Red and Black Song Club.

        To all those singers, warblers, chanters, open mike enthusiasts, karaoke characters, and those who just like to sing in the bath. Here is an opportunity to let you dulcet tones rip forth, join a bunch of enthusiast, who love nothing better than getting together and letting their tonsils vibrate, come and sing because you love singing, not because you are a good singer. The Red and Black Song Club meet 1st. and 3rd. Wednesday of the month at Glasgow Autonomous Space, (GAS).

        You can contact The Red and Black Song Club on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/redandblacksongclub/

For directions to Glasgow Autonomous Space better to visit their site.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

National Poetry Day 2017.

       Today is national poetry day, so in my humble way I attempt to celebrate and further the idea that, poetry is a magic portal through which you can see a different world. Enjoy.

 

Anarchy

 

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
rings false for a pillaging empire.
To die for war-mongers
and criminals in business suits
is sour.

The Pledge of Allegiance
is sinister and violent.
National identity empowers
the American war machine.
Proudly waving flags
conceal the unjust bloodshed.

War needs public support;
propaganda makes it possible;
repetition makes it stick.
Indoctrination into the fold
of nationalistic pride
from birth.

Do governments truly
unite their peoples...

...or divide the world
with flags and gods?

Mind control
on an unbelievable scale,
a shill production scheme.

And who votes either
"For" or "Against"

plays into
unknown
fists.

Mucro Pondera Divinus Sep 2014 

 

WE THE LABOURING MASSES.

We the people have, every brick laid,

have fed the world with sweat and spade,

every instrument played in every band

created by the skill of the craftsman's hand.

We made every truck and every load,

our toil our effort every winding road,

every ship that ever sailed the sea,

our power our imagination made it be.

Cities and towns large and small,

our labouring hands fashioned them all,

every home, every spire,

luxury mansion or humble byre.

No matter what dreams the mind might spawn

without labour's hand, never see the light of dawn,

without labour's strength and labour's skill,

we would be foraging beasts in a jungle still.

FROM GEORGE SQUARE TO TAHRIR SQUARE.

In a global square, in a global village the people are gathering,

They want to sort out their village once and for all.

They have had enough of wild beasts stealing their chickens,

Of war lords pillaging and plundering their crops.

Though they labour hard, they live poor

While the wild beasts and war lords grow fat.

This time they will take the time and do it right,

This time they will finally and forever banish,

Wild beasts and war lords from their village.

This time all our chickens will feed all the children of the village

This time our crops will see all our people through the winter,

This time, all the fruits of our labour will be ours.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk 

The System With The Gloves Off.

         The establishment billionaires, chatting about their latest investments, as they sit in their marble halls of power, or sipping champagne on board their multi million pound yachts, must be feeling rather, smug at the moment, they have succeeded in sparking the fire again. The have the ordinary people fighting each other on the streets, a wonderful opportunity for the state to increase controls to keep "law and order". The rise of the right, is no mystic happening, no unforeseen accident, it always appears as the dissatisfaction rises among the people. It is a well tried and tested strategy to get the people fighting among themselves. When resistance to the system becomes too difficult, for the "legal" system to silence, intimidate and imprison, why not try to kick the shit out of them on the street. and at the same time, take the focus of the system itself, capitalism. The so called Alt-right, etc., is just the system with the gloves off.

       Sadly the Nazis on the streets are not the billionaires, they tend to be from the streets where you live, they are the street thugs of those billionaires, who wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, Hence they always get treated differently from those on the left, by the "forces of law and order" when it cones to a confrontation on the streets.

