There is an “Eastern route” for migrants from Africa that crosses Yemen and lands in Saudi Arabia. A new report from Human Rights Watch documents the violence of Saudi border guards against Ethiopian migrants. The U.S. has chosen not to raise the issue publicly.
Country after country reacted to the war by increasing oil and gas trade and production. Only movements from below can keep the fossil fuel capitalists from turning the opportunity for a greener, freer future into opposite.
After seven years of war in Yemen, the UN estimates that almost 400,000 people, primarily civilians, have died, 60% from hunger and disease, with children being 70% of the deaths. The war has become a proxy for the Saudi Arabia-Iran Middle East conflict.
Readers’ Views on: Putin’s Brutal War on Ukraine; War on Yemen; Canadian Convoy; Trucks and Tribes; and Abortion Politics.
Students at West Virginia University, Harvard and Stanford, among others, held protests and rallies against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, college students picketed the office of Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley on March 4 to protest an $8,000 campaign contribution from weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
The Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan has shaken world politics and challenged the Left to respond in a revolutionary way. In the absence of truly liberatory revolutionary movements, what looms to fill the vacuum is not only a reinvigoration of fundamentalist political and military movements but the reactionary maneuvering by Russia and China, refugee-scapegoating parties, and repression of social movements on the model of Syria’s Assad and Burma’s Tatmadaw—all of which have been flourishing under the U.S. permanent “war on terror.”
The brief, dirty war that broke out May 10-21 between the Israeli government and Hamas, the Islamist group ruling Gaza had many reactionary consequences.
National Human Trafficking Awareness Day; Saudi activist Loujain Al-Hathloul released but not free; Scotland becomes first country to make menstrual supplies free.
In huge swaths of Yemen—particularly in areas controlled by Houthi rebels—famine and mass starvation are rampant. To add to this tragedy, U.S. President Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s parting shot before leaving office was to declare the Houthis a terrorist organization, thus creating draconian difficulties for food aid to reach famine-suffering masses.
The regional war devastating Yemen is a counter-revolution against its Arab Spring revolution and its humanism.
Call to Action in solidarity with Sudan’s revolution
The brilliant Sudanese revolution is another in a line of rebellions against reactionary rule.
Yemen’s civil society organizations, representing the revolutionary hopes of 2011, have presented humane terms for a peace agreement. The state powers and non-state actors dependent upon them have their own ideas.
Sudan’s genocidal President Omar al-Bashir is being challenged by nationwide protests. The Sudanese people’s struggle is humanity’s struggle.
Days after the Saudi regime murdered Jamal Khashoggi, the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro murdered its own critic, Fernando Alban Salazar, in equally horrific fashion.
In OPEC powers’ participation in the counter-revolutionary attacks on the revolutions in Syria and Yemen, and in the anti-immigrant reactionary reshaping of European politics, we see the next stage of bourgeois politics taking shape.
Readers’ Views on: Fighting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Hysteria; Women’s Liberation; Attacks on Gays; Support Restaurant Workers; Swords into Plowshares; Human Rights Struggles in Iraq…; …And in Russia; Arthur Gursch in Memoriam
We look at the world economic situation that must be changed: the role of state-capitalism, labor, climate change, the law of value, exploitation, alienation, and revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.
Yemenis face another winter of war, hunger, disease, and the brunt of Saudi and Iranian imperial rivalry. Over half the population urgently needs humanitarian assistance.
Qatar isn’t Yemen, and the Saudis won’t attack it. Qatar will not accept the Saudi demands.
March 2017 marks the sixth anniversary of the Syrian Revolution. Syrian revolutionaries have articulated a necessary step in organizing outside and beyond the aims of state powers.
The U.S. raid that destroyed Yakla in Yemen, killing 25 civilians, drew world focus on slaughter of Yemenis since the 2011 uprising in Change Square in Sana’a toppled the Saleh dictatorship.
A look at the situation in the Middle East in light of Donald Trump’s election that takes up Syria, Yemen and the arming by the U.S. of varying forces–some of whom are fighting each other.
Readers’ Views on Election Stirs Battles in Thought and in Life; Deep Racism in the USA; Women Fight Back; Indigenous Struggles; Global (In)Humanity; Why Read N&L?
Readers’ Views on: Racism and Revolt Put U.S. on Trial; Life and Death Under the Class Divide; Environmental Struggles; War and Atrocities; and Women’s Lives at Stake.
Part IV of the Draft Perspectives 2016: The renewal of Syrian demonstrations for freedom refuted the state powers’ belief that the idea of revolution can be destroyed by bombs, and highlighted a civilizational crisis and the need for international solidarity.
Part II of the Draft Perspectives 2016: The worldwide war against women includes attacks on abortion rights, counter-revolution in Egypt, attacks on women by UN troops. Women celebrated International Women’s day in Turkey and other countries.
Contents: Introduction; I. Discontent, revolt and reaction in the U.S.; II. The worldwide war against women; III. Chinese labor in revolt; IV. Counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa; V. Toward organizational new beginnings. The fact that the old, crumbling order will not go away quietly explains why we print the Marxist-Humanist Draft Perspectives in the pages of the paper of News and Letters Committees. It is an open window onto the needed philosophy of revolution, without which all revolutions and freedom movements remain incomplete.
A Yemeni doctor pleads for help for the tragic and hopeless circumstances of many wounded from the Yemeni Civil War in a Taiz hospital, and the U.S. is called upon to have a grassroots movement to support military pilots who would resist what are clearly illegal bombings of foreign hospitals and healthcare and rescue workers.
