Do We Leave The Problems To Our Kids?

 

 

      So you have seen the grotesque pantomime performed by the political ballerinas at Westminster, you have seen the rising child poverty, you have seen the increase in precarious working conditions, you have seen the decimation of our social services, you have seen the increase in homelessness and un-affordable rents, you have seen the corporate mafia vultures circling our National Health Service. Look abroad and you see the rise of fascism in Europe and else where, you have seen the wars in the Middle East where the West has stepped in to bring the people of that area "democracy" and delivered death, destruction and destitution, plus an unimaginable wave of desperate people taking the dangerous course migrating half way across the world in search of a decent life. You look at our burning planet and the total unwillingness linked to complete inability of the system to do anything meaningful about this impending disaster. You look at Chile and you see the people of that country rise up in desperation to try and stop the the ever downward spiral of their living conditions, as well as the continuing exploitation, endemic corruption and state violence. Across the globe people are standing up and saying, very loud and clear, this system doesn't work for the vast majority of the people on the planet.

      We see the vast wealth that we produce, but we see it private jets, luxury yachts, opulent penthouse and vast gated estates, we are aware of the tax havens that are a boon to the millionaire and billionaire predatory class, while we, the wealth producers, struggle from day to day for a decent living.

      It is obvious that we have the imagination, the desire, the means and the ability to devise a much fairer and sustainable system that is built on mutual aid, and co-operation, that sees to the needs of all, and respect for all life on the planet. A system freed from the vile clutches of the profit motive, free of borders and authority over others. You know that in your hearts that is the world we want for our children and our grandchildren. However it is up to us to deliver it, or will we sit back and leave this vile corrupt system of exploitation for our kids to sort out?

     It is obvious that the system cannot be reformed, it is built on exploitation of others for personal gain, that is the basic principle of its existence. The only answer is the total destruction of the entire system, and that will only come about by you and me standing up and joining those who are already in direct conflict with this cancerous system of corruption and greed. We can eradicate it from the planet and place it in stories of the past, labelled "The Darkest Hour In Human History.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Israeli State, The Fire Raiser.

  

 Syria, home to millions of ordinary people, like you and I.

 

     The Middle East region is a powder keg, it is in fact where World War3 is, for the time being, being fought. Conflicts rage across the region with every major power involved in some way or another, and this weekend Israel threw petrol on the fire. That Zionist apartheid state, this weekend carried out a series of attacks on three nations, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq as well as Sections of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Palestinian PELP-GC. Of course it couldn't do this without a nod of approval from it financial banker, the US.

      Despite this ruthless escalating series of illegal attacks, the western nations will sit back and do nothing, some of the poodles that head these governments may nod their heads in disapproval, but will continue to call Israel their friend and ally and continue making lucrative arms deals for Israel to continue its attacks on any and all Arab nations. We are being dragged to destruction by two psychopathic entities, Israel and USA and their poodles in the EU.

This from Antiwar: 

        The weekend marked a precipitous escalation in Netanyahu’s promise to attack all perceived “enemies.” From Saturday evening into late Sunday afternoon, Israel carried out strikes against three separate nations, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. By Monday morning, he had also attacked forces from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as well as Palestinians from the PFLP-GC. That’s a lot of enemies to wage war against all at once.
        Rumors of Israeli attacks against targets in Iraq over the last few weeks came to a head last week, when US and Israeli officials confirmed that the attacks were taking place. This led to some complaints from Iraqi officials, but Israel is hardly backing away from this policy.
       Indeed, with Israel’s election less than a month away and Prime Minister Netanyahu and his allies trailing substantially in most polls, it appears the policy is to escalate its attacks across the region, hoping to secure more votes from the hawkish right.
        The biggest attacks came Saturday, when Israel launched a series of attacks against a village near the Syrian capital of Damascus. The attacks were drone bombings, with Israeli drones laden with explosives flying into the target, crashing and detonating.
       Israel attacking Syria is common enough, but the real news was the Israeli military commenting directly, claiming they’d attacked an Iranian site, intending to preempt an Iranian attack on northern Israel on Thursday. Iran denied everything, including that they’d been hit in the strikes.
      It makes sense why the Netanyahu government would want to make this the case, as while he’s got mounting political opposition, he likely believes war with Iran is still a platform that would benefit him in the election. Indeed, if the war actually was ongoing against Iran and basically all Shi’ites, it would probably guarantee his reelection.
     But it didn’t stop with an attack in Syria, nominally on Iran. On Sunday, Israel carried out attacks against the Lebanese capital of Beirut, targeting Hezbollah. Israeli drones also slammed into Western Iraq, killing at least one member of a Shi’ite militia there.
      That bought Israel into engagements in three distinct countries, targeting Iraqi Shi’ite militias, Hezbollah, Syrian, and Iranian forces. Adding a fifth faction, early Monday morning Israel attacked a Palestinian base in northern Lebanon.
       That’s almost everyone in the region that Israel could attack, but this week will probably see a continuation of such strikes. Israel has also indicated an interest in starting to attack the Shi’ites in northern Yemen, even though they are not the same type of Shi’ites, so that too is likely to be a priority target.
       So far there has been no reaction from Israel’s opposition parties, and it puts them in an awkward position, as historically attacking anything is relatively popular in Israel, and it is considered unthinkable for the opposition to chime in on that in anything but enthusiastic support.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Terrorists Are Back In Action.