        A recent incident from Houston Anarchist Bookfair, reported by Black Rose Anarchist Federation: 

HOUSTON – With chants of “Blood and Soil” about 30 fascists affiliated with Vanguard America and the Proud Boys attempted to rush the entrance of the Houston Anarchist Book Fair underway at MECA Houston community center on Sunday, September 24. The attempt occurred at 11:50am but was quickly rebuffed as the security team present locked the doors to the facility, blocking the entrance briefly but foiling the effort of the fascist groups to enter the building to intimidate and likely attack organizers and attendees.
       The incident lasted roughly 20 minutes in total and no confrontations or injuries occurred as the the fascists gave up, circled the building in their trucks and left the scene according to members of Black Rose/Rosa Negra – San Antonio, who were present at the book fair tabling. Members of the Proud the Boys and Vanguard America were both involved in the violent “Unite the Right” march one month ago in Charlottesville, VA, where a participant linked to Vanguard America rammed their vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, resulting in the  death of Heather Heyer. This incident at the Houston Anarchist Book Fair occurred immediately before lunch, which suggested prior planning and knowledge of the event.
      Correction: The original headline of this article incorrectly identified the group present as the “alt-right” Proud Boys groups. Members of this group may have been present but our understanding is that this was led by members of Vanguard America.
Video clip of the incident taken by a member of Black Rose/Rosa Negra – San Antonio. At this point members of Vanguard America, identified by their white polo shirts, had given up and were circling the building to leave.

View video clip HERE:  http://blackrosefed.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/video-1506277361.mp4

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Two Bells With A Different Ring.

        Working class history is all too often lost, forgotten or deliberately hidden, but it is there, a rich history of struggle, a culture of community that stretches back as far as we wish to look. However the establishment has no desire to allow that history to take its rightful place, as the true history of the people. Much better for them, that we admire barons of industry, kings, queens and other forms of parasitical power. Our cities are festooned with statues of exploiting millionaires, military figures with the blood of ordinary people on their hands, and at the top of the tree of parasites, royals. I believe it was George Orwell that said, "The surest way to destroy a people, is to destroy their history", I paraphrase. In Glasgow we have Spirit of Revolt and Strugglepedia, two sites where we do our best to record, preserve and publicise that history, making it easily accessible to the general public, Have a wee look, perhaps you can get involved and add to that true picture of our history.

        Scotland has been fortunate in the fact it has had a long line of working class radical activists, stretching back as far as exploitation has used its venomous tentacles. Some have carried on their fight against the system in the full glare of publicity, others have battled away in seclusion and in the background, but never the less determined to change this world for the better for all. All must be remembered

      We have had, just to mention a few, Thomas Muir, Ethel MacDonald, Willie McDougal, Guy Aldred, John MacLean, Rita Milton, George (Ballard) Barrett, Tom Anderson, and in more recent times, Les Foster, Charlie and Molly Baird,  Bobby Lynn, I could go on. We have also had the strange occurrence of two Tom Bells. One, Tom Bell, red Clydesider, who mixed with the anti-parliamentarians, until a visit to Moscow seen him come back with the strange idea that the only way to get emancipation for the people was through the ballot box, and with some others formed the British Communist Party. 

       The other Tom Bell, Thomas Hastie Bell, was a different kettle of fish. A life long vociferous anarchist, always eager to get people involved, always busy with propaganda and action. He travelled the world, learnt to speak several languages, and eventually settled in America, still pushing his ideas and anarchist philosophy, he died in America in 1942.

        Here is a short biography of that Thomas Hastie Bell, this article first appeared in Organise! magazine #66. Also published by Libcom.