The United Arab Emirates, a Gulf state ally of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, is the perfect model of a two-tier society.
On the challenges facing the Syrian Revolution, the lie of the current ceasefire, the forces lined up against the Revolution including Russia and Iran, and the insufficiencies of much of the international Left when it comes to supporting a genuine revolution and comprehending revolution in permanence.
Foregrounding the new formal solidarity between Trust Black Women with Black Lives Matter, we explore the thought and actions of women worldwide, including the struggle for reproductive justice in the U.S.; women fighting war and terrorism in places like South Sudan and Syria, the successful fight of domestic workers to organize, and the need to make the revolutionary content of such actions explicit.
Russian airstrikes create havoc in Syria, embodying a philosophy of unfreedom. Revolutionary unity in Syria isn’t just a tactical issue, but a philosophic question, on the revolution’s ground of freedom and dignity, needing philosophic as well as material solidarity.
The fascist terror attacks in Paris herald further reaction. Syria and its tortured twin, Iraq, have become the umbilical cord connecting ISIS to the bourgeois imperialism that is its model.
Saudi’s seven-month-long campaign of death and human suffering has been abetted by logistical support from the Obama administration. The Houthis they purport to oppose wasted the popular welcome they received entering Sana’a in 2014 by allying with former oppressor, ex-ruler Saleh, and imposing their own brand of narrow sectarian rule.
Economic problems are worsening crazily because of this war, but that is no longer the only major problem in Yemen. There are at least four major problems/risks being horribly worsened as the war continues. They are: famine, epidemics, the expansion of extremist groups, and sectarianism.
Black lives as Subject; Russia in crisis; Nothing about us without us; Homelessness in L.A.; Central Canada Alliance; Perspectives and philosophy; Elderly to the streets?; Women and Yemen half-peace; Labor and climate justice; Dialectic and women’s liberation; Voices from behind the bars
Worldwide, the refugee crisis is unprecedented and is fueled by war, terrorism and climate change. The worldwide response is paltry with country after country turning away or deporting frantic and desperate people in search of a safe haven.
Under the control of religious armed militias, Yemenis live a humiliating life and die in insulting ways! Now death is the closest thing to Yemenis, whereas our dreams have become impossible.
In-person report: Everything in Yemen is being destroyed horribly: humans, the fabric of society, national unity, the infrastructure, including public services systems.
Another human tragedy is unfolding in Yemen, where civilians are under attack. As in Syria, the world is doing virtually nothing while civilians are targeted. Here is an in-person report sent to News & Letters.
In the absence of successful social revolution, today’s total crisis is shown in a world capitalist order that is falling apart economically, politically, environmentally, and in thought. That does not mean that we can wait for capitalism to collapse and step aside for a new society. On the contrary. Its desperation makes it that much more vicious, and it threatens to doom all of humanity with it.
The late Syrian writer Alisar Iram, for one, saw where IS/Daesh were heading, long before they took their hammers into the Mosul Museum.
Yemen’s Western-backed President, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, announced the long-awaited formation of a new, “technocratic” government Nov. 7. The country has been in upheaval since the 2012 overthrow of dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The immediate background to the new agreement is the changed situation resulting from the occupation of large areas of the country by Houthi rebels, including the capital, Sana’a….
The explosive advances of the army of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS), crossing from Syria into northern and central Iraq, have brought deeper miseries to the Iraqi people who might have expected they had already endured the worst, including the effects of U.S. imperialist policy. Atrocities from mass shootings and beheadings to systematic kidnapping and rapes of women—that the world and U.S. foreign policy ignored when IS carried them out against anti-Assad revolutionaries in Syria—in Iraq no longer remained hidden.
The results of the Québec Election on April 7 are a disaster that may have implications for all of North America.
Three years ago, the Egyptian Revolution was fighting for its life in Tahrir Square. For 18 days and nights, the women and men of the Square faced off against President Hosni Mubarak’s security forces and thugs. In the end Mubarak was forced to follow Tunisia’s President-for-life, Ben Ali, into retirement and shame. The light of freedom spread–Square to Square, occupation to occupation. It was a historic turning point.
It was this global struggle that the military coup that ousted Morsi, and led to the massacre of over 800 of his supporters, was meant to stop short. Now, revolution continues, and the freedom idea lives, but the old world has tried hard to destroy it. Egypt’s newest new Constitution, passed Jan. 15 under the military rule of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, evokes only faint echoes of Tahrir. As artist Hanaa Safwat said, “The referendum is stained in innocent people’s blood. It has been built on the dead bodies of 800 people in Rabaa al-Adawiya.”
Occupations of planned fracking sites in Canada and Romania showed the intensification of struggles against the damage fossil fuel exploitation is inflicting. The urgency of stopping the headlong rush to extract and burn fossil fuel was underscored by the latest comprehensive report from the International Panel on Climate Change.
On Aug. 21 the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad murdered over a thousand civilians, mostly women and children, with sarin gas in the Damascus suburbs of Eastern Ghouta. It committed this crime in full view of the world—images of hundreds of murdered children, still in pajamas, laid out in temporary morgues, shocked viewers across the world.
Since April 2011 the world has looked on as over 115,000 Syrians have been killed, and over 7.2 million have been made refugees. When Assad’s regime resorted to illegal chemical weapons, it seemed to many that this would change. It seemed that the images of so many murdered innocents might compel some action.
