Putin failed to terrorize Ukraine into submission with massive bombing of civilians and social infrastructure. Ukrainian social solidarity, resilience and massive participation of all layers of the population inspired the world that a people do not have to cave to extortion and terror.
This appendix to “Society in the Grip of Genocidal Ideology” details Putin’s genocidal ideology and how prominent Left journal “Monthly Review,” its editor John Bellamy Foster, and Noam Chomsky echo Putin’s propaganda in their apologetics for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Genocidal ideology, which was manifested differently in the Buffalo mass shooting and in Putin’s war on Ukraine, has spread throughout our society, pervading the Right but also polluting the Left. How to fight this retrogression in all its forms?
The work of Guardians of Equality Movement (GEM), the LGBTQ+ rights organization in Syria; Greece joined 14 other nations in banning conversion therapy; a student at Kalama High School in the state of Washington organized a rally supporting a Transgender student who was beaten in the school; and an art exhibit “Our Blood Can Save” opened in Brooklyn’s Major R. Owens Health and Wellness Community Center.
Like repression in Iran, the war against Ukraine is, more than anything else, understandable on the basis of fear of revolution and the overthrow of the existing order.
Free Syria areas have repeatedly demonstrated solidarity with Ukrainians fighting their common enemy, but have had to carry on their fight, for freedom and to avert extermination, without the international support their struggle has deserved.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resistance to it are shaking up the world and revealing the ideological pollution of society, including of the Left.
Readers’ Views on: Putin’s Brutal War on Ukraine; War on Yemen; Canadian Convoy; Trucks and Tribes; and Abortion Politics.
Putin’s invasion confronted fierce resistance in Ukraine and opposition on Russian streets. The war reveals a changed world of competing centers of capital–which is in a state of stalled accumulation globally, devolving into militarism, other-hating fascism and fomenting new forms of genocide–signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked.
Putin’s invasion confronted fierce resistance in Ukraine and opposition on Russian streets. The war reveals a changed world of competing centers of capital–which is in a state of stalled accumulation globally, devolving into militarism, other-hating fascism and fomenting new forms of genocide–signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked.
No to war on Ukraine! The capitalist system in crisis ever veers toward war. Putin is not so much the exception but the embodiment of the ongoing shift in world politics, signaling the future this system holds if left unchecked. The destruction of democracy and the move to the Right, which Putin has aided, helps set the stage for that nightmare.
In Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian Revolution, resistance has continued. Fifty Syrian revolutionaries and their families were forced to leave the city to join other revolutionaries in the Free Syrian enclave in the country’s northwest.
Since 2011, the opposition between a largely secular “Left” and a more religious “Right” has delimited bourgeois democratic politics. This could have been the starting point for a revolutionary politics. But the Tunisian Left has been unable to transcend this Enlightenment contradiction, despite the vital working-class participation in the 2011 revolution.
Fascism has been cultivated by rulers fearing revolution and enabled by the normalization of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Congo, and Syria–and by the philosophical void on the Left, a substantial part of which is still accepted as “Left” despite ideological confusion that aligned it with genocides in Syria and Bosnia.
In light of the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, we present a piece that takes up the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the connected slaughter of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. This piece goes beyond exposé to explore the treacherous nature of halfway revolutions, which set the stage for counter-revolution. It thus illuminates today’s crisis.
In light of the ongoing Israel-Palestine crisis, we present a piece that takes up the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the connected slaughter of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. This piece goes beyond exposé to explore the treacherous nature of halfway revolutions, which set the stage for counter-revolution. It thus illuminates today’s crisis.
Violence against women has worsened in the era of COVID-19. Sexism, like racism, is systemic to almost every culture. Nevertheless women fight back with creative activism and thought. What is new is the internationalization and deepening of that struggle. This year’s International Women’s Day shows women deepening our fight for full freedom and new human relationships.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part IV: In the absolute opposite of today’s society, one based on freely associated labor instead of slavery to capital’s production for production’s sake, we can leave behind pervasive misery, precarity and antagonism, and self-development and cooperation can flourish, as can a rational relationship to nature. We can see the beginnings in self-organization from below and the ever-growing rejection of capitalism. Against the large part of the Left that focuses on the power of the state to combat disasters, we must bring out the self-activity of masses in motion and not disarm ourselves by separating mass struggles from dialectical philosophy of revolution.
Abortion bans during the COVID-19 pandemic are cruel, based on lies, and constitute torture against women, causing not only more deaths, but also revealing the contempt with which women are held and the danger in forcing women to give birth against their will at this time.
Draft thesis for discussion about where the world is heading, and what to do about it from a revolutionary standpoint. Part II. The true pandemic war: A. The capitalists’ class war; B. Subjects of revolution fight back; and C. Pandemic class war reveals the social structure.
