IV474 - July 2014

Women in Black of Madrid remember the Cassandras of the Great War:

Exactly a year ago today (July 13, 2013), the GPH and the MILF peace panels had concluded the 30th exploratory talks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the result and content of which had become one of the main points of the 4th State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Benigno S. Aquino when he announced to the nation the positive developments of the peace process between the two panels.

The Israeli military aggression against the Gaza Strip, which started 10 days ago and caused the death of more than 200 Palestinians, including 80 percent of them civilians and about 20 percent of them children, reminds us of the reactionary and agressive nature of the Zionist State: an entity that is guilty of occupation, colonization and Apartheid.

On July 8, 2014 Plínio de Arruda Sampaio, one of the principal militants of the Christian socialist left in Brazil, died in Sao Paulo at the age of 84.

In the 1960’s Ernest Mandel analysed the bureaucracy of the labour movement. 50 years later his thoughts are introduced into the debates about the Danish Red Green Alliance. A growing number of party full-timers make it relevant.

A spectre is haunting the Spanish political system, the spectre of the collapse of the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español – Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) . A spectre which inspires fear in those at the top and hope in those at the bottom. As unimaginable as it is possible. As much wished for by some as feared by others.

There should never have been any doubt that another Israeli assault on Gaza would occur, with the inevitable accompanying mass atrocities. That’s not necessarily because it serves anyone’s strategic interests—but simply because Israel’s brutalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the strangulation of Gaza by Israel, the new military-dominated regime in Egypt, and the latest collapse of the absurd “peace process” exercise would inevitably produce a triggering event one way or another. [1]

Before May 25, there were no elected representatives of what is called the "radical" left in Belgium, unlike in other countries in Europe. This anomaly has now been corrected. The PTB-GO! [2] lists are in fact sending two members to the Belgian federal Chamber of Deputies (Raoul Hedebouw in Liège and Marco Van Hees in Hainaut), two to the Walloon Parliament (including the steelworker Frédéric Gillot) and four to the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital region. Apart from Vincent Decroly and Bernard Wesphael, who were elected for the Ecolo party but who continued to sit after resigning from their party (one on the feral level federal and the other in the Walloon Region), there had been no member of parliament to the left of the Socialists (PS) and the Greens since the early 1980s ...

This statement by the Central Committee of OKDE-SPARTAKOS,
was issued on 31 May 2014.

Writers, journalists, academics, artists and intellectuals warn of the depth of the gap which these religious and political movements drive our societies and peoples to