It is worth viewing the complete film, to get a clearer picture of the history of Ukraine.
Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info
views and poetry from an anarchist perspective.
It is worth viewing the complete film, to get a clearer picture of the history of Ukraine.
Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info
I just wish those calling for an end to the war in Ukraine would widen their call to end war. It is not just in Europe that countries are being bombed, the population being slaughtered. Let's look a little further afield, Yemen, 24 MILLION Estimated number of people in need of assistance Source, 100,000 Estimated number of people killed since 2015 Source 4 MILLION Estimated number of displaced people, Still the bombing goes on, but it is done by one of our "friendly" nations, Saudi Arabia, so turn a blind eye. Somalia, a civil war raging since the 1980's, Casualties: 300,000 (SFG)–400,000+ (AFP) Displaced: 1.1 million+, various nations giving support to try to prop up a government that will work with them, not the for people of Somalia. Rojava, a region in northern Syria that has claimed independence and is being bombed by Turkey on a daily basis in an attempt to crush and destroy any idea of Kurdish independence. Then let's not forget the Israeli genocide on the people of Palestine, with daily killings and land grabs by the Israeli Zionist apartheid regime, and the West again turns a blind eye, because Israel is one of our "friendly" nations.
It seems that Europe is sacrosanct so a war in Europe is of greater importance than any war else where. Are European lives worth more than Yemen citizen, Somalia citizens, Kurdish citizens, or Palestinian citizens? Direct our anger at the imperialist power blocks that are trying to tie up the planet in their own particular power block, and will take any action they deem necessary to maintain and further their control of the planet and its resources. You and I are the pawns in their cruel, despicable and vicious plans and are called on to rally behind what they deem a "just war" and getting us to condemn what they deem to be an "unjust war", we are also the cannon fodder in their greed driven desire for world control. There is no such thing as a "just war", slaughter of innocents is never and can never be, just.
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
European societies are, Fekete writes, “increasingly divided between citizens, demi-citizens and non-citizens,” some of whom are no longer guaranteed certain fundamental rights, depending on their race, class, religion, immigration status, incarceration, and political beliefs. These people include immigrants, Muslims, and the poor—in fact, anyone outside of the dominant ethnicity or the reigning political ideology. In Hungary for instance, human rights groups with international funding must register as “foreign agents.” Similarly, in Poland, the right wing Law and Justice Party has targeted human rights groups, feminists, and pro-immigration activists through media censorship, new laws around the teaching of holocaust history, and frequent raids on the offices of groups that criticize the government. The fallout from the Syrian Civil War intensified these trends. As millions fled, many into Europe, the right attacked the principle of freedom of movement within the Schengen Area of European Union; some countries started to impose passport checks at their borders with EU countries and many more sent police onto trains to detain brown and black passengers.Continue reading HERE:
For the most part, the center-left has gone along with these tactics. After terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, for instance, France’s socialist party president François Hollande declared a state of emergency that has been extended multiple times with no sign of ending. Many on the Left subscribed to the 1990s hope that the EU would enable a softer form of globalization that concentrated on regional integration. However, it may also have hardened the distinctions between Europe and the rest of the world, giving credence to the notion of a “fortress Europe” in need of defensive parapets and a well-patrolled moat. A cross-continental network of right-wing political parties—from Fidesz in Hungary to the Danish People’s Party—now preaches border defense at all costs, national purity, and religious intolerance.
While the new right-wing movements participate in electoral politics, many of them have unofficial links with vigilante groups that patrol their country’s borders, shake down immigrant businesses, and harass women in hijabs, and small armies of thugs that wait to pick fights at rallies. These groups do not live in fear of prosecution for hate crimes: They maintain Facebook pages and websites. Groups like the Cologne-based Hooligans Against Salafists make their racial claims on the streets of German cities, taking over public space as in an attempt to shock multiculturalism out of city life. In Greece, Golden Dawn members beat up immigrant vendors in street markets. In France, the National Front has sponsored “pork festivals” in cities its members see as being in danger of losing their French-ness, because of changing demographics.
Some of the most visible manifestations of New Right muscle-flexing have emerged in post-socialist Europe. In Hungary and Bulgaria vigilante border guards target migrants fleeing North. In the former East German city of Dresden, Pegida (an acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) took over the streets in 2014 to protest immigration turning Germany into “Eurorabia.” In Serbia, nativism merges with a desire to protect “traditional values” resulted in the cancellation or violent persecution of gay pride marches in Belgrade. Unlike in the past, when the Soviet Union commemorated the Great Patriotic War against fascism across Eastern Europe, Nazism is no longer something to hide. The extremist Hungarian Guard (Magyar Gárda) talks openly about following in the footsteps of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s wartime fascist party that murdered thousands of Jews.
Read the full article HERE: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.1In 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.
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.ukThe Western powers are planning a major military escalation in Libya. The UN is trying to impose a new government on the country, despite the fact that both of the two existing and competing authorities have rejected their plans. The reason the West backs the man they call 'Prime Minister designate' Fayez al- Sarraj, is that they expect him to invite the West in to support.
