The Australian Labor Party’s national conference, representing trade unions, party branches and parliamentarians, has decisively backed the AUKUS nuclear submarine treaty. While AUKUS was the most controversial question internally, the conference was largely silent on the pressing cost-of-living crisis, particularly on housing.
As Hollywood celebrates the release of Oppenheimer, protests have focused on the devastating impact of the Trinity atomic test in New Mexico on local Hispanic and indigenous communities. The protests have brought attention to the ongoing struggle of the communities for recognition and compensation, and the film’s whitewashing of racism during the development and testing of the bomb.
“Children who work in the mines are often drugged, in order to suppress hunger.” It sounds like Victorian-era Britain, but the scene is a cobalt mining operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reported in the New Yorker two years ago. This is a violent reminder that, despite decades of political independence, Africa once again finds itself the target of a big-power scramble for its wealth.
On July 25, Russian intellectual and socialist activist Boris Kagarlitsky was detained and accused of “justifying terrorism” by the Federal Security Service (FSB) before being transported to the city of Syktyvkar, 1300 kilometres from Moscow. There, in a closed hearing and without his lawyer present, a court ordered that he be detained until his trial in late September, where he faces the possibility of up to seven years in prison.
August 1914 was a decisive turning point for the world socialist movement. A fundamental divide opened between reformists and revolutionaries when most parties of the Socialist International supported their own ruling classes in the world war.
When the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, told an audience in Singapore recently that the US would not allow “coercion and bullying” of its allies by China, he must have been counting on a lack of historical knowledge (or a tolerance for hypocrisy) in his audience. Bullying and coercion, including threatened and actual military attacks, are not something new; they have been part of US policy in Asia (and elsewhere) for two centuries.