The protest was seconded by thousands of Palestinian prisoners in various detention centres inside and outside the occupied territories.
Published: Wednesday 23 January 2019 | 09:09:46 pm.
Updated: Wednesday 23 January 2019 | 10:50:35 pm.
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Ramallah, January 23.- More than 1,200 Palestinian prisoners held in the Israeli high security prison of Ofer went on an indefinite hunger strike in protest against the aggressions and mistreatment of military police, aided by dogs of prey, during violent searches carried out in their cells.
The protest was seconded by thousands of other Palestinian prisoners in various detention centers inside and outside the occupied territories, Middle East Monitor reported.
Ofer prison is the only Israeli prison built in Palestinian territory, located near the town of Beitunia, from which it is separated by an imposing concrete wall, and only three kilometers from Ramallah, in the West Bank.
The prison is governed by its own law and the hunger strike is considered a transgression of the rules, which carries severe punishments, sources of the Resistance recalled.
Ofer prison houses about 1,200 Palestinian prisoners, including a large number of young people and minors.
According to the Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer, there are about 5,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 230 children and 54 women. Of that number, 481 were held without trial under the pretext of an illegal practice known as “administrative detention”.
In all Israeli prisons tensions increased, as the prisoners solidarized with Ofer, and suspended their daily activities, even refusing to eat.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners Association, some 150 prisoners were injured when special forces of the Israeli military police stormed Ofer prison on Monday morning.
According to this organization, six prisoners suffered bone fractures, 40 were injured in the head and had to receive stitches, and several were injured as a result of the use of rubber projectiles and tear gas.
Cuba condemns aggressions
Meanwhile, at the United Nations, during the Security Council’s quarterly open debate, the Cuban representative, Ambassador Anayansi Rodríguez Camejo, reiterated her strong rejection of Israel’s use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force against Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories.
It also condemned the unilateral actions of the United States, such as the withdrawal of financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East, the repeated obstruction of that country so that the Security Council does not condemn the escalation of violence, the tragic events that have occurred in the Gaza Strip since 30 March 2018, and the establishment of its diplomatic representation in the city of Jerusalem, which only contribute to the worsening of the situation.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The ultra reactionary American writer, columnist, politician, and radio commentator Patrick (Pat) Joseph Buchanan recalled, on January 18th in his column widely circulated in several countries, that on this date, seventy years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. He did so with a memorable quotation from the undisputed French leader General Charles De Gaulle who said in 1966, when he was ordered to leave his headquarters in Paris: “Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”
“NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.
“And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations, from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania, as an attack on the United States.
The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.”
“Apparently,” Buchanan writes, “President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans and suggested that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, should study the matter in the light of current events and ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, Germany joined NATO, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the USSR was divided into several nations and Leninism expired in its place of origin.
As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that alleged Soviet threat should be allowed to fade away, and Europe should now provide for its own defense.
It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, US Ambassador to Moscow, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”
Soon afterwards, the doctrine of “containment” became official U.S. policy, and even Kennan himself, whose policies he had helped launch, started criticizing them.
Before the end of the year 1948, Ambassador Kennan was convinced that negotiations could be initiated with the Soviet government, but his proposals were rejected by the Truman administration.
“But Kennan was right,” says Buchanan. “America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.”
“And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.”
“Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory,” says Buchanan
“Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions,” says Buchanan.
Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories.
The capitalist version is that in 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city. The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb equal in power to the ones that the United States – inhumanly and unnecessarily—had exploded in two densely populated Japanese cities causing a still uncalculated number of victims.
As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, Washington formed a new alliance to supposedly protect the crucial European powers and make sure that all of them remained at its service.
What remains of NATO today is twelve nations that, with more or less consistency, serve the interests of the greatest superpower which has not yet stopped aspiring to be the only one.”
January 21, 2019.
Published: Tuesday 25 December 2018 | 07:39:10 pm.
By Marina Menéndez Quintero
marina@juventudrebelde.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The new President of Mexico delivers… and makes the most of the time. He could be seen as the other side of social plundering, which in other Latin American countries means the return of the ultra reactionary and extremist right.
The Mayan train will touch every ruin of the ancestors, and will bring tourism, estimated in those areas at about ten million visitors, to each place. He is confident that it will help create new jobs.
His awareness of the need to mitigate the differences between the north and south of the country was also reflected in next year’s budget, which prioritizes the south-southeast as “an act of justice, because it has been the most abandoned region of the country and its time has come”.