       Today as I watch the plunder of Venezuela unfold and I fear for the people of the unfortunate country, visions of the past flash through my head. For those who still think that the media splurge of propaganda is to show the world that the West cares and to let them know that we will rescue the people of Venezuela from a mad evil dictator, I ask them to cast their minds back to recent history across the Middle East, and see the Western states for what they are, professional terrorists.

     I wrote this article back in March 2016, but because of what is going on in Venezuela I think it is well worth repeating. I have seen nothing since 2016 that would alter my opinion, but a lot that would re-confirm that view.

          We live in a world of terrorists, the religious fanatics who feel the need to kill, to prove how wonderful their religion is, how great their god, they kill hundreds indiscriminately, while praising their god. Then there is the professional terrorist, the states, who bomb into destruction entire countries, killing countless millions in the process, spreading terror across land after land. At the same time creating breeding grounds for the for the religious fanatic to recruit and win over more suicide maniacs. What links these two groups is the fact that will kill indiscriminately for an idea, they will kill innocent people who are in no way involved in the terrorist process. People who just happen to be in their line of fire.

        There is no terrorist organisation on earth or has there ever been one, that could compete with, let alone out do, the countless deaths and massive destruction of the nation state. Today we are witness to almost the entire Middle East in a quagmire if blood, death and destruction, we have seen countries with modern infrastructure reduced to rubble, with the victims numbering in the millions, and the vast majority of those killed have been killed by the various states. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, the accolade for the highest number of deaths and greatest destruction goes, unchallenged, to the Western states. Only an idiot would say that the West only carried out these blood soaked actions with the welfare of the people of the Middle East in mind. They done it for their own self centred ideology, just like the religious nutters.

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

We Must Not Let History Repeat Itself.

       History repeats itself, just as the capitalist/imperialists in 1936 turned a blind eye or actively indulged in the destruction of the Spanish revolution, NATO, America, and Russia turn a blind eye while the dictator Erdogan  unleashes his Western kitted out military machine, against the people of Afrin. No alternative to capitalism will ever be allowed to survive, no matter the cost to human life, if the capitalist/imperialist cabal of this world has its way. In their rules it is capitalism or death. Surely the line must be drawn somewhere?

Insurrection News-Received on 09.03.18:

          For more than 6 weeks we have had to watch the Turkish state attack and occupy, together with Islamist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaida, Afrin, the most western canton of Rojava. In this extermination campaign, the invaders are neither deterred by the deliberate bombardment of civilians nor by the use of chemical weapons. The Islamist mercenaries and fascist Turkish soldiers leave a trail of devastation, plunder, rape and murder, they practice an ethnic cleansing of the territory of Kurds. So far, more than 300 civilians and many militants have given their lives, dozens of villages have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people have had to leave their homes.

          Despite the determined resistance of Afrin’s people and their YPG / YPJ / SDF defense units, the Turkish army manages to gain more ground every day. While the Turkish offensive was stuck in the border area of the canton for the first month, in recent days important small towns such as Raco and Shera have been conquered by the invaders. Their destination is Afrin City, the place where civilians have fled the villages and small towns they have conquered so far.

        This is made possible by the massive use of modern NATO technology such as fighter jets, artillery, tanks and drones. The fascist-Islamist war of aggression against Afrin is not only Erdogan’s attempt to destroy the Kurdish freedom movement; While Russia opens the door to the Turkish Air Force and the Syrian Assad regime is de facto inactive, NATO actively supports this war with intelligence information, military technology, weapons and ammunition from Western factories. The hypocritical messages from the palaces of power can not hide the fact that this war is nothing but the reckoning of the rulers with the revolution of Rojava. It is a reckoning with the attempt to counter the capitalist system with a self-determined alternative of radical democracy, women’s liberation, real gender equality, and social ecology.

         As radical left in Europe, we should be aware of the historical significance of these days. The attack on Afrin is an attempt to destroy the most promising revolutionary project of our generation. The Rojava Revolution is not only the only significant emancipatory perspective in the Middle East, but also one of the worldwide last remaining glimmers of hope for another world.

        Like no other revolution of the last decades, Rojava has inspired us and shown us how radical and beautiful the struggle for the liberation of a society can be. The heroic resistance of YPG and YPJ in Kobani and the self-organization of the population under the initiative of self-liberating women cast a spell over thousands of leftists, anarchists, socialists and feminists. Worldwide, this revolution was discussed, admired and given solidarity, hundreds of people made their way to Rojava and participated in the resistance against ISIS and the building of a new society. In spite of all the contradictions, the Rojava movement, with its determination, its attachment to the people and the concrete implementation of our utopias, has become the most important focal point of the global struggle against capitalism, patriarchy and racism.

