International Viewpoint, the monthly English-language magazine of the Fourth International, is a window to radical alternatives world-wide, carrying reports, analysis and debates from all corners of the globe. Correspondents in over 50 countries report on popular struggles, and the debates that are shaping the left of tomorrow.
Fascism has been, over the last decade, and especially more recently, an object of vigorous debate on the left. But, as a long editorial from the Salvage collective bemoaned about debates over what to make of Russia’s war on Ukraine, much of this debate has been stuck in the ditch of historical analogy. Is Trumpism more like Mussolini’s or Hitler’s fascism? When we stack up all the measures of rights violated and attacked, does the far right today pass the test of comparison with major fascist events of the 20th century?
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The Together Alliance march against the far right on Saturday, 28 March, was probably the biggest anti-fascist protest in British history. It was comparable to some of the early Palestine solidarity demonstrations.
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Local elections were held in France on 15 March (first round) and 22 (second round). The confusion that has emerged, one year before the presidential election, is a sign of a fragmentation of the central bloc and the right, which is likely to produce a shift towards the far right and, in the face of this, a splintering of the forces of the Nouveau Front populaire (New Popular Front - NFP) which compromises the construction of a unitary alternative.
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Never had a military initiative of the Lebanese Hezbollah (literally, Party of God) been so much repudiated in Lebanon as its decision on March 2 to launch rockets across the country’s southern border with the Israeli state, in retaliation against the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This opening salvo was immediately seized upon by the Zionist state as a pretext to launch a long-premeditated invasion of southern Lebanon.
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Land Day, on 30 March, marks a central moment in Palestinian history: in 1976, a general strike broke out in historic Palestine against the confiscation of land belonging to Arabs by the state of Israel. It was the first mass mobilization of Palestinians in the 1948 territories, where they are supposed to be “equal”. The targeted lands are located in particular in Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna, as part of the policy of “Judaizing Galilee”. On that day, six unarmed Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during demonstrations. 50 years later, the Palestinians are still there and continue to fight against the confiscation of land and the bloody repression of the Israeli state.
read article...In Xi Jinping’s China the habitual political framework has not withstood any substantial modifications. The party has kept its usual centralized posture, which makes it the backbone of de facto power. The recent attempts to invest state-level and provincial agencies with greater managerial significance have not altered the usual frame of reference. This happened despite the erosion of credibility that the elite had to necessarily register vis-Ã -vis a body social that is progressively going into overdrive and within which increasingly divergent pressures and disparate impulses are taking shape. [1]
From Angola to Chad, Central Africa, including Equatorial Guinea, is the sub-region most affected by the decline in oil prices, because it is dependent on oil revenues. An oligarchic resistance to the respect of the rules of the democratic game, in the form of a new type of authoritarian regime combining a formal multiparty regime with a repressive confiscation of power, characterized by nepotism, is closely related to this rentier character.
Thus, in a direction contrary to the wind that blew from North Africa in 2010-2011, sweeping away in 2014 the Blaise Compaoré regime in Burkina Faso, in 2016, the Congolese, Chadian and Gabonese peoples were forced to suffer, for another term of office, disgraced regimes. The people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), confronted with the postponement of the elections, which extended the presidency of Kabila, have already seen dozens of people killed following the repression of popular demonstrations. So we could speak of a "spirit of sub-region". Without forgetting that in Côte d’Ivoire Ouattara has had a constitution drafted that allows the president to appoint one third of the members of the Senate.
Fidel Castro was by far the greatest statesman of this last half century. He was also the last of the great revolutionary leaders of the democratic revolutions of national liberation that began in 1910 with the Chinese, Persian and Mexican revolutions and during and after the Second World War led to the independence and unity of China and the independence of the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia, Indochina, the African colonies, Nasser’s Egypt and Algeria.
Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuba’s revolutionary leader, president, and prime minister for five decades, died in Santiago de Cuba on Friday, Nov. 25. He was 90 years old. Although one of the most profound, clear-sighted, honest, and dedicated revolutionary leaders of the past half-century, Castro has been demonized by the corporate media as a dictator, tyrant, murderer, and torturer.
The first round of the local elections took place against a backdrop of widespread creeping fascism in France and comes after a brutal offensive by the far right, during which the traditional ‘Republican’ right has decisively broken from much of its historical framework and values.
- read article...The majority of the party votes to maintain its autonomy and a commitment to social change.
- read article...After 59 days of unjust imprisonment, Lyes Touati has finally been acquitted - 59 days of waiting, mobilization, solidarity and determination.
- read article...International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
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