2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@rav3nus
one of the 16 dead in Ukrainian drone strike on the dormitory of Starobelsk College of Lugansk Pedagogical University, Sofia Fen
“She is remembered as a smart girl, a winner of science competitions, and a very kind person, always ready to help.”
May she rest in peace
Maksim Bugakov is one of the sixteen dead in the Ukrainian drone strike on the dormitory of Starobelsk College of Lugansk Pedagogical University
“Kind, cheerful, responsive guy, who was always ready to support friends, this is how close ones remember him. Maksim was studying in his third year as a programmer, making plans, living, dreaming…”
Currently, funds are being collected to help the family of the deceased.
oh, i am sure the maidanist ukraine is what nazis like melnyk dreamed of.
On May 13th, French outlet RTL published an explosive report, entirely unremarked upon by English language media. It exposed how Ukrainian military and intelligence units are covertly operating in Mali on France’s behalf, “in coordination” with both ethnic Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda-linked forces determined to crush the country’s revolutionary government. Furthermore, Kiev is keen to expand and escalate its African operations yet further, and destabilise neighbouring countries. Ukrainian militancy, long-encouraged by the CIA and MI6, has now decisively developed into an independent international threat.
In August 2020, elements of Mali’s military staged a coup, overthrowing Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. Ever since, its government has sought to neutralise Western influence locally, while pursuing radical economic policies for the good of the population. French forces were booted out in 2022 after almost a decade of occupation. Mali has instead looked to China and Russia for economic, military and political assistance, while founding the revolutionary Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
Polling shows Malians almost universally embrace their government, and its close alliance with Moscow. However, Bamako’s military administration has throughout its lifetime battled incursions from ethnic Tuareg rebels, backed by murderous extremist groups. Since late April, they have conducted combined offensives, capturing several towns, executing deadly strikes on major cities, attacking state buildings, and murdering Defense Minister Sadio Camara via car bomb. Moreover, government forces backed by Russia’s Africa Corps have been ejected from several key areas.
Bamako and Moscow characterise the bloody upheaval as a thwarted coup attempt. Nonetheless, the situation remains volatile, and potentially grave. RTL now reveals the Al-Qaeda-linked unrest has been orchestrated and practically supported all along by “Ukrainian soldiers on the ground, who are cooperating with the Tuareg rebels.” In turn, France can “continue to operate” in Mali “indirectly”. Through Kiev’s cutouts, Paris provides “operational support” to the unpopular and savage local counter-revolutionary insurgency, in the absence of her own occupying army.
Per RTL, “France relies in particular on numerous French-speaking Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Foreign Legion.” It’s not just French-sponsored Ukrainian soldiers attempting to foment civil war and regime change via brute force in Mali. Units of Kiev’s fearsome CIA and MI6-constructed military intelligence agency, the GUR, are also present in profusion. By “limiting its operational support to these Ukrainian proxies, France is thus avoiding direct cooperation with jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda” into the bargain:
“The Tuareg separatist rebels are seeking to weaken the junta in power in Bamako, while France and Ukraine want to overthrow the junta’s Russian backers, the former Wagner militia members (renamed the Afrika Korps) who did everything they could to drive France out of Africa. A sharing of interests…the Tuareg rebels have a longstanding relationship with French intelligence services in the Sahel.”
RTL reports how “a Franco-Ukrainian alliance” to crush anti-imperial governments in Africa has been long in the making. Strikingly, Kiev took the lead. At the start of 2025, Ukrainian intelligence proposed a “detailed plan” to their French counterparts, “to dislodge the juntas from the Sahel region, and push back the Russian enemy” from the continent altogether. Paris reportedly “did not follow up on this proposal, particularly due to security concerns.” Yet, “the lock has now been lifted.”
