The implications of Trump's Jerusalem ploy (*)
dokumentiert

Henry Siegman, a Holocaust survivor and today in his late eighties, was president of the Project US-Middle East and a former member of the Foreign Affairs Council. He once was head of the American Jewish Congress and the Council of Synagogues of America.

"Die bedingungslose Kapitulation war Deutschland nicht genug, es will den karthagischen Frieden." Die konservative US-amerikanische Tageszeitung Washington Post (12.7.2015) analysiert die deutsche Rolle bei den Verhandlungen mit der griechischen Regierung.

Germany doesn’t want to save Greece. It seems to want to humiliate Greece.
Greece has offered an almost unconditional surrender on its bailout, but Germany might not accept anything less than a Carthaginian peace. In other words, a deal that not only forces Athens to submit, but also humiliates it in the process.

Declaration of left activists in and on East-Central Europe

Note from the LeftEast editors: with this text Left-wing activists working in/on East-Central Europe support the struggle of SYRIZA in Greece in the coming election on the 25th of January 2015. If you would like your name or that of your organization to be added to the list, please write to:lefteasteditors@gmail . com

An Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko
by New Left Review, 16 June 2014

Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the entwinement of opposed political camps with the strategic ambitions of Russia and the West, the former bidding to maintain its grip over its ex-Soviet bailiwick even as the latter relentlessly expands its sphere of influence.

Kiev-based sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko discusses the unfolding of the Ukrainian crisis and its outcomes to date, against the backdrop of the political and economic order that emerged after 1991.

Fred Leplat argues that socialists cannot be neutral or ambivalent about Bashar al-Assad’s bloody dictatorship.
http://socialistresistance.org/4432/revolution-and-imperialism-in-syria

Interview mit Gilbert Achcar.

Quelle: Z-Net Communications, Saturday, February 5 2011

To help explain the thrilling developments in Egypt, Farooq Sulehria interviewed leading Arab scholar-activist Gilbert Achcar on February 4.

Do you think that Mubarak's pledge on February 1st not to contest the next election represented a victory for the movement, or was it just a trick to calm down the masses as on the very next day demonstrators in Al-Tahrir Square were brutally attacked by pro-Mubarak forces?

Interview mit Yannis Almpanis vom Netzwerk für politische und soziale Rechte

by Catherine Samary

December 2009

Outline

Twenty years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Timothy Garton Ash wrote that « in 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution”. Some years before, instead, he used an interesting neologism -“refolution” - to describe the kind of systemic changes that had occurred, combining features of revolutions and of reforms from above.

I want here to support and radicalise the neologism against the « pure » epithet, as more accurate in order to analyse the very ambiguities of the historical transformations that put an end to the “bipolar world”. I will argue, that the deepest democratic movements which occurred in and before 1989 were both against the ruling nomenklatura and not in favour of the main socio-economic transformations introduced since 1989. Going behind etiquettes and ideological discourses is needed to take in full account the role of “bipolar” international “deals” still at work in 1989, but also the role taken by leading figures of the former single party in opaque forms of privatisations : all that means the lack of any real democratic procedure of decision making about the main reforms which have had lot of a counter-revolutionary substance… Popular aspirations expressed massively in revolutionary upsurges against the single party and Soviet domination like in Solidarnosc in 1980-1981. And this movement was closer to the Prague’s autumn of workers councils in 1968 against the Soviet occupation than to 1989 liberal shock therapies : those embryonic revolutions towards a kind of 3rd way were repressed and dismantled by the bipolar world’s dominant forces through different episodes, because they were an alternative to such order or to its kind of “end” -by the victory of one of its pole- occurring in 1989 : a reality hidden by cold war concepts.

III- Democratic revolutions or opaque refolutions?
Let us deal here with all the factors which prevented real social “revolutions” to occur and even more which contradict the “democratic” nature of the changes..

A first group could be expressed and in certain context accepted in a capitalist society ; but they indicate a very high level of social expectations of the population : that would be and has been quite conflicting with the dominant liberal trends in the post 1989 kind of capitalism :  wages protected from inflation and full payment of the days of strike, reduction in the retirement age (50 for women !) ; pensions to reflect working life; good universal healthcare; an increase in the number of school and nursery places for the children of working mothers; three year’s paid maternity leave ; increased support for those forced to travel far to work…