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.

Meet the experts behind the new and improved worker-participation.eu website

11 December 2024, 14:00-15:30, Zoom

As part of the Critical Agrarian Studies seminar series, the Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) is pleased to invite you to its tenth seminar for 2024 titled ‘Agrarian Crisis in the Age of Inequality‘by Palagummi Sainath on Wednesday, 4th December 2024 from 5.00 pm – 6.30 pm at the SSA Office, No. 380/86, Sarana Road, Colombo 7.

Palagummi Sainath is the Founder Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). He was honoured in 2007 with the Ramon Magsaysay Award, “for his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s consciousness, moving the nation to action”. He is the author of the celebrated Everyone Loves A Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts (Penguin India 1996). 

An analysis of a new global economy run by government backed multinational companies who are further widening the gulf between the rich and the poor.

“A small group of powerful individuals are now richer than most of the population of Africa. Just 200 giant corporations dominate a quarter of the world’s economic activity… The famous brands of almost everything from running shoes to baby clothes are now made in very poor countries with cheap labour, at times bordering on a form of slave labour.”

Globalisation had become a topical subject by the time The New Rulers of the World was screened. More than a million people opposed to the increasing gap between rich and poor, at a time when the control of resources was becoming centred in fewer and fewer hands, had staged a series of anti-capitalist demonstrations.

John Pilger’s documentary on globalisation brings together several of the themes that run throughout his work – the way in which superpowers use small countries as pawns in their global strategies, the courting of dictators by the West to open the doors to valuable resources and the exploitation of workers in those countries to provide riches in which they do not share.

The New Rulers of the World puts the story of multinationals’ global domination into a political context and demonstrates how the West has increased its stranglehold on poor countries by using the might of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization to control their economies.

Through secret filming, Pilger shows how cheap labour in an Indonesian sweatshop produces goods such as Nike, Adidas, Gap and Reebok running shoes that are sold for up to 250 times the amount received by workers, about 72p a day. Almost 70 million Indonesians live in extreme poverty, many in labour camps housing the workers, where children are under-nourished and prone to disease. Inside the sweatshops, mostly young women are crowded together under the glare of strip lighting in temperatures of up to 40°C, some doing 24-hour shifts.

Observing the parallel between modern-day globalisation and old-world imperialism, Pilger recalls that Indonesia has been “plundered by the West for hundreds of years”. Globalisation in Asia began in Indonesia, where Western governments backed dictator General Suharto after he seized power in the mid-1960s. “Within a year of the bloodbath,” says Pilger, “Indonesia’s economy was effectively redesigned in America, giving the West access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour – what President Nixon called the greatest prize in Asia.” In 1997, the World Bank had called the country a “model pupil” of the global economy.

The IMF’s first deputy managing director, Stanley Fischer, tells Pilger that complete debt cancellation is not the only means of relieving poverty around the world – governments should be willing to integrate with Western economies. Meanwhle, Barry Coates, of the World Development Movement, suggests that consumers should put pressure on retailers and manufacturers to provide information on the source of products and give assurances about the conditions under which they are produced.

Pilger concludes with his own prescription: “Why not abolish the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organization, and replace them with genuine trade and development institutions that are democratically accountable? And why not cancel a debt that condemns nations like Indonesia to poverty and disease?”

The New Rulers of the World (Carlton Television), ITV1, 18 July 2001

Director: Alan Lowery; producer: John Pilger (54 mins

Awards: Gran Prix Leonardo Award, 2003; Certificate of Merit, Chicago International Television Awards, 2003.

Republished From: https://johnpilger.com/the-new-rulers-of-the-world/

As outgoing Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin embarks on his twelfth tour of the Indo-Pacific, the US’s New Cold War on China shows no signs of slowing down, even under a second Trump presidency.

21 November 2024

Dear friends,

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

On 31 May, the United States military endorsed a Statement of Principles for Indo-Pacific Defence Industrial Base Collaboration to strengthen military industry cooperation with its allies in the region. The principles outline commitments to initiatives such as the co-production of missile and rocket systems in Australia, the co-development of hypersonic missile interceptors with Japan, and possible collaboration with South Korea on defence technologies, including artillery systems. This collaboration adds to the extensive network of Indo-Pacific partnerships that the United States has created since the end of World War II.

As part of this deepened partnership, on 15 November US Defence Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III embarked on a tour of the region that will include stops in Australia, Fiji, Laos, and the Philippines. Austin’s tour began in Darwin, Australia, where he convened the fourteenth Trilateral Defence Ministers’ Meeting (TDMM) with his Japanese and Australian counterparts; Australia is also home to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Base Tindal, where the US is co-funding expansions that will allow the base to house US-made nuclear-armed B-1 and B-52 bombers. In Laos, the defence secretary will attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus to discuss China’s so-called ‘aggression in the South China Sea’. The point of the tour is to underline the continuity of US policy in the region between the administrations of outgoing President Joe Biden and incoming President Donald Trump.

