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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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War for the Map

The political map does not show corruption schemes, diagrams of wealth, transactions to the offshore zones, structures of the world economy, hidden political agreements, maps of domination and alienation.   When I listen to the conversations about “United Ukraine”, I get a feeling that translators of this message do not really understand what they are […]