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Showing posts with the label belgium

Going Back to Class. Yes. But.

Peter is emphatic that a focus on class politics means organising the working class in all its diversity. He contrasts the position taken by the PTB with that of Sahra Wagenknecht, who split off from Die Linke in Germany to form the anti-migration BSW Party. ‘I’m not happy with their tendency, this kind of socialism and chauvinism combined, because they are locking themselves up inside of Germany…  And I think that the basic thing of the Left is to empower people, to make them proud, to make them feel part of something again, part of a bigger history, a bigger collectivity, a class, a movement that they can be proud of.’ It sounds a new and promising leftist experience. Note though that there is not a single internationalist mention/discussion. Is class only national? 

Belgium’s Role in Rwandan Genocide

Individual or institutional subscription is required to access the article. “The Tutsi notables, who had come to believe in the superiority the Belgians attributed to them, became tools of the colonial administration, responsible for assigning forced labour and punishments. Only Tutsi children had access to education. The colonisers and missionaries unpicked the fabric of the Rwandan nation, even issuing identity cards that recorded the bearer’s ‘ethnicity’. A revolt by smallholder farmers, directed not against the Belgian colonial administration but against Tutsi notables and officials. This ‘social revolution’ was supported by the colonial regime’s top-ranking official. Independence, declared in 1962, was presented as a victory for ordinary people. The Tutsis’ huts were burned, and 300,000 fled into exile. Until 1990 the Belgians supported the Hutus, in the belief that the ethnic majority was also the political majority.  When war broke out on the Ugandan border in October 1990, ...

Western Europe

"Snapshot data from varying official sources shows that in Italy, Spain, France,  Ireland  and Belgium between 42% and 57% of deaths from the virus have been happening in homes, according to the report by academics based at the London School of Economics (LSE)." Half of coronavirus deaths happen in care homes