Willie Mc.

            Glasgow has a long history of anarchist activists one being Willie McDougal, born 1894, Willie was an active anarchist from his teens until his death in 1981. As a conscientious object he was in several prisons, escaping from Dartmoor, after stealing a bike cycled part way back to Glasgow, where he continued his anti war public stance. He kept the Anti-parliamentary Communist Federation going until 1941, Guy Aldred having left in 1932. Willie held street meetings at the bottom of Buchanan St. Arrested for speaking on Glasgow Green without a permit during the "Fight for Freedom of Speech on Glasgow Green". He published printed and edited numerous papers, among them, Advance, Fighting Call, Barcelona Bulletin, Workers Free Press, Solidarity,  He also formed Workers Revolutionary League. Also with others formed The Workers Open Form and kept it going until 1950's. The last issue of his paper Sense was at the printers when he died in 1981. We owe his dedicated life a gift of gratitude for helping to keep that vision of a better world alive for us to take up the struggle and carry forward. See https://spiritofrevolt.info and Clck on STRUGGLEPEDIA.

Image courtesy of LibCom.

 

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$ Demise!

Image courtesy of Youtube.

           We live in very dangerous times, what we are witnessing is the de-dollarisation of the world, in other words the crumbling of a very powerful empire. America ruled the world since the end of the second world war, by means of the SWIFT organisation. This used the dollar as the world's reserve currency, meaning that practically all the world had to deal in dollars for world trade. They had to buy those dollars from the U$A and the power of the SWIFT organisation meant that any country that did not play by their rules could be sanctioned and more or less excluded for world trade. All this made U$A a very rich and powerful country.
          More and more countries started to be totally dissatisfied with the power the U$A held over their country and sought other ways to try and trade. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) grouping was born from this desire to control their own affairs. More and more countries have joined this grouping, making it an extremely large proportion of the world's trade who now trade in their own currencies, breaking loose for the dollar domination.
         Why do I see this as dangerous? Well the psychopaths that control the cesspool that is American politics are at the same time warmongers and will do anything to hold onto that dollar dominance as their fortunes depend on the dollar being dominant. Their bitter hatred of Russia and China has nothing to do with regimes or human rights, it is all to do with the fact that these two countries are the mainstay of the de-dollarisation of the world.
        The U$A at this moment has ringed China with nuclear bases, and is fighting a war with Russian on the Ukrainian front. If the dollar continues to lose ground they will have no hesitation in bombing China and Russia on the pretext of defending Taiwan and Ukraine and protecting democracy. The propaganda machine has already whipped up hatred of both Russia and China, this will be maintained until it reaches fever pitch, making the annihilation of millions seem like a good idea.
        The answer is not to get a new leader in Washington or else where, the only answer is to rid ourself of the state system and the capitalist economic system that keeps these psychopaths alive and gives them power to endanger the world for their personal gain.  

Image courtesy of Coinwire.

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Anti-War.

Image courtesy of Nation Library of Scotland

         Monday May 15th. is International Conscientious Objectors Day, a day when we rightly mark in honour of all those who had the courage to refuse to be drafted into the state's military killing machine. Two world wars have seen thousands of individuals take a stand against the state process of murdering citizens who happen to live on another patch of this planet, and all the blood and misery shed is for power and wealth to the few. We owe a debt to these courageous individuals for their courageous stand in the face of brutal and savage state reprisals.
        Glasgow like most cities, towns and villages across the country has a proud band of conscientious objectors. To them we raise a clenched fist and say thank you.  

      The two short pieces from our Spirit of Revolt Archive T SOR 1-1-2 refer to Allan Burnett one of Glasgow's young courageous conscientious objectors who eventually ended living in New Zealand.

 

