts according to that belief. But the powers that be say that what Roger says is not true and that in fact, he is antisemitic. A consequence of the powers that be is that they tried to cancel his show in Frankfurt and—weirdly—all the hotel owners in Argentina refused to allow him—but not his band—a room in their establishments (he had to stay at a friend’s house in Uruguay). When Katie Halper and I asked him about this attack on him, Roger responded:

    My platform is simple: it is [the] implementation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights for all our brothers and sisters in the world including those between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. My support of universal human rights is universal. It is not antisemitism, which is odious and racist and which, like all forms of racism, I condemn unreservedly.

    Roger says this over and over again, and yet, over and over again the powers that be malign Roger. “I will not be canceled,” Roger said in Birmingham at a concert. And why should he be? The attempt to cancel critics of Israel had some impact in recent years, but no longer carries weight: the atrocities of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza have produced new generations of people who see the hideousness of the Occupation and refuse to bow down before the powers that be. “We need more than a pause” in the bombing of Gaza, Roger said from the stage in Santiago, “but a ceasefire that lasts forever,” the soundtrack to that sentiment produced by the saxophone of Seamus Blake and the lap steel of Jon Carin.

    The show opens with Pink—the lead figure from The Wall (1982)—in a wheelchair, comfortably numb. In the second half, Roger is in the wheelchair in a straitjacket, thrown in there by orderlies of the powers that be. Is this the life we really want? It better not be. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.

    Roger Waters’s This is Not a Drill tour moves on to Lima, Peru (November 29), San José, Costa Rica (December 2), Bogotá, Colombia (December 5), and ends in Quito, Ecuador (December 9).

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

    The post Are There Any Paranoids in the Stadium Tonight? Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • A New Mood in the World Will Put an End to the Global Monroe Doctrine

    Tagreed Darghouth (Lebanon), from the series The Tree Within, a Palestinian Olive Tree, 2018.

    Every day since 7 October has felt like an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, with hundreds of thousands gathering in Istanbul, a million in Jakarta, and then yet another million across Africa and Latin America to demand an end to the brutal attack being carried out by Israel (with the collusion of the United States). It is impossible to keep up with the scale and frequency of the protests, which are in turn pushing political parties and governments to clarify their stances on Israel’s attack on Palestine. These mass demonstrations have generated three kinds of outcomes:

    1. They have drawn a new generation not only into pro-Palestine activity, but into anti-war – if not anti-imperialist – consciousness.
    2. They have drawn in a new section of activists, particularly trade unionists, who have been inspired to stop the shipment of goods to and from Israel (including in places such as Europe and India, where the governments have supported Israel’s attacks).
    3. They have generated a political process to challenge the hypocrisy of the Western-led ‘rules-based international order’ to demand that the International Criminal Court indict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli government officials.

    No war in recent years – not even the ‘shock and awe’ campaign used by the United States against Iraq in 2003 – has been as ruthless in its use of force. Most horrifying is the reality that civilians, penned in by the Israeli occupation, have no escape from the heavy bombardment. Nearly half (at least 5,800) of the more than 14,000 civilians that have been murdered are children. No amount of Israeli propaganda has been able to convince billions of people around the world that this violence is a righteous rejoinder for the 7 October attack. Visuals from Gaza show the disproportionate and asymmetrical nature of Israel’s violence over the past seventy-five years.

    Vincent De Pio (Philippines), Back to the Future, 2012

    A new mood has taken root amongst billions of people in the Global South and been mirrored by millions in the Global North who no longer take the attitudes of US leaders and their Western allies at face value. A new study by the European Council of Foreign Relations shows that ‘much of the rest of the world wants the war in Ukraine to stop as soon as possible, even if it means Kyiv losing territory. And very few people – even in Europe – would take Washington’s side if a war erupted between the US and China over Taiwan’. The council suggests that this is due to the ‘loss of faith in the West to order the world’. More precisely, most of the world is no longer willing to be bullied by the West (as South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor put it). Over the last 200 years, the US government’s Monroe Doctrine has been instrumental in justifying this type of bullying. To better understand the significance of this key policy in upholding US dominance over the world order, the rest of this newsletter features briefing no. 11 from No Cold War, It Is Time to Bury the Monroe Doctrine.

    n 1823, James Monroe, then president of the United States, told the US Congress that his government would stand against European interference in the Americas. What Monroe meant was that Washington would, from then on, treat Latin America and the Caribbean as its ‘backyard’, grounded by a policy known as the Monroe Doctrine.

    Over the past 200 years, the US has operated in the Americas along this grain, exemplified by the more than 100 military interventions against countries in the region. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US and its Global North allies have attempted to expand this policy into a Global Monroe Doctrine, most destructively in Western Asia.

    Stivenson Magloire (Haiti), Divided Spirit, 1989.

