Alternatives International

In Quebec and Everywhere, Anti-Racism is Essential to Class Politics

Richard Roys — 2026-07-09T01:05:04Z

In early 2023, Quebec's political class erupted in indignation over comments made by Amira Elghawaby, newly appointed by Ottawa as Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. Her offense was straightforward: she suggested that many Quebecers seemed disturbingly indifferent to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the province. What followed was immediate, furious, and entirely predictable.

Rather than treat her remarks as an invitation to reflect on the social reality of racism in Quebec, the political and media establishment transformed them into a national affront. The terms of the debate were rapidly reduced to an absurd binary: either one stood with Elghawaby and, by extension, with Ottawa, or one stood with Quebec. In that framework, there could be no nuance, no complexity, no space for anyone attempting to hold together two basic truths at once: that Quebec is a nation with a legitimate collective existence, and that racism, including Islamophobia, is a real and deadly force within it.

This is one of the defining operations of contemporary right-wing identitarian politics in Quebec. It transforms any criticism of racism into an attack on the nation itself. It recasts anti-racism not as a democratic necessity, but as a foreign imposition. It suggests that to name racism is to deny Quebec's dignity, rather than to insist that any society worthy of dignity must be able to confront its own injustices honestly.

The Elghawaby affair was never only about one public figure or one set of comments. It exposed the broader ideological terrain on which debates about race, secularism, identity, and belonging now take place in Quebec. On that terrain, acknowledging Islamophobia is treated as more scandalous than Islamophobia itself. Naming racism is seen as divisive, while the structures and discourse that produce exclusion are treated as expressions of collective self-affirmation.

The reaction reached its apex when all parties represented in the National Assembly, including Québec solidaire, voted in favour of a motion condemning Elghawaby's remarks. At that moment, the entire parliamentary spectrum effectively closed ranks around a shared refusal to confront social and political conditions that had already produced lethal consequences. Quebec remains marked by the massacre at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, where Muslim worshippers were murdered while at prayer in 2017. Yet even the memory of that attack has not been enough to force a sustained reckoning with the environment of normalized suspicion, resentment, and scapegoating in which anti-Muslim violence becomes more likely.

The issue is not whether Quebec is uniquely racist. Indeed, racism is a structuring reality across Canada. The issue is also not whether Quebecers have a right to self-determination – they do – although those national aspirations must be pursued in a way that respects the equal right of Indigenous nations to self-determination, rather than resting on their dispossession or marginalization.

The issue is whether the left is willing to tell the truth about the society in which it operates. And more than that: whether it is capable of understanding that the struggle against racism is not secondary to class politics, not a diversion from it, not a boutique moral concern for urban professionals, but one of the central terrains on which class domination is organized and reproduced.

The right-wing onslaught

The right-wing offensive in Quebec, much like in France and across the globe, does not operate primarily by openly defending racism in crude biological terms. It proceeds instead through euphemism, through displacement, through coded language about “integration,” “values,” “social cohesion,” “common culture,” and “secularism.” It denies the existence or prevalence of racism while constantly producing racist political meanings. It insists that the problem is not Muslims, immigrants, or racialized communities as such, but their supposed failure to adapt, their excessive visibility, their alleged refusal to conform to the norms of the host society.

This distinction is politically useful precisely because it allows a reactionary politics to present itself as universal, republican, or neutral. Exclusion is reframed as principle. Discrimination is recast as civic firmness. And those who object are portrayed not as defenders of equality, but as sectarian actors trying to import dangerous “Anglo-Saxon” obsessions with race into a supposedly colour-blind society.

This logic has become a structuring feature of public debate in Quebec. Questions that should be approached in material and democratic terms are reframed as existential threats to national identity. The debate is no longer about discrimination in hiring, housing, policing, or access to institutions. It becomes a battle over whether “they” share “our” values. It is no longer about whether Muslim women can access work, education, and civic participation on equal terms. It becomes a discussion of whether visible religiosity is compatible with Quebec modernity.

The same general mechanism has long been visible in France. The hijab, halal food, mosques, religious associations, Muslim schools, public prayer, anti-discrimination organizing – in France, all of these have been repeatedly transformed into symbols of national crisis, by the right and by large sections of the political mainstream. This constant creation of a state of crisis has little to do with concrete threats and everything to do with governing through division.

The point is not merely to stigmatize Muslims. It is to build a broader political bloc organized around resentment, fear, and a reactionary conception of national belonging. A social crisis produced by neoliberal restructuring, austerity, and democratic exhaustion is narrativized as a cultural crisis caused by migrants, racialized minorities, and the alleged collapse of authority. Instead of anger being directed upward — toward landlords, bosses, privatizers, political elites — it is redirected downward, toward those with even less power.

This is why the right's culture war is never just cultural. It has a clear social function. It disorganizes solidarity. It weakens trade-union instincts. It fragments shared grievances into competing identities. It turns workers against one another by suggesting that some are more legitimate members of the collective than others. It invites white or majority workers to see themselves not as exploited subjects with common interests alongside racialized workers, but as members of a threatened national core under siege from outsiders.

In this framework, anti-racism becomes especially dangerous to the right because it disrupts the narrative. It insists that the problem is not excessive diversity but organized inequality and oppression. It reveals that what is presented as cultural incompatibility is often just the political management of labour, status, and belonging. It points out that those cast as problems are often the very people cleaning hospitals, delivering food, staffing long-term care homes, driving buses, filling warehouses, and holding together the most fragile parts of the social order.

The right therefore requires that anti-racism appear alien, elitist, and disconnected from ordinary life. It must be presented as a discourse imported from universities, NGOs, or Ottawa – never as something emerging from the lived experience of workers subjected to discrimination and exploitation. This is one of its most effective ideological maneuvers: to treat anti-racism as foreign to the working class while simultaneously defining the working class in ways that exclude those most affected by racism.

That is not a secondary distortion. It is the heart of the strategy.

Leftist proposals that fall short of actual left politics

Faced with this sustained offensive, large parts of the left have failed to respond with clarity. Some have chosen evasion. Others have retreated into moral denunciation without strategy. Still others have accepted the right's basic framing and concluded that anti-racism, however well intentioned, has become a political liability best softened, postponed, or subordinated.

In Quebec, this problem is intensified by history. Much of the institutional left in the province emerged from a political culture shaped by national liberation, sovereignty, and the defence of Quebec's autonomy against the Canadian federal state. That history matters. It contains real emancipatory elements. But it also creates a recurring vulnerability: the accusation of siding with Ottawa can still function as a political veto. Once anti-racism is coded as federalist, moralizing, or alien to Quebec's collective experience, many on the left become cautious, defensive, and disoriented.

This helps explain the recurring temptation to return to what are often called “bread and butter” issues. The argument usually goes something like this: the left has become too preoccupied with identity, culture, and symbolic struggles; it has lost contact with working people; it needs to return to wages, inflation, housing, and healthcare; anti-racism and similar struggles are either distractions or at least should be de-emphasized in favour of more universal economic appeals.

This diagnosis is superficially attractive because it names something real: many people are suffering materially, and the left does need to speak concretely about exploitation, austerity, and redistribution. But the proposed remedy is deeply flawed. It assumes that class can be politically articulated in a way that bypasses race, religion, and immigration status. It imagines that there exists some pure social question untouched by the hierarchies that actually shape labour markets and everyday life.

When the left counterposes anti-racism to “real” class politics, it concedes the right's central premise: that issues of race are niche, divisive, or external to common material life. It ends up reproducing the fiction of an average worker who is culturally one of the majority, implicitly white, and unaffected by the forms of exclusion directed at migrants, Muslims, Black people, and other racialized groups. In other words, it speaks of universality while quietly narrowing the universe of those it imagines.

This is not merely a moral failure. It is a strategic disaster. A left that refuses to see how racism structures class relations cannot build durable majorities. It cannot organize the sectors of the working class most exposed to precarity. It cannot explain why some workers are more vulnerable to wage theft, deportability, informalization, or public exclusion than others. It cannot account for why reactionary narratives resonate where collective infrastructures have weakened. And it cannot construct solidarity if it refuses to address the fractures through which ruling classes govern.

Québec solidaire's difficulties have often been interpreted through this lens. Whenever the party is attacked for supposedly focusing too much on anti-racism, its representatives appear to feel a pressure to reassure, rebalance, depoliticize. But this defensive posture only deepens the problem. It leaves the right in command of the terms of debate. It permits the media ecosystem to define anti-racism as excess, and a focus on class politics turns into silence on racism. And it demoralizes those militants and communities who understand, from direct experience, that these questions cannot be split apart.

The same dynamic exists in many places outside Quebec. France is a notable example. Sections of the left there have long hesitated to engage directly with anti-Muslim racism for fear of appearing communautariste – that is, overly fixated on a particular community rather than the social whole – or anti-republican, or lenient when it comes to enforcing secularism. The result has often been paralysis: a left unable to respond adequately either to the far right's offensive or to the realities of postcolonial exclusion in the deprived banlieues (suburbs), schools, labour market, and the criminal justice system.

In France as in Quebec, the left is too often failing to develop a materialist politics of race. It either treats anti-racism as a moral supplement detached from economic struggle, or it abandons it altogether in the name of economic universality. Both paths are dead ends. What is needed instead is a politics that understands how racism is woven into the production, management, and fragmentation of the working class itself.

Class politics is anti-racist politics

Capitalism has never exploited a generic labour force in the abstract. It has always organized labour through difference. Colonialism, slavery, immigration regimes, legal stratification, citizenship hierarchies, and racial segmentation are not side stories to capitalism's development; they are among its principal mechanisms. The making of labour markets has always involved deciding whose work is cheapened, whose mobility is restricted, whose humanity is diminished, and whose disposability can be normalized.

Racism, then, is not simply prejudice. It is a mode of social organization. It sorts populations, allocates vulnerability, and justifies uneven treatment. It tells us who is expected to absorb risk, who is denied recognition, who can be excluded from protections, and who can be blamed when social systems fail.

This is visible everywhere. In Quebec, racialized and immigrant workers are heavily concentrated in sectors marked by low wages, difficult conditions, and weak protections: food processing, warehousing, domestic work, cleaning, care work, platform delivery, agriculture, private security, and many others. During the pandemic's emergency period, many of the workers called “essential” were precisely those treated as disposable in ordinary times. They were praised symbolically while being exposed materially.

You cannot make sense of this with a race-blind class politics. Why are some workers overrepresented in the hardest jobs? Why are temporary migrants often more vulnerable to abuse? Why are some workers less likely to complain about unsafe conditions? Why do some face additional barriers in accessing stable public employment? Why do credential recognition, language policy, policing, and immigration status shape bargaining power? These are not marginal questions. They are central questions of class composition.

Even debates that appear symbolic or cultural often have important material content. Consider the exclusion of Muslim women wearing religious symbols from certain forms of public employment. This is often defended as a neutral expression of secularism. But in practice it means barriers to stable jobs, pensions, career progression, and unionized workplaces. It means constraining the economic horizon of a section of the working class on explicitly ideological grounds. It means telling certain women that participation in public life is conditional on effacing themselves in ways the majority never has to contemplate. That is class politics. Or rather, that is class domination articulated through racism and gender.