         Today, this project is standing with its back to the wall. The war over Afrin is a struggle for existence or not-existence for the revolution in Rojava. If Afrin falls, Minbij will fall as well. With a victory for the Turkish state west of the Euphrates, American imperialism will also rethink its regional strategy and consider to hand over northern Syria to Turkey-affiliated Islamist militias under the FSA label aka ISIS and Al-Qaida / Al-Nusra. This would not only be the beginning of ethnic cleansing and the bloody end of the Rojava revolution, but also the beginning of a new phase in the development of Turkish fascism as a source of worldwide Islamism – Erdogan’s dreams of the new Ottoman Empire with him as Sultan at the head would no longer have any counterpart. The dictatorship inside would be consolidated for decades, the colonial expansion would be extended to the outside. The Middle East would be driven deeper into the chaos of war and annihilation without a force that can develop an emancipatory alternative.
        The fact that developments in the Middle East have a direct impact on political and social processes also in Europe and other parts of the world has not only been shown by the attacks of ISIS in recent years. The rise of racism, sexism and antisemitism in European societies, the new militarism and the ever-increasing calls for the authoritarian state and thus the comeback of the radical right, are directly related to this. We must be aware that the conditions under which we, the radical left, are struggling in the centers of power are also shaped by the international balance of power. And the same is true of the political conditions in the metropolises of capitalism, which influence the conditions under which our friends fight in Afrin.

        The people of Rojava are still standing, YPG / YPJ / SDF are opposed to these developments. And this resistance has so far only been successful because people have decided to give everything for it. However, they will not be able to defend against the brutal superiority of the attacking Turkish army and their Islamist helpers without international support. But despite weeks of worldwide protests, the states of North America via Europe to Russia hold on to their cruel decision to end this revolution, and seem to have sealed the fate of the people in Rojava. The resistance in Afrin will only succeed if we are ready to give it all, even if it is the most valuable.

         We will not continue to watch this injustice passively. We will not leave the people in Rojava and our fighting comrades alone, because the war against Afrin is just as much a war against us. The Turkish attack on Afrin is NATO’s political, economic and military push into the heart of our revolutionary struggles, dreams and hopes. We will carry this war back to where it is approved, supported, legitimized and produced. We will drive up the costs for those who benefit from this war. We will hold to account those who endorse the murder of civilians and legitimize them as a supposed “war on terror”. And we will make the deafened European public listen up and remind our societies that we all have a responsibility for what governments are doing on our behalf.

         In this sense, we call upon all emancipatory forces worldwide to break the silence and give a voice to the people of Rojava that no one else can ignore. If not us, who else will be able to remind our societies of their responsibilities? The situation in Afrin is an existential threat to all our revolutionary perspectives – when, if not now, is it time to risk everything? If Afrin falls, it will be too late. Only if we give everything, we will be able to win everything.

The past solidarity actions with the resistance in Afrin have been right and good. We greet all the comrades who have been organizing, demonstrating and carrying out direct actions for weeks. These were important moments, but they are not enough. In the current situation, the murderous silence and the support of fascist Turkey by the international community forces us to other means. We must exercise our right of self-defense of our hopes.

         Direct actions can not only be a concrete intervention in the war and propaganda machinery of the Turkish state and its helpers, but have much more potential to draw attention to the extraordinary urgency of the situation. Burning Turkish consulates, sabotaged armaments companies and mass militant actions against the symbols of capitalist and imperialist rule will break the silence and make the atrocities of Turkish fascism no longer ignorable. The system in Europe thrives on us to engage and stun, to pacify conflicts and contradictions – let this false illusion of social peace go up in flames. Let us show the rulers that we will resist the attacks with the people of Rojava and defend by all means the revolution in Rojava, which is also our revolution.

         We call on Monday, 12.3.2018 to start with this militant campaign wherever we can hit the rulers: Radical, creative and courageous, involve you and organize local actions as a prelude to a resistance that will show the powerful of this world that Afrin is not alone. Like the people of Rojava, we also say: “Together we will fight, together we will lose, or together we will win”.

Afrin will not fall!

Biji Berxwedana Afrin!

Long live the international solidarity!

Radical cells in the heart of the beast
8.3.2018

        We will collect all direct actions in solidarity with the Afrin resistance and possible targets at: fight4afrin.noblogs.org

Contact: fight4afrin[at]riseup.net

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

Imperialism's New Debt Colonies.

       What is the difference between a bag full of money and a gunboat? None, they are both weapons of imperialism. Capitalism shapes itself according to its needs, the gunboat was replaced by the more subtle bag of money, but when that fails it has no hesitation in going back to the gunboat. Though nowadays the gunboat is much larger and more powerful, as the Middle East has found out in recent times. Modern capitalism still uses blood, death and destruction to further its ends, but in recent years it has swung behind the bag of money model to dominate and subjugate nations, Greece obviously springs to mind as a country beaten into submission by the bag of money, in the form of debt.

        

           This is an excerpt published by ROAR Magazine from Jerome Roos’ essay, “The New Debt Colonies”, well worth a read, Marxist or not.

