Dia Al-Azzawi (Iraq), Sabra and Shatila Massacre, 1982–83.
Two important reports were released last month, neither getting the kind of attention they deserve. On 4 April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group III report was published, evoking a strong reaction from the United Nations’ Secretary General António Guterres. The report, he said, ‘is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unliveable world’. At COP26, the developed countries pledged to spend a modest $100 billion for the Adaptation Fund to assist developing countries adapt to climate change. Meanwhile, on 25 April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) issued its annual report, finding that the world military spending surpassed $2 trillion in 2021, the first time it has exceeded the $2 trillion mark. The five largest spenders – the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom, and Russia – accounted for 62 percent of this amount; the United States, by itself, accounts for 40 percent of total arms expenditure.
There is an endless flow of money for weapons but less than a pittance to avert planetary disaster.
Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World (Bangladesh), The resilience of the average Bangladeshi is remarkable. As this woman waded through the flood waters in Kamalapur to get to work, there was a photographic studio ‘Dreamland Photographers’, which was open for business, 1988.
That word ‘disaster’ is not an exaggeration. UN Secretary General Guterres has warned that ‘we are on a fast track to climate disaster… It is time to stop burning our planet’. These words are based on the facts contained in the Working Group III report. It is now firmly established in the scientific record that the historical responsibility for the devastation done to our environment and our climate rests with the most powerful states, led by the United States. There is little debate about this responsibility in the distant past, a consequence of the ruthless war against nature carried out by the forces of capitalism and colonialism.
But this responsibility also extends to our present period. On 1 April, a new study was published in The Lancet Planetary Health demonstrating that from 1970 to 2017 ‘high-income nations are responsible for 74 percent of global excess material use, driven primarily by the USA (27 percent) and the EU-28 high-income countries (25 percent)’. The excess material use in the North Atlantic countries is due to use of abiotic resources (fossil fuels, metals, and non-metallic minerals). China is responsible for 15 percent of global excess material use and the rest of the Global South is responsible for only 8 percent. The excess use in these lower-income countries is driven largely using biotic resources (biomass). This distinction between abiotic and biotic resources shows us that the excess resources use from the Global South is largely renewable, whereas that of the North Atlantic states is non-renewable.
Such an intervention should have been on the front pages of the newspapers of the world, particularly in Global South, and its findings debated widely on television channels. But it was barely remarked upon. It proves decisively that the high-income countries of the North Atlantic are destroying the planet, that they need to change their ways, and that they need to pay into the various adaptation and mitigation funds to assist countries that are not creating the problem but that are suffering from its impact.
Having presented the data, the scholars who wrote this paper note that ‘high-income nations bear the overwhelming responsibility for global ecological breakdown, and therefore owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world. These nations need to take the lead in making radical reductions in their resource use to avoid further degradation, which will likely require transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches’. These are interesting thoughts: ‘radical reductions in resource use’ and then ‘post-growth and degrowth approaches’.
Simon Gende (Papua New Guinea), The US Army Find Osama bin Laden Hiding in a House and Kill Him, 2013.
The North Atlantic states – led by the United States – are the largest spenders of social wealth on arms. The Pentagon – the US armed forces – ‘remains the single largest consumers of oil’, says a Brown University study, ‘and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters’. To get the United States and its allies to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the UN member states had to allow greenhouse gas emissions by the military to be excluded from the national reporting on emissions.
The vulgarity of these matters can be put plainly by comparison of two money values. First, in 2019, the United Nations calculated that the annual funding gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) amounted to $2.5 trillion. Turning over the annual $2 trillion in global military expenditure to the SDGs would go a long way toward dealing with the major assaults on human dignity: hunger, illiteracy, houselessness, lack of medical care, and so on. It is important to note here, that the $2 trillion figure from SIPRI does not include the lifetime waste of social wealth given to private arms manufacturers for weapons systems. For example, the Lockheed Martin F-35 weapons system is projected to cost nearly $2 trillion.
In 2021, the world spent over $2 trillion on war, but only invested – and this is a generous calculation – $750 billion in clean energy and energy efficiency. Total investment in energy infrastructure in 2021 was $1.9 trillion, but the bulk of that investment went to fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal). So, investments in fossil fuels continue and investments in arms rise, while investments to transition to new forms of cleaner energy remain insufficient.
Aline Amaru (Tahiti), La Famille Pomare (‘The Pomare Family’), 1991.
On 28 April, US President Joe Biden asked the US Congress to provide $33 billion for weapons systems to be sent to Ukraine. The call for these funds comes alongside incendiary statements made by the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said that the US is not trying to remove Russian forces from Ukraine but to ‘see Russia weakened’. Austin’s comment should not come as a surprise. It mirrors US policy since 2018, which has been to prevent China and Russia from becoming ‘near-peer rivals’. Human rights are not the concern; the focus is preventing any challenge to US hegemony. For that reason, social wealth is wasted on weapons and not used to address the dilemmas of humanity.
Shot Baker atomic test under Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands), 1946.
Consider the way the United States has reacted to a deal between Solomon Islands and China, two neighbours. Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said that this deal sought to promote trade and humanitarian cooperation, not the militarisation of the Pacific Ocean. On that same day of Prime Minister Sogavare’s address, a high-level US delegation arrived in the nation’s capital Honiara. They told Prime Minister Sogavare that if the Chinese establish any kind of ‘military installation’, the United States would ‘then have significant concerns and respond accordingly’. These were plain threats. A few days later, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, ‘Island countries in the South Pacific are independent and sovereign states, not a backyard of the US or Australia. Their attempt to revive the Monroe Doctrine in the South Pacific region will get no support and lead to nowhere’.
The Solomon Islands has a long memory of the history of Australian-British colonialism and the scars of the atom bomb tests. The practice of ‘blackbirding’ abducted thousands of Solomon Islanders to work the sugarcane fields in Queensland, Australia in the 19th century, eventually leading to the Kwaio Rebellion of 1927 in Malaita. The Solomon Islands has fought hard against being militarised, voting in 2016 with the world to prohibit nuclear weapons. The appetite to be the ‘backyard’ of the United States or Australia is not there. That was clear in the luminous poem ‘Peace Signs’ (1974) by Solomon Islands writer Celestine Kulagoe:
A mushroom sprouts from
an arid pacific atoll
Disintegrates into space
Leaving only a residue of might
to which for an illusory
peace and security
man clings.
In the calm of the early morning
the third day after
love found joy
in the empty tomb
the wooden cross of disgrace
transformed into a symbol
of love service
peace.
In the heat of the afternoon lull
the UN flag flutters
hidden from sight by
national banners
under which
sit men with clenched fists
signing peace
treaties.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Takashi Murakami (Japan), Tan Tan Bo Puking – a.k.a. Gero Tan, 2002.
On April 19, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its annual World Economic Outlook, which forecasted a severe slowdown in global growth along with soaring prices.‘For 2022, inflation is projected at 5.7 percent in advanced economies and 8.7 percent in emerging market and developing economies – 1.8 and 2.8 percentage points higher than projected in … January’, the report noted. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva offered a sobering reflection on the data: ‘Inflation is reaching the highest levels seen in decades. Sharply higher prices for food and fertilizers put pressure on households worldwide – especially for the poorest. And we know that food crises can unleash social unrest’.
What is the root cause of this extraordinary wave of inflation? US President Joe Biden blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine: ‘What people don’t know is that 70 percent of the increase in inflation was the consequence of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s price hike because of the impact of oil prices’. However, even The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that ‘this isn’t Putin’s inflation’. Georgieva of the IMF has tried to walk a middle ground, saying that ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created a crisis on top of a crisis’. Her view mirrored that of the World Economic Outlook, which pointed out that ‘the crisis unfold[ed] while the global economy was on a mending path but had not yet fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic’.
Beauford Delaney (USA), Exchange Place, 1943.
The No Cold War platform, with whom Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has a close working relationship, has produced a very important intervention into this debate. Briefing no. 2, The United States Has Destabilised the World Economy, which appears below, makes the case that a governing factor in the current inflation crisis is the outsized impact of the United States on the global economy; here, US military spending, the scale of the United States in global consumption, the role of the Wall Street-Dollar-IMF regime, and other factors play a key role. We hope you find briefing no. 2 useful and circulate it widely.
The International Monetary Fund has announced that the global economy is entering a major slowdown, downgrading the growth prospects of 143 countries. At the same time, inflation rates have reached historic levels. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people are falling into poverty, particularly in the Global South. Oxfam has sounded the alarm that we are ‘witnessing the most profound collapse of humanity into extreme poverty and suffering in memory’. What is producing this immense human suffering?
An Economic Crisis ‘Made in Washington’
On 13 April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that this global economic deterioration was due to the Russian war in Ukraine. This is factually incorrect. Although the conflict has worsened the situation, the key driver which has destabilised the world economy is the massive inflationary wave that had already built up in the United States and has now begun to crest on the world. Prior to the war in Ukraine, US inflation had already tripled in recent years from 2.5% (January 2020) to 7.5% (January 2022) before accelerating further to 8.5% (March 2022) after the war broke out.
‘This isn’t Putin’s inflation’, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted. ‘This inflation was made in Washington’.
The US consumer market absorbs a fifth of the world’s goods and services; as the demand for these goods outstrips the global supply, the tendency for US inflation to spread around the world is very high. The average Commodity Research Bureau Index, a general indicator of global commodity markets, has risen astronomically: as of 25 April, year-to-year prices have soared for oil (60%), palm oil (60%), coffee (56%), wheat (45%), natural gas (139%), and coal (253%). These price increases have sent shock waves through the global economy.
This instability is inseparably connected to US economic policy. Since 2020, the United States has increased its budget by $2.8 trillion. To finance this budgetary expansion, the US government increased borrowing to 27% of the gross domestic product (GDP), and the Federal Reserve Bank increased the money supply (the quantity of money issued) by 27% year-on-year. Both of these increases are the highest in US peacetime history.
These huge US economic packages were generated to put cash in the hands of consumers. The US government focused on the economy’s demand side by putting money into circulation for consumption, but it did not increase spending on the economy’s supply side by putting money into investment. From 2019–21, 98% of US GDP growth was in consumption, while only 2% was in net investment. With a large increase in demand by consumers and almost no increase in supply, a huge inflationary wave grew in the United States.
Carmen Lomas Garza (USA), Tamalada, 1990.
Investing in Guns or People?
Inflation in the United States, which has global implications, is a by-product of its economic priorities. For the past half-century, US governments have not used the country’s social wealth to make substantial social investments in areas such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure, nor have they invested in the manufacturing sector to increase supply. Instead, to manage inflation the government has chosen to push an agenda which cuts demand. These cuts in demand have already lowered living standards; for instance, real wages in the United States have fallen by 2.7% in the past year.
Instead of making social investments to prevent such economic downturns, the US government has prioritised its military, which receives a budget increase every year. In 2022, the Biden administration proposed a military budget of $813 billion, a 9.2% increase over the military budget in 2021 – larger than the next eleven highest spending countries combined. To justify this massive expenditure, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has invoked the need to ‘combat threats’ posed by China and Russia.
A reduction in US military spending would free up government funds to invest in education, healthcare, infrastructure, and manufacturing. However, this would necessitate a shift in US foreign policy, which does not appear to be on the horizon. Until that time, the people of the United States and other countries will have to sustain the costs of Washington’s new Cold War.
Joseph Bertiers (Kenya), The Bar, 2020.
Against the shallow assessment that global inflation is caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Western sanctions on Russia, No Cold War’s briefing no. 2 points its finger at the root of the crisis: the distortions produced by US military spending and by the Wall Street-Dollar-IMF regime gripping the world economy.
In December 2021, the IMF’s Georgieva said that Europe’s governments must not allow economic recovery to be endangered by the ‘suffocating force of austerity’. This is part of the West’s astonishing double-standards: at the same time, the IMF has enforced harsh austerity measures on the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As Oxfam notes in a new analysis, during the pandemic’s second year (from March 2021 to March 2022), the IMF approved 23 loans to 22 countries in the Global South – all of which either encouraged or required austerity measures. For example, the IMF’s $2.3 billion loan agreement with Kenya required a four-year public sector pay freeze alongside higher taxes on gas and food, all while 63 percent of Kenyan households experience multidimensional poverty, according to a report by the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA).
The austerity policies that impact the vast mass of the populations in these countries must be reversed. We need less money spent on war and more money spent to solve what Frantz Fanon called the obstinate facts of human life, such as hunger, illiteracy, and indignity.
Langston Hughes’s poetry focused on the impact of these ‘obstinate facts’ on the lives of people in the United States, people who fought against a life built on wages that equalled ‘two bits minus two’. In 1962, the United States spent $49 billion on its military ($431 billion in 2022 dollars); in 2022, as noted in briefing no. 2, the US government proposes to spend $813 billion on its military, larger than the military spending of the next eleven countries combined.
There is immense social wealth available to us, but it is spent on the parts of human life that are most destructive rather than productive. In 1962, as the US military budget began to balloon, Langston Hughes wrote:
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want my freedom
Just as you.
We need to advance to the goal of human emancipation now. Not tomorrow, but now.
The post I Cannot Live on Tomorrow’s Bread first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Shengtian Zheng and Jinbo Sun, Winds of Fusang, 2017.
‘Fusang’ is an ancient Chinese word referring to what some believe to be the shores of Mexico. The work is an homage to Latin America’s influence on China, particularly that of Mexican artists on the development of modern Chinese art.
