Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

There are days when the dusk of events settles heavily on me, and I try to find a way to retreat into a quiet corner and throw myself into the world of a book. It does not matter if it is a novel or a history book, as long as the author is able to conjure up a world that transports me from the flood of brutalities to an island of imagination. In recent months, I have been reading more and more novels – including Japanese crime fiction, a notable favourite – and finding in them characters with whom I can sometimes laugh and sometimes frown in bewilderment. Madness is not new to our world. It has been there before.

I have before me Seichō Matsumoto’s Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958) and Suna no Utsuwa (Inspector Imanishi Investigates, 1960–1961) as well as Tetsuya Ayukawa’s Kuroi Hakucho (The Black Swan Mystery, 1961), all detective novels that were written in the aftermath of the US’s horrendous use of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These books, and the films of the same period – especially Gojira (Godzilla), which was directed and co-written by Ishirō Honda in 1954 – irradiate the complexities of a post-atomic society. I can imagine these writers in their war-ravaged towns with their pens and scarce paper trying to place a mirror before their society, their detectives serious working-class men who must confront the audacity of ancient families that were oncedeeply entrenched in the old fascist social order and have now reinvented themselvesas dynamic capitalists. These writers, however, came well after the first words had been uttered from within Hiroshima itself from poets such as Sankichi Tōge (1917–1953) and Sadako Kurihara (1913–2005), both victims of the atom bomb who wrote as the radiation still lingered over their homes. In December 1945, Kurihara wrote a gentle, calm poem called ‘The Children’s Voices’:

On a warm winter afternoon
I was tending the vegetable garden.
Absorbed in foolish thoughts, I’d neglected it
for some time,
and with all the sun we’ve had this year,
before I knew it, there were weeds.
Normally I tended the garden so religiously, dawn and dusk,
but I’d been too restless and stopped.
Why? I pulled up weeds as I pondered.
‘Mommy!’ The children were calling, out of breath.
They were home from school.
Ah, how innocent and pure their voices!
From now on, Mommy won’t be so silly
as to let weeds grow in our garden.
Our garden won’t have a single weed.

In 1949, the German Marxist Theodor Adorno wrote in an essay on cultural criticism, ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Obviously, Adorno did not mean that any poetry written after the Holocaust is barbaric, since his close friend Bertolt Brecht wrote some beautiful verse in the post-war years. What Adorno seemed to imply was that the culture industry absorbed all that was good in the world and made it into commodities. Art struggled with its inherent capacity to be illuminating and was being dragged into becoming just another commercial object. But Adorno’s pessimism was unwarranted. Kurihara’s poems, for instance, despite being censored by the US occupation, have nonetheless become a constant refrain at commemorations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they eventually entered the curricula for school children in Japan and other parts of the world. The artistic sensibility, eager to make the world a better place, continues to try and build communities across the world rather than just commodities to sell.

In our latest dossier, The Joy of Reading, we celebrate this sensibility: we want reading to help us build communities of joy. The text champions the importance of literacy for a democratic culture, but this literacy is not merely teaching people to write their name in their own language; it is to afford everyone the right to access a public library and to continue to expand their imagination throughout their lives. In the dossier, we highlight examples of popular literacy campaigns in Mexico, China, and the Indian state of Kerala. In each of these cases, the imperative of reading came from anti-colonial movements, which put on the agenda not only freedom from colonialism but also the clarity of building a society with high levels of political and cultural education so that people could participate in social debates and not be mere spectators of an elite.

Fernand Léger (France), Woman with a Book, 1923.

When we asked the Mexican writer Paloma Saiz Tejero of the Brigade to Read in Freedom (Brigada para Leer en Libertad)about the importance of reading, she told us:

A people who read are a people who build critical thinking; they are promoters of utopias. A people who know their history and take ownership of it will feel proud of their roots. Reading socialises; it shares experiences and information. Books allow us to understand the reason that constitutes us and our history; they make our consciousness grow beyond the space and time that founds our past and present. Reading generates better citizens. Thanks to books, we learn to believe in the impossible, to distrust the obvious, to demand our rights as citizens, and to fulfil our duties. Reading influences the personal and social development of individuals; without it, no society can progress.

What the Brigada para Leer en Libertad does in Mexico is not so different from the public library movements in China and India. The Indian Library Congress, an initiative of the Indian communist movement, was first held in January 2023 and has now become an annual event. Part of its work is to ensure, as the congress pledged, that ‘libraries must become an important and active public space for the community as well as incubators for cultural development and hubs for the organisation of and/or venues for activities such as movie screenings, sports, art fairs, festivals, and vocational training classes. Health centres and science classes must be established next to these libraries’. Likewise, in both rural and urban parts of China, public libraries anchor cultural life and provide a space for popular education.

Radha V. P. in her village in Vellur, Kannur, Kerala, with her bag of books from the Jawahar Library.

In these countries, the establishment of these public libraries was not a top-down initiative. It came from the work of ordinary people. The cases presented in the section on Kerala are exemplary, such as sixty-year-old Radha V. P., a beedi (a type of hand-rolled cigarette) worker who came to her passion for education by reading the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s weekly magazine in her limited free time and then joined a local library’s mobile unit. She would carry books in her satchel to community members’ homes, particularly women and the elderly, so that they could borrow them and then return them to her. ‘I never felt the bag was heavy’, she said, ‘as the scent of the books always gave me immense happiness’.

