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Revolution

How ‘Fist Rice’ Became A Symbol Of Korean Democracy

On a humid summer morning in the mountain-backed metropolis of Gwangju, a cluster of fifth graders shuffled into an auditorium at 5.18 Freedom Park. Here were the former barracks where the South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan and his forces imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and in some cases killed thousands of civilians in May of 1980. Today, Koreans refer to these events as “5.18,” marking the first day of the Gwangju Uprising, when city residents demanded democracy in the wake of Chun’s 1979 power grab after the assassination of Park Chung-hee, the previous dictator president. The Chun regime’s brutal response still reverberates in the lives of the city’s residents. As the young students took a breather from their field trip, a guide passed out jumbo rice balls called jumeokbap, or “fist rice.”

China Plans New Era Of Revolution

On 21 October 2022, Friends of Socialist China co-editors Danny Haiphong and Carlos Martinez joined Multipolarista editor Ben Norton to discuss the CPC’s 20th National Congress, currently drawing to a close in Beijing. In the 90-minute stream embedded below, the three discuss some of the key themes emerging from the Congress, including the pursuit of China’s Second Centenary Goal (“building a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful”), common prosperity, ecological civilization, whole-process people’s democracy, and the need for self-reliance and military modernization in the face of escalating hostility from the imperialist countries.

Assata Shakur, Black Liberation Struggles And The Cuban Revolution

As far back in history as the period of enslavement of African people in North America, resistance and rebellion has been met with retaliatory repression from the ruling interests. Freedom fighters such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, among many others named and unknown, have been either brutally executed or left with no alternative other than to seek flight from oppression. This same legacy of confinement, brutality and lynching continued into the post-slavery era of the 20th and 21st centuries. Between the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of African Americans were extra-judicially murdered by mobs of law-enforcement agents and vigilantes.

Nicaragua Celebrates 43 Years Of Revolution

Masaya, Nicaragua - July 19th is a day of celebration in Nicaragua: the anniversary of the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. But the international media will have it penciled in their diaries for another reason: it’s yet another opportunity to pour scorn on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. We’ll hear again about how the government “clamps down on dissent,” about its “political prisoners,” its recent “pantomime election,” its “damaging crackdown on civil society” and much more. All of these accusations have been answered but the media will continue to shut out any evidence that conflicts with the consensus narrative about Nicaragua, that its president, Daniel Ortega, has “crushed the Nicaraguan dream.” Since the violent, U.S.-directed coup attempt in 2018, in which more than 200 people died, it has been very difficult to find objective analysis of the political situation in Nicaragua in mainstream media, much less any examination of the revolution’s achievements.

Sit-Ins Mark New Stage Of Protests Against Sudan’s Military Junta

Revolutionary slogans and music defying the military junta continue to resonate from at least four sit-in protests in Sudan as on Monday, July 11, eleven days after security forces injured over 600 during the landmark anti-coup protests on June 30. Efforts are underway to organize a total civil disobedience campaign and political general strike. Sudan’s pro-democracy protest movement is arguably at its strongest since the coup on October 25, 2021, and growing despite the continuing attacks on sit-ins and the custodial torture of detainees. The over 5,000 neighborhood Resistance Committees (RCs) across Sudan, which are leading the struggle against the junta, “are working hard to produce a unified political charter”, said Muaz Khalil, spokesperson of the RCs in Al Kalakla Al Quteia neighborhood of capital city Khartoum.

Colombia’s New President: What This Victory Means For The Continent

On August 7th a new left of center government will take power in Colombia. Many questions remain to be answered but one thing is clear: this historic election marks a break with a long Colombian history of State violence and monolithic conservatism. On June 19, Gustavo Petro beat his rival, the businessman Rodolfo Hernández, by a margin of 50.44% to 47.03%, after 100% of the country’s polling stations reported their results. Both his opponent and current president Iván Duque recognized the results, congratulating Petro. Despite an information war and decades of violence against the left, over 11 million Colombians successfully mobilized and voted for the historic change. La Unión Patriótica (UP) was one leftist political party that suffered from this political genocide.

Cuba: Dissidence In ‘Normal Position’

It is said that the famous Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén used to tell groups of people who wanted to take a portrait with him to “put on a smart face.” and at the end he would smile and tell them to “go back to the normal position”. The group photo of the so-called Cuban dissidence could imitate that joke but in something much less funny and innocent: A brief pose to simulate something that never was. On April 15, 2009, Jonathan Farrar, then head of U.S. diplomatic corps in Cuba, wrote a cable that in 2011 would be declassified by Wikileaks. In it, the counterrevolution that Washington had been cultivating on the island since the mid-eighties of the twentieth century, with millionaire funding, international tours and international media resonance, was exposed as corrupt, divided, and lacking in program and popular scope.