    The Violence of the Monroe Doctrine

    Two decades before Monroe’s proclamation, the world’s first anti-colonial revolution took place in Haiti. The 1804 Haitian Revolution posed a serious threat to the plantation economies of the Americas, which relied upon enslaved labour from Africa, and so the US led a process to suffocate it and prevent it from spreading. Through US military interventions across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Monroe Doctrine prevented the rise of national self-determination and defended plantation slavery and the power of the oligarchies.

    Nonetheless, the spirit and promise of the Haitian Revolution could not be extinguished, and in 1959 it was reignited by the Cuban Revolution, which in turn inspired revolutionary struggles across the world and, most importantly, in the so-called backyard of the United States. Once again, the US initiated a cycle of violence to destroy Cuba’s revolutionary example, prevent it from inspiring others, and overthrow any government in the region that tried to exercise its sovereignty.

    Together, US and Latin American oligarchies launched several campaigns, such as Operation Condor, to violently suppress the left through assassinations, incarcerations, torture, and regime change. These efforts culminated in a series of coups against left-wing forces in the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), and El Salvador (1980). The military governments that were subsequently installed quashed the sovereignty agenda and imposed a neoliberal project in its place. Latin America and the Caribbean became fertile ground for economic policies that benefitted US-led transnational monopolies. Washington co-opted large sections of the region’s bourgeoisie, selling them the illusion that national development would come alongside the growth of US power.

    Oswaldo Vigas (Venezuela), Duende Rojo (‘Red Elf’), 1979.

    Progressive Waves

    Despite this repression, waves of popular movements continued to shape the region’s political culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, these movements toppled the military dictatorships put in place by Operation Condor and then inaugurated a cycle of progressive governments inspired by the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions and propelled forward by the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. The US response to this progressive upsurge was yet again driven by the Monroe Doctrine as it sought to secure the interests of private property above the needs of the masses. This counterrevolution has employed three main instruments:

    1.  Coups. Since 2000, the US has attempted to conduct ‘traditional’ military coups d’état on at least twenty-seven occasions, with some of these attempts succeeding, such as in Honduras (2009), while many others were defeated, as in Venezuela (2002).

    2. Hybrid Wars. In addition to the military coup, the US has also developed a series of tactics to overwhelm countries that are attempting to build sovereignty, such as information warfare, lawfare, diplomatic warfare, and electoral interference. This hybrid war strategy includes manufacturing impeachment scandals (for example, against Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo in 2012) and ‘anti-corruption’ measures (such as against Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner in 2021). In Brazil, the US worked with the Brazilian right wing to manipulate an anti-corruption platform to impeach then President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and imprison former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018, leading to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro in 2018.

    3. Economic Sanctions. The use of illegal, unilateral coercive measures – including economic sanctions and blockades – are a key instrument of the Monroe Doctrine. The US has employed such instruments for decades (since 1960 in the case of Cuba) and expanded their use in the twenty-first century against countries such as Venezuela. The Latin American Strategic Geopolitics Centre (CELAG) showed that US sanctions against Venezuela led to the loss of more than three million jobs from 2013 to 2017 while the Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that sanctions have reduced the public’s caloric intake and increased disease and mortality, killing 40,000 people in a single year while endangering the lives of 300,000 others.

    Maya Weishof (Brazil), Between Talks and Myths, 2022.

    End the Monroe Doctrine

    US attempts to undermine progressive politics in Latin America, underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, have not been entirely successful. The return of left-wing governments to power in Bolivia, Brazil, and Honduras after US-backed right-wing regimes illustrates this failure. Another sign is the resilience of the Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions. To date, while efforts to expand the Monroe Doctrine around the world have caused immense destruction, they have failed to install stable client regimes, as we saw with the defeat of US projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nonetheless, Washington remains undeterred and has shifted its focus to the Asia-Pacific to confront China.

    Two hundred years ago, the forces of Simón Bolívar trounced the Spanish Empire in the 1821 Battle of Carabobo and opened a period of independence for Latin America. Two years later, in 1823, the US government announced its Monroe Doctrine. The dialectic between Carabobo and Monroe continues to shape our world, the memory of Bolívar instilled in the hope of and struggle for a more just society.

    Sheena Rose (Barbados), Agony, 2022.