          Today we are witnessing the resurgence of an old phenomenon: the debt colony. A decade after the collapse the U.S. housing bubble and the onset of the worst capitalist crisis in living memory, governments around the world continue to bear the burden of historically unprecedented public debt loads. In some cases, most spectacularly in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone but also in a number of emerging markets, these mounting financial obligations have led to crippling sovereign debt crises – which have in turn impelled the dominant creditor powers to intervene aggressively on foreign bondholders’ behalf, imposing highly intrusive regimes of international financial supervision on distressed borrowers in order to ensure continued debt servicing. The fiscal autonomy of Greece and Puerto Rico, in particular, has now been abolished in all but name, although similar processes have long been afoot elsewhere as well.

        This contemporary experience in turn carries strong historical echoes. A century and a half ago, Karl Marx already observed how the emergence of the national debt in early-modern Europe constituted one of the “most powerful levers of primitive accumulation,” leading to the “alienation of the state” by private financiers and “giving rise to stock exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.” These dynamics intensified during the Age of Imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the export of European and U.S. capital to the newly independent countries of Latin America and the Mediterranean added an international dimension to this long-standing process of dispossession through debt. During this period, the dominant creditor powers regularly subjected distressed sovereign borrowers to external financial control – often under force of arms. The British invasion of Egypt in 1882, the German push to establish an International Financial Commission in Greece in 1898, and the appearance of European gunboats on the Venezuelan coast in 1902 are but some of the most prominent cases in point.

       Today, such long-standing processes of financial subjugation continue in a new form – through what has euphemistically come to be known as “international crisis management.” Ever since the Mexican debt crisis of 1982, banks and bondholders in the wealthy creditor countries have increasingly come to rely on their own governments and international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank to impose painful structural adjustment programs on crisis-stricken debtor countries in the developing world. Over the course of two decades, international creditors – private and official alike – went on to plunder the immense wealth of the Global South, from Argentina to Zaire, aggressively opening up local economies to foreign capital and restructuring them in line with the neoliberal prerogatives of the Washington Consensus. The result has been a vast flow of capital “upstream,” from public hands in the global periphery to private hands in the advanced capitalist core, with developing countries transferring an estimated $4.2 trillion in interest payments to their creditors in Europe and North America since 1982, far outstripping the official-sector development aid these countries received during the same period.¹

           In the wake of the global financial crisis, these same methods have now come to be applied on a massive scale in the capitalist heartland itself. The result has not just been a new wave of “accumulation by dispossession,” but in some cases also the effective abolition of national sovereignty. When Greece’s fledgling Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was forced into a humiliating capitulation to his European creditors in the summer of 2015, for instance, an anonymous diplomat from a Germany-allied country candidly described the terms of surrender as “akin to turning Greece into an economic protectorate.”² In his memoirs of his brief tenure as finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis repeatedly denounces the creditors’ financial intimidation tactics as an example of “latter-day gunboat diplomacy.” When Poland’s foreign minister was asked for the reason behind his country’s refusal to join the euro, all he had to do was point south: “Greece is de facto a colony,” he explained, “We don’t want to repeat this scenario.”

        These ongoing developments raise a number of important questions about the relationship between contemporary patterns in international crisis management and Europe and America’s long-standing history of financial imperialism. How different is our contemporary era really from the “era of gunboat diplomacy” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the dominant creditor powers also regularly intervened in the debtors’ sovereign affairs to defend bondholder interests? What are the continuities and discontinuities between the two periods? And can the hotly debated and polemical notion of imperialism still serve as a useful analytical tool to help us make sense of the current conjuncture? If so, how far can the classical Marxist theories of the phenomenon take us in elucidating the asymmetric power relations at the heart of the contemporary global political economy – and what, if anything, can be done to revamp existing theoretical frameworks to better reflect the enduring relevance of imperialism in our time?

           In what follows, I will argue that imperialism clearly remains an important factor in the early 21st century – even if the original Marxist accounts require extensive revision in light of the recent transformations of global capitalism. The lasting contribution of the classical theorists was to anchor their critiques of imperialism within a broader critique of political economy, highlighting the central role of finance in driving imperialist relations of domination. This, I argue, should remain the starting point for any contemporary analysis of imperialism. At the same time, however, the classical theories also suffered from a number of important limitations. Most consequentially, perhaps, they tended to emphasize the more overt manifestations of imperialist power (territorial conquest and military intervention) at the expense of its more subtle, structural dynamics (operating through the global financial system), which ended up blinding them to some of the underlying dependencies that later kept the asymmetric power relations between debtors and creditors in place even in the absence of territorial conquest or military intervention.

Read the full article HERE:

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

The Savageness Of Full Spectrum Dominance

       Only an idiot would believe that the brutal bloody disaster that is the Middle East is not a direct result of American lead Western foreign policy. We are asked to believe that the endless wars, the slaughter of millions of innocent people, the destruction of entire countries, is all for the benefit of the people of those countries. How much longer must we maim, traumatise and brutally kill the civilian population of that area to make their lives better? We have been in Iraq since 2003 and still the brutal slaughter goes on and on, that is almost three times longer than the second world war. It is the thought process of the insane, or devious, corrupt, ruthless power mongers, but not the actions of rational humane beings.

        The charade of the civilised West putting its self in harms way to protect the ordinary people of the Middle East, is created by the propaganda wing of the established Western power structure. With limitless finances the babbling brook of bullshit that is our mainstream media, spews out the toxic vomit of the West as the world's knight in shining armour, while in fact it rides blood stained and mercilessly tramples innocents across the globe, all for its own wealth and power.