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WW3

           Capitalism stutters from one crisis to another but people seem to forget, the capitalist system is always in crisis. Over production, inflation, labour shortage, lack of growth, its necessary ingredient, are just some of the inherent flaws in the insane economics of capitalism. The recent flutter of worries over the collapse of two Banks within a week is the least of their worries. Another unexploded bomb in their midst is the sudden mushrooming of "buy now pay later" loans. Even when times are hard, the system still wants you to continue buying all those little luxuries. hence the pie in the sky, there is a cost of living crisis, they still have to move all those luxuries, but there isn't the where-with-all to pay for them. So the magic wand of capitalism, "buy now and pay later" when the "good times" return. Of course the don't and all this millions of loans don't get paid, boom and other capitalist crisis.
        The capitalist system has never recovered from the 2008 banking collapse, they are desperate to re-capitalise the system, and despite enforcing years of austerity on millions and billions of tax payers bailout cash, they have still failed miserably. The Western oligarchs that form the American financial Mafia are desperate to get back to those glory days that America enjoyed after WW2, when the world paid homage to the dollar and the loot kept flowing into the U$A coffers. However emerging economies, like China, Russia, India etc. are making that difficult for the masters of the dollar.
        So our biggest worry should be the fact that these parasitic masters of the dollar will take desperate measures and play their big ace, war. War is also a great way of releasing tax payers money into the military industrial complex, and a way of destroying the opposition and grabbing their resources, in the insane hope of that illusion, "Make America Great Again"
      There is desperation among the big dollar owners and dollar lovers, and desperation leads to drastic consequences. We would do well to remember, WW2 caused the deaths of 100 million+ innocent individuals, with America the only nuclear nation then, and they used that power on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, WW3 would more devastating as several nations now have nuclear weapons. The result would be the complete devastation of the entire planet. The masters of capitalism don't worry too much about that, it is up to us, the ordinary people to take away that power and take control and create the society we want, freed from the insanity of capitalist economics. 

 
The following extract from Struggle-La-Lucha.

 

          Drone swarms. The Pentagon’s massive budget includes a new project, the Autonomous Multi-domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms (AMASS), to launch automated, coordinated attacks by swarms of thousands of many types of drones that operate in the air, on the ground, and in the water.
    

The White House released its budget request for 2024. For the Pentagon, there is $824 billion. Adding armaments for military operations in Ukraine takes that figure to more than $950 billion.
            Add the $24 billion Department of Energy budget item, as the department maintains nuclear bombs and related armaments. Hidden are the budgets for the CIA and other secret military forces. Biden’s total budget for world war totals well over $1 trillion.
            The Biden administration has started a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. At the same time, it is building up toward war on China, including a possible U.S. invasion of Taiwan under some wild pretext, such as a threat from weather balloons.
           Don’t laugh. That’s how every U.S. imperialist war started, like the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor — the Maine sank because of a coal-bunker fire next to the ship’s gunpowder storage, not from mines planted by Spain, as was reported at the time. “Remember the Maine” became the battle cry for launching the war with Spain in 1898.
        Like the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” in Vietnam, alleged attacks by the Vietnamese on U.S. ships that never happened but were used to authorize an all-out war on Vietnam. Like the “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed but were used to launch a war on Iraq.
            As history has shown, a country that prepares for war is likely to go to war. Washington is engaged in a military buildup against China, diplomatic hostility including sanctions and trade barriers, and multiple semi-unreported operations such as basing a fleet of U.S.-crewed nuclear-powered attack submarines in Australia.

Read the full article HERE: 

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War.

 

           My only criticism of this advert is the title, A war that should never have happened. In my nearly 89 years on this planet I have yet to know of a war that should have happened, unless we talk about the Class War. Also Blair and Bush didn't start the war, they didn't wake up one morning and decided to have a war with Iraq, it was the big Western multi-national corporations, who wanted their hands on Iraq's oil and to dollarise Iraq in the process. Blair and Bush were merely the pawns tasked with managing that process to war. Despite these small criticisms, I give my full support to the campaign for peace and attempting to stop all wars, which will require a complete change away from the insane economic system that shackles our lives.

This from Stop the War Coalition.

 Iraq-20 years on: A war that should never have happened.

          The invasion of Iraq launched twenty years ago by George Bush and Tony Blair was a catastrophe for the Iraqi people and had a disastrous impact across the Middle East and beyond. It led to a million deaths, the displacement of millions more, the destabilisation of the region and a deep anger against the Western powers across whole areas of the globe.

It also generated the biggest anti-war movement in history.
           Stop the War is marking the anniversary of the war with an evening of remembrance and analysis from Iraqi activists and other leading anti-war figures including Lowkey, Sami Ramadani, Raghad Al-Tikriti, Tariq Ali and Lindsey German.

 

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Criminal.

           During this so called cost of living crisis, (really an exploitation crisis) the Western nations have been pouring in a virtual avalanche of weapons and ammunition to this American war with Russia, being fought on Ukrainian soil. So much so that some military experts are claiming that the West has depleted its defence capabilities and will have to make military spending, (they call it defence spending) a top priority. UK's Ben Wallace has stated that the military will get an extra £52 billion, and the pentagon has already sent $18billion on prolonging the Ukrainian blood flow, with the U$A planning to up its military budget once again.
      The European Union, in total aid, financial, humanitarian and military, has spent the most, however the U$A has by far, supplied the most in military hardware. The Kiel Institute calculated that between January 24th and November 20th, 2022 £96.7 billion flowed into Ukraine from Western countries, I have no doubt there is more we don't hear about.

