Preparatory Issue 1 September 2021
On the Launching of our International Strategy Monthly... from Hwang, Jeongeun (General Secretary) Greetings from the International Strategy Center! The International Strategy Center (ISC) is an organization fighting to overcome capitalism and realize social alternatives based on labor, gender equality, ecology, democracy, peace, and solidarity. In order to achieve such goals, we build bridges between social movements in the Korean Peninsula and those abroad, explore new alternatives, and fight for social change. These days, people’s lives are plagued by the pandemic, climate change, war, and violence and discrimination against minorities. It is especially in such times, that we must uncover the root causes of such problems, create exchange between peoples fighting such problems, uncover new social alternatives, and radically expand our imagination. To such ends, the ISC, starting Sept. 2021 is launching its International Strategy Monthly newsletters in Korean and in English. Through this newsletter, we will be analyzing issues domestic and abroad to achieve our goals; sharing/highlighting or translating articles and writing from progressive media around the world; exploring experiments and struggles abroad; and researching the policies that we need. Look out for us in your inbox and recommend us to others that might be interested. Join us, as we undertake to change the world. Thank you.
From: Links International Journal on Socialist Renewal
...The key task of the US administration in “volatile Eurasia”, as described by Zbigniew Brzezinski, was “to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the US or even diminish its decisive role”. This was the case in the 1990s, and still the same in 2001. The causes for the war in Afghanistan cannot be found by looking only at September 11 terrorist attacks, without considering this long-term strategic goal. For reasons both of world strategy and control over natural resources, the US administration was determined to safeguard a dominant position in the Eurasian heartland. Experts claimed that Afghanistan, with its strategic location, offered the most convenient route for pipelines to carry Central Asian and Caspian oil to Western locations. A 790-mile oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan that would carry Caspian Sea basin’s oil and natural gas south to the Pakistani coast on the Arabian Sea would reduce US dependence on the volatile Gulf oil zone controlled by the OPEC. In 1998, the US-based UNOCAL oil consortium started negotiations with the Taliban government to build the trans-Afghan pipeline; and the Enron corporation, a major contributor to the Bush administration, undertook a feasibility study for the project on behalf of the UNOCAL...
From: Tricontinental Institute for Social Change
...The US funded the mujahideen, undermined the DRA, drew in the reluctant Soviet intervention across the Amu Darya, and then increased the pressure on both the Soviets and the DRA by making the counter-revolutionary Afghan forces and the Pakistani military dictatorship pawns in a struggle against the USSR. The Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of the DRA led to an even worse scenario with a bloody civil war, out of which the Taliban emerged. The US war against the Taliban ran for twenty years but – despite the superior military technology of the United States – led to the US defeat. Imagine if the US had not backed the mujahideen and if the Afghans had been allowed to entertain the possibility of a socialist future. This would have been a struggle with its own zigs and zags, but it would certainly have resulted in something better than what we have now: the return of the Taliban, the flogging of women in public, and the enforcement of the worst social codes. Imagine that...
from : Monthly Review ...A few countries have done relatively well in responding to COVID-19, and they all approach health care and public health very differently from the United States, even if their economies are capitalist. I focus now on one of those countries that I know best: South Korea. I then move the focus to that other mysterious, noncapitalist country on the same peninsula: North Korea. Although I explain these countries’ initiatives to control the downstream effects of COVID-19 in sickness, suffering, and death, I also report what if anything the two Koreas have done about the upstream causes of the pandemic in the industrial production of food and the destruction of natural habitat.2 This work is part of an effort to understand the ways that countries with different political-economic systems have approached COVID-19, and how they are likely to approach future pandemics that may be even worse….
ISC Progressive Forum Online Webinars * July 21 Commemoration of the Sandinista Day of Revolution in Nicaragua w/ the Ambassador of the Republic of Nicaragua Embassy in the Republic of Korea * Aug. 22 #LetCubaLive w/ Rodrigo Huaimachi, Cuban Activist * Oct. 7 at 7 PM (coming) Afghanistan: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow w/ Vijay Prashad, Director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Change RSVP: https://bit.ly/afghan-isc
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