      In a mad insane world of lies, subterfuge, double speak and spin, the truth will sound insane, but the truth is the only weapon that will bring an end to this carnage of people for the purpose of power.  

      Thanks for the link Loam.

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

Here, There, The Thoughts The Same.

 

Our smart bombs bringing democracy to the Middle east.

        Hi all, I'm back after a break away from the normal routine, it does wonders for you mind, clears out some fixed ideas that you're not too sure why they are fixed in the first place, gives birth to new ideas, you wonder why you never thought of them before. No matter where we hide, the destruction and misery that is capitalism continues. However, in my case, no matter where I escape to, the focus is always the same, unnecessary injustice, avoidable misery, implemented poverty, and the horrors of the power struggles that spawn avoidable wars, with all their attendant suffering, trauma and countless violent deaths of innocent bystanders, and what we can do about them. These are all symptoms of the festering disease, born of the cancerous marriage of the nation state and capitalism.

       Capitalism is blind, irrational, and destructive, it will race towards the precipice, unwilling and unable to stop before the edge, it is only after it has crashed does it pause to see how to modify itself, to continue on its course of total destruction. To allow this to continue will obviously lead to the destruction of everything, from climate, environment and human civilisation. To hope for anything else from this system is naive in the extreme.

       Frankie Boyle is a Glasgow comedian I much admire, as well as making us laugh, he uses his skill with words, to make us think, pointing at things with his own brand of humour and wit. Humour can be a great weapon against authority and its corrupt thoughts and decisions, and against the woven illusions, and smoke and mirrors, of that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media. I repeat here his latest piece.

 Frankie Boyle

Yesterday at 10:37 ·

A column I wrote about Trump and Syria:
Nothing more perfectly embodies White America than a 70 year old golfer firing missiles at the Middle East from his country club. Some sticks in the mud probably expect a host of formalities to be gone through before attacking another country: a UN investigation, or congressional approval perhaps, but personally I'm just glad to see a guy with the temperament of a mistreated circus animal launching ballistic missiles on a hunch. It seems statesmanlike and decisive. It's difficult to tell what Syria's moderate rebels are really like, as journalists can't really be embedded with them, because they'd be beheaded. But I refuse to be cynical: there's every chance that Assad's end will see a peaceful, pastoral period for Syria once groups like Allah's Flamethrower and Infidel Abattoir get round the table and good-naturedly sort out their deep seated differences on the finer points of Islamic Law. Perhaps this is a period which Syrians will one day look back on and laugh, if laughter is still allowed.

Not only will Democrats support any war Trump chooses to start, they'll be outraged by any voters who hold it against them at the next election. Hillary Clinton called for the airstrikes immediately before they happened. We'd do well to listen to the woman who is the architect of modern Libya, where her neoliberal intervention introduced the principals of the free market with such clarity that the country now has several different governments competing for the right to kill everybody. Clinton was criticised for running a tone-deaf, aloof campaign but Democrats have rallied, pointing out that many people didn't vote for Hilary because Trump is a Russian spy, and people who didn't vote for Hillary are Russian stooges, and people who voted for Hillary but not very enthusiastically are also Russian stooges, and slowly but surely the goodwill has begun to return.
Personally, I think it would be great if Putin was controlling Trump. I'd love to think there was a rational, malevolent actor directing him rather than just a combination of his own blood sugar levels and the concept of vengeance. I honestly think we'd be in less trouble if he was being controlled by the dark wizard Thoth Amon, or if his body had been taken over by a sentient bacterial civilisation that was using him as a kind of Lifeship. I'm not saying it's impossible that Trump was moved by the plight of Syria's children, perhaps in the same way that Tony Soprano got really upset when that guy killed his horse, it's just that the balance of probabilities is that he doesn't care about them, even enough not to ban them from entering his country.
The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said that the UK government had close discussions with the US over the few days running up to the attack and had been given "advance notice of the President's final decision". Odd then, that immediately after the chemical attack the Guardian cites Downing Street officials (on a tour of despots with the prime minister in the Middle East) who, when asked about military reprisals, said “nobody is talking about that”. Sort of makes you wonder if there's any contempt that can be shown by the US that will stop us drooling about our "special relationship" like we're some kind of stalker. I doubt the Americans see us as a valued ally. We're just somewhere that they stick a few missiles. My best guess is that they think of us in the way that we would think of a shed.
At the prospect of a war, the media reacted with the exuberant joy that I remember fights bringing to a school playground. War copy sells well, and is easier to write. A good way to get a handle on the media's attitude to conflict is to try to write a thousand words on a United Nations sponsored bilateral negotiation, then the same on a missile cutting a hospital in half. The Guardian exuberantly described the "pinpoint accuracy" of Tomahawks. I'm not sure accuracy is strictly relevant when you're delivering high explosives, the ultimate variable. In the West, we've never needed the military spectaculars favoured by Soviets and dictators; the news has always been our missile parade. On MSNBC the launch of the Tomahawks was repeatedly described as "beautiful". And there is a certain beauty at that point in their trajectory. Perhaps we should focus on some other point. It would be nice to see a shot of them ten seconds before they drop on their screaming victims. Or two days later when bodies are being pulled from the rubble. Maybe a shot from ten years down the line when the shell casings form part of a makeshift gallows, reflected in the glass eye of an implacable amputee warlord. Perhaps our whole fucked up attitude to war comes from only ever seeing our missiles taking off, only ever seeing our soldiers setting out.
Ignoring international law is bad for all sorts of reasons, not least because it's the same position as Assad's. Knowing that our own resolve is only strengthened when people attack us and expecting other people's to be weakened is suggestive of a kind of racism. Pouring arms and bombs into an intractable conflict means that you are happy for it to be prolonged and worsen. Britain's activities in the Middle East historically mean we almost can't imagine what a moral position might look like. We have a huge navy that we could use to pick up the thousands of Syrians, Libyans and others scheduled to drown in the Mediterranean this year, for a fraction of the cost of the bombs we've dropped on them. I wonder if those people know, clambering onto boats with their frightened children, many of whom have never seen the sea before and will never see land again, that we aggressively tune out images like this, should they ever reach us at all. That we see all these lives we could save as part of a chaotic, insoluble mess, better not thought about; we who focus so intently on the sleek, clear lines of bombs.

