IV468 - January 2014

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning. The average salary in Ukraine is 2 to 2.5 times lower than in Russia and Belarus, and much lower than in the EU.

For decades the People’s Party (PP) of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has believed it has a reliable gun in its political holster—unbending opposition to anything that could be portrayed as linked to Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), the left-nationalist armed organisation responsible for more than 800 deaths in its 50-year-long fight against the Spanish state.

On Christmas Eve the Queen of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Commonwealth deigned to pardon one of the twentieth century’s most important mathematicians of the crime of homosexuality.

Around two weeks ago, from the date of the famous Geneva Conference 2, which will give birth to a stillborn, a war was waged by Islamist groups and battalions of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) against the reactionary and fascist group of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Dā’ish, according to its Arabic acronym). affiliated with Al-Qaida,

1 - François Hollande’s “wisecrack” about the "safe and sound " return of his Minister of the Interior following the latter’s visit to Algeria, the broadcast on the French TV channel Canal Plus showing a montage of images that illustrated the bizarre nature of the discussion between the president and his guest, the head of the French government, Jean-Marc Ayrault, must have been greeted with hollow laughter in the Algerian capital!

Interview of Joseph Daher, member of the Revolutionary Left Current in Syria, by Turkish comrades of the Devrimci Sosyalist ??çi Partisi (DSiP)

A politically weakened U.S. president is pulled by a powerful domestic lobby and influential foreign governments toward launching a war that U.S. imperialism right now doesn’t want, that the world doesn’t want, and that the large majority of the American public doesn’t want — what will be the outcome?

Ariel Sharon died eight years ago (after a botched medical procedure put him in an irreversible coma). This past weekend, the corpse stopped breathing. Big freaking deal.

The massive rejection of the repressive neoliberal policies of the Muslim Brotherhood was reflected in spring 2013 by the biggest popular mobilisation that Egypt had know in its long history. The left forces were unfortunately not in a position to offer a political outcome finally allowing the realisation of the social and democratic demands of the revolution of 2011. That allowed the army to return on July 3 to the power that they had to abandon following the presidential elections of June 2012.

On the second anniversary of the massacres of Mohamed-Mahmoud Street in Cairo on November 19, 2011 by the police forces of the military government, Egyptian revolutionaries went onto the streets to denounce the army and the Moslem Brotherhood and to demand the bringing to justice of the soldiers and police responsible for these massacres. Several marches called by the Revolutionary Socialists and the April 6 Movement as well as by prominent personalities started from various university buildings to converge on Mohamed-Mahmoud street with cries of “Down with the military regime”, “Against Al-Sissi, the Moslem Brotherhood, long live revolution”. The street was barred off with a banner “Reserved for revolutionaries, forbidden to Moslem Brothers, the army and feloul” (former apparatchiks of the Mubarak period).