In early March, Argentina’s government came to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a $45 billion deal to shore up its shaky finances. This deal was motivated by the government’s need to pay a $2.8 billion instalment on a $57 billion IMF stand-by loan taken out under former President Mauricio Macri in 2018. This loan – the largest loan in the financial institution’s history – sharpened divides in Argentinian society. The following year, the Macri administration was ousted in elections by the centre-left Frente de Todos coalition which campaigned on a sharp anti-austerity, anti-IMF programme.
When President Alberto Fernández took office in December 2019, he refused the final $13 billion tranche of the IMF’s loan package, a move applauded by large sections of Argentinian society. The next year, Fernández’s government was able to restructure the $66 billion debt held by wealthy bondholders and open discussions with the IMF to delay repayment of the debt incurred by Macri’s government. But the IMF was rigid – it insisted on repayment. Neither the Macri loan nor the new deal under President Fernández settles Argentina’s long-term struggle with its public finances.
Carlos Alonso (Argentina), La oreja, 1972.
The term ‘odious debt’ is used to describe the money owed by societies whose governments have been undemocratic. The concept was crafted by Alexander Nahum Sack in his book The Effects of State Transformations on Their Public Debts and Other Financial Obligations (1927). ‘If a despotic power incurs a debt not for the needs or in the interests of the State, but to strengthen its despotic regime, to repress its population that fights against it, etc.’, Sack wrote, ‘this debt is odious for the population of the State’. When that despotic regime falls, then the debt falls.
When Argentina’s military ruled the country (1976–83), the IMF generously lent it money, ballooning the country’s debt from $7 billion at the time the military took power to $42 billion when the military was ousted. Plainly, the IMF’s provision of funds to the Argentinian military junta – which killed, tortured, and disappeared 30,000 people – set in motion the ugly cycle of debt and despair that continues till today. That those ‘odious debts’ were not annulled – just as the apartheid debt was not annulled in South Africa – tells us a great deal about the ugly reality of international finance.
Gracia Barrios (Chile), Desaparecidos, 1973.
The deal cut by the IMF with the Fernández government is exactly like other deals that the IMF has made with fragile countries. During the pandemic, 85% of the IMF’s loans to developing countries came with austerity conditions that sharpened their social crises. Three of the most common conditions of these IMF loans are cuts and freezes to public sector wages, the increase and introduction of value-added taxes, and deep cuts to public expenditure (notably for consumer subsidies). Through its new deal with Argentina, the IMF will inspect the operations of the government four times per year, effectively becoming an overseer of the Argentinian economy. The government has agreed to reduce the budget deficit from 3% (2021) to 0.9% (2024) to 0% (2025); to accomplish this, it will have to cut large areas of social spending, including subsidies for a range of consumer goods.
After reaching the agreement, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva pointed out the great difficulties faced by Argentina, though these difficulties will not be ameliorated by the IMF plan. ‘Argentina continues to face exceptional economic and social challenges, including depressed per capita income, elevated poverty levels, persistent high inflation, a heavy debt burden, and low external buffers’, she said. Consequently, Georgieva noted, ‘Risks to the program are exceptionally high’, meaning that further default is all but certain.
Shengtian Zheng and Jinbo Sun, Winds of Fusang (close up), 2017.
A few weeks before Argentina came to terms with the IMF, President Fernández and China’s President Xi Jinping held a bilateral meeting in Beijing at which Argentina signed onto the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Argentina is the twenty-first country from Latin America to join the BRI. It is also the largest economy from the region to join, pending applications from Brazil and Mexico. Expectations rose amongst sections in Argentina that the BRI would provide a pathway to exit the grip of the IMF. This remains a possibility even as President Fernández returned to the IMF.
Our team in Buenos Aires has been looking carefully at China’s growing ties with the Caribbean and Latin America. These studies resulted in our most recent dossier no. 51, Looking Towards China: Multipolarity as an Opportunity for the Latin American People (April 2022). The main argument of the dossier is that the emergence of programmes such as the BRI offers countries such as Argentina choices for development finance. If Argentina has more latitude in choosing its avenues for finance, then it will be better positioned to reject harsh offers of stand-by assistance from the IMF which come with conditions of austerity. The possibility of these choices opens the door for countries such as Argentina to develop an authentic national and regional development strategy that is not written by the IMF staff in Washington, DC.
The dossier is quite clear that the mere entry of the BRI into the Caribbean and Latin America is not sufficient. Deeper projects are necessary:
It is possible for Chinese integration to further the ‘development of underdevelopment’ if the Latin American state projects produce a new relationship of dependency on China by merely exporting primary products. On the other hand, it will be far better for the region’s peoples if the relationship is based on equality (multipolarity) as well as the transfer of technology, the upscaling of production processes, and regional integration (national and regional sovereignty).
Josefina Robirosa (Argentina), Bosque azul (‘Blue Forest’), 1993-94.
The BRI’s annual disbursement of funds is around $50 billion, with projections suggesting that, by 2027, total BRI spending will be about $1.3 trillion. These capital flows primarily focus on long-term investments in infrastructure rather than short-term bailouts, although new studies suggest that China has offered short-term liquidity to several countries. Between 2009 and 2020, the People’s Bank of China entered into bilateral currency swap arrangements with at least 41 countries. These currency swaps take place between the local currency (the Argentinian peso, for instance) and China’s renminbi (RMB), with the local currency as collateral and the RMB used either to buy goods or to acquire dollars. The combination of BRI investments and RMB currency swaps provide countries with immediate alternatives to the IMF and its austerity demands. In January 2022, Argentina’s government asked China to increase its 130-billion-yuan swap ($20.6 billion) by an additional 20 billion yuan ($3.14 billion) to cover the IMF payment. A few weeks later, the People’s Bank of China provided the necessary swap to Argentina’s Central Bank. Despite this infusion of cash, Argentina still went to the IMF.
The answer to why Argentina took that decision can perhaps be found in the letter written by Martín Guzman (minister of the economy) and Miguel Pesce (president of the Central Bank) to the IMF’s Georgieva on 3 March 2022. In the communication, Argentina promises to ‘improve public finances’ and to restrain inflation, which are straightforward orthodox positions. But then there is an interesting obligation: that Argentina will expand exports and draw in foreign direct investment to ‘pave the way to an eventual re-entry into international capital markets’. Rather than use the opportunity afforded by BRI-currency swaps to develop its own national and regional agenda, the government seems eager to use whatever platform possible to return to the status quo of integration into the capitalist marketplace for finance dominated by Wall Street and the City of London.
On 12 April 2022, the Committee of Creditors of Internal Debt (CADI) announced that the people of Argentina refuse to shoulder the burden of the IMF debt. The people should not pay a single peso: those who squirrelled away the billions that Macri borrowed from the IMF should be the ones who pay the price. Banking secrecy laws need to be suspended in order to draw up a list of those who took that money and hid it in tax havens. The hashtag of CADI’s campaign is #LaDeudaEsConElPueblo – the debt is with the people. It should be paid to the people, not drawn from them.
As the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman (1930–2014) wrote during the reign of the military junta, these are ‘dark times, filled with light’. This phrase resonates even now:
dark times/filled with light/the sun/
pours sunlight onto the city/ torn
by sudden sirens/the police on the hunt/night falls and we/ make love under this roof
Gelman, a communist, fought the dictatorship, which killed his son and daughter-in-law and damaged the spine of his country. Even the dark times, he wrote, echoing Brecht, are filled with light. These are tough moments in world history, but even now there remain possibilities, there remain people gathered on the streets of Buenos Aires and Rosario, La Plata and Córdoba. Their slogan is clear: no to the pact with the IMF. But theirs is not only a politics of ‘no’. It is also a politics of ‘yes’. Yes to taking advantage of the new openings to shape an agenda for the well-being of the Argentinian people. Yes, also yes.
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Ever Fonseca (Cuba), Homenaje a la paz (‘Homage to Peace’), 1970.
While the United States began its illegal war against Iraq in 2003, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro spoke in Buenos Aires, Argentina. ‘Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples’, he said, ‘nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities … Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated on the idea of saving lives’. Cuba had an army, yes, but not an army for war; Castro called it ‘an army of white coats’. Most recently, Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade of medical practitioners have selflessly worked around the world to help stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Castro reminds us that there are two ways to be alive in this world. We can live in a war-filled world awash with weapons and confounded by intimidation, a world that continuously prepares for combat. Or, we can live in a world of teachers and doctors, scientists and social workers, storytellers and singers. We can put our confidence in people who help us create a better world than the one we live in today, this wretched world of war and profit, where ugliness threatens to overwhelm us.
The surface of our skin beats with the fear that a new iron curtain will descend, that there is pressure to box in China and Russia, to divide the world into camps. But that is impossible, because – as noted in last week’s newsletter – we live in a knot of contradictions and not in a clean cut world of certainties. Even close allies of the US, such as Australia, Germany, Japan, and India, cannot break their economic and political ties with Russia and China. Doing so would plunge them into a recession, bringing the kind of economic chaos that war and sanctions have already brought to Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka. In those countries – already battered by the International Monetary Fund by the greed of the elites and by foreign embassies – rising fuel prices have transformed an economic crisis into a political crisis.
Sergey Grinevich (Belarus), Tank, 2013.
Wars either end with the destruction of a country’s political institutions and its social capacity or they end with ceasefires and negotiations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) war on Libya in 2011 ended with the country stumbling along with the smell of cordite in the air and a broken social order. The fate of Libya should not be repeated anywhere, certainly not in Ukraine. Yet it is a fate ordained for the people of Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, who have been suffocated by wars egged on by the West – wars armed by the West and that have been profitable for the West.
When contemporary Russia emerged from the fall of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin led a coup against the Russian parliament, tanks blazing. Those currently in power in Russia operate in light of these violent beginnings and the experiences of other war-stricken nations. They will not allow themselves to suffer the fate of Libya or Yemen or Afghanistan. Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are ongoing in Belarus’ Homyel Voblasts (or Gomel Region), but trust must be strengthened before a ceasefire can become a real possibility. Any ceasefire should not only apply to the war inside Ukraine – which is imperative – but should also include halting the broader US-imposed pressure campaign on all of Eurasia.
Svetlana Rumak (Russia) Endless Green Fields, 2017.
What is that pressure campaign and why bother talking about it now? Shouldn’t we only say Russia out of Ukraine? Such a slogan, while correct, does not address the deeper problems that provoked this war in the first place.
When the USSR collapsed, Western countries wielded their resources and power through Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999) and then Vladimir Putin (from 1999). First, the West impoverished the Russian people by destroying the country’s social net and allowing elite Russians to devour the country’s social wealth. Then, they drew the new Russian billionaires into investing in Western-driven globalisation (including English football teams). The West backed Yeltsin’s bloody war in Chechnya (1994–1996) and then Putin’s war in Chechnya (1999–2000). Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007) signed allowances for Russia to buy British weapons till his arm hurt and welcomed Putin to London in 2000, saying, ‘I want Russia and the West to work together to promote stability and peace’. In 2001, former US President George W. Bush described looking into Putin’s eyes and seeing his soul, calling him ‘straightforward and trustworthy’. In the same year, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman encouraged readers to ‘keep rootin’ for Putin’. It was the West that helped the Russian billionaire class capture the state and ride astride Russian society.
Once the Russian government decided that integration with Europe and the US was not possible, the West began to portray Putin as diabolical. This movie keeps replaying: Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a great hero of the US and then its villain, the same with former military leader Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama. Now the stakes are unforgivably higher, the dangers greater.
Shakir Hassan al-Said (Iraq), The Victims, 1957.
Beneath the surface of the current moment lies dynamics that we foregrounded in our tenth newsletter of this year. The US unilaterally damaged the international arms control architecture, withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (2001) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (2018) and thereby gutting the policy of deterrence. In December 2018, the US pushed its allies to prevent, by a slim margin, the United Nations General Assembly from passing a resolution to defend the INF. Putin began to talk about the need for security guarantees, not from Ukraine or even from NATO, which is a puffed-up Trojan Horse of Washington’s ambitions: Russia needed security guarantees directly from the US.
Why? Because in 2018, the US government announced a shift in foreign policy that signalled that they would increase their competition with China and Russia. NATO-led naval exercises near both countries also gave Russia cause for concern about its security. The US’s bellicosity is enshrined in its 2022 National Defence Strategy, where it asserts that the United States is ‘prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritising [China’s] challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russian challenge in Europe’. The key phrase is that the US is prepared to prevail in conflict. The entire attitude of domination and of defeat is a macho attitude against humanity. The US-imposed pressure campaign around Eurasia must end.
Abel Rodríguez (Colombia), Territorio de Mito (‘Myth Territory’), 2017.
We do not want a divided world. We want a realistic world: a world of humanity that deals adequately with the climate catastrophe. A world that wants to end hunger and illiteracy. A world that wants to lift us out of despair into hope. A world with more armies of white coats and instead of armies with guns.
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we amplify the lives and voices of people building a world of hope against fear, a world of love against hate. One such person is Nela Martínez Espinosa (1912–2004), the focus of the third study in our Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle series. Nela, as we call her, was a leading figure in the Communist Party of Ecuador and a builder of institutions that infused the masses with confidence. These organisations included anti-fascist fronts and women’s federations, support for the rights of indigenous Ecuadorians, and platforms defending the Cuban Revolution. In 1944, during the Glorious May Revolution, Nela briefly led the government. Throughout her life, she worked tirelessly to build the basis for a better world.
In 2000, as president of the Women’s Continental Front for Peace and against Intervention, Nela fought against the creation of a US military base in the city of Manta. ‘Colonisation returns’, Nela said. ‘How will we escape this colonisation? How can we justify ourselves in the face of our cowardice?’
