NATO/West Or Global Majority?
Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss the fracturing international order between the NATO/West bloc and the Global Majority, analyzing Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, and Europe.
Fascism
We Are Spartacus
Spartacus was a 1960 Hollywood film based on a book written secretly by the blacklisted novelist Howard Fast, and adapted by the screenplay writer Dalton Trumbo, one of the ‘Hollywood 10’ who were banned for their ‘un-American’ politics. It is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times.
Both writers were Communists and victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, which, during the Cold War, destroyed the careers and often the lives of those principled and courageous enough to stand up to a homegrown fascism in America.
Israel’s Final Solution For The Palestinians
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Is The US Turning Into A Christofascist State?
Jeff Sharlet has spent two decades covering the intersection of extreme Christian nationalism and the far-right. In his new book, Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, he gives snapshots of a country rapidly devolving into a Christian fascism state. He captures the rage, the despair, the dislocation, the alienation, the aesthetic of violence, and the magical thinking that are the foundations of all fascist movements—forces that are now coalescing around the Trump-led Republican Party. The bizarre conspiracy theories and buffoonish quality of many who lead and embrace this movement, such as Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, make the use American fascists easy to ridicule and dismiss.
Fascism Comes To America
The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.
Trump, as the writer Jeff Sharlet points out, has morphed from the Elmer Gantry huckster of politics — holding out the illusion that we can all get rich like him — to the peddler of dark conspiracies about the deep state and pedophiles running the Democratic Party, to full blown fascism.
Kansas Newspaper Owner Died After Police Raid ‘Hitler Tactics’
A newswoman since 1953 and co-owner of the local paper in her hometown in central Kansas, she lived to see her Marion County Record, as well as her home, raided by police on Friday, for reasons that defied both law and logic.
It is not hyperbole to say that this attack on the people’s right to know appears to have killed her.
On Friday, police showed up looking for evidence that a reporter had run an improper computer search to confirm an accurate report that a local business owner applying for a liquor license had lost her driver’s license over a DUI.
According to coverage of this story on the Record’s website, the reporter “made no attempt to conceal her identity, providing her name.”
Lessons From Gramsci For Social Movements Today
He has been called one of the most original political thinkers of the 20th century. Historians point out that “If academic citations and internet references are any guide, he is more influential than Machiavelli.” And his impact on the way we think about the processes of social change has been described as “little short of electrifying.”
The accomplishments of Antonio Gramsci, born in Italy in 1891, are all the more remarkable considering that his life was both short and notably difficult: His family was destitute in his childhood; he was sick for much of his life; he spent the prime of his adulthood confined to prison by Benito Mussolini’s fascists after his own party’s attempts to foment revolution had failed; he was often denied access to books during his incarceration; and he died at the age of just 46.
Why I Crashed The White House Garden Party For Narendra Modi
On June 22, the White House held a “welcoming ceremony” for visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the South Lawn of the White House, where members of the public could register to attend.
I signed up, along with my friends Keya and Apoorva. Our goal was not to welcome Modi, but rather to be a visible presence as dissenting voices. We wore t-shirts with the hand-painted message “Modi=Fascist” under our outer garments and smuggled in printed signs denouncing the Modi government’s human rights violations and persecution of religious minorities.
An overwhelming majority of the crowd of more than 1,000 were Indian American, and judging by their chants and their visible symbols, many were Modi supporters.
Antifascism In Italy: ‘We Are At The Beginning Of A New Phase’
In Italy the Republic has never been able to fully settle accounts with fascism. By that, I mean that, under various conditions and in different cycles of Italian history, the antithesis between fascism and anti-fascism could emerge again, albeit in ever-changing ways.
Anti-fascist culture has been through many ups and downs. It has, at times, enjoyed an absolutely overwhelming hegemony, also because of its rebirths — as in the early 1960s, and as in the long cycle opened up by 1968 and 1969, that is, in moments when it resisted attempts to erase or manipulate it — when it resisted attempts to reduce anti-fascism to nothing more than an ancient, historical memory. But what we are seeing today is another turning point.
