7 June 2017
Al Jazeera: Corbyn was right in 2003, and he is right again today
The import of Corbyn's statement must be considered in its historical context. Despite the legion of people who stood figuratively and philosophically with the then backbench Labour MP, Corbyn faced a deep and vitriolic thicket of establishment opposition, particularly from Britain's rancid reactionary press that universally supported then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's disastrous military misadventure and instinctively libelled the war's opponents as quislings. [...]
But Corbyn's speech arrived at its moral crescendo when he warned the mesmerised throng, and, by, extension, the rest of us, of the calamitous human and geopolitical consequences the obdurate trans-Atlantic architects of the pestilential Iraq invasion would ultimately cause.
His voice rising in plaintive anger, Corbyn said the war would "set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression, and the misery of future generations ... the way to free us from the scourge of war is to free ourselves from the scourge of injustice, of poverty, and of misery". [...]
In this regard, Corbyn made what many other politicians consider a politically fatal admission: Britain, France and the United States (or their regional proxies) invading and dropping bombs on Afghanistan and other, predominately Arab countries - from Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Libya - year after dreadful year have fuelled, rather than stemmed, the terror visited upon so many, in so many places.
Politico: Anarchic Athens finds a new cause: Ukraine
The neighborhood of Exarchia in central Athens has always been home to those who fight the system. Before Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ left-wing Syriza Party came to power in 2015, groups of police would stand on street corners bordering the area, riot shields at the ready, waiting for the streets to erupt into one of the area’s periodic fits of violence. Syrians, Afghans and Africans; pirated DVDs, cannabis and cocaine, you can find just about anyone and anything on the central square — except ATMs, symbols of “rapacious capitalism” that the anarchists long ago firebombed out of existence. [...]
Zafeiris started to pay attention to the political situation in Ukraine in the aftermath of the EuroMaidan protests, he recalls. “For the first time in recent European history we had a government in a European country with a Nazi element,” he says. He describes EuroMaidan as a NATO-organized coup “to overthrow Yanukovych because he was not interested in [drawing closer to] the EU.” [...]
Far-right parties only managed to secure a tiny percentage of the vote in Ukraine’s post-EuroMaidan elections, but that doesn’t deter Zafeiris from concluding that they’re a controlling element in Kiev. “It’s not a matter of size but of quality,” he says. “There are a lot of Nazis with top posts in the government.” The Ukrainian government, he claims, has become a “puppet for some parts of the U.S. regime.”
In March, Zafeiris decided to take action. He gathered a group of like-minded people and began to communicate with the separatist group in Donetsk, which granted him permission to open the Athens office. It’s not the first of its kind in Europe — there are offices in Italy, the Czech Republic and Finland. In Athens, the founding members put up their own money toward renting the premises to get the ball rolling.
Vox: The British election is in 3 days — and the polls are getting a lot closer
Experts on UK politics say that the Troy collapse is, first and foremost, May’s own fault. She has run a disastrous campaign filled with unpopular policies and embarrassing flip-flops that have seriously shaken British confidence in her ability to govern. Meanwhile, the public’s view of Corbyn was so dim that there really wasn’t anywhere else to go but up — and his relatively competent campaign trail performance has helped that. [...]
To be clear, May’s Conservatives are still heavily, heavily favored to win a majority on Thursday. They’re still ahead in the polls by a healthy margin, and May is still viewed more favorably than Corbyn is overall in opinion polls. Moreover, the basic setup of British politics gives the Conservatives an intrinsic advantage in the 2017 race: Their supporters are more likely to vote and tend to live in more strategically important areas. [...]
Some of the issues the Conservatives chose to talk about were especially unpopular. On May 9, for instance, the prime minister came out in favor of legalizing fox hunting — a traditional, but cruel, pastime of the British upper classes that had been banned by a Labour government in the mid-2000s. The comments made her out of touch with ordinary British concerns, interested in the cultural priorities of the rich rather than what really matters to most people. [...]
The criticism of the “dementia tax” was so overwhelming that, three days later, it was removed from the Conservative manifesto. This actually managed to make things worse: It suggested that May, who was selling herself as a strong hand during the Brexit negotiations, wasn’t to be trusted.
Quartz: Despite the rhetoric, Macron isn’t about to loosen France’s paternalistic grip in Africa
Unlike any other French leader Macron has openly expressed remorse for aspects of France’s colonial past. His election rhetoric suggested that he viewed France’s neo-colonial dominance with some embarrassment, preferring to loosen France’s hold on its former colonies. [...]
France also propped up francophile leaders, in particular Senegal’s Leopold Sédar Senghor and Cote d’Ivoire’s Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Both saw themselves as the guardians of a paternalistic order that kept Francophone Africa under French tutelage. [...]
During Francois Mitterrand’s term in office (1981 – 1995) 60,000 French troops were stationed in Francophone Africa. They supported several unsavoury governments, including the Hutu regime presided over by Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda, which went on to murder 800,000 Tutsis and some Hutus in the 1994 genocide. French soldiers did little to stop the bloodbath. [...]
Chirac was the last of the paternalistic, Gaullist French leaders. After his presidency, France became unapologetically mercantilist: it remains in Francophone Africa to protect its nationals, to guard its assets and to counter Chinese competition for natural resources and markets. [...]
But, nearly 60 years after African independence, France and Francophone Africa remain entangled beyond separation. French companies still have a quasi-monopoly over the most strategic areas in Francophone economies. Examples include electricity, telecommunications, infrastructure, airports and harbours. France’s continued influence on Francophone African foreign policy is apparent in Africa’s policy alignments.
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