Image courtesy of Energy Intelligence.

 

        So it is obvious that as far as the so called free democratic West is concerned, there is never a cry of "not enough money" when it comes to war.
         Contrast this with the cry that there isn't the money to fund the NHS properly. The flow of funds for destruction while our people die waiting for an ambulance, die waiting for treatment, die waiting for an appointment. We have reached the level of third world countries where people languish in hospital simply because there is no community social service to look after them and hospital staff are forced to take strike action to try and improve their working conditions and pay.

Image courtesy of The Mirror.

 

       In this society the government is supposed to have a duty of care for the citizens in their keeping. Failing to do this and allowing people to die because of the lack of proper funding while spending billions on destruction and death of another country's citizens, is surely criminal, and those responsible should be held to task and face criminal charges. It is our money, and we the ordinary public have no desire to see our money being used for the killing and maiming of ordinary people in another country. 

 

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Class War.

  A little message lifted from Act For Freedom Now.

 Destroy Borders. Destroy Slavery!

Xenophobia, hierarchy, and racism
cannot be fought with fratricidal wars
sworn on bibles or patriotic flags

In breaking the silence and
indifference of the civilised we want to
widen the space for revolt, increase the
possibilities for direct attack on the
pillars of this world.

The objectives can be seen everywhere
the concentration camps,
the airline companies that deport
‘aliens’, the ‘waiting zones’, the slave
traders, the lines of communications,
etc. etc.

Only through direct solidarity
will we be able to refuel the social
tempest of class war, sabotage and
relentless attack where the divisions
into nationals and foreigners, legal
immigrants and aliens dissolves in
joyous collision against the enemy
that oppresses us all.

Vagabond hearts, enemies of all
borders, the world-wide of insurgents

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Wars.

          The following poem was taken from Direct Action summer 1999, author unknown. It refers to different war, in another time, but war is war, no matter the time or the nation, it is the innocent that suffer, and the perpetrators, though they never pull a trigger nor shed any of their blood, are the ones who gain. When will we ever learn.

Image courtesy of Institute of Policy Studies.

All In The Name Of democracy.

From the height of 60,000 feet
you can't see the bombs hit the street
can't see the terror in their eyes
as death rains down from the skies
can't hear the shrieks and groans
as we burn their flesh and mangle bones
Milosoviv and his cronies safe below
deep in shelters where our bombs can't go.
We punish the people on the ground
Leaving devastation all around
you feel the excitement and the thrill
when "our" government says "go out and kill".
But when alone, I think " how insane
the Serbian people are not to blame
it's the politicians again - as before
and they never fight the bloody wars.
One day maybe we'll get it right
when workers of all nations refuse to fight
when all races, brothers and sisters can be
joined in human solidarity.

 

                                           Image courtesy of Stimson.org

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Why Not?

  Well, why not?

Why Not?

I see hungry children crying beside warehouses of food

I see the elderly cold hungry alone in an ocean of plenty

I feel anger when caskets draped in that coloured rag

carried home with military pomp weeping families

another causality of greed privilege power

Day and daily I see greed praised as success

rich as celebrities poor as failures

I swim in a sea of fabricated illusions where privilege is progress

where truth dies a lonely death somewhere in a corner of our heart

Yet within my heart I have millions of seeds of love

I know I must plant and let grow

So why shouldn’t I be an anarchist?

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Everywhere.

        An extract from an article in Enough is Enough. In truth, we are everywhere, we are everybody. I think well worth a read, a very interesting read and food for thought.

           We are post, we are autonomous, we are anarchists, we are communists, we provide humanitarian aid in Ukraine, we chase the uprisings, we are brutal feminists and we look after each other, searching for truth and yet disoriented, we fight in our neighborhoods and look for every opportunity to throw a stone. We come from the solidarity movement with Latin America, from the housing struggles of the 80s, from the fading Antifa of the 2000s, from the anti-globalization movement, and finally from today, which does not yet have a name. We want everything and nothing

 