        A short biography of leading Scottish anarchist Tom Bell, a marine engineer and propagandist who travelled the world, finally settling in the US.
        Thomas Hastie Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1867. He should not be confused with another Tom Bell, fellow Scot , Red Clydesider and one of the founders of the Communist Party. He acquired fluency in French, Italian, Spanish and German thanks to his job as a ship’s engineer, visiting all the Mediterranean countries, South Africa, the United States and South America.
        As a young man he joined the Scottish Land and Labour League and in the 1880s became an anarchist through his association with the Socialist League. He was active in the Freedom group in London. In 1892 he returned to Edinburgh and carried on intense anarchist propaganda with J. Blair Smith and McCabe. He established a friendship there with Patrick Geddes, the biologist and town planner and persuaded him to bring over Elisée Reclus, the anarchist and geographer, to lecture at Edinburgh University. Emma Goldman mentions Bell “of whose propagandistic zeal and daring we had heard much in America”.
        Staying in Paris he had urged French anarchists to have open-air meetings, but they were reluctant. He went to the Place de la Republique, one of the most central and busiest squares, after having distributed handbills about meeting there the following Sunday afternoon. There was a big crowd there, also plenty of policemen. He climbed up a lamp-post padlocked to a crosspiece and started speaking. The police called for a file, but he continued speaking till his voice gave out and then nonchalantly produced the key. Police then threatened him with prosecution for “insults to the Army and the law” but all Paris laughed and the authorities decided not to prosecute. After 2 weeks in jail he was expelled as “too dangerous a man to be allowed loose in France”. He married the anarchist John Turner’s sister Lizzie.
         On the visit of Tsar Nicholas II to Britain, Bell went with McCabe to Leith where he was landing. Separated and although surrounded by Highlanders, territorials and infantry, Bell and McCabe got through to the Tsar’s carriage and shouted in his face “Down with the Russian tyrant! To hell with all the empires!”. Again the authorities were not inclined to prosecute, because a Scottish jury would probably throw out any charges.
        In 1898, Bell, who suffered from asthma all his life, went back to London and got a job as the (long-suffering) secretary to the man of letters Frank Harris, famous for his friendship with Oscar Wilde and his womanising, as revealed in his Life and Loves. Harris is suspected of stealing Bell’s experiences as a cowboy near the Mexican border for his own fake cowboy memories.
         Through Harris, Bell got to know Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw and others. Bell wrote a book about Wilde in his Oscar Wilde Without Whitewash in memory of those times, unfortunately never published. After 7 years in that position, he had a disagreement with Harris over the latter’s biography, which he thought was unjust to Wilde.
         He went to New York in 1905, and in 1911 finally settled in the United States for good, becoming a farmer in Phoenix, Arizona. He spent the last 20 years of his life in Los Angeles. Both Bell’s wife Lizzie Turner and his sister Jessie Bell Westwater emigrated with him to the USA and were involved in the movement. Throughout his life he remained active in the movement, maintaining lifelong friendships with Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Rudolf Rocker.
        Rocker said, “I saw him again in Los Angeles, when he was an old man. He was ill. His mop of red hair and his bushy beard were now white. His giant frame (he was well over six foot) was bent. But his mind was active; he was still working and speaking for the movement”.
        In a letter to the Yiddish anarchist paper Die Fraye Arbeter Shtime in 1940, Bell declared, “We become in our old age crabby, blind, deaf, lame or asthmatic. And our movement is now completely overwhelmed in a gigantic world-wide wave of reaction. But, ah, when I look back to the glorious days and the glorious comrades of our young movement, I am stirred to the depths by affection and pride”.
Tom Bell died in 1942 at the age of 75.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Killing Of History.

         It is becoming increasingly easy to point the finger at America and its barbaric imperialism, but we should not forget that the UK, like other Western countries are its trusted cold blooded gun-slingers, that will always back up Americas savagery. America might be the top gun in this brutal grasp of power, but we are always there to back that top gun, and throw in a few shots of our own, hoping for some of the spoils of conquest. No matter the blood curling savagery of its exploits, its propaganda mouthpiece, Hollywood and the mainstream media will, with pathos, humour and emotion, always rewrite history to portray America and it puppets, as the brave good guys, putting their lives on the line to help those poorer nations rid themselves of tyranny. The truth of history will be lost in a façade of glitter and glory, genocide will be shown as liberation, aggression and invasion will will be seen as the flowering of democracy. That is the true purpose of that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media.
           This lunacy will only end with repeating the savagery of past wars and genocides, in a nuclear fireball that will dwarf anything we can imagine in horror and barbarity, unless we the people of this world, decide to end this lunacy and remove power from the insane and the power crazy, bring down this system of capitalism that can only survive by wealth and power. 

         Another excellent article by John Pilger, The Killing of History. Thanks for the link Loam.

           One of the most hyped "events" of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, "They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way".
           In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
            Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
          I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
           The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record - the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
            There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me - as it must be for many Americans - it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
            In the series' press release in Britain - the BBC will show it - there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. "We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy," Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
            All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while "searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy". Cue Bob Dylan: "Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?"
            I thought about the "decency" and "good faith" when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as "termites".
              In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers "killings"). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an "American tragedy" (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American "free fire zones". Mass homicide. This was not news.
            To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly "South Vietnam", the country America claimed to "save" and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
        The "meaning" of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
           Quoting Robert Taber's The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, "There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert."