The same is true in France, where anti-Muslim discourse has repeatedly been used to legitimize forms of public exclusion that have direct material effects. To talk about police harassment, discrimination in hiring, school exclusion, urban fragmentation, and stigmatization of the banlieues is not to leave class behind. It is to describe how class is lived under raced conditions in contemporary capitalism.

A serious left must therefore reject two illusions at once. The first is the liberal illusion that anti-racism can be reduced to representational diversity, symbolic recognition, or ethical sensitivity while leaving structures untouched. The second is the economistic illusion that redistribution alone can solve racism without directly confronting the political and ideological machinery that produces racial hierarchy. Both are insufficient because both separate what in reality is joined.

Anti-racist class politics means recognizing that solidarity cannot be proclaimed into existence while major sections of the working class are routinely stigmatized, policed, and excluded. It means understanding that class unity is not a starting point but a project — one that requires active struggle against the divisions through which capital and the state govern. It means refusing the fantasy that one can organize workers effectively while treating some workers' oppression as secondary, exaggerated, or politically inconvenient.

There is also a harder truth. When the left refuses anti-racism, it does not produce a more coherent class politics. It produces a more exclusionary one. It allows the rhetoric of the people, the nation, or the common good to be captured by those who would reserve those categories for some and not others. That is why anti-racism is not merely defensive. It is generative. It expands the horizon of who counts in the collective. It clarifies who the adversary is. It redirects anger away from scapegoats and toward structures. It creates the basis on which workers with different histories and positions can recognize themselves in a shared struggle without pretending they are identical. A left worthy of the name does not flatten those differences. It organizes through them.

La France Insoumise and a way forward

If Quebec illustrates the impasse, the French party La France Insoumise (LFI) offers at least a partial example of how the left can begin to move differently. Not perfectly, not without contradiction, but in a way that is strategically sound.

What has distinguished LFI, at its best, is its refusal of the false opposition between anti-racism and social struggle. In a political landscape where much of the mainstream treats anti-racist politics as suspect or divisive, LFI has insisted – unevenly but unmistakably – that “the people” must include racialized minorities, that the social question cannot be detached from the postcolonial question, and that a democratic bloc cannot be built by excluding Muslims.

This matters enormously in the French context. France has spent decades producing a specifically republican version of racial politics, in which the state claims blindness to race while managing profoundly raced inequalities in policing, schooling, housing, work, and media discourse. Under these conditions, for a left party to name Islamophobia, speak to the banlieues, oppose police violence, and link those struggles to austerity and neoliberalism is not a minor rhetorical choice. It is a strategic reorientation.

LFI has understood something that much of the traditional left in France fails to grasp: that France's contemporary working classes are not the workers of a nostalgic industrial past. They are multiethnic, urban and peri-urban, precarious, feminized in many sectors, shaped by migration and colonial histories, and often alienated not only from the market but from institutions that treat them with open suspicion. A left that does not speak to these publics is not speaking to the working class as it really exists.

What LFI has tried to do, at its strongest moments, is build a popular bloc wide enough to include both classic redistributive demands and an explicit confrontation with racism. Letting itself be influenced by progressive social movements, it has linked pension reform, wage struggles, and public services to police repression, anti-Muslim stigma, and territorial abandonment. It has refused to treat these as separate audiences or disconnected agendas.

The significance of this approach is not that it resolves every tension. LFI has faced criticism, backlash, caricature, and internal contradictions, but it has at least shown that there is political life beyond the sterile choice between moralized liberal anti-racism and reductive economism. It has demonstrated that one can speak of class without erasing race, and speak of racism without abandoning projects of economic transformation.

This is especially important for Quebec. The lesson is not that one can mechanically import the French case, or that these dynamics are disproportionately present in the francophone world. Still, though Quebec has its own history, its own national question, and its own institutional forms, the strategic lesson of La France Insoumise is transferable: a left grows stronger, not weaker, when it confronts racism as part of the general struggle against domination. It becomes more rooted in a popular base, not less, when it organizes among those most exposed to both exploitation and exclusion. It gains coherence when it stops treating anti-racism as an embarrassment to be managed and starts treating it as one of the languages through which collective emancipation must now be articulated.

What LFI points toward is a renewed universalism: not the false universalism that asks the marginalized to disappear into an abstract white, cis, documented citizen, but a concrete universalism built from below, out of the actual plurality of the people. A universalism that does not deny conflict, history, or hierarchy, but seeks to overcome them politically. That is the way forward. Not a left that chooses between class politics and anti-racism, but one that understands the former is inseparable from the latter. Not a left that clings to an imagined social subject stripped of race, migration, religion, gender, and history, but one that wants to rebuild solidarity on the basis of the working class as it actually exists. Not a left that adapts itself to reactionary nationalism's terms, but one that confronts it head on, understanding how capitalism governs through fragmentation.

The task, then, is to reunify anti-racism and class struggle intellectually, strategically, and organizationally. To show, concretely, how labour markets are raced, how exclusion weakens collective power, how scapegoating protects elites, how secularism can become a tool of class discipline, how immigration status shapes exploitation, and how racism helps govern precarious workers' lives. In other words: to tell the truth about the society we live in. Only on that basis can a left worthy of the moment be rebuilt.

Richard Roys is a grassroots labour activist and organizer hailing from Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, unceded lands of the Haudenosaunee nation, also known as Montreal. He has been active in the struggle against racism and Islamophobia in Quebec.

Source: https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/class-domination-is-organized-and-reproduced-through-racism/

Photo credit: Red square badge Quebec student strike

The Tyrant's Final Illusion: When the World No Longer Needs Him

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-07-05T15:17:00Z

Article dedicated to all peoples who live under dictatorship, and to those in democratic societies who may one day find themselves confronting it again.

“He was depressed when he suddenly realized that everything had finally fallen into place in the world… everything except him… he alone no longer had a place.”

– Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch

This is not merely a literary moment drawn from a novel. It expresses a political and human experience that recurs throughout history: the moment when power ceases to be a function and becomes an illusion of existence.

At the moment of his fall, the tyrant - indeed, every tyrant - does not simply lose power. He is confronted with something far more unsettling: the world he believed revolved around him has continued without him. History, it turns out, was never waiting for his arrival.

This marks the final collapse of a foundational illusion: the belief that a single individual can embody an entire nation.

While these reflections emerge from the experience of authoritarian power in the Arab world, they point to a broader understanding of how tyranny operates beyond any single geography or context.

Power as a Monopoly of Meaning

Tyranny is not only the monopoly of power. It is also the monopoly of meaning.

The tyrant's way of thinking is not formed alone. It is shaped by a controlled environment: a media system that repeats and amplifies his image, an entourage that filters reality to please authority, and networks of political, economic, and personal interests that value proximity to power more than truth.

In such a system, the ruler no longer sees society as it is. He receives only a filtered version of reality and, over time, hears only the echo of his own image.

But this is not only imposed from outside. It also connects with something inside the tyrant himself: an ego built on self-importance and a strong belief in his own exceptionality and superiority. Propaganda becomes a silent agreement between what he is told and what he already wants to believe.

Over time, propaganda no longer targets society alone. It returns to its source. The ruler, surrounded by a language of “necessity” and “exception,” begins to believe it. He stops being only a political actor and becomes a kind of existential necessity: not just a ruler, but a condition for the state to exist.

At this point, a dangerous form of authoritarian thinking appears: the nation is reduced to one person, institutions to one will, and history to one biography. Thus, criticizing the ruler becomes an attack on the nation itself, because the boundary between them has disappeared.

This is the deeper meaning of “I am the state.” It is not only a historical phrase linked to Louis XIV. It expresses the moment when power closes all access to truth and becomes a mirror reflecting only itself.

The Tyrant as a Prisoner of His Own Illusion

The paradox of tyranny is that the illusion used to control society ultimately traps its creator. What begins as domination ends in confinement. Gradually, the space of truth around the ruler contracts, while fear and flattery expand. He no longer encounters an external reality; he is surrounded instead by reflections carefully adjusted to confirm him. He hears only what reassures him and sees only his own image endlessly mirrored back to him—until even reality becomes indistinguishable from his self-image.

In this way, he becomes the first victim of the system he created.

As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems do not only shape society; they also reshape the very conditions in which truth is perceived. When critical voices disappear and public space closes, the ruler is left with nothing but the echo of his own voice. When fear dominates, truth recedes behind propaganda.

The tyrant no longer lives within a real society. He inhabits an artificial world produced by power, fear, and his own reflected image. This is why collapse is so violent: it is not a simple transition from strength to weakness, but a sudden shift from certainty to exposure.

The Seizure of Time

Tyranny tries to control time itself—not only the present, but also the past and the future. History is rewritten, collective memory is reshaped, and the ruler's symbols become the starting point of national time, as if history began with him.

But time, unlike power, cannot be fully controlled. It can be distorted, but it does not, by any means, stop. When the ruler's control weakens, reality slowly returns. People resume their lives with relief, as if a heavy burden has been removed. Institutions search for balance, daily life recovers its rhythm, and even language begins to free itself from fear.

At that moment, the tyrant discovers something simple: the time he thought he owned was only an illusion. The history he tried to control continued without him, indifferent to his absence. In the end, time does not recognize those who believe they can possess it.

Tyranny as a Relationship, Not a Person

Étienne de La Boétie, in Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, reminds us that tyranny is never a purely personal power; it is sustained by a collective habit of obedience that transforms domination into an apparent necessity.

In this sense, tyranny is not something the ruler possesses. It is produced by a structure—institutions emptied of meaning, elites who protect themselves rather than speak the truth, and a society gradually conditioned to accept obedience as normal.

When this structure weakens, what once appeared absolute is revealed as fragile. This is why the fall of tyrants often looks strikingly similar across history. What collapses is not only the individual, but the entire system of illusions that made him appear necessary.

The Shock of Aftermath

At the moment of collapse, it is not only the system that breaks. The tyrant's entire view of reality collapses.

He discovers that people never stopped living, that the country was not waiting for him, and that time was never suspended in his name.

Here lies García Márquez's insight: the tragedy is not the loss of power, but the discovery that power was never necessary for the world to exist.

The patriarch does not suffer because he loses the throne. He suffers because he realizes the throne was never the centre of the world. History, which he believed reflected him, is only a river that continues to flow without noticing anyone.

The Recurrent Illusion

What tyranny reveals most clearly is not the strength of the ruler, but the fragility of the illusion behind his power: the belief that one person can represent an entire nation.

The tyrant who sees himself as the centre of history, and a society that comes to believe it cannot exist without him, are both imprisoned by the same illusion, though from opposite sides. One inflates himself until the nation is reduced to a single body. The other diminishes its own capacity to act until the nation is reduced to that body's supposed necessity. Between these two distortions—narcissism at the top and resignation below—authoritarianism is born and endlessly reproduced.

