IV488 - September 2015

IVP 488 September 2015 PDF magazine

In recent weeks, the influx of refugees into Germany has generated a mass movement of welcome, support and solidarity. On the front page of German newspapers and in the German and international electronic media, we can see the new culture of "welcome". Hundreds of people gather in the railway stations in Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne and in many other cities. They applaud the refugees who arrive by train. They bring flowers, food and drink. They make cash donations. A large number of people volunteer to sort and distribute clothing, to care for the children, to give German classes and to render a thousand and one other services.

After two years of de facto ceasefire, Turkey has resumed its aerial attacks against the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) fighters on its borders, but also launched a new wave of repression against the Kurdish population in the south east of the country. Phil Hearse asked Sarah Parker, a long time Kurdish solidarity activist, to explain.

As a powerful pro-sovereignty movement that advocates withdrawal from the Spanish state has consolidated itself within Catalonia, the majority of Spanish analysts and political leaders, even those on the left, have been habitually belligerent to that aspiration. Generally, they tend to focus their explanation of the rise of the independence movement on the interests and behaviour of the Catalan political and cultural elites, emphasizing their greater or lesser capacity of manipulation of the middle classes of this country against the “common enemy”, i.e. Spain or the Spanish state.

The earth’s climate is changing quickly, much faster than experts thought.
There is no doubt what is causing this: the warming of the atmosphere as a result of emissions by greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 from the burning of oil, coal and natural gas.

Alexis Tsipras’ SYRIZA won a resounding victory in general elections on September 20, winning nearly as many seats in parliament as it did in the January 2015 election that first brought it to power. The strong showing came despite Tsipras negotiating another so-called Memorandum of harsh austerity measures demanded by the European governments and financial institutions in return for bailing out the ailing Greek financial system.

This was not a good election night. I am not talking mainly about the fact that Popular Unity failed to pass the 3 percent threshold necessary to gain parliamentary representation, but rather that the election results seem like a vindication of Syriza’s capitulation to the European Union and the signing of the new memorandum. The new loan agreement will mean devastating cuts and neoliberal reforms, and we now have a parliament dominated by pro-memoranda forces to see it all through.

A security-led approach to climate change and complex emergencies not only fails to address the fundamental causes of these crises – it will often exacerbate them.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has swept the 2015 parliamentary elections in its Tamil constituencies. This victory further consolidates the power of the TNA and particularly the Federal Party (ITAK). However, this is also the weakness of Tamil nationalist politics. Historically, Tamil politics dominated by the Federal Party has done little other than win elections. Politics should be much more, building alliances with other political forces and mobilising society and finding solutions to people’s social, economic and political problems. Tamil nationalist politics neither seems to have the capacity to govern as with the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) nor does it seem to have a vision to recover Tamil society out of the post-war crisis in the North and East. This article addresses the future of Tamil politics given this problematic political trajectory.

African-Americans have been murdered by white mobs, vigilantes, and “law enforcement” from the time of slavery to, quite possibly, this morning. The fundamental reason for the killing of African-Americans by whites has been fear by many whites of all classes that the existing rules of racial hierarchy, that is, white supremacy, are endangered—whether by slave uprisings, Blacks threatening white job monopolies, taking political power from whites, moving into white neighborhoods, undermining their monopoly on white women by allegedly having “intimate relations” with them, or simply seeming insubordinate.