The dossier closes with a section on Red Books Day, celebrated each year on 21 February to commemorate the anniversary of The Communist Manifesto’s publication as well as International Mother Language Day. An initiative of the Indian Society of Left Publishers and then of the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), Red Books Day began in 2020 to encourage people to hold festivals and public readings of their favourite red books. The day has expanded to the point that last year over a million people participated across the world, from Indonesia to Cuba. The art in the dossier comes from the Red Books Day 2025 Calendar, which can be downloaded in its English format and purchased around the world from members of the IULP, from Marjin Kiri (Indonesia) to Inkani Books (South Africa) to La Trocha (Chile).

Red Books Day is an initiative to enhance the public joy of reading and to rescue collective life. We anticipate that, in a few years, millions of people around the world will join together in public places to celebrate Red Books Day, from floats in Brazil’s Carnival with a giant red book on a flatbed truck to members of a public library in Kerala who carry more and more chairs onto the streets and read to each other while a musician bangs an idakka (a type of wooden drum).

M. F. Husain (India), 100% Literacy (Folklore Kerala Series), 2010.

As part of this attempt to promote a joy of reading and rescue collective life, our institute is encouraging our readers to create Tricontinental reading circles. Gather friends and colleagues to form a reading group in your area and meet once a month to discuss our dossiers or other publications. There is nothing more enriching than the process of collective reading and discussion. If you set up a Tricontinental reading circle, please let us know by writing to circle@thetricontinental.org.

Warmly,

Vijay

In this fiery and uncompromising speech, Yanis Varoufakis calls out Europe’s leaders for their complicity in endless war, economic injustice, and the betrayal of the dream of a peaceful and just Europe. Speaking at Anti-Siko’s rally in Munich, Varoufakis denounces the militarisation of Europe, the genocide in Palestine, and the exploitation of Ukraine for profit by the Western military-industrial complex. Varoufakis reminds us that the dream of Europe as a peace and justice project has been replaced by austerity, deindustrialisation, and fascism’s resurgence. But there is hope – if we stand together and say: NEVER AGAIN, ANYWHERE. This is our call to action. This is our moment to seize the day and dream of a new Europe.

The journalist, actor and human rights activist Richard de Zoysa was abducted from his home by men later identified as policemen, in the early hours of 18 February 1990, thirty-five years ago. His body, with gunshot wounds and signs of torture, was discovered in the sea the following day. Cheran Rudhramoorthy, friend and fellow poet, offers these words (translated from Tamil to English by Anushiya Ramaswamy) from “a question about/friends who were murdered/friends who disappeared.”

https://polity.lk/question-cheran-rudhramoorthy-trans-anushiya-ramaswamy

The flawed IMF program with its focus on the market has further aggravated the economic situation with a food crisis

Sri Lanka over the last three years has been hit by tremendous price hikes and shortages of essential services and goods. What does the New Year hold for the working people, pummelled by the rising cost of living and stagnant incomes, whose lives have become unbearable? 

Even as the public awaits the national budget next month, to address the ongoing economic crisis, the Government should announce a firm New Year resolution to address people’s suffering. I argue that resolution should be self-sufficiency first!

Vehicle imports 

Three years ago, with the disruptions of the Covid pandemic and rising global commodity prices triggered by the onset of the war in Ukraine, Sri Lanka faced tremendous shortages of imported goods with the collapse of foreign reserves. The Government of that time, failed to prioritise imports in the preceding years, which could have at least ensured the flow of essential goods. Those shortages were never really resolved. The so-called solution of market pricing imported goods from fuel to cement which only led to the contraction of demand for such goods. Indeed, the consumption of fuel and cement have fallen between thirty and fifty percent reflecting a deep economic depression; a drastic fall in consumption with people travelling less and not repairing or building houses.

Disregarding these dynamics, the wealthier classes are jubilant about the possibility of buying vehicles this year, as the IMF programme problematically calls for the lifting of restrictions on vehicle imports. What do more cars on the road mean when working people cannot even afford public transport?

In fact, the economic crisis itself was in part a consequence of vehicle imports funded by external borrowing. I warned about this trend and the impending disaster in this very column titled “Crisis, Class and Consumption” on 4 October 2021:

“In this context, from 2010 to 2019, Sri Lanka’s vehicle import bill was US$ 8,628 million. And the biggest headache for Sri Lanka today is the US$ 13,000 million in sovereign bonds that have to be repaid over the next many years. Here, the average each year of US$ 863 million in vehicle imports by using foreign exchange from sovereign debt requires debt payment ten years later of US$ 1,500 million each year. Multiply that debt repayment cost over ten years and the unsustainability of the sovereign debt stock becomes clear. Unable to pay for the past luxurious consumption of the elite, the country is now reduced to restricting the imports of essential foods for the people. Would it not be fair to wage a massive wealth tax on the wealthy classes and redistribute such wealth to the working classes so they can survive this crisis?”

The current IMF programme is marching Sri Lanka right back into a similar situation with another cycle of vehicle imports that will lead to the draining of foreign reserves. While those reserves are expected to increase with more commercial borrowing in international capital markets, another shock in the global markets will push Sri Lanka back to where it was four years ago. 

Food crisis 

The flawed IMF program with its focus on the market has further aggravated the economic situation with a food crisis. It is no longer imported goods alone that is a problem in the country, essential foods produced in Sri Lanka itself including rice, coconuts and salt, are now in shortage. The most economically marginalised of our people during the direst of times who rely on a plate of rice and sambol, or rice porridge, cannot even afford that.

What a dangerous state for our country, where people cannot afford the bare minimum of calories to keep them from starvation, not to mention the unaffordability of nutritious food such as fish and milk. Sadly, the average consumption of fish per person per year has dropped from 31kg in 2015 to 19kg in 2023, amounting to a forty percent drop due to the reduced production for local consumption and unaffordability of seafood. This is in the context where seventy percent of our people’s animal protein depends on seafood.