Time eventually dissolves this shared illusion. When the dust settles, it becomes evident that the state was never a person, that history never paused for anyone, and that life continued the moment fear and illusion lost their grip.

The meaning of The Autumn of the Patriarch is this: the tragedy is not that tyrants fall, but that they realize too late that their fall was never a historic event—only a brief episode in a longer history that never required them.

But the harder lesson does not end with the fall of the tyrant; it begins after it. If the illusion survives, history does not repeat the same individual—it reproduces the same idea in another form.

Tyranny endures not because tyrants are identical, but because the illusion that sustains them is persistent.

For this reason, the liberation of the future does not begin with the removal of a regime or a leader, but with the breaking of the mental need for such authority. When societies cease to seek a figure or a system to embody the nation, they begin to recover themselves, and time regains its quiet sovereignty. Time, unlike power, does not require permission to move forward.

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

Photo credit: Yup'ik mask from the Jacobsen collection, 1883, in the Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction.

The Challenge in Facing 4 July in the United States

Bill Fletcher, Jr. — 2026-07-04T23:36:00Z

There has been something almost surreal in President Donald Trump's efforts to both whitewash US history as well as make 4 July a celebration of his own delusional greatness. There is little that can be done about the latter, but for all progressive forces, there is certainly something that must be done regarding the efforts towards the former.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall leave aside Trump's 3 July speech about the alleged threat of “communism.” Instead, we shall focus on the problem of history.

The challenge in the United States is that we are taught to be suspicious of history, if not hate it. Instead, we are encouraged to embrace myth. Though this may sound strange, if not implausible, it makes perfect sense when one understands the USA as having resulted from a settler-colony. Think about it for a moment. A factually accurate history of the origins of the United States would read something like this:

In 1607, a group of English colonists invaded a territory in what is now known as ‘Virginia,' a territory occupied for thousands of years by an indigenous population, and began a process of seizing land and people, spreading disease and introducing slavery.

There is nothing in that statement that can be challenged. The problem, of course, is that such a telling is not a wonderful way to start a narrative about the greatness of one's country. More importantly, the actual history of a settler-colony is one that always questions the moral legitimacy of the state established as a result of the colonization process. This challenge or question acts as a perpetual nightmare for the resulting state and those who support it, whether such support is passive or active.

Thus, “July 4th” is complicated by both the contradictory nature of the 1775-1783 war of independence, as well as due to being a part and parcel of a longer and equally contradictory history of what came to be the United States. It is this that Trump and his MAGA minions wish to suppress and, both literally and figuratively, whitewash.

The reality of US history is the actuality of contradiction. There are really two histories of the United States, each having its own respective subsets. And it is these two histories that are irreconcilable, even when they may agree on certain specific facts. There is the history of the United States from the standpoint of those who have sought to construct a capitalist state, in effect a white supremacist, male supremacist imperial state. Separately, there is the history of the USA from the standpoint of the subaltern classes and groups, a history of class struggle; a history of the struggles against white supremacist national oppression; a history of the struggles against patriarchy/male supremacy; a history of the struggles against the capitalist degradation of the environment; a history of solidarity with oppressed populations in other parts of the planet.

These irreconcilable histories—that of the ruling groups vs those of the subaltern classes—are what we find at stake when we are asked to celebrate 4 July. Do we uphold the rhetoric of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or do we dig deeper and unpack their attack on Native Americans and their fury with King George III for the Proclamation of 1763, halting colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountain range? Do we turn a blind eye to the signatories' repudiation of the British King for attempting to turn the settlers into “slaves,” when the settlers overwhelmingly embraced slavery? Can we, in other words, remove myth, and grasp the facts and currents of history in order to understand the circumstances and actions that have led us to where we find ourselves today, both domestically and internationally? Can we utilize history, to be blunt, in order to grasp the roots of rightwing populism and neofascism in the USA and, perhaps, get a sense how to utilize the history produced by the subaltern classes against the tyrants?

Those are the questions with which I leave the reader on this, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a longtime socialist, trade unionist and international solidarity activist in the USA. He is a cofounder of standing4democracy.org and can be followed @BillFletcherJr; billfletcherjr.com.

Photo credit: Illustration from R. G. Horton's pro-Confederate propaganda "history" of the American Civil War

Trump, the Iran Memorandum, and the “World's Greatest Authority”

Bill Fletcher Jr — 2026-07-04T23:36:00Z

The announcement of the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding allegedly ending the war between Iran and the USA/Israeli axis has brought forth more confusion than I can remember in the aftermath of any crisis. And, how can we even use the word “aftermath” when, shortly after the “signing” of the Memorandum, Israel continued its relentless war against Lebanon, and Iran–as a result–announced another blockade of the Straits of Hormuz! And then, on June 21st, Trump, once again, threatened Iran and specifically threatened to kill the Iranian negotiating team! We will get back to this in a moment. First some background.

Though the mainstream media and liberal commentators have consistently referred to the USA/Israeli assault as Trump's supposed “war of choice,” such a designation entirely misses the mark. Would one call Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 a war of choice? Perhaps in a very technical sense since it was not a defensive war, but the reality was that it was a war of naked aggression. History has identified it as such and there has been no ambiguity, except among a certain ring of fascists.

Additionally, consider that Trump twice engaged in what were supposed to be good-faith negotiations with the Iranian government, only to launch military actions against them during the negotiations. The Japanese did exactly the same thing in the leadup to Pearl Harbor and, in fact, Japanese negotiators were in Washington, DC at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. History has been very unkind to the Japanese for such duplicity. Why should it be anything different with Trump?

Let us be clear that this has been a war of aggression on the part of the USA and Israel, countries which had similar and different reasons to attack Iran. They carried out the attack with a high level of hubris, poor intelligence, an irrational view of air power replacing soldiers on the ground, and an overall lack of preparation. In fact, they could not even define the objectives of the war.

During the course of the war there have been liberal commentators who have criticized Trump for failing to enter the war with a set of clear objectives, including but not limited to the failure to overthrow the Iranian theocracy or definitively crippling their military. This point of view is astounding since it suggests that had Trump been clearer about destroying the Iranian military and overthrowing the Iranian regime the war might have been justified! As any student of international law can attest, an unprovoked military assault against a country that offers no evidence of an imminent attack is in violation of international law and such actions have, since World War II, been condemned, with the exception of the “pass” regularly provided to Israel.

The contempt for international law demonstrated by Trump, et al, went hand in hand with a dismissal of human rights. On the first day of the war of aggression, US aircraft killed 175 Iranian civilians, mainly children, in a missile attack on a school. The attack at first appeared inexplicable except when it was later revealed that the US intelligence assessment of that area was completely out of date. Trump's response? According to the New York Times, Trump replied most recently, “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

Trump's contempt for the victims of US atrocities matches his contempt for people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean unless, of course, they are Afrikaners from South Africa. It is in Trump's contemptuous view of the global majority that we see the parallels between the Trump administration on foreign and domestic policy. The ethnic cleansing and atrocious treatment of immigrants in the USA – documented and undocumented – who have been warehoused and denied humane treatment displays the same attitude the Administration has taken towards the Iranians, including attacking civilian targets and attacking non-military Iranian targets on the high seas. The basic principle that applies is that no principle applies! This is what so many people failed to understand when they classified Trump as a supposed isolationist. He and his administration are not isolationists! Instead they are a regime that believes that no law, foreign or domestic, should constrain a US administration from undertaking policies driven by perceived self-interest, however avaricious.

The Memorandum signed by Trump is as odd as a four legged duck. Despite the denunciations of the Obama administration's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 – by Trump and MAGA and their insistence that it be obliterated, Trump has won nothing of substance for the US ruling elite. As has been acknowledged in both Left and Right circles, the Strait of Hormuz was open before the war; the price of oil was down; the global economy was not teetering on the brink of recession; billions of dollars per day were not being thrown into war; and Iranian civilians, neighboring Arabian/Persian Gulf nation-states, along with US personnel in western Asia, were not facing war and terror. Trump has won nothing for the US elite or his MAGgot millions. And, as should be obvious, the people of the United States have won nothing through the pirate assault on Iran.

How should we understand this situation? First, these are the steps of a 15 year old encased in the body of an 80 year old who displays serious cognitive issues. Second, these are the actions of a segment of the US political elite that wishes to reshape the world in the interest of transnational capital, particularly the fossil fuel and tech sectors. Third, these are the actions of an Administration that exists in both unity and tension with Israel wherein it, for ideological and strategic reasons, wishes to reinforce Israel, while at the same time Trump does not particularly value chaos in western Asia (the latter appearing to be a major objective of the Israeli government).

This war and settlement are an abomination. The entire process of engaging in this war of aggression must be denounced, if not ridiculed. The stand of people of good will must be that there was never any justification for this war and, indeed, the USA and Israel need to supply Iran with reconstruction assistance. They cannot afford to walk away and shrug.

There is one more critical lesson. Our fight against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism at home is not now and has never been separate from our duty to oppose wars of aggression and acts of tyranny on the global stage (the latter including standing with the Iranian people not only against the USA/Israeli aggression but, separately, against the repressive Iranian theocracy). Trump and MAGA have a global vision which includes domination of the Western Hemisphere; transactional relationships with other countries insofar as it benefits transnational capital and US political elites; and strong relationships with other tyrannical powers under a 21st century version of spheres of influence. The global majority has no interest in such a vision. And such a vision will not succeed to the extent to which we succeed in taking down rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism in our respective countries.

We moved far too slowly in responding to the Iran war. We sit awaiting a possible US strike against Cuba, not to mention other possible Trump targets. Those of us standing against rightwing authoritarianism and neofascism simply cannot sit out the global struggle.

Bill Fletcher, Jr . is coordinator and cofounder of standing4democracy.org. He is a longtime trade unionist, international solidarity activist, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

Source: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/trump-the-iran-memorandum-and-the-worlds-greatest-authority/

Photo credit: Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Fútbol Belongs to the People

Taki Manolakos — 2026-07-03T21:46:00Z

Maradona, Messi, and Fifty Years of the Same Imperial Logic

In June 1978, the World Cup came to Argentina. The military junta of General Jorge Rafael Videla had seized power two years earlier, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Isabel Perón in a coup the United States quietly encouraged. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had told Argentina's foreign minister in 1976: “We want you to succeed. If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” Kissinger attended the 1978 World Cup as the personal guest of General Videla, watched Argentina play, and praised the regime's “outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.” The declassified cable from his own National Security Council staff described his praise as “the music the Argentine government was longing to hear.”

While the matches were being played, the torture was continuing. The infamous Navy Superior Mechanics School — ESMA — was a concentration camp less than a kilometer from the River Plate stadium where Argentina played its home matches. Prisoners held there could hear the roars of the crowd during games. Thirty thousand people “disappeared” during the Dirty War — kidnapped, tortured, drugged and tossed from military airplanes into the Río de la Plata to drown. Many of the victims were students, journalists, trade unionists, and anyone deemed subversive by a regime that the United States had organized, funded, and encouraged through Operation Condor — a coordinated campaign of state terror across six South American military dictatorships.