That last question hangs over us. We do not want to live in a divided world. We must act to prevent the iron curtain from descending. We must fight against our fear. We must fight for a world without walls.
The post We Do Not Want a Divided Planet; We Want a World Without Walls first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Henry Moore (Britain), Grey Tube Shelter, 1940.
It is hard to fathom the depths of our time, the terrible wars, and the confounding information that whizzes by without much wisdom. Certainties that flood the airwaves and the internet are easy to come by, but are they derived from an honest assessment of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russian banks (part of a broader United States sanctions policy that now afflicts approximately thirty countries)? Do they acknowledge the horrific reality of hunger that has increased due to this war and the sanctions? It appears that much of the ‘certainties’ are caught up in the ‘Cold War mentality’, which views humanity as irreversibly divided on two opposing sides. However, this is not the case; most countries are struggling to craft a non-aligned approach to the US-imposed ‘new Cold War’. Russia’s conflict with Ukraine is a symptom of broader geopolitical battles that have been waged over decades.
On 26 March, US President Joe Biden defined some certainties from his perspective at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (Poland), calling the war in Ukraine ‘a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’. These binaries are wholly a fantasy of the White House, whose attitude towards ‘rules-based order’ is not rooted in the UN Charter but in ‘rules’ that the US pronounces. Biden’s antinomies culminated in one policy objective: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’, he said, meaning Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The narrowness of Biden’s approach to the conflict in Ukraine has led to a public call for regime change in Russia, a country of 146 million people whose government possesses 6,255 nuclear warheads. With the US’s violent history of controlling leadership in several countries, reckless statements about regime change cannot go unanswered. They must be universally contested.
Juss Piho (Estonia), Journey, 2009.
The principal axis of Russia’s war is not actually Ukraine, though it bears the brunt of it today. It is whether Europe can be permitted to forge projects independently of the US and its North Atlantic agenda. Between the fall of the USSR (1991) and the world financial crisis (2007–08), Russia, the new post-Soviet republics (including Ukraine), and other Eastern European states sought to integrate into the European system, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace process in 1994, and seven Eastern European countries (including Estonia and Latvia that border Russia) joined NATO in 2004. During the global financial crisis, it became evident that integration into the European project would not be fully possible because of vulnerabilities in Europe.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, President Vladimir Putin challenged the US’s attempt to create a unipolar world. ‘What is a unipolar world?’, Putin asked. ‘No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single centre of power, one single centre of force, and one single master’. Referring to US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 (which he had criticised at that time) and the US’s illegal Iraq War in 2003, Putin said, ‘Nobody feels secure anymore because nobody can hide behind international law’. Later, at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest (Romania), Putin warned about the dangers of NATO’s eastward expansion, lobbying against the entry of Georgia and Ukraine into the military alliance. The next year, Russia partnered with Brazil, China, India, and South Africa to form the BRICS bloc as an alternative to Western-driven globalisation.
Yang Fudong (China), Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part IV, 2006.
For generations, Europe has relied on imports of natural gas and crude oil first from the USSR and then from Russia. This dependence on Russia has increased as European countries have sought to end their use of coal and nuclear energy. At the same time, Poland (2015) and Italy (2019) signed onto the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Between 2012 and 2019, the Chinese government also formed the 17+1 Initiative, linking seventeen central and Eastern European countries in the BRI project. The integration of Europe into Eurasia opened the door for its foreign policy independence. But this was not permitted. The entire ‘global NATO’ feint – articulated in 2008 by NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer – was part of preventing this development.
Fearful of the great changes occurring in Eurasia, the US acted on commercial and diplomatic/military fronts. Commercially, the US tried to substitute European reliance on Russian natural gas by promising to supply Europe with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from both US suppliers and Gulf Arab states. Since LNG is far more expensive than piped gas, this was not an enticing commercial deal. Challenges to Chinese advancements in high-tech solutions – particularly in telecommunications, robotics, and green energy – could not be sustained by Silicon Valley firms, so the US escalated two other instruments of force: first, the use of War on Terror rhetoric to ban Chinese firms (claiming security and privacy considerations) and second, diplomatic and military manoeuvres to challenge Russia’s sense of stability.
Sadamasa Motonaga (Japan), Red and Yellow, 1963.
The US’s strategy was not entirely successful. European countries could see that there was no effective substitute for both Russian energy and Chinese investment. Banning Huawei’s telecommunications tools and preventing NordStream 2 from certification would only hurt the European people. This was clear. But what was not so clear was that the US concurrently began to dismantle the architecture that held in place confidence that no country would begin a nuclear war. In 2002, the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in 2018–19, they left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. European countries played a key role in establishing the INF Treaty in 1987 through the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement, but the abandonment of the treaty in 2018–19 was met with relative silence from Europeans. In 2018, US National Security Strategy shifted from its focus on the Global War on Terror to the prevention of the ‘re-emergence of long-term, strategic competition’ from ‘near-peer rivals’ such as China and Russia. At the same time, European countries began to carry out ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises through NATO in the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, and South China Sea, sending threatening messages to China and Russia. These moves effectively brought China and Russia very close together.
Russia indicated on several occasions that it was aware of these tactics and would defend its borders and its region with force. When the US intervened in Syria in 2012 and Ukraine in 2014, these moves threatened Russia with the loss of its two main warm water ports (in Latakia, Syria and Sebastopol, Crimea), which is why Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened militarily in Syria in 2015. These actions suggested that Russia would continue to use its military to protect what it sees as its national interests. Ukraine then shut down the North Crimean canal that brought the peninsula 85% of its water, forcing Russia to supply the region with water over the Kerch Strait Bridge, built at enormous cost between 2016 and 2019. Russia did not need ‘security guarantees’ from Ukraine, or even from NATO, but it sought them from the United States. There was fear in Moscow that the US would place intermediate range nuclear missiles around Russia.
Evgeny Trotsky (Russia), Rest, 2016.
In light of this recent history, contradictions rattle the responses of Germany, Japan, and India, amongst others. Each of these countries needs Russian natural gas and crude oil. Both Germany and Japan have sanctioned Russian banks, but neither German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida can cut energy imports. India, despite being part of the US-backed Quad along with Japan, has refused to join the condemnation of Russia and the sanctions on its banking sector. These countries have to manage the contradictions of our time and weigh up the uncertainties. No state should accept the so-called ‘certainties’ that reinforce Cold War dynamics, nor should they neglect the dangerous outcomes of externally influenced regime change and chaos.
It is always a good idea to reflect on the quiet charm of the poems of Tōge Sankichi, who watched the atomic bomb fall on his native Hiroshima in 1945, and then later joined the Japanese Communist Party to fight for peace. In his ‘Call to Action’, Sankichi wrote:
stretch out those grotesque arms
to the many similar arms
and, if it seems like that flash might fall again,
hold up the accursed sun:
even now it is not too late.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Each year, Japan’s Foreign Ministry releases a Diplomatic Bluebook, a guide to the government’s views on the world. Kyodo News, a reputed Japanese wire service, reports that the 2022 Bluebook will have strong language against Russia. This Bluebook will be released to the public before the end of April, but Kyodo News’ reporters have seen a leaked text. The text that the news agency has seen has not been finally vetted by the government of Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. More
The post Will Japan and Russia Tensions Over Contested Pacific Islands Spill Over Into War? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Almagul Menlibayeva (Kazakhstan), Transoxiana Dreams, 2010.
On 16 March 2022, as Russia’s war on Ukraine entered its second month, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev warned his people that ‘uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing’. A week later, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a brief study on the immense shock that will be felt around the world due to this war. ‘Soaring food and fuel prices will have an immediate effect on the most vulnerable in developing countries, resulting in hunger and hardship for households who spend the highest share of their income on food’, the study noted. South of Kazakhstan, in the Kyrgyz Republic, the poorest households already spent 65% of their income on food before these current price hikes; as food inflation rises by 10%, the impact will be catastrophic for the Kyrgyz people.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, immense pressure was brought to bear on the countries of the Global South to disband their food security and food sovereignty projects and to integrate their production and consumption of food into global markets. In his recent address, President Tokayev announced that the Kazakh government was now going ‘to oversee the production of agricultural equipment, fertilisers, fuel, and the stocks of seeds’.
Saule Suleimenova (Kazakhstan), Skyline, 2017.
While 22% of world cereal production crosses international borders, Big Agriculture controls both the inputs for cereal production and the prices of cereals. Four corporations – Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, and Limagrain – control more than half of the world’s seed production, while four other corporations – Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus – effectively set global food prices.
Very few countries in the world have been able to develop a food system that is immune from the turbulence of market liberalisation (read our Red Alert no. 12 for more). Modest domestic policies – such as banning food exports during a drought or keeping high import duties to protect farmers’ livelihoods – are now punished by the World Bank and other multilateral agencies. President Tokayev’s statement indicates an appetite in the poorer nations to rethink the liberalisation of the food markets.
In July 2020, a statement titled ‘A New Cold War against China is against the interests of humanity’, was widely circulated and endorsed. No Cold War, the campaign which drafted the statement, has held a number of important webinars over the past two years to amplify discussions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe on the impact of this US-imposed pressure campaign against China, and on the racism that this has inflamed in the West. Part of No Cold War’s analysis is that these manoeuvres by the United States are intended to discourage other countries from commercially engaging with China, and also Russia. US firms find themselves at a disadvantage compared to Chinese firms, and Russian energy exports to Europe are vastly cheaper than US exports. The US has responded to this economic competition, not on a purely commercial basis, but treated it as a threat to its national security and to world peace. Instead of dividing the world in this manner, No Cold War calls for relations between the United States and China and Russia based on ‘mutual dialogue’ centred ‘on the common issues which unite humanity’.
During this war on Ukraine, No Cold War has launched a new publication called Briefings, which will be factual texts on matters of global concern. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will share these periodic briefings in this newsletter (you can also find them here). For its first issue, No Cold War has produced the following Briefing, World hunger and the war in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine, along with sanctions imposed by the United States and Western countries against Russia, have caused global food, fertiliser, and fuel prices to ‘skyrocket’ and endanger the world food supply. This conflict is exacerbating the existing crisis of global hunger and imperils the living standards and well-being of billions of people – particularly in the Global South.
War in the ‘breadbasket of the world’
Russia and Ukraine together produce nearly 30 percent of the world’s wheat and roughly 12 percent of its total calories. Over the past five years, they have accounted for 17 percent of the world’s corn, 32 percent of barley (a critical source of animal feed), and 75 percent of sunflower oil (an important cooking oil in many countries). On top of this, Russia is the world’s largest supplier of fertilisers and natural gas (a key component in fertiliser production), accounting for 15 percent of the global trade of nitrogenous fertilisers, 17 percent of potash fertilisers, 20 percent of natural gas.
The current crisis threatens to cause a global food shortage. The United Nations has estimated that up to 30 percent of Ukrainian farmland could become a warzone; in addition, due to sanctions, Russia has been severely restricted in exporting food, fertiliser, and fuel. This has caused global prices to surge. Since the war began, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent, and some fertilisers by 40 percent.
The Global South is ‘getting pummelled’
The painful impact of this shock is being felt by people around the world, but most sharply in the Global South. ‘In a word, developing countries are getting pummelled,’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently remarked.
According to the UN, 45 African and ‘least developed’ countries import at least a third of their wheat from these two Russia or Ukraine – 18 of those countries import at least 50 percent. Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, obtains over 70 percent of its imports from Russia and Ukraine, while Turkey obtains over 80 percent.
Countries of the Global South are already facing severe price shocks and shortages, impacting both consumption and production. In Kenya, bread prices have risen by 40 percent in some areas and, in Lebanon, by 70 percent. Meanwhile, Brazil, the world’s largest producer of soybeans, is facing a major reduction in crop yields. The country purchases close to half of its potash fertiliser from Russia and neighbouring Belarus (which is also being sanctioned) – it has only a three month supply remaining with farmers being instructed to ration.
‘The United States has sanctioned the whole world’
The situation is being directly exacerbated by U.S. and Western sanctions against Russia. Although sanctions have been justified as targeting Russian government leaders and elites, such measures hurt all people, particularly vulnerable groups, and are having global ramifications.
Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, director of an Afghan import company, made the following diagnosis: ‘The United States thinks it has only sanctioned Russia and its banks. But the United States has sanctioned the whole world.’
‘A catastrophe on top of a catastrophe’
The war in Ukraine and associated sanctions are exacerbating the already existing crisis of world hunger. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation found that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020.’ In recent years, the situation has worsened as food prices have risen due largely to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and related disruptions.
‘Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,’ said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the UN World Food Program. ‘There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.’
‘If you think we’ve got hell on earth now, you just get ready,’ Beasley warned.
Regardless of the different opinions on Ukraine, it is clear that billions of people around the world will suffer from this hunger crisis until the war and sanctions come to an end.
Stanisław Osostowicz (Poland), Antifascist Demonstration (1932-1933).
In 1962, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote ‘Starvation Camp Near Jasło’. Located in south-east Poland not far from the Ukraine-Poland border, Jasło was the site of a Nazi death camp, where thousands of people – mainly Jews – were caged and left to die of starvation. How does one write about such immense violence? Szymborska offered the following reflection:
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 fetus, 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 …
Each death is an abomination; including the 300 children who die of malnutrition every hour of every day.
The post History Rounds off Skeletons to Zero first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On March 16, 2022, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev delivered his State of the Nation address in Nur-Sultan. Most of Tokayev’s speech was about the political reforms in Kazakhstan he had either accomplished or planned to advance, after he had promised them as redress to January’s political unrest and protests against the Kazakh government. He also addressed the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Kazakhstan during his speech and pointed to the spikes in food prices and currency volatility as some of the worrying economic consequences being faced by the country as a fallout of this conflict. More
The post Hunger Stalks Central Asia as the Ukraine War Unfolds appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Jaider Esbell (Brazil), The Intergalactic Entities Talk to Decide the Universal Future of Humanity, 2021.
