Tommaso Segantini is a freelance writer and student of migration studies whose work has appeared on TeleSur, openDemocracy, and Adbusters.
With 18,000 dead out of a population smaller than Ohio’s, Belgium has suffered the world’s worst rate of coronavirus deaths. Belgian Workers’ Party leader Peter Mertens told Jacobin how the population has been abandoned by the country’s elites — and why things didn’t have to be this way.
Since 2016, the Europe Union has outsourced the repression of migrants to Turkey, bribing the Erdoğan regime to hold back arriving refugees. But as Ankara abandons the deal, the Greek state has now become Europe’s border guard — with deadly consequences for the stateless and dispossessed.
Hillary Clinton has called on Europe to harden its borders. The strategy is completely wrong, but it’s also already underway — the EU is outsourcing border enforcement to states in Africa and the Middle East.
The crisis of the political center has given the Workers’ Party of Belgium a new lease on life.
Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.