    Today, the ugliness of the war on Gaza suffocates our consciousness. Em Berry, a poet from Aotearoa, New Zealand, wrote a beautiful poem on the name Gaza and the atrocities being inflicted upon its people by apartheid Israel:

    This morning I learned
    The English word gauze
    (finely woven medical cloth)
    comes from the Arabic word غزة or Ghazza
    because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries

    I wondered then

    how many of our wounds
    have been dressed
    because of them

    and how many of theirs
    have been left open
    because of us

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Provocations by the U.S. State Department Can Chill Press Freedom in Latin America

    Photograph Source: US State Department – Public Domain

    The headline is provocative: “The Kremlin’s Efforts to Covertly Spread Disinformation in Latin America.” This was a statement on the U.S. State Department website, posted on November 7, 2023. The United States government accused two companies—Social Design Agency and Structura National Technologies—of being the main agents of what it alleged is Russian-backed disinformation. The statement named the heads of both of the firms, Ilya Gambashidze of Social Design Agency and Nikolay Tupkin of Structura. On July 28, 2023, the European Union sanctioned several Russian individuals and firms, including SDA and Structura. The European Union accuses these two IT firms of being “involved in the Russian-led digital disinformation campaign” against the government of Ukraine. The statement by the U.S. State Department now alleges that these IT companies are involved in a disinformation project in Latin America.

    Neither the European Union nor the U.S. State Department offer any evidence in their various public statements. The U.S. document does, however, refer to the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which says the following: “Russia’s influence actors have adapted their efforts to increasingly hide their hand, laundering their preferred messaging through a vast ecosystem of Russian proxy websites, individuals, and organizations that appear to be independent news sources.” Here, we get mainly the methodology—laundering information through proxy websites—rather than any hard evidence.

    On May 3, 2023, the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on “The Global Information Wars: Is the U.S. Winning or Losing?” The main speaker at the hearing was Amanda Bennett, the Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an umbrella group that runs several U.S. government media projects from Europe (Radio Liberty) to the Americas (Office of Cuba Broadcasting) with an $810 million annual budget. Bennett, the former director of the U.S. government’s Voice of America, told the senators that if the U.S. government fails to “target investments to counter inroads Russia, the [People’s Republic of China], and Iran are making, we run the risk of losing the global information war.” These three countries, she argued, have “outspent” the United States in Latin America, an advantage that she said needed to be overcome by increased U.S. interference in Latin American media.

    The Role of RT

    In Latin America, Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute told the Senators, Russian media has secured a decisive advantage. The facts she laid out are worthwhile to consider: “Through the first quarter of 2023, three of the five most retweeted Russian state media accounts on Twitter messaged in Spanish, and five of the ten fastest growing ones targeted Spanish-language audiences. On YouTube, RT en Español has also proven capable of building large audiences, despite the platform’s global ban on Russian state-funded media channels. On TikTok, RT en Español is among the most popular Spanish-language media outlets. Its 29.6 million likes make it more popular than Telemundo, Univision, BBC Mundo, and El País. Likewise, on Facebook, RT en Español currently has more followers than any other Spanish-language international broadcaster.” In other words, RT by itself has become one of the most influential media outlets in Latin America. Brandt’s facts are widely accepted, including by a report published in March by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism called “Despite Western bans, Putin’s propaganda flourishes in Spanish on TV and social media” and by a study from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab from 2022.

    RT (formerly Russia Today) is owned by TV-Novosti, a non-profit organization founded by the state-owned Ria Novosti in 2005. RT is banned or blocked in Canada, the European Union, Germany, the United States, and several other Western countries. In fact, at the Senate hearing, there was little discussion about the entire web of RT projects. The focus was on the “laundering” of “disinformation.”

    ‘Most Likely’

    What is striking about the U.S. State Department statement is that it names two news projects that operate in Latin America as these “proxies” without any evidence but with hesitant language. For instance, the U.S. State Department says that part of the Russian campaign is to cultivate a group of journalists “most likely in Chile,” but not definitely. This hesitation is important to underline because a few paragraphs later, the doubt vanishes: “While the network’s operations are primarily done in concert with Spanish-language outlets Pressenza and El Ciudadano, a broader network of media resources is available to the group to further amplify information.”

    Pressenza, founded in 2009 in Milan, Italy, emerged out of the debates and discussions provoked by the International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems (formed by UNESCO) and its report, Many Voices, One World or the MacBride Report (1980). The MacBride report itself built on discussions about media democracy that had resulted in the formation, in 1964, of Inter-Press Services, and then later in Pressenza. El Ciudadano was founded in 2005 as part of the process of democratization in Chile in the aftermath of the fall of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990.

    Both outlets denied (in English and Spanish) that they are either funded by the Russian government or that they launder information for the Russian government. In their joint statement, signed by David Andersson (editor of Pressenza) and Bruno Sommer Catalán (editor of El Ciudadano), they say, “We believe that this kind of attack is malicious, and we insist that the US State Department withdraw this accusation as well as publicly apologize to us for maligning our reputations.” In a separate statement, Italian journalist Antonio Mazzeo (who won the Giorgio Bassani prize in 2010) said: “This affair worries me because it could prepare for the next step, the creation of a proscription list…  to put all those who do not accept to think only of war and therefore become dangerous and must be silenced.”

    This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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