Rusiate Lali (Fiji), Qilaiso 2, 2017.

In early 2020, a group of people began discussing the need to create a platform to address the dangers of the US military build-up – both through its own military arsenal and its array of military alliances – along the coastline of East Asia. This build-up started to emerge after the US ‘pivot to Asia’, which started in 2011 under US President Barack Obama. The discussion led to the creation of the No Cold War collective, which was rooted in a statement signed by many individuals and organisations. The No Cold War collective held its first public webinar on 25 July 2020 and has since published 14 briefings on issues such as the war in Ukraine and the build-up of the US-NATO military machine in northeast Asia.

In the aftermath of the US election, No Cold War has released briefing no. 15, which explores what the second presidency of Donald Trump will mean for the world, with a focus on the US’s New Cold War on China. The briefing is below:

Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.

Briefing no. 15: Trump’s Victory is a Morbid Symptom of US Imperial Decline

On 6 November, Donald Trump was elected as the 47^th President of the United States, ensuring he will return next January to the office he vacated in 2021 under the shadow of constitutional crisis and a failed far-right putsch. In doing so, he secured a more decisive and uncontested victory than in his first election in 2016, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton while prevailing in the United States’ Electoral College system – an arcane and profoundly undemocratic mechanism through which as little as 0.03% of the country’s voting population can decide the overall winner, with outsize consequences for the entire world due to US military and economic hegemony.

This time Trump scored over two million more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris, becoming the first Republican Party candidate in two decades to win the national popular vote. (This outcome had far more to do with the Democrats’ loss of almost ten million votes since 2020 than with the marginal increase in Trump’s support.) More consequentially, Trump swept all seven ‘swing states’ in the Electoral College.

Mathias Kauage (Papua New Guinea), Kauage Flies to Scotland for Opening of New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999.

One of this election’s most emblematic swing state outcomes was in Michigan, home to the country’s largest proportion of Arab American voters. Here, the Biden-Harris administration’s full-throated military and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and Lebanon arguably sealed its ignominious defeat. In the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Harris scored less than half of Biden’s 2020 vote share, falling behind Trump while anti-genocide Green Party candidate Jill Stein surged to over 18%. Nationwide exit polling by the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that a stunning 53% of Muslim voters opted for Stein, recognising that both major parties are ineluctably invested in imperialist aggression abroad and violent repression of the Palestine solidarity movement at home.

While core elements of the traditional Democratic Party voter base have deserted the Biden-Harris administration over its murderous foreign policy, the incoming Trump presidency will not bring any relief to Palestinians after more than a year of full-scale genocide. Trump has stated on multiple occasions his intention to let the Netanyahu regime ‘finish the job’ in Gaza, and all indications suggest that he will maintain and indeed accelerate Biden’s push for a ‘new Middle East’ fully subordinated to Zionism and US imperialism. Judging by his past and present bellicosity towards Iran – having assassinated Qassem Soleimani and unilaterally reneged from the Iran Nuclear Deal (formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) in his first term – he will likely display even fewer inhibitions about escalating the crisis into a full-scale regional war. One clear indicator of this is Trump’s choice of Iran hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and of Brian Hook (author of the ‘maximum pressure’ strategy against Tehran in his first term) to oversee the transition.

Elmer Borlongan (Philippines), The Happiest Place on Earth, 2017.

The appointment of Rubio, who has historically been almost equally hawkish on Russia, seems to pour cold water on largely speculative hopes that Trump would at least de-escalate the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Such hopes had been buoyed by his closest foreign policy advisers’ plans to condition US military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to negotiate and accept a temporary ceasefire with Russia, while threatening to ‘open the floodgates’ if Moscow in turn refuses this arrangement. This was motivated not by any principled commitment to diplomacy but by an equally belligerent realpolitik that envisions China as the United States’ number one enemy and aims to redirect US military assets into an even more menacing encirclement of that country.

Trump insider Elbridge A. Colby has laid out an exhaustive plan to provoke China into a shooting war over Taiwan, which his proposed National Security Advisor Mike Waltz would be well-placed to execute. Indeed, Trump in his second term will almost certainly intensify the US hybrid war against China that escalated dramatically in his first term and continued unabated under Biden – not just in the military domain but in information warfare and trade policy as well. In particular, he has proposed a minimum 10-20% tariff on all imports into the United States and a steep 60% tariff on those from China. This would sharply increase consumer prices and thereby cost the average household around $3,000 per year according to the Tax Policy Center.

