Category: World

The Ukrainian presidential elections resulted in a TV actor beating the incumbent (Petro Poroshenko) and a third-time candidate for president (Yulia Tymoshenko) into second and third places, respectively.
The first round of the Ukrainian elections was won by Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor, with no previous political experience – unless you include playing an anti-corruption campaigner who becomes president in a satirical TV show.
The election of Zelensky is yet another sign of the willingness of the working class to stray from the well-worn path the ruling elites would have them follow. Zelensky, however, is no anti-corruption superhero. His campaign was supported and partially funded by one of the many oligarchs who use their financial clout to try and wield political power in Ukraine. This support from Igor Kolomoisky, who owns a Ukrainian TV channel, casts a shadow over Zelensky’s anti-corruption credentials.
The incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, is himself a chocolate magnate and ranks among the wealthiest people in Ukraine. And Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and presidential candidate, was at one time one of the richest people in the country as a result of her activities in the gas industry.
The rejection of these establishment characters by the Ukrainian working class is an indication of their growing impatience with the high-level corruption in Ukrainian government circles. The fact that they would rather vote for a TV comedian than their current president or their former prime minister is a measure of the contempt felt by ordinary working people for the political elite.
For a truly effective anti-corruption regime to be established in Ukraine they may need to return to the soviet election system, as it was first established in 1905 and 1917 – in which elected representatives do not serve a fixed term but can be recalled and forced to stand for re-election by their constituents at any time. Putting political power back into the hands of the working class, as it was briefly following the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, is a big step, and will require more than the current protest vote for Zelensky. He is not the saviour he portrays in the television series.
Taking political power into the hands of the working class will require a social revolution, and the expropriation of the oligarchs who have been robbing the country for decades. Ukraine is in a uniquely fortunate position as the social ownership of the country’s greatest manufacturing assets is a recent memory for the working class. But it will require democratic workers’ control those assets to prevent them becoming under the control of a political bureaucracy with its own agenda.

The media are hailing Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France as a victory for their own bourgeois-liberal agenda. But analysis of the results gives a very different picture.

Macron is a former merchant banker who was recruited by the reformist President Hollande to the position of Finance Minister. The idea that he could attract the support of the majority of working class voters and French youth is laughable. In fact 3 million voters cast blank ballot papers, and a further million spoiled their papers. So about an eights of everyone who cast their votes actively participated in the election just to say ‘A curse on both their houses’.

The abstainers were also notable. More people decided not to vote than in any presidential election in nearly fifty years. The last time so many abstained was in the aftermath of the 1968 revolutionary actions when the right wing had suppressed a rising by workers and youth.

The media may crow about a resounding victory for the centrist consensus. But it is more a case of a defeat for neo-fascism.

You can be sure a lot of the workers who cast their vote for Macron were actually casting their vote for the only candidate left standing against the neo-fascist Marie Le Pen. When the Left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon was narrowly eliminated in the previous round, opponents of Marie Le Pen were left with the choice of abstaining, voting for Macron or spoiling their ballot paper.

Melenchon had stood on a platform of opposing austerity (or ‘cuts’ as I prefer to call it), calling for withdrawal from the EU and extending workers’ rights. He came within 2 percentage points of defeating Marie Le Pen. And that would have left Macron campaigning for cutbacks and attacks on workers’ rights against Melenchon’s anti-austerity rhetoric.

The French working class did not vote for Macron. To the extent that he got any votes from French workers, they were voting against fascism.

Macron now has the daunting task of trying to impose his neo-liberal programme on the French working class. With youth unemployment standing at around 24% he may find he is sitting on an explosive situation.

What a crock of s**t to describe 2016 as the start of “post-truth” politics.

The Oxford English Dictionary is reported to have said that “post-truth” is their word of the year. In the Washington Post they commented: It’s official: Truth is dead. Facts are passe.

What world do you live in, where the pre-2016 establishment-sanctioned zeitgeist is “the truth”? The only thing that has happened in 2016 is that millions of working people have shown that they do not accept the world view that has been foisted on them for decades.