This helps them avoid a public debate about intervention. On Monday, Michael Fallon made it clear the government disapproves of democratic scrutiny over going to war when he announced a promised bill to enshrine parliamentary debate on military action would be dropped. Their unseemly haste to intervene in Libya is driven by two things. Firstly, a desire to control the oil and gas fields and secondly, a plan to stop refugees crossing the Mediterranean from Libya by force. We need to widen our campaign against the government plans.
Stop the War is holding a public meeting on Libya this Tuesday 26th April at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in Central London (235 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8EP). Please join us to discuss the situation and how we can oppose another disatrous intervention.
World banking explained in less than 2 minutes...
World banking explained in less than 2 minutes...An animated interview of IMF whistleblower John Perkins, author of 'HoodWinked' and 'Confessions Of An Economic Hitman'Feel free to share, to educate others... For more info like this, please visit: Wesley Hall: The Voice Of Treason
Posted by Wesley P P Hall on Sunday, 27 September 2015
Eye witness report & film from the Front-line of the refugee crisis in Lesvos.
Awareness and fund raising film screening and Q&A with film maker Guy Smallman who is just back from Lesvos, and visiting Scotland for two days only. Donations will be going to support refugees in Greece.
Edinburgh:
Tuesday, December 15 at 5:30pm
Hunter Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place,
EG3 9DF
Glasgow:
Wednesday, December 16 at 7:00pm
Boyd Orr room 513 (Lecture Theatre D), University of Glasgow
https://glasgowanarchists.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/stateless-in-lesvos-screening-and-qa-with-film-maker/
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.ukWe are very lucky to be able to screen this short (25min) documentary shot this November on one of the islands considered the front-line of the refugee crisis. Focusing on the solidarity of ordinary people in the face of government-led racism and incompetence, this film will show how the working class in Greece are defying the state and showing their solidarity with refugees.
The director, Guy Smallman of Reelnews, will be travelling to Scotland fresh from the press film screening and will be on hand to give a Q&A on his first-hand experiences. You can check out his travel-blog for the project here:http://reelnews.co.uk/the-lesvos-blog/
This event is free to attend. There will be an opportunity to give a financial donations to send to Lesvos, but it is just as important to come along and raise awareness.
Glasgow event co-hosted by Glasgow AFed and Glasgow Uni Anarchist Soc. https://www.facebook.com/events/194379107567573/
Edinburgh co-hosted by counterinfo lab and the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh https://www.facebook.com/events/106327519737862/
Until now the fight has always been, from first to last, between existing and aspiring world powers; it has always been a struggle between a power that already oppresses us and one that will soon do so; the point, however, is to finally get beyond this stale tale of two shitty choices----
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk-------Unlike the citizens of early Mesopotamian city-states, who assembled to govern their own affairs directly and whose active consent was needed even by a demi-god ruler like Gilgamesh before he could wage war, the voters of France assemble only to labour as servants for their bosses or consume the bread and circuses they are thrown as distraction and compensation for their servitude. The rulers of European or Middle-Eastern states wage war through the passive resignation of modern plebeans, who can do no more than reap the grave consequences of decisions they neither understand nor command. A civilisation that began as a democracy of slave-holders who elected their representatives has reached perfection in a democracy of slaves who elect their masters. From this botched experiment (which has produced nothing but irresponsibility, insanity, and impotence – transmuted by the lies of history, art and political-economy into fictions with pretty names like duty, reasonableness, and maturity) there's nothing worth defending or saving.The ferocious muslims who, unlike the era of the crusaders, now have the ability to retaliate, are right to despise it. If only they did so consistently! The first and final paragraphs from the entry for Ebla on Wikipedia read:Ebla was one of the earliest kingdoms in Syria. Its remains constitute a tell located about 55 km southwest of Aleppo near the village of Mardikh. Ebla was an important center throughout the third millennium BC and in the first half of the second millennium BC. Its discovery proved the Levant was a center of ancient, centralized civilization equal to Egypt and Mesopotamia, and ruled out the view that the latter two were the only important centers in the Near East during the early Bronze Age. Karl Moore described the first Eblaite kingdom as the first recorded world power.
As a result of the Syrian Civil War, excavations of Ebla stopped in March 2011, and large-scale looting occurred after the site came under the control of an opposition armed group. Many tunnels were dug and a crypt full of human remains was discovered; the remains were scattered and discarded by the robbers, who hoped to find jewelry and other precious artifacts. Digging all around the mound was conducted by nearby villagers with the aim of finding artifacts; some villagers removed carloads of soil suitable for making ceramic liners for bread-baking ovens from the tunnels."
The villagers of Syria know how to treat the ruins of a despicable past with the disrespect it deserves. Only people able to perform this task coherently can create anything useful, beautiful and happy out of the rubble of a miserable history. Until now the fight has always been, from first to last, between existing and aspiring world powers; it has always been a struggle between a power that already oppresses us and one that will soon do so; the point, however, is to finally get beyond this stale tale of two shitty choices. Humanity will never be happy until the last Quran is used as tinder for setting fire to the presidential palace of the last democratic republic!