The staff and friends of the IIRE were saddened to hear about the sudden death of Chris Harman on the evening of 6 November, in Cairo, where he was giving a talk.

A towering figure of the left in Europe, Harman was a pillar of the British revolutionary, anti-capitalist organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, and editor of the journal International Socialism. His monumental work A People’s History of the World, published in 1999, represented the first attempt to provide a single bottom-up account of the development of human civilisation.

By IIRE Fellow Eric Toussaint [1].

It may be useful to assess the dangers of the systematically hostile attitude of the overwhelming majority of major European and North American media companies in relation to the current events taking place in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. This hostility is only matched by an embarrassed, complicit silence with regard to those involved in the putsch in Honduras or the repression enacted by the Peruvian army against the indigenous populations of the Amazon. In order to demonstrate this statement, here are a few recent facts:

Since 1982, the existence of the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam (IIRE-Amsterdam) has been instrumental in bringing together activists from all inhabited continents for critical exchanges of thoughts and experiences in the daily struggle for emancipation of all oppressed peoples of the world.