He also thought of the workers and decreed a minimum wage increase of 16 percent, convinced that if there are no revenues there is no internal market or income. In addition, he said, people will earn a decent wage, and an historic debt will be settled with the worst paid workers.
The increase is 50 percent in the border areas with the United States, a difference that may be due to the desire that their nationals stay in Mexico and not emigrate to the neighboring nation.
Precisely, the most transcendent action of these first days, because of the repercussions it must have for his country and Central America, is perhaps the materialization of his approach to stop illegal migration, and the decision by his own citizens and those of neighboring countries to go to another country.
Five billion dollars will be dedicated in 2019 to productive projects in Central America. He has already presented the plan to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who said he would analyze the project. Hopefully he will support it… and forgets the wall. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is also being consistent in this regard.
Certainly, the doors of social development may be opening for Mexico after being closed for dozens of years, including the recovery of an economy where the neoliberal model had almost reprivatized its main conquest, won by Lazaro Cardenas when he nationalized oil.
The announced creation of a National Guard is in the works and almost ready to be submitted to popular opinion. This body will henceforth be in charge of the security of all Mexico, and leave the army and the rest of the armed forces, for other types of orders.
In order to make sure that his mandate will be enough, AMLO, who insists that he will not lrun for president again, works 16 hours a day so that his term will be doubled and six years will produce twelve years’ worth of work completed, as he said just two days ago to journalists. But time is time, and in real life he only has a six-year term.
Knowing that whoever comes after him can upset everything again, he wants to have a Constituent Assembly and, in fact, has already issued decrees so that each vindicatory step that he is taking is written in ink and in the form of laws.
He is today the opposite side of the right-wing and neoliberal processes that feed on the Argentine population under Cambiemos and Mauricio Macri and, above all, on the hardships and vicissitudes that arelikely to fall on the people of Brazil when, on January 1, the intolerant and reactionary Jair Bolsonaro takes over.
Let’s hope that the Mexican opposition, respectful until today of the popular roots that demonstrated AMLO’s crushing triumph at the polls, does not trip him up or boycott him. And also that the mafias that up to now have profited from public money do not turn against him.
Let Andrés Manuel López Obrador do his job. And may he help our sister nation of Mexico get safely into 2024. That could be a good wish for Latin America on the coming New Year’s Eve.
By Hedelberto López Blanch
hedelberto@opciones.cu
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Who would have thought, 13 years ago, that with the arrival of indigenous president Evo Morales Ayma to the presidency of Bolivia, that this country, for the first time in its history, would begin a straight line period of political stability, economic impulse and social development that has benefited the vast majority of its inhabitants.
Skeptics and right-wing forces in Latin America still don’t want to understand, but as Evo recently stated, his country’s economic stability is an example for the world to follow.
During 2018, Bolivia consolidated its position as one of the countries in Latin America with the most advances in the economic-social sphere, after reaching a growth of 4.7 percent and a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 40 billion dollars.
It is extremely important that when aggressive neoliberal and privatization policies are imposed in Latin America, promoted from the United States with the backing of several international financial organizations, Bolivia’s Minister of Economy and Public Finances, Mario Guillén, says that the nationalization of natural resources has been the fundamental pillar to understand the success of his country’s economic model.
Guillén added that this model allowed the State to appropriate the economic surplus, whose resources are invested in the construction of a productive-based economy and redistributed through population bonuses, public investment, wage increases and cross-subsidies to eradicate poverty and reduce the gaps between rich and poor.
In this way, domestic demand was boosted, which in a context of international economic crisis of high volatility and uncertainty has become the main engine of economic growth.
And notice the relevance of the system adopted, since in 2005, four out of every ten people lived in extreme poverty, without satisfying their basic food needs, but today this index has reduced by half, that is, only two out of every ten people still live in these conditions.
When Evo took began of the first term in 2006, the characteristics in Bolivia were citizen political insecurity, with great poverty, lack of education and attention to the health of the people, while the economy suffered indiscriminate looting.
From that year on, a series of measures were taken to nationalize productive, mining and service companies and wealth, and a stage began to leave behind more than two centuries of exploitation by foreign governments and transnational companies with the consent of the Creole oligarchies.
Previously, its main energy products and public companies created by the 1952 revolution had been privatized or sold at auction prices. This process increased between 1985 and 2005 during the neoliberal governments. During that period, the State ceased to control 70 percent of the productive activity and its main industry, Yacimientos Petrolíficos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), received royalties of only 18 percent from the transnationals.