         The world is decaying. The Greens, in their compulsive good face game, try to stop or heal this decay with aloe vera. The fascists try to breathe new life into the decaying world with their necromancy of family, fatherland and Christianity. The old capitalists just continue as before. And the left, in its unsurpassed wisdom of the both-as-also dialectic, also tries its hand at the necromancy of concepts from the 19th and 20th centuries, also adding a pinch of aloe vera to the alleged magic potion that gives them the feeling of moving forward. Even the disciples of Andreas Malm pay homage to a despondent Leninism that trivializes the seizure of power in questions of militancy and pressure to act. Gramsci and Lenin would turn in their graves.
         We stand stunned before what nowadays calls itself revolutionary politics, and yet is only a pile of rubble of left-wing social-democratic politics, which pounces resentfully on the FDP, still has not gotten over the betrayal of the SPD of 1914, and does not realize that the Greens have taken these “Punch and Judy” parties to their side as welcome idiots, in order to comfortably consolidate their project of Green Capitalism without causing a stir:

 

Continue reading HERE. 

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Anarchy.

 

       For January, 2023, “Read of the Month” we at Spirit of Revolt bring you three for one, three copies of Practical Anarchy from early 1982. Apart from the interesting information contained in the pamphlets, it let’s us know that the struggles of today are part and parcel of the struggles of yesterday. It is one long continuous struggle for peace, justice and freedom for all, that is yet to be won. Why not have a browse through our website of thousands of interesting pamphlets, posters, banners, videos, photographs, periodicals, letters and much much more all to do with anarchist and libertarian socialist history and actions, an Aladdin's cave  of the history  of the struggles of the ordinary people. Probably the largest anarchist archive in Scotland, and still growing.  

READ ON LINE.

 

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Ukraine.

 

          Russia is the largest country in the world, it is a land rich in resources, more so than any other country on the planet. It has abundant supplies of oil, natural gas, timber and valuable minerals, such as copper, diamonds, lead, zinc, bauxite, nickel, tin, mercury, gold and silver. The value of these resources is probably immeasurable. America has long had its eye on these resources and has worked hard to bring about the demise of Russia, and hand those resources to the dollar corporate empire. The latest U$A endeavour to bring about the fall of Russia is to fight a war with Russia without useing American troops. The U$A and its puppets will fund the war and supply intelligence and hardware, the Ukrainians can supply the blood and misery. Unfortunately in wars the manpower gets depleted, so all the sophisticated weaponry becomes useless if you don't have the manpower to use them. This is what is happening in Ukraine today. Ukraine is losing a vast amount of troops and that is unsustainable, of course Russia too is losing vast numbers of its troops, but there is a vast population difference between these two countries. This bloodshed will rumble on to the inevitable end, Ukraine will be obliterated, or America and its band of puppets will send in the cavalry and turn the world into on vast blood bath. Only if sanity returns and a vast anti-war movement forces some sort of negotiated settlement, will this mayhem cool down.

The following from Arrezafe.

          Put these four things together: tremendous and unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying and indefensible asymmetries of military power; inability to stock up on even conventional defensive weapons; and support completely reduced to that of its main sponsors.
         Sounds like the formula for winning a war? Obviously not. It is the formula to lose it, which is why Von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz and Blinken are already preparing the exit. The tide is turning out for Zelensky. 

 Source: Robert Freeman , We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?

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End Wars.

   

            In yesterday's post I emphasised, to end wars, we need to strangle the military industrial complex here at home, without that beast, there would be no wars. However there are other ways to help to bring an end to wars, we must give all the support we can to draft dodgers and deserters. An increase in these numbers would certainly have an effect on the war machine. If they know they have support, then we might see a trickle become a flood. Nobody should be forced to kill someone they don't know on the orders of another.

This extract from tridni-valka-en

 Appeal: Days of international solidarity with deserters

 

           The war in Ukraine continues with all the negative consequences for much of the world. However, acts of desertion and draft evasion also continue, which, if widespread, could lead to the end of the war. Anarchists from the Central European region are therefore publishing this call to organise active support for deserters. Wherever we live, let us make every other day a day of international working-class solidarity and resistance against the war. Let us organise in workplaces, schools and streets to strengthen the influence of desertions. Let us fight for dignified conditions for all who refuse to serve as a cannon fodder in the inter-imperialist war.

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Our War!

             War is in the air, rumblings of nuclear war, our insane war mongering politicians playing the tune of the corporate and imperialist masters, spout the phoney mantra about defending freedom. If you want to stop this psychopathic society of perpetual war, then I'm afraid calling "Stop the War" from the streets will have no effect what so ever. Remember Iraq, millions in the UK and millions more across the globe took to the streets and shouted "No War". What did our democratic leaders do, why they stuck two fingers up at the public and went ahead and obliterated Iraq's infrastructure, killed thousands of innocent people and displaced millions, turning Iraq into a religious faction fighting ground, while at the same time devouring its natural resources. All this on a lie. 

