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It sounds a good book

by Siyǎvash Shahabi Just look at the size of this crowd. These are people who came out fully aware of the risks—live bullets, arrest, even death. This presence is not random, not emotional, and not the result of some outside call. It is a conscious decision by people who feel they have nothing left to lose except humiliation and silence. Anyone who reduces the anger and uprising of Iranians to “foreign interference” or to “Pahlavi” is either not stupid but knowingly lying, or is a racist who does not want Iranians to deserve freedom, dignity, and the right to decide their own future. Or worse, they are someone cheering from afar, treating the clash between East and West like a Colosseum spectacle—applauding a gladiator fight while real people’s lives, futures, and deaths mean nothing to them. Our lives as Iranians cannot be reduced to this naive and stupid “East versus West” binary. We are not pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, and we are not tools for settling power struggles. The p...

An analysis by Eric Toussaint The international policy doctrine made public by the White House in early December 2025 is not simply a temporary shift in US foreign policy but the logical outcome of a process that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century in the context of the ’new Cold War.’. Under Donald Trump, this orientation takes on an unprecedented ideological form that is openly  predatory, violent, reactionary, authoritarian, and neo-fascist . Where previous administrations combined the exercise of imperialist violence with deeply hypocritical liberal and humanitarian rhetoric, the Trump administration has broken with this façade. Human rights, social rights, the protection of migrants, the self-determination of peoples and even the minimal reference to multilateralism have completely disappeared from official strategic discourse. They have been replaced by a worldview based on ’God-given natural rights,’ the absolute sovereignty of dominant states, the hierarc...

Trump’s bellicose language at face value – including  claims  that the US wants “to take back the oil … we should’ve taken back a long time ago” – can cause us to miss some of the deeper dynamics at play in the US invasion. Oil is unquestionably key to understanding what is going on, but in ways that go far beyond the direct control of Venezuela’s crude reserves. A must-read analysis by Adam Hanieh

Capital accumulation and political economic interests know no colour or religion.

A sharp critique of  Hamid Dabashi’s   After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization The first essential question arises:  What, exactly, is the West?  Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors. The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon —  “white civilisation.”  But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior? Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not  explain  power; it  assigns  essence. Instead of asking  which institutions, with...

“ Western media are flooded with different stories about Iran . It is hardly surprising that we are once again seeing a wave of racist and deeply stupid analyses that serve the far right and erase the agency of the Iranian people. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last. The West seems incapable of looking at countries like Iran without a racist lens.”

History should be taught as the history of the rise of civilization, and not as the history of this nation or that. It should be taught from the point of view of mankind as a whole, and not with undue emphasis upon one’s own country.  Children should learn that every country has committed crimes and that most crimes were blunders. They should learn how mass hysteria can drive a whole nation into folly and into persecution of the few who are not swept away by the prevailing madness. They should be shown movies of foreign countries in which the children, though aliens, would be enjoying much the same pleasures, and suffering much the same sorrows, as those enjoyed and suffered by children at home. —Bertrand Russell, What Is Democracy? A Background Book, published by the Batchworth Press (1953), Reprinted and revised in Fact and Fiction (1961), pp. 78-110

According to the film critic Joseph Fahim,  “should you decide to do the unthinkable and watch any of the following titles , consider this your sole advisory: proceed with caution.”

An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival. The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep ...

“We are betraying everything we claim to believe in.” It implies we were once faithful to high values and principles. That is a liberal approach, not a fact.

A different perspective by Richard Seymour

Trump did not hide that a major reason for the attack and kidnapping of Maduro was aimed at putting the US in control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves , described as “our oil” by Trump. However, there are other factors behind Trump’s move against Venezuela.  The new  National Security Strategy  makes it clear: the Monrow doctrine of the 1820s is back on steroids.  Back then, President Monroe declared that European nations must not interfere or try to control Latin America, as this was now the ‘sphere of influence’ for the United States of America.  Now under Trump, globalisation has given way to ‘Making America Great Again’ by firmly establishing Latin America as the US imperialism’s backyard.  That means no country can be allowed to resist US policy and interests.  ‘Friendly regimes’ must be installed to enable both privileged American use of resources and the ability to deny those to competitors. That means growing Chinese influence and investme...

The classic mindset of the “neoliberalised left.” Inside the United States, the crisis is reduced to a few violations, a few instances of lawbreaking, or a handful of limited reforms—as if making the process “legal” automatically means power itself has been restrained. The same intellectual currents that, at home, strike an anti-corruption moral pose and limit the debate to legal procedures, show up internationally with vague “anti-imperialist” slogans—without any serious analysis of capital, state power, and global hegemony. The truth that should be kept in full view is deliberately removed: capital is not just markets and companies. Capital is organised political power. Hegemony m eans the ability to set the world’s agenda—to decide what counts as “legitimate,” what is “illegal”,  what is “security,” what is “terrorism,” and who has the right to use force and who does not. The logic of rebuilding empire

The  devaluation  of the world of men is in direct proportion to the  increasing value  of the world of things. — Karl Marx, 1844

Donald Trump are an extension of a long US tradition of interference in the region . Related Rogue State by William Blum on the CIA website

This was published about three months before the ongoing protests.  An article available in 4 languages “ The present crisis is the combined result of past political choices, climate constraints, and economic pressures exacerbated by international sanctions and regional tensions, to which is now added the very real threat of military escalation. For much of the population, this everyday life fuels a feeling of injustice and the constant bitterness of a future with no prospects. Are the absence of ambitious structural reforms and the persistence of external tensions not liable to threaten the country’s internal security and trigger a major internal crisis   ?”

Notice that there is not a single mention of the political economy of refugee. “Fleeing for their lives” and “be returned to a place of danger.” Economic and environmental factors are completely ignored. Thus, the regression is not only in the 'traditional' rights , which have been enshrined in conventions since the end of WWII, but in leaving out new structural factors that compel people to flee one country and seek a better life in another out of the discussion.  The ruling classes in rich nation-states want to maintain their interests, mainly electoral interests, and ‘stability’ by containing the growth of ethno-nationalist movements , adopting some of their demands, and some cases even defections of politicians from the mainstream parties to far right ones.

Kenya’s parliament has accused British soldiers that were stationed at the British Army Training Unit in Kenya (BATUK) base of decades of sexual assaults, killings, maimings, the abandonment of children, human rights violations and environmental destruction. A 94-page report follows a two-year inquiry into accusations surrounding BATUK. The report suggests that the base used dangerous substances like white phosphorus in its field exercises, resulting in serious health and environmental impacts for the local community. The investigating panel also accused the soldiers of refusing to cooperate with the investigation, claiming diplomatic immunity. As Jean-Christophe Servant wrote in 2022 : ‘BATUK, which has been stationed in Kenya since 1964 and trains up to 4,000 British infantry a year, long enjoyed diplomatic immunity, but this ended in 2016 when Nairobi and London renewed their five-year defence agreement. Justice [Antonina Cossy] Bor was the first to follow through on the implication...

“The number of people who believe “Britishness” is something you are born with has almost doubled in two years, according to research that warns of a rising tide of ethno-nationalism in Britain. “Although a majority of the public still believe being British is rooted in shared values, a growing proportion see it as a product of ethnicity, birthplace and ancestry, according to analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and shared with the Guardian. “About one-third of people (36%) thought a person must be born British to be truly British, up from one in five (19%) in 2023, a YouGov poll carried out this month for the thinktank found. “Supporters of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK held the most  extreme views  of any party backers, with 71% saying that having British ancestry was a prerequisite for someone to be truly British, and 59% saying they believed the nation was an ethnic, not a civic, community.“