By May 1, 2006, the hydrocarbon industry was nationalized and a retention policy was established for the sector, divided into 50 percent royalties, seven percent in recoverable profits from operating companies, YPFB, and payment of taxes and patents. In this way it was ensured that the State and the people obtained an income in the first six years of $12,424 million dollars, an average of 2,000 million dollars annually.
In addition, in these 13 years, the recovery of wealth and resources was promoted as an act of social, economic and political justice. This allowed poverty to be reduced and the family economy to be revitalized; a modernization of transportation was carried out with the launch of the longest cable car in the world. It has seven lines, 20 kilometers of travel and 125 million passengers transported since its inauguration, contributing additionally to the development of tourism.
One of the first tasks undertaken by the Plurinational State was to implement a program to eliminate the extreme ignorance of millions of Bolivians, with the help of Cuban and Venezuelan specialists. In 2010, UNESCO declared the country free of illiteracy.
There are many benefits and one of the main ones is that at the regional level Bolivia is no longer one of the poorest countries. The urban open unemployment rate fell substantially, from 8.1 percent in 2005 to 4.5 percent in 2017. GDP grew since 2006 at an average rate of 4.3 per cent, while social programmes were broad and varied.
The progress made by the Plurinational State in just 13 years is instructive. It would be prudent for other poor countries in Latin America to stop looking north and begin to adopt economic and social policies that help their citizens, as Bolivia has done.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
War Against the Weak is a well-documented book of more than half a thousand pages, written by Edwin Black. It describes a criminal operation planned by the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century and put into practice between the 1930’s and 1960s with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.
That U.S. campaign, virtually ignored in the world today because of the media cover up to which it has been subjected, served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jewish population carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Characters and institutions in politics and the economy that today are presented as respectable champions of democracy and respect for human rights, were involved in this genocide.
The book tells us that, in the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans labeled as feeble minded –because they did not conform to Teutonic patterns– were deprived of their right to reproduce.
Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages because of who their ancestorswere, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, they were sterilized without their consent, and prevented from procreating and getting married. They were separated from their partners by governmental bureaucratic means.
This pernicious white collar war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, prestigious professors in elite universities, wealthy businessmen, and senior government officials who formed a pseudoscientific movement called Eugenics Its purpose, beyond racism, was to create a superior Nordic race that would impose itself at global level.
The eugenics movement gradually built up a national legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to cleanse the United States of the “unfit.” Intelligence tests colloquially known as “IQ measurements” were invented to justify the exclusion of the “weak-minded”, who were often nothing more than shy people or persons who spoke another language, or who had a different skin color.
Forced sterilization laws were enacted in some 27 US states to prevent the persons so detected from reproducing. Marriage bans proliferated to prevent race mixing. Numerous lawsuits, whose real purpose was to impose eugenics and its tactics in everyday life, reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and several million more in other parts of the world so that, at a later stage, they could continue eradicating the rest of the “weak” and leave only the purebred Nordics on the planet.
In the 1930’s, some 60,000 people were coercively sterilized. and an incalculable number of marriages were banned by state laws stemming from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, covered with a mantle of respectable science.
Eugenics, whose objectives were global, was spread by U.S. evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America forming a well-woven network of movements with similar practices. By means of lectures, publications and other means, they kept its advocates on the lookout for opportunities for the expansion of their ideas and purposes.
Thus it arrived in Germany, where it fascinated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the U.S. search for a “superior Nordic race” into what was Hitler’s struggle for a “dominant Aryan race.”
Nazi eugenics quickly displaced American eugenics because of its fierceness and speed, as well as by the scientific rationality applied by the murderous doctors of Auschwitz. The process had been previously rehearsed at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenic Labs on Long Island, New York, with the financial support of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations in whose laboratories the eugenics experiments, that culminated in Auschwitz, began.
When the extermination of Jews was described as genocide in the Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. institutions linked to the practice of eugenics, it was renamed “genetics” and continued its sinister projects for more than a decade.
Edwin Black’s book, a jewel of investigative journalism, provides the reader with the possibility of seeing the common kinship and features of this tragic history with the circumstances the U.S. population faces today.