Outside the stadium, a group of women had been marching every Thursday since April 30, 1977. Fourteen mothers had gathered for the first time at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires — the large square in front of the presidential palace — to demand information about their disappeared children. Public assembly was illegal under the dictatorship, so they began walking in circles around the pyramid at the center of the plaza. They wore white headscarves made from the cloth diapers of their missing children. They embroidered the names and birth dates of the disappeared onto the fabric. They carried photographs. The military called them “las locas” — the madwomen — and were baffled about how to suppress a protest of grieving mothers without provoking a backlash. Eventually they turned their violence on the movement itself. In December 1977, one of the founders, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped outside her home, tortured, and thrown from a military airplane into the sea. Two other founding members were taken from a church meeting and killed in the same manner. Their deaths did not stop the march. Azucena Villaflor had told them before she was taken: “Even if I'm not around, keep going.”

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo used the World Cup's global visibility to make the dictatorship's crimes visible to an international audience for the first time. Foreign journalists covering the tournament saw them marching. Human rights organizations in Europe and North America launched campaigns under the slogan “football yes, torture no.” Amnesty International organized letter-writing drives. In France, over two hundred local committees formed under the banner “No football in the concentration camps.” None of this stopped the tournament. Argentina won. General Videla lifted the trophy. Henry Kissinger smiled for the cameras. The torture continued.

Diego Maradona — the seventeen-year-old who would go on to become, by wide consensus, the greatest fútbol player who ever lived — was in Buenos Aires that June, and he was not on the field. Argentina was hosting the tournament, and much of the country wanted him on the roster, but the coach chose to exclude him from the squad, judging him too young to carry the pressure of a home World Cup. “I cried my eyes out when I was not considered,” Maradona said of the snub. He spent the tournament his country's dictatorship was using to launder its reputation watching from the outside — too young to play in it, but not too young to understand exactly what was happening.

This is the history that FIFA carries into every World Cup it hosts. It is the history it carried into Kansas City on June 16, 2026, when FIFA president Gianni Infantino sat in the VIP section of Arrowhead Stadium to watch Lionel Messi's Argentina defeat Algeria 3-0. Maradona had a word for this. In 2019, one year before his death, he resigned from FIFA's Legends program after concluding that the organization was going in the wrong direction. “Since Blatter and Grondona left,” he wrote in his resignation letter to Infantino, “FIFA hasn't changed a bit. No change.” He added: “They treated us as if we were little dogs that only needed to be fed and that's it. A total lack of respect.” When Maradona died in November 2020, Infantino called him “simply immense” and said fútboll owed him “eternal gratitude.”

Maradona would have laughed. Then he would have said something unprintable about Infantino, just as he had said something unprintable about George W. Bush at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata — where he boarded a train full of protesters alongside Hugo Chavez, wore a shirt bearing Bush's image and the words “war criminal,” and called the American president “human garbage” in front of tens of thousands of people. He said: “Argentina has dignity. Let's throw Bush out.” He meant every word.

Diego Maradona was born on October 30, 1960, and raised in a shantytown on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires with no clean water, no paved roads, and open sewers running between houses where families survived on construction work, factory shifts, and whatever else could be found. His father left for work at 4am. His mother told the children she had already eaten so they could have larger portions. On his third birthday, an uncle brought him a worn leather ball. He slept with it under his arm.

From those streets he became what Messi himself later called the greatest player in history. “Even if I played for a million years,” Messi said, “I'd never come close to Maradona. Not that I'd want to anyway. He's the greatest there's ever been.” Maradona returned the admiration: “I have seen the player who will inherit my place in Argentine football and his name is Messi. Messi is a genius.” Between them they produced the most complete account of what a human being can do with the ball that the sport has ever seen.

But Maradona never forgot where he came from. He had Che Guevara tattooed on his right arm. He had Fidel Castro tattooed on his left leg. He called Castro “my second father” and dedicated his autobiography to him. He traveled to Venezuela to embrace Chavez at the presidential palace. At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, coaching Argentina for the last time, he had his team display a banner on the pitch calling for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He said the World Cup had been stolen from the people who loved fútbol and given to corporations and politicians. He was right then and he would be unsurprised today.

In 1986, playing against England four years after Argentina's defeat in the Malvinas war — a conflict that killed approximately 900 people, most of them young Argentine conscripts, Maradona scored a goal with his hand and was not penalized. He said afterward it was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” He later clarified what he had really been thinking: “We knew that a lot of Argentine kids had died there, that they had killed them like little birds.” It was a goal but more importantly an act of political defiance against an imperial power.

Messi was born on June 24, 1987, in Rosario, Argentina. His father was a foreman at a pressed steel plant. His mother worked in a manufacturing workshop. He left for Barcelona at 13 when FC Barcelona offered to pay for the growth hormone treatment his family could not afford in Argentina. He became the greatest player of his generation — Maradona's own verdict confirmed it. He is also, in political terms, essentially blank. He has never said anything about anything that matters beyond the game. He has never called anyone human garbage. He has never boarded a train full of protesters. He has never had a revolutionary's face tattooed on his body.

On March 5, 2026, Messi walked into the East Room of the White House, handed Donald Trump a pink Inter Miami ball, and accepted the president's congratulations on winning the MLS Cup. Trump said: “It's my distinct privilege to say what no American president has ever had the chance to say before: ‘Welcome to the White House, Lionel Messi.'“ Fourteen months earlier, Messi had declined President Biden's invitation to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing schedule conflicts. He found no such conflict this time.

This is not simply a story of two men who chose differently. Messi's working-class origins were not so different from Maradona's. The difference is what happened next. Maradona stayed inside Argentine fútboll into his twenties, in a culture saturated with the politics of a nation living through dictatorship and its aftermath, before the world's biggest stages ever found him. Messi left for Barcelona at thirteen, extracted from working-class Rosario before any political consciousness could fully form, and was rebuilt inside La Masia — an elite academy engineered to produce footballers, not citizens. He came of age entirely inside the most financialized, brand-managed era the sport has ever known, a system perfected precisely to manufacture players who would never alienate the market. Maradona's class consciousness survived because the fútbol culture that raised him carried it forward. Messi's was engineered out of him by the very machine that made him great. He was not born without politics - he was made that way.

None of this makes Messi a villain. The contrast between Maradona and Messi is not about talent. Messi is a genius — Maradona said so himself. It is also not about morality. Both are human and complicated. It is about whose side you are on. Because we must all pick a side.

On June 18, 2026, two days after Gianni Infantino watched Messi score three goals at Arrowhead Stadium, the country Maradona loved more than any other outside his own faced the same imperial pressure that had crushed Argentina decades before. That day, Cuban lawmakers unanimously approved what economists described as the most profound transformation of the country's economic system since the revolution. Foreign investors would no longer be required to form joint ventures with the state. Both Cuban and foreign investors would be allowed to acquire stakes in state companies. Private banks would enter Cuba's once state-dominated finance sector. The measures came after the Trump administration cut off Cuba's oil supply in January — following the US military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela — reducing the island's fuel imports by an estimated 90 percent, producing nationwide blackouts of ten to twenty hours daily. Trump had said the United States would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.” He had mused about an aircraft carrier stopping just outside Cuban waters. There is no appeasing fascists. The Cubans, of all people, know this. They have known it for sixty years.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched in 1977 and 1978 while Henry Kissinger praised the junta that was throwing their children from airplanes. Nearly fifty years later, the same imperial logic — applied through oil blockades and military threats — produced the privatization of the revolution Maradona loved. But the imperial logic that crushed Cuba and silenced Argentina has never gone unanswered. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo answered it by marching every Thursday for nearly fifty years. They were not politicians. They were ordinary people who refused to disappear along with their children. That tradition of refusal does not belong only to Argentina. It surfaces wherever ordinary people decide, without permission and without guarantee of safety, that our elites do not get to define what is possible.

Forty miles from Arrowhead Stadium, in Lawrence, Kansas — a college town of 96,000 people better known for the University of Kansas than for international fútbol — something happened this June that no algorithm can price. When the Algerian men's national team arrived the first weekend of June to begin their World Cup preparations, Lawrence showed up. The city had been preparing for over a year. Local restaurants updated their menus with halal-friendly options. Residents arrived at open practice sessions waving Algerian flags and wearing team scarves. Lawrence artist Stan Herd — known for his large-scale earthworks — created a giant Algerian flag made from organic materials on the grounds of the University of Kansas. The University of Kansas marching band learned and performed the Algerian national anthem as the crowd stood in reverence. The Spencer Museum of Art at KU opened an exhibition titled “Welcoming the World to Lawrence,” drawing from its permanent collection to celebrate the nations represented in the tournament.

The story of Lawrence and Algeria made headlines internationally — on Good Morning America, and across the Arab world — because it was the story of a small American city choosing, in the face of a federal government conducting immigration raids and threatening military action against Muslim-majority nations, to offer genuine and unconditional welcome. This is what Maradona recognized in every city he played in — it was another moment when the game belongs to the people. Lawrence chose to keep going. Azucena Villaflor told the Mothers before she was taken: “Even if I'm not around, keep going.” They kept going. For nearly fifty years they kept going. The junta fell. Kissinger died. Videla died. The march continued.

Maradona was not the first athlete to turn a stadium into a stage for defiance. Jesse Owens did it in 1936, winning four gold medals in track and field at the Berlin Olympics with Adolf Hitler in the stands, watching the Games he had built to prove Aryan supremacy. Muhammad Ali did it in 1967, refusing induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War and declaring he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong — a decision that cost him his title, his boxing license, and three and a half years of his prime. Tommie Smith and John Carlos did it in 1968, raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic medal stand in Mexico City, and were suspended from the team and sent home under death threat for it. None of them were rewarded. All of them were right. Maradona belongs to that lineage. And even in the face of crass commercialization, fútbol still belongs to the people.

Photo credit: Archivo Hasenberg-Quaretti, 9 December 1982
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Photo Caption: En Plaza de Mayo, el 9 y 10 de diciembre de 1982 con las consignas: "Aparición con vida de los detenidos desaparecidos; restitución de los niños a sus legítimas familias y libertad a los presos políticos"

The Colonised Feet that now carry the White World

MJ Vijayan — 2026-07-02T20:20:39Z

Look carefully. The so-called ‘white nations' of world football are no longer carried only by ‘white bodies', white histories, white churches or white bloodlines. They are carried, again and again, by the children of Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America – migrant neighbourhoods, refugee homes, working-class suburbs and postcolonial memory. This is the story.

What is the most striking question the FIFA World Cup throws at us today?

Not merely who scored, who topped the group, who moved to the next round. The deeper question is this: who is carrying the dreams of the old empires on their feet?

Look at France.
Look at England.
Look at Belgium, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, the United States and Canada.

