Eyewitness Cuba: March Against Homophobia celebrates new outlook
Dancing at March Against Homophobia, Cienfuegos, Cuba, May 17, 2012. Photo by Don Fitz.
United States: Far right and Republicans attempt roll back of constitutional equal rights
Former enslaved African Americans vote in New Orleans, 1867, during the "Radical Reconstruction" period.
By Malik Miah
May 25, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The “Reconstruction amendments” — the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States constitution — are being targeted in many of the far-right “Tea Party” and Republican campaigns against the rights of immigrants and women, marriage equality and gay rights, and voting rights for African Americans and other minority ethnic groups.
The racist tinge of many of these attacks, whether openly stated or implied, is obvious – but this does not mean that racism is more prevalent now than in the past. Rather, the smear campaign against President Barack Obama’s mixed background and dark skin is calculated to appeal to the most extreme backward elements of the Republican Party.
Sri Lanka: Crimes against humanity with the West’s complicity
By Ron Ridenour
Bradley Manning supporters at Occupy London, last year.
‘Closing the doors of learning’ to the Israeli state opens the doors of freedom
By Patrick Bond and Muhammed Desai
Royal Society’s tunnel vision on population and poverty
People and the Planet
Royal Society Science Policy Centre Report
April 2012
Review by Ian Angus
May 23, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the Ian Angus' permission -- The radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once compared populationism to a phoenix, the mythical bird that periodically burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. No matter how often the “too many people” argument is refuted, it always returns, making the same claim that people are breeding too much and consuming too much, devouring the Earth like a plague of locusts.[1]
Germany: Die Linke's program in English (adopted October 2011)
May 23, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Below is the full text of Germany's radi
Afghanistan: Amnesty International lauds war and occupation as 'progress' for women
The bitter reality for Afghan women: an address by Malalai Joya.
By Tim Anderson
May 20, 2012 -- Stop the War Coalition, Sydney -- Amnesty International has muddied the waters over the occupation of Afghanistan with its latest campaign urging NATO to “keep the progress going” on women’s rights. The campaign was aimed at a NATO summit in Chicago and drew on one of the few remaining arguments for continued military occupation of that war-ravaged country.
The idea that a military occupation would somehow help Afghan women was promoted by Laura Bush, wife of the former US president who ordered the October 2001 invasion. It is an argument that been rejected by the Afghan women’s group, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and by activist and former Afghan MP Malalai Joya (see video above). They say that the NATO occupation has simply added a third enemy, on top of the Taliban and the NATO-backed warlords.
The Arab uprisings, democratic demands and the Saudi payroll
Hillary Clinton (centre) meets King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (right) in Riyadh to discuss Syria. Photograph: AP.
By Rupen Savoulian
May 21, 2012 -- Antipodean Athiest, submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author-- In April 2012, a number of high-level political officials attended conferences in Paris and Istanbul organised by the Friends of Syria group. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton attended these meetings, and joined the foreign ministers from the NATO powers and Arab Gulf monarchies in denouncing the killings committed by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Lars Lih: How Lenin's party became (Bolshevik)
By Lars T. Lih
May 17, 2012 – Weekly Worker – Did Lenin seek to exclude Mensheviks from Russia's revolutionary organisation in order to forge a "party of a new type"?
Message from SYRIZA to Chicago anti-NATO protests + photos, videos: massive, conscious, determined
Demonstrators defy Chicago police during anti-NATO protest march in Chicago, May 19, 2012.
By Antonis Davanellos and Sotiris Martalis, members of the coordinating secretariat of SYRIZA
May 20, 2012
Dear comrades, dear brothers and sisters of the anti-war movement
We salute your mobilisations against the NATO Summit [in Chicago] and we send you our solidarity from Greece.
We don’t need to say much about the reasons to raise our voices against NATO. Millions of people are familiar with its record or crimes over the last years in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya to name just a few.
And if we look further back, NATO has provided nothing but wars, dictatorships and terror around the globe, from the day it was founded, and during all the years of its existence.