This time of year Mediterranean beaches are the destinations of choice for many European holidaymakers; it’s also the beginning of the busiest time of year for the people smugglers based in Libya and elsewhere along the North African coast. July to October is their peak season — during this time in 2016 around 103,000 refugees were crammed into unsafe boats, often in the dead of night, and cast off into the Mediterranean Sea.
African migrants chant slogans during a protest against Israeli government discrimination in Rabin’s square in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The Israeli government has amplified its offensive against people of color with a new law that financially blackmails African migrants into leaving the country.
Employers of Jews of Sudanese and Eritrean origins are now obliged to deduct 20 percent of their wages if they have temporary visas. The deductions are to be put into a fund, which can only be accessible after they leave the country.
A few days ago I returned from Veldhoven, The Netherlands, where last April 13 in a breathtakingly fascist act of racism the Mayor of this small Dutch town deported over 600 Eritrean youth attending a conference, kicked out of their hotel and forced to leave the city in the middle of the night. I am not talking about Eritrean youth[Read More...]
“I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”)
During the 1920s General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Josef Stalin formulated what he considered to be the essential contribution of Lenin to Marxist political economy. Leninism, he wrote, is Marxism in the era of proletarian revolution. Since 1989 proletarian and national liberation revolutions throughout the world have been overturned by a general, global counter-revolutionary upsurge.
Migration is a major political and social issue throughout Europe; in the UK it is a highly emotive matter, distorted by the rabid right wing media and irresponsible politicians.
Imagine you wake one fine morning and find you are living in a war zone, aerial bombardments are a weekly occurrence, family members have been killed, tortured or imprisoned and the children’s school destroyed. You love your country, but frightened and desperate you decide to leave in search of a new home, in a peaceful place, where you can study, work and have a chance to live out your days happily.
Artificial mass migration as imperial policy has a long history. To illustrate this, we will cite a few historical examples. According to Bulgarian historian A, Eminov, civil wars in the Balkans in the 13th and 14th centuries led to significant population decline, which greatly facilitated colonisation of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire.
By Eric Draitser | New Eastern Outlook | 21.11.2015 In the wake of the horrific terror attacks in Paris, world attention will once again be focused on the issue of refugees entering Europe. While much of the spotlight has been rightly pointed at Syrian refugees fleeing the western-sponsored war against the Syrian government, it must […]
It sometimes happens in the middle of a dark night, when I don’t expect it, when I think that I am sound asleep but am not, or when perhaps I really am but not completely. I don’t know. All that I witnessed and overheard, all that I thought I forgot but couldn’t, all that I tried so desperately to forget comes back, first in spasms, then in full force.