To date, a fusion of battle strategies “seems to favor the extremists, who are currently allied with Tuareg separatists” - not merely in Mali, but potentially wherever in the region Russian forces are present. As RTL notes, several Sahel countries harshly condemned Ukraine’s involvement in a brutal July 2024 rebel ambush, which allegedly killed 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian soldiers. At the time, a GUR spokesperson boasted how Kiev’s support to the rebels “enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”
Such was Ukraine’s openly advertised centrality to the bloodshed, West African governments issued statements making clear Kiev’s local “interference” was highly unwelcome. Several summoned their respective Ukrainian ambassadors for verbal drubbings. Such was the opprobrium, the BBC contemporaneously enquired whether the operation represented an “own goal in Africa,” threatening to wreck “peaceful Ukrainian diplomacy.” Undeterred, Kiev’s military and intelligence conniving in the Sahel has only ratcheted since. RTL records how this activity is “proving its worth in the region.” [...]
A lengthy essay published April 29th by Militarnyi, Ukraine’s most prominent military news site, lays bare Kiev’s brutal cloak-and-dagger strategy in Mali and beyond. Headlined Islamist Offensive in Mali: The Prospect of a Syrian Scenario, it details how the successes of Ukraine’s Al Qaeda army in Mali - including Camara’s assassination - are part of a wider military and intelligence operation concerned with “dislodging Russian-Chinese influence from the region” altogether. Damascus being overwhelmed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in mere days in December 2024 was cited as inspiration. (It’s been publicly confirmed Kiev’s clandestine assistance was instrumental in toppling Assad.) [...]
Kiev’s alliance with Al-Qaeda in the Sahel amply demonstrates how it's CIA and MI6-assisted military and intelligence capabilities definitively represent a “growing danger”, to average citizens the world over. Kiev is openly plotting to replicate HTS’ violent takeover of Damascus, first in Mali, then in Burkina Faso and Niger. Militarised, extremist-occupied territories are to multiply, while economic warfare impoverishes and enfeebles the military governments, damaging their domestic popularity. Then, they can be brought to heel via forced capitulation, or outright regime change.
Land of the free
1991 - Fidel Castro speaks about the failures of Capitalism.
1969 - A member of the Black Panther Party explains why the party iss opening a free medical clinic in Chicago, USA. [video]
"Fred [Hampton] went from site to site working at the breakfast programs and talking to the kids and their parents about what the Black Panther Party was trying to do for the community. Kids were taught revolutionary songs. Parents were asked to participate in the programs, although it was not a requirement for their kids to get fed. In one of his later speeches, Fred said: “The pigs say, “Well the Breakfast for Children Program is a socialistic program, it’s a communistic program.” And the women say, “I don’t know if I like communism. I don’t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids.” A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children Program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change. Honey, if you just keep on changing, before you know it—in fact, you don’t have to know what it is—they’re endorsing it, they’re participating in it, and supporting socialism.” Doc Satchel, who started the Panther Health Clinic in Chicago, put it another way: The Panthers were an armed propaganda unit that raised the contradictions, set the example and provided the vehicle that the people could ride to revolution. We do not say the Black Panther Party will be overthrowing the government; we heighten the contradictions so the people can decide if they want to change the government."
— The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas
Last week, we learned from the Associated Press that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — the government agency which manages billions in overseas “humanitarian” aid programs — plotted to overthrow Cuba’s communist regime via a covertly-funded fake Twitter platform.
Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, Dan Mitrione.
USAID grew out of programs like the Marshall Plan, but the agency itself wasn’t established until 1961 under President Kennedy. Under Kennedy’s reorganization, a police training program set up under President Eisenhower, the Office of Public Safety (OPS), was placed under USAID’s authority. The OPS had been set up in 1957 to train friendly overseas police forces how to be more professional, more democratic, less corrupt, more like us — but in reality, the OPS was essentially a CIA proxy, headed by an agent named Byron Engle, its ranks covertly sprinkled with CIA spooks in hotspots across the globe.
Former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth wrote that the “the two primary functions” of the USAID police training program were to allow the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world,” and to bring to the United States “prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees.” [“Police Program is Called CIA Cover,” New York Times, May 7, 1978]
Dan Mitrione wasn’t a CIA man himself. Mitrione was a small-town cop and a family man from Richmond, Indiana, who joined the FBI, and was sent to Brazil in the early 1960s under USAID’s Office of Public Safety to train the fledging democratic government’s police force. A few years later, in 1964, a US-backed coup overthrew Brazil’s democratically-elected president Joao Goulart, and installed a right-wing military dictatorship that ruled for the next two decades, with largesse from USAID’s coffers, and vital training and equipment supplied by USAID officials like Mitrione.