The capitalist media are incandescnt that the public are not believing what the capitalist media want them to believe. And with the arrogance that only an establishment incapable of accepting any other truth apart from their own can hold, they patronise the non-believers. They are ignorant. They are uneducated. They are the great unwashed. How dare they have the effrontery to hold beliefs that have not been handed down to them by the great and the good.

The main examples of this post-truth reality the Washington Post cites are the UK referendum on membership of the EU, and the US presidential election.

I am one of those great unwashed who voted for the UK to leave the European Union. The believers in capitalist propaganda would have you believe that I, and millions of people like me, voted out of ignorance. We were led astray by the lies of the official Leave campaign. We swallowed every lie. Because we are stupid. The truth did not matter to us, what mattered was our emotions or our personal beliefs.

The Oxford dictionary definition of post-truth says it means – relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

In their bitterness at losing the referendum, many politicians who campaigned for Remain blame the loss on lies told by the Leave campaign. At the same time they believe that the Leave voters were predominantly the non-metropolitan, predominantly Labour-voting working class. And yet they suggest that this caricature of Labour working-class flat-cap wearing socialist-loving voters were seduced by the lies of the Leave campaign.

But the Leave campaign was dominated by right-wing Tory politicians. Boris Johnson is known to the whole world as a far-right self-serving ambitious opportunist. Do you think your flat cap wearing caricatures of a Labour voter listen to Tory demagogues? Only if you assume they are stupid, ignorant or both.

I do not think you can characterise 17 million people with a few broad brush strokes like that. But I can definitely speak for myself. And I can definitively say that nothing that came out of Boris Johnson’s mouth, or out of MIchael Gove’s lips, had the slightest influence on my voting decision.

In fact, in discussion with other Leave voters (voters whose views differ from my own on many issues) one thing was clear – they were more likely to have been influenced negatively by the pronouncements of the Remain campaign than they were to listen to Gove and Johnson. Because if David Cameron opened his mouth, you knew he was lying. If George Osborne uttered a word, it was a false word.

Post-truth is not the correct word for what is happening now, either in the UK or in Europe. To call it post-truth, you have to believe that what was happening before 2016 was truth. It never was. Working people are becoming increasingly aware that both sides of the mainstream political divide are liars. If they reject your lies, you call it post-truth.

There is something Orwellian about that.

They say Americans do not do irony. And of course, they do. But the CIA, on the other hand….

When the US foreign intelligence agency issues press releases about the (shock/horror) attempts by the Russian government to influence the recent presidential campaigns, the irony is lost on them

The CIA have been trying to influence democratic elections all over the world for as long as they have been in existence. The most recent and most blatant example is their involvement in Iraq and Syria. Who decided what kind of democratic institutions would be set up after their illegal invasion of Iraq?

And it was their attempts to destabilise the government of Ukraine that clearly demonstrate their willingness to promote a foreign movement which the USA thinks it can profit from. They admit to spending over $5 billion in Ukraine trying to ensure the government there came into the western sphere of influence. They decline to say where the money was spent. They call it “supporting democratic institutions”. But the democratic institutions they supported are whichever ones were working towards the overturn of the Yanukovich government. $5 billion. To quote Victoria Nuland, the money was spent to help the Ukranian people “in their search for justice, human dignity, security, a return to economic health, and for the European future they have chosen and that they deserve.” Taking sides in an internal political dispute in a foreign country, and funding those who the US sees as acting in its interests. That is what the CIA does. When it is not assassinating foreign heads of state.

There are too many examples of CIA interference to list. The most egregious, like the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, resulted in thousands of deaths, torture victims and people ‘disappeared’. No twinges of conscience from the CIA about that success for USA foreign policy.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

How much of a surprise was it to find that Donald Trump had been elected president?

To be honest, it was less of a surprise to me this week than I would have thought a couple of weeks ago. Watching from the UK, I could not envisage how or why Trump stood a chance in hell. Arrogance. Bombast. Racism. Foul-mouthed misogynism. Failed business man and tax avoider. Surely no-one in their right mind would vote for this jackass?

