Subjects Archives: Fascism

Since taking office in 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump has used his annual speech at the UN General Assembly to denounce socialism, promote nationalism and xenophobia, and bully and threaten the whole world.

In recent years, the reactionary, authoritarian and/or fascist extreme right wing has been in the ascendant all over the world: it already governs half of the world’s countries. Among the best-known examples are: Trump (United States), Modi (India), Orbán (Hungary), Erdoğan (Turkey), Daesh (Islamic State), Salvini (Italy), Duterte (Philippines), and now Bolsonaro (Brazil).

Russian oil giant Rosneft blasted threats of U.S. sanctions as “unfair competition.”

The leader of the Tupac Amaru Neighborhood Association is a symbol of the fight against the old order.

On one level the intensifying deceit of Western media foreign affairs coverage corresponds to the increasing desperation of Western elites confronting their failing global power and influence.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal explains how Nicaragua celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution just one year after defeating a U.S.-backed coup effort — and how U.S. sabotage efforts continue today.

Nationalism has always been, to some degree, a feature across Europe’s political spectrum, but in recent years, fostered by the likes of Donald Trump and funded by American religious ‘conservatives’ there has been an explosion in voter support for right-wing and populist parties.

HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that, through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy can be saved.

Tariq Ali on the situation in Kashmir.

In Brazil recently, I gave an interview to Brasil de Fato, which was born in 2003 as the weekly magazine of the World Social Forum. It is now one of the most important windows into Brazil’s political world. The newsletter this week carries the text of most of the interview.

In an interview with Bob Fernandes, on TVE Bahia, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that the U.S. government “created the Lava Jato investigation to take our oil.”

The Trump administration is intensifying its economic warfare on the people of Venezuela with a crippling embargo—and facing no resistance from the Democratic Party.

In June it was finally settled, the short-term detention centers run by the U.S. Border Patrol were—quite technically—concentration camps. While they are not the extermination camps of the Holocaust, the rounding up and mass incarceration of people who haven’t seen a judge fits the definition exactly, according to expert Andrea Pitzer. The legal definition of concentration camps are “places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.”

The partisan condemnation of white supremacy that has taken shape during the Trump era has reduced anti-racist critique to political theater.

The ship was seized in the Panama canal according to the Venezuela government.

The total embargo declared by Donald Trump against Venezuela is another step in sharpening his strategy to generate chaos in the country and overthrow Nicolás Maduro. Julio Escalona, deputy of the National Constituent Assembly, analyzes the situation, the possibility of dialogues, and challenges.

U.S. police agencies, including the FBI, are incapable of mounting an effective offensive against their soul mates in the armed white right.

The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released  CIA Torture Unredacted report.

On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.

It is impossible to predict what will happen in West Asia. Impossible to know whether the United States will conduct a military strike against Iran, which has already faced the full brunt of a U.S.-driven hybrid war against it for the past seven decades.