Read the full article HERE: 

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Poverty and Hunger, The Necessities Of Capitalism.

        To those who need a little explaining as to how capitalism and poverty go hand in hand, and why poverty is necessary for capitalism to function, you could do worse than read the article by Simon Springer, of the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada,  called Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger:

          Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure excess for the few. While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl Marx (1867) and particularly his understanding of primitive accumulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890) had worked out the contradictory underpinning of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the principle of right and of government, where he declared “property is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself. If famine requires a combination of political, production and market shocks” as Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state elites holding the reigns of power. For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),“ it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial answer when he suggests that,“ if the number of poor rapidly increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States” .So we are starting to see a picture where capitalism and the state come together as indeed they always have as a dialectics of violence. Through the process of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept“ the principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p. 220). The history of capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship. In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property. It was in the form of dispossession that deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible. Consequently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger. As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it, “the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest. In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists. Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011). Yet to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling. If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “ dedicates more detail and space to …the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De Waal (2017) argues, then indeed this should tell us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control. With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive spectre of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being. This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs land, water, housing,food, and tools the result of which is both the institutionalization of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land. One is enslaved by This system, where refusing it means starvation. The only thing that prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement that secures our political value. Without this exchange our lives are rendered useless to capital.

Read the full article HERE:
    Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger,

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Yes, Thery Do Kill Youths In The "Free" World.

      As one youth is beaten and tortured by police in Greece, another is shot dead by another Wyatt Earp police officer in America. How many deaths across the world are at the hands of the so call law and order brigade. Obviously death is a price worth paying to intimidate the population into a state of subservience. 

  

Live updates @ABC7 @OCHAWKNEWS #shooting #Huntingtonbeach pic.twitter.com/NFUP1M9mkN

— Timo (@Cali_Funk1) 22 September 2017

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

They Do Kill Teenagers!!!

 

        Sorry I seemed to have missed this by a day or so, however it should be widely publicised, and I have no doubt there will be other calls for solidarity in this case  of extreme state violence against a young teenager. Time and time again the state's minders, the police, get away with murder, and near murder, the state has no intentions of putting its bully-boys on a leash, it needs them to intimidate and terrorise those who would dare to speak out against this brutal, exploitative, unjust system. Our silence, our inactivity, is their gain and their aim.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

URGENT COUNTER-INFORMATION REPORT CONCERNING 16 YEAR-OLD K.B. Athens – Greece

       On september 16th, the day of anti-fascist protests in Keratsini and Athens, for the 4 years since the murder of Pavlos Fyssas by neonazis of the Golden Dawn, 16 year old K.B. is arrested in Exarchia. During his arrest and transportation to GADA (central police hq of Athens), K.B. is beaten and tortured by riot cops resulting in his severe injury.
      Although this incident is publicized on social networks and counter-information websites, on the same day false information is leaked concerning the health of K.B. as well as the conditions of his care in the intensive care unit of KAT hospital.
      In an attempt to cover-up a very serious incident during an especially explosive juncture, another attempt is coordinated to downplay this incident. Stray information on the same day say that the kid’s situation has stabilized, that he has escaped danger, as well as that the detention protocol in the hospital was upheld.
       The reality however is far from that, and goes as such: K.B. right now is being hospitalized in an induced coma, in tubed???? in intensive care of KAT hospital. His relatives have had no hopeful news (till now) about his health and the information they have been receiving is extremely incomplete. It simultaneously became known after a syndicalist doctor of that hospital denounced it, that the police had a cop INSIDE the intensive care unit which is obviously forbidden. Doctors  cannot bring him out of the coma he is in right now because of his situation and do not know when he will come out of it. His injuries are severe, he had an epileptic episode as well as loss of consciousness.
        Also, today he had an operation and had metal rods placed in both of his legs. Not trusting the state apparatus who only care about their self-preservation in anyway, we call on anyone who knows anything concerning the arrest and transfer of 16 year-old, to email:
againstpolicebrutality@espiv.net in order for us to investigate what has happened exactly.
      It is a matter of survival of the authoritarians to maintain the illusion of social normality in any way. On our side, we ought to not give even a bit of space to those who attempt to silence and punish whoever resists.
Our solidarity is a given but also factual and we call for a gathering at KAT hospital on Wednesday September 20th.
NO ONE ALONE IN THE HANDS OF THE STATE
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS
EVERYONE TO THE BARRICADES
Solidarity assembly to K.B.
*next assembly is on September 22nd at 7pm at the Polytechnic in Athens.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Violence, Power And Empire Go Hand In Hand.