Image courtesy of Arab News.

            Wars don't just happen in other places, they start right here in our own land. The war machine has tentacles that feed through the fibre of our society, without which it could not function. As long as we tolerate this breeding ground for the war machine to freely function in our own country, we are complicit in the wars in other lands. To stop the wars, we have to strangle the war machine at home. The powers that be will preach about how the "arms" industry creates jobs, grows the economy, but do you want jobs and a strong economy that relies on the brutal bloodshed of innocents in other lands? To stop wars, we have to change society completely, rebuild it from the bottom up, dispense with the capitalist greed system and replace it with a society built on mutual aid, free from borders and the profit motive. A society that sees to the needs of all our people, no matter from what part of this tiny planet they live. That will take massive direct action on a prolonged scale, the alternative is to continue with this cancerous capitalist system with its military industrial complex that breeds poverty and destructive wars.

An interesting article from Greece via Act for Freedom Now.

            In the days of commemoration of the Polytechnic, we must not forget the anti-militarist implications of the uprising. In the midst of military dictatorship, one of the central slogans of the occupied Polytechnic in ’73 was “Out with NATO”. Picking up this thread, anarchy today must find a way of direct action against those who profit and gain from these wars.
          While we try to develop anarchist considerations and analyses of every interstate war conflict, one of the most important aspects of the multifaceted anti-military struggle is often ignored: sabotaging the death machine on the ground we are on.
          Since we are in NATO’s territory of influence, we have a duty to sabotage everything used by the armed forces of the Greek state and its allies, the arms industry, the financiers and those who give orders and make decisions.
          Alongside the Russian state’s invasion of Ukrainian territory, the Turkish state’s war against the Kurdish people is raging, while the USA is waging wars all over the planet. In all these cases, DB Schenker is actively involved, supporting and profiting from these wars. It is a German state-owned company, owned by Deutsche Bahn (DB, the German railway company) and controlled by the German Ministry of Transport. It is a company responsible for war crimes during World War II, and today, it maintains supply chain hubs in dozens of places around the globe, transporting and delivering war equipment, weapons as well as parts of vehicles, tanks and war planes. In 2019, DB Schenker received an award from the U.S. Department of Transportation for its cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense, as there seem to be very few transnational wars in which DB Schenker does not transport weapons to the front lines.
           The parent company, Deutsche Bahn, is responsible for the ‘Tren Maya’ project, the development of railway lines on Mexican territory, including the Chiapas region, lines that will serve the Mexican military.
          This project will destroy huge tracts of forested land, and the lands are home to thousands of people. It obviously serves as the basis of a wider plan to pressure the Mexican state against the liberated Zapatista land, and resistance against it has already begun.
           While the Greek police were gradually occupying Exarcheia, in an attempt to suppress the memory of the resistance against the junta, on the morning of 15 November, we carried out an arson attack on a DB Schenker truck on Baltinon Street in Gyzi. While we know that a destroyed truck alone will not stop any war, we have a duty to recognize the cogs that set the state war machines in motion and dismantle them piece by piece.

Solidarity with the struggle of the Kurdish people against the Turkish state.

Solidarity with the prisoner Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis

We support the 4 imprisoned comrades in the case of the Piraeus traffic police.

Victory for the hunger strike of Alfredo Cospito.   Anarchists

via: athens.indymedia Translated by Act for freedom now!

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No Poverty.

 

         Get behind this mass protest, if you can't get to London, then try to organise one in your own locality. We have to get the message across, we will no longer be poor to pay for the gambling machinations of the financial mafia. Glasgow will be holding one in Buchanan Street at the Donald Dewar statue. Saturday 1pm give these all the support you can muster, it's your standard of living.

          Another new Prime Minister, same old war policy. Rishi Sunak's selection to No. 10 is unlikely to see any trimming of the magic money tree for war.
        The re-appointment of Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, means that huge proposed increases in military spending are set to be maintained. We're told that all departmental budgets are could face cuts but the 'defence' budget is going to be doubled to £100 billion by 2030.
        Cuts for the NHS, our schools and possibly pensions but mammoth increases for weapons and war. It's a disgrace. We have to get rid of this government before these ludicrous hikes in military spending become reality.
       That’s why Stop the War and CND are throwing our weight behind The People’s Assembly’s ‘Tories Out’ demonstration this Saturday (5 Nov). Join us on the 'Welfare Not Warfare' bloc which is assembling at midday at Embankment Bistro Cafe.

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info