By the end of the 1960s, when Mitrione left for Uruguay, USAID had trained over 100,000 of Brazil’s police in the dark arts of rule-by-terror; another 600 Brazilian police were brought to the US for special USAID training in explosives and interrogation techniques.
Brazil’s military dictatorship murdered or disappeared hundreds of dissidents, and tortured and jailed thousands more. Among those tortured: a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, arrested in 1970 and subjected to beatings to her face that distorted her dental ridge, and electrical shocks from car batteries, resulting in the hemorrhaging of her uterus. Today, Rousseff is Brazil’s president — and she’s not too happy about the NSA tapping her phones.
The junta also murdered one ex-president in a staged car accident in 1976. Another ex-president who allegedly died of a heart attack in 1978 is now believed to have been poisoned.
Once satisfied, Mitrione began teaching human anatomy and the human nervous system to the elite Uruguayan police officials hand-picked by USAID for counter-insurgency training in America. Then — according to a CIA double-agent secretly working for Cuba, Manuel Hevia, and corroborated by journalist A. J. Langguth — Mitrione began performing gruesome live torture demonstrations on homeless beggars plucked off the streets of Montevideo. Four of Mitrione’s human guinea pigs were tortured to death, including one woman — according to Hevia, testing on street beggars was something Mitrione learned to do while training Brazil’s police.
…
Mitrione took over the USAID police training program in Uruguay in 1969, and within months, the country was racked by allegations of widespread torture and police abuses. In 1970, Uruguay’s Senate opened an investigation and heard testimony from tortured men and women who’d been subjected to electrocutions, genital mutilation and psychological torture.
…
A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety:
— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed “Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit.
– Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. Later, as the CIA-backed Hmong were under attack from Lao Marxist rebels and North Vietnamese forces, USAID forcibly resettled Hmong families in the line of their advance to protect the pro-US government in Vientaine.
—Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.
According to Victoria Sanford’s “Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala,” USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.
—El Salvador: According to NYU historian Greg Grandin, in El Salvador, where 75,000 were killed between 1979 and 1992.
Further reading: Winning the Peace - USAID and the Demobilization of the Nicaraguan Contras, Hidden Terrors (excerpts) by A. J. Langguth, Counterinsurgency in Vietnam: lessons for today, The Last Mission
the original article is down, here’s the archive.org version:
Last week, we learned from the Associated Press that USAID (United States Agency for International Development) — the government agency whic
Scholars on state types in general and Libyan scholars in particular (Vandewalle, Martinez, etc) drive me crazy. Like they view any state that helps people meet their basic needs through provisions as cynical authoritarians "buying consent." As opposed to what? Letting people starve? Why is ruthless individualism such an important prerequisite for freedom for these people?
You see, freedom and DEMOCRACY are when you're a conspicuous consumer in a soulless metropolis where homeless people are treated like garbage and the majority live in fear of eviction, anything other than such is an authoritarian mafia state
They're manufacturing consent for invading Cuba by claiming they're acquiring military drones and are going to use them on the usa. The very article "reporting" on this "development" directly claims it will be used to stage a false flag event to justify war in Cuba.
Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones from Russia and Iran, U.S. intel says.
Magic Tuber Stringband ~ Heavy Water
Imagine living in the “best town,” a rural community of friendly neighbors surrounded by natural beauty, and then being forcibly displaced so the government could make nuclear bombs. This is what happened to the shellshocked citizens of Ellenton, South Carolina in 1951. A research project at the nearby Savannah River, testing birds to see if they were still radioactive (they were) prompted the…
The war against Napoleon instantly assumed the character of a people's war. "This is not an ordinary war but a people's war," wrote Bagration. The population hunted out French scouts and spies, they refused to furnish supplies for the invading army, and, when the French approached, set fire to their homes and corn and went into the forests to wage guerilla warfare. The regular troops displayed wonderful feats of heroism. A Bashkir division, Kalmyk soldiers, Tatars and men of other nationalities fought bravely side by side with the Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
The people's war in Russia, which inflicted heavy losses on Napoleon's army, incensed the conqueror, who had never met that kind of opposition anywhere in Europe. On 23rd September 1812, he sent a protest to the Russian command against the "barbaric and unusual" methods of warfare and proposed a "cessation" of the war by the people. On another occasion, he presented the following demand through General Lauriston: "Military operations should conform to the established rules of warfare," to which Kutuzov replied: "The people liken this war to a Tatar invasion and, consequently, consider all means to rid themselves of the enemy to be not only not reprehensible but praiseworthy and sacred." [...]
