WAR = PROFITS.

       

         Ten years of death and destruction in Afghanistan and still it goes on. Hundreds of UK troops killed and thousands injured, plus billions of pounds spent on maintaining this inhumane, pointless slaughter. Where does all that money go? It pours into the arms industry who are delighted to see tons of munitions being exploded, creating a need to have them replaced, at the same time allowing the other psychopaths in power across the globe an opportunity to see these destructive weapons in use. A war is like a trade show to the arms industry and it doesn't cost them a penny.

         There are urgent and pressing needs across the globe, they are not being seen to, the usual excuse is lack of resources. How much of the capitalist world's resources are spent on destruction and killing, what impact would there be if all those resources were directed at people's needs? Of course for that to happen we need to get rid of the capitalist system itself. As long as we have the present system of corporate capitalism and national governments, we will have wars and destruction, suffering and deprivation, as the parasites engineer everything to their own benefit.

STOP THE WAR 

       The Antiwar Mass Assembly in Trafalgar Square on 8 October is going to be one of Stop the War's most important events.  Thousands of people have pledged to be there (see  http://bit.ly/pBlNMI), transport is being organised around the country (see http://bit.ly/oM17x9), the timetable for the event
has just been published, with a very impressive list of speakers, musicians, artists and performers (see http://bit.ly/poSQPd).

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AFGHANISTAN?

      

        After ten years of the UK being at war in Afghanistan, how much do we the British people know about that country and its people. At a guess, I'd say practically nothing, except what our biased media spew out from time to time in an attempt to justify that illegal slaughter. This might not be the empirical answer, but it helps.

AFGHANISTAN: A Potted Social History

      I. If the history of Afghanistan is about any one thing, it is about playing hard to get when capital turns on the charm: a mainly small-holding peasantry and artisanal population that spurns the joys of wage-slavery; saturated carpet bombings by external foes (sometimes in conjunction with the Afghani government) that fail to crush the smuggling operations of the mountain people; civil wars and the restricted nature of export crops making (non-drug related) industrial agriculture untenable; mountain bandits collecting taxes from all sides in return for protection, making the state’s tax collectors green with envy; meticulous social engineering plans to divide the country into northern (oil, gas, and minerals) and southern (cheap labour) spheres of influence, overwhelmed by ethnic/