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

Every Day You Die Many Times.

         So we think we have a lot on our mind, what with austerity, Brexit, and the Indy-ref 2. Well perhaps we should spare a thought for those hundreds of thousands of refugees herded like cattle in various points on the continent of Europe. In Greece, in particular, their conditions are deteriorating rapidly from appalling to utterly inhumane and unbearable. Having managed, through grit, courage and determination, to extract themselves from the bloody dystopia that is the imperialist slaughter house of the Middle East, they find themselves trapped in a living hell. Just the other day, "an asylum seeker was found hanged in an apparent suicide at Greece’s largest port, shortly after aid agencies warned of mounting desperation among refugees trapped in the country. The 25-year-old Syrian man was carrying refugee application papers when he was found dead near passenger ferry departure gates in Piraeus, outside Athens." More than 1,500 refugees are living around the Greek port of Piraeus, but there are over 62,000 refugees trapped in Greece in concentration camps and elsewhere by the idiotic impractical EU-Turkey deal and other border closures across Europe. Of course this is capitalism, so there will be those standing by to make a profit from exploiting this trapped and desperate group.

         Research by Save the Children found more than 5,000 minors are living in “appalling conditions”, driving a mounting mental health crisis. It found that children as young as nine were self-harming and 12-year-olds attempting suicide, sometimes filming themselves in the act. A spike in drug and alcohol abuse by teenagers was also recorded, as dealers exploit them in the camps.

       The root of this "refugee crisis" is  of course, the world imperialists' blood stained foreign policy, their brutal, savage drive for control of the oil rich territory. Those unfortunate individuals and families, caught up in this mayhem of death and destruction, who see their homes, villages, towns, and cities being obliterated, and their families and friends being killed, and decide to try to make it to a safer place, are further hindered by those imaginary lines dawn on the planet's surface, borders. This is where the minders of the various states, stop the hungry, the sick, the maimed and the desperate, then make the arbitrary decision, which to accept and which to reject. Decisions that can mean, in many cases, the difference between life and death.
       The plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the bloody fireball that is the Middle East, has somewhat, disappeared from our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, that does not mean that the problem has been solved, far from it, it just means that they have lost interest and have moved on to their usual bilge splurge of candy-floss and bubble gum, peppered with the odd cash and sex scandal.
       What is going on in the Middle East is still there, the misery is still being created, the death and destruction is still going on, and the hungry, the terrified, the desperate, are still trying to flee to a safer place, and the developed world, the cause of the problem, is still turning its back on them.

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

The Purveyors Of Plunder And Mayhem Come To Hamburg.

         July 2017 will see the the gathering of our beloved leaders from across the planet, the G20 will take place in Hamburg, on July 7th.-8th. These are the people that shape our world, and are so beloved by their people, that when they come together to discuss their grand plans, they need  the area where they are to meet, to be in lock-down, the citizens cleared or restricted, and a minimum of 10,000 police and secret agents to protect them from their loving citizens. The scale and concentration of the security that will surround this bunch of managers of the plundering of the earth, is indication of the total disgust in which the people hold them. These are the people responsible for the slaughter in the Middle East, the genocide of the Palestinian people, the drowning of thousands of fleeing innocent people, the army of refugees that are being, harassed, herded like cattle, or abandoned to claws of hunger and deprivation. Protests against this cabal of greed driven war mongers and power grabbers, should not be limited to Hamburg, it should be at least, pan-European, but preferably world wide and co-ordinated.

    They will arrive in their private jets, their limousines, and with their army of flunkies. This obscene display of corrupt power and savage authority will be paid for by you and me, no matter the cost, you and I will pick up the tab, they call it democracy.  

This from 325:

          On the 7th and 8th of July 2017 the G20 summit is supposed to take place in Hamburg. The heads of the governments of the 19 richest and most powerful states of the world, accompanied by 6.000 delegation members, surrounded and permanently photographed by 3.000 journalists and of course cordoned off and protected by an army of at least 10.000 police and secret service operatives.

         All this is supposed to take place in the middle of Hamburg: in the exhibition halls, in the town hall, in the Elbphilharmonie. Large-scale and multilevel barriers, ID controls, evacuated appartments – the main victims will be the people in the Karoviertel and the surrounding neighborhoods. Especially those, that are already more exposed to frequent controls and harrassments because of the color of their skin, their legal status, their precarious social situation or other reasons.

       The residents are supposed to give way for an orchestration of power, a living city is turned into a dead scenery. The main performance is the illusion that the political elites of global capitalism have everything well under control, that they are somehow capable of providing security, peace, livelihood and a real future perspective to the people of the world.

        But we are witnessing the exact opposite: the prevailing world order is a further escalating world disorder of brutal social inequality, structurally embedded sexism and racism, ecological destruction and spreading wars.

       Millions of people are forced to flee, billions are struggling to survive and the number of people that is affected by precarisation is continuously rising, also here in Germany. At the same time a small global upper class is getting richer and richer.

         The political representatives of this world disorder want to come to Hamburg: Erdogan from Turkey, Putin from Russia, the cold putschist Temer from Brasil, and if we are unlucky also Donald Trump.

       There also aren’t a lot of good things to say about the governments of China or India. And the so very democratic governments of western Europe? They are the ones that build walls and fences and coldly let fleeing people drown at sea. We will show them that they are not welcome in Hamburg!

        In many political groups and spectres the reflections on how to organize the necessary protests and actions against the G20 Summit have already begun. There are many different approaches: Some care about the right to the city, others about climate policy, to others flight and migration or capitalism as a whole matters. There are ideas such as a counter summit, a major demonstration, or disobedient actions around the conference venue or in the whole city.

No matter what the criticism of the G20 Summit is precisely based on, no matter what actions or forms of expression are prefered, the protest can only be a success if we are able to make the possibility of a different world, a world of justice and solidarity, appear in them. And if the protest are complementary rather than in opposition to each other.

        That needs arrangements and a lot of communication between the summits opponents.
Autonome Aktion Europe

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

 

Spaceship Earth Has No Escape Capsule.

 

         Two policies that will, in my opinion, eventually destroy the planet for human habitation, one is the illusion of perpetual growth, and the other is the continuous wars that are engineered to support that illusion. At the moment practically the whole of the Middle East is a hell-hole of bloodshed, destruction and unbelievable misery for millions of ordinary people, and this is just one strand of what has been continuous wars imperialism has foisted on the planet. These wars are to hold/gain or increase control over resources to feed that illusion of continuous growth, or they are to protect markets, create or capture new markets, or to prevent another force from gaining ground in that field. The driving force is capitalism's insatiable insane philosophy of "perpetual growth", a policy of rip the planet apart  to feed the greed of the corporate world. Where and when will it stop, will the corporate world one day say, well I think we have done enough damage, let's start to try to repair the mess we have created? If that's what you believe, you will be a spectator to humanity's destruction. The when and where is up to the ordinary people, the world belongs to all life that lives on, and depends on, the planet for survival, and if we don't stand up and fight for it now, our home will be lost forever. Just remember, spaceship Earth has no escape capsule.

Global Fuckin Warming from subMedia.tv on Vimeo.

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

Remember 9/11??

       In a few days the anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, and no doubt the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, will spew out its usual avalanche of phoney patriotism, aiming to get all and sundry beating their patriotic chests. This comment in no way detracts from the suffering of those involved in that tragic event. The Western imperialist states’ response to this tragedy was, the “war on terror”, which spawned a continuous series of brutal wars, that are still to this day, shedding the blood of thousands of innocent people. All the wars that arose from the “war on terror”, are still ongoing, with the devastating consequences to people, villages, towns, cities and countries across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. The “war on terror” was the West’s attempt to reassert its power and control over that region, for no other reason than its oil under the soil.
       However, the 9/11 that the babbling brook of bullshit will not give much, if any cover to, will be the tragedy of September 11th. 1973. This was the brutal overthrow of the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, by the butcher of the Chilean people, General Augusto Pinochet, let's not forget, he was a deeply religious man, who acted with the backing of US president Nixon. 

       The presidential palace was bombed, Allende committed “suicide” and there followed the usual fascist public burning of books, brutal torture, savage repression and disappearings. More than 200,000 Chileans went into exile, their lives destroyed by the savagery of the regime. Thousands of Pinochet’s political opponents were murdered, thousands of others ended up being tortured while held indefinitely in detention centres. Such was the savagery of the Pinochet regime that more and more states across the world started to distance themselves from his brutality. Even the US government of President Carter started to distance itself from this butcher, of course we all know that Margaret Thatcher loved him. Over his 16 years of savage power hugging, Pinochet shed the blood of countless thousands of the citizens of Chile. That is the 9/11 that will be to the fore of my thoughts when that date comes round once again. Though the New York 9/11 was a tragic event, it is dwarfed by the 9/11 of Chile, more deaths, more brutality, 16 years of ongoing torture and repression, backed by the so called democratic free West.

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

World War III.

