Politics

Photograph: Lalo Alcaraz / Universal Uclick. There are various ways of coming at this. We can definitely do smart readings of Trump’s own rhetoric and show very direct indebtedness to well-known fascist or neo-Nazi tropes and ideas. The fact that Trump tweets this or that Nazi slogan or uses language the Nazis used definitely is significant. But in the end the more structural question seems more important. That is, what kind of situation makes fascism feasible and appealing? If we think of fascism as a type of politics that wants to suppress and even kill its opponents rather than arguing with them, that prefers an authoritarian state over democracy, and that pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that prioritizes difference – if we accept that definit...

By Michael Shrimpton  With a number of distractions around, including the likelihood of a short war in the Ukraine and the slow but steady collapse of the Johnson government in Britain, I’ve had to push this subject back. However I’m an intelligence historian and don’t just cover current affairs. Moreover the lessons of the JFK assassination have relevance nearly six decades later, indeed the failure to identify who was responsible for President Kennedy’s murder led directly to the failure to prevent the subversion of the Trump presidency 57 years later. The 60th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination falls next year, and it’s going to be huge. I can cover the war next week, or maybe the week after.Over four days, between December 28th and New Year’s Eve, Sky Document...

BY MELVIN GOODMAN Victor Gillam’s 1896 political cartoon, Uncle Sam stands with rifle between the Europeans and Latin Americans – Public Domain There is no doctrinal statement in American diplomatic history that is more fundamental than the Monroe Doctrine.  It was designed to draw a strategic line between the New World and the Old, and to alert the European powers that their political influence and presence was no longer welcome in the Western Hemisphere.  No doctrinal statement has been enforced as often as the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used to justify U.S. intervention throughout Central America and the Caribbean.  The Monroe Doctrine was cited in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, a perfect failure, as well as the Cuban missile crisis, a diplomati...

BY HENRY GIROUX Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. – Martin Luther King, Jr. The brutalizing horrors of a fascist past are with us once again. This is most evident in the growing support for bigotry and white nationalism among Republicans and their base, buttressed by the increased presence of armed militia and an increasingly well-armed populace.[1] Within the current abysmal historical moment, a mix of aggrieved agency, a tsunami of conspiracy theories, and an expanding culture of lies fuel a  massive political effort to legitimate and normali...

Striking Chicago public school teachers and other unionized staff and their supporters march through the Loop on day two of their strike on October 18, 2019, in Chicago, Illinois. BY: Colin Barker, Haymarket Books PART OF THE SERIES Progressive Picks Colin Barker, a leading British Marxist intellectual, died in 2019 before the publication of his final work, Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age, in 2021. This extraordinary volume, published by Haymarket Books, examines the processes and outcomes of mass uprisings between 1989-2019 in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Bolivia, Latin America and Egypt.In this excerpt from the chapter titled “Social Movements and the Possibility of Socialist Revolution,” Barker discu...