A Regime Of Private Corporations That Is Normalizing Fascism In Italy
Italy is one of a few countries in the European Union without a legal minimum wage; 21 out of 27 EU countries have instituted minimum wages. In Italy, minimum wages are only determined in collective labor agreements, but these salaries are often very low — around four to six euros per hour. In addition, Italy is the only country in the continent where since 1990, real wages are not growing — they even diminished by 3% in the last 30 years. Thus, one out of 10 people in Italy are working poor, among the youth, this number increases to one out of six.
Already a year ago, Potere al Popolo started a political campaign seeking the introduction of a legal minimum wage. At the end of May, together with the alliance Unione Popolare, we submitted a legislative proposal to institute a minimum wage of at least 10 euros (US$ 10.72) per hour, which will also be automatically inflation-linked.
Liberalism And The Spectre Of Inverted Totalitarianism
The conflict now raging between the West and Russia and China is a struggle for global power. At the end of the Second World War the economic weight and influence of the United States allowed it to dominate world trade and manufacturing but also to control financial markets as well as build a system of global political and military alliances and bases which reinforced its control. Today its imperial dominance is under threat. The US is trying to prevent the emergence of rivals for world hegemony and block the development of a multipolar world. But it still maintains a residual power based on the role of the dollar as well as its military forces and political pacts.
Africans In The United States Are A Colonized People
In the colonial context, the colonized have no rights that the colonizer ever really needed to recognize. Therefore, any social space that Africans in the U.S. experienced were won through resistance. The historic fight for African self-determination and liberation from the anti-human colonial/capitalist system has been an uninterrupted feature of what we claim as the “Black Radical Tradition.”
An unapologetic opposition to the U.S. colonial/capitalist project and U.S. imperialism centers the Black radical tradition, along with internationalism and a commitment to socialist transformation. It is this tradition of principled, militant resistance that has been a constant source of concern and, consequently, systematic repression of Black/African radicalism by the U.S. colonial/imperialist state.
Statement On The Ninth Anniversary Of The Odessa Massacre
Each year, the Odessa Solidarity Campaign has promoted actions on May 2 to mark the date in 2014 when a right-wing mob led by openly fascist organizations murdered at least 42 anti-fascists at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, Ukraine.
The Odessa Massacre took place just a few months after the violent coup that replaced a pro-Russian president with a pro-U.S. one. Not surprisingly, the U.S. was heavily involved in promoting the coup.
Today Ukraine has an authoritarian government that openly collaborates with neo-Nazi organizations, incorporating them into its military and promoting the memory of Ukrainian fascists who shamefully collaborated with the World War II Nazi occupation of their country.
The United States Of Paralysis
Political paralysis is snuffing out what is left of our anemic democracy.
It is the paralysis of doing nothing while the ruling oligarchs, who have increased their wealth by nearly a third since the pandemic began and by close to 90 percent over the past decade, orchestrate virtual tax boycotts as millions of Americans go into bankruptcy to pay medical bills, mortgages, credit card debt, student debt, car loans and soaring utility bills demanded by a system that has privatized nearly every aspect of our lives.
It is the paralysis of doing nothing about raising the minimum wage, despite the ravages of inflation, around 600,000 homeless Americans and 33.8 million people living in food insecure homes, including 9.3 million children.
Anti-War Groups Protest Against Munich Security Conference
Munich, Germany - On February 18, Saturday, anti-imperialist, leftist groups protested in Munich, Germany against the ongoing 59th annual Munich Security Conference (MSC) which began on Friday February 17. Left-wing groups including the German Communist Party (DKP), Socialist German Workers Youth (SDAJ), and others marched in the city and slammed MSC as the conference of warmongers. The mobilization saw the participation of tens of thousands of people who condemned the conference and called for peace. Anti-fascist groups also denounced the far-right groups who also organized protests in Munich on Saturday.