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Sunday, May 29, 2022
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Stalin’s 1944 exile of Crimean Tatars commemorated despite Russian occupation – The Militant
[....]May 18 was the 78th anniversary of Moscow’s forced deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people from their homeland to Central Asia in 1944. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin said the Tatars were all agents of the Nazis. The date is marked annually by Tatars in Crimea and across Ukraine. Despite a ban on Tatar actions imposed for the past eight years since Russian troops seized and occupied the peninsula, hundreds gathered solemnly at a memorial monument in Kerch.Over two days in 1944 over 200,000 Tatars were herded into cattle cars, locked in, and taken by rail deep into Russia, above. Over half died during the journey and by privation over the next two years.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, waves of Tatars began returning home, to discover their homes had been seized under Moscow’s attempts to “Russify” the population. Today the Tatars, the native people of Crimea, make up some 12% of the population. With Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Tatar culture flowered and identification with Ukraine expanded....
Working class needs to lead fight against racist violence, Jew-hatred – The Militant
[....]Gendron’s ravings blame Jews for seeking to “replace” Caucasians with Blacks and immigrants. He says that a key goal of his attack was to incite “retaliation and further divide” Blacks and immigrants from Caucasians. These rightist views can be found widely on the internet.Democratic Party politicians from President Joseph Biden to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Charles Schumer are also using the killings to push through measures that undermine political rights in the name of combating “domestic terrorism.”
To promote these steps, the liberals cover up basic facts, including by trying to block access to the vile 180-page manifesto written by Gendron.
Jew-hatred permeates Gendron’s manifesto. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the rulers will increasingly use Jew-hatred to divert attention from the real source of the problems working people and the middle class face, which is capitalism. The fight against Jew-hatred is crucial to the working class....
Monday, May 23, 2022
Saturday, May 21, 2022
The road forward to meet US rulers’ assault on families, women’s rights – The Militant
Numerous demonstrations took place across the country May 14 following the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that would overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.
Justice Samuel Alito’s draft holds the Roe decision was not constitutional, and hands decision-making on abortion and related questions to state legislatures and public debate. It would mean that in states where abortion is legal those laws would continue to stand. Some state governments have passed or are considering legislation to impose restrictions on access to the procedure. Nationally the door would be open to a widespread debate.
But the heart of the discussion has to be put on a broader basis. The key question isn’t abortion. It’s how to organize working people to defend ourselves and make gains amid a broader capitalist crisis that is making it harder to start a family and to hold one together. This includes the fight for jobs, adequate wages, protection against soaring inflation, accessible and affordable health care, child care, access to family planning, including adoption, as well as access to contraception and safe and secure abortion when needed.
Liberals and middle-class radicals, however, oppose this course. They think working people are “deplorables” and fear a fight to win public opinion. They want to shut down discussion and show disdain for the rights and opinions of others.
“To put the right to have an abortion up for debate,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says, “degrades” women. But it’s the liberals’ refusal to discuss this and all the related questions that have aided opponents of women’s rights in systematically restricting access to the procedure ever since Roe was pushed through in 1973....
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Putin’s charge Ukraine gov’t is ‘fascist’ is a lie – The Militant
Russian President Vladimir Putin claims Moscow had to invade Ukraine to “denazify” the country. He propagates through his rigidly government-controlled media the charge that “neo-Nazis” and “far-right nationalists” took over Ukraine in 2014 in a “coup” backed by Washington and are carrying out “genocide” against Russian speakers in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.
But his accusations are false to the core. The government of Ukraine is elected and not much different than other liberal capitalist regimes around the world. Russian speakers are a significant part of the Ukrainian population. They overwhelmingly back Ukraine independence and are proud members of the fierce resistance to Moscow’s invasion.
In the United States, calling anyone you disagree with “Nazis” or “fascists” has become the stock in trade of many middle-class radicals, who use it as a way to shut down debate and discussion and silence opposition.
For Putin, his slander has an additional purpose. In World War II, Moscow’s resistance to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a key part of defeating Hitler, at a huge cost of millions of lives of Russian, Ukrainian and other peoples there. By invoking the specter of fascism, Putin hopes to convince working people in Russia to support the war effort or at least keep quiet.
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