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Afghanistan: Humanitarian Catastrophe

“The UN has forecast that Afghanistan’s gross domestic product will contract 20 per cent within a year following the Taliban’s takeover of the country, representing one of the worst economic meltdowns in history. Such a contraction took five years of civil war in Syria to achieve, and was expected to worsen to 30 per cent next year. The UNDP said aid accounted for as much as 80 per cent of budget expenditure. The UNDP estimates that the loss of female employment could cost up to $1bn, or 5 per cent, of GDP, and slash productivity.” Source: the Financial  Times
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Democratic Socialism in Honduras?

Can a poor country establish democratic socialism? Would imperialism, especially American imperialism, tolerate it at its backyard? Is Honduras an alternative to the Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ or is it just a continuation of changing horses between the right and the left? One of the good outcomes in Honduras is a confirmation that the question is not about more ‘women’ occupying high positions in state and government, but about the colour, the ideology and socio-economic programme of the ‘woman’. “I believe firmly that the democratic socialism I propose is the solution to pull Honduras out of the abyss we have been buried in by neoliberalism, a narco-dictator and corruption.”  – Xiomara Castro
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They Do ‘Human-Trafficking’, We Drive People Into the Sea

‘What the Belarus regime is doing is basically human trafficking,’ a French government spokesman said on 10 November. A few days later, interior minister Gérald Darmanin ordered French police to dismantle the migrant camps outside Calais and Grande-Synthe; they slashed the tents with knives. And on 24 November, 27 migrants drowned trying to cross the Channel. Is that a crime difficult to solve?
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The Undesirable and the ‘Civilised’ Nation State

Dunkirk’s camps
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Blowbacks by Mehdi Hasan

Caution: This is not to say that blowbacks are exclusively consequences of external forces – Israel and Western powers. Local socio-economic context as well as political factors and balance of forces also played a role, converged or intersected with external players. How Israel went from creating Hamas to bombing it Related My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas
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Counter-Counter Revolution

Some of the arguments in this review are very interesting. Here is one of them. “If you had told someone at the start of 1975 that the architects of the new age were going to be the  MP  for Finchley [Margaret Thatcher] , the bishop of Krakow [ Pope John Paul  II] , the exiled ayatollah [ Khomeini]  and the ostracised apparatchik [ Deng Xiaoping , you would have been laughed at. Apart from anything, they looked so powerless. So we shouldn’t be surprised if we can’t yet spot who is going to make the difference this time round. What we’re waiting for is the counter-counter-revolution, led by progressives who have learned the lessons from the age of neoliberalism and are unafraid to make use of its instruments in order to overthrow them. Plenty have started trying. Someone will get there in the end and maybe by the end of the decade we will discover who. But it is unlikely to be anyone near a position of power right now.”
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UK Rail Network

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The ‘Civilised’ Defending Themselves from Aliens

‘British troops to help at Poland-Belarus border’ ‘Polish forces tear-gas migrants at Belarus border’ ‘Poland to build border wall to stop migrant influx’ ‘Freezing to death on the edge of the EU’ The sad fact is that we have become immune to the suffering of other people unless they are pets or useful material. After all, they are not white Belarusians fleeing ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’.
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