Look carefully, not with the lazy eye of nationalism, but with the historical eye of politics. The so-called ‘white nations' of world football are no longer carried only by ‘white bodies', white histories, white churches or white bloodlines. They are carried, again and again, by the children of Africa, the Caribbean, the Arab world, Asia, Latin America – migrant neighbourhoods, refugee homes, working-class suburbs and postcolonial memory.

That the global North is being carried on its feet by the global South is not a small footnote to football.

This is the story.

France is the most striking example. Kylian Mbappé, born in Paris, with Cameroonian and Algerian roots, is not an exception in the French team. He is the centre of a wider truth.

Around him stand names like Ousmane Dembélé, Aurélien Tchouaméni, N'Golo Kanté, Mike Maignan, William Saliba, Ibrahima Konaté, Jules Koundé, Dayot Upamecano, Michael Olise, Rayan Cherki, Bradley Barcola, Marcus Thuram, Désiré Doué and others. They are French. They are also children of histories that France once ruled, exploited, extracted from, policed, racialised and called “outside”.

Now those “outsiders” are France's centre.

The old empire wanted labour without equality, colonies without citizenship, resources without memory, and culture without justice. Football has staged a brutal reversal. The children of the colonised now sing the Marseillaise, wear the French blue, win the trophies, take the penalties, absorb the racist abuse, and still rescue the republic from its own narrow imagination of itself.

The irony is not symbolic. It is historic.

England too is no longer explainable through the mythology of ‘island purity'. Its footballing hope now runs through Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham, Marcus Rashford, Eberechi Eze, Kobbie Mainoo, Noni Madueke, Marc Guéhi, Ezri Konsa, Ivan Toney, Djed Spence and others. Some are of African or Caribbean descent. Some come from immigrant families. Some carry names and histories that would have once been told to remain at the margins of ‘Englishness'.

Yet today, without them, England is not a World Cup contender. It is just nostalgia in a white shirt.

And then there is the question of faith. Europe, which still imagines itself as a Christian civilisational space, now finds its footballing future deeply shaped by Muslim, migrant and minority histories. Spain's Lamine Yamal, born in Catalonia to a Moroccan father and an Equatorial Guinean mother, is one of the most dazzling young talents in world football. His very presence unsettles the old categories.

Is he Spanish?
Yes.
Is he African in lineage?
Yes.
Is he a child of migrant struggle?
Yes.
Must he choose only one history?
No.

That is precisely what football is teaching Europe: identity is not a prison. It is a river that cannot be dammed.

Djed Spence becoming a Muslim representative in the England side is not merely a sports trivia point. It is a political image. A Muslim player in the national team of a country where Islamophobia has been normalised by tabloids, politicians and street racism. A player of minority background wearing the shirt of a country still struggling to admit what empire did to the world.

This is not token diversity.

This is the new demographic truth breaking through the old national lie.

Germany has its own version of this story. Antonio Rüdiger, Jamal Musiala, Malick Thiaw, Karim Adeyemi in earlier squads, and now Deniz Undav, the German-born player of Kurdish Yazidi heritage, show that Germany's footballing body is not the old ‘Aryan fantasy' of its darkest past.

Undav's story is particularly moving. A son of a persecuted Yazidi refugee family, he plays for Germany and becomes a symbol of dignity for a stateless and wounded people. This is football doing what parliaments often refuse to do: making the invisible visible.

Belgium's story is equally powerful. Jérémy Doku, Romelu Lukaku, Amadou Onana, Dodi Lukebakio, Youri Tielemans and others represent a country whose wealth was historically tied to the violent extraction of Congo and Africa. Today, Belgium's footballing pride is inseparable from African-origin players. The descendants of those who were once colonised or racialised now carry the flag of the country that once profited from colonial brutality.

History has a strange left foot.

The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal too are no longer culturally sealed European teams. They are teams of migration, empire, labour and refuge. Virgil van Dijk, Cody Gakpo, Xavi Simons, Denzel Dumfries, Manuel Akanji, Breel Embolo, Alexander Isak, Rafael Leão, Nuno Mendes, Danilo Pereira and many others are reminders that Europe's footballing quality is built not by ethnic purity but by pluralism.

North America tells the same story in a different grammar.

The United States team is not a white American story. It is Christian Pulisic, yes, but also Tim Weah, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams, Folarin Balogun, Haji Wright, Malik Tillman, Sergiño Dest, Antonee Robinson, Chris Richards, Mark McKenzie, Miles Robinson, Auston Trusty, Ricardo Pepi and Alejandro Zendejas.

It is Black America, African migration, Caribbean routes, Latino histories, mixed families and the children of movement. In a country where racism remains structural and police violence remains political, the national team quietly displays what the republic refuses to fully become. In a nutshell, the football team of the USA at the FIFA World Cup, negates everything that Donald Trump and rusted Republican politics stand for. Literally getting beaten on the grass.

Canada too is unimaginable without the men with curls! The first country team to advance to the round of 16 in the 2026 FIFA WC, Canada is nothing without Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Ismaël Koné, Tajon Buchanan, Moïse Bombito, Ali Ahmed, Cyle Larin, Tani Oluwaseyi, Promise David and others. Here is a country whose footballing rise is powered by Black, Caribbean, African and migrant-origin players. The new Canada on the pitch is far ahead of the old Canada of settler innocence.

This is why football is political and is the most political sport on the map.

Not because players must issue manifestos, but because their bodies already carry history. Every sprint by Mbappé, every dribble by Yamal, every tackle by Rüdiger, every run by Saka, every burst by Doku, every save by Maignan, cheered by nationalist fans, is also a commentary on race, empire, conquests, belonging and nationhood.

It is a poetry against colonisation, written with blood and sweat.

The Far Right understands this. That is why it attacks these players the moment they miss a penalty. They are French when they score, African or Arab when they miss. English when they win, immigrant when they fail. Belgian when they dribble, Congolese when they demand respect. The racist mind wants minority bodies to produce national glory without claiming national equality.

But football is defeating that bargain. The colonised are not merely asking for entry anymore. Their children are carrying the keys. They are not guests in Europe's house. They are rebuilding the house. They are not symbols of charity. They are makers of national pride.

They are not evidence of decline, as racists claim. They are proof that pluralism works.

This World Cup is therefore not just a globalised, glamourised tournament. It is a people's census of modern history; standing tall against the ignorance of settler colonialism. It tells us that no nation is pure, no flag is innocent, no anthem belongs to one race, and no empire can forever control the descendants of those it once tried to rule.

Centuries after colonialism, the ball has rolled back. The children of the colonies, the children of migrants, the children of Muslims, Africans, Arabs, Asians, Caribbeans and refugees are now the messengers of possibility for the very countries that once treated them as inferior.

And they are not whispering. They are scoring and roaring; winning hearts for who they are.

MJ Vijayan , a football fanatic, is a socio-political analyst and writer, based in New Delhi.

Source: independentink.in

Photo credit: Team Germany players, Ecuador v Germany at 2026 Fifa World Cup by YantsImages

In Defense of the Fourth of July

Ryan Zickgraf — 2026-07-01T14:53:00Z

The Declaration of Independence has been quoted by abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, civil rights activists, and the Black Panthers. Why should conservatives get to own it now?

"The 4th day of July, as a national holiday, commemorates an event which ought to be very dear to American workingmen," claimed Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs.

“I like the Fourth of July, it breathes a spirit of revolution,” said Eugene V. Debs in a 1901 Independence Day speech. The socialist firebrand was far from blindly patriotic (“I am not of those who worship the flag,” he added in the same speech), but throughout his life, Debs refused to let the American flag, the Fourth, or the revolutionary inheritance of 1776 fully fall into the hands of reactionaries.

Debs consistently cast himself as an heir to a native tradition of dissent, invoking not only John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, but also Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln. For Debs, these figures were not just ancestors cast in marble, but unfinished business. The American Revolution had announced a principle that capitalism, racial hierarchy, and class rule had betrayed. Socialism, in Debs's telling, was not some foreign poison poured into the American bloodstream but the next democratic demand made by the same revolutionary spirit that had once waged a war on monarchy itself. Why abandon the American democratic promise when you ask it to live up to its own ideals?

Yet, “I like the Fourth of July” is not a popular take on the Left in the twenty-first century. This is a mistake. It's one thing to say the American Revolution was compromised. It is another to say it is useless. The Left has increasingly confused the two. As Debs proves, it's entirely possible to separate the art from the artist.

Growing Paines

The socialist case for 1776 is not that the Revolution was some pure emancipatory rebellion, but that it was historically progressive — far more than just a tax revolt by annoyed Boston merchants. It was a sustained, often genuinely radical argument — argued in pamphlets, sermons, town meetings, and taverns before it reached the battlefield — against the idea that some people are born to rule others. The British Empire represented monarchy, aristocracy, and imperial rule. Certainly, the Founders were not secular saints: many were slaveholders, speculators, creditors, pursuers of Native displacement, and men of property whose idea of liberty often stopped at the edge of their own class interests. But the colonies, for all their contradictions, were also fighting for self-government, national independence, and a wider democratic horizon.

Anti-imperial revolt against a distant, extractive metropole; a refusal of aristocratic privilege; a claim to popular sovereignty against rule by birthright — these are not incidentally compatible with left politics.

Just ask Thomas Paine, America's original left-wing populist, who criticized monarchy in language so blunt it still practically draws blood. In Common Sense, he called England's king “the Royal Brute of Britain,” who “hath wickedly broken through every moral and human obligation, trampled nature and conscience beneath his feet, and by a steady and constitutional spirit of insolence and cruelty procured for himself a universal hatred.” He understood that the point of republican politics was not simply to replace one bad king with wiser administrators. It was to destroy the idea that anyone had a natural right to rule. That's why Paine wasn't just offended by the British ruler, but monarchs in general, calling them absurd, useless — even evil. Monarchy “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry,” he wrote.

It's hard to overstate how much Paine's words helped shape the political ideology of the Revolution, even if it also served the Founders' self-interest. Common Sense, published in January 1776, perhaps sold somewhere north of 100,000 copies in its first few months in a colonial population of perhaps two and a half million free adults — proportionally the best-selling book in American history. In 1776, Paine's searing words were crucial to inspiring the American Revolution. “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense,” John Adams is alleged to have said, “the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Then there are the words of the Declaration of Independence itself, which have done more damage to hierarchy than almost any political sentence in the English language. “All men are created equal” was written by a slaveholder, which is both the central American hypocrisy and the reason the line has never stopped burning. Its power lies partly in the gap between who wrote it and what it said. Jefferson did not live up to it, nor did the republic he helped found. But the words transcended him almost immediately. Abolitionists invoked it relentlessly, and Frederick Douglass didn't reject the Declaration of Independence in his famous 1852 speech (“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”) — he beat the country over the head with it, demanding it mean what it said. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at Seneca Falls in 1848, also didn't write a new manifesto. Instead, she sat down and rewrote the Declaration, replacing “King George” with “man” and insisting that the self-evident truths be self-evident.

Even the Black Panthers, who were not exactly in danger of being mistaken for Daughters of the American Revolution docents, understood this. Their Ten-Point Program concluded with a lengthy quotation from the Declaration of Independence. They used the language of rights, grievances, and the right to alter or abolish oppressive government because they knew American power could be indicted in the language it claimed for itself.