For electoral purposes, from the beginning of his election campaign, Donald Trump raised the “America First” slogan, backed up with many of his own manifestations of xenophobia, rejection of immigrants and proven identification with white supremacists. He did this within the scenario of deep political fragmentation of a country whose ruling elite has been able to keep the population focused on the naïve alternative between Democrats or Republicans.
Any similarity is pure coincidencidental!
December 31, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
In the course of next week, Correos de Cuba will put on sale in all its units and newsstands, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba that was approved in the Second Ordinary Session of the IX Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power, at the price of one peso in national currency.
Correos de Cuba will put on sale in the course of next week in all its units and press stands, to the extent that it is available in the provinces, the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba that was approved in the Second Ordinary Period of Sessions of the IX Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power.
The document will have a 16-page tabloid format and will be marketed through the national postal network at the price of one peso (CUP).
As reported, the new constitution will be submitted to popular referendum for ratification on February 24, 2019.
Institutional Communication Direction
Correos de Cuba Business Group
5 January 2019
Constitution of the Republic of Cuba in PDF
This note translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American writer, broadcaster and political commentator characterized –because of his ideological orientation—as fascist and ultraconservative. He began his political career with Richard Nixon and then went on to work as senior advisor to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
He ran several times for the presidency of the United States. In 1982, he began working on the TV show Buchanan-Braden sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and became a main voice with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News until 2012, when he was kicked out for racist.
With such a resume, one understands why Pat Buchanan asks, on December 18, on his official website, “Could the United States carry out a Cold War containment policy against the other two existing military powers, while maintaining its defense commitments with dozens of countries around the world? And if we could, how long could we keep on doing it, and at what price?
His doubts are based on three arguments:
“Firstly: because we have repeatedly intervened militarily in the Middle East where no vital U.S. interest was in danger, and got trapped in the eternal war of that Muslim region.
“Secondly: for having extended NATO’s alliance to Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic, thus triggering a Second Cold War with Russia.
“And thirdly: because the United States had been supporting China for decades, before acknowledging that it was turning into a superpower whose ambitions in Asia and the Pacific could only be achieved at the expense of countries friendly to the US.”
The question now being asked by Buchanan is different: Can the United States carry out a Cold War containment policy against the other two great military powers of our time, while maintaining its Cold War commitments to dozens of countries all over the world? And, if so, for how long can we keep on doing it, and at what price?
“Very late has the American establishment become aware,” says Buchanan, “of the historical madness of having accompanied China on the world stage trying to buy their lasting friendship with the sale of trillions of dollars of our trade surpluses from Bush to today.”
For Buchanan, the problem lies in the fact that China has not reciprocated properly to US courtship, and not in the impressive boom that the Asian giant has been achieving without the suffocation it had experienced at the hands of the West until the end of the Cold War.
“Beijing has reaffirmed its sovereignty over the South China Sea. It has built air and missile bases on half a dozen islets in dispute; and has warned U.S. ships and airplanes to stay away.
“China has built and leased ports and bases from the Indian Ocean to Africa. It lent billions to poor countries in Asia and Africa, such as the Maldives, and then when these nations could not fulfil with the debts contracted, China demanded compliance with the commitments undertaken as a basis to build their facilities.”
China has sent hundreds of thousands of students to colleges and universities in the United States, and Buchanan says that many of them have devoted themselves to espionage.
Buchanan accuses China of all the evils the capitalist system has been facing on a global scale. He says Beijing kept its currency below its market value to maintain its trading advantage and attract U.S. corporations to China where, he thinks, they’re pressured to transfer their technological secrets to China.
Among other things, he blames China for taking part in the cyber theft of millions of personnel files of U.S. federal applicants and employees and the credit card and passports numbers of millions of US hotel guests the world over for years; and even for the cyber-security beaches that facilitated the theft of data on the United States F-22 and F-35 aircraft, information which is believed to have played an important role in the development of the fifth generation of Beijing combat fighters.
For decades,” says Buchanan, “we have been funding the development of a China whose ambition is to drive us out of East Asia and the Eastern Pacific, and replace us as the first power in the world.”
However, Washington’s commitment to China has failed and has the US facing a new adversary with a population and an economy ten times larger than those of Russia
.
December 20, 2018.
This article can be reproduced quoting journal POR ESTO as its source.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
There was a moment, between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the Great Recession of 2008, when, in the great United States, optimism about the global spread of US-style liberalism reigned.
It was believed at the time that the United States could use its economic, military, and political superiority to shape a new world order in which their manipulated versions of democracy, human rights, economic interdependence among nations and long-lasting peace would prevail.
