Headlines

• The clerics are struggling to control widespread unrest
• Protests have engulfed several cities in Iran
• Iran death toll rises as protests continue ← click for more 

 Midle East, Jan.2.– Incredibly, religious hardliners may have started the protests that have spread across Iran. Preachers in Mashhad, Iran’s second city and a stronghold of the clerical regime, called their followers onto the streets on December 28th to protest against rising prices, most recently of eggs. Many of those who turned out supported Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric, in the presidential election last May. “Death to Rouhani,” they chanted, referring to President Hassan Rouhani, whose liberal economic policies they oppose and whose budget in December called for sweeping subsidy cuts.  

But their cries have been drowned out by a far broader swathe of Iranian malcontents. Even as the hardliners retreated, the protests spread to more than 20 cities, where Iranians of all stripes voiced pent-up anger over a lack of economic and political progress.

Havana, Dec.29.– After Raul’s announcement in his latest speech in front of the National Assembly, him stepping down as the President of the State Council and Council of Ministers seems to be pretty much definite. Everything is pointing towards Miguel Diaz-Canel being named his successor, the First Vice-President who rose up to the highest ranks of Cuban politics thanks to the post-Fidel purge that took some of the system’s key figures out of the game.

While it is true that there were strong indications, during the first half of this year, that this transfer of power might not happen, his nomination today is clear. Ambiguous declarations by figures close to power, such as Mariela Castro, have predicted that there may be “surprises”. The Vice-President himself has made sure to come off as a “die-hard Communist” in the few public images that have leaked of him, in a clear move to create trust among the population. And added to his absence from national press, there has been a sudden and unprecedented appearance of the Castro family’s descendents, both Fidel’s and Raul’s children.

 Dec.29.–  The Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution” destroyed tens of millions of lives. From the communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, through the upheaval, famine, and bloodletting of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set segments of Chinese society against one another in successive spasms of violent class warfare. As wave after wave of savagery swept China, millions were killed and millions more sent off to “reform through labor” and ruination.

Mao had expected this level of brutality. As he once declared: “A revolution is neither a dinner party, nor writing an essay, painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely, gentle, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Today, even experts on Chinese history find it difficult to keep track of all the lethal “mass movements” that shaped Mao’s revolution and which the party invariably extolled with various slogans. Mao launched campaigns to “exterminate landlords” after the Communists came to power in 1949; to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” in the early 1950s; to purge “rightists” in the late 1950s; to overthrow “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s; and to “rectify” young people’s thinking by shipping them off to China’s poorest rural areas during the Down to the Countryside Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 Kigali, Dec. 21.– Another year, another Umushyikirano. To a casual observer, the just completed two-day event, now traditionally held under the splendid dome of the Kigali Convention Centre, or KCC, might seem little more than a gathering of the great and the good, which concludes with the last speech, to be repeated again the following year. In reality, the two days are some of the most important in the national calendar. The true nature of Umushyikirano as a forum for policy analysis, can be clearly glimpsed in last year’s concluding presidential address.

One could pick any year, but, last year’s was as good an illustration as any before it. It is perhaps not entirely accurate to call it a presidential address. The president, who chairs Umushyikirano, opens it with a State of the Nation address. This is delivered with the formality one would expect of such an address to the nation.