The Unfinished Revolution

For the past half-century, since the bicentennial, the Left has treated the American project not as unfinished but as inherently fraudulent. In doing so, it's fully ceded 1776 to conservatives who have reduced the Revolution to conservative kitsch: tricorn hats, powdered-wig memes, patriotic lesson plans, decorative muskets, and the general conviction that America was born perfect until the universities came along and spilled Foucault all over the parchment.

The notion that 1776 is a solidly conservative property was formalized by Donald Trump, who, in his first term, convened a “1776 Commission” to draft a so-called “patriotic education” to counter what he called the “left-wing indoctrination” of American schoolchildren. The commission's report was a thin, ahistorical pamphlet, more interested in flattering the Founders than understanding them. It also goes to great lengths to make villains out of progressivism, communism, and identity politics as “false theories” that betray the ideals of the founding of America.

Yet, the 1776 Commission had a perfect foil. Two years earlier, the New York Times had published the 1619 Project, which relocated the country's true founding to the arrival of the first slave ship at Point Comfort, Virginia, and recast the Revolution itself as, in part, a counterrevolution waged to protect slavery from a supposedly abolitionist Britain. Historians picked that claim apart fairly thoroughly. But the project's deeper argument — that 1776 is best understood as original sin rather than founding myth persists.

The 1619 Project wasn't wrong to insist that slavery sits at the center of American history rather than its footnotes. But it was wrong to treat that as the whole story — as though Paine's antimonarchical argument was simply a cover for slaveholders' property interests, rather than a genuinely separate current that abolitionists spent the next eighty years dragging toward its logical conclusion. The point isn't to adjudicate which tradition was more “authentically” American. It's that two things can be true at once: the Revolution was deeply compromised, and the language of the Revolution has always been the most effective instrument the American left has ever wielded.

Thomas Paine understood that the point of republican politics was to destroy the idea that anyone had a natural right to rule.

It's why, when Karl Marx wrote Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the First International during the Civil War, he told the president that “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” The Revolution represented by 1776 didn't truly end when King George surrendered; the claim that “all men are created equal” was a promise to be fulfilled by future generations.

The Left's posture has changed from “America hasn't lived up to its ideals” to “America's ideals are themselves the problem,” which might appear as radicalization. It's actually a retreat — unilateral disarmament from a weapon that has worked in American politics for a moral purity that has nowhere to go.

Reclaiming the Day

Today, the invocation of the Revolution has shifted once again, this time toward older mainstream liberals defying Trump in the streets under the slogan “No Kings.” It's common to go to a No Kings protest and hear liberals clad in American Revolution costumes chanting for limits on executive authority (“No Kings, No Tyrants!”) and waving the kind of Don't Tread on Me flags that, a decade ago, were flown by libertarians.

That the old Tea Party costume box has been passed to the resistance libs is, in one sense, comic. But it is also revealing. “No Kings” works because it touches something deeper than anti-Trump proceduralism. It does what all the best American radical language does: it converts a specific political crisis into a simple republican principle. No kings. No rulers by birthright. No presidents as sovereigns. No executive who treats law as a nuisance, office as property, and loyalty as the highest civic virtue. The slogan is almost childish, which is why it is so effective. It reaches beneath the bloodless vocabulary of norms and institutions and hits the nerve center of American politics.

The Left's job isn't to compete with the liberals for ownership of the wig-and-bayonet aesthetic. It's to insist on the more radical reading — one that asks not just “is this constitutional?” but “who has power over whom, and why?” A genuine left 1776 Project would say that the Revolution's core claim — that no one is born with the right to rule anyone else — doesn't stop at the White House. It applies to the boss, the landlord, the monopoly, and the creditor just as much as the king. That was Debs's argument. The Revolution as a permanent demand, not a founding moment encased in glass.

America's 250th anniversary is here, and Trump is busy acting like the Second Coming of King George. What would Thomas Paine do?

Source: https://jacobin.com/2026/07/independence-day-trump-1776-project

Photo Credit: Eugene V. Debs speaking to an audience outside of the Hotel Antler & Keeflin Cafe, 1908

Cyprus in the New World Disorder: Resisting the Logic of “Geopolitics”

Nicos Trimikliniotis and Eren Duzgun — 2026-06-30T15:50:00Z

Since 7 October 2023, Cyprus has moved from the margins of Middle Eastern conflict into its operational geography. British bases on the island have supported Israeli and US military activity across the region; the Republic of Cyprus has expanded defence cooperation with the United States, Israel, France, and Greece; and Northern Cyprus has been integrated more deeply into Turkey's military infrastructure. The March 2026 drone strikes on the island exposed the consequence: Cyprus can no longer host the machinery of regional war while assuming that war will remain elsewhere.

This militarisation is usually presented as an unavoidable response to external danger. Yet this reverses the causal relationship. Cyprus is exposed not simply because it lies in a dangerous region, but because partition has made the island available to competing external powers. British sovereign territory, the Republic's Israeli alignments and Turkey's military control of the north turn Cyprus into a fragmented security space. Partition facilitates militarisation; militarisation deepens partition. This cycle has accelerated since the collapse of the last substantive settlement talks in 2017, and even the latest attempts by the UN to revive negotiations risks reproducing it. They are subordinating reunification to the security calculations of external powers and placing Cyprus's future under NATO tutelage.

This circular logic is reproduced by an entourage of security experts, politicians, and geopolitical commentators, who translate the interests of ruling classes into the language of necessity. Many have little knowledge of the society they designate as the other: they do not speak its language, have rarely visited it, and encounter its people mainly through official threat narratives. Yet they confidently prescribe deterrence, armament, and alliance on the basis of pseudo-scientific, game-theoretical models of geopolitical competition. “Geopolitics” thereby ceases to be an analysis of historically produced power relations and becomes a means of naturalising them. The priorities of ruling elites are presented as if they followed automatically from geography itself, while alternative political possibilities – demilitarisation, cooperation, and regional solidarity – are dismissed as naïve. The language of the powerful is thus circulated as neutral expertise, making the reproduction and escalation of conflict appear as common sense. In this brief commentary, we seek to demystify this geopolitical logic in Cyprus.

The Republic of Cyprus: Israelization as a Class Project

From independence in 1960, the Cypriot state emerged in a fragile and highly constrained postcolonial form. The anti-colonial movement had contained strong intercommunal and left-wing possibilities, yet these were weakened and suppressed by the rise of Greek-Cypriot nationalism. Following British colonial rule between 1878 and 1960, the Republic of Cyprus became independent under constitutional arrangements involving three guarantor powers – the United Kingdom, Greece, and Turkey – while Britain retained 3 per cent of the island as “sovereign base areas.” The breakdown of the constitutional order in 1963, the intercommunal violence of 1963-74, the July 1974 coup organised by the Greek junta, Turkey's subsequent invasion, the mass killings and displacement of both communities, and the later declaration of the so-called “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC) in 1983 entrenched an unequal and internationally contested order.

The Republic of Cyprus's foreign policy has shifted markedly from the non-aligned and pro-Palestinian orientation of earlier decades. Over the past fifteen years, and especially under the Anastasiades government between 2013 and 2023 and the Christodoulides government since 2023, Cyprus has presented itself as a dependable node in a US-aligned Eastern Mediterranean security architecture. The 3+1 framework with Greece, Israel, and the United States, the Cyprus–US Strategic Dialogue launched in 2024, the bilateral defence roadmap for 2024–29 and increasingly regular military exercises have institutionalised this direction. The British bases remain important operational infrastructure, but the more consequential change from the earlier period is that the Republic itself now actively markets its ports, airspace, intelligence capacity, geographical location, and political reliability as strategic assets.

Security cooperation is only one part of this project. It is linked to hydrocarbons, electricity interconnection, shipping, technology, tourism, property, and infrastructure. American energy companies participate in offshore gas development; the proposed electricity connection to Greece and Israel is promoted as both an economic and geopolitical corridor; and Israeli firms and citizens have become increasingly visible in property, hospitality, technology, and services. Even setting aside the ecological costs of these activities, none is inherently sinister, nor does every investor participate in a coherent geopolitical plan. The point is structural: defence cooperation, energy diplomacy, and private accumulation increasingly reinforce one another. Cyprus's value to Israel and the United States strengthens the position of Greek-Cypriot elites able to broker land, licences, contracts, services, and political access. They, in turn, translate commercial and strategic opportunities into a single “national interest.” The promise is that geopolitical usefulness will deliver investment, diplomatic protection, and deterrence against Turkey.

The cost is that security becomes detached from reunification. Instead of asking how Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots might share sovereignty and reunite the island within a bizonal, bicommunal federation – the model negotiated by both parties since the 1970s – these elites ask how the Republic can increase its value within an anti-Turkish regional balance. The relationship with Israel exposes the contradictions most clearly. While claiming neutrality through its operation of a humanitarian maritime corridor to Gaza, Cyprus has simultaneously deepened military cooperation with the state carrying out the destruction of Gaza. Alongside strengthening diplomatic ties, it purchased Israeli surveillance drones in 2019 and began taking delivery of an Israeli-made air-defence system in December 2024, intended to complement and eventually replace its ageing Russian systems. Meanwhile, the lifting of the longstanding US arms embargo has opened access to American military equipment. Arms procurement thus ties the Republic ever more closely to the Israeli and American defence industries. The Iranian drone assault on Cyprus in March 2026 demonstrated the broader danger: once the island's infrastructure becomes part of a regional war, official declarations of Cypriot neutrality cannot prevent Cyprus from being treated as part of the battlefield.

This shift is unfolding within a wider regional reordering in which Turkey and Israel are increasingly constructed as strategic adversaries with Cyprus positioned as a military outpost in their emerging confrontation. At its root lies the erosion of US hegemony, which has weakened the regional order it once imposed and intensified competition among states seeking to fill the resulting vacuum.

The Wider Context: Turkey and Israel as Enemies in the Making?

US foreign policy under Trump has been confusing, to say the least. Yet one thing is clear: its erratic oscillation between restraint and escalation registers deeper crises of social reproduction at home and geopolitical reproduction abroad. “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), which initially promised a form of isolationism, could not sustain it in practice. Faced with a crisis of legitimacy at home and the rise of China abroad, while unable – or unwilling – to address the underlying causes of American decline in any meaningful way, MAGA has been pushed almost inevitably toward a more strident projection of power abroad. It has intensified the “moral asymmetry” that has traditionally sustained American exceptionalism by presenting US power as uniquely legitimate, its violence as necessary, and its interventions as the defence of order itself.

This increasingly aggressive dynamic is inseparable from the perpetuation of American supremacy through the petrodollar order in the Middle East. As the productive foundations of US power have weakened, strategic control over oil and gas routes, and over the dollar-denominated circuits through which energy moves, has become even more central to the reproduction of American primacy. The wars on Gaza and Iran must also be seen in this light. They are not only Israel's wars, justified and fought by the US; they are also wars over the political and military conditions under which the wider US-led energy and monetary order is secured. Even if the war on Iran ended in a major failure for the US, the broader project of weakening Iran, consolidating Israel as a regional military bully, disciplining Europe into deeper dependence on American energy and security structures, and militarising the Eastern Mediterranean remains part of this wider process.