On 31 March 1964, the Brazilian military initiated a coup d’état against the democratically-elected progressive government of President João Goulart. The next day, Goulart was deposed and, ten days later, the 295 members of the National Congress handed the state over to General Castello Branco and a military junta. The military ruled over Brazil for the next twenty-one years.
The Brazilian military is an institution with deep roots in society and constitutes the second largest military force in the Americas, after the United States. The 1964 coup was not the first time that the military left the barracks and seized power over the state. Along with its role in overthrowing the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), the military entered to remove President Washington Luís in the Revolution of 1930, replacing him with Getúlio Vargas, and then intervening in 1945 to end Vargas’ Estado Novo, also known as the Third Brazilian Republic. The nine presidents that followed in Brazil’s civilian era included one general, Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946–1951), and the return of Vargas, men in civilian clothes who upheld the interests of the elites and their close allies in the United States. Goulart attempted to break part of the old compact, driving a social democratic agenda to benefit the Brazilian masses; this irritated the US government which felt that Goulart would deliver Brazil to communism.
A glance through the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States shows its deep involvement in the 1964 coup. Less than a year after Goulart took office in September 1961, US President John F. Kennedy met with his advisor Richard Goodwin and US Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon in July 1962 to discuss their concerns about the Brazilian president. Gordon told Kennedy and Goodwin that Goulart was seeking to transform the military, having replaced several military commanders and threatening to replace others. ‘How far he goes on those changes depends a little bit on the resistance of the military. I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the military. To make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action’. Why should the United States act against Goulart? ‘He’s giving the damn country away to…’, Gordon started to say, when Kennedy interrupted him, ‘Communists’. ‘The military’, Ambassador Gordon said, ‘I can see that they are very friendly to us, very anti-Communist, very suspicious of Goulart’. The coup was part of what the US government called Operation Brother Sam, to ensure Brazil remained pliant to the aims of the multinational corporations.
The United States delivered aid to the Brazilian military, along with the clear message that Washington would support a military coup. When the Brazilian military left their barracks on 31 March, a telegram from the US embassy in Rio de Janeiro alerted the US navy to station a flotilla of warships off the Brazilian coastline. Declassified documents now show us the minute-by-minute coordination between the US President Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA, and the Brazilian military in the execution of the coup.
The army generals that ruled Brazil for the following twenty-one years drew their ‘geo-strategy’ from Brazil’s highest-ranking war college Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG), a perspective founded on the view that the United States and Brazil would jointly control the Americas. The generals opened the doors to the Brazilian economy, welcoming North American banks and mining companies to invest and repatriate their profits (in 1978, 20% of Citicorp’s profits were from Brazil, more than it made in the United States). Concessions to multinational corporations structured the rule of the generals, with wages kept below the growth of labour productivity and inflation climbing from 30% (1975) to 109% (1980). By 1980, Brazil had the highest level of debt ($55 billion) in the Global South; President João Figueiredo (1979–1985) said that there was ‘nothing left over for development’.
Mass struggles of workers, students, indigenous communities, religious communities, and a range of other sections of the population pressured the decadent military regime to hand over governmental authority in 1985. However, the transition was carefully managed by the military, which ensured that it did not see any meaningful attrition in its power. The democratic movement pushed back against the rigidities of the Brazilian class structure which had been strengthened by the military and made significant gains, led by the Workers’ Party (1980), the Movement of Landless Rural Workers or MST (1984), and others. The high point of this democratic movement in the electoral domain were the Workers’ Party presidencies of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from 2003 to 2016. During this period, the state drove a massive wealth redistribution programme centred around the eradication of hunger and absolute poverty (through the family allowance programme Bolsa Família); the enhancement of social security programmes; the increase in the minimum wage; the reinvigoration of the health care system; and the democratisation of higher education. All of these advances began to be eroded with the US-supported lawfare coup against Dilma in 2016.
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, our researchers have been carefully examining the role of the Brazilian military in the post-2016 period and, in particular, during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Not only has Bolsonaro glorified the military dictatorship (1964–1985), but he has effectively built a ‘Military Party’ to govern the country. Our latest publication, The Military’s Return to Brazilian Politics (Dossier no. 50, March 2022), closely assesses the militarisation of Brazilian politics and society. The key argument of this dossier is that Brazil’s military has grown, not to confront any external threat, but to deepen the control of Brazil’s oligarchy – and its multinational allies – over society. The armed forces routinely use violence against ‘internal enemies’, groups which are deeply committed to democratising Brazil’s society, economy, and military.
The coup against Dilma and the lawfare against Lula are part of the gradual attrition of democracy in Brazil and the slide towards militarisation. In a few months, Brazil will face an important presidential election. Current polls show that Lula (40%) is ahead of Bolsonaro (30%), with the wind behind Lula’s sails. Our dossier attempts to understand the social ground that lies beneath the political debates currently taking place in the country; it is an invitation to a dialogue on the role of the military in public, both within Brazil and globally.
The art in the dossier and in this newsletter, reflects on the argument that Brazil’s armed forces are geared more to internal repression than defence at the country’s borders. That is why the images evoke the brave people who have fought to democratise their country and faced the wrath of the military.
Before he could return to Brazil from exile in Argentina, Goulart died in 1976. Later, high officials in Brazil said that Goulart had been assassinated as part of the US government’s Operation Condor. From our office in Buenos Aires, in collaboration with Editorial Batalla de Ideas, comes a new publication, The New Condor Plan: Geopolitics and Imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, a collection of articles on the latest manifestations of Operation Condor in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Our dossier ends with the following paragraphs:
Our past is also a key part of our future; without settling scores with a past marked by slavery and dictatorship, it will not be possible to build a democratic future in which the armed forces are wholly subordinated to the sovereignty of the people and their institutions and are exclusively destined for external defence and no longer used against their own people. This requires confronting the crimes committed during the 1964 dictatorship as well as its authoritarian legacy, which has shaped the state and the political culture up to the present day. Giving new meaning to patriotic symbols, such as the Brazilian flag, should be part of this process.
Lastly, we must resist the idea that preparing for war is necessary for building peace. To the contrary: in order to build peace, the priority must be placed on a programme that centres the wellbeing of humankind and the planet by eliminating hunger, guaranteeing safe and secure housing as well as universal, quality health care, and defending the right to a dignified quality of life.
These words remind us of the words of writers such as the communist poet Ferreira Gullar (1930–2016), whose poetry dreams of a socialist Brazil. In his No mundo há muitas armadilhas (‘In the world, there are many traps’), published in 1975, Gullar writes,
In the world, there are many traps
and what is a trap could be a refuge
and what is a refuge could be a trap
….
The star lies
the sea is a sophist. In fact,
humans are tied to life and need to live
humans are hungry
and must eat
humans have children
and need to raise them
In the world, there are many traps and
it is necessary to shatter them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Chiharu Shiota (Japan), Navigating the Unknown, 2020.
The war in Ukraine has focused attention on the shifts taking place in the world order. Russia’s military intervention has been met with sanctions from the West as well as with the transport of arms and mercenaries to Ukraine. These sanctions will have a major impact on the Russian economy as well as the Central Asian states, but they will also negatively impact the European population who will see energy and food prices rise further. Until now, the West has decided not to intervene with direct military force or to try and establish a ‘no-fly zone’. It is recognised, sanely, that such an intervention could escalate into a full-scale war between the United States and Russia, the consequences of which are unthinkable given the nuclear weapons capacities of both countries. Short of any other kind of response, the West – as with the Russian intervention in Syria in 2015 – has had to accept Moscow’s actions.
To understand the current global situation, here are six theses about the establishment of the US-shaped world order from 1990 to the current fragility of that order in the face of growing Russian and Chinese power. These theses are drawn from our analysis in dossier no. 36 (January 2021), Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future; they are intended for discussion and so feedback on them is very welcome.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (Canada), The One Percent, 2015.
Thesis One: Unipolarity. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, between 1990 and 2013–15, the United States developed a world system that benefitted multinational corporations based in the United States and in the other G7 countries (Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Canada). The events that defined overwhelming US power were the invasions of Iraq (1991) and Yugoslavia (1999) as well as the creation of the World Trade Organisation (1994). Russia, weakened by the collapse of the USSR, sought entry into this system by joining the G7 and collaborating with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as a ‘Partner for Peace’. Meanwhile, China, under presidents Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013), played a careful game by inserting its labour into the US-dominated global system and not challenging the US in its operations.
Thesis Two: Signal Crisis. The US overreached its power through two dynamics: first, by overleveraging its own domestic economy (overleveraged banks, higher non-productive assets than productive assets); and second, by trying to fight several wars at the same time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sahel) during the first two decades of the 21st century. The signal crises for the weakness of US power were illustrated by the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the debacle of that war for US power projection, and the credit crisis (2007–08). Internal political polarisation in the US and a crisis of legitimacy in Europe followed these developments.
Olga Bulgakova (Russia), Blind Men, 1992.
Thesis Three: Sino-Russian Emergence. By the second decade of the 2000s, for different reasons, both China and Russia emerged from their relative dormancy.
China’s emergence has two legs:
- China’s domestic economy. China built up massive trade surpluses and, alongside these, it built up scientific and technological knowledge through its trade agreements and its investment in higher education. Chinese firms in robotics, high-tech, high-speed rail, and green energy leapfrogged over Western firms.
- China’s external relations. In 2013, China announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which proposed an alternative to the US-driven International Monetary Fund’s development and trade agenda. The BRI extended out of Asia into Europe as well as into Africa and Latin America.
Russia emerged on two legs as well:
- Russia’s domestic economy. President Vladimir Putin fought some sections of the large capitalists to assert state control of key commodity export sectors and used these to build up state assets (notably oil and gas). Rather than merely leech Russian assets for their overseas bank accounts, these Russian capitalists agreed to subordinate part of their ambitions to rebuilding the power and influence of the Russian state.
- Russia’s external relations. Since 2007, Russia began to edge away from the Western global agenda and drive its own project, first through the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-
South Africa) agenda and then later through increasingly close relations with China. Russia leveraged its export of energy to assert control of its borders, which it had not done when NATO expanded in 2004 to absorb seven countries that are near its western boundary. Russian intervention into Crimea (2014) and Syria (2015) used its military force to create a shield around its warm water ports in Sebastopol (Crimea) and Tartus (Syria). This was the first military challenge to the US since 1990.
In this period, China and Russia deepened their cooperation in all fields.
Ibrahim el-Salahi (Sudan), Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I, (1961-65).
Thesis Four: Global Monroe Doctrine. The United States took its 1823 Monroe Doctrine (that asserted its control over the Americas) global and proposed in this post-Soviet era that the entire world was its dominion. It began to push back against the assertion of China (Obama’s Pivot to Asia) and Russia (Russiagate and Ukraine). This New Cold War driven by the US, which includes hybrid warfare through sanctions against thirty countries such as Iran and Venezuela, has destabilised the world.
Thesis Five: Confrontations. The confrontations hastened by the New Cold War have inflamed the situation in Asia – where the Taiwan Strait remains a hot zone – and in Latin America – where the United States attempted to create a hot war in Venezuela (and attempted but failed to project its power in places such as Bolivia). The current conflict in Ukraine – which has its origins in many factors, including the demise of the Ukrainian pluri-national compact – is also over the question of European independence. The US has used ‘Global NATO’ as a Trojan horse to exercise its power over Europe and keep it subordinated to US interests even if it harms Europeans as they lose energy supply and natural gas for the food economy. Russia violated the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, but NATO created some of the conditions which accelerated this confrontation – not for Ukraine but for its project in Europe.
Olga Blinder (Paraguay), A mi maestra (‘To My Teacher’), 1970.
Thesis Six: Terminal Crisis. Fragility is the key to understanding US power today. It has not declined dramatically, nor does it remain unscathed. There are three sources of US power that are relatively untouched:
(1) Overwhelming Military Power. The United States remains the only country in the world that is able to bomb any of the other UN member states into the stone age.
(2) The Dollar-Wall Street-IMF regime. Due to the global reliance on the dollar and to the dollar-denominated global financial system, the US can wield its sanctions as a weapon of war to weaken countries at its whim.
(3) Informational Power. No country has as decisive control over the internet, both its physical infrastructure and its near monopoly companies (such as Facebook and YouTube, which remove any content and any provider at will); no country has as much control over the shaping of world news due to the power of its wire services (Reuters and the Associated Press) as well as the major news networks (such as CNN).
There are other sources of US power that are deeply weakened, such as its political landscape, which is deeply polarised, and its inability to marshal its resources to send China and Russia back inside their borders.
People’s movements need to grow our own power, by organising the people into powerful organisations and around a programme that has the capacity to both answer the immediate problems of our time and the long-term question of how to transition to a system that can transcend the apartheids of our time: food apartheid, medical apartheid, education apartheid, and money apartheid. To transcend these apartheids leads us out of this capitalist system to socialism.
In the past week, we have lost many comrades, old and young. Amongst them, our Senior Fellow Aijaz Ahmad (1941–2022), one of the great Marxists of our time, left us at the age of 81. When Marxism was under attack after the fall of the USSR, Aijaz held the line, teaching generations of us about the necessity of Marxist theory; that theory remains necessary because it continues to be the most powerful critique of capitalism and, as long as capitalism continues to structure our lives, that critique remains boundless. For us at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Aijaz’s mentorship was invaluable. In fact, the dossier Twilight, which helped us orient ourselves in the current conjuncture, was written after substantial discussion with Aijaz.
