liberal anti-racists

“Much of today’s advocacy around racial justice places the onus on individual actors and the private sector. We need collective action instead.”

Posted by The Guardian on Monday, March 8, 2021

After years of embracing the “post-racial” rhetoric of figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, mainstream Democrats are coming around to acknowledging how much the 1960s civil rights revolution left unfinished. And yet, years into a “great awokening” that has drawn attention to these issues, it’s worth asking whether anything is changing.

companies like Apple, where workers in the secretive Chinese complex that manufactures iPhones attracted global concern after a spate of suicides, just brought out a special edition $429 Black Unity Apple Watch that was marketed for Black History Month. Apple says: “The Black Unity Sport Band is inspired by the pan-African flag and made from soft, high-performance fluoroelastomer with a pin-and-tuck closure laser-etched with ‘Truth. Power. Solidarity.’” Where is the power or solidarity for the workers toiling in factories in China, one might wonder? Or for child workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo who toil and die in mines extracting raw materials like cobalt that are used in iPhones. One doesn’t hear anything about that kind of material injustice affecting the working class from the global south when corporations make their self-congratulatory PR statements around inclusion.

A 2020 paper, not surprisingly, finds that white workers are less likely to hold racist views if they’re in a union, and that white union members also tend to have greater support for not only universal social goods, but for policies like affirmative action.

Afghan in the Balkans

‘Police searched my baby’s nappy’: migrant families on the perilous Balkan route

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/01/balkan-route-migrants-croatia-bosnia-border

“Out of a total of about 8,000 migrants in Bosnia, about 2,000 people are basically left to fend for themselves in abandoned buildings, squats, makeshift settlements and in forests,” Nicola Bay, the Danish Refugee Council’s Bosnia director, says. “These people include families, children and unaccompanied minors that have practically no shelter, no access to basic services and no access to proper healthcare.”

Russia ethnic cleansing in Georgia 2008

European Court of Human Rights has found Russia guilty of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians following the ceasefire of the August 2008 war from r/worldnews

https://agenda.ge/en/news/2021/167

Georgia has won the 2008 war case against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The court released its judgement earlier today which says that Russia violated several articles of the European Convention on Human rights during the conflict and carried out ethnic cleansing of Georgians.

The court said that Russia violated the following articles:

  • The right to life (Article 2).
  • Prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 3).
  • The right to liberty and security (Article 5).
  • The right to protection of private and family life (Article 8).
  • Protection of property (Article 1 of Additional Protocol 1);
  • Freedom of movement (Article 2 of Protocol No. 4).

Xi JinPing China

https://www.facebook.com/spiegelinternational/posts/10157832430087285

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-dawn-of-the-dragon-how-xi-jinping-has-transformed-china-a-49d467ed-3bd8-4b95-882a-395200cef324

the power of the state has grown, with Xi having secured his office for life, cemented party rule and perfected the surveillance state. In the west of the country, hundreds of thousands of the Muslim Uighur population are in labor camps, and critics of the regime have fled or been silenced.

 

support populist beliefs falls

Support for populist beliefs in Europe has fallen markedly over the past year,

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, a survey of about 26,000 people in 25 countries

“You could think of the virus like a volcano,” said Matthijs Rooduijn, a political sociologist at the University of Amsterdam and expert on populism. “It has hit populism hard, but it will leave behind fertile ground for the future.”

Populism, which frames politics as a battle between ordinary people and corrupt elites, has grown rapidly as a political force, with support for populist parties in national elections across Europe surging from 7% to more than 25% in 20 years.

Populist leaders mainly on the far right – Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Sweden’s Jimmie Åkesson – have surged and populist parties have entered government in nearly a dozen European countries.

“Things are already changing quite rapidly with the second wave,” Rooduijn said. “Conspiracy theories are rising; populations are becoming increasingly polarised over the measures governments are taking.

Anti-immigration sentiment remained most consistently strong in Sweden, where 65% of respondents said fewer immigrants should be allowed into the country in future, up from 58% last year. The figures were similar in Italy, where 64% of those surveyed agreed immigration should be cut, against 53% last year.

The country with by far the strongest anti-immigration feelings was Greece, included in the survey for the first time in 2020. Nearly four out of every five respondents wanted immigration reduced, with 62% saying it should be reduced by “a lot”.

Armenia and Azerbaijan

“a decades-old conflict between majority Christian Armenia and mainly Muslim Azerbaijan, with Russia calling for an immediate ceasefire and another regional power, Turkey, saying it would support Azerbaijan.”

#Putin and #Erdogan, not #Russia and #Turkey:
“Mr. Erdogan, promising support for traditional ally Azerbaijan, said Armenia was “the biggest threat to peace in the region”
which confirms the end of Ataturk’s secular policy; Erdogan fights to keep his autocratic rule choosing religious fundamentalists as the most loyal from his shrinking base of supporters, no different than Trump.
Erdogan counts on people’s short memory, since the 90s conflict on the Balkan clearly showed that there are no innocent Muslims as they were no innocent Christians for his #propaganda
While dictators and politicians follow their own agenda, innocent people will die.
#patriotism is NOT #nationalism, LESS #chauvinism

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2020/0927/Armenia-and-Azerbaijan-clash-again-over-disputed-region