I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2021)

29 April 2021 — Tricontinental

3 Fackelzug zur Gründung der DDRA mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister Miklós Németh asked the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on 15 June, Gorbachev told the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’. He did not list the preconditions, but he said, ‘Nothing is permanent under the Moon’. On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was knocked down. By October 1990, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) was absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.

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Post-American Afghanistan through the looking glass

29 April 2021 — Indian Punchline

by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Debris of Afghan civil war: A boy runs past a destroyed Soviet-made armoured tank on a Kabul street, Afghanistan. (File photo)

Ex-CIA officer Bruce Riedel at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, whose familiarity with Afghanistan is never in doubt, has held a looking glass to figure out the future course of events even as the US troop withdrawal commences.

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Not so much oven-ready as ready made curtains for Mr. Johnson

29 April 2021 — theplanningmotivedotcom

Something interesting is happening in capitalist governance. The capitalist class is closing ranks, regularising and professionalising its rule by squeezing out the populist fools. Instinctively they recognise the class battles which lie ahead and they can no longer tolerate those who flippantly raise the aspirations of the masses and then misgovern.

its-curtains-for-mr-johnson.pdf

 

Politics in Britain is entering a new phase

31 March 2021 — Socialist Resistance

By the Socialist Resistance editorial committee.

The successful vaccine roll out by the NHS and Starmer’s right wing gallop has given Johnson a shot in the arm. Polls put the Tories 7% ahead of Labour, and on the 6 March at 13% ahead. But the Brexit fall-out, the Covid “social murder”, the dis-United Kingdom, and the economic crisis all point towards a period of intensifying political turmoil. The reheated deep centre of Blairism, now led by Starmer, will fail to dislodge the English nationalist Tories, and thus maintain the creeping authoritarianism and the far right in politics. The Covid pandemic is not about to disappear as mutations arise. As billionaires increase their wealth in this period, neoliberal governments will make the working class pay for the economic crisis. Measures are not being taken to stop the rise of temperature at 1.5°C by 2030. The multi-faceted crisis will continue and deepen. In this context, there will be greater opportunities to present a radical ecosocialist and revolutionary alternative.

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How Climate Collapse Will Overwhelm The U.S. Military & Jeopardize The State’s Existence

28 April 2021 — See you in 2020

The story of the climate’s deterioration is intertwined with the story of class conflict, with the battle between the revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionaries. Much to the chagrin of U.S. national security technocrats, factors show that the instability and destruction from the climate collapse is most likely going to harm the strategic interests of the counterrevolutionaries far more than those of the revolutionaries.
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Can sabotage stop climate change?

28 April 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Book Review

Andreas Malm’s call for minority violence is eloquent and sincere, but self-defeating 

Andreas Malm
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE
Learning to Fight in a World on Fire

Verso, 2021

reviewed by Simon Butler

Despite the climate movement’s growth, epitomized by Extinction Rebellion and Student Strike for Climate, fossil fuel extraction continues to grow, and a safe climate can seem dismayingly distant. Given a choice between forgoing capital accumulation and tipping the whole world into a furnace, our rulers prefer the furnace.

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The CIA’s Chinese Walls

27 April 2021 — Craig Murray

Craig Murray

It is not in dispute that the CIA is in possession of Julian Assange’s legal and medical files seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy, including correspondence and drafting by his lawyers on his defence against extradition to the USA on Espionage charges. The defence submitted evidence of this in court. After Julian was arrested in the Ecuadorean Embassy and removed, all of his personal possessions were illegally seized by the Ecuadorean authorities, including his files and his IT equipment. These were then shipped back to Ecuador by diplomatic bag. There, they were handed over to the CIA.

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Watch: “The Present” — A Painful Short Film Tells the Whole Story of What It Means to be Palestinian

28 April, 2021 — Mint Press News

In “The Present,” as throughout all of Palestine, soldiers, police officers, secret police, or Shabak agents, have the power — indeed they are instructed — to harass, humiliate, and take the lives of Palestinians in the most arbitrary fashion.

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