The European Parliament on June 14 overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on Russian authorities to release Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, and all the other "illegally detained Ukrainian citizens" in Russia and Russia-annexed Crimea "immediately and unconditionally." Sentsov has been on hunger strike in a Russian prison in the far-northern Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region since May 14. He is demanding that Russia release 64 Ukrainian citizens he considers political prisoners. Sentsov was arrested in Crimea in 2014, after Russia seized the Ukrainian region. A Russian court in 2015 convicted him of planning to commit terrorist acts and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. He denies the accusations.

Syria Solidarity NYC will be protesting Seymour Hersh's appearance at the New York Public Library to promote his newly released memoir on June 20. It is a painful irony that Seymour Hersh, who broke the My Lai massacre story in 1968, has now become an open supporter of the genocidal Assad regime, portraying it as a guarantor of "stability" and repeatedly covering up for its massacres. Please stand with us, and for the Syrian victims who cannot be present.

In the prelude to the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, Robert Park, himself a survivor of Kim Jong-un's prisons, called in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post for an amnesty for North Korea's tens of thousands of political prisoners to be a condition of any peace deal. He recalled a 2014 UN report (PDF) finding that up to 120,000 were being held in camps in North Korea, and subjected to "unspeakable atrocities and hardships." Most are held in life-imprisonment slave labor complexes called "absolute control zones" (wanjeontongjekyooyeok or kwanliso). The report found that these prisoners "have no prospect of securing release [and] are subject to gradual extermination through starvation and slave labour…with the apparent intent to extract a maximum of economic benefit at a minimum of cost." Park quoted Thomas Buergenthal, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen who served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, who said: "I believe that the conditions in the [North] Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps..."

CounterVortex editor and chief blogger Bill Weinberg will speak at the Left Forum in New York City on June 2, at the panel "Has 'the Left' Accommodated Trump (and Putin)? A Debate." Tens of millions of Americans and people around the world have regarded Trump and Trumpism as exceptional threats that must be resisted tooth-and-nail. But some voices on the "left" have argued that anti-Trumpism is itself a problem, that concerns about Trumpism are a distraction from struggles against neoliberalism and imperialism, and/or that the left should reach out to Trump's anti-establishment and populist base. Who are the deluded ones here?

Dictator Bashar al-Assad flew to Vladimir Putin's summer residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi for talks on the prosecution of the Syrian war and their future plans for the country. Assad congratulated Putin on his new term as president, following his March re-election (amid waves of protest), and (of course) thanked the Russian military for its support in re-conquering Syria. "Stability is improving," Assad told Putin at he opening press conference. Invoking the intermittent Russia-brokered peace talks in Kazakhstan (now largely irrelevant, that most of the country has been re-conquered), Assad added that "we have always wholeheartedly supported the political process, which should proceed in parallel with the war on terrorism." (Reuters) As Assad arrived in Sochi, Putin announced that Russian military vessels with Kalibr cruise missiles would be on permanent stand-by in the Mediterranean to counter what he called the "terrorist threat" in Syria. (Moscow Times)

In Episode Nine of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg rants against "Red-Brown Politics," the dangerous notion of an alliance between the left and fascist right against liberalism and the West—now evidenced in the growing support for the genocidal dictatorship of Bashar Assad on both the "anti-war" (sic) "left" (sic) and the "alt-right." Leading lights of the American "left" have joined pro-Assad delegations to Syria, as have figures on the fascist right. Emerging as the global representative for this sinister trend is Russo-nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, who is bringing together supposed peaceniks and neo-fascists around supporting despots like Putin and Assad in the name of a "multi-polar" world. Perversely,. representatives of "anti-war" groups in the US recently traveled to a Duginist confab in Moscow, where they met with various Euro-fascist leaders and a delegation of white nationalists from the neo-Confederate League of the South. Weinberg urges that leftists utterly reject overtures from the radical right, and adopt a single-standard anti-fascism—which must inlcude solidarity with the Syrian Revolution. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

In Episode Eight of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the bitter historical irony: In April of 1937, the aerial bombardment of the Spanish town of Guernica by the Nazi Luftwaffe shocked the world. Today, what happened there is a near-daily occurrence in Syria (as well as Yemen and elsewhere around the world), and we are so inured to it that the "anti-war" people are actually on the side of the authors of aerial terror. During the Spanish Civil War, the left heroically opposed Generalissimo Francisco Franco's drive to establish a fascist dictatorship with the aid of German military intervention. Today, it cravenly abets Bashar Assad's drive to re-establish his fascist dictatorship with the aid of Russian military intervention. Even as Russia scrambles to block any investigation into the Douma chemical attack and other war crimes in Syria, "leftists" shamefully echo Russian propaganda denying any responsibility by Assad. Weinberg again urges that any legitimate anti-war position must begin with opposition to the genocidal regime of Bashar Assad, and with solidarity for the Syrian Revolution. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

In an in-depth interview for the Dobbstown podcast, CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg traces the downward trajectory of the anti-war movement to the point that it now doesn't protest when Trump (let alone Assad or Putin) bombs civilians, but does protest when Trump bombs warplanes that are used to bomb civilians. The poorly named "anti-war" left has morphed into its exact opposite: pro-war, pro-dictatorship, and even pro-genocide. Weinberg discusses his own political awakening in the Reagan cold war, and the American left's descent to its current political and ideological nadir. Weinberg urges support for the actual social struggles in places like Syria, Libya, Crimea, etc., rather than viewing them as pawns on the geopolitical chessboard, as our imperialist enemies do. He also touches on the deleterious effects of digital technology on the human mind, and our ability to think and analyze.