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Showing posts with the label "emmanuel macron"

Lebanon

Vis Tariq Ali A friend writes from Lebanon: "There’s a blind rage in the streets. I’ve seen nothing like it, Tariq. Not in Pakistan, not in Sri Lanka, not in Turkey, not even in Tunisia when I was there in 2011. I was in Martyrs’ Square yesterday, and there were young people everywhere just looking for something to break. They didn’t care if they would get infected with COVID-19, knowing that the hospitals have collapsed and wouldn’t be able to take care of them. They didn’t fear the security forces arrayed around them, who fired multiple rounds of tear gas first, then rubber bullets, then live ammunition in an abortive attempt to scatter their ranks. “They’ll run out of tear gas and bullets soon,” one protestor told me, noting how everything is in short supply in Lebanon these days. “Then what will they do to us?” It’s extraordinary. The protestors sacked four ministries yesterday, taking with them documents from the Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Foreign Affai

US and Russia

When the US swung a Russian election The full article requires subscription. Here is the rest of the main points: “When Yeltsin announced he was standing in February 1996, his chances of success were small. His political movement Our Home — Russia, had only won 10% of the vote in the legislative election of December 1995. The Communist party, headed by Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s rival for the presidency, had become the biggest party in the State Duma with nearly 25% of the vote and 157 seats (up from 42 in 1993).  A former member of Yeltsin’s team recalled of the real-life events, ‘We managed to create panic at the idea that communism was returning ... queues, shortages of alcohol, cigarettes, soap. Vote, or you’ll lose! God save us from communism! Last chance to buy food! Those slogans worked’ (BBC in Russian, 5 July 2016). Time  magazine revealed ‘the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win’; its front page carried a now famous caricature of the victorious

US and beyond

Toppling George Washington and the myth of American democracy Related Winston Churchill and the use of chemical weapons Controversies of Churchill's career 

France

A good article from last year "Power usually operates through distinct, sometimes competing, sub-groups — senior civil servants, both French and European, intellectuals, bosses, journalists, the conservative right, and the moderate left. Within this cosy framework, turns are taken in power, and these obey certain democratic rituals of elections followed by periods of quiescence." Class war

Europe

One of the things that Corona has exposed The grim crisis in Europe's care homes

Egypt

The Franco-Egyptian Initiative for Rights and Freedoms published a letter to France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, calling on his government to “seriously consider its responsibilities concerning the use of French weapons against peaceful protesters ”. My comment: Why should Macron consider that? Like his predecessors, he is elected democratically to carry out a democratic mandate by millions who believe in capitalist democracy... His predecessors too supported Mubarak's regime in different ways.  Voting democratically for men and women who prop up dictators is part of the democratic tradition. When I go to the ballot box I have a shopping list why I am choosing this or that candidate. Complicity in repression, debt enslaving, and underdevelopment of others perpetuated by the governments who I voted for in the past are not in my shopping list. So, I continue exercising my democratic right. In fact, I am denying the others to have the possibility to gain democractic rights.
Vassal States "So Macron is worried that Britain might become a vassal state of the US. Which planet has he been on these last four decades and more? A process that began in 1956 after the Suez debacle was lovingly completed by Thatcher and Blair. Britain has been a fully-fledged vassal for a long time. And France, especially under Jospin and Hollande, was/is moving in the same way. Militarily, ideologically, culturally the US dominates most of Europe. Britain's vassal status is enshrined on many levels and partially explains the hysteria that greeted Corbyn's election as Leader of the Labour Party and the non-stop attempts to denigrate and defeat him, of which the 'anti-semitism' campaign is the most recent. Even Corbyn will find it very difficult to break the shackles." —Tariq Ali, 22 August 2019
Les gilets jaunes? Qu'ils mangent du caviar. "The French (bourgeoisie) way of life"  (NYT)
"When you see how quickly anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-foreigner stereotypes can reappear, there is a colonial impregnation that goes back a long way and is still very strong. It remains in the collective unconscious. It takes the form of a certainty, incredible to me, that our world is superior to any other. It is clear that the West, i.e. the last expansionist powers, considers itself – and is considered by the majority of its population – as the panacea of modern civilization. In reality, it is an imperialist and unequal construction, creating irreparable disparities. There is a blind violence in equating the ne plus ultra of civilization with something that in certain respects is monstrous. 
When we talk about violence, we must keep two criteria in mind. First, that violence is rarely good and should be avoided. That’s a moral judgment, which I accept. If objectives can be achieved without resort to violence, that’s much better. I’m definite that violence is not something I
Macron and co. " If any anti-Jewish expression in the world always worries me, I feel a certain disgust at the flood of hypocrisy and manipulation orchestrated by those who now want to criminalize anyone who criticizes Zionism." —Shlomo Sand Semites, Anti-Semites, Zionists, Anti-Zionists
Good! Unsurprisingly, one of the most significant impacts of the  Guardian ’ s series is to reaffirm the laziest tenet in the liberal worldview: horseshoe theory. Its adherents hold that the further one drifts on the spectrum, left or right, one is bound to end up at a point which converges with the other extreme. What other conclusion could you draw from this treatment of “populism,” a singular phenomenon that sees in the anti-Roma marches of Hungarian post-fascists Jobbik and the anti-gender violence demonstrations of Spanish leftists Podemos essentially the same thing? The Guardian's Populism Panic
France recognises use of torture in Algeria war Better late than never! Today France does not use systemic torture, but some of her Friends do.