 

Winter

Dark malefic clouds crowd the sky

winds carry the stench of carrion to every nostril,

the crazy ape has followed the faculty of hawks.

All around stand crows, magpies, jackdaws, vultures,

edacious eyes anticipating their putrid feast.

A weary Cassandra laments;

doves, hearts weeping for a better yesterday

forsake their olive branches.

       More on the American savage empire. Thanks Loam for the link.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

It Doesn't Always Go To Plan.

        Thursday was a pleasant day, a wee break from the usual wind and rain we have been getting. So good opportunity to get out on the bike, over the last month or so, I have been out once and on occasions twice a week as weather permits for a fair weather cyclist. Usually it was round the Campsie area, on a recent visit to Bishopbriggs I noticed a cycle path that went through a kids play area and on through some trees. With my twisted logic I assumed that it would continue meandering down towards the Forth and Clyde canal. So that was my plan, set off from Bishopbriggs along the cycle path on to the canal to Kirkintilloch, and then decide which road to take from there. Nice and easy through the kids park, into the tree area, then faced with a rather steep incline of a footpath/cycle-track. That's where I bumped into these three guys, they looked quite surprised to see me.

       At the top of the incline, disappointment, the cycle path didn't continue, it was onto a road, I was now in a housing estate. making my way through an area I didn't know, finally arrived at the main Bishopbriggs, Kirkintiloch road, a road I always try to avoid. The traffic was horrendous and every couple of hundred yards or so, a set of traffic lights. Before Kirkintilloch, I decided that I had had enough, and headed back to a café in Bishopbriggs and home. A rather short and not my most enjoyable outing, that will teach me not to assume anything, but check things out first.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Savagery Of The American Empire.

         I don’t believe that the most of the general public grasp the full extent of American imperialism and the scale of its savage barbarity, or they would rise up with fury and revulsion and tear it apart. Ever since its independence from British imperialism, America has steadily built its own empire. Always with ruthlessness and no regard for civilian populations. Today it is the most powerful imperial power on the planet, and it will defend and expand this position with unimaginable weaponry, used with savage brutality, against civilian populations. In its imperial logic, to rid itself of an annoying leader, it is acceptable and probably necessary to destroy a country, slaughter its population and obliterate its infrastructure. It will then call the result a victory and a success, once it has replaced the annoying leader with a more subservient puppet. 

        A small list of the countries that have felt the wrath of the American empire since 1980 is a lesson in geography:
Iran (1980, 1987-1988),
Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011),
Lebanon (1983),
Kuwait (1991),
Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-),
Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-),
Bosnia (1995),
Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996),
Afghanistan (1998, 2001-),
Sudan (1998),
Kosovo (1999),
Yemen (2000, 2002-),
Pakistan (2004-)
Syria, ongoing.
        Not only does the American empire spend more of its taxpayers money on weaponry than any other country on earth, with, by far, the largest military budget of any nation, it also has more of its troops on foreign soil that any other nation. All this to defend its power over its empire.
         For a more detailed look at the savagery and vicious enforcement of its power over its empire it is worth reading Zoltan Grossman’s A BRIEFING ON THE HISTORY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS.

         Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the U.S. military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing U.S. civilians is wrong.
      The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of our "freedom" and "prosperity." Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the U.S. role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world. This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of U.S. foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of U.S. military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of "freedom" and "protecting civilians."
       The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to "protectorates" such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers. Many of the uses of U.S. combat forces are documented in A History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

Well worth reading the full and well detailed article HERE:
The list and briefing are also available as a powerpoint presentation.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Truth Lies Somewhere Outside The Media.

