International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

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  Cesar Chavez, Civil Rights and Labor icon, raped girls and women

  25 March, by Dan La Botz

  Cesar Chavez, who in the 1960s led the struggles of Mexican Americans for civil rights and of farmworkers for labor unions, was accused in a carefully researched New York Times article of having raped women and sexually abused girls as young as 13. Among those women was Dolores Huerta, herself a founder and leader of the union, who confirmed that he forced himself on her and fathered two of her children, secretly raised by others. Debra Rojas reported that Chavez had had intercourse with her when she was 15, which is rape under state law because she was too young to give legal consent.

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• Anti-fascism
  

  Towards an international anti-fascist convergence

  24 March, by Éric Toussaint

  Uniting left-wing forces to counter the rise of the far right. That is the aim of the First International Anti-Fascist Conference, to be held in late March in Porto Alegre, Brazil

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• Italy
  

  Italy: The stakes of the March referendum on justice

  23 March, by Hélène Marra

  In Italy, prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is continuing its authoritarian offensive with a reform of the judiciary that threatens the independence of the judiciary. The referendum on 22 and 23 March is a central political issue. After the “security” decree, the reform of the judiciary is another important link in the authoritarian project promoted by Meloni’s government. By changing the methods of electing members of the Supreme Council of the Judiciary (CSM), the latter threatens the independence of this body and limits its ability to act as a counter-power to the political and economic systems. The victory of the “No” vote in the referendum on 22 and 23 March is an important opportunity to destabilise Meloni’s coalition and to solidify the political and social opposition camp.

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• Canada
  

  Out of the Impasse? The Avi Lewis Campaign and Left Strategy

  22 March, by Marcel Nelson, Nathan Rao

  Journalist and activist Avi Lewis is campaigning for the leadership of the NDP in the Canadian state, attracting much attention, dedication, and debate. Voting concludes on 28 March.

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• 

  Collateral Damage Comes Home: Lebanon, Palestine, Iran to Michigan

  21 March, by David Finkel

  The already unbearable horrors engulfing the peoples of the Middle East exploded into U.S. domestic news on March 12 with the attack in suburban Detroit at Temple Israel, the country’s largest Reform Jewish congregation.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• Iran: Imperialists escalate war

• Philippines-Middle East

  On the Middle East crisis and the Philippines.

• Senegal

  Senegal: Debt fuels authoritarian drift

• Iran

  The Iranian nuclear bomb: a devastating boomerang

• USA

  The American People and the U.S.-Israeli War on Iran

Recently posted Features

• Obituary

  "It is the Henri Weber who sang the Internationale with Higelin that we mourn, not the one at the service of the political apparatus of the PS"

  2 May 2020, by Philippe Cyroulnik

  Henri Weber was born in Leninabad (now Khujand), Tajikistan, Soviet Union on 23 June 1944. His Polish-Jewish parents had left Poland at the time of the German-Soviet pact but, refusing to become Soviet citizens, were sent to labour camp where he was born. They returned to Poland after the war but four years later left because of prevailing anti-semitism and moved to France. As a student in Paris Weber was recruited by Alain Krivine and became a leading member of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR) and of the Ligue Communiste (subsequently Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire LCR), French section of the Fourth International. In the early 1980s he ceased political activity and in 1986 joined the Socialist Party. A member of the leadership of the Socialist Party, he held elected positions as a senator (1995-2004) and then as a member of the European Parliament (2004-2014). He died in Avignon on 26 April 2020 from coronavirus.[IVP]

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• Historical events

  1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians, and British overlords’ indifference strengthened the anti-colonial movement

  2 May 2020

  In India, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, a staggering 12 to 13 million people died, the vast majority between the months of September and December. According to an eyewitness, “There was none to remove the dead bodies and the jackals made a feast.”

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• Pandemics

  Social contagion - Microbiological class war in China

  2 May 2020

  Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.

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• Obituary

  Luis Sepulveda, revolutionary activist and Chilean writer, has died from Covid-19

  23 April 2020, by Sylvain Chardon

  Luis Sepulveda died on Thursday 16 April in Oviedo (Asturias, in the Spanish state) of Covid-19, which he had contracted at the end of February during a congress of writers in Portugal. Sepulveda was a great writer and his works, translated into more than 60 languages, have enjoyed worldwide success.

  Luis Sepulveda was also an activist. Member of the Chilean Communist Party from the age of 12, he quickly moved towards a more revolutionary commitment. In recent years, he had moved away from the debates on the socialist and revolutionary left. Nevertheless he was also very close to us because he had participated, in practice and with arms, in all the debates of the revolutionary movement from the beginning of the 1970s to the mid-1980s.

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