But a US-led redesign of the region does not only produce a coherent camp beneath it. It also sharpens rivalries among the very middle powers Washington hopes to align. One of the most important is the emerging rivalry between Turkey and Israel over the future of the Middle East, particularly post-Assad Syria. Both Turkey and Israel worked to topple the Assad regime, but they did so for different reasons and with different endgames in mind. It was Turkish-backed, Idlib-based neo-jihadi forces that brought Assad down, a development the United States openly praised on several occasions. The fall of the regime also created an immediate opportunity for Israel to expand its influence in Druze-dominated southern Syria and to destroy much of the military hardware and naval capacity that the new regime would otherwise have inherited from Assad. What is emerging is a distinctly American-dominated Syria: a new regime backed by Turkey, aligned against Iran and Hizbullah, and keen to maintain workable relations with Israel despite Israel's continuing expansion in the Golan Heights.

However, this apparent stabilisation has also generated new contradictions. Even as Syria is being reintegrated into a US-aligned regional framework, that process has opened the way for a more direct Turkish–Israeli rivalry over who will shape the new order on the ground. Since December 2024, Turkey's relationship with Israel has deteriorated sharply, as Syria has become the site where Ankara's search for regional influence collides directly with Israeli fears of any neighbouring order it cannot control. Israel wants to preserve its freedom of action in Syria and the wider Levant; Turkey seeks to consolidate its influence in northern Syria, now openly declares that its security begins in Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut and increasingly presents itself as a counterweight to Israel's attempt to reshape the regional order.

Furthermore, Turkey and Israel are also advancing competing infrastructure corridors: Israel seeks to establish itself as a pivotal link in the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), while Turkey – excluded from IMEC – promotes the Iraq–Turkey Development Road and its wider Middle Corridor as alternative routes connecting Asia and Europe. That is why Israeli rhetoric has increasingly recast Turkey not merely as a difficult regional actor, but as an emerging strategic threat—indeed, as what several Israeli politicians and commentators call the “next Iran.”

These statements reflect both a real concern and an amplified threat perception. The threat is amplified because Turkish–Israeli relations continue to contain significant areas of overlap. During the Arab Spring and even at the height of Turkish geopolitical adventurism in Syria, the two sides still had incentives to repair ties. They held normalisation talks in 2015-16 after the Mavi Marmara rupture and restored full diplomatic relations in August 2022. More importantly, political confrontation never eliminated practical interdependence. Turkey has not stopped the flow of Azeri oil through the Baku–Ceyhan pipeline, which covers roughly a third of Israel's oil needs; it has allowed indirect or disguised trade to continue despite the political theatre of sanctions; and it has remained embedded in a US-led regional order whose strategic infrastructure, including the Kürecik radar site in Malatya, materially strengthens Israel's security environment, even if Ankara denies any direct bilateral role. In this sense, confrontation at the level of discourse has coexisted with indirect commercial and logistical ties, preventing the relationship from hardening into outright rupture.

That said, threat perceptions are also real and increasing on both sides. From Israel's standpoint, the problem is less that Turkey threatens its immediate security than that Turkish influence might gradually narrow Israel's freedom of action in post-Assad Syria. Israeli pre-emptive strikes, such as the bombing of the Palmyra airbase, which had reportedly been promised to the Turkish air force by the new Syrian regime, were early signs of this logic. Calling Turkey the “next Iran” is therefore part of a strategy that magnifies present risks and prepares the ground for a harder line should Turkish influence in the region increase. On the Turkish side, the starkest sign of this intensifying threat perception is the way the Kurdish question has been drawn back into the regional equation. Ankara fears that Israel could use the Kurdish card in Syria to unsettle Turkey and increase pressure on it indirectly. Precisely because the Kurdish question has once again acquired wider geopolitical significance, it has pushed Erdo?an and his ultra-nationalist allies toward seeking some form of peaceful, democratic resolution to Turkey's long-standing Kurdish question – something that was unthinkable only a few years ago.

In that sense, the threat is not merely rhetorical inflation but a real struggle over the distribution of influence within a reordered regional space. Nor has this rivalry remained confined to Syria: Somalia already points in the same direction from the south. In this wider setting, Cyprus also stands out as a particularly dangerous flashpoint, since it brings together several fault lines at once: Greek–Turkish rivalry, Israeli strategic alignments, energy competition in the Eastern Mediterranean, militarisation, and unresolved questions of sovereignty.

Northern Cyprus: Turkeyfication as a Class Project

The north is incorporated into regional power through a more direct form of subordination. Turkey remains the decisive military authority and the sole state that recognises the Turkish-Cypriot administration. It also underwrites public finance, supplies the currency, dominates trade and tourism, and increasingly shapes energy, communications, and education. In 2023, Turkey accounted for roughly 80 per cent of northern exports and 70 per cent of imports, while Turkish citizens formed the overwhelming majority of tourists. Financial protocols negotiated with Ankara reach deeply into budgets, public administration, infrastructure, and privatisation.

This relationship sustains a particular model of accumulation. Construction, casinos, tourism, private universities, and property sales connect Turkish-Cypriot elites and business groups to Turkish capital, contractors, and regulatory protection. Development on Greek-Cypriot property seized after 1974 – estimated to constitute nearly 80 per cent of the immovable property in the present-day TRNC – turns the unresolved property question into a source of profit. Every new hotel, residential complex, or infrastructure project can make restitution and territorial adjustment more difficult, while also generating constituencies with a direct interest in permanent separation. Ankara's support is therefore not only military protection; it is the framework within which political authority and profit are reproduced.

Militarisation consolidates this dependence. Turkish forces remain across the north, while the Geçitkale/Lefkoniko airbase has been incorporated into Turkey's advanced drone and broader military infrastructure. These developments connect Northern Cyprus to Turkey's maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean and its expanding rivalry with Israel. In this respect, the Turkish-backed “two-state” doctrine, rather than federation, performs a double function: it translates Turkey's regional ambitions into a claim of Turkish-Cypriot sovereignty, while protecting a local governing bloc whose power depends on Turkish recognition, money, and coercive backing.

Turkey, Israel, and the Regionalisation of Partition

The emerging Turkish–Israeli rivalry binds these two complexes together. Ankara views the Greece–Cyprus–Israel relationship as an attempt to confine Turkey to its territorial waters in the Eastern Mediterranean and block its access to international waters. Northern Cyprus thus gives Turkey territorial and military depth close to the Levant, as well as leverage over maritime and energy disputes. It also protects Turkey's access to international waters to the south. The Republic offers Israel diplomatic depth, training space, logistical proximity, and a partner inside the European Union, all within a wider alignment directed against Turkey.

The danger therefore lies in the regionalisation of the Cyprus conflict. What began as an intercommunal and postcolonial conflict is increasingly inserted into a broader contest over the Middle East, maritime zones, energy corridors, and regional hierarchy. The Greek-Cypriot ruling bloc interprets Israeli and American support as compensation for the failure of reunification; Ankara and its allies in the north interpret that alignment as proof that Turkish military guarantees and separate sovereignty are indispensable.

The stronger the Republic's military relationship with Israel, the easier it is for Ankara to portray the south as a hostile forward platform. The more Turkey militarises the north, the easier it is for Greek-Cypriot leaders to present alignment with Israel and the United States as unavoidable. Threats are real, but they are also politically counter-productive: they discipline dissent, legitimise military expenditure, increase the bargaining power of security institutions, and conceal the private gains attached to strategic projects.

Beyond Competing Dependencies: Can NATO be a guarantor of peace?

The challenge is not to choose the stronger patron but to prevent Cyprus from being reduced to a bargaining chip in a larger geopolitical game. Balancing Turkey against Israel and Israel against Turkey does not protect Cyprus; it ties each half of the island more tightly to the rival ambitions of others. Ukraine offers a painful warning of the dangers of such strategies: smaller states can become front lines in conflicts among larger powers. The alternative is not neutrality as passivity but rather reunification as an active project of shared sovereignty, social transformation, and regional solidarity.

A solution must, therefore, reach deeper than constitutional engineering. A bizonal, bicommunal federation remains the only plausible framework for reunification. The social basis for such a project exists in movements that have resisted war, austerity, authoritarianism, and nationalism on both sides. Their task is not to deny insecurity but to redefine it. Housing costs, ecological destruction, precarious work, displacement, and the absence of democratic control are security questions too. Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are made less secure when their rulers trade sovereignty for protection and turn the island into infrastructure for powers whose conflicts they cannot control. The central divide is, therefore, not between East and West, nor simply between Turkey and Israel. It is between ruling blocs that reproduce power through partition and a Cypriot society that can become sovereign only by overcoming it.

In this sense, we are skeptical toward the most recent attempts intending to solve the Cyprus question through NATO. The current initiative of the UN Secretary-General must not be allowed to become another missed opportunity. However, the suggestion that NATO could somehow function as a new guarantor of a Cyprus settlement is deeply problematic. The advocates of these packages are depicting NATO as offering a convenient answer to the old security dilemma: Greek Cypriots want the abolition of the 1960 guarantee system and the end of unilateral intervention rights; Turkish Cypriots want credible security safeguards against domination by the Greek-Cypriot majority; Turkey wants to retain strategic influence; and Western actors want Cyprus more firmly embedded in the Euro-Atlantic security architecture.

It is misleading, to the say the least, to assume that NATO can resolve the communal security dilemma. Turkey is already a NATO member. Greece is a NATO member. The United Kingdom is a NATO member and retains sovereign military bases on the island. The history of Cyprus shows that shared membership in Western security structures does not prevent conflict, intervention, or partition when strategic interests diverge. To imagine NATO as an impartial guarantor is therefore to forget that the Cyprus problem was itself shaped within the orbit of NATO power and its staunch anti-communism, and regional military calculations. Likewise, NATO cannot be expected to defuse the intensifying rivalry between Turkey and Israel when its own regional architecture is increasingly implicated in producing and militarizing that confrontation.

Making NATO the guarantor of a settlement would, therefore, embed a reunified Cyprus more deeply within the very militarised regional order from which it needs to escape. It would also reinforce the ecologically destructive accumulation models developing on both sides of the island and reward the elites that have treated our island as an asset to be monetised, its ports and airspace as strategic commodities, and its foreign policy as a brokerage mechanism connecting Western power, Turkish-Israeli militarisms, and regional capital. Reunification should restore the capacity of Cypriots to determine their collective future, not transfer the supervision of that future from one set of external powers to another.

Nicos Trimikliniotis is associate professor in law and sociology, at the University of Nicosia.

Eren Duzgun teaches International Relations at the University of Cyprus. He is the author of Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity published by Cambridge University Press.

