Imperialism & crisis: France in Mali

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The French military intervention in Mali – taking the North of the country in a firestorm of imperialist arrogance and air power – has the French rulers and press gloating about easy victories and the apparent support of much of the Malian population and a majority of French too, arguing "There's no other solution". A small demonstration of Malians in the southern capital city of Bamako disputed this charade of "liberation" with hand-printed signs reading, "Down with imperialist interests, down with ECOWAS".

This crisis in Mali reveals a maelstrom of contradictions in the entire region of West and North Africa known as the Sahel-Sahara that no imperialist army or state will even begin to solve. In fact their role is certain to accelerate the contradictions that have spun into a war and a multi-national occupation of Mali spearheaded by French imperialism. It is the imperialists who are largely responsible for the impoverished, very short and crushed lives most Malians lead.

Report of the meeting of the International Committee to Support the People’s War in India

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.in/

 

Report of the meeting of the International Committee to support the People’s War in India

19.1.13

The Committee had invited the Parties and Organizations that had participated the in the International Conference in Hamburg, or were interested in the activity of support, to send their representatives.

Some of them attended the meeting, other sent messages and communications.

Particularly, we welcomed with joy the attendance of the comrades of Gran Marcha Hacia el Comunismo from Spain and the Revolutionary Front to defend the people’s rights from Brazil. We wish they will take part also in the future meetings and activities of the Committee. The Committee is not yet structured in final form, it fulfils the tasks pointed out in its founding Call and realizing campaigns and actions.

Report

The purpose of this meeting is at the same time important and limited. We have to draw a summary assessment of the Conference, organize the publishing of the booklet of speeches and fix the tasks to be accomplished with operational decisions.

We have to be a dynamic organization capable of mobilizing energies and at the same time to tune its activity with the current state of People’s War in India.

All the speeches the International Conference stressed the importance of People’s War in India, and the Committee considers all the forces participating in the conference as forces of real support to the People’s War. The point is not to impose a general line to which such forces have to conform, but to promote in a unified form all this activity.

Our work is twofold: first, to go on with the line and the method of work that led to the International Conference in Hamburg, second, to share this line and working method with even more large and articulated forces.

Decade After Iraq WMD Speech at UN, Ex-Powell Aide Lawrence Wilkerson D

Bill McKibben: Ahead of Keystone XL Rally, Fossil Fuel Divestment Expands A

Egypt: The Struggle Continues until Victory

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Remembering Second World War and the Cause of the Bengal Famine

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by Utsa Patnaik  During the Second World War, apart from being responsible for the deaths of 27 million Soviet people and millions elsewhere, the Nazis slaughtered 5 million Jews. Known as the holocaust, people throughout the world know the truth about this holocaust. During the same war, in 1943-44 in Bengal, at least 3 million people perished from starvation, while an additional 25 million were reduced to utter destitution. Yet hardly anyone of the world is aware of this Bengal holocaust, let alone that it was perpetrated by the British colonial rulers of India who, having taken India into the war without consulting the leadership of the Indian people, then went on to impose on the Indian people a disproportionate share of the cost of financing the Allied offensive against Japan. The manner of this imposition directly resulted in the deaths of 3 million Bengalis. The imperialist powers, supported by their compliant media and subservient ‘academics’ and other ideologues are forever inventing tens of millions of deaths in the former USSR and People’s Republic of China in an effort to malign socialism. However, when it comes to real mass murder perpetrated by the various imperialist powers, the silence of this criminal gang is truly deafening. In view of this, Lalkar is delighted to reproduce below the short article by a noted Indian Marxist academic, Utsa Patnaik, which exposes one of the holocausts perpetrated by British imperialism – namely the Bengal imperialist-made famine. _________________________________ June 2012 marked the seventy-first anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Germany’s desire to control Russian oil and other primary resources was a major reason of its drive for conquest. It is estimated that about nine-tenths of all German army casualties occurred on the Eastern Front and Hitler’s ultimate defeat was assured by his inability to counter the fierce resistance of the Soviet Union which itself lost an estimated 20 million people in the anti-fascist war. August 2012 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Quit India movement which unleashed mass repression by the dying British colonial power against the Indian people. India had been involved by Britain in WW II without consulting Indian opinion. A large part of the financing of the Allied offensive against Japan had to be borne compulsorily by India and the way this burden was effectively imposed led to the death by starvation of over 3 million people in Bengal. August 15, 2012, India’s Independence Day also marked the sixty-seventh anniversary of Japan’s defeat, V-J Day on August 15, 1945. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union changed political alliances throughout the world. The attitude towards the War of those struggling for freedom in colonised lands came to reflect substantial theoretical differences. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communists in India, many of whom were working within the Congress, unequivocally supported the anti-fascist front against Germany and later Japan. Many Communists however were nevertheless jailed along with other Congress workers. Subhas Chandra Bose adopted the opposite position of treating ‘the enemy of British imperialism as the friend of India’ and first sought German aid and later succeeded with Japanese help to raise his army. Bose’s political position was not that of other Congress leaders who opposed the fascist Axis powers and also saw an opportunity to press for independence. Gandhiji launched the Quit India movement in August 1942, which led to mass repression and arrests effectively immobilising the nationalist leadership for nearly three years. Many communists within the Congress were also jailed at the same time.

Maoists regroup in Nepal: Ruptures and obstacles

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Category: Winter Has Its End

 

Created on Saturday, 02 February 2013 20:14

 

Written by Liam Wright

Revolutionaries at the Maoist party congress in Nepal - 2013

The Nepali Maoists always talk of peace and revolution.  To us, arriving as a reporting team from the U.S., this seems like a peculiar contradiction. Revolution would seem, to us, to be sharply opposed to peace. And a social peace seems like an absence of revolution.

But here in Nepal, the revolutionary process is deeply embedded among much of the population, and it is therefore just as idiosyncratic and contradictory as its people. The country went through a difficult and brutal decade of civil war to overthrow a hated king – and the costs of igniting a new war are understood by everyone. And yet, even after all the changes and events of the last years, the great majority of people in Nepal truly need a much deeper, more thorough-going revolution – they need deep changes in the social system, they need profoundly different, and new, forms of power at all levels, they need to break with the dominating treaties with India. Nepal’s people want peace, but many of them also want radical change.

We got to attend the founding congress of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) to see how the revolutionaries were going to work through that peculiar contradiction: how they would bridge the Nepali people's desire for peace and that aspiration for revolution.

For six days, our reporting team watched over 2,000 communist delegates debate the future. Just walking into a conference of that size and hear those debates in real-time, we got a gut sense that, that for Nepal, revolutionary change is not just a dream. Here it is a living movement and confronts a set of very intense and urgent problems.

The red in a room of comrades

We were in a towering, multilayered auditorium.