IV547 - August 2020

The explosion that devastated Beirut was an indictment of the parties that have misruled Lebanon for decades. Now, however, those parties are using the disaster as a pretext to deepen neoliberal policies, with French leader Emmanuel Macron and the IMF egging them on.

“There’s no left anymore’’ - Nicola, retired lorry driver; “there is just a deep sorrow and hurt among many, many people who see themselves as left” – Franca, teacher; “they are all the same the only one who can sort it out is Salvini”- Giuseppe, driver who worked in Germany for several years."; “The Democratic Party (PD) is actually the preferred party of the rational sectors of the bourgeoisie” – Antonello, comrade from Naples.

BY ALL POLITICAL leading indicators, Donald Trump is taking down the Republican Party to its most shattering electoral debacle in decades. “Presiding,” if that’s a word for anything Trump does, over the entirely preventable health and economic COVID-19 calamity, he’s proving himself willing to sacrifice anything for his own interests.

The past year under the BJP has helped us in Kashmir to grasp, up close, what an attempt at total political domination looks like.

Many Lebanese people had hoped for a silver lining to this tragedy of an independent government and new elections.

On 5 August 2020 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi performed the Bhoomi Pujan ceremony and laid the foundation stone of the Ram Temple to be built on the ruins of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India. On 6 December 1992 the mosque had been destroyed by a mob of Hindu nationalist supporters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fascist movement behind Modi’s government. [IVP]

Politics in the United States has always revolved around the issue of race and racism. When a woman is tapped for a top elected office, the vile sexism of white men also spills out.

The number of social groups involved in the Belarusian protest movement guarantees a broad front, but it also makes the emerging coalition internally fragile.

“For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood.”

–Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth1

President Donald Trump has loudly targeted the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as “left wing anarchists” and “terrorists”. He speaks of “carnage in the street” and “law and order”. But it is clear that the agents provocateurs are in the White House and its federal agencies