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The Presidental Election in Turkey: Winners and Losers

Note from LeftEast: Somewhat belatedly, we are presenting you with an analysis of the Turkish Presidential Election of August 10, 2014 produced by Turkey’s Movement for Permanent Revolution (SHD). The statement expresses the group’s strong support for Selahattin Demirtaş of the Peoples’ Democracy Party, who polled 9.6% in the election, and also critically assesses the prospects for future cooperation between this traditionally pro-Kurdish party and the labor and socialist camps of the country as a whole. 
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Soma: the Aftermath of a Tragedy (a Report)

The 1980 military coup introduced neoliberalism to Turkey in the most assertive way. The spirit of the coup was crystallized in the words of leading businessman Halit Narin: “Up until now, we cried and the workers laughed. Now, it is our turn. We will laugh, and they will cry”. Halit Narin’s words proved quite accurate. Following the coup, the condition of the working class changed dramatically. Leading unions were shut down; labor law was amended to the detriment of the working classes.

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Romanian-Israeli Arms Trade and Military Relations

During a recent visit to Israel, Romanian President Traian Basescu stressed that the Romanian-Israeli military cooperation has not been harmed by the tragic accident three and a half years ago in which six Israeli and one Romanian military lost their lives when their CH-53 Sikorsky helicopter crashed in Romania, probably due to weather conditions. It was this accident that revealed the secret military agreements between Israel and Romania, whose Carpathian mountains were found by the Israeli military similar to parts of Iran.

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On the Juridical Offensive Against the Anti-Fascist Left in Serbia

a statement by Marks21

Just over a month ago, an activist of the Serbian socialist organization Marks21, Matija Medenica, received a letter from the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality. He was duly informed that, by appeal to that state institution, the protofascist organisation SS Dveri is trying to bring criminal charges and offence proceedings against him ‘and the organisation Marks21, and NN person, a young woman from the picture, and a group of students at the Philosophy faculty’ on account of – discrimination and extreme disparagement of citizens.

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Dialogue between societies, not between authorities: a left activists’ view of the situation in Karabakh

by Zara Harutyunian and Anton Ivchenko, leftists and anti-war activists                   Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliev, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serzh Sargsyan, President of Armenia

 

The end of July saw a flaring up of the simmering conflict around the unrecognized Nagono Karabakh republic. The confrontation between the militaries of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbajan, in the course of which both sides sustained serious losses, marked a new level of escalation.

Against the background of crescendoing militarist rhetoric and the de facto end to the status quo, at the initiative of Vladimir Putin, two- and three-way meetings took place between himself and Presidents Sargsyan and Aliev.

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Ukraine: The Normality of War

“What’s abnormal is not the worst. What’s normal, for example, is world war.”

(Franz Kafka)

The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War takes place in a growing atmosphere of global conflict. The world seems to be once again teetering on the verge of catastrophe. A wave of violence is spreading around the globe, leaving destruction and death in its wake. This surge towards war has developed a momentum that at times seems uncontrollable.

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How Not to Debate: My Reply to Agon Hamza (Concluding Part 2 of the Kosovo polemic)

With special thanks to MC, a LeftEast reader

 

For a rounded view of the Kosovo Question

It might be valuable, at this juncture, to go back to another key issue where there is a significant measure of agreement between my view and Hamza’s, even if Hamza is, much to my disappointment, so set on obscuring it.

For there is clearly agreement between us on Serbia’s shameful role as the oppressor of the Kosovo Albanians, ever since it occupied Kosovo in the First Balkan War of 1912 – and most recently during the appalling oppression of the 1990s.

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Book Review: The Contradictions of Real Socialism (by Michael Lebowitz)

Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted. Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012, 222 pp., $ 11.62

 

Rather than a historical or dialectical analysis of “actually existing socialism”, ‘The Contradictions of Real Socialism. The Conductor and the Conducted’ should be read more as an exercise in the moral psychology of ‘human development’. For Michael Lebowitz, this should supplement today’s Marxism.

The crucial tenet of this kind of socialism is the idea, nay, the ideal, of human development.

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Metastasis of the Islamic State

by Vijay Prashad Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the anti-Assad powers, refuse to join a united front with Iran, Iraq and Syria to tackle the IS threat. With absent coordination, the Islamic State will continue to thrive.

IS has slipped through the cracks of regional disunity.

 

Comfortable in its bastions along the Euphrates river in Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State (IS) has struck at its two ends — in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and Iraq’s Jabal Sinjar.

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Hope in a Hopeless Place

 

Why is there no anti-war movement in Russia? Because today there are so few who are ready to go into the streets in order to publicly throw in the face of the state accusations of prolonging the war in Eastern Ukraine? Such are the questions that we continue to pose to each other, those of us who several months ago supported the March 15th “March of Peace” in the center of Moscow. The circle of such people continually shrinks, but most importantly even those who still in their hearts support the protests are no longer sure that protest can change anything.