But as his polling continued to show him within spitting distance of Clinton, despite all his negatives, it gradually started to dawn on me just how hated was Hillary Clinton. From this distance, it looks like a large section of the US electorate look on Clinton as corrupt. And that corruption is not just that she is in the pockets of the filthy rich, which she undoubtedly is. If that were her main negative, it would be ironic if she were beaten by a man who actually was himself one of the filthy rich.

It seems that many ordinary USA citizens are angry with the existing system. Just like here in the UK, they have been told that the worst of the economic crisis is over. Things are getting better, we hear. Hold on there and just watch everything improve. Wait, and trust us. Some of the pundits have described Trump voters as ‘the left behind’. And that has a ring of truth.

Since World War Two the USA has been run by two parties who differ only in minutiae. We do not trust them. And there is definitely an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. When everyone in the media, all the established politicians, economists, ‘expert’ think tankers and foreign leaders all agree, you begin to think they must be wrong.

This election is not a vindication of Trump. It is a repudiation of everything Hillary Clinton stands for.

And therein lies the positive aspect to the situation. In a country where working people have had to choose between two capitaist parties, there has been no choice. So the people have rejected the existing order. Admittedly, the only channel they were afforded to express that rejection was an insincere narcissist with absolutely nothing in common with the people who used him as a battering ram against the status quo. But that was the only tool they had. And they used it.

For people who want to see the end of capitalism and the beginning of a socialist economy and a socially equitable society, the message is clear. We need leaders who represent what we really want. If that means creating a new Workers’ Party in the USA (and in the UK for that matter) then so be it.

Where are the revolutionary bolsheviks when you need them?

The action taken by Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship, in executing 47 dissidents and opponents on January 2, has caused an outcry across the world. The focus of the media reporting has been on protestations from Shia leaders, particularly in the Middle East. And in doing so they fan the flames of Shia-Sunni sectarianism.

For the capitalist media, it is all about relegious sectarianism.

Yet Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent person to be executed, was a member of a Shia minority in Saudi Arabia who also spoke out against Shia dictators like Bashr al-Assad in Syria. Shia decries Shia? Not the message the capitalist press want to promulgate. Whatever his views were, and I am no expert on the man, his was obviously not just an outright pro-Shia, anti-Sunni position. But the media have an agenda of their own, and it includes reporting middle eastern politics in terms of Shia-Sunni conflict, and not along nationalist, class or other divisions.

And while the condemnation of Saudi Arabia continues, the vocal silence of the US and UK governments on this act of barbarity by their treasured ally speaks volumes. The US and UK governments have no right to speak of human rights and defending liberties, when they continue to provide political and military support to the regime of King Salman, the Saudi dictator. Just a few weeks ago the media were telling us about democratic progress, when women were permitted to participate and vote in elections for some ineffectual local government bodies. Coming so soon after David Cameron’s fawning sycophancy during Salman’s state visit to the UK, the UK prime minister must have thought it was a great PR coup for Salman to look so ‘democratic’ in the media.

The reality of the Saudi dictatorship is that under Salman executions have increased dramatically. In fact, on 2 January, in a single day, Salman executed 47 people. That is more than half the number executed by his predecessor, King Abdullah, in the whole of 2014. And the total number of executions in 2015 was a 20-year high for the dictatorship.

Meanwhile western politicians and press continue to regale us with stories of the barbarity of ISIS; the ‘barbaric cult’ behead people. The dictator Salman’s regime executes people in precidely the same mannner – beheading with a sword. But the word ‘barbaric’ has not been used by our so-called representatives in relation to this act.

LIke ISIS, the Saudi dictatorship resorts to barbaric methods to defend its regime. Take the example of Sheikh al-Nimr’s nephew, Ali, who took part in an anti-government political rally at the age of 17. He has been found guilty and sentenced to death by crucifixion.

So much less barbaric than those devils in ISIS.

It was reported today that the Taleban had taken over another area of Afghanistan – Takhar province, which lies on the border with Tajikistan. Almost as an aside, the report mentioned that the district had been hit by an earthquake earlier in the week. The quake was 7.5 magnitude, and at least 300 people died, some in Takhar province, but most in Pakistan.

I don’t recall any mention of 300 people dying in an earthquake in the news this week. They must have been foreigners; hardly worth mentioning.