Europe

It was obvious that being cut off from cheap energy would have a severe negative impact on German industry. The deniers are starting to look pretty foolish now.

The CAA has in the past had to deny being “a pawn employed by a foreign government to smear its enemies.” Despite such denials, it is abundantly clear that the CAA exists to lobby on behalf of the [apartheid neocolony].

This influential organization has been proactive in an attack and sabotage strategy on behalf of [the neocolony] to combat “delegitimization” — campaigning in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Funded by the occupiers of Palestine, the CAA has aided [neocolonialism], including by helping to take down a left-wing leader of the Labour Party. Such partisan activity is entirely incompatible with genuine charitable status.

Lesson: don’t trust every organisation that claims to be confronting antisemitism. Oftentimes these organizations care about antisemitism as much as trans‐exclusionary ‘radical feminists’ care about misogyny.

Over the first half of the year, 50.6 thousand German companies have already gone bankrupt, Zeit Online reported.

This is about 12% more than the same period last year.

In recent years, government aid has partially contained the surge in bankruptcies caused by the pandemic and the energy crisis. But analysts expect the situation will only worsen from here.

Sanctions are doing their job destroying German economy.

archived: https://archive.ph/sWZBB

and a related article from Reuters from June https://www.reuters.com/business/energy-crisis-inflation-push-more-german-firms-into-insolvency-study-2023-06-29/

We Believe in [Neocolonialism] launched a campaign earlier in 2023 for Spotify to remove several Arabic songs that allegedly targeted [a neocolony]. The campaign was the first step in a larger plan. Luke Akehurst, director of We Believe in [Neocolonialism], has cited Spotify’s ability respond to complaints of “public disgust,” and has called on Spotify to do the same regarding Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices hosted on the service.

We Believe in [Neocolonialism] has also been accused of acting to remove one of pop artist Mohammad Assaf’s songs in part of its ongoing attempt to ‘cleanse’ the platform. The group complains that Spotify is promoting violence by allowing these artists to post their music using the service.

A particular target of We Believe in [Neocolonialism’s] Spotify campaign is artist Lowkey, a popular artist whose songs have become informal anthems of the pro-Palestine movement. We Believe in [Neocolonialism] contends [that] Lowkey’s music is offensive and incites violence against Jew[s] and [neocolonists].

Universal pushback caused the campaign to ban Lowkey’s music to fail. Thousands of people signed a counter-petition “demanding Spotify not buckle to the [neocolonial] lobby’s pressure,” MacLeod reported. The petition included “dozens of the most prominent Jewish individuals in the creative industries,” his report noted.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a group with links to the pro-[neocolonial] lobby, has been allotted two seats on Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council; one of the Institute’s co-founders, the late George Weidenfeld, had ties to an organization that built illegal [neocolonial] settlements.

The Institute is funded by several NATO countries and a CIA front organization (the National Endowment for Democracy) historically devoted to performing illegal activities. This group has been considered extremist itself, though it states its devotion to counter-extremism. The Secretary of State of the UK Department of Digital Culture, Media, and Sport has been identified as supportive of We Believe in [Neocolonialism].

Put simply, Sweden chose not just to ally itself with the U.S. but to enter into a death cult run by U.S. [neo]imperialist interests rather than confront its own fears about Russia and people’s misgivings about American [neo]imperialism. And to be sure, there are misgivings—or at least there were. A 2013 international Gallup poll found that people in sixty-five countries overwhelmingly felt that the U.S. is the greatest threat to peace in the world. Around the same time, in 2014, Swedes were also overwhelmingly against joining NATO.

Fast forward to 2023 and the numbers have essentially flipped: 56 percent against joining NATO in 2014 vs. 62 percent for joining NATO in May 2023. This is the power of propaganda. This is the game that Swedish politicians have been playing for more than a decade, and indeed even after the war in Ukraine began, Swedish politicians campaigned in the 2022 election against joining NATO. Even then, the establishment didn’t trust the people to vote for an eager U.S. [neo]imperialist sycophant.

But alas, we’ll never know if the people would ultimately have voted to be a nation of sycophants because NATO membership was never put up for a vote, an issue that Swedish journalist Kajsa Ekis Ekman rightfully highlighted as undemocratic and deeply disturbing.

Ekman points out that there was a referendum for joining the EU, arguably a vote of lesser importance as it didn’t involve the potential for global war and carnage. She writes that the EU referendum prompted people to get educated about the issue. People held study groups and meetings and passed out pamphlets. It was discussed in schools, workplaces, bars, and at home. People wanted to be knowledgeable when they took to the polls.

And perhaps there lies the primary reason why there was never a NATO referendum. If people really knew the history of NATO, and the present and future aims, they’d be horrified at the prospect of joining.