Malangatana Valente Ngwenya (Mozambique), Faces, 1972.

Such a policy would only further immiserate a population already reeling from the Biden-Harris administration’s attack on working-class living standards – the proximate cause of the Democrats’ collapse. Real weekly wages have noticeably declined over the course of Biden’s term in office and rates of inequality increased (as of December 2023 one in nine adult women were living in poverty, including 16.6% of Black women and 16.8% of Latina women). At the same time, US billionaires’ aggregate wealth increased by an astonishing 88% (to $5.5 trillion) between March 2020 and March 2024, while capital wealth as indicated by the S&P 500 index rose by 72%. Small wonder that Trump won a majority of households earning under $100,000 a year (including a massive 74% of those reporting ‘severe hardship’ due to inflation) while losing the $100,000+ bracket: a complete reversal from the partisan breakdown in 2020 and all previous presidential elections in living memory.

Ultimately, such economic grievances garnered Trump large enough winning margins that the third-party vote share proved not at all decisive: a further humiliation for the Democrats, who mounted Herculean efforts to keep progressive anti-genocide candidates off the ballot. At first glance, the fact that many voters were disappointed with the failures of the Biden-Harris administration’s massive domestic spending initiatives would appear to complicate narratives that directly attribute Harris’s defeat to Biden’s foreign policy. But one can hardly call a country’s domestic budget ‘domestic’ when it includes its military budget – including maintaining a globe-spanning empire of over 900 military bases, investing $175 billion into the proxy war in Ukraine and $18 billion into Israel’s genocide, and when the actual military spending stands at more than double the official figure – an astounding $1.5 trillion in 2022 alone. Trumpism, in all its paradoxical extremes of isolationism and belligerence, populism and nativism, is but another morbid symptom of this violent imperial decline.

Andy Leleisi’uao (Aotearoa), Harmonic People, 2017.

These morbid symptoms, as noted in briefing no. 15, reflect the desire on the part of the US ruling class for a war to undermine the economic advances made by China. This is dangerous. We might want to listen to those who know what wars bring. Cao Cao, a warlord during the Eastern Han dynasty, wrote a charming poem that provides such a warning:

Lice and fleas infest the long-worn armor;
Tens of thousands of civilians perished.
Bones lie bare in the fields,
Not a rooster crow heard within a thousand li.
Out of a hundred, lives one;
The very thought of it breaks my heart.

Warmly,

Vijay

Republished From: https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/give-us-peace-on-earth/

Key Highlights:

1. Growth Trends:
   • Industrializing economies reported a quarterly growth of 1.4% in manufacturing output in Q2 2024. High-income industrializing economies, such as Saudi Arabia and Chile, led with a growth of 2.2%, while middle-income economies grew by 1.2%​.
   • Emerging industrial economies like Malaysia and Rwanda showed exceptional growth rates of 2.7% and 2.6%, respectively, with countries such as India and Vietnam following at 1.3% and 1.2%​.
2. Sectoral Analysis:
   • High-technology industries rebounded in Q2 2024 with a growth of 1.6%, after stagnation earlier in the year. Meanwhile, lower-technology manufacturing remained relatively flat.
3. Challenges:
   • Growth remains uneven across low-income countries, with some regions experiencing contraction. For example, low-income industrializing economies saw a 0.5% decrease in production, highlighting vulnerabilities in these areas​.

Long-term Trends:

• A gradual convergence process appears underway, as industrializing economies outperform high-income industrial economies, which reported slower or stagnant growth​.
• These insights reflect a dynamic yet uneven industrial development landscape, emphasizing the potential for technological investment and productivity improvement to sustain growth.

For further details, refer to UNIDO’s World Manufacturing Report

4 November 2024 

The liberal order supposedly built since World War II and claims of international promotion of human rights now stand fully exposed with the West’s unconditional support for Israel’s wars and heinous crimes in the Middle East

Today, I mark my one hundred and fiftieth Red Notes column. As I started writing this column, I reflected on if and how I should continue on this twice-a-month weekend preoccupation. If it were cricket, at a century and a half, I would have to consider if the pitch is changing and the light is fading, and how long to continue batting before getting all out or retiring. But what about in writing? Am I steady with my strokes; how is the world changing, and is anybody even reading?

My first column in March 2017 was titled, ‘Global Turmoil: International Tutelage and Adherence in a Time of Crisis’. I began that column by paying homage to one of my mentors and comrades, Kethesh Loganathan, who also wrote a column in the Daily Mirror for many years. He was silenced by an LTTE assassin in August 2006, when he was a year younger than I am now. The broader world I described in my first column is eerily similar, and perhaps gotten worse today. 

