One specious argument that those of us active in Palestine solidarity hear time after time is the hoary line that “Jews are not really Semites, so why say that they are the victims of antisemitism”, or its many variants, such as “Palestinians are Semites too”.
China and the United States: A New Cold War
10 August 2020, by ,The United States and China are locked in a spiraling conflict over everything from the pandemic to trade, investment, high tech, geopolitics, and military hegemony in Asia. “We’re essentially in the beginnings of a Cold War,” declared Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “We are on a downward slide into something increasingly adversarial with China.”
A triumph of ideology: John Hume and the defeat of Irish Republicanism
9 August 2020, byThe flurry of commemoration by the great and the good following the death of John Hume can be summarised as follows: Hume was the leader of the Irish Civil Rights Movement, he advocated non violence and peace through negotiation and argued for a shared Ireland that included all political currents. Decades of work saw eventual recognition of his arguments, movement towards peace, the peace process and Good Friday Agreement and eventually the Nobel prize, a celebration choreographed by Bono, and recognition as a world statesman.
A Global View of Coronavirus, Medical Policy, and Research
8 August 2020, byIn 2019, a new virus of the coronavirus family emerged in Wuhan, China, and the disease that was caused by this virus was named COVID-19 to indicate both the virus associated with it and the year it began. “Patient Zero,” the initial patient, appears officially to have started the epidemic in early December 2019 (though there are some unsubstantiated claims of cases as early as November or even September). For one month, the local Communist Party authorities concealed and later minimized the outbreak and even organized a 4,000-person banquet in Wuhan as the epidemic emerged. This is interesting because it sheds some light on the Chinese state-capitalist bureaucracy as well as the issue of local corruption. This behavior certainly helped the initial spread, while a very active containment strategy, such as was performed in Vietnam, might have strangled the epidemic at its very beginning in China. There is, however, no evidence that the Chinese government intentionally created such a virus. The sequencing of the genome has revealed that the virus originated as a bat virus modified by hybridization in a pangolin. If it were intended for biological warfare, as some have suggested, it would have been much easier to work directly on a nonhybrid strain.
We denounce the renegotiation of the debt by LenÃn Moreno’s government
7 August 2020, byThis Open Letter by former members of the Ecuadorian Debt Audit Commission was released on 30 July 2020.
‘A queer cry for freedom’: Meet the LGBTQ Palestinians demanding liberation
6 August 2020, byHundreds of queer Palestinians protested last week following a tumultuous year for the community, which is forced to navigate between homophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.
A Marxist Guide to Understanding the Gulf States’ Political Economy
5 August 2020, byWestern analysts often regard the Gulf as a strange anomaly among capitalist states. In fact, it has the same underlying dynamics as capitalist countries elsewhere, and it is powerfully shaping the politics of the Middle East.
For an analysis of the state of the Gulf’s political economy, Hamza Culin spoke with Adam Hanieh. His most recent book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies, examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Here, he discusses the specific nature of Gulf capital, its role in regional and global markets, and its future in a post-COVID-19 world.
“The people are active” – interview with Bolivian miners’ leader Orlando Gutiérrez
4 August 2020, byOrlando Gutiérrez spent fifteen years working in the depths of the mines of Colquiri, in the province of Inquisivi, in the department of La Paz. Today he is the highest reference point of the mineworkers’ union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB). He is a key figure in the union’s support for Luis Arce Catacora, the economist (and former minister of the economy who, on 6 September, 2020 – on condition the elections take place – will be the presidential candidate for the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) led by Evo Morales. He was interviewed by Gustavo Veiga for the Argentine daily newspaper Página 12. The interview took place before the interim government installed by the coup decided to postpone the presidential elections to 18 October, 2020.
U.S. Imperialism and Africa’s “Perfect Storm”
3 August 2020, byOn December 24, 2019, the New York Times reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper was weighing a reduction in troop levels in West Africa. Although the numbers involved were small, this news was met with official outcry and unleashed a fierce policy debate on the wisdom of such a drawdown. Military and elected officials have pushed back on the notion of a troop reduction as a “retreat” and a missed opportunity to counter both China’s regional influence and terrorism. In fact, by the military establishment’s own definition, “counter-terror” across the continent has failed: Attacks by militant groups have been sharply rising and have increased with foreign intervention. And devastating strikes by the United States have continued unabated: Somalia, for example, was the target of an unprecedented level of attacks in early 2020 alone.
Fighting Back against Hungary’s Ban on Legal Gender Recognition
2 August 2020, byOne of the laws voted on by the Viktor Orban government during the pandemic makes mandatory a “sex at birth” rubric on official identification documents. This makes legal gender recognition impossible, violently ruling against trans and gender non-conforming persons’ right to exist. Tina Kolos serves as vice-president of Transvanilla Transgender Association – the only active NGO focusing only on trans issues in Hungary. They have kindly answered our questions about the effects of the law in Hungary, the trans community’s fight against it, and the broader associational landscape in which Transvanilla carry out legal and social work.