Articles by admin

January 17, 2018

Call for Solidarity from Bulgaria: No Nazis on Our Streets, No to Fortress Europe

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Note from the LeftEast editors: In January 2018 Bulgaria has taken the presidency of the Council of the European Union for the first six months of 2018. Meanwhile Neonazis will still be marching the on the streets of Sofia in February to commemorate General Hristo Lukov: the head of the interwar Legion and Minister of War in the late 1930s. Known as a stark nationalist and anti-semite, he was killed by a partisan woman. The march that commemorates him combines nationalist, chauvinist, anti-communist and racist rhetorics. It is a feast of the international right extreme, whose members come to Bulgaria in big num ..

February 15, 2017

Open Letter to the University of Vienna

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We, the undersigned, condemn the invitation of Ayelet Shaked, minister of Justice and member of far-right party HaBayit HaYehudi in Israel who openly called for mass murder of Palestinians to hold a roundtable discussion at the University of Vienna on the 15th of February, called “Protecting Human Rights While Countering Terrorism – The Israeli Case”. In July 2014, Shaked, who is known for her radical incitements on social media, publicly shared a quote from Uri Elitzur, who was a leading pro settler journalist and a close adviser to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. What follows are some excerpts of this ..

December 23, 2016

Undermined: how the state is selling out Ukraine’s coal workers

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Vitalii Atanasov// Dec. 19, 2016// OpenDemocracy-Russia Ukraine’s miners were once heroes of socialist labour. Today, after years of sector-wide neglect and corruption, there are new plans for further mine closures, leaving thousands of people without work. September 2016: miners from Novovolysnk No.10 in west Ukraine protest the government’s plans to close their mine. (c) RIA Novosti. All rights reserved. Since 2014, war has redrawn the map of Ukraine, removing many of its mining operations. Half of Ukraine’s 150 mines operational before 2014 are now in the territories of the so-called “Peoples’ R ..

December 16, 2016

‘Tyrants across the world know now they can maintain power through mass slaughter.’ Interview with Leila al-Shami for Open Left

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by Gabriel Levy and Ilya Matveev Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on the social and geopolitical situation which has rendered the Allepo crisis so severe in these past weeks. It is also, however, part of an emerging transnational conversation between anti-war activists in Russia and Syrian activists, spearheaded by portals such as OpenLeft, where the int ..

December 14, 2016

József Böröcz: “An incapacity to see ourselves as part of the whole world, and the insistence to see ourselves as part of Europe”

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This interview with József Böröcz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, was conducted by Ágnes Gagyi and Gergő Pulay in 2012. In a way, it is a dense summary of the conceptual perspective which had informed the new wave of  intellectual left emerging in the region – including LeftEast – especially in regard to Eastern Europe’s post-socialist transformation and EU accession in the context of global capitalism. Four years later, further mired in the conflicts that this perspective foreshadowed, this concise summary is colored by the experiences, fatigue and different social geography of the ..

November 30, 2016

Open Letter in Solidarity with Students and Professors at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb

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IN DEFENSE OF SECULAR, FREE AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND RESEARCH! We, the undersigned, Express our deep concern over continuous pressures on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, which threaten basic academic freedoms, free research and thinking, democratic governance and participation, and, last but not least, the secular character of the University. After unsuccessful attempts by the former dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences to merge the Faculty’s curricula with the curriculum taught at the Catholic Faculty of Theology, the situation has moved from bad to worse. Violatin ..

November 24, 2016

The International community needs to stop Erdoğan!

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A Press Release of the World March of Women Since the arrival of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the Turkish government the women live a constant struggle against the restrictions imposed on their civil and political rights. Today, 22nd of November, women gathered in front of the parliament to denounce the AKP’s attempt to legalize child marriage by changing the current penal code that states that a man marrying a minor is automatically charged with rape and needs to be imprisoned. These changes are a major setback to the rights Turkish women managed to achieve and reinforces their persecution. Since July Erdogan’s ..

November 4, 2016

HDP: Urgent Call for Solidarity

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Note from LeftEast Editors: We publish this Call for Solidarity, written by a member of the HDP ( (Halkların Demokratik Partisi -The Peoples’ Democratic Party) following the arrests of the joint leaders of the HDP along with at least nine other MPs, in what has become the latest stage of an ongoing offensive by President Erdogan to eliminate every single oppositional voice in the country, under the excuse of the coup attempt on July 15th.  More than 80,000 people have been detained since July 15, and about half of them are in prison now.  Dear friends, I hope this message will find you all good a ..

October 26, 2016

The Future of the Euro Area

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Written by Frederic Heine and Thomas Sablowski, this article was first published as a working paper in  Monetary Union Unravelling. Frederic Heine is a political scientist and activist, and researcher with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin. Thomas Sablowski works at the Institute for Critical Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is also a member of editorial board of the journal PROKLA and a member of the scientific advisory board of ATTAC Germany. The unequal development of the countries of the euro area since the outbreak of the crisis is causing increasing friction that threatens to tear t ..

July 23, 2016

“And then he would end up just like Morsi” Öcalan had said

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This interview with Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of Peoples’ Democratic Party, was conducted by OSMAN OĞUZ and HABER MERKEZİ of YENİ ÖZGÜR POLİTİKA. This English language translation was taken from HDP’s English language blog. Öcalan had warned Erdogan about this matter a lot. “Tell him, he does not get it, he is acting like an idiot” Öcalan said. “By continuing the resolution process I supported him, if this process ends, the mechanics of coup would step in and he would end up just like Morsi of Egypt” he constantly warned. Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of Peoples’ Democratic Part ..