We also lost Ayanda Ngila (1992–2022), who was the deputy chairperson of eKhenana land occupation, part of South Africa’s militant shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM). Ayanda was a courageous leader of AbM who had recently been released from a second spell of being held in prison on trumped up charges. He was a kind comrade to his peers and a student and teacher at the Frantz Fanon School. When he was gunned down by his adversaries in the African National Congress, Ayanda was wearing a t-shirt with a quote from Steve Biko: ‘It’s better to die for an idea that is going to live than to live for an idea that is going to die’. On the walls of the Frantz Fanon School, the comrades at AbM painted their ideals clearly: Land, Decent Housing, Dignity, Freedom, and Socialism.
We concur. So would Aijaz.
The post We Are in a Period of Great Tectonic Shifts first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
During the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey, which took place from March 11 to March 13, 2022, the Kyrgyz Republic’s Foreign Minister Ruslan Kazakbaev told Helga Maria Schmid, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), that his country would be happy to host Russian-Ukrainian talks and serve as the More
The post Central Asia Struggles With the Consequences of Russia’s War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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The war between Russia and Ukraine began long before 24 February 2022, the date provided for the beginning of the Russian invasion. read now…
This post was originally published on Independent Australia.
The war between Russia and Ukraine began much before February 24, 2022—the date provided by the Ukrainian government, NATO and the United States for the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Dmitry Kovalevich, a journalist and a member of a now-banned communist organization in Ukraine, the war actually started in the spring More
The post Understanding the War in Ukraine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Daniela Edburg (Mexico), Atomic Picnic, 2007.
On 27 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov and the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. ‘The top officials of the leading NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] countries have made aggressive statements against our country’, Putin said. Therefore, he told his top officials ‘to transfer the deterrence forces of the Russian army to a special mode of combat duty’. The last phrase, reasonably cloaked in bureaucratic language, means that Russia’s nuclear arsenal will move to high alert. Meanwhile, Russian forces appeared to have seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Early reports that the power plant was on fire were false, although it was sufficiently chilling to hear that there had been fighting at the site.
More than 90% of the world’s 12,700 nuclear weapons are owned by the United States and Russia; the rest are found in seven other countries. About 2,000 of these warheads – held by the US, Russia, Britain, and France – are on perpetual high alert, which means that they are ready to be used at a moment’s notice. The United States has stationed nuclear weapons not only on its own territory but across the world, including in Europe; roughly 100 of its B61 nuclear gravity bombs are based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey – all NATO member states. In 2018-19, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, an arms control agreement with Russia, which promptly followed suit. The abandonment of the treaty means that each country can now deploy ground-launched missiles with a range of up to 5,500 kilometres, seriously weakening the security architecture in and around Europe. It is undeniable that the INF withdrawal is part of the reason why the Russians believe that the United States seeks proximity to its borders in order to deploy such missiles and reduce the strike time to Russian cities. On top of this, the United States is building a new $100 billion missile system called the GBSD (ground-based strategic deterrent) that can travel nearly 10,000 kilometres; this missile can carry nuclear weapons and strike any place on the planet in minutes.
Elliott McDowell (USA), Tony at Yucca Flats, 1982.
These dangerous developments – the withdrawal from the INF, the development of the GBSD, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – came after the world voted ‘yes’ on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017) which went into force on 22 January 2021. An overwhelming number of United Nations member states, 122, voted in favour of this treaty; only one member (the Netherlands) voted against it. However, 69 countries abstained, including all nine of the nuclear weapons states and all NATO members (except the Netherlands). The Russian military action in Ukraine is a reminder, at the very least, of why a global nuclear weapons ban is necessary, and why every single country must commit to disarming and disposing of its nuclear weapons arsenal.
There is a practical method to take the global desire for the abolition of nuclear weapons forward: the expansion of the Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ).
Maria Prymachenko (Ukraine), May That Nuclear War Be Cursed!, 1978.
Since the early 1960s, Mexico’s representative to the United Nations, Alfonso García Robles, led the fight to develop a NWFZ in the Americas. If these regional zones are created and expanded, García Robles said at the UN in 1974, eventually the area ‘from which nuclear weapons are prohibited [will reach] a point where the territories of Powers which possess those terrible weapons of mass destruction will become something like contaminated islets subject to quarantine’. García Robles spoke with the prestige afforded to Mexico for its leadership in passing the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967. This treaty created the first NWFZ, which included 33 of the 35 countries of the American hemisphere; only Canada and the United States remained outside the zone.
Four other NWFZs have been created since the Treaty of Tlatelolco: in the South Pacific (Treaty of Rarotonga, 1985), in Southeast Asia (Treaty of Bangkok, 1995), on the African continent (Treaty of Pelindaba, 1996), and in Central Asia (Treaty of Semipalatinsk, 2006). Together, these five NWFZs include 113 countries, comprising 60% of the member states of the United Nations and every country on the African continent. The main legal agreements related to nuclear weapons, such as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT, 1968), allow for the establishment of these Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones; for example, article VII of the NPT states, ‘Nothing in this Treaty affects the right of any group of States to conclude regional treaties in order to assure the total absence of nuclear weapons in their respective territories’. The UN General Assembly has regularly called for the establishment of additional NWFZs.
Pavel Pepperstein (Russia), Bikini 47, 2001.
None of the nuclear weapons states have joined these treaties. This is not from lack of interest. In 1966, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin told the UN’s Disarmament Committee that his government was willing to include a clause into the NPT that would prohibit ‘the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear States parties to the treaty which have no nuclear weapons in their territory’. The next year, the Soviet Ambassador to the Disarmament Committee Alexei Roshchin said that his government hoped that the NPT should be considered as a ‘first step towards the cessation of the nuclear arms race, towards the elimination of nuclear weapons’.
These sentiments from Kosygin and Roshchin followed the plan that was proposed to the United Nations by Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki on 2 October 1957 for the creation of a denuclearised central Europe. The Rapacki Plan suggested that a NWFZ be established in Poland and the two Germanys, with the hope that it be extended into Czechoslovakia. The plan was supported by the Soviet Union, along with all the countries of the Warsaw Pact (Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the German Democratic Republic).
Objection to the Rapacki Plan came from NATO and in particular from the United States. At the Paris meeting of the NATO council in December 1957, the military alliance decided to continue their nuclear weapons build-up, arguing that the Soviet Union would wield an advantage over European countries relying on ‘arms of the preatomic age’. Two weeks later, the Polish Foreign Ministry discussed NATO’s decision and formulated a reasonable response toward the creation of a second draft of the Rapacki Plan. The four new elements of the plan included:
- To guarantee that the nuclear-free zone would not be attacked by nuclear weapons.
- To be prepared to reduce and balance conventional armed forces.
- To develop a control plan in the zone for all types of weapons.
- To develop a legal form for a nuclear-free zone treaty.
NATO would not take any of these proposals seriously. The Rapacki Plan died a quiet death and has been largely forgotten. Today, there is no discussion about a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in any part of Europe even though it is ground zero for the nuclear trigger.
Faiza Butt (Pakistan), Get Out of My Dreams I, 2008.
Suggestions for Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zones for other parts of the world abound. Iran has been one of the proponents for a NWFZ in the Middle East. This was first raised at the UN in 1974 and was proposed in the UN General Assembly by Egypt and Iran each year from 1980 to 2018 and is adopted each year without a vote. But that proposal has been dead in the water because Israel refuses to accept it. In September 1972, Pakistan’s representative to the UN Atomic Energy Conference Munir Ahmad Khan proposed a NWFZ in South Asia, but the idea was set aside when India tested nuclear weapons in May 1974. Here and there, countries raise the issue of an Arctic NWFZ or a Pacific Ocean NWFZ, but none of these have come to pass. The main adversaries to these proposals are the nuclear weapons states, with the United States in the lead.
Akiko Takakura (Japan), A Woman Driven by Unbearable Thirst Tried to Catch the Black Raindrops in Her Mouth, c. 1974.
The fighting in Ukraine which is taking place in and around nuclear power plants and the loose comments made by powerful men about nuclear weapons remind us of the great dangers we face.
When I was a child, Indian schools commemorated Hiroshima Day on 6 August with great solemnity. Our school was given a lecture about the brutality and then we went to our classes and either made a drawing or wrote a story about what we had learned. The point of the exercise was to imprint a great hatred for war in our young minds. It strikes me that we – as a human civilisation – have forgotten about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the terrible weapons dropped upon their populations by the United States in 1945.
I have spent years reading the words of the hibakusha, the survivors of those attacks, and re-reading the journalism of Wilfred Burchett, John Hersey, and Charles Loeb and the writings of Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, Masuji Ibuse, Michihiko Hachiya, Sankichi Tōge, Shinoe Shōda, Tamiki Hara, Yōko Ōta, Yoshie Hotta, and others. These writers illuminate the terror of war and the amnesia inflicted on the world by those who want to continue to drag us into conflict after conflict.
In this reading, I encountered the exchange between Günther Anders, a German Marxist philosopher, and Claude Eatherly, one of the US pilots who flew as part of the squadron that bombed Hiroshima. Anders wrote to Eatherly in 1959, beginning a correspondence that resulted in a broken Eatherly writing for forgiveness to the people of Hiroshima. The response from thirty young hibakusha women to Eatherly moved me deeply, as I hope it will move you too:
We have learned to feel towards you a fellow-feeling,
thinking that you are also a victim of war
like us.
It is as if the hibakusha women were channelling the sentiments that first created International Working Women’s Day over a hundred years ago, a day which, in 1917, was the spur to the revolution in Tsarist Russia. Of war and its divisions, one of the day’s founders Clara Zetkin wrote, ‘The blood of the killed and the wounded must not be a stream to divide that which unites the present distress and the future hope’.
The post You Are Also a Victim of War like Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The roots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine go deep to various political and foreign policy developments, writes Vijay Prashad.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Konstantin Yuon (USSR), People of the Future, 1929.
It is impossible not to be moved by the outrageousness of warfare, the ugliness of aerial bombardment, the gruesome fears of civilians who are trapped between choices that are not their own. If you read this line and assume I am talking about Ukraine, then you are right, but of course, this is not just about Ukraine. In the same week that Russian forces entered Ukraine, the United States launched airstrikes in Somalia, Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen, and Israel struck Syria and Palestinians in Gaza.
War is an open sore on humanity’s soul. It draws precious social wealth into destruction: ‘The impact of war is self-evident’, wrote Karl Marx in the Grundrisse (1857–58), ‘since, economically, it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop a part of its capital into the ocean’. It disrupts social unity and damages the possibility of international solidarity: ‘workers of the world unite in peacetime’, wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Either Or (1916), ‘but in war slit one another’s throats’.
War is never good for the poor. War is never good for workers. War itself is a crime. War produces crimes. Peace is a priority.
Anton Kandinsky (Ukraine), Grenade, 2012.
The war in Ukraine did not begin with the Russian intervention. There are a series of authors for this war, each one important to understanding what is happening today.
Pluri-nationalism vs. ethnic chauvinism. Ukraine, shaped out of Lithuanian, Polish, and Tsarist empires, is a pluri-national state with large minorities of Russian, Hungarian, Moldavian, and Romanian speakers. When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the question of ethnicity was held in check by the fact that all Ukrainians were Soviet citizens and that Soviet citizenship was supra-ethnic. In 1990, when Ukraine departed from the Soviet Union, the question of ethnicity emerged as a barrier to full participation in society for all Ukrainians. The socio-political problem faced by Ukraine was not unique; ethnic nationalism surfaced in almost every country in the post-communist East, from the terrible break-up of Yugoslavia initiated by Croatian independence in 1991 to the military confrontation between Georgia and Russia in 2008. Ethnic cleansing was treated as utterly normal, such as when the West cheered on the forced removal of half a million Serbs from Krajina, Croatia in 1995. In contrast, Czechoslovakia, one of the countries in the communist East, broke up along ethnic lines peacefully in 1993 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Regional peace vs. NATO’s imperialism, part I. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (1991), the United States sought to absorb all of eastern Europe into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This was despite the agreement made in 1990 with the last government of the Soviet Union that, in the words of then US Secretary of State James Baker, NATO would not move ‘one-inch eastwards’. In the new period, eastern European countries and Russia sought integration into the European project through entry into the European Union (for political and economic purposes) and into NATO (for military reasons). During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999), Russia became a NATO partner and joined the G-7 (which, for a time, became the G-8). Even in President Vladimir Putin’s early years, Russia continued to think that it would be welcomed into the European project. In 2004, NATO absorbed seven eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia); at that time, NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said that Russia understood that NATO had ‘no ulterior motives’. However, Moscow eventually called NATO’s persistent march eastward into question, and, in 2007, Putin accused NATO of ‘muscle-flexing’ in eastern Europe. From then on, NATO’s expansion became an increasingly contentious matter. Although Ukraine’s entry into NATO was blocked by France and Germany in 2008, the question of Ukraine being drawn into the NATO project began to define Russian-Ukrainian politics. This last point highlights how the discussion about ‘security guarantees’ for Russia is incomplete; it is not about Russia’s security fears alone – since Russia is a major nuclear power – it is also about Europe’s relationship with Russia. Namely, would Europe be able to form a relationship with Russia that is not predicated upon US diktats to subordinate Russia?