During those years, many new members were admitted to NATO and the European Union.
The perspective that Boris Yeltsin’s Russia would become a neoliberal “democracy,” was considered a close possibility. And it was thought that China would be a “responsible” player in the international community.
But now, “we live in a completely different time,” says Stephen Walt in his new book entitled “The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy”, where he analyzes the spirit of today’s times.
The forecasts on the dissipation of the pre-eminence of the United States have become routine. Anti-liberal — left and right wing– parties and movements (many of the latter xenophobic) — have emerged all over Europe. Britain’s departure from the European Union is near.
Globalization is facing a violent reaction and intolerant nationalism is moving forward from Brasilia to Budapest.
Walt’s assessments about the US foreign policy after the Cold War, describe it as “visible failures without great achievements” and consider that, regarding both the general condition of the world, as well as Washington’s status within it, have declined significantly and steadily between 1993 and 2006.”
The liberal internationalist agenda is attractive, but according to Walt it is based on three erroneous assumptions.
(1) The first is that other countries would embrace liberalism mirroring the US style, despite the world’s political and cultural diversity.
(2) The second — which is widely shared by those responsible for U.S. foreign policy and influential members of the media, academia, and think tanks– is that the US could successfully promote democratic policies all over the world thanks to unipolarity. The democracy-building programs of alleged non-governmental organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the US National Fund for Democracy and the International Republican Institute arose from this belief. And when tougher measures are required, the foreign policy establishment considers that the U.S. military strength can defeat despotic regimes, win hearts and minds, and impose democratic policies.
(3) The third assumption underlying liberal internationalism is that the end of the Cold War will end up rendering the political balance of power obsolete, along with spheres of influence, and the nationalism based on blood, soil and faith.
For Walt, these assumptions constitute a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces that shape the world and, therefore, will inevitably lead to failure.
He believes that the madness and fiascos of the last twenty-five years have been a result of the blind commitment of this endogamy system with liberal internationalism: a vision of the world that unites Democrats and Republicans and Liberals and Conservatives alike, and that was adopted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
During these three presidencies, the supposed leader was the United States, which, for reasons of principle and self-interest, had to use its unequal power to spread liberal values all over the world. In practice, this meant designing a world in which the majority of the world’s countries — ideally all—would embrace the US pattern of “democratic” ideals, human rights, global governance, markets and rule of law.
Such an international order would not only preserve the preponderance of the United States but would also be safer. Such a belief has been fundamental for the credo of liberal internationalists because “democracies” do not make war against their peers nor do they massacre their citizens or produce bloodshed and agitation that can culminate in civil wars and broken states.
Despite the billions of dollars spent on its promotion, the US model “democracy” failed in 27 states between 2005 and 2015.
December 6, 2018.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation, edited by Walter Lippmann.
In a few years, it’s metastasized to every continent. Its fervent advocates and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In Italy, Germany or Spain in the 1930s, they called it by its name: Fascism. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Franco in Spain were bloodthirsty tenors of the symphony orchestra of capitalism.
By the time when, in 1945, Russia and the Western allies put an end to the collective psychosis induced by fascism, between 68 and 80 million people had already been killed in the world.
This is how French journalist, analyst, and filmmaker Gilbert Mercier recounts it in a work — published on the News Junkie Post website –devoted to the analysis of this surprising political phenomenon that has been spreading out throughout several countries, to the shame and fear of human kind.
“Neo-fascists have wrapped themselves in the flag of populism and nationalism and have falsely convinced their supporters that they are the champions of the struggle against globalism, elitism and the corruption of the neoliberal political system.
However, they are ferocious defenders of the capitalist dogfight, and its abject systematic exploitation of the working class. They enthusiastically support the global military-industrial complex, as well as the meaningless capitalist exploitation of natural resources through deforestation and mining.
For the neo-fascists, just as for the capitalists, wealth has to be concentrated in fewer hands, and their money must circulate across borders without restrictions, even though ordinary people can’t do this with theirs.”
Some of its leaders, like Trump and Bolsonaro, were elected mainly
on the false premise and racist notion of cultural war and clash of civilizations. That is, the mythical threat that, in an already multi-ethnic world, immigrants and outsiders –often with darker skins or with another religion– represent a present danger to the host countries.
Neo-fascists have been erecting mental walls of hatred in Europe and America.