 

         I know we can never accept what we read in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, but there is also what they fail to mention, that can be as dangerous as the vomit they spew out.

       This article from Real News24. makes very interesting reading, but it should not surprise you, we are fed propaganda, not news.

         You wouldn’t know it if you were to turn on your television every day or simply skim the media’s headlines, but North Korea has continuously offered to freeze its nuclear program. The very threat we are continuously told to fear could be immediately neutralized but is instead repeatedly rejected by the United States.

      However, prominent media outlets such as the Washington Post continue to tell a different story, namely that:

“[North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un] has shown no interest in talks — he won’t even set foot in China, his biggest patron. Even if negotiations took place, the current regime has made clear that ‘it will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table, as one envoy recently put it.”

As the Intercept explains, this is a false assertion:

        “There’s, of course, a significant difference between North Korea saying it will never negotiate to halt or eliminate its nuclear weapons program, and that it will never negotiate as long as the U.S. continues to threaten it…The reality is that North Korea is saying that, under certain conditions, it will put its nuclear weapons on the table.” [emphasis added]

         Not only does the media continue to misinform the public on this issue, but as Noam Chomsky explained in an interview with Democracy! Now, the United States continues to categorically reject North Korea’s proposal:

        “There is one proposal that’s ignored. You see a mention of it now and then. It’s a pretty simple proposal. Remember the goal is to get North Korea to freeze its weapons systems – weapons and missile systems. One proposal is to accept their offer to do that. Sounds simple, they’ve made a proposal – China and North Korea – proposed to freeze the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons systems and the U.S. instantly rejected it. And you can’t blame that on Trump, Obama did the same thing, a couple of years ago. The Same offer was presented – I think it was 2015 – the Obama administration instantly rejected it.”

       Why would they do that? Why fear North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities but then reject a proposal to freeze their production? As Chomsky explains further:

       “The reason is that it calls for a quid pro quo. It says in return the United States should put an end to threatening military maneuvers on North Korea’s borders, which happen to include under Trump, sending of nuclear-capable B-52s flying right near the border. Maybe Americans don’t remember very well but North Koreans have a memory of not too long ago when North Korea was absolutely flattened – literally – by American bombing. There was literally no targets left.” [emphasis added]

       In the early 1950s, the U.S. relentlessly bombed North Korea, destroying over 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country’s population. As the Asia Pacific Journal has noted, the U.S. did, indeed, drop so many bombs that they eventually ran out of targets to hit and bombed the irrigation systems, instead:

         “By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.” [emphasis added]

        Despite the people and leadership of North Korea knowing this history and the history of other like-minded states who became easy targets for the U.S. military upon dismantling their weapons programs, North Korea is still to this day offering this proposal to freeze its program.

As the Intercept explained at the end of August:

          “North Korea’s proclamations have been closely tracked by Robert Carlin, currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and formerly head of the Northeast Asia Division in the State Department’s intelligence arm. Carlin has visited North Korea over 30 times.

         “Via email, Carlin described how it is difficult but critical to accurately decode North Korean communications. ‘Observers dismiss as unimportant what the North Koreans say,’ Carlin writes, and ‘therefore don’t read it carefully, except of course if it is colorful, fiery language that makes for lovely headlines. Some of what the North says is simply propaganda and can be read with one eye closed. Other things are written and edited very carefully, and need to be read very carefully. And then, having been read, they need to be compared with past statements, and put in context.’”

       The media’s insistence that North Korea will never give up its weapons systems is completely disingenuous when one reads the entire context of the statements offered by Kim Jong-un’s government. On July 4, Kim’s statement read as follows:

         “[T]he DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.” [emphasis added]

Quid pro quo.

        This is a deal-breaker for the U.S. even though it would undoubtedly diffuse the entire situation and provide the region with at least a brief period of stability.

            The U.S., together with South Korea, simulates an invasion of North Korea every year. In Donald Trump’s first six months in office, he dropped over 20,650 bombs in approximately seven countries, which killed thousands of civilians. By comparison, Kim Jong-un bombs the ocean.