Democracy vs the Coup. In 2014, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych sought a loan from Russia, which Putin said he would provide if Yanukovych would sideline the country’s oligarchy-controlled financial networks. Instead, Yanukovych turned to the European Union (EU), which offered similar advice, but whose concerns were set aside by the United States, a dynamic that was on full display when US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, ‘Fuck the EU’. Earlier, Nuland had boasted about the billions of dollars the US spent on ‘democracy promotion’ in Ukraine, which in fact meant the strengthening of pro-Western and anti-Russian forces. Yanukovych was removed and replaced in a parliamentary coup by a string of US-backed leaders (Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Petro Poroshenko). President Poroshenko (2014–2019) drove a Ukrainian nationalist agenda around the slogan armiia, mova, vira (‘military, language, faith’), which became reality with the end to military cooperation with Russia (2014), the enacting of legislation which made Ukrainian ‘the only official state language’ and restricted the use of Russian and other minority languages (2019), and the Ukrainian church breaking ties with the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (2018). These measures, along with the empowerment of neo-Nazi elements, shattered the country’s pluri-national compact and produced serious armed conflict in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which is home to a substantial Russian-speaking ethnic minority. Threatened by state policy and neo-Nazi militias, this minority population sought protection from Russia. To mitigate the dangerous ethnic cleansing and end the war in the Donbass region, all parties agreed to a set of de-escalation measures, including ceasefire, known as the Minsk Agreements (2014–15).
Vasiliy Tsagolov (Ukraine), Untitled, 2008.
Regional peace vs. NATO imperialism, part II. Emboldened by the West, the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists grew their power, and the possibility of negotiations to settle the conflict waned. Violations of the Minsk Agreements by all sides undermined the process. For eight years, the people of the Donbass lived in a constant state of war, which, according to the United Nations, produced over 14,000 deaths and over 50,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021. There appeared to be no exit from that situation. What began to take place was essentially ethnic cleansing, with large sections of Russian speakers fleeing across the border to the Rostov region of Russia and Ukrainian speakers moving westwards. There was little international attention paid to this crisis and the rise of the neo-Nazi elements. NATO powers refused to take these issues seriously or provide Moscow with security guarantees; particularly, to guarantee that Ukraine would not be provided with nuclear weapons and would not become a member of NATO. Furthermore, Russia intervened to seize Crimea, where its navy has a warm water port. These moves further destabilised the situation, threatening the security of the region. NATO’s refusal to negotiate over Russia’s security is the spur that led to the intervention.
Otto Dix (Germany), Schädel (‘Skull’), 1924.
Wars make very complicated historical processes appear to be simple. The war in Ukraine is not merely about NATO or about ethnicity; it is about all these things and more. Every war must end at some point and diplomacy must restart. Rather than allow this war to escalate and for positions to harden too quickly, it is important for the guns to go silent and the discussions to recommence. Unless at least the following three issues are put on the table, nothing will advance:
- Adherence to the Minsk Agreements.
- Security guarantees for Russia and Ukraine, which would require Europe to develop an independent relationship with Russia that is not shaped by US interests.
- Reversal of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist laws and a return to the pluri-national compact.
If substantive negotiations and agreements regarding these essential matters do not materialise over the next few weeks, it is likely that dangerous weapons will face each other across tenuous divides and additional countries will get drawn into a conflict with the potential to spiral out of control.
The Soviet Ukrainian writer Mykola Bazhan wrote the powerful poem Elegy for Circus Attractions (1927) on the tensions of a circus. Could there be any better metaphor for our times?
A lady will shriek out piercingly…
Then panic takes aim and flies
into their heart-breaking howls,
crumpling their naked mouths!
Grind up the spit and tears,
whisk lips into grimaces!
They’re swinging like corpses on threads,
the voices.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That’s likely because although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways. The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. More
The post Ukraine: A Conflict Soaked in Contradictions and New Patterns in War and Media appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
On February 17, 2022, French President Emmanuel Macron held a press conference in Paris just ahead of the sixth European Union-African Union summit in Brussels along with Senegal’s President Macky Sall and Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo as well as European Council President Charles Michel. At the conference, Macron announced that the French forces would be withdrawing from Mali. This More
The post France Withdraws From Mali, But Continues to Devastate Africa’s Sahel appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Ahmed Rabbani (Pakistan), Untitled (Grape Arbor), 2016. Rabbani endured 545 days of torture at the hands of the CIA before he was transferred to Guantánamo in 2004. He has been in the prison without charge since then.
Twenty years ago, on 11 January 2002, the United States government brought its first ‘detainees’ abducted during the so-called War on Terror to its military prison in Guantánamo Bay. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘We do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva Conventions’. For the most part. Evidence began to emerge almost immediately – including from the International Committee of the Red Cross – that the Geneva Conventions were being violated and that many of the prisoners were being tortured. By December 2002, the US media began to report that ‘many held at Guantánamo [were] not likely terrorists’.
Nearly 780 known ‘detainees’ have been caged in the prison over these past two decades; currently 39 men remain, most of whom have never been charged. While US President Joe Biden has said that he wants to close the detention camp, he has, in fact, authorised plans to expand it. The Biden administration is spending $4 million to build a new secret courtroom in the facility, which will be closed to the public. Whether the remaining prisoners will now be granted trials and have their fates decided upon is yet to be seen. On 10 January 2022, independent experts of the United Nations Human Rights Council found that ‘Guantánamo Bay is a site of unparalleled notoriety, defined by the systematic use of torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against hundreds of men brought to the site and deprived of their most fundamental rights’.
Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), Vision of the Tomb, 1965.
One of these men, Sami al-Hajj, was picked up by Pakistani troops on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on 15 December 2001 and then handed over to the US on 6 January 2002. Al-Hajj was then transferred to Guantánamo on 14 June 2002, where he remained until his release to Doha, Qatar on 31 May 2008. The US government accused al-Hajj of being a member of al-Qaeda as well as part of the leadership of both the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood. He was also accused of providing weapons and funds to groups in Chechnya via the Saudi charity al-Haramain.
We know these details about al-Hajj thanks to the Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) leaked to the media via WikiLeaks in April 2011. These Gitmo Files are remarkable because each of the DABs show us the misinformation at the base of the War on Terror. A close reading of al-Hajj’s DAB shows that he was not a leader of any of these organisations; he was actually a journalist with Al Jazeera. Al-Hajj began working for Al Jazeera in early 2000 and was sent to Afghanistan in October 2001 to work with his colleagues Yusuf al-Sholy and Saddah Abdul Haq. There was no evidence that al-Hajj was a member of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the DAB, he was brought to Guantánamo to give information about Al Jazeera’s training programme as well as various charity groups that operated in Azerbaijan, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
In 2007, al-Hajj’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, wrote that his client had ‘been on hunger strike for more than 230 days, more than three times as long as the IRA strikers in 1980’. When al-Hajj arrived in Doha, he said that he had been interrogated 130 times, ‘mostly related to his work with Al Jazeera’.
The DABs helped lawyers such as Stafford Smith find out who was behind the fence at Guantánamo and what lies were being told about them. Thanks to WikiLeaks, this information was made public. No one responsible for the crimes at Guantánamo has been tried for the ‘systematic use of torture’, as human rights experts have noted. Yet the co-founder and publisher of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, sits in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s Guantánamo. The US seeks to extradite him to face charges of espionage. Who is Julian Assange and why is the US so desperate for his extradition? Along with the International Peoples’ Assembly, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has produced the following Red Alert no. 13, Free Julian Assange.
Who is Julian Assange and what is WikiLeaks?
Julian Assange is an Australian journalist and publisher who co-founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks is a website that was designed to publish documents leaked to it anonymously by officials from governments and corporations. The project was inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a US government internal document that showed the extent of its deceit in prosecuting the war in Vietnam. Between 2006 and 2009, WikiLeaks published a series of important documents that contained revelations such as the membership list of the fascist British National Party (2008), the Petrogate oil scandal in Peru (2009), and a report on the US-Israeli cyber-attack on Iranian nuclear energy facilities (2009). In 2013, the International Federation of Journalists called WikiLeaks a ‘new breed of media organisation based on the public’s right to know’.
In 2010, while based in Iraq, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents, including videos, from US government servers. She sent them to WikiLeaks with a note, saying, ‘This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare’. In November 2010, WikiLeaks partnered with major newspapers (Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde, The New York Times) to publish the diplomatic cables (CableGate) that came from Manning’s tranche of documents. WikiLeaks also published the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries, which contained materials that suggested that US forces had committed war crimes in both countries. Amongst these documents was a classified video from 2007 showing US forces killing civilians, including employees of the news organisation Reuters. This video, released by WikiLeaks as Collateral Murder, had an enormous impact on public opinion about the nature of US warfare.
In November 2010, US Attorney General Eric Holder said that his office had opened ‘an active, ongoing criminal investigation’ against WikiLeaks.
Why is Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison (London, UK)?
By early December 2010, senior US politicians called upon the US government to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act (1917). Sexual assault allegations in Sweden drew Assange into a legal net. While willing to return to Sweden to face the allegations, he wanted an undertaking that Sweden would not extradite him to the US, where he faced life imprisonment on potential espionage charges. Sweden, in close contact with the US, refused to provide this undertaking. In 2012, Assange received asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London. In April 2019, Ecuador’s government – in exchange for what it considered a favourable deal with the International Monetary Fund – handed Assange over to British authorities. Assange was taken to Belmarsh prison to await hearings for extradition not to Sweden, which had dropped its investigation, but to the United States.
The US government indicted Assange on 18 charges related to the obtaining and publishing of classified documents, which could result in a sentence of up to 175 years in prison. However, 17 of these charges were only levied after Assange entered British custody. Initially, Assange was only charged with conspiring with Manning to crack a password and hack into the Pentagon’s computer system, which on its own carries a short prison term of up to 5 years. The problem here, it appears, is that the US government has no evidence that Assange colluded with Manning to break into US servers; Manning says that she acted alone in acquiring and delivering the documents to WikiLeaks.
Thus, the US government seeks to bring Assange to the US to be tried under the Espionage Act for soliciting, obtaining, and then publishing classified information – in other words, precisely the work of an investigative journalist. It is journalism, therefore, that Assange is being prosecuted for.
What can you do to free Julian Assange from prison?
Mobilise. Take to the streets on 25 February 2022. Protest outside the embassies and consulates of the United Kingdom and the United States. Demand that these governments respect international law and Julian Assange’s fundamental rights.
Send a letter. Sign this letter drafted by the International Peoples’ Assembly and send it to your local British embassy or consulate telling them to respect their legal responsibilities.
Participate. Follow the International Peoples’ Assembly on social media to learn more about Assange’s case and his contributions to the anti-imperialist struggle today. Share our materials with your communities and movements. Help us get the word out about why we must #FreeAssangeNOW! Register
In 2020, Roger Waters spoke at a rally for Julian Assange in London. In his closing remarks, he shared a story about his mother:
As a young supply schoolteacher in the North of England before the war, she saw the children of mill workers walking barefoot to school through snow in the depths winter. In that moment, my mother’s light went on, and it stayed on, burning bright for the rest of her life. One day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, she said to me, ‘As you go through life, Roger, you will encounter difficult times and difficult questions that you will need to ponder. It won’t always be easy, so here is my advice to you for those times: seek the truth, look at the question from all sides; by all means, listen to other opinions, try to remain objective. When you’ve come to the end of your deliberations, the hard work is over; now comes the easy bit. Do the right thing’.
Do the right thing: free Julian Assange and shut down Guantánamo.
The post Those Who Violated the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo Are Free, While the Man who Helped Expose Their Crimes Languishes in Prison first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On 8 February 2022, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Afghanistan sent out a bleak set of tweets. read now…
This post was originally published on Independent Australia.
On January 21, 2022, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach attended a talk in New Delhi, India, organized by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. Schönbach was speaking as the chief of Germany’s navy during his visit to the institute. “What he really wants is respect,” Schönbach said, referring to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “And my god, giving someone respect More
The post The Western Allied Nations Bully the World While Warning of Threats From China and Russia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
On 16 February 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Kolhapur, in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Two men on a motorcycle stopped them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them. One of the men laughed, pulled out a gun, and shot the two Pansares. Uma Pansare was hit but survived the attack. Her husband, Govind Pansare, died in a hospital shortly thereafter on 20 February at age 82.
Raised in poverty, Govind Pansare was fortunate to go to school, where he encountered Marxist ideas. In 1952, at the age of 19, Pansare joined the Communist Party of India (CPI). While in college in Kolhapur, Pansare could often be found at the Republic Book Stall, where he devoured Marxist classics and Soviet novels that came to India through the CPI’s People’s Publishing House. When he became a lawyer, Pansare worked with trade unions and organisations rooted in poor neighbourhoods. He read avidly, researching the history of Maharashtra to better understand how to get rid of wretched customs such as the caste system and religious fundamentalism.
Out of his world of struggle and his world of books emerged Pansare’s commitment to culture and to intellectual liberation. Along with his comrades, he set up the Shramik Pratishthan (Workers’ Trust), which not only published books but also held seminars and lectures. One of the most popular programmes organised by the Trust was the annual literary festival in honour of the Marathi writer Annabhau Sathe. In 1987, Pansare wrote a book called Shivaji Kon Hota? (Who Was Shivaji? in the LeftWord Books English edition). He freed the 17th-century warrior Shivaji from the manipulations of the far right in India, which had falsely portrayed him in their books as a Hindu warrior who battled Muslims. In fact, Shivaji was reported to have been benevolent to Muslims, which is why Pansare rescued him from their clutches.