The True Adventure Of A 19-Year-Old North American Fighting In The Cuban Revolution With Fidel Castro

Wild Green Oranges describes how author Bob Baldock dropped out of college and was at loose ends in 1958. Then he became inspired after a chance viewing of a newsreel. It was about a band of rebels in the remote eastern mountains of Cuba fighting a guerilla war against the US-backed Batista dictatorship. He had access to news about the little-known events in Cuba at his job as a copyboy at the (now defunct) New York Herald Tribune and became determined to interview the rebels. Then a youth of nineteen years, his only travel outside the Midwest was to New York City. He recruited another dropout classmate, forged press credentials, and hitched to Miami. Working odd jobs and getting by with a little help from their friends to buy air tickets, the two flew to Havana.

Sudanese Resistance Committees Reject UN Calls To Negotiate With Coup Leaders

“No negotiation, No compromise, No Partnership with the military” remains the main slogan in the unrelenting mass-protests, rallies, and barricades organized in cities across Sudan since the military coup on October 25, 2021. Now in the fifth month, the civil resistance continues to draw hundreds of thousands week after week to the streets. On March 14, the nation-wide demonstrations, like in other weeks, were met with repression from the army and the militia of the military junta. Since the coup, at least 87 young protesters, including minors, have been killed in the crackdown while over 3,300 have been injured, and over 500 are still undergoing treatment, according to data compiled by Hadhreen Organization. 28 have lost limbs or other organs and at least eight have been paralyzed as on Friday, March 11.

Venezuela: Eyewitness Report Day Three Of The PSUV Fifth Congress

Caracas, Venezuela - Day three of the PSUV 5th Congress began on March 8, with thousands filling the large auditorium again as Afro-Venezuelan dancers took to the stage and Caribbean coast music filled the air. The Chavista delegates smiled and swayed to the steady rhythm of folkloric songs about the Bolivarian Revolution. PSUV militants came prepared to listen to speeches and consider the changing conditions and forces in motion, explanations of errors, questions about how to achieve new goals, and implementation of the Three R’s: Resistance, Rebirth, and Revolution. Luis Brito Garcia, a professor, spoke on ethics, responding to the arrest of a mayor and others in a drug smuggling scandal.

Why We Need A Mau Mau In Amerikkka

There is nothing left to do in the US but to organize and mobilize the masses. The US is a country made up of conservatives who are openly racist and imperialist, and liberals who are incoherent and inconsistent; only “inclusive” when it comes to upholding white supremacy and imperialism. They both give false hope to us, the colonized masses, lie after lie, broken promise after broken promise. We have come to see that the US has always resembled genocide, war, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and so many other cancers that we as the colonized masses are infected with. To be cured, to be free, we must rid ourselves of the tumors and infected areas of our body. Only through collective, protracted, and organized struggle will we obtain liberation.

Seducing People With The Communal Model

February 4 followed on the insurrectional footsteps of February 27 [1989, the Caracazo], a massive social explosion triggered by the absolute failure of the existing societal model. Three years later came Chávez’s military insurrection. Now, the element that was missing on the 27th was there on the 4th. Conversely, what was absent on the 4th was there on the 27th. The Caracazo mobilized the masses: tens of thousands of people went to the streets and expressed their dissent with the existing order. On the other hand, February 4th had a vanguard and a strategic objective, but the masses didn’t participate. The Bolivarian Revolution is the synthesis of those two moments: it brings vanguard and masses together.

Sudan’s Revolution Enters Its Second Phase: Disrupting The State

A few hours after the military coup in Sudan on 25 October 2021, its leader, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, appeared on television to announce the dissolution of the Sovereign Council, the governmental body composed of military and civilian representatives, which had been formed in the wake of the 2018 revolution. In a typical justification for coups in the country, Al-Burhan declared a state of emergency, describing the takeover as a “corrective step”. The 2018 revolution was the third in Sudan’s modern history. They have all followed a pattern of ousting a dictator, followed by a transitional period, elections, and then a new military coup that once again interrupts the path towards democratic rule.

We Are Human, But In The Dark We Wish For Light

For over a decade, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in and out of Egypt’s prisons, never free of the harassment of the military state apparatus. In 2011, during the high point of the revolution, Alaa emerged as an important voice of his generation and since then has been a steady moral compass despite his country’s attempts to suffocate his voice. On 25 January 2014, to commemorate the third anniversary of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government, Alaa and the poet Ahmed Douma wrote a moving epistle from their dungeon in Tora Prison, Cairo. This prison, which houses Alaa and other political prisoners, is not far from the beautiful Nile and – depending on Cairo’s traffic – not too far from the Garden City office of Mada Masr, where the epistle was published.

60 Years After His Death, Fanon’s Ideas Remain The Weapons Of The Oppressed

Born and raised in what is still France’s Caribbean island colony of Martinique, Fanon was exposed to and shaped by the everyday class and race relations that characterized the island in the early 20th century. Forced to join a segregated column of Black troops, he fought in World War II. Upon continuing his studies in post-war France, he came face to face with the racism that dominates the European world. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon reflects on coming of age in a world, where, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” At the time of publication, Fanon had just turned 27. In 1953, the Martiniquais psychiatrist was assigned to Algeria, where he treated patients who were severely traumatized by the violence French colonialism had spun into motion.

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Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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