      No matter how objectively you look at it, North Korea has a genuine reason to want to be prepared in the face of American aggression. But a military strike option to counter any potential North Korean threat is not the only option and, further, is almost certainly the worst option on the table.

         After the failures and crimes of U.S. politicians and the military in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan — to name a few — we should be demanding that our world leaders try the diplomatic option advanced by the North Korean regime to the fullest extent in order to avoid a potential nuclear holocaust and the deaths of millions of innocent civilians.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Buddies Or Enemies??

        Anarchist and leftists, buddies or enemies, in the final analysis, we are enemies. Anarchists stand against the forming of any state, leftists want to recreate the state, with them in control. History tells us that where leftists win, anarchists are murdered, we stand on different sides of the barricades. Anarchists fight for freedom, leftists fight for dictatorship, albeit, dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the illusion to disguise what is still an authoritarian institution. There can be no illusions, no matter who controls the state apparatus will control the people, and the basis of anarchist principles is the fact that we believe that people should not be controlled.

        There are those who say put our differences aside to fight the common enemy, capitalism, So who are our common enemies? Anarchists see the co-joined twins of capitalism and the state as the enemy. We wish to destroy the state and all its controlling and repressive apparatus, along with capitalism, the leftists want to reconstitute the state and shape it so that they are in control of all the institutions and repressive apparatus. But somehow we are to believe that it will be a kinder controlling apparatus. Rather than trying to come together in some sort of quasi friendship, we should be making clear our differences and where we stand on all issues. Only by highlighting our differences will we be able to convince anyone with a left leaning view, that our vision of the future is the only one that will free us from those co-joined twins, capitalism and the controlling and repressive institutions of the state, and lead to freedom.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Some Thoughts On Trump.

 

       I don't as a rule write about individual leaders, I view them all just as necessary cogs in the capitalist juggernaut, assistants to the financial Mafia, get rid of that economic system and the leaders will probably disappear with the system. I am, however, a great admirer of Frankie Boyle, a Glasgow comedian, I love his style of humour, and his outspoken manner, and though he is expert at making people laugh, he also makes people think, and he is not afraid to make his views known. This latest piece by him sums up a lot of what most of us are thinking.

        It’s impossible to imagine what it’s like to be killed in a nuclear explosion, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think it will probably involve being blasted over quite a large distance, and at a surprising height, while simultaneously having all your skin burnt off. I know we think of it as being an instant death, but there’s every chance that there will be a few seconds where you’ll be sailing out of your local school catchment area, at a height of about a hundred feet or so, as some sort of screaming skeleton. Maybe you will get to see your family melt before the blast picks you up, and your final memory will be of their faces devolving into cubism. Or maybe it’s more like being smashed to pieces by a wave of rubble. After all those years of driving into town to go to work, or go shopping, your city centre will finally be coming to you, moving at several thousand miles an hour, and hotter than Venus in July.
        Donald Trump got himself into yet another war of words with North Korea after they test fired a missile that went over Japan. In a war of words you do not want to be on Trump’s side: a man who speaks like he’s on shuffle and has a smaller vocabulary than an upturned calculator. It’s incredible to see the US take the moral high ground about, of all things, nuking Japan. Bear in mind that Japan is a country that specialises in wooden buildings with paper walls. It’s odd to think that as millions of people hunkered down in their paper houses during a potential nuclear attack, they were still safer than the many thousands of people in the UK living in high rise social housing.
Trump is like a fat bee bashing around inside a greenhouse repeatedly failing to understand why the world doesn’t work as he thought it did. The chances of this unrepentant lunatic starting World War III are surely very high. Often, when I hear Trump talk even the most egregious garbage about wanting to strip people of their healthcare, or exile children, I’m actually just glad that he’s talking about the future, weighing his words like I would those of a possible suicide.
This is a man who obsesses over winning, and uses success as his single metric for evaluating humanity, who has become the key player in a game which it is impossible too win. Who would win in an all out conflict with North Korea? My best guess is a guy in Tokyo who knows how to catch and roast rats, who owns a shopping trolley and has the entrepreneurial flair to get out into the smoking rubble of his city and begin trading his rodents on sticks for essential items. A UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations told the media that Trumps latest intervention on sanctions was, ‘an exceedingly silly thing to say’. We can only assume he’s had that statement prepared for the last two years and since writing it has thought about pressing the send button a couple of hundred times a day.
          Trump isn’t a military man, and salutes troops in a way that makes Benny Hill look like Stalin. I hate the way that “draft dodger’ is thrown at Trump as an insult. I mean, if you want to insult a guy who looks like God twisted some haemorrhoids into a balloon animal, why pick one of the few moments that he behaved rationally? Some take comfort in the fact that a triumvirate of US generals have essentially annexed military policy. In many ways, the concentration of power into the hands of Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster is the only thing worse than Trump.
           It’s impossible to have been in an institution like the US army your whole life without having internalised a worldview that believes complex international relationships are best handled through the medium of high explosives. In their own way, their worldview will be as limited as those priests who live in the catacombs under the Vatican who can see in the dark and have five hundred words for a child’s bottom. The US military view is one that sees existence as a permanent war for resources. A huge reason for elite climate change denial is that it collapses the American worldview. If you allow that climate change is real, the war for resources is two dying men in a locked room fighting over a live hand-grenade. It’s also a worldview of permanent escalation. In the aftermath of a college shooting, we always laugh at the wing-nut who calls for more guns on campus. Yet that’s actually a pretty tight metaphor for US foreign policy, one where the US is both the wing-nut, and the shooter.
          If I might make one suggestion to the North Koreans, please don’t drop bombs indiscriminately upon the USA. There are specific targets you should hit that would upset the President the most and, luckily for your bombing crews, they’ve all got his name written on them in fifty foot high letters.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

