Solidarity 618, 15 December 2021

The need for week-to-week socialist organising

As we go to press, talk is rife of Tory moves to oust Boris Johnson — in favour, alas, of someone probably even more right-wing. The Tory government is on the back foot, floundering on Covid, commanding little trust or credit, u-turning again and again. And yet its Borders Bill (went to Lords 8 December), Police Bill (entered final Lords stage 8 December), and Health and Social Care Bill (Lords committee stage starts 11 January) are going through Parliament with little loud and active opposition. The left seems to be on the back foot, too. There are millions who oppose the Tories from the left...

Borders Bill puts 40% of ethnic minority UK citizens at risk

The protest-criminalising Police Bill is just one element of the Tories' push towards a vicious authoritarian state. Just behind it in the parliamentary queue of measures to assault the rights of people living in, working in or trying to come to the United Kingdom, the Nationality and Borders Borders Bill passed the House of Commons on 8 December and is now on its second reading in the House of Lords. The Bill now attacks the rights not just of the small numbers of refugees the Tories are trying to present as some kind of overwhelming tide , but of vast numbers of UK citizens – mainly with...

Putin’s hands off Ukraine!

In 2014 Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, which was a Russian colony until 1991. Since then it has waged a proxy war against Ukraine through right-wing Russian-nationalist forces in the east of the country. Since the start of November maybe 175,000 Russian troops have massed within striking distance of the Ukrainian border. Russia is moving weapons and equipment to the area. There seems little doubt that the Ukrainian government has committed human rights abuses in the eastern conflict zones. So have the Russian-nationalist rebels. To give a sense of the scale, the Office of...

Revanchism, irredentism... and the Chinese state

Revanchism, from the French revanche or “revenge”, is the will to reverse territorial losses following war or social upheaval. The term originated in the 1870s, after the Franco Prussian War, for nationalists who wanted to revenge the defeat and the reparations extracted by Germany, and to reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Revanchism is also linked to irredentism — the drive to expand nation-state territory to claim fragments of the cultural and ethnic nation outside the borders of the core. When Mao Zedong took power in 1949, he set an immediate goal of re-establishing the...

Again on Rittenhouse

Charlie George ( Solidarity 617 ) presents us with the fiction that Kyle Rittenhouse went to Kenosha protests to administer first aid, as if he was someone akin to a member of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. I don’t know if he ever got first aid training, but I’m sure that even in America instructors do not recommend including an AR-15 assault rifle with the bandages as part of the first aid kit. Incidentally, one of those Rittenhouse shot actually was a certified paramedic. If Rittenhouse had gone armed only with a first aid kit, he would have been welcomed and nobody would have been shot...

More environment reading

I want to add some books that we’ll be covering in our upcoming Workers’ Liberty reading groups to Stuart Jordan’s “Reading on environment emergencies”, Solidarity 617 . In Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science , the evolutionary epidemiologist Robert G. Wallace gives vital accounts of how capital is driving our age of pandemics. Large-scale and international agriculture, organised in pursuit of profit and coupled with ecosystem destruction, leads to spill over of ever-scarier pathogens from animals to human: and with increasing regularity...

Women's Fightback: Is Die Hard a feminist movie?

This column contains spoilers for Die Hard Christmas may be Christianity’s second fiddle religious festival, never enough to rival Easter, but it is the number one festival of the secular world. A global phenomenon filled with nebulous and contradicting traditions. Even attempts at counter-Christmas culture will be co-opted by this global hobgoblin. In A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish by Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, he describes the growth of New York Jewish families spending Christmas day in Chinese restaurants, a tradition that is now definitively “Christmassy”. In Japan, KFC have...

Uyghur Tribunal delivers its verdict

On 9 December, the Uyghur Tribunal delivered a judgement that the Chinese state has committed torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide in its assault on the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim groups in East Turkestan (“Xinjiang” province). This was an unofficial “people’s tribunal”. A civil society panel of lawyers and human rights experts assessed evidence against international law and the threshold of proof was “beyond reasonable doubt”. It concluded that the Chinese state — under policies directed by leaders including Xi Jinping — had committed crimes against humanity including...

Lithium for batteries: how?

Thousands of environmentalists in Serbia have forced a small government u-turn in a battle over mining giant Rio Tinto’s claim to the Jadar valley. 130,000 people, 2% of the Serbian population, have signed a petition against Rio Tinto’s plan to open the biggest lithium mine in Europe. The government has ditched proposed law changes that would make it easier to expropriate land. As an essential ingredient in car batteries, lithium is a key resource of the green tech revolution. The EU wants to produce 30 million electric vehicles in the next few decades to meet its climate pledges. Demand for...

High Court rules against Assange

The UK High Court ruled on 10 December that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges. There are still steps in the process, including a possible appeal to the Supreme Court and a final decision by the Home Secretary – but this makes it more likely Assange will be sent to the US. We have commented on the Assange case many times over the years. For instance, in Solidarity 536 , “Assange: don’t extradite, don’t glorify”, "Assange: don’t extradite, don’t glorify", explaining the US charges and extradition attempt. Our overall view remains...

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