All this means, the Government needs to get its priorities right. Without food today, there is no point talking about economic prosperity in the future. There needs to be a resolute emphasis on self-sufficiency beginning with food we can produce in the country and extending to other goods.

Public distribution system

Self-sufficiency in food will only be possible if we rebuild our public distribution system that was long abandoned with the open economy reforms in the late 1970s. That means re-investing in many of our institutions such as the Food Commissioner Department, the Co-operative Wholesale Establishment, the Paddy Marketing Board, the Ceylon Fisheries Corporation and the Multi-Purpose Co-operative Societies. 

There will be the clamour of neoliberal proponents claiming these institutions are inefficient and have failed. In reality, it was a deliberate move of the political class and the economic elite to make these institutions fail for their extractive interests justified under the guise of a market economy. They never care about the consequences of a food crisis, as long as their supermarkets are stocked with food, even if it means unaffordable prices for ordinary people.

This year and the year ahead are likely to be full of global shocks. Geopolitical tensions, not to mention the ongoing wars, could escalate further. A global trade war seems imminent as Trump pushes his populist agenda. The climate crisis will, most of all, affect food production causing shortages and massive food price fluctuations.

In such troubling times there needs to be a focus on the food system. That will require the Government to focus on planning, and not the IMF prescribed reliance on markets. There is also the need to revive state institutions relating to the food system and social institutions such as co-operatives that can mobilise people towards food production. Indeed, the New Year’s resolution for us as a country should be self-sufficiency.

Republished From: https://www.dailymirror.lk/opinion/Self-Sufficiency-in-the-New-Year/231-299503

The current economic crisis cannot be resolved by households or social institutions alone, and loans are not the solution. The Government should introduce livelihood and income stabilisation programs to help people escape the debt trap. It should also leverage cooperatives to create markets and supply chains for rural production, while expanding affordable credit for rural livelihoods and small-scale industrial growth. Additionally, a universal social security program should be implemented

The ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka has greatly affected household debt. As the economy worsened due to inflation, higher living costs and job losses, more households are relying on debt. A significant portion of Sri Lankan households rely on microfinance companies or informal lenders and are trapped in cycles of debt. The situation mirrors what northern and eastern part of the country faced 10 years ago, which led many women to commit suicide or leave their homes. 

The household debt crisis is often attributed to people taking loans for conspicuous consumption and if financial literacy was provided, the people would avoid falling into the debt trap. However, amidst the current economic crisis, people are caught in another debt crisis. This time no one can deny that people are forced to take loans to meet their livelihood needs and cover daily essentials due to the effects of this crisis. Therefore, simply giving financial literacy will not help them escape the debt trap. 

Effects on the households 

Since 2022, when the economic crisis hit, inflation increased the prices of raw materials, energy, and transportation. Sectors such as Agriculture, Manufacturing, Small and Medium – size Entrepreneurs are facing difficulties in maintaining profit margins and have reduced their workforce leading to unemployment. Due to limited job opportunities many family members are migrating abroad for work.

When import tariffs and indirect taxes are imposed, and subsidies are removed, people pay higher prices for essential items, thus, medical, educational, fuel, and utility cost have increased. Our country depends on imports even for essentials goods such as rice, dhal, sugar, milk and so on. Therefore, the need for money to run a household has substantially increased. 

Household incomes are inadequate to keep up with rising living costs. People have been pushed to take loans or lose their small savings or assets to manage their livelihood. The current crisis has eliminated or reduced the means of repaying loans. As a result, more loans are taken to repay the loans previously taken.

Impact on different social groups

The ongoing crisis has impacted different social groups in varied ways, however, it reveals a pattern of how they have fallen into debt. People who do not have stable incomes, resources or assets are likely to fall into the debt trap quickly. 

For the fishing community, an increase in the price of fuel impacted operational costs, making it less profitable to go out to sea. The impact differs depending on the scale. Large-scale fishers have resources such as assets and social connections with state and commercial banks, so they don’t fall into the debt trap immediately. Small-scale fishers don’t have such connections to meet their financial needs in an affordable way. When the cost of fishing equipment (nets, hooks, engines and boats) increases, this makes it difficult for them to maintain or replace their equipment. Many small-scale fishers rely on loans from financial institutions or informal lenders (Sammaddy) to finance their operations. Often, these loans come with high interest rates, further deepening their financial burden and difficulty to repay, and eventually leading to a cycle of debt that many fishermen struggle to escape.

Farmers face rising costs for inputs like fertilisers, pesticides, and seeds. The Government’s 2021 ban on chemical fertilisers reduced agricultural productivity, while fuel price hikes, driven by the economic crisis, increased costs for machinery and transportation. These factors reduced profitability, causing farmers to cut back on labour, resulting in fewer job opportunities for agricultural wage workers. To manage these pressures, large-scale farmers turn to state and commercial bank loans or pawn jewellery, while small farmers rely on village-level institutions and microfinance companies. However, poor harvests and rising costs prevent many small farmers from repaying their loans, trapping them in a cycle of debt and eroding their economic resilience.

Daily wages have increased from Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 3,000 over the last three years, but job opportunities have decreased, leaving monthly income insufficient for basic needs. Many low-income earners and daily-wage workers have turned to borrowing to cover living expenses, taking out multiple loans from village savings groups, microfinance companies, and credit cooperatives, trapping them in a debt cycle. This crisis has depleted household savings and emergency funds. In this context, microfinance companies exploit people by offering daily, weekly, and monthly loans at high interest rates, targeting vulnerable people because credit is their only available means of survival. 

Behaviour of credit providers  

State and commercial banks provide loans only to people who have assets or guarantors – Government employees, large-scale farmers and fishermen – afer evaluating the borrower’s credit worthiness. Small-scale farmers, fishermen, daily wage-workers, and low-income earners are unable to access such loans.