After tremendous hardships, the Grande Armée finally reached Smolensk, where it hoped to find food and rest. But like Moscow, Smolensk had been burned down. Horses perished for lack of fodder. The last provisions were stolen by hungry soldiers who broke into the stores. The French army was by now completely out of hand. To crown all, severe frosts had set in. The soldiers used carriages, carts, and furniture left in the houses to build bonfires on the squares. No fewer than 30,000 soldiers were ill. But it was not the "Russian frosts" that caused the defeat of the Grande Armée. In a work entitled Did the Frosts Destroy the French Army in 1812?, Denis Davydov says the weather was mild during Napoleon's retreat. His army was already at Yelnya when the first snow fell. The temperature did not drop below minus twelve degrees, and the frost lasted no more than three or five days. "Is it possible," wrote Davydov, "that an army of 150,000 could lose 65,000 men because of frosts that lasted from three to five days? The far more severe cold of 1795 in Holland, in 1807 during the Eylau campaign, which held about two months in succession, and in 1808 in Spain, which held throughout the winter campaign in the mountains of Castile, touched the surface, so to speak, of the French army, but did not penetrate it." [...]
The War of 1812 was a righteous war, a patriotic war, and, as such, occupies a place of great importance in Russian history. It was a war that asserted the national independence of Russia and of the Russian people. The heroism of the soldiers, the operations of the guerillas and the peasants, and the unity of the entire Russian people in fighting the foreign invaders, all helped Russia to defeat Napoleon, one of the most powerful conquerors in history.
A History of the USSR (1947).
The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, and while the political essence is t
Since the launch of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in 2012, the US has prioritised China containment over all other foreign policy commitments. This includes steadily increasing its presence in the South China Sea and encouraging China’s neighbours in their various territorial claims. Obama also initiated an expansion of US military, diplomatic and economic cooperation with other countries in the region. The overarching strategic goal of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was to isolate China and to draw East and Southeast Asia back into the US economic – and ideological – orbit.
The Trump administration, while dropping the TPP due to its domestic unpopularity, escalated the Pivot in other respects: launching a trade war in January 2018, imposing a ban on Huawei, attempting to ban TikTok and WeChat, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19, and turning ‘decoupling’ into a buzzword. Anti-China propaganda became – and has remained – pervasive in the West.
Alongside the economic and information warfare, there has been a rising militarisation of the Pacific and a deepening of a ‘China encirclement’ strategy that goes back to the arrival of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits in 1950, just a few months after the establishment of the People’s Republic. Recent years have witnessed ever more frequent US naval operations in the South China Sea; increased weapons sales to Taiwan; the encouraging of Japan’s re-armament; the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile defence system in South Korea and Guam; the establishment of a US marine base in northern Australia; and the bulking up of the Indo-Pacific Command. [...]
Historians in the West typically regard the Cold War as an elaborate ideological struggle between two superpowers with comparable motivations – a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which the capitalists and communists slugged it out for supremacy. Such an interpretation ignores the fundamental class struggle dynamics at play. The Soviets hoped to avoid a return to hostilities following the shared Allied victory in World War II; rather they consistently proposed a system of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in which they – and other countries – would enjoy the right to build the society of their own choosing, without the constant threat of war. Vladimir Shubin, former head of the Africa section of the international department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, writes that the ‘Cold War’ was not part of our political vocabulary; in fact the term was used in a strictly negative sense… For us the global struggle was not a battle between the two ‘superpowers’ assisted by their ‘satellites’ and ‘proxies’, but a united fight of the world's progressive forces against imperialism. (V. G. Shubin. The Hot ‘Cold War’. London: Pluto Press, 2008, p. 3)
‘A man is judged by the company he keeps’, goes the saying. During the Cold War period, the Soviet Union’s allies included the people of Vietnam and Korea fighting against imperialist domination; the people of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea Bissau, Algeria and elsewhere, fighting against colonialism and apartheid; and the people of Cuba, Grenada, Chile, Nicaragua and elsewhere, fighting for the right to construct socialist societies.
The US and its allies fought a very different kind of Cold War: a global hybrid war against socialism and non-alignment. President Truman said fairly bluntly in 1947 that the Cold War was ‘designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.’ (R.L. Walli. U.S. Foreign Policy of Interventionism. Social Scientist 4, no. 6 (1976): 41-48) The essence of the Cold War was thus a protracted struggle by the US and its allies to protect the long-term viability of the imperialist world system – and, by corollary, weaken the global socialist and anti-imperialist movement. And this war was not always very cold. From Vietnam to Angola to Chile, the Cold War wrought horrifying death and destruction.
The US won the Cold War by default when the Soviet Union ceased to exist on 31 December 1991. The USSR’s dissolution was not accompanied by the promised ‘peace dividend’. Rather, the removal of the Soviet Union as a bulwark against imperialist hegemony meant the launch of a new era of NATO expansionism and war; an untrammelled and invigorated US-led militarism, which has thought nothing of destroying Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. [...]
Along with expanding the US’s sphere of economic and political influence into the former socialist countries, strategists developed a new obsession: maintaining the new single-superpower status quo and forestalling the rise of any potential geopolitical challenger. [...] The adoption of the Pivot to Asia reflects a consensus in US ruling circles that the ‘future global competitor’ in question is China. This in turn reflects China’s emergence as the principal driver of global economic growth and the corresponding rise in its influence. [...]
The techniques of the original Cold War have been updated and adapted for a new enemy in a new century, but the political essence is the same. The US and its allies still seek to maintain the overall stability and long-term viability of the imperialist world system. This system is under threat from China, which is coalescing forces throughout the world in support of a new, multipolar world order; by definition a negation of the US hegemonist project for military and economic control of the planet. Thus, much like the original Cold War, the New Cold War is a sustained conflict, initiated and led by the US, between the forces of imperialism, hegemony and unipolarity on the one hand, and the forces of socialism, sovereignty and multipolarity on the other.
Much is made of the ‘China threat’, which forms the basis of a new McCarthyism in the West. This threat is real enough, albeit not in the sense it’s used by bourgeois politicians and journalists. China does not seek to rule the world, nor does it seek to ‘undermine democracy worldwide’. It is however increasingly challenging the established imperialist world order – economically, strategically and ideologically.
To the extent that China’s extraordinary growth was driven by low-cost, low-margin, low-tech, large-scale manufacturing within US-led supply chains – and to the extent that the abundant supply of cheap, competent and well-educated Chinese labour has made a lot of Americans very rich – the US cautiously tolerated China’s emergence from generalised poverty. [...] But China’s long-term strategy was not aimed at permanently playing a subservient role in a globalised economy dominated by the US. [...]
China’s economic structure gives the Communist Party of China (CPC) government various powerful levers for directing production. In particular, the publicly-owned banks, the dominance of state-owned enterprises in the ‘commanding heights’ of industry, and the enforcement of a strict set of regulations on private business have allowed the government to steadily rise up the global value chain and construct an advanced economy. ‘China is the only authentically emergent country’, wrote Samir Amin. Chinese scientific research is increasingly world-class. China is the biggest trading partner of most countries in the world, and has become a major source of investment in developing countries. It’s leading the way in the battle against climate breakdown – the sort of thing the West expects to dominate, that feeds into a pervasive (albeit largely subconscious) assumption that the predominantly white nations of Western Europe and North America are fundamentally more ‘civilised’ and ‘enlightened’ than the rest of the world.
If China’s progress were occurring within a framework of US-led imperialism, if US finance capital were able to exercise meaningful control over the process, it would be less of a problem. Japan, Germany, and South Korea have all become significant players in the global economy in the post-war era, but since their rise has occurred within the boundaries of the imperialist world system, it hasn’t provoked any strategic crisis in Washington. These countries largely play by the US’s rules, and are to a greater or lesser degree militarily and politically beholden to the US.
As a non-white country – a country that consistently aligns itself and identifies with the Global South, a country with a Communist Party government, a country that rejects the neoliberal consensus, a country where the capitalist class does not dictate policy – China represents a substantial threat in the battle of ideas. China’s unprecedented increase in economic strength and geopolitical influence has provoked a renewed resolve in the US ruling class to ‘contain’ China; to apply the methods of Cold War against it in order to limit its rise and to secure a ‘New American Century’. [...]
With Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential elections, many hoped for an easing of tensions between the US and China. Five months into the Biden presidency, such hopes have to all intents and purposes been dashed. The New Cold War has become an invariant of a declining US capitalism determined to hold on to global hegemony via whatever means it can muster. Hostility towards China is a consensus, bipartisan position in the US. [...]
A crucial difference between the original Cold War and the current one is that the US is very unlikely to ‘win’ the New Cold War. Compared to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, China is much stronger economically, much more integrated into the global economy, and frankly has much stronger leadership and a more coherent vision for the future of socialism.
Soviet GDP never exceeded 40 percent of US GDP, but China will surpass the US in absolute GDP terms in the next couple of years. China has been able to avoid an arms race, and has not been involved in direct military confrontation with the imperialist powers – having made a strategic choice to prioritise the strengthening and defence of its own revolution over taking a leading role in the promotion of global revolution. Meanwhile its deep integration into global value chains, and the fact that it is the largest trading partner of the majority of the world’s countries, mean that stability in China is crucial for the global economy. As such, in economic terms, even the capitalist world has a clear vested interest in the People’s Republic of China not collapsing. [...]
‘Decoupling’ from China would be highly detrimental to the US economy, as it would mean losing access to a Chinese market of 1.4 billion people and increasing the production cost of a vast array of commodities. Tariffs on Chinese goods have a direct and immediate impact on US businesses that rely on these products (most are intermediate goods, used in the production process for consumer goods). Even Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, has described the trade war as ‘unwinnable’, noting that ‘tariffs have hit US consumers harder than their Chinese counterparts.’ [...]
The outlook for the New Cold Warriors is not promising. China is not internationally isolated, is not suffering economic stagnation, and is not facing a crisis of legitimacy. The Chinese government enjoys enormous popularity at home, the result of ever-improving living standards at all levels of society. Wages are rising, social welfare is improving. [...]
It seems that every Cold War must have its own ‘third camp’ in the Western left. During the original Cold War, in particular in Britain, a significant proportion of the socialist movement rallied behind the slogan Neither Washington nor Moscow, withholding their support from a Soviet Union they considered to be state capitalist and/or imperialist. [...] A few decades later, this slogan has been resurrected as Neither Washington nor Beijing, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union as the evil ‘social imperialist’ power to be opposed. Presenting the New Cold War as an inter-imperialist conflict means that a number of prominent organisations and individuals on the left are failing to take an effective anti-war position. If China is ‘an emerging imperialist power’; if ‘socialists should side with workers — not the Chinese or American ruling class’; such socialists are unlikely to take a strong position against the rising US-led militarisation of the Pacific, or the China containment strategy, or economic ‘decoupling’, or against the varied forms of hybrid warfare being leveraged against China by the US and its allies.
Particularly under the Biden administration, phoney human rights allegations form a centrepiece of the attack on China. These allegations are being used to attempt to cut China out of global value chains, to disrupt the Belt and Road Initiative, to diplomatically isolate China and to generate anti-China sentiment worldwide. Unfortunately, much of the Western left – even if it has a stated position of opposing Cold War – is parroting this slander unquestioningly. [...]
The situation is reminiscent of the Western left’s failure to effectively oppose the NATO war on Libya. In theory, these pseudo-socialist groups claimed to be against bombing (with a few dishonourable exceptions that supported the No Fly Zone), yet they simultaneously echoed idiotic and unsubstantiated claims about the Gaddafi government which were clearly designed to build public support for war. [...] Similarly, the Western left largely failed to build an effective movement against the war in Syria, instead participating in the propaganda campaign against the Syrian government. [...]
Anti-China sentiment is at an all-time high, to the point where it is fomenting a rise in anti-Asian racism [...]. For the left to echo imperialist propaganda against China in the context of a burgeoning Cold War is to comprehensively abdicate its most basic responsibilities in the global struggle against imperialism.
The original Cold War was waged by the US and its allies not just against the Soviet Union but against the forces of socialism and national sovereignty worldwide. It was a protracted and multifaceted struggle to ensure the preservation of an imperialist status quo. The same is true of the New Cold War. It’s being waged by the US and its allies not just against China but the entire Global South, against the very notion of multipolarity, against the possibility of a democratic system of international relations and the end of hegemony.
China is a strong and increasingly consistent supporter of multipolarity – an international order in which there are multiple centres of power, creating an equilibrium that increases the costs of war and conflict, and promotes peaceful cooperation and integration. [...] Multipolarity provides a path for the defeat of modern imperialism; it involves weakening the forces of polarisation of wealth and power; it deprives the imperialist bloc of its power to determine the fate of the rest of the world through military action, sanctions and destabilisation. Because it enhances the sovereignty of the non-imperialist countries, it also by corollary helps to create appropriate conditions for those countries to pursue socialist experiments. Thus Samir Amin: ‘Multipolarity will provide the framework for the possible and necessary overcoming of capitalism.’ (Samir Amin. Beyond US Hegemony? New York: Zed Books, 2006, p. 149) [...]
Such a situation is precisely what the US ruling class is trying to avoid. This is the most powerful driver of the New Cold War. The imperialist powers – particularly the US, but generally supported by Canada, Britain, Western Europe and Japan – seek to maintain a unipolar status quo which provides maximum benefit to the US (with some crumbs to its allies) at the expense of the rest of the world. China by contrast is leading the construction of a multipolar world in which each country can choose its own development path and all countries are free to build mutually beneficial relations.
Those that oppose imperialism must therefore resolutely and consistently oppose the US-led New Cold War in all its manifold forms. To sit on the fence would be to uphold the imperialist status quo. (Article's date: 24/06/2021).
As a woman who is both gender non-conforming and who is planning a pregnancy in the near future AND who works with children, I am very invested in the conversation about the confines of femininity, the complexities of motherhood and the fascistic expectation of women to have children. I also often find it deeply frustrating.
I do not think it should need to be said, but unfortunately it absolutely is, that nobody should ever be forced to become pregnant, be a parent or carry a pregnancy to term. Ever. This requires both complete and total abortion rights & access but also the dismantling of the gendered expectation of women to want and need children. Remaining child free should not only be possible for women, it should also be normal and completely accepted. Anything else is oppressive.
However, I am deeply bothered by how many people who share these views talk about children. I have come across many posts describing children in cruel and dehumanizing ways, emphasizing how gross and terrible children are and how much of a burden they are to their parents. This, I think is also wrong.
Children are a particularly vulnerable population. They often have very little rights and autonomy and are at the whims of adults around them, which makes then particularly vulnerable to abuse. Children are real, fully realized people who have very specific needs and considerations. Constantly discussing how disgusting and terrible children are, means attacking people who have no power and cannot defend themselves, legally or otherwise. These views cannot be separated from calls to remove children from public life, like parks and transportation, the practice of which is both dehumanizing and oppressive. This goes hand in hand with the gendered oppression of women who are unfortunately still often the primary caregivers of children. Forcing children out of the public sphere means forcing mothers out of it too. And the right to not have children needs to go hand in hand with the right to have children. Women need abortion rights and access but they also need the right and access to give birth for free. They need robust childcare and child & family friendly infrastructure. Otherwise the only people who can afford to have children are wealthy elites.
The rights of women to not have children and the rights of children and mothers go hand in hand. They are not contradictory. Being a parent is a complex relationship, one wrought with a long history of violence and oppression of children and women. It is not easy to navigate, and nobody should be expected to do it. Simultaneously, the people who do decide to do it deserve help and support, not scorn or mockery. And most of all, children, all children, even the annoying, dirty and screaming ones deserve a safe loving world that sees their full humanity, respects their perspectives and their bodily autonomy. We are all a part of creating that world for them. Society should be about being good to each other, and that includes children too.
