Dr Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of ‘justifying terrorism’ in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
In this speech, Shawki describes the need for a sharp break from the narrow perspectives shared by most small revolutionary socialist organizations of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s (and the vast majority, including the ISO, were very small) as necessary to break out from the margins of sectarianism, so that older generations of revolutionaries could reach out to newly radicalizing layers of people.
On the evening of November 22, armed police stormed Vargas’ house, arrested him, and took him to an undisclosed prison. Vargas is a public and well-known critic of the personalist dictatorship of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo
The Iranian football team refused to sing their national anthem before their opening match at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar on November 21, in solidarity with mass protests that have followed the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody—for not wearing her hijab “appropriately”.
A political activist and public intellectual with a master’s degree in Nicaraguan history, Dora María Téllez has been recognized nationally and internationally for her publications and her political and civic activism in favor of democracy.
Revelations of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay persisted as the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan continued, while the U.S. sent “suspects” to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured, a procedure it sanitized with the label “rendition”.
Here, we reprint an editorial from the International Socialist Review examining NATO’s sustained bombing of the former Yugoslavia for more than two months in 1999, when civilians again paid the price.
However shocking, these events shouldn’t surprise us. In the last few years, our sense of what is politically “normal” has been stretched.