Microfinance companies claim to provide fast and flexible loans at the doorstep, without assessing borrower’s repayment capacity. Then, they pressure borrowers to repay the loans on time. As a result, families prioritise repaying the loans from their income and are forced to take out new loans to meet their basic needs. 

Local moneylenders too offer high-interest loans during emergencies in an outwardly friendly manner. However, borrowers end up paying the interest for the rest of their lives for the loan they once received.

People end up using most of their time, labour, and incomes to obtain and repay the loans. Many women have become members of multiple village-level credit groups and spend 3 to 4 days a week attending group meetings to become eligible for loans. They also make small savings to use as collateral for the loans they borrow. To build these savings, they borrow money from friends, relatives, and microfinance companies that offer daily loans. Social groups who are directly affected by the debt crisis do not have time or agents to voice their issues or struggle against the exploitation, as all their time and labour are spent on their daily survival.

Role of State and social institutions 

The Government has failed to provide adequate social welfare for low-income and daily wage workers. Cash transfers and food aid have limited scope and don’t reach vulnerable people. The Aswesuma program offers Rs. 3,000-15,000 monthly based on family size and vulnerability, but a four-member household needs at least Rs. 3,000 daily to survive. Delays in aid disbursement and bureaucratic hurdles further prevent timely support.

Cooperatives and village groups offer affordable loans that help people maintain financial liquidity. However, they lack the capacity to provide loans for increasing credit needs and higher amounts because they circulate loans from the savings of their members. Cooperatives should enhance access to affordable credit by strengthening cooperative networks with unions and federations. In addition to offering credit services, they should focus on creating marketing opportunities for rural producers and ensuring efficient distribution of quality goods and services to consumers at fair prices.

Community-level organisations and non-governmental organisations should not limit their duties to merely providing low-interest loans as an immediate solution to this complex problem. They have a duty to reveal the depth of the issue and pressure the Government for permanent solutions.

The current economic crisis cannot be resolved by households or social institutions alone, and loans are not the solution. The Government should introduce livelihood and income stabilisation programs to help people escape the debt trap. It should also leverage cooperatives to create markets and supply chains for rural production, while expanding affordable credit for rural livelihoods and small-scale industrial growth. Additionally, a universal social security program should be implemented.

(The writer is a Research Officer at the Northern Cooperative Development Bank and a member of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice.)

Republished From: https://www.ft.lk/opinion/Economic-crisis-and-household-debt-in-the-north/14-770935

As NATO fails in its attempt to expand into Ukraine, popular support has shifted significantly in favour of a path to peace.

16 January 2025

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Mark Rutte, the current secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), is not a poet. He, like other secretary generals of NATO, is a mediocre European politician who has been given the task of holding NATO’s reins for the United States (to be fair to Rutte, he has been the prime minister of the Netherlands for fourteen years, but mainly as a survivor rather than a leader). Yet, on 12 December 2024, Rutte gave a speech at the Concert Noble in Brussels (Belgium), a venue rebuilt in 1873 by Leopold II, the brigand king who looted the Congo as its sole owner from 1885 to 1908. This speech was then published on NATO’s website in a very curious form, as a poem rather than the typical bureaucratic prose. Most of the text is banal, but there are four stanzas that I wish to share:

From Brussels, it takes one day to drive to Ukraine.
One day –
That’s how close the Russian bombs are falling.
It’s how close the Iranian drones are flying.
And not very much further, the North Korean soldiers are fighting.
Every day, this war causes more devastation and death.
Every week, there are over 10,000 killed or wounded on all sides in Ukraine.
Over 1 million casualties since February 2022.

…..

Russia, China, but also North Korea and Iran, are hard at work to try to weaken North America and Europe.
To chip away at our freedom.
They want to reshape the global order.
Not to create a fairer one, but to secure their own spheres of influence.

They are testing us.
And the rest of the world is watching.

No, we are not at war.
But we are certainly not at peace either.

…..

And, finally, to the citizens of NATO countries, especially in Europe, I say:
Tell your banks and pension funds it is simply unacceptable that they refuse to invest in the defence industry.
Defence is not in the same category as illicit drugs and pornography.
Investing in defence is an investment in our security.
It’s a must!

…..

A decade ago, Allies agreed it was time to invest in defence once again.
The benchmark was set at 2%.
By 2023, NATO Allies agreed to invest ‘at least’ 2%.
At least…
I can tell you; we are going to need a lot more than 2%.

Alexander Berdysheff (Georgia), Anticipation of Departure, 2024.

Rutte wrote no such poem for Palestine or for Sudan, where the devastation has been much greater. Only Ukraine, with several evasions and errors of fact, at a time when there is no appetite within Europe to prolong this conflict. Rutte’s poem asks the already austerity-struck NATO states to increase their defence spending to at least 2% of their GDP. Donald Trump has already called to raise the threshold to 5%.

From No Cold War comes briefing no. 16, which provides a clear analysis of the overwhelming opposition to the Ukraine war within the Global South and Europe alike. Please read it carefully, download it, and share it. The clarity of this text speaks directly to Rutte’s doggerel.

From the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, countries in the Global South – which contains the overwhelming majority of the world’s population – have opposed US policy towards that conflict. A recent survey found that only two Global South countries have actually implemented US sanctions against Russia over the war, and India increased its oil imports from Russia tenfold during the war’s first year. Global South leaders, such as South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, stated that the US policy of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Eastern Europe lay behind the war.

But, until recently, support for the war seemed firm in the US and among its European allies. This is now changing significantly. Media speculation has focused on Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he could end the war within 24 hours, but much more substantial is evidence of a sharp change in popular attitudes to the war. This provides the basis for hopes to permanently end the war.

Gülsün Karamustafa (Turkey), Window, 1980.

The Necessity to Restore Economic Links Across Europe

The first pressure changing the situation is economic. On 1 January 2025, for example, a five-year gas transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine expired, ceasing Russian gas exports to Europe via Ukraine entirely and ensuring that the Ukrainian government will shut the pipelines across its territory. The US’s gradual success in achieving its decades-long objective of cutting the direct export of Russian gas to Europe has reduced the living standard of Europe’s population due to soaring energy prices and has simultaneously dealt a huge blow to Europe’s economy. Price shocks from the war spread out to affect many developing economies as well.

US liquid gas exports, on which Europe is now reliant, are on average 30–40% more expensive than Russian gas. Moreover, this Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is mostly sourced via the devastating fracking method and transported to Europe in an equally ecologically unfriendly way, on huge LNG carrier tankers.

The tremendous economic damage done to Europe has now created increasing opposition to the war, not least among the working class and households at large. More and more people have come to understand that they pay twice for the war in Ukraine: their taxes underwrite the enormous war and militarisation efforts, and at the same time they bear the brunt of the concomitant rising energy prices and imposed austerity measures.

In Germany, the leadership of Christian Democratic, Conservative, Social Democratic, and other ‘centrist’ parties implemented such US-enforced policies, thereby deeply damaging their own economies and societies. This sort of complicity has defined the approach in most European countries until recently and has continued despite the immense unpopularity it created for their own parties. The overwhelming majority of governing parties in Europe are now deeply unpopular, and there has been a sharp rise of xenophobic and overtly neofascist/fascist forces. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, there is a sharp rise of support for parties opposing the war. Lately, an increasing number of politicians have openly stated that it is vital for Europe’s economy to break with this disastrous US policy and resume direct supply of gas from Russia, as well as to reinstate normal trade and investment relations with the Global South and BRICS countries, particularly China. Former Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine summarised this sentiment by saying there should simply be a phone call to Russia to restore the gas supply.

Aubrey Williams (Guyana), Comic Storm, 1977.

NATO Cannot Win the War in Ukraine

The second factor changing public opinion is that the US and NATO are suffering setbacks in the Ukraine war.

NATO’s expansion into Ukraine is, of course, not the only example of US-supported aggression in the present world situation. Notably, in Gaza, Israel and the US are able to carry out unbridled military massacres, atrocities, and genocidal policies against the Palestinian people and other countries in the region. In Europe, however, the US and its allies are confronting Russia, which has the most powerful army on the continent and nuclear forces essentially equal to those of the US. The latter appears incapable of winning this proxy war; only direct intervention by NATO military forces, risking global nuclear war, would turn this around.

The dragging on of the Ukraine war, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of victims –including thousands of children – and widespread devastation, has led to a sharp change in public opinion. In Ukraine, polls now show that 52% of the population supports the position that ‘Ukraine should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible’. Only 38% support the view that ‘Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins the war’.

In Romania’s first-round presidential elections in November, after Diana Șoșoacă, a candidate opposed to the war, was banned from the election, Călin Georgescu, who also opposes the war, came in first place. Romanian authorities, with US support, responded by cancelling the election.

In December 2024, a YouGov survey of Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark showed a sharp increase in support for a negotiated settlement. In four of these countries – Germany, France, Spain, and Italy – the position to ‘encourage a negotiated end to fighting, even if Russia still has control of some parts of Ukraine’ had more support than the view to ‘support Ukraine until Russia withdraws, even if this means the war lasts longer’.

In the US, only 23% of the population thought ‘supporting Ukraine’ should be a US foreign policy priority.

María Cenobia Izquierdo Gutiérrez (Mexico), Dream and Premonition, 1947.

The Situation in Ukraine

Re-establishing normal, mutually beneficial economic ties across Europe is necessary for the region’s economy but is only a first step in bringing an end to the disastrous Ukraine war that US imperialism has imposed on Europe.

NATO’s expansion effort is interrelated with the situation within Ukraine, which has a very large Russian-speaking minority (around 30% of the population) that is a majority in the East and Southeast of the state. Experiences in countries such as Canada and Belgium confirm that bilingual states can only be held together by strict guarantees of linguistic and other rights of the different communities and avoiding policies which are totally unacceptable to either.

Nonetheless, from the 2014 Maidan coup onwards, the Kyiv government, supported by the US, has set out to suppress the rights of the Russian-speaking minority. As the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, which cannot at all be accused of being pro-Russian, stated, ‘the current Law on National Minorities is far from providing adequate guarantees for the protection of minorities… many other provisions which restrict the use of minority languages have already been in force since 16 July 2019’.

Both the attempt to oppress the Russian-speaking population and the question of NATO membership for Ukraine are two issues that must be resolved in order to bring a permanent end to the war.

Misheck Masamvu (Zimbabwe), Voodoo Astronaut, 2012.

The Conditions for an End to the War in Ukraine

Europe should undertake honest, serious efforts to bring the Ukraine war to an end. Building on public opinion that is longing for peace and progress and on a peace movement with a strong working-class component, European social and political forces must promote the following steps to end the war in Ukraine:

1. Opening peace negotiations without preconditions.
2. Calling for a ceasefire.
3. Opposition to NATO membership of Ukraine.
4. Recognition of language rights across Ukraine and the rights, including self-determination, of the Russian-speaking majority in the East and Southeast of Ukraine.
5. End of involvement by NATO countries in the Ukraine war, including a halt to all arms sales and withdrawal of all military personnel and trainers from Ukraine – the money saved to be used for strengthening social spending and public services.

It will take a significant period for Europe, and the world, to recover from the disastrous effects of US policy in the region. Permanently halting the war in Ukraine is an indispensable first step.

Bertina Lopes (Mozambique), Grido grande (Big Cry), 1970.

The steps drawn up by No Cold War are not only logical and humane: they are also the only way forward. All wars end in negotiations. So will this one.

Warmly,

Vijay

Even as the gloomy realities of war and hunger threaten to dull the light of humanity, the red sparkling dance of our struggles illuminates the path forward.

9 January 2025

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Very few humans have had the good fortune to descend into the depths of the world’s oceans. The deepest such place – 11 kilometres below sea level at its deepest point – is the Mariana Trench, which is located just north of the 607 islands of the Federated States of Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean (by comparison, Mount Everest is nearly nine kilometres above sea level). Down there, in the depths below six kilometres in what is called the hadal zone, there is no light. It is called the hadal zone after Hades, the ancient Greek god of the underworld. In Aeschylus’ The Persians, the chorus sings, ‘Hades, the all-receiving god, takes all into his grasp and never releases them’. The depths are treated with fear, the darkness below almost a gateway to Hades’ fiery hell.

Explorers who have been to the deepest ocean floors in various submarines report that it is indeed blindingly dark below six kilometres. But even in the deepest waters, they witnessed flashes of light and then saw that deep-sea creatures emit their own light (bioluminescence) to attract partners or hunt for food by producing luciferin (a light-emitting molecule) and luciferase (an enzyme), both named from the Latin for ‘light bringer’, which interact and produce photons. In fact, a new study now tells us that seventy-six percent of these deep-sea creatures possess this ability. Some are as small as single-celled algae that cannot be seen by the human eye while others are as large as the giant squid, which can reach up to thirteen metres long. There are unique creatures in these great depths, many of them evolved to adapt not only to the darkness but also to the extreme water pressure (16,000 pounds per square inch or psi compared to about 14.7 psi at sea level). They have been given fantastic names by humans who see them for their strangeness: goblin shark, dumbo octopus, vampire squid, zombie worms, half-naked hatchet fish. The key to their survival lies not merely in their fantastical eyes and mouths but in the light they produce to fight off the darkness.

Jean Cocteau (France), Oedipus or the Crossroads of the Three Roads, 1951.

The struggle to survive defines natural and human history on Earth. No animal or plant succumbs to whatever outrageous challenges are placed before it. On the beaches of Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia, there are flowers – such as the beautiful orange, pink, and red coastal hibiscus – that erupt from the sandy soil and thrive when the saltwater washes over them. In 2013, the Pohnpeian poet Emelihter Kihleng wrote ‘Tide’, which captures that resilience:

The tide, it pulls at me,
a reminder of the things that are lost
and the things that return.
I stand at the shore,
feet sinking into the sand,
wondering if the ocean remembers me.

Pohnpei was not bombed in World War II, and it was spared from the nuclear tests that impacted Bikini Atoll (23 US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958) and Enewetak Atoll (43 nuclear tests between 1948 and 1958), both approximately 900 to 600 kilometres away, respectively.

In 1934, Jean Cocteau published the play La Machine infernale (The Infernal Machine). In it, the Oracle of Delphi, who knows the story of Hades, tells the wise Oedipus, ‘The underworld is no more than a mirror of the world above, where we find only the same face, the same destinies, and the same shadows’. But, in fact, the Oracle of Delphi got it wrong. In the depths, near the gates of Hades, instead of succumbing to their situation, the creatures that live there – despite the reality of Thomas Hobbes’ motto Bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all, or the struggle to survive) – produce their own inner light for reasons of reproduction or preservation. When I read about the ubiquity of these bioluminescent animals in the deepest ocean, I felt more for the metaphorical implications than for the evolutionary ones: is their luminescence merely a biochemical reaction or can it be read as resilience?

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes dossier no. 83 (December 2024), The False Concept of Populism and the Challenges facing the Left: A Conjunctural Analysis of Politics in the North Atlantic.

This text was spurred on by Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the United States, but also by the sensibility amongst sections of old liberalism and social democracy that it is this – the arrival of the far right of a special type – that is the cause of the problems facing humanity. Trump alone has not given us the habits of intimidation and repression that the United States and its allies inflict upon the Global South. Trump was born in 1946, a year after the US used atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he was a child, the US invaded the Korean peninsula (1945) and interfered in elections in Costa Rica (1948), Syria (1949), Iran (1953), and Guatemala (1954). Trump certainly set the terms for Israeli regional aggression with the Abraham Accords (2020), but he did not sign the orders to transfer dangerous weapons systems to Israel for its genocidal war, nor is he the only force in the North Atlantic committed to defending its financiers.

Trump is a product of the neoliberal compact. He is Frankenstein’s monster. His claim of being a self-made billionaire is as realistic as his claim of being a self-made politician: in both arenas, he was propelled by forces far bigger than him. When the old liberals and many of the social democrats tossed aside their commitments to welfare and the common good and salivated their way into neoliberalism, they increasingly lost popularity amongst large sections of the electorates in the North Atlantic. These old liberals and some social democrats used the state to divert enormous parts of the surplus to create billionaires and then take jobs in their world. As it lost its mass base, the ruling class frenetically searched for a way to maintain its electoral hegemony. This meant, first, destroying the possibility of any revival of welfarism through the centre left (the sabotage of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the conspiracy against Jeremy Corbyn are illustrations of this) and then finding candidates willing to say anything to create and discipline a new base (as long as these new candidates, such as Trump, remained committed to the rigid structures of surplus extraction from the social labour of the many for the bank accounts of the few). In time, unable to deliver upon their promises, Trump and others of the far right of a special type will fall out of favour with their mass base. When this happens, the ruling class, the Frankensteins of capitalism, will find another conjurer who will dazzle a disoriented mass base while continuing to inflict brutalities on the workers and peasants of the world.

Salah Elmur (Sudan), Golden Jubilee, 2020.

What will Trump’s presidency mean for the world, asks the liberal commentator? What has the neoliberal compact meant for the world? When the ‘lesser evil’ of the neoliberal compact – Biden in the United States, Starmer in the UK, Macron in France, Scholz in Germany (and until the pathetic end of his political career, Trudeau in Canada) – is totally complicit in an ongoing genocide, there is little that Trump could do to be worse. Beyond ‘finishing the job’ in Gaza as he and his cronies have vowed to do, perhaps all that is left is if he actually, Dr Strangelove style, conducts the extermination of the human race and the annihilation of the planet. But even when it comes to planetary destruction, what have the mega-corporations of the neoliberal compact done but commit ecocide and ignore the evidence of the climate catastrophe? These neoliberal forces claim to support forms of liberalism, such as freedom of speech, but indeed it is these old liberal and former social democratic forces in the Atlantic world that introduced widely unchecked powers for the forces of repression in the name of anti-terrorism, thereby delivering these powers to forces – such as Trump – that are instinctively against freedoms of speech and association. The old liberals and the former social democrats will say that at least they are not patriarchal or racist, but even here their records are abysmal: the deportation rate in the United States is as high if not higher under liberal presidents as under conservatives, and the old liberals and former social democrats have done almost nothing to defend women’s rights, which has become a campaign hobby horse rather than a field of struggle.

That is precisely the point: neither the old liberals and former social democrats nor the far right of a special type are capable of expanding the field of struggle. This allows space for working people to enter that field with confidence and clarity and shape a politics of emancipation from the grip of capitalism, and it allows them to deepen the battle of ideas and raise programmatic questions that seek to solve real problems rather than to merely try and build electoral formations to defeat the right.

Larkin Durey (Ivory Coast), Haut les mains (Hands Up), 2020.

I cannot get those deep-sea creatures out of my mind. At one point in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the monster says that though he ‘ought to be thy [his creator’s] Adam’, he is ‘rather the fallen angel’ (i.e., Lucifer). The name Lucifer – like luciferin and luciferase – comes from the Latin word for ‘light bringer’, and although the term first appeared in a late fourth-century translation of the Hebrew Bible as a translation of the Hebrew phrase Heilel or ‘shining one’, it was not until John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) that it was identified with the fallen angel. Could it be that the monsters, the carriers of the far right of a special type – such as Trump – are also in some respect Luciferian ‘light bringers’ whose contradictions allow us to better see the deceptions of the neoliberal compact? They can do that, but they and the rest of the monsters of the North Atlantic world cannot do anything beyond that. They are not like the deep-sea creatures. Their followers are momentarily excited by their charisma but will soon tremble at their failures. Where will these masses go when they have lost interest in the far right of a special type? The gloomy realities of war and hunger have dulled the possibilities of an inner light for many humans who seem to have lost the spark in their eyes that holds the promise of illuminating a way forward.

But that light cannot go out. There is always a flash of light. The Haitian poet Paul Laraque (1920–2007) surrealistically wrote of those short bursts of light in the dances of the creatures and flowers deep in the waters in his poem ‘Mourir’ (To Die), which appears in his 1979 collection Les armes quotidiennes: Poésie quotidienne (Everyday Weapons: Everyday Poetry):

The wave of shadow dragged them to nothingness,
to the bottom of the sea, where they rest among the corals,
which open like roses, the red sparkling dance of fish,
the rusting remains of ships, the derisory opulence of the sands.

That red sparkling dance of fish, our protest for a new world.

Warmly,

Vijay

Republished From: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/struggles-illuminate-the-path-forward/

From Palestine to Sudan, imperialist wars are destroying the lives of innocent children, leaving long-term physical and psychological wounds on those who survive.

2 January 2025

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

A study came out in December that made me cry. Titled Needs Study: Impact of War in Gaza on Children with Vulnerabilities and Families, it was conducted by the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management (CTCCM) in Gaza. Written in a clinical style, nothing about the language should have impacted me in the way that it did. But the study’s findings were shocking. Here are some of the cold facts:

1. 79% of the children in Gaza suffer from nightmares.
2. 87% of them experience severe fear.
3. 38% report bedwetting.
4. 49% of caregivers said that their children believed that they would die in the war.
5. 96% of the children in Gaza felt that death was imminent.

Put simply, every single child in Gaza feels that they are going to die.

Galal Yousif Goly (Sudan), Untitled, 2024.

This newsletter, the first of 2025, could have ended after that last line. What more needs to be said? But there is more to say.

In March 2024, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child released a sharp statement on the war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, both backed by a range of foreign powers. That statement had its own powerful facts:

1. 24 million children in Sudan – nearly half of the country’s total population of 50 million – are at risk of ‘generational catastrophe’.
2. 19 million children are out of school.
3. 4 million children are displaced.
4. 3.7 million children are acutely malnourished.

The first point refers to the totality of Sudan’s children, all of whom are at risk of a ‘generational catastrophe’. This concept, which was first used by the United Nations to describe the trauma and setbacks that children experienced due to COVID-19 lockdowns, means that the children of Sudan will not recover from the ordeal that the war has inflicted upon them. It will take generations before anything resembling normality returns to the country.

Pacita Abad (Philippines), Water of Life, 1980.