Pansare’s assassination is one among many left-wing writers and political figures. No country is immune to this, with left bookstores being attacked and left publishers being threatened across the world. As Héctor Béjar, the former foreign minister of Peru told us in our most recent dossier, right-wing intellectuals simply do not have the intellectual weight to debate the key issues of our time. They do not have the facts or the theory to make a coherent argument for bigotry or for climate destruction, for social inequality or for their interpretation of history. Intellectuals of the right instead promote obscurantist and irrational thought alongside their other weapons: open intimidation and violence. The rise of neo-fascistic politicians and parties provides a veneer of respectability to the scum who take up guns and rods to attack and kill people like Pansare.
Justice for people such as Govind Pansare is elusive, just as it is for Chokri Belaïd (Tunisia), Chris Hani (South Africa), Gauri Lankesh (India), Marielle Franco (Brazil), Nahed Hattar (Jordan), and far too many others. These were all sensitive people who took the dangerous step to fight for something greater than our present world.
Pansare’s daughter-in-law, Dr. Megha Pansare, sent a message to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research: ‘The space for free expression is shrinking in our country. There have been regular attacks on journalists and artists, intellectuals and farmers. We have been compelled to fight to expand the public sphere. It is extremely worrying to see the state patronise religious fundamentalist forces. We must raise our voices to stop the silencing of our voices by guns’.
The International Union of Left Publishers released a strong statement calling for justice for Govind Pansare: ‘Seven years have gone by and yet the police have not gathered hard facts’, they write. ‘The entire world is witness to the rising trend of hate crimes in India and crimes against Indian culture (including the murder of writers). We, the International Union of Left Publishers, stand in solidarity with the families of the victims and we raise our voice in defense of the progressive and humane values of secularism, social progress, and social justice’.
A few years after the murder of Govind Pansare, LeftWord Books in New Delhi began to float the idea of Red Books Day. This would be a celebration of radical books and the people and institutions that make them. Knowing Pansare, he would have been aware that the day after his death was a significant anniversary. On 21 February 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto just months before revolutions swept across Europe, which would later be called the Springtime of the Peoples (Printemps des peuples). The manifesto is not only one of the most read books in our time, but in 2013, the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) adopted this book in its Memory of the World Programme. This initiative by UNESCO is intended to preserve humanity’s heritage against the ‘ravages of time’ and ‘collective amnesia’. So, LeftWord Books – along with the Indian Society of Left Publishers – decided to issue a global call for Red Books Day to be held each year on 21 February.
When the first Red Books Day was held on 21 February 2020, thirty thousand people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the manifesto. It turns out that the United Nations had also designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The manifesto was read in the language of the people who were reading it – in Korean when the day began and in Spanish when the day ended. Without question, the largest number of readers of the manifesto on that day were in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where the publishing house Bharathi Puthakalayam and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) included ten thousand people in the festivities. The readings began under the Triumph of Labour statue, erected in 1959 on Chennai’s Marina Beach at the precise spot where May Day was first celebrated in India in 1923. The book was read aloud in the fields by communist peasant organisers in Nepal and in the Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) occupied settlements in Brazil; it was read in study circles in Havana (Cuba) and read out aloud for the first time in Sesotho (one of South Africa’s eleven official languages). It was read in Gaelic at Connolly Books (Dublin, Ireland) and in Arabic in a café in Beirut (Lebanon). Bharathi Puthakalayam published a new translation into Tamil by M. Sivalingam for the occasion, while Prajasakti and Nava Telangana published a new translation into Telugu by A. Gandhi.
In the aftermath of Red Books Day, a group of publishers – invited by the Indian Society of Left Publishers – began to form the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP). Over the course of the past two years, the IULP has produced four joint books: Lenin 150, Mariátegui, Che, and Paris Commune 150. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, twenty-seven publishing houses released a book on the same day, 28 May 2021, in almost as many languages – an unparalleled feat in the history of publishing. This year, the IULP will publish two more books which collect key texts of Alexandra Kollontai (May) and Ruth First (August). The Union is meanwhile developing its principles of exchanging books between publishers and standing together against the attacks against authors, publishers, printers, and bookshops.
Red Books Day is an initiative of the IULP, but we hope that it will become part of the broader global calendar of annual cultural activities. The Red Books Day website allows anyone to post information about their activities for the day this year and includes an art exhibit of Red Books Day posters from around the world organised by Young Socialist Artists. Rather than insist that everyone read the same book, the idea this year is for people to read any red book in public or online. For example, in Tamil Nadu this year’s reading will be Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). Others will read the manifesto or poetry about the human spirit in search of emancipation.
Up in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro and his comrades spent long periods in the evenings reading whatever they could find. When they boarded the Granma from Mexico, they brought guns, food, and medicine, but not many books. They had to circulate what they had: Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin (1949) about the Nazi occupation of Naples and Émile Zola’s terrifying thriller, The Beast Within (1890). They even had a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which was almost the cause of Che Guevara being killed during an air raid.
One of the guerrillas, Salustiano de la Cruz Enríquez (also known as Crucito), composed ballads in the old Cuban guajira style. He would sit by the campfire and sing his poems as he played the guitar. ‘This magnificent comrade had written the whole history of the Revolution in ballads which he composed at every rest stop as he puffed on his pipe’, wrote Che Guevara in his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968). ‘Since there was very little paper in the Sierra, he composed the ballads in his head, so none of them remained when a bullet put an end to his life in the battle of Pino del Agua’ in September 1957. Crucito called himself el Ruiseñor de la Sierra Maestra – ‘the nightingale of the Sierra Maestra’. This Red Books Day, I am going to imagine his ballads and hum his forgotten tune in honour of people like Crucito and Govind Pansare, who keep trying to make the world a better place for humans and for nature.
Warmly,
Vijay.
PS: my red book to read this year is Võ Nguyên Giáp’s Unforgettable Days (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1975).
The post What Red Book Will You Read This Year on Red Books Day (21 February)? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The United Nations has warned that approximately 23 million Afghans—about half the total population of the country—are “facing a record level of acute hunger.” In early September, not even a month after the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the UN Development Program noted that “A 10-13 percent reduction in GDP could, in the worst-case scenario, bring Afghanistan to the precipice of near universal poverty—a 97 percent poverty rate by mid-2022.” More
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Greta Acosta Reyes (Cuba), Women Who Fight, 2020.
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’.
Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru and across Latin America. ‘In the cultural world’, Béjar notes, ‘the left has everything, the right has nothing’. When it comes to the great cultural debates of our time, which are manifest in the political sphere around social changes (the rights of women and minorities, the responsibility to nature and to human survival, etc.), the needle of history bends almost fully to the left. It is difficult to find an intellectual of the right who can get away with justifying the destruction of nature or the historical violence against indigenous people in the Americas.
Béjar’s assessment reminded me of a conversation I had last year with Giorgio Jackson in Santiago (Chile). Jackson, who will be the secretary general to incoming president Gabriel Boric, told me that the broadest left agenda prevails easily on many key social issues. Despite the deep roots of conservatism in large parts of Latin American society, it is by now quite clear that there are majorities of people – particularly young people – who will not tolerate the rigidities of racism and sexism. While this is true, it is equally true that the objective structure of economic relations, such as the nature of migration and household labour, reproduces all the old hierarchies in ways that people might not want to acknowledge, and which retain the harshness of racism and sexism. Béjar and Jackson would agree that neither in Peru nor in Chile nor in many parts of Latin America would an intellectual be able to credibly mount a defence of reactionary social ideas.
Túlio Carapiá and Clara Cerqueira (Brazil), Frutos da terra (‘Fruits of the Earth’), 2020.
Héctor Béjar is not only a leading left intellectual in Latin America, but, for a few weeks in 2021, he was President Pedro Castillo’s foreign minister in Peru. The brevity of his term is best understood by the limited space available for the Castillo government to manoeuvre as immediate and immense pressure was exerted to remove the most respected left intellectual in Peru from his government. The basis of that pressure is twofold: first, that the Peruvian ruling class remains in power despite the electoral victory of Castillo, a trade union leader and teacher who ran on a platform that was much more to the left than he has been able to put into practice, and, second, that Peru is, as Béjar put it, ‘a country dominated from abroad’. The word ‘abroad’ is clearly understood in Latin America: it means the United States.
Even if the intellectuals of the right have an outlook that is threadbare – the most famous of them being the novelist and professor Mario Vargas Llosa – it is these writers and thinkers who reflect the views of the Peruvian oligarchy and Washington’s ‘backroom boys’, as Noam Chomsky calls them. Being the mirror of power allows right wing intellectuals’ barren ideas to appear reasonable and enables these ideas to continue to shape our institutions and socio-economic structures. For those unaware, Vargas Llosa publicly supported the failed Chilean presidential candidacy of José Antonio Kast; Kast’s father was a Nazi lieutenant and his brother was one of the Chicago Boys who developed the neoliberal economic policies implemented during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whom Kast continues to praise.
Lizzie Suarez (United States), Abolish Neoliberalism, Resist Imperialism, 2020.
If the debate on the major social processes of our time favours the left, this is not the case when it comes to discussions about the economic system. As Béjar put it, ‘the world still belongs to the banks’. It is bankers’ intellectuals – such as the professors who repeat the slogans of ‘market liberalisation’ and ‘personal choice’ as a cover to justify the power, privileges, and property of a tiny minority of people – who control intellectual property and finance. Bankers’ intellectuals do not worry themselves about the deep costs paid by the people for their bankrupt ideas. Salient issues – such as global tax abuse (which costs governments nearly $500 billion per year), the illicit tax havens that harbour trillions of unproductive dollars, and the great social inequality that has generated mass suffering – rarely figure into the concerns of bankers’ intellectuals. Though the right might be ‘intellectually poor’, their ideas continue to frame socio-economic policy across the globe.
It is fascinating to engage with the ideas of a someone as learned as Héctor Béjar. The wide-ranging interview featured in our dossier suggests many lines of enquiry, some of which require our urgent attention for further analysis and others which are merely points to note down as we build a proper assessment of why the ideas of the right continue to be dominant. Of course, the most important reason for this is that the political forces of the right continue to hold power in most of the world. These forces support right-wing ideas with their largesse through foundations, building think tanks, and financing universities to suffocate realistic analysis with the clichés of power. Béjar notes that intellectual thought in academic institutions suffers from a culture that discourages risk and – because of the scale-back of democratic public funding – becomes addicted to the funds of the powerful elite.
Beyond these institutional limitations, the ideas of the right prevail because there has not been sufficient accounting of the ugliness of history along two axes. First, Latin America, like other parts of the formerly colonised world, remains in the thrall of a ‘colonial mentality’. This mentality continues to draw intellectual sustenance from the establishment ideas of the West rather than from the emancipatory ideas that exist both in Western thought and in the long histories of countries such as Peru (such as the work of José Carlos Mariátegui). An example of how this limitation manifests itself, Béjar says, is in the way we understand the idea of ‘investor’. It turns out that in many countries such as Peru, the main investors are not the multinational banks but rather working-class migrants who send remittance payments home. Yet, when the idea of ‘investor’ is discussed, the image that comes up is that of a Western banker and not a Peruvian worker in Japan or the United States. Second, countries such as Peru have provided impunity to those who participated in and benefitted from the era of dictatorships, during which time the elites drew even more of the society’s wealth than they had done previously. None of the political regimes in Peru pursued an agenda to unearth the power of the dictatorship’s elites after it had formally ended. Consequently, those extraordinarily powerful economic elites, with their close ties to the United States, remain in charge of the policy levers in the state. The Peruvian state, Béjar says, ‘is a state colonised by business’, and ‘anyone hoping to manage the state will be met with a corrupt state’. These are strong and powerful words.
Colectivo Wacha (Argentina), Imperialism
Béjar’s clarity, and that of thousands of other intellectuals like him, offer proof that the battle of ideas is alive and well. The intellectuals of the right – characterised by their ‘great mediocrity’, as Béjar puts it – do not have a free run to define the world. Serious debates are needed to affirm a better side of history. That is what we do at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
When I was listening to Béjar talk, the last parable in Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2008), titled ‘Lost and Found’, came to mind. Here it is, a reminder of what lies hidden:
The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are hiding here on earth. Waiting.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I became a journalist because of a photograph by Bill Foley (AP) on the front page of an Indian newspaper in 1982. It was taken in Sabra and Shatila (Beirut, Lebanon) a few days after the mass slaughter of Palestinians engineered by the Israeli army and a Lebanese Christian militia. The photograph showed two grieving More
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
On January 27, 2022, the Hebrew-language news site Walla published part of the text from a telegram sent by Amir Weissbrod—who is part of the Israeli Foreign Ministry—to Israeli embassies around the world. The telegram warned the Israeli diplomats that in the upcoming 49th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which is expected to begin on February 28, a report will be tabled regarding Israel’s 2021 bombing of Gaza. This report will apparently use the word“apartheid” to refer to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, according to the telegram. More
The post Can Israel Stop the World from Saying ‘Apartheid’? Concealing the Suffering in Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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Amadou Sanogo (Mali), Je pense de ma tête, 2016.
In October 2021, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) held a seminar on the pandemic and education systems. Strikingly, 99% of the students in the region spent an entire academic year with total or partial interruption of face-to-face classes, while more than 600,000 children struggled with the loss of their caregivers due to the pandemic. It is further estimated that the crisis could force 3.1 million children and youth to drop out of school and force over 300,000 to go to work. At the seminar, Alicia Bárcena, the executive secretary of ECLAC, said that the combination of the pandemic, economic turbulence in the region, and the setbacks in education have caused ‘a silent crisis’.
