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Global Left Midweek - Focus on Asia

Victories in Chile and Honduras, bitter fights in Asia and Sudan, and more

Supporters of Chile’s President elect Gabriel Boric, of the Apruebo Dignidad coalition, celebrate his victory in the presidential run-off election, in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021. Credit,AP Photo/Matias Delacroix
  1. Chilean Voters Reject Pinochet Legacy
  2. Focus on Asia
  3. Sudan: Marches of the Millions
  4. No Antivax Movement in Cuba
  5. Greek Women Break Through
  6. Xiomara Takes Honduras
  7. The Deeper Meanings of the Arab Spring
  8. A New Normal Beyond Capitalism
  9. Lockdowns and the Left
  10. Fifty Years of an Italian Communist Daily

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Chilean Voters Reject Pinochet Legacy

Video: Win for Democracy  / Peoples Dispatch (New Delhi)

A Nail in Neoliberalisms Coffin  Francisco Dominguez / Public Reading Rooms (London)

Boric Election Settles It: The New Pink Tide is Rising  Laurence Blair / The Guardian (London)

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Focus on Asia

Myanmar: Beyond Aung San Suu Kyi  Nicola Smith / The Telegraph (London)

Philippines Election  John Nery / Rappler (Manila)

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Hong Kong Power  Au Loong Yu / Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières (Paris)

Thai Youth Movements in Perspective  Kanokrat Lertchoosakul / New Mandala (Canberra)

Iran’s Eco Activism  Elahe Boghat / Worldcrunch (Paris)

South Korea: No Votes for Misogyny  Ko Byung-chan / Hankyoreh (Seoul)

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Sudan: Marches of the Millions

Dabanga (Amsterdam)

Resistance Committees, doctors, lawyers, and activists have condemned the excessively violent response by the Sudan Armed Forces and associated paramilitaries, to the December 19 Marches of the Millions in the capital Khartoum on Sunday.

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No Antivax Movement in Cuba

Marc Vandepitte and Toon Danhieux / Latin America in Movement (Quito)

Cubans do not grow up in a spirit of competition or every person for themself. They know from experience that only by working together can they meet the immense challenges facing their country. Helping neighbors, cleaning the neighborhood together, meeting and making decisions together in the workplace, etc., this is how they live.

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Greek Women Break Through

Sonia Mitralia / International Viewpoint (Paris)

2021 has seen the birth in Greece of a renewal of the feminist movement, young, radical but also unitary, which already occupies the forefront of popular struggles against neoliberal reaction and nationalist and orthodox obscurantism. The event is significant, almost historic, in a conservative and disoriented Greek society, which is always seeking a left worthy of its name.

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Xiomara Takes Honduras

Dana Frank / New Left Review (London)

Castro will be the first female president in Honduran history, with the highest vote total ever. Her landslide success was the product of twelve years of hard organizing against the regime installed by a 2009 coup. The challenges Castro now faces are beyond daunting. Looming behind them is US imperialism – facing the potential loss of one of its most captive nations.

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The Deeper Meanings of the Arab Spring

Miriyam Aouragh and Hamza Hamouchene / Middle East Eye (London)

The peoples of the region are all too familiar with the racist stereotypes in the facile falsehood that “Arabs and Muslims are not fit for democracy and are incapable of governing themselves”. Imperial and colonial dominance over the region have led to it being viewed in some quarters as a homogeneous entity, systematically reduced through negative tropes.

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A New Normal Beyond Capitalism

Chris Hazzard MP / Verso (London)

This ‘business as usual’ mentality is blinding us to the fact that our political and economic order - extractive capitalism - is by its ecologically destructive nature, interwoven with the natural world. This toxic fusion of global capitalism and eco-colonialism is increasing both the occurrences of epidemiological threats and hastening the destructive collapse of the ‘Capitalocene’. 

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Lockdowns and the Left

Richard Seymour / Novara Media (London)

The danger for the left is that we haven’t yet developed a coherent alternative. We have, for the most part, correctly if critically supported temporary lockdown measures and economic support to limit mass death. But, as the new biosecuritarian state is rolled out, our contradictory desire for the state has not borne fruit in an agenda for the long-term.

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Fifty Years of an Italian Communist Daily

Marco Grispigni / Verso

On 28 April 1971, the first issue of the daily version of il manifesto hit the newsstands. Despite countless difficulties, phases when its survival was deeply imperilled, and periods when it temporarily had to suspend publication, fifty years later the newspaper is still with us — and thriving.