A scientific study from 2017 found that deep childhood traumas can mark a person both physically and psychologically. Trauma reroutes children’s developing nervous systems, causing them to be highly alert and anxious even decades later. This process, the authors write, generates a mechanism called ‘enhanced threat processing’. No wonder studies of children who lived through earlier wars show that they disproportionately suffer from medical conditions, including heart ailments and cancer.

In March 2022, five doctors from Afghanistan, India, Ireland, and Sri Lanka wrote a heartfelt letter to The Lancet in which they reminded the world of the plight of the children of Afghanistan. As of 2019, every child in Afghanistan was born and raised during war. Not one of them had experienced peace. The authors noted that ‘studies on psychotherapeutic interventions in Afghan children and adolescents are rare, and the evidence they have produced is low quality’. So, they proposed an integrated healthcare plan for Afghan children that relied upon telehealth care and non-medical professionals. In another world, the plan could have been debated. Some of the funds that had enriched the arms merchants during that war would have instead been expended to realise this plan. But this is not the way forward in our world.

Mahoud Ahmad (Iraq), Title Not Known (Ahmad 9), 1976.

The statement about arms merchants is not made idly. According to a December 2024 fact sheet from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s top 100 largest arms-producing and military services companies increased their combined arms revenues by 4.2% in 2023, reaching a staggering $632 billion. Five US-based companies accounted for nearly a third of these revenues. These 100 companies increased their total arms revenues by 19% between 2015 and 2023. Though the full numbers for 2024 are not yet available, if one looks at the quarterly filings from the main merchants of death, their earnings have spiked even further. Billions for warmongers, but nothing for children who are born into warzones.

Ismail Shammout (Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory), We Will Not Leave, 1987.

In 2014, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza resulted in the death of innocent children. Two incidents in July struck a special chord. First, Israel fired a missile that hit the Fun Time Beach Café (Waqt al-Marah) in Khan Younis at 11:30pm on 9 July. In the café, which was a makeshift structure about thirty metres from the Mediterranean Sea, several people had gathered to watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup semi-final match between Argentina and the Netherlands. They were all serious football fans. The Israeli missile killed nine young people: Musa Astal (age 16), Suleiman Astal (age 16), Ahmed Astal (age 18), Mohammed Fawana (age 18), Hamid Sawalli (age 20), Mohammed Ganan (age 24), Ibrahim Ganan (age 25), and Ibrahim Sawalli (age 28). They never got to watch Argentina win the match in the penalty stage or see Germany win the tournament in a tense match a few days later.

Israel’s bombing, meanwhile, was unabated. Three days later, on 16 July, several boys were playing football – as if replaying the World Cup on Gaza’s beach – when an Israeli navy ship fired first at a jetty and then, as the boys ran from the explosion, at the boys. Israel killed four of them – Ismail Mahmoud Bakr (age 9), Zakariya Ahed Bakr (age 10), Ahed Atef Bakr (age 10), and Mohammad Ramez Bakr (age 11) – and wounded others.

The 2014 Israeli barrage on Gaza killed at least 150 children in total. When the human rights group B’Tselem produced an advertisement to broadcast the names of the children on Israeli television, the Israel Broadcast Authority banned it. The British poet Michael Rosen responded to the killings and the ban with the beautiful poem ‘Don’t Mention the Children’.

Don’t mention the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
The people must not know the names
of the dead children.
The names of the children must be hidden.
The children must be nameless.
The children must leave this world
having no names.
No one must know the names of
the dead children.
No one must say the names of
the dead children.
No one must even think that the children
have names.
People must understand that it would be dangerous
to know the names of the children.
The people must be protected from
knowing the names of the children.
The names of the children could spread
like wildfire.
The people would not be safe if they knew
the names of the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
Don’t remember the dead children.
Don’t think of the dead children.
Don’t say: ‘dead children’.

Yes, the children have names. We will continue to name all those whose names we can remember. We will not forget them. In September 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health released an updated list of the names of Palestinians killed in the US-Israeli genocide from October 2023 to August 2024. On that list are 710 newborns whose ages are listed as zero. Many of them had only just been named.

Though the list is too long to reproduce here, the story of Ayssel and Asser Al-Qumsan is emblematic. On 13 August 2024, Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan left his apartment in Deir al-Balah, within central Gaza’s ‘safe zone’, to register the birth of his twin children Ayssel and Asser. He left the twins with their mother, Dr. Jumana Arfa (age 29), who had given birth to them three days earlier at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. Dr. Jumann Arfa was a pharmacist trained at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. A few days before giving birth to her children, she posted on Facebook about Israel’s targeting of children, citing an interview with Jewish-American surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter on a powerful CBS News segment called Children of Gaza. When Mohammed returned from registering the twins, he found that their home had been destroyed and that his wife, newborn children, and mother-in-law had all been killed in an Israeli strike.

Ayssel Al-Qumsan.
Asser Al-Qumsan.

We must name the dead children.

Malak Mattar (Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory), Tiger Embracing the Boy, 2024.

Warmly,

Vijay

Republished From: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/palestine-gaza-2025/

Salomé Saqué

After Donald Trump’s victory, a question haunts many of us: how could so many people elect someone who talks nonsense, lies daily, and yet his supporters don’t seem to hold him accountable for those lies? At its core, these are broader questions : how has conspiracy thinking gained so much ground in recent years? What can be done about those, an ever-growing number, who live in parallel realities? Repeating the facts is no longer enough, so how do we address this? This is one of the questions highlighted by author Naomi Klein. In her latest essay, she delves into this parallel world—a whole underground realm of disinformation and conspiracies that, according to her, feeds off the silence and failures of the so-called progressive world. In this book, she explains that the causes progressives stand for have now become dormant and have been usurped, replaced by distorted doubles. And to discuss this, she is on the set of Blast.