International tutelage and pressure

This is what I wrote in my first column, over seven and a half years ago:

“The global economy has not recovered from the Great Recession of 2008. Brexit signalled last year the tremendous backlash against neoliberal globalisation and the rising tide of anti-immigrant and racist forces in Europe. With the election of Trump, the American mask has come off, and its naked exploitative interests are bound to undermine international treaties and laws, which for better or worse, maintained a certain global order and stability. Furthermore, even the emerging power China is in a deep economic crisis, as its debt driven construction boom has reached its limits… 

“If the political leadership in the West is too much to stomach, there is always the bureaucracy of the international organisations whether it be the UN, the IMF or the World Bank. The buck does not stop there, when these international agencies lose their legitimacy with repeated political and economic crises – as with the war in Iraq and the anarchic fallout in the Middle East or the global economic crisis of 2008 – there are the metropolitan academic centres for coaching, whether it be Harvard or Oxford. So, for countries like Sri Lanka, it is not a question of what advice is sought or given, rather how and through what institutions, the same imperial policies are pushed and received gratefully by our elite.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South

“The most far reaching international disciplining of Sri Lanka in recent years is the IMF Extended Fund Facility Agreement in June 2016. However, even as the IMF demanded liberalisation of capital markets to allow for the free flow of capital into Sri Lanka, that very month, three senior researchers of the IMF wrote an article titled, ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’, about the risks of such policies. They argued that the chances of financial crises and inequality increases with such capital inflows. The IMF researchers were forced to question such policies after the IMF’s failed interventions in Europe, particularly in Greece. But in practice, the IMF works with double standards, one for the West and another for the Global South… As Sri Lanka stumbles along on the knife edge of an economic crisis, the advice we receive pushes us towards a deeper crisis…

“With Sri Lanka at the crossroads in a time of global turmoil, it is high time we eschewed our colonial mind-set of looking for solutions in the West. Rather, we must learn from struggles in other countries like ours, against their neoliberal states enriching their elites and critiques of similar forms of Western tutelage. More importantly, we must listen carefully to the protests of our people for land and housing, for sustainable agriculture and fisheries, for free healthcare and education, and for permanent work and decent working conditions.” 

Has the world not changed much since I started writing my column? Am I just repetitious in my writing? Or is the global order in a downward cycle with wars raging around the world along with economic crises in countries like Sri Lanka?

Over the next two weeks, we will see the results of two important elections. The outcome of the Trump and Harris election in the United States, which this time has little to offer the world. The Democrats in power have been as naked as the previous Trump regime in pushing imperialist interests. The liberal order supposedly built since the Second World War and claims of international promotion of human rights now stand fully exposed with the West’s unconditional support for Israel’s horrible wars and heinous crimes in the Middle East. 

In this context, amidst our hopeful moment in Sri Lanka after regime change, the General Elections next week are under the shadow of tremendous pressure from the West to stick with the IMF road of deprivation. The economic depression devastating Sri Lanka requires considerable relief, but the new government is constrained by powerful global actors demanding repayment of defaulted loans to international creditors.

As the global order unravels, there will be more aggressive and lethal manoeuvres from the metropolis, and there will be further dispossession in the Global South. The debt crisis of the 2020s now affecting over half the developing countries is only being patched up to prolong the extraction of global finance capital. It is in these troubled global waters that the National People’s Power (NPP) government will have to swim.

Looking back from the future

In the impossible probability that I will be writing this column seven and a half years into the future, what would I be writing? 

That destructive wars and brutal extraction by global powers has morphed liberal democracies onto the path of authoritarian populism and fascism in many parts of the world. Alternatively, that a non-aligned world led by progressive leaders emerging in the Global South are building a post-neoliberal world favourable to working people.

Closer at home, Sri Lanka has gone into its 18th IMF Agreement and again in the middle of a debt restructuring process following its second default on high interest International Sovereign Bonds (ISBs). And that free education and healthcare have been completely dismantled with drastic cuts and privatisation. Furthermore, Sri Lanka’s only major sector is tourism that falters from year to year, even as public utilities – unaffordable to working people – are owned by multinational giants from India and China. Alternatively, Sri Lanka has become one of the first indebted countries to exit the IMF programme in the 2020s, and found avenues of development financing avoiding commercial borrowing with ISBs. That a self-sufficient economy reviving agriculture with a strong food system has reduced inequality, and the country has become a beacon of economic democracy. 

As Sri Lanka goes into a decisive parliamentary election to form a new government for the next five years, the great expectations of the citizenry cannot wait seven and a half years. They will want to see changes in the next year itself. Elections, we know, are only one form of democratic engagement, and in the absence of social and economic changes, working people’s protests will follow suit regardless of who is in power. The year ahead is bound to be eventful, with either major progressive changes or more dispossession and repression.