Abortion bans during the COVID-19 pandemic are cruel, based on lies, and constitute torture against women, causing not only more deaths, but also revealing the contempt with which women are held and the danger in forcing women to give birth against their will at this time.
Neither the coronavirus nor the ongoing climate changes are merely “acts of nature.” Rather both have emerged at this moment because humanity is grounded—entrapped—in the economic-social-political system(s) of capital/capitalism. It is the behemoth that we must examine: the monster we must free ourselves from.
Readers’ Views on youth climate strike; Socialism and ecology; counter-revolution and revolution in the Middle East; auto and teacher strikes, and Brexit and labor
We will discuss not just the needed critique to those on the Left who defend Bashar al-Assad, but also the pragmatic philosophy that underlies the broader Left. The resulting search for a new orientation in the Syrian revolution demands a dive into dialectical philosophy.
A report on the Oct. 13 demonstration of Kurds in San Francisco, California, to protest Donald Trump’s giving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the green light to invade the Kurdish-held part of Syria.
Gerry Emmett writes on the crossroads reached by the Sudanese Revolution, with the accord between the revolutionary Forces for Freedom and Change and the genocidal Transitional Military Council signed on Aug. 4. He sees a parallel between the Left’s response to the Sudanese Revolution and the Syrian Revolution.
Message in solidarity with the annual international antiwar assembly, stressing the full development of proletarian internationalism.
Free Syrian revolutionaries are being pushed to the limit. But humanity is being put to the test.
The brilliant Sudanese revolution is another in a line of rebellions against reactionary rule.
There is no question that women are a vital part of the movement in Algeria since it erupted on Feb. 22, fighting to bring down le pouvoir—the power structure—that has been running the country and their lives since 1999.
Participant report of a Chicago vigil in solidarity with the Syrian people against Assad.
In the Rukban camp along the Jordan/Syria border, at least 41,000 displaced Syrians, including women and children, are suffering the ravages of winter weather, hunger, lack of medicine, and the terror of being threatened by the forces of the genocidal Bashar al-Assad regime.
Official Call for national gathering of News and Letters Committees to work out Marxist-Humanist perspectives for 2019-2020
In-person report from Idlib province, Syria.
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.
The Syrian Revolution has been the physical and intellectual battlefield that defines our time. As early as 2012 it was clear that what happened in Syria would determine the next stage of world history.
We post this Dec. 24, 2018, commentary by Mohammed Elnaiem as a discussion article which begins: “On these holidays, we mourn for the Kurds in Syria who hopelessly fear an upcoming Turkish invasion, we mourn for the yellow vests in France who rise up in an empire built on colonial wealth but which continues to make destitute its working and unemployed poor…”
Readers’ Views on: Capitalism vs. the Planet; Anti-Semitism’s Inhumanity; Kavanaugh Travesty; Youth Rock!; Freedom Movements vs. Fascism across the Globe; Catholic Church Crisis; Voices from behind Bars
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.
Raed Fares, revolutionary martyr of Kafranbel, Syria, is remembered after his assassination.
A U.S. activist in Syria solidarity criticizes the broad Left’s failure to practice revolutionary solidarity and outlines the dangerous political consequences.
Readers’ Views takes up: attacks on immigrants; Syria and the Left’s failure; Democratic Party’s selling out women; Women’s Liberation; Serena Williams; ending money bail the right way; Trump-Kim “peace”; genocide and war heroes; and a discussion on sex crimes and their fallout.
News & Letters editorial taking up how in Syria, attacks are intensifying upon the three million Syrians, mostly civilians, trapped in Idlib province and how so many in the Left have failed them.
Syria’s Idlib province faces imminent slaughter by Russia, Iran, and Assad regime forces, which have already made it into the model of the 21st century concentration camp. We call upon all of humanity to oppose this and to demand protection for these millions whose only “crime” was to fight for freedom against a fascist regime.
Free Syria activists gathered in Chicago on June 8 in a vigil opposing the ongoing genocide against civilians who are ignored by most of the world.
With his victory in the June 24, 2018, presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated his one-man rule of Turkey’s 80 million-plus population. He had already eliminated the office of prime minister and created a powerful executive presidency.
Marxist-Humanist analysis of the nature of President Donald Trump’s inhuman immigration policy, the damage it is causing and the outcry against it, including from his own base.
It is a question of working out how to actualize for this moment the relationship of philosophy, spontaneity, organization. We look at concrete tasks.
Hershu Habeel is a story by Syrian Najm Aldin Samman that attempts to show the the extent of Syrians’ love of their homeland, and the genocide that is happening in Syria at this moment.