PFI, Private Fiddling Initiatives.

         In this greed driven capitalist system the financial Mafia and the moguls of the corporate juggernaut have refined the numerous ways they can steal from the public purse, of course with the unstinting assistance from their minders, the state apparatus. They work hand in glove with each other to further the plunder of that public purse.
       The capitalist greed merchants start their grand theft by first managing us, the ordinary people, to "work" for them in producing tremendous wealth, then let us lick the droppings from the cats saucer, then they move on to getting us to pay rip-off prices for the merchandise we produced.
       Of course there are other ways they dip their hands into the public cash machine. One of those devious rip-off schemes is the Public Finance Initiatives, (PFI). This is the con-trick of getting public bodies to engage in projects where the financial Mafia fund the infra structure of our NHS and other public institutions. Then, in theory, the infra structure becomes the property of that institution. In the UK this con-scheme started about 20 years ago, with a push from the corporate friendly State. Today, these public bodies now owe a staggering £300 billion in PFI debt. Our public institutions are in hock to the financial Mafia to that mouth dropping £300 billion, that's debt that you and I will have to pay the vampires from our taxes.

         Our NHS is sinking under a totally engineered, state and corporate greed burden. Between 1997 and 2007 approximately 90% of capital investment in the NHS was PFI. The result is that today the NHS is cracking at the seams from lack of funding, yet it has to pay out to private companies a staggering £2 billion per year. £2 billion of our cash that could be improving the service to the people, is flowing into the bank accounts of private companies. Will it end, well not likely, as by the time that the infrastructure is paid off, it will need upgrading, repairing or replacing, and so the merry-go-round continues, shovelling our cash into the pockets of the vampire squid, the corporate world. It is a brilliant scheme for transferring public money to private bank accounts, and let's not talk about the quality of some of those PFI built infrastructures, that's another story.

       If you are foolish enough to want to continue this plunder of the public purse, then stay with the present greed driven corrupt system of capitalism. If on the other hand you would like to live on a society that sees to the needs of all our people, without the rip-off from greed driven power mongers, parasites and vultures, then you have to look at demolishing this man made economic system of exploitation and corruption. Stop appealing to the parasites, to be a little more kind to you, and to give you a little more of the wealth that you created, they don't understand that language. 

        Only the ordinary people can create a society that looks after the ordinary people, only when we control our communities and our work places, can we hope to create that better world. Forget that middle class approach of petitioning for improvements, within the parameters capitalist system, forget the pointless appealing for reform, where some extra crumbs come you way. Forget a bigger crust, take over the bakery.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk