Showing posts with label North Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Africa. Show all posts

Saturday, 7 February 2015

When Workers Kill Workers.

    On most occasions, war, in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is portrayed as something heroic, with our side standing tall on the moral high ground, and the enemy crawling from the sewers with mean and nasty tactics. How else could they keep recruiting fresh young blood. We can be thankful for that band of heroes the poets, who experience war in all its brutality and record it, as viewed through the eyes of a human being, seeing the destruction and death of another human being.
    One such poet was the Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay, 1915-1984, born in Elderslie and brought up in Kintyre. Due to his pacifist values, for more than a year during WWII, he had tried to avoid conscription. Faced with prison, he opted for non-violent service in the army. George was sent to North Africa and given the job as night watchman. The events of the night May 7th. 1943 traumatised him, and he was never the same again. The event he witnessed was the allied saturation bombing of the German occupied  town of Bizerta.  
What is their name tonight,
the poor streets where every window spews
its flame and smoke,
its sparks and screaming of its inmates,
while house upon house is rent
and collapses in a gust of smoke?
And who tonight are beseeching
Death to come quickly in all their tongues,
or are struggling among stones and beams,
crying in frenzy for help, and are not heard?
Who to-night is paying
the old accustomed tax of common blood?

    Of course we  have to ask ourselves, why in Gaza and many, many more places on this planet, can these words still be applied.
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Monday, 2 February 2015

The Kurdish Question, Rojava's Communes And Councils.

    It is safe to say that most of North Africa and the Middle East is in turmoil, in a state of flux, with the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, spewing out a myriad of false and confusing stories, all of which are painting the West as the only saviour of those people in conflict. Totally ignoring our role in creating the bloodshed and misery in the area, in the first place.
    It is difficult to get at the truth of what is happening in that area and get at what the people on the street are thinking and doing, all our babbling brook of bullshit's misinformation, tends to be about institutions, religious, state and otherwise, and confusion reigns.
     I found the following article on Rojava, both interesting and informative, and also encouraging.
 
     The system that we're living in has been going on for five thousand years. Different stages of history have given it different names, but at its core it has remained the same, and its main pillar is the state. This has to be well understood. In the last hundred years people have struggled against the state, and they have achieved independence historically, but they haven't achieved freedom, because they didn't emancipate themselves from the state. Their concept of freedom remains within the limits of the state.
   The current nation-sate system has opened the gates to the huge crisis that we are seeing. The Kurds have also played a role in this region—as our archaeologist friends have found out, they have left a mark on history and culture. We understand as Kurds that our problems will not be solved by creating a new nation-state. How can we overcome this chaos with as little bloodshed as possible? How to find a solution in spite of the existing state borders?
Read the full article HERE:
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

THE MARCH OF THE CORPORATE EMPIRE.


       It would be difficult for anybody to pick a year since the end of the second world war, when the UK, that peaceful nation, has not been somewhere fighting on foreign soil? We have the headline affairs, like Suez, Korea, Falklands, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Then we have had UK military overseas, “peace keeping”, “training” and “supporting”. Now that we are preparing to pull out of Afghanistan, it would appear that our millionaire war lord, Cameron, has a vision of a long military adventure in North Africa, his corporate friends demand it, “Thar's gold/oil in them thar lands”. His statement, “This is a global threat and it will require a global response. It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months…,” I'm sure would be most heart warming to those blood merchants in the arms industry, Once again the camouflage is the war-on-terror, protecting us at home, making our streets safer. The message they put out is that if we go into foreign lands and bomb the shit out of the locals and steal their natural resources, they will love us and leave us in peace. Though they always omit to mention the part about the rich resources. No, there is never any mention that the countries that we bomb into democracy happen to be sitting on resources that the corporate West need and from which our fat cat corporate over lords can make billions. At one time we had the British Empire that butchered its way across the world looting and pillaging, fattening its privileged parasites, now it is the Western Corporate Empire, backed up by a cabal of state funded military. The Empire is dead, long live the Empire.

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Sunday, 20 March 2011

THE CARING COMPASSIONATE WEST!!!

          
             No matter what argument that is put forward to justify the bombing of Libya, the REALITY is that it will be ordinary Libyan people that will die, young, old and innocent. Our wonderful cruise missiles do not just hit bad guys and they go off with a helluva big bang, we can be sure that and one certain beneficiary will be the arms industry. Of course, to the politicians sitting ever so safe in their corridors of power, these lives are a price worth paying!! The world is peppered with dictators that repress “their” people with a vicious violence, some we put there and some we help stay there and most of them are armed to the teeth by the same benevolent West, and of course we do lots of profitable business with them. So now the West has placed its bets and we have Libyans cheering and Libyans dyeing. The result will be a divide country potholed by cruise missiles and pockmark with graves of innocent Libyans. I object very strongly to being labelled as a Gaddafi supporter because I oppose the bombing. Is brute force the only answer that the so called moralistic and civilised West has to these problems? If so can we really call ourselves “civilised”? It is surely naive to think that the West is pouring all this money and blasting off all these very expensive missiles out of compassion for the Libyan people. We have proved in the past the the West doesn’t give a shit about the people of the Middle East nor North Africa, and many other places. The ordinary people of the West might care, but the Western state apparatus? Don’t make me laugh, it’s not funny.