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/2026/07/cyprus-in-the-new-world-disorder/#more

Racist Violence in Belfast: Orchestrated, Organized, and Resisted

Kevin Callahan — 2026-06-18T19:23:04Z

On Monday, June 8th, in Belfast, a Sudanese man Hadi Alodid, legally in the United Kingdom as a refugee claimant, viciously attacked a local man Stephen Ogilvie with a knife. The intervention of others saved the victim's life though he lost an eye in the attack

Within an hour, Tommy Robinson, a leader of the far right in the UK, shared a video of the incident on X, and his post got 6 million views. Shortly after, Elon Musk, the owner of X, chimed in, retweeting Robinson's post and calling for repeated and loud protests.

A far-right group called the Ulster Youth Club, which has links to the racist international “Active Clubs”, mobilised to take advantage of the situation. Several nights of horrendous racist violence followed in which visible minorities were targeted and attacked. Nurses and other healthcare workers from Africa were beaten on their way to work. The homes of immigrants were burned.

It must be understood that this was not a spontaneous outburst of popular anger. Musk and Robinson fanned the flames. Far right activists moved quickly to profit from public shock about the knife attack. In Belfast, neo-fascists also have an ad hoc alliance with still existent Loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). These armed groups were formed in the 1960s to counteract the liberation struggle of Irish Republicans. In 1969, the Loyalists burned out hundreds of Irish nationalist families and during the 30 years of conflict in the North of Ireland, they were responsible for the murder of hundreds of civilians. They share a common hatred of “others” with the fascists groups and are willing to cooperate in certain actions. Along with avowed racists and Loyalists, some of the rioters were simply disaffected youth who were recruited as cannon fodder. Some youths were ferried to riots and told to participate to clear off drug debts they owed to paramilitaries.

The nights of racist violence that followed grabbed headlines. However, the cameras did not show popular mobilisation moving quickly to offer support to minorities and to denounce and stop the racist attacks. Community leaders and local Sinn Féin politicians and activists provided information, support, and shelter for victims. Young people were educated about the manipulation tactics of far-right groups and told not to be tempted to get involved. On Saturday, June 14th, 20,000 people filled the streets of downtown Belfast to say no to division and racism in a” Together Against Hate” rally.

While the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) did act to contain the racist mobs, popular mobilisation and community solidarity are the main factors that put a stop to the fascist actions in Belfast.

To get a first-hand account, I spoke with Sinn Féin's John Finucane who is MP for North Belfast where much violence took place. John was a young boy when his father Pat, a human rights lawyer, was shot dead in front of him by Loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with British security forces.

Kevin Callahan (KC): There is speculation that the racist attacks were orchestrated to some extend form outside Belfast. Can you comment on that?

John Finucane (JF): Whilst we saw violence in Belfast, notably well away from the area which saw the attack take place, what is beyond dispute is that many individuals and organisations from outside Belfast, outside Ireland and in some cases from much further afield, immediately sought to exploit the horrific knife attack to spread misinformation, inflame tensions and sow division.

I witnessed that myself throughout the week. Inaccurate claims were circulated online, often by people with no connection to the local community and no concern for the victim or his family.

My Sinn Féin colleague and Mayor of Belfast Róis-Máire Donnelly was one of those targeted by those seeking to exploit the horrific knife attack in North Belfast, targeted by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson while also receiving death threats from others.

Unfortunately, this is not unique to Belfast. We have seen similar attempts in other parts of the world where tragic events are weaponised by those seeking to advance political agendas rooted in fear, division and hostility.

The people who suffered most from this were ordinary families, local residents and communities who found themselves caught up in violence that had nothing whatsoever to do with securing justice for the victim, those who bravely intervened, or the local community.

KC: How did community leaders and local politicians respond to the racist violence to protect targeted communities and stop the violence?

JF: Many political leaders, community representatives, faith leaders and local activists worked responsibly throughout the week. They condemned both the original attack and the racist violence that followed, supported the PSNI and helped reassure frightened families and communities.

However, I do think there has been mixed messaging from some political leaders, particularly within unionism, not only in the immediate aftermath of last week's attack but over a longer period of time.

Political leadership carries responsibility. There can be no room for ambiguity when it comes to racism, sectarianism, intimidation or criminality.

The First Minister Michelle O'Neill and I visited those communities in North Belfast to listen and support them. It was important that we listened to their fears and concerns and reassured them that their political representatives stood against the racism and hate of last week.

But anger at a crime should never become hostility towards entire communities

We have a duty to challenge misinformation, to deal in facts and to avoid creating an atmosphere where prejudice is normalised or where those prepared to engage in racist or sectarian violence feel emboldened.

The overwhelming majority of people want safe and peaceful communities. Political leaders should be reinforcing that message consistently and without qualification.

KC: What lessons can be learned from what happened in Belfast for other communities facing far right racist violence?

JF: One lesson is that communities must be careful not to allow horrific incidents to be exploited by those who want to spread fear, hatred and division.

The attack was appalling and people were right to be angry. But anger at a crime should never become hostility towards entire communities.

Another lesson is the importance of responding quickly with clear and united leadership. Communities need reassurance, facts need to be established quickly, and misinformation must be challenged before it takes hold.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to remember who suffers most when this happens. It is often ordinary families, workers, children and local residents who pay the price. We saw that in Belfast when people were driven from their homes and left fearing for their safety.

The answer to far-right violence is not silence or ambiguity. It is clear leadership, support for the rule of law, solidarity with those targeted and a refusal to allow division and hatred to define our communities.

Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1u69p4x/a_white_supremacist_youth_group_helped/

https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/teenagers-ferried-to-belfast-race-riots-to-clear-paramilitary-drug-debts-childrens-commissioner-says-

Photo Credit: L'installation "For peace!" (slovaque “Za mier!”) est formée d'une suite de personnages lumineux, qui marchent, qui courent. Le slogan de l'œuvre est “For peace, for freedom, for art!” (Pour la paix, pour la liberté, pour l'art !). L'œuvre a été montrée lors de plusieurs festivals en l'Europe.
Source: Festival Geneva Lux 2025
Author: Sébastien Kottelat

Iran's Remaining Two Vows

Jawed Naqvi — 2026-06-18T15:31:15Z

As Iran braces to change the global landscape of war and peace, of imperial conquest and its nemesis in a people who refuse to be afraid of dying for their nation's self-respect, for their abiding pride in a mesmeric culture of poetry, inclusion and reflection, where do its friends and foes go from here? An all but signed agreement for permanent peace with the US promises to leave Israel out in the cold, and with it its sympathisers. That leaves room for future trouble, of course. But Iran has shown it has the wherewithal to figure out the cure.

For now, the peace deal would be a shot in the arm for BRICS whose summit, contrarily, a rightward-bound Israel-hugging India is to hold in September. But what is in store for Pakistan and its Saudi allies whose endeavours for the peace deal, overtly and covertly, may fall short of Iran's larger vision of a multicultural Palestinian state in lieu of Zionist Israel, in which its Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities live as equal partners as they had done for centuries, not as superiors and inferiors as proposed by colonialism? Isn't that the equation each one of the communities strives for in its abode in Europe and America? What will become of India's Hindutva project of majoritarianism in a world in which its sheet anchors in racist Israel, and to an extent the MAGA-bound US, struggle to fend off Iran's two remaining deadly vows?

Of the four clenched-fisted promises that Iranians learnt to state collectively during Ayatollah Khomeini's early consolidation of power, the West applauded two and even egged them on with fulsome support. “Marg bar Shauravi” translated as “death to the USSR”. “Marg bar Saddam” was a united cry for “death to Saddam Hussain” at the Friday prayer congregations at the Tehran University. In a Macbeth-like turn of events, however, as if to fulfil the witches' prophecy in the Shakespeare tragedy, Saddam's death was instigated not by Iran but by the Western occupiers of Iraq who had recently supplied him with chemical weapons to use against revolutionary Iran.

The more macabre the deaths of its enemies, the more the West exults in its malodorous worldview. The pictures they cherish of the gruesome murder at their bidding of Che Guevara, Najibullah, Muammar Qadhafi and Nicolae Ceausescu were circulated as cruel Roman emperors did with the heads of the rebels hoisted on poles. Qadhafi's barbaric murder got a laugh out of Hillary Clinton. They cut Che Guevara's hands after his execution in Bolivia in 1967, and the fingerprints taken from them were used to verify his identity. The severed hands were preserved in formaldehyde and sent to Buenos Aires, Argentina, while the fingerprints were promptly matched in Washington, D.C. Iran denied the world the perverse pleasure of putting a frame around the revered body of its slain Supreme Leader. And that's the abiding lesson of the war: self-respect.

As for the USSR, the West courted a perpetually drunk Boris Yeltsin to avenge Moscow's glee at its defeat in Vietnam. Then Soviet troops followed their quarry in an error of judgement and waded straight into a merciless Kabul. With Saddam dead and the USSR dismantled, two of Iran's vows were met, for which Iranians never fail to claim divine help. The remaining two oaths target the US and Israel, the “Great Satan” and “Little Satan”, respectively. But “death to Israel” or “death to America” were never meant as exhortations that the people inhabiting the countries should expire collectively. The dismantling of US imperialism like the one being carried out in Donald Trump's face with his MAGA base splitting vertically, and a globally isolated Israel in which Zionism has become its bane instead of an asset, could be much of what was ever desired by Khomeini's Iran.

Where do India and Pakistan stand in the equation? I had been sceptical of the Pew survey of the time claiming that when the world, from Europe to Asia, through Africa and back home in America, had put George W. Bush in the doghouse for his invasion of Iraq, Indians overwhelmingly cheered for the US president. It's not a surprise, therefore, when idols are carved of Trump today and he is worshipped in propitiating rituals in the presence of the god of fire. The early example came from the top. Prime minister Manmohan Singh hugged Bush publicly in New Delhi and professed to him his affection while reminding him of how much he was loved in India. A communist leader lost patience and ticked off Singh, telling him to speak for himself.

But the silly collective behaviour wasn't about Bush or his invasion of Iraq; ignore here the fact that Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had executed was the rare Arab leader to back India in its Kashmir dispute with Pakistan. Indians who stand with the Hindutva ideology of blindly close ties with Israel are enthralled by Benjamin Netanyahu who they see as a supremo commanding the ability to gather rich intelligence needed to track and assassinate rival leaders and their military commanders at will. Indian admirers forget that the Israelis are keeping an eye on them too, through Pegasus spyware and other potent contraptions. Remember too that Israel plied the Epstein scam to lure political leaders, which spared nobody.

As for Pakistan, after its well-deserved glory as the key mediator to end the world's most devastating military confrontation in decades, it would do well to explain to itself primarily its participation in Donald Trump's imperialist racket to usurp the Gaza Strip for a riviera to be built by his son-in-law. Pakistan maintains that its involvement is strictly focused on humanitarian aid, stabilising a ceasefire, and preventing the permanent displacement of Palestinians. That's an onerous task to shoulder. How is it planning to throw Trump off the scent? Perhaps the peace deal will take care of that?

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2026
Photo credit: Dawn