       What do you call a war where every major power in the world is involved? I suppose it should be called World War III. The difference with this world war is that they are not fighting each other over a large expanse of the planet’s surface. Instead, they are fighting each other on one plot of land for control of the Middle East. Of course you’ll be fed the usual bullshit that all the major powers in the world are spending billions of pounds/dollars/roubles to help the Syrian people. One section are helping the Syrian people by trying to remove a nasty leader, the other section are helping the Syrian people by trying to maintain a wonderful leader of the people. 

     Meanwhile, the people of Syria are being slaughtered in their tens thousands, their towns and cities are being pulverised, and we have to believe it is all for the benefit of the people of that area. It is the only way to help them, we in the West are so altruistic. Our lords and masters only have the well-being of the people of Syria at heart. If you believe that crap, your brain has melted by watching too much TV. 

    No matter how they dress it up, we are in the midst of World War III, the power mongers have managed to localise their slaughter, and that mode of warfare will continue until one or the other can take control of the Middle East area and it vast resources, no major power will allow any other major power to control it all, hence the bloodshed. If they can’t resolve their blood fest with a clear winner, then in all probability, it could spread over a wider area, they will have no hesitation in doing so, remember 1914, then 1939, well nothing has changed, the power mongers are still empire builders.

     To end this insanity based on greed and power, we have to destroy the root, the state. The states of this world are the biggest terror organisations on the planet. They have the greatest fire-power, they do the greatest damage, and they kill the greatest number of innocent people. Until we resolve that problem, the death and destruction will continue.

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

The School Of Americas, A Blood Factory.

      For a while our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media has been giving some space, between celebrities, sex and sport, to the hundreds of thousands painfully grinding their way across Europe from the hell hole that is the Middle East. Not much cover to the fact that the reason for the brutal bloodshed taking place in that region, is the imperialists, past and present, greed and power driven desire to plunder the rich resources of the region.

     This is not a unique situation, it is the pattern of imperialism that goes on across the globe. At the other end of the world, that troubled continent, South America, has faced, and still does, the vicious brutality of empire, as the corporate greed behind the American imperialism, try to crush any opposition to their plunder of the resources of that region.

        South America is steeped in blood, the blood of ordinary people, savagely beaten, tortured, murdered and "disappeared". All at the behest of American corporate power, through the medium of the American military.

      Just as the European imperialists are seeing mass exodus from their killing fields to their "homeland", so the US imperialists are seeing a similar mass increase crossing their border by those fleeing the savagery of their military machine.

     The rivers of blood that have flowed, and are still flowing, to protect the profits of the corporate world, outdo the combined volume of the Nile, Yangtze and the Amazon. Truly, corporate profit can be measured in blood.
This is a video that everybody should see.

 

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

What Cost Bombing?

     It is no surprise that after last night's expected success of the imperialist warmongers, in the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption, the same cabal that tell us we must have austerity to balance the books, we can't afford decent social services, these are difficult times, we shouldn't live beyond our means, have no problem opening the nations cheque book for war.

        According to the the Ministry of Defence, (should be renamed, Ministry of War) figures released in 2010 state that every time a Tornado plane takes to the air, it costs the taxpayer £35,000 per hour. Assuming the average flight lasts about six hours, not excessive, that comes in at £210,000 an excursion. Of course they will not be flying paying tourist, each Tornado will have a payload of probably four Pathway bombs, (£22,000 each) and two Brimstone missiles, (£105,000 each) that takes us to the staggering cost of £508,000 per plane per mission. Of course these instruments of destruction rarely fly solo on missions, they tend to fly in pairs. So that takes your cost of each mission to a little over £1 million. Of course our air-force has much more expensive weaponry at its disposal, they could take off with our super-duper destructive toy, the Storm Shadow, at a cool £800,000 each. Now that would make a nice big bang. 

         During our imperialist intervention in Libya in 2011, 16 Tornado GR4s were employed, at £35,000 per hour flying cost, and used 230 Brimstones missiles, (£105,000 each) and a number of Storm Shadows, (£800,000 each). Of course there are other costs involved, support and back up services, also these planes often have to refuel in the air, a very expensive exercise. What if just one aircraft is lost, at a cost of £9.4 million.

      So you see how the costs stack up as the missions continue over a period of years. The other imperialist forces have been bombing Syria for approximately 15 months so far. Considering that some of the most powerful military in the world have been bombing the hell out of Syria for that amount of time, what difference do you think the British imperialists will make?

       Like I keep saying, we are a very rich country, it is just that that wealth, created by all the working people in this country, is not shared out fairly among those wealth creators. It is hoarded by our lords and master to keep them in unimaginable opulence, and for operations to protect their imperialist power.

         Apart from the outrageous financial cost of these imperialist escapades, there is of course the human cost, the destruction of villages, towns and cities, comes with incomprehensible death, misery and trauma, to hundreds of thousands of families. We are seeing the result of our imperialist's recent endeavours in the Middle East, as hundreds of thousands of families now find themselves facing a European winter living in fields and inadequate camps. Among those families are sick, elderly, and children, all fleeing a hell-hole, a dystopia, created by the actions of the imperialists quest for power and wealth.  

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