Convicted Rapist-President Donald Trump (USA) and wanted international war criminal President Vladimir Putin (Russia) are knifing Ukraine Palestine and Syria, hosted by the Saudi Arabia bloodbath kingdom.
Three sociopathic assassins (Putin, Trump, and Mohammed bin Salman) have form. Barcelona journalist Cristina Mas notes : “This format would have been unthinkable just five years ago, after the murder of journalist and opposition leader Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, a crime that prompted condemnation around the world and the cooling of relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia”
From the pro-Ukraine left, useful interpretations are circulating.
In a highly confrontational speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference opening on 14 February, US Vice President JD Vance declared that the “internal threat” facing Europe was more serious than that posed by Russia and China. He criticised the annulment of a recent election in Romania, the prosecution of an anti-abortion protester in the United Kingdom, and the exclusion of far-right and far-left German politicians from the event itself.
This is a very stimulating interview with Catherine Samary on solidarity with Palestine and Ukraine – and also about the unstable political scene in France, where President Macron was electorally defeated by the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire) – and then made an unstable parliamentary deal with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
President Macron, Prime Minister Michel Barnier, Far-Right Extremist Marine Le Pen – Versus Left-Wing Resistance
— Before we turn to the discussion of the war in Ukraine and prospects for left internationalism, let’s talk about the recent developments in your home country. How do you analyse the current political situation in France and the role that left-wing politics might play in it?
— Michel Barnier’s new government combines two core elements: racism and attacks on social rights. The latter is evident in the ongoing parliamentary debates over the 2025 budget and social security funding. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National) has played a key role in these discussions, not least due to the fact that no single party has managed to achieve a stable majority in the French parliament. Even though the result of the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire) in the recent legislative election, which followed the dissolution of the Assembly last June, was unexpectedly high — and most welcome — it is still only a minor and relative victory.
This situation is unlikely to change unless the various forces within the New Popular Front come together, consolidate their victory, and start a large-scale mobilization. This could be achieved through the creation of local political alliances across the entire country that would be focused on concrete struggles. We should not forget that mass mobilizations against attacks on the social system are still possible — and so is the collapse of the government itself.
Frieda Afary has written an excellent analysis (see below). She shows that the Democratic party candidate Kamala Harris lost 10 million votes compared with Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Trump’s vote totals in 2020 and 2024 were almost identical.
This article analyzes the vote breakdown, the pundits’ views, argues that Trump is a fascist and offers perspectives for the needed anti-fascist resistance.
Donald Trump’s election as president, and the Republican victories nationwide are a catastrophe for progressive forces in the U.S. and around the world. What the November 5, 2024 election showed was that while this country is still divided, there has been a rightward shift nationwide and across all demographic and geographic groups. (Levitt, 2024)
Vote Breakdown:
Let’s take a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the votes. Approximately 72 million voted for Harris and 75 million voted for Trump. Approximately 700,000 voted for Jill Stein and 700,000 voted for Robert Kennedy. This means that Democrats received 10 million fewer votes than in 2020 when Biden received 81 million. Trump received approximately the same number of votes he received in 2020. (U.S. Election Results, 2024)
Howie Hawkins, Green Party Presidential Candidate in the 2020 USA General Election, reports from Kyiv, Capital City of Ukraine, on a meeting of the European Left Alliance for People and the Planet.
Dispatches from Europe, No. 8, November 6, 2024 – European Left Alliance for People and the Planet
Air Raid Alerts in Kyiv
I arrived in Kyiv on the afternoon of November 2 to the sound of air raid sirens. The air raid warnings had been going on all day. They come by phone once you get the Air Alert app, which is one of the first things my hosts had me do. Now my phone screen is covered with air alerts.
By the end of the night of November 2-3, Ukraine had been targeted with 96 drones and 1 air-to-surface missile. Ukrainian air defense units intercepted the missile and 66 of the drones, but between the drones that got through air defenses and debris falling from intercepted drones and missiles, six districts of Kyiv were hit, mostly residential buildings. One explosion woke me up. A large explosion hit a building at one of the campuses of Taras Shevchenko National University.
The resolution below was recently adopted by a left-wing organisation in Ukraine : Social Movement (Sotsialnyi Rukh).
Here is one of many important statements very relevant to the left in Ireland and elsewhere :
The growing contradictions between the centers of capital accumulation in the world capitalist system will not stop even after the complete destruction of Russian imperialist power. The left in Europe and around the world turned out to be helpless and disoriented when the Russian aggression in Ukraine occurred. Unless the international socialist movement realizes mistakes it has made and builds a new, truly internationalist cooperation and coordination, we simply have no chance of preventing the growth of inter-imperialist struggle in the future.
Resolution: The War and the Future of Ukraine and the Left Movement
The people of Ukraine have been facing hard challenges, yet they have proven their ability to fight for the right to decide on their own fate, and their determination to defend the country and to end the war as soon as possible. The authorities and representatives of market-fundamentalist ideology, together with big business, keep pushing through an economic model focused on benefiting a minority at the expense of the welfare of the absolute majority
The people of Ukraine have been facing hard challenges, yet they have proven their ability to fight for the right to decide on their own fate, and their determination to defend the country and to end the war as soon as possible. The authorities and representatives of market-fundamentalist ideology, together with big business, keep pushing through an economic model focused on benefiting a minority at the expense of the welfare of the absolute majority. In this model, workers are completely subservient to the will of their employers, while social and regulatory functions of the state are abolished for the sake of “business needs”, “competition” and “free market”.
BORIS KAGARLITSKY INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
On February 13, 2024, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation sentenced prominent Russian socialist, anti-war activist and author Boris Kagarlitsky to five years jail for ‘justifying terrorism’.
This campaign exists to win his freedom and that of all other antiwar prisoners in Russia.
During the interview Cristina asks Ilya about Pablo Gonzalez (real name Pavel Rubtsov ) who was accused of espionage in Poland. See postscript about an Irish connection at the end of this fascinating interview.
Ilya Yashin—Interview with Cristina Mas, Ara, September 30, 2024
Ilya Yashin is a Russian opposition politician who was released from prison on August 1, in the prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States. Since his exile in Germany, he has been touring several European cities to reach out to the Russian diaspora, which has taken him to Barcelona. Yashin, now 41, was jailed in 2022 for criticizing the invasion of Ukraine on his YouTube show. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for denouncing the Butxa massacre. He is now free thanks to the largest prisoner exchange of the Cold War, in which sixteen Russian political prisoners and U.S. citizens Evan Gershkovitx and Paul Whelan were exchanged for prisoners in the West claimed by Russia, including Spain’s Pablo Gonzalez, accused of espionage, and Vadim Krasikov, who shot a man in the head to death in a Berlin park on Moscow’s orders.
Pierre Rousset reviews a democratic crisis in France.
At a time when the far-right is marching forward all over Europe (including Ireland), France offers an example of left-wing resistance. The The New People’s Front (NFP) won a surprise parliamentary victory, but President Macron retaliated by making a deal with the far-right.
On 9 June, Emmanuel Macron unexpectedly decided to dissolve the National Assembly, just as the Rassemblement Nationale (far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen) was gaining momentum. Three weeks later, the results of the first round of voting were unequivocal: the parties of the presidential bloc were crushed, and in the second round the National Rally could hope to win an absolute majority of seats in Parliament, or at least be the largest party. (The French electoral system uses two rounds of voting. If no candidate gets an absolute majority in the first round, the names of the top candidates go to a second round. The one with the most votes in the second round wins).
These hopes were dashed. After the second round, the far right ended up in third place, behind the Nouveau Front populaire (the New People’s Front formed by parties of the broad Left) and the presidential party.
The electorate wanted neither Macronism nor the National Rally in the corridors of power. Today, thanks to Macron, it has both. It took him eight weeks to choose a prime minister: Michel Barnier, a member of Les Républicains party, which won only 5% of the vote. He had previously negotiated this appointment with Marine Le Pen, to ensure that she would not immediately table a vote of no confidence against him. Madame agreed… conditionally.
Now, the choice of a prime minister depends on the goodwill of the far right!
The lame duck President of the USA Joe Biden – a “proud Irish-American Zionist” – is a bigger danger to the people living in Gaza and Palestine because he does not have to bend to electoral pressures.
The US president’s behaviour towards Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has clearly retreated from the semi-critical approach he had begun to adopt after realizing how costly his total complicity in the Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people is electorally, especially among traditional Democratic Party voters, as it is even resented within the party itself.
This is a very persuasive analysis. Accordingly, we must hope that pressure mounts in the USA and elsewhere to drive Biden out of office as soon as possible. Some reports suggest that Biden only agreed to leave the election race in favour of Kamala Harris after Barack Obama threatened Biden with ejection from the White House, using the 25th Amendment mechanism.
This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continue as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.
At the same time we must dismiss wild conspiracy claims about these developments. There was no “coup” against Biden – since when did party bosses deciding to bully an unpopular leader to resign become a coup? A better argument is that Obama, Harris and company did not go far enough dumping candidate Biden, who clearly has major medical cognitive issues – War Criminal Biden should be booted out of the White House as soon as possible, by any means necessary – the 25th Amendment is a satisfactory instrument.
John Meehan August 7 2024
Joe Biden’s Crime Against Humanity
Joe Biden will alas not stand in the dock before the International Criminal Court – that much is sure. There is no doubt, however, that the court of history, which is the fairest of criminal courts, will include his name prominently on the list of perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
Since he announced his decision to stop running for a second presidential term, Joe Biden has become a “lame duck” – an expression that commonly refers in the United States to an elected official who has reached the final months of their term without any extension prospect. The expression means that the official’s influence has become limited, as everybody knows that they will not remain in office for long. However, a person in such a situation in a presidential political system in which the president is elected by popular vote (indirectly in the US case), is also, in contrast, more free-handed than a president campaigning for an additional term, who must therefore ensure that he (no she, yet) does not lose votes as a result of positions or measures he may take.
It is our pleasure to present the launch of Maurice Casey’s new book Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, which follows Irish radical May O’Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern’s Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux. This fascinating history history of international communism will be launched at 6pm on Thursday 22nd August. Join us to celebrate!
Tomás Ó Flatharta 