The global proliferation of neo-fascism is a new way of ideological globalization; and global capitalism is counting on it.
For example, once it became evident that Bolsonaro would be elected president of Brazil, that country’s stock market rose by 13% in two weeks, while the main international markets were dropping.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has already put Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in the neo-fascist hit-list of his agenda. He called these countries the “troika of tyranny”.
Bolton is counting on Colombia and Brazil as the new regional fascist accomplices of U.S. imperialism to enforce a resurrected Monroe Doctrine.
In the United States and Brazil, the evangelical Christian vote was a paramount factor in the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro.
“The born-again Christian fundamentalists in the United States are concentrated mainly in the former Civil War Confederate states of the South.”
These evangelical fundamentalist communities, to a great extent, reject evolution, secularism, and the reality that climate change is human-made. Many in these communities believe that the US should be a Christian state. These fundamentalists are the most reliable voting block for Trump, just as they were for George W. Bush.
Behind the curtains, very well-financed right-wing fundamentalist think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have been moving the world’s threads since the early 1970s.
Bolsonaro in Brazil was raised as a Catholic, but he became an Evangelical
This could be interpreted as a foresighted opportunistic and cynical political move. It was the evangelical voting bloc that gave him the advantage over his opponent during the presidential elections in October 2018.
The emergence of global fascism offers a gloomier perspective for the survival of humanity. Like Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, neo-fascists deny climate change. The latter could design a dangerously destructive strategy for the Amazon, which can be considered the breathing lung of the Earth because of its ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
The super-rich who control global capitalism will give free rein to their fascist substitutes to increase and use a mass military-police force to repress the billions of people who become climate change refugees and victims of the ecological collapse.
Despite its predictions –handled discreetly by the Pentagon — that climate change is becoming a national security problem; climate change will be the endgame for capitalism. All the gold and diamonds in the world will neither stop the storms, nor protect the atmosphere from the deadly rays of a scorching sun.
December 10, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
by Francisco Rodriguez Cruz, aka, Paquito
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Almost coinciding with the celebration on December 4 of the ninth anniversary of my blog, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Association (Ilga) has just given me the surprise of posting in its official pages an interview where I am presented as a defender of human rights in Cuba.
Sometimes one is afraid of the use of terms whose political manipulation in relation to our country leads us to murky and ungratifying stories with which on many occasions they tried to tarnish, and even attack, what was done by the Cuban Revolution in terms of equality of rights and social equity.
However, it is possible and very desirable to defend human rights in Cuba, because we also have a long way to go on that essential path. To do so implies a critical stance towards what has been achieved and what we lack, and when we do it with total honesty, it means that we are uncomfortable people both for the system’s propagandists at all costs, whether out of conviction or for the safeguard of some privileges, and for the recalcitrant enemies of socialism, who disguise their not at all altruistic interests with the labels of opponents or dissidents.
And this distancing does not imply any intermediate positioning. I don’t believe in centers or neutrality. Centrism and extremism are in politics only ways of masking or procuring benefits, most of the time with motivations in the individualistic background. Like everything else in life, these are statements that may require nuances. Nothing is absolute, especially in matters of subjectivities and filiations.
As I reached 48 years of age with nothing material to safeguard, I am free to say what I think and to do what I want, with all the responsibility that I am able, based on what I feel and believe to be fairer, to contribute to the collective well-being of LGBTI people and also of my homeland in its broadest sense. It’s my very particular idea about being a militant and a communist.
That’s what the nine years of this blog are all about. Thank you, Ilga, again. I will try to be consistent with this new label that I am given and that I consider being still very big: defender of human rights in Cuba.
Here’s the video:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpYhjb4v1JU&feature=youtu.be
I am Francisco Rodríguez Cruz, also known as Paquito, from Cuba; I am a Marti follower and an author; I am a communist and gay journalist; I am a convinced and superstitious atheist; I am the father of a son whom I have adored and have been a partner for fifteen years with a seronegative man who loves me; I have been an AIDS patient since 2003 and am a survivor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for more than twelve years; I am a university professor and a student of life; a follower of Cuban economic issues and a passionate devourer of universal literature; an incontinent and belligerent moderate; a friend of my friends and a compassionate friend of my enemies; often wrong and never repentant; a hardened and eternal enthusiastic optimist; alive and kicking; in short, another ordinary man who wants to share his story, opinions and desires with you…
M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
29 | 30 |
You must be logged in to post a comment.