The situation around the world is equally dire, with the phrase ‘silent crisis’ perhaps in need of a more global application. The United Nations notes that ‘more than 1.5 billion students and youth across the planet are or have been affected by school and university closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic’; at least 1 billion school children are at risk of falling behind in their studies. ‘[T]hose in poorer households’, the UN said, ‘do not have internet access, personal computers, TVs or even radios at home, amplifying the effects of existing learning inequalities’. Close to one third of all children – at least 463 million – do not have any access to technologies for remote education; three out of four of these children come from rural areas, most of them from the very poorest households. Because of the school closures during the lockdowns and the lack of infrastructure for online learning, many children ‘face the risk of never returning to school, undoing years of progress made in education around the world’.
Mao Xuhui (China), I Leave the Trace of Wings in the Air, 2014–2017.
In 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, setting seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be met within fifteen years. The entire SDG process, which began as the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty in 2000, had widespread consensus. The fourth SDG is to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. As part of the process to advance this goal, the UN and World Bank jointly developed a concept called ‘learning poverty’, defined as ‘being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10’. The ‘learning poverty’ measure applies to 53% of children in low and middle-income countries and up to 80% of children in poor countries. Before the pandemic, it was clear that by 2030 the SDG aspirations would not have been met for 43% of the world’s children. The United Nations now reports that in 2020 an additional 101 million or 9% of children in classes 1 to 8 ‘fell below minimum reading proficiency levels’ and that the pandemic has ‘wiped out the education gains achieved over the past 20 years’. It is now universally recognised that the fourth SDG will be unrealisable for a very long time.
Said Aniff Hossanee (Mauritius), The Thinker, 2020.
The UN and World Bank have sounded the alarm that this ‘silent crisis’ will have a devastating impact on the economic future of students. They estimate that ‘this generation of children now risks losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14% of today’s global GDP, because of COVID-19 related school closures and economic shocks’. Not only are the students going to lose trillions of dollars in lifetime earnings, but they are also going to be deprived of social, cultural, and intellectual wisdom and skills vital to the advancement of humanity.
Already, education institutions from the early years into college emphasise the commercialisation of education. The decline of basic training in the humanities has become a global problem, depriving the world’s population of a grounding in history, sociology, literature, and the arts, which create a richer understanding of what it means to live in a society and to be a citizen of the world. This kind of education is an antidote to the toxic forms of jingoism and xenophobia that have us goose-stepping our way to annihilation and extinction.
Cultural institutions are in the deepest of trouble in the ‘silent crisis’. A UNESCO study on the impact of the pandemic on 104,000 museums around the world found that almost half of these institutions experienced a significant reduction in public funding in 2020, with limited gains the following year. Partly due to lockdowns and partly due to the funding problems, attendance at the world’s most popular art museums declined by 77% in 2020. In addition to the pandemic, the rise of platform capitalism – economic activity that is rooted in Internet-based platforms – has accelerated the privatisation of cultural consumption, with public forms of cultural exposure through public education, public museums and galleries, and public concerts unable to keep pace with Netflix and Spotify. That only 29% of the people in sub-Saharan Africa have internet access makes the inequities of cultural life an even more pressing concern.
Wycliffe Mundopa (Zimbabwe), Easy Afternoon, 2020.
The way teachers have been treated during the pandemic illustrates the low level of importance given to this crucial job and education more broadly in our global society. Only in 19 countries were teachers placed in the first priority group with frontline workers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Over the course of the past few weeks, this newsletter has highlighted A Plan to Save the Planet, which we developed alongside 26 research institutes from around the world under the leadership of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). We will continue to point to that text because it significantly challenges the status quo view of how we need to proceed in our shared global struggles. When it comes to education, for instance, we are building our framework for the planet based on the needs of teachers and students and not centrally on the GDP or the value of money. On education, we have a list of eleven demands – not comprehensive, but suggestive. You can read them here.
Please read the plan carefully. We look forward to your interventions, which we hope you will send to us at gro.latnenitnocirtehtnull@nalp. If you find these ideas useful, please circulate them widely. If you wonder about how we propose to finance these ideas, please have a look at the full plan (there is, by the way, at least $37 trillion currently sitting in illicit tax havens).
In Honduras, steps are being taken in this direction. On 27 January, President Xiomara Castro took the reins, becoming the first female head of government in the country’s history. She immediately pledged to give free electricity to more than one million of the nearly ten million people in Honduras. This will enhance the ability of the poorest Hondurans to expand their cultural horizons and increase the chances of children being able to participate in online learning during the pandemic. On the day of President Castro’s inauguration, I read the beautiful words of the Nicaraguan-Salvadorean poet Claribel Alegría, whose commitment to the advancement of the people of Central America comes across in her brilliant poems. In 1978, just before the Nicaraguan Revolution, Alegría won the Casa de las Américas Prize for her collection Sobrevivo (‘I Survive’). With D. J. Flakoll, she wrote the definitive history of the Sandinista Revolution, Nicaragua, la revolución sandinista: una crónica política 1855-1979 (‘The Sandinista Revolution – a Political Chronicle, 1855–1979’), published in 1982. The fragment of her poem Contabilizando (‘Accounting’) in her book Fugues (1993) teaches us of the importance of poetry and epiphany and of the importance that dreaming and hope hold for human advancement:
I don’t know how many years
dreaming of my people’s liberation
certain immortal deaths
the eyes of that starving child
your eyes bathing me with love
one forget-me-not afternoon
and in this sultry hour
the urge to mould myself
into a verse
a shout
a fleck of foam.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Israeli state is pulling out all stops to deligitmise international organisations that dare use the term “apartheid” to describe its decades-long brutal occupation of Palestine, writes Vijay Prashad.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Shefa Salem (Libya), Life, 2019.
On 19 January 2022, US President Joe Biden held a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. The discussion ranged from Biden’s failure to pass a $1.75 trillion investment bill (the result of the defection of two Democrats) to the increased tensions between the United States and Russia. According to a recent NBC poll, 54% of adults in the United States disapprove of his presidency and 71% feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The political and cultural divisions that widened during the Trump years continue to inflict a heavy toll on US society, including over the government’s ability to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Basic protocols to avoid infections are not universally followed. Misinformation related to COVID-19 has spread as rapidly as the virus in the United States, where large numbers of people believe sensational claims: for example, that pregnant women should not take the vaccine, that the vaccine promotes infertility, and that the government is hiding the data on deaths caused by the vaccines.
![Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay), Entoldado (La Feria) (‘Canopy [The Fair]’), 1917.](https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/rJ9-71B6dACsPPsGWCw0qD6Gaw2BBcbqk6Cov1H-YaX6WZ3xogLeNoOKqy0arHaq_dHar2NQt6wZ0Mdc43pEL3G57JxeCoxHT6lbXZHiyVLgl9qGV4AIaqlZSptY_X4O3iYq85gajn8LuogZHG1KFf18TZHOJxOgTwgEaExKIY9lVCHdOFOIfyn9yYlM3kgMoG6MAjJWoMk=s0-d-e1-ft#https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Joaquin-Torres-Garcia-Uruguay-Entoldado-La-Feria-Canopy-The-fair.-1917..jpg)
Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay), Entoldado (La Feria) (‘Canopy [The Fair]’), 1917.
At the press conference, Biden made a candid remark regarding the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which treats the American hemisphere as the ‘backyard’ of the United States. ‘It’s not America’s backyard’, Biden said. ‘Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard’. The United States continues to think of the entire hemisphere, from Cape Horn to the Rio Grande, not as sovereign territory, but, in one way or the other, as its ‘yard’. It meant little that Biden followed this up by saying, ‘we’re equal people,’ since the metaphor he used – the yard – indicated the proprietary attitude with which the United States operates in the Americas and in the rest of the world. It is this proprietary attitude that inflames conflict not only in the Americas (with epicentres in Cuba and Venezuela), but also in Eurasia.
Talks have been ongoing in Geneva and Vienna to dial down the conflict imposed by the United States and its allies against Iran and Russia. The US’ attempts to re-enter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran’s nuclear programme and to dominate eastern Europe have thus far not borne fruit. The talks persist, but both are hindered by the US government’s continued adoption of a narrative about the world that is premised on its hegemony and a rejection of the multipolar dispensation that has begun to appear.
Ramin Haerizadeh (Iran), He Came, He Left, He Left, He Came, 2010.
Early indications in the eighth round of the JCPOA talks in Vienna, which opened on 27 December 2021, suggested that there would be little forward movement. The United States arrived with the attitude that Iran could not be trusted, when in fact it was the United States that exited the JCPOA in 2018 (after it certified twice in 2017 that Iran had in fact followed the letter of the agreement). This attitude came alongside a false sense of urgency from the Biden administration to rush the process forward.
The US wants Iran to make further concessions, despite the fact that the initial deal had been negotiated over twenty long months and despite the fact that none of the other parties are willing to reopen the agreement to satisfy the United States and its outside partner, Israel. The Russian negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov said that there is no need for ‘artificial deadlines’, an indicator of the growing closeness between Iran and Russia. Ties between the two states have been strengthened by their shared opposition to the failed attempt by the Gulf Arab states, Turkey, and the West to overthrow the Syrian government, particularly since the Russian military intervention into Syria in 2015.
Aneta Kajzer (Germany), I’ve Got No Brain Baby, 2017.
Even more dangerous than the US’ hostile attitude towards Iran is its policy towards Russia and Ukraine, where troops are at the ready and the rhetoric of war has become more strident. The heart of this conflict is around the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) towards the Russian border, in violation of the deal struck between the United States and the Soviet Union that NATO would not go beyond Germany’s eastern border. Ukraine is the epicentre of the conflict, although even here the debate is unclear. Germany and France have said that they would not welcome the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO, and since NATO membership requires universal consent, it is impossible for Ukraine to join NATO at present. The nub of the disagreement is over how these various parties understand the situation in Ukraine.
The Russians contend that the US fomented a coup in 2014 and brought right-wing nationalists – including pro-fascist elements – into power, and that these sections are part of a Western ploy to threaten Russia with NATO weapons systems and with NATO country forces inside Ukraine, while the West contends that Russia wishes to annex eastern Ukraine. The Russians have asked NATO to provide a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be allowed to join the military alliance as a precondition for further talks; NATO has demurred.
When the German navy chief and vice admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach said in Delhi that Russia’s Vladimir Putin deserves ‘respect’ from Western leaders, he had to resign. It made no difference that Schönbach’s comments were premised on the notion that the West needed Russia to combat China – only disrespect and subordination of Russia are acceptable. That’s the Western view in the Geneva talks, which will continue but are unlikely to bear fruit as long as the United States and its allies believe that other powers should surrender their sovereignty to a US-led world order.
Olga Chernysheva (Russia), Kind People, 2004.
The movement of history suggests that the days of the US-dominated world system are nearing their end. That is why we called our dossier no. 36 (January 2021) Twilight: The Erosion of US Control and the Multipolar Future. In We Will Build the Future: A Plan to Save the Planet (January 2022), produced alongside 26 research institutes from around the world, we laid out the following ten points for a restructured, more democratic world system:
- Affirm the importance of the United Nations Charter (1945).
- Insist that member states of the United Nations adhere to the Charter, including to its specific requirements around the use of sanctions and force (chapters VI and VII).
- Reconsider the monopoly power exercised by the UN Security Council over decisions that impact a large section of the multilateral system; engage the UN General Assembly in a serious dialogue over democracy inside the global order.
- Insist that multilateral bodies – such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – formulate polices in accord with the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); forbid any policy that increases poverty, hunger, homelessness, and illiteracy.
- Affirm the centrality of the multilateral system over the key areas of security, trade policy, and financial regulations, recognising that regional bodies such as NATO and parochial institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have supplanted the United Nations and its agencies (such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development) in the formulation of these policies.
- Formulate policies to strengthen regional mechanisms and deepen the integration of developing countries.
- Prevent the use of the security paradigm – notably, counterterrorism and counternarcotics – to address the world’s social challenges.
- Cap spending on arms and militarism; ensure that outer space is demilitarised.
- Convert the resources spent on arms production to fund socially beneficial production.
- Ensure that all rights are available to all peoples, not just those who are citizens of a state; these rights must apply to all hitherto marginalised communities such as women, indigenous peoples, people of colour, migrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, oppressed castes, and the impoverished.
Adherence to these ten points would aid in the resolution of these crises in Iran and Ukraine.
Failure to move forward is a result of Washington’s arrogant attitude towards the world. During Biden’s press conference, he lectured Putin on the dangers of a nuclear war, saying that Putin is ‘not in a very good position to dominate the world’. Only the United States, he implied, is in a good position to do that. Then, Biden said, ‘you have to be concerned when you have, you know, a nuclear power invade… if he invades – [which] hasn’t happened since World War Two’. A nuclear power invading a country hasn’t happened since World War Two? The United States is a nuclear power and has continually invaded countries across the globe, from Vietnam to Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq – an illegal war which Biden voted for. It is this arrogant approach to the world and to the UN Charter that puts our world in peril.
Listening to Biden, I was reminded of Mario Benedetti’s 1985 poem, El sur también existe (‘The South Also Exists’), a favourite of Hugo Chávez. Here are two of its verses:
With its worship of steel
its giant chimneys
its clandestine sages
its siren song
its neon skies
its Christmas sales
its cults of God the Father
and military epaulettes
with its keys to the kingdom
the North is the one who commands
…
but here underneath the underneath
close to the roots
is where memory
forgets nothing
and there are people living
and dying doing their utmost
and so between them they achieve
what was believed to be impossible
to make the whole world know
that the South also exists.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Thanks to manoeuvring by the United States, the prospects for peace and self determination for Western Sahara have suffered a serious setback, writes Vijay Prashad.
This post was originally published on Green Left.