What does the most gigantic economic rebuilding program of all time announced in the US under the title "Build Back Better" have to do with the increasingly fierce internal American culture war over issues such as abortion or theories of race and racism? At first glance, nothing, but for the world power, its leadership and its people, apparently a great deal. In our article on the subject, you can read about what the US is actually suffering from and why its leaders are so single-minded in thinking that they have to take care of the "soul of America."
Accompanied by humanitarianism, judged from a legal point of view, disputed on moral grounds
Israel’s Gaza war — a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world[1]
Israel is going forward with its war against Hamas' state-founding terrorism in Gaza. So more and more of the population's living conditions and the population itself are being destroyed because with this war Israel is defining and treating this population as a swamp of terror. Gaining momentum alongside this is the wrangling over the question of which of the atrocities of this war are necessary — and which are superfluous and should therefore be blamed on Israel as a violation of good manners in state killing and destruction. The provisional highlight in this context is the accusation of “genocide,” because according to the relevant legal texts, nobody should be doing such a thing at all. The debate about whether Israel's terror-extermination campaign in Gaza is still within the green range of military violence permitted under international law or whether it is already criminal — is obviously so edifying for those involved in it. GᴇɢᴇɴSᴛᴀɴᴅᴘᴜɴᴋᴛ does not take part. Instead, it explains how ends and means also belong together in this war; it explains further the imperialist content of the concerns about legality and admonitions of the supporting states as well as the mistakes and achievements of the public and private moral statements on the ongoing war.
The German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is not the only party in the world that boasts a polemical excess of patriotism.[1] Parties of this kind are successful everywhere, ones that promise to put their country at the top as it deserves, however the comparison goes; to put it “back” where it used to be according to their philosophy of history.
The technological and economic advances that capitalists have been achieving — largely not on their own but rather through their states’ action — are in many ways of the utmost importance to these states, especially and above all others the mighty ones. These advances urgently require their supervision, control, and direction because they are essential for their own competition with each other, whether on the economic, world-market strategic, or military level — in short, essential for their “future.”
NATO is celebrating its 75th anniversary as a war alliance and considers itself to be more necessary and more alive than ever before. Although it is not directly at war, it refers to the war in Ukraine as the “greatest security crisis in generations.” Russia’s violently asserted opposition to NATO’s eastward expansion has given the alliance back the enemy that constitutes its unity and that it had lost with the abdication of its system rival. And for the past two-and-a-half years, its proxy war in Ukraine has proved to be a productive force for the alliance’s power, extended its deployment area to 32 states, and added fuel to the members’ rearmament efforts, the financial level of which now finally largely meets the alliance’s requirements.
The Cuban leadership has decided on far-reaching reforms. Promoting foreign exchange–earning economic sectors and attracting foreign capital; committing state-owned companies to profit-oriented production standards; dismissing at least one million state employees; considerably expanding the small-scale private sector and promoting private farmers; abolishing what remains of state-guaranteed basic services as soon as possible. The government justifies its list of measures by pointing to the country’s catastrophic budget situation, which makes painful corrections unavoidable. At the same time, however, it promises that these measures will “preserve socialism, strengthen it and make it truly irreversible.” (Raúl Castro)
GᴇɢᴇɴSᴛᴀɴᴅᴘᴜɴᴋᴛ takes the reforms as an opportunity to critically assess the current end point as well as the general intentions, barriers, contradictions, and negative progress of fifty years of Cuban “socialism” — with an epilogue on Cuban friendship and enmity past and present.
In wartime, the morality of bourgeois society is turned upside down. What people must never do in peacetime — kill other people ---- they are now ordered to do. The right to life, one of the inalienable rights protected by basic law, now gives way to the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the state. This revaluation of values makes war the ultimate moral challenge. It provokes the need for justification, of all things.
For months now, a dispute has been raging in Israel acknowledged to be dividing the nation and throwing the state into crisis. It has seized both the political class democratically organized into parties, and large sections of the population. On the surface, the issue is a reform of certain aspects of Israel’s judicial system and, above all, the relation of the judicial to the executive and legislative “powers,” especially in terms of the reciprocal veto rights of the parliament and the Supreme Court. It is in fact clear to all those involved in the national divide that the reform of the judiciary, while presenting a significant change to the separation of state powers, is as such merely a part and, above all, a symbol of a dispute that goes far beyond the question of how the state is organized. What is it all about?
The question of what the war in Ukraine is all about, what’s at stake there, is not asked in the West’s democratic public sphere (example: Germany), but rather is outstripped by a politico-moral answer. To wit: the Kremlin is all about conquering, suppressing democracy in Ukraine and in general, embarking on a new Russian imperialism; the Supreme Commander-in-Chief wants personal power. Ukraine is fighting to defend itself against illegal aggression and protect democratic values. The NATO states are helping the victim of an attack that violates international law, promoting the European peace order and the rules-based world order overall. After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, the world is more ideologically in order than it’s been for a long time.
Experts and government advisors of the two nuclear powers involved in Ukraine quite seriously pose the question of what is at stake in Ukraine for each of them and in general, and as professional partisans they give somewhat different answers. In Russia, there is debate about the pros and cons of using nuclear weapons; in the USA, there are firm views on this. Both are documented below in order to draw some conclusions about the nature of the deterrent relationship between the USA and Russia.
A year of war in Ukraine leaves the country looking accordingly.
Last fall, the destruction already caused by both sides started to include widespread Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. They target Ukraine's combat and resilience capabilities, hitting often enough to make quite a few parts of the country hardly inhabitable and challenge the viability of both its economy and its rule.
Despite all this, the Ukrainian government’s military goal has not changed. It remains the sacred right of Ukrainian nationhood to achieve complete territorial integrity of the country, reconquering all territories annexed and occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Those in charge are also certain that their people are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to be liberated or reborn as a (Russian-)free nation at last, fully ‘anchored’ in the European West. However, this ambitious claim is blatantly disproportionate to the current military situation.