Despite the Scottish government’s claim that COVID-19 has entered “a calmer phase,” many medical groups, including the British Medical Association (BMA), denounced its decision as having no basis in science. Data show that COVID-19 continues to infect hundreds of people every week in Scotland as well as England, Wales and the north of Ireland. Medical workers, including all the members of the SHWC, remain at disproportionate risk of infection, with tens of thousands continuing to suffer from often disabling long COVID symptoms. (BBC July 17)

“With at least 4% of [National Health Service (NHS)] staff now living with chronic post-COVID complications, the Scottish government must follow the evidence and improve protections from the airborne spread [of the virus] in health care settings, not reduce them,” said Dr. Shaun Peter Qureshi, a member of the SHWC.

The plight of health care workers reveals broader trends. An Office of National Statistics (ONS) survey found that around two million people in England, Scotland, and Wales have or are experiencing long COVID symptoms. According to a June 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, almost one in five of the 40% of U.S. adults who reported having COVID-19 also have suffered from long COVID symptoms. (cdc.com)

We are not curious about the grounds for Erdoğan’s assurance that Sweden’s membership will be approved by the parliament. We have already said that this is the most counter-revolutionary parliament in the history of Türkiye … We will not be surprised by the outcome.

But we will fulfill our increasing responsibility. We will not allow NATO, which threatens the peoples of the whole world with its existence, to gain legitimacy while NATO expands — and all of the actors in our country’s bourgeois political system pave the way for this expansion by settling into a pro-NATO position.

We will continue to uphold anti-imperialism and opposition to NATO, which have stronger roots in these lands than is believed elsewhere. We will continue to work for the strengthening of this resistance that right-wing forces are trying to take over and do this immediately. The necessity to remove NATO from our country with all its bases and soldiers is as urgent as the need to establish an equal, independent and secular country.

The stories of some defendants in these cases revealed how deprived are many youth in the working-class suburbs of major French cities. In one case, the defendant was arrested carrying a sack of peaches and apricots; he hadn’t eaten any fruit for a year.

Another defendant was arrested while he was asleep on the floor of a clothing store using some clothes for a pillow. He was homeless, sleeping under a bridge with just a mattress that had been waterlogged for weeks.

The following revolt had many similarities to the Black Lives Matter uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May 2020.

The régime showed its worry by its attempts to conciliate with the masses. The next day, President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne both condemned the police killing as unjustified, even abhorrent. The prosecutor on the case kept the killer cop locked up on charges of voluntary manslaughter.

Remember that this is the same government that pushed its cops to use tear gas and rubber-coated bullets against the Yellow Vests in 2018-19 and to arrest and beat unionists and others protesting the pension cuts all this year.

But the régime failed to stop the protests against the killer cops from becoming angry and massive. The anger among the youth in the suburbs over the daily racism they confront was too strong to be deflected by political maneuvers. (In France, most suburbs are working-class communities, often populated by descendants of migrants from former colonies.)

ETA: Nahel’s murder: France’s continuum of post-colonial denial

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko offered to mediate the conflict between Prigozhin and Russian officials on June 24. Lukashenko has known both Prigozhin and Putin for over 20 years. The Belarusian President held meetings with Russian security and defense leaders in the morning and afternoon of June 25. He had also been in contact with Putin and Prigozhin.

As a result of the two day-long meetings, Prigozhin agreed to honor Lukashenko’s proposal to stop the advancement of Wagner’s armed units in Russia’s territory and on furthering steps meant to deescalate tensions. The Wagner leader also ordered his fighters to retreat from Rostov-on-Don.

To the disappointment of the [neo]imperialists, Russian Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov publicly thanked Lukashenko for brokering the agreement between the Wagner Group and Russia. Peskov further added that Russia will not persecute Wagner soldiers who had taken part in the alleged “armed mutiny.” (Belta, June 25)

Some say the Greek ship tried to tug the boat with the migrants and caused it to sink. The Greek Navy denies this.

The officials and the media blame it all on “traffickers,” those who smuggle in migrants on overloaded ships, charging prices bloated by the impossibility for migrants from Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, countries where the Adrianna’s passengers came from, to travel by normal, legal channels.

Whoever is to blame for the capsizing of the boat, the Greek Navy reported it had pulled 104 migrants from the water alive and 78 bodies of people who had drowned, with unknown hundreds of people below the decks, including children.

Behind the immediate crime are EU bureaucrats and the EU member politicians, who first created the crisis that forced people to leave their home countries and then built a wall to keep them out of Europe.

Behind the politicians and bureaucrats is the capitalist–imperialist system, whose profit drive pushes hundreds of millions of human beings from poverty level down to starvation level and whose wars turn livable societies into a living hell, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2014, it is estimated that 21,000 migrants have died trying to travel from [Afrasia] to Europe.

We call on the governments and peoples of the European Union to resist the policy of sanctions initiated by the United States against the Russian Federation! Sanctions bring mutual harm to the EU and Russia.

Stop the systematic violations by the countries of the West and Ukraine of the terms of the grain deal to provide the world market with grain from Ukraine!

We demand the cessation of military assistance from the United States and its allies to the Kiev regime!

We support the initiative of Humberto Carvalho (Brazilian Communist Party) to create a World Organization of Anti-Fascists!