Against the Current No. 229, March/April 2024
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What Genocide Looks Like
— The Editors -
Middle East Tensions Grow
— Joseph Daher -
Charges of Antisemitism Weaponized
— Peter Hudis -
Campus Restrictions & Resistance
— Purnima Bose -
Refusing Colonial Constructs
— Cynthia G. Franklin -
Puerto Rican Solidarities with Palestine
— Sara Awartani -
Sergey Lavrov and Vulgar Anti-Imperialism
— Howie Hawkins - Free Boris Kagarlitsky!
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Promised Land: Dimensions of the Agrarian Issue
— Hobeth Martínez Carrillo -
Mechanics of Colombia's Land Reform
— Hobeth Martínez Carrillo - Women in Struggle
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Ohio's Citizen-Led Reproductive Rights Victory
— Marlaina A. Leppert-Wahl -
Sanba: Chinese Feminists in Struggle: Maoist Past, Coercive Present
— Jiling Duan -
Women's Activism in Romania--An Overview
— Maria Bucur - Reviews
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Leader in a Time of Change
— Malik Miah -
King's Real View of Malcolm X
— Malik Miah -
Chandler Davis: Dissent and Solidarity
— David Palumbo-Liu -
Socialism Past, Socialism Present
— William Smaldone -
An Eco-Suspense Thriller
— Frann Michel -
A World of Collateral Damage
— Donald Greenspon - In Memoriam
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Last of the Hollywood Blacklistees: Norma Barzman
— Paul Buhle
What Genocide Looks Like
— The Editors
THE TELEVISED AND live-streamed war in Gaza following October 7th gives new insights into things that previously couldn’t be seen in real time. In their essay “Gaza: A Ghastly Window into the Crisis of Global Capitalism” William I. Robinson and Hoai-An Nguyen observe:
“The twentieth century saw at least five cases of acknowledged genocide, defined by the United Nations Convention as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,...
Chaos Here and There
[This letter from the editors is a preliminary version of the statement for the forthcoming May-June 2024 issue of Against the Current.]
AFTER NON-SUPER TUESDAY, Nikki Hayley’s presidential campaign, and Colorado’s hail-Mary effort to bar Donald Trump from the ballot all came and went, more basic facts of the political landscape have come into sharper focus. The United States....
Middle East Tensions Grow
— Joseph Daher
THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION army is continuing more than 125 days after its outbreak to wage a genocidal war against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. This immediately followed the October 7th Hamas attack, which led to the death of 1,139 persons, including 695 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the security forces and 71 foreigners.*
The 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip are living under a constant Israeli bombardment of....
Frantz Fanon and the Paradox of Anticolonial Violence
— Alan Wald
Writers and Missionaries:
Essays on the Radical Imagination
By Adam Shatz
New York: Verso, 2023, 357 pages,
$29 hardback.The Rebel’s Clinic:
The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
By Adam Shatz
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2024, 451 pages, $32.00 hardback.
ARE YOU THE kind of socialist activist looking for easy answers to questions about revolutionary violence, or who hungers for uplifting political biographies of icons of radical commitment?...
From ATC authors and friends
The New McCarthyism: A Personal Testimony
— Warren Montag
I AM A tenured professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which has a long tradition of progressive activism, including around Palestine. I have served as the faculty advisor to the campus chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine for about 12 years. There was nothing unusual about the fact that, soon after the October 7 attack by Hamas and beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, a group of 37 faculty, of which I was one, drafted and sent a letter to faculty, students and staff condemning....
The Significance of “Uncommitted” Vote in Michigan
— Malik Miah
[UPDATE: Super Tuesday primary results in Minnesota show the “Uncommitted” movement spreading, with 19% of Democratic voters choosing that option. In Massachusetts, nine percent voted “No Preference” in the Democratic primary....
Open Letter to the Israeli and U.S. Governments and Others Weaponizing the Issue of Rape
ALL TOO OFTEN in the fog of war, the brutality of sexual assault and rape is lost in the public eye, and bringing these abuses to light is something for which feminists have fought for decades. Complicating this issue, however, is the fact that accusations of sexual assault have also been wielded as a tool of war – and as an (often lethal) weapon of racism and colonialism....
Stand Against Genocide & Imperialism, from Palestine to Ukraine
— Ukraine Solidarity Network
Statement of the Ukraine Solidarity Network on the Second Anniversary
of Russia’s FulI-Scale Invasion of Ukraine
Two wars dominate world politics today – and the United States is involved in both, although in very different ways. Washington enables Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza with weapons, funds and political support while providing direct military backing through airstrikes in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. In Ukraine, however, the U.S. opposes Russia’s also-genocidal attack on its culture and people, and has provided weapons, funds, and political backing to the Ukraine government. Washington’s double standards and hypocrisy are obvious to the millions of people around the world who have taken to the streets in solidarity with Palestine.....
Freedom for Boris Kagarlitsky! Solidarity is Stronger than Repression!
— Suzi Weissman
BORIS KAGARLITSKY*, RUSSIAN Marxist writer-activist, had an unexpected “appeal” trial on February 13, 2024. Prosecutors were seeking to overturn the results of his two-day trial in December 2023, when Kagarlitsky was released with a fine after serving 4.5 months in pre-trial detention in the Komi Republic,...
Alexi Navalny Killed in Prison
— Russian Socialist Movement
ALEXI NAVALNY WAS killed in prison. Federal penitentiary service reported the death of the politician but it is evident that he did not die by himself, he was killed by Vladimir Putin. Navalny’s anti-corruption investigations and campaigns helped to politicize millions of Russians and to inspire thousands of activists -- many of whom did not share his political views but believed in the possibility of change in Russia....
Israel’s Genocidal War After Four Months
— Gilbert Achcar
Four months have elapsed since the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation and the start of the Zionist genocidal war that ensued. The situation has now surpassed the 1948 Nakba in terms of intensity of disaster as well as in terms of horror. Consider the facts presented by the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing in a remarkable article published by the New York Times on the 29th of January:...
Gaza: A Ghastly Window into the Crisis of Global Capitalism
— William I. Robinson & Hoai-An Nguyen
AS THE WORLD watches in horror over the mounting death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel faces charges before the International Court of Justice for the Crime of Genocide, the carnage in Gaza gives us a ghastly window into the rapidly escalating crisis of global capitalism. Connecting the dots from the merciless Israeli destruction of Gaza to this global....
Sergei Lavrov: "Israel Pursues Objectives Similar to Those of Russia"!
— Yorgos Mitralias
THOSE WHO STILL have doubts about the existence of "similarities" between the wars waged by Mr. Putin and Mr. Netanyahu against Ukraine and the Palestinians, respectively, can now be reassured that their doubts have been finally and irrevocably dispelled: Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister and Mr. Putin's right-hand man, categorically asserts to the official Russian news agency RIA Novosti,...
“Developing Countries” Are Trapped in a New Debt Crisis
— Eric Toussaint
THE WORLD BANK report on the debts of “developing countries,” published on December 13, 2023, reveals an alarming fact: in 2022, developing countries as a whole spent a record US$443.5 billion to pay for their external public debt.(1)
The 75 low-income nations that are eligible for loans from the International Development Association (IDA), a World Bank organization that provides loans to the world’s poorest nations, paid a record US$88.9 billion to its creditors in the same year....
Degrowth: A Remarkable Renaissance
— Alan Thornett
There has been an upsurge of interest in degrowth –a long-discussed strategic alternative to climate chaos and not just from the radical left. It is experiencing a renaissance at the moment, driven by the relentless rise in global temperatures and the resulting climate chaos.
It was the theme of a three-day....
Martial Terror in the Neocolony: Plight of Philippine Women Political Prisoners
— E. San Juan, Jr.
IN HIS CLASSIC "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Karl Marx amends Hegel's quip on history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce (1986 97). With the former Philippine dictator Marcos's son in office, will farcical acts be the spectacle for the next six years? Imagine the sons of Somoza, Trujillo or Batista returning to their banana republics -- that would indeed be "the tradition of all the dead generations" acting as toxic "nightmare on the brain of the living."
The oldest U.S. neocolony, the Philippines, was then plundered....
Michigan Appellate Courts Curb Death in Prison Sentences for Minors
— Efrén Paredes, Jr.
A DECADE AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court banned mandatory life without parole (LWOP) sentences for justice-involved children under age 18 ("juvenile lifers"), Michigan appellate courts are course-correcting years of arbitrary sentencing outcomes which have been an affront to the rule of law.
LWOP sentences are often referred to as a "death in prison" or "death by incarceration" sentences because a person who receives the extreme punishment is condemned to die in prison unless her/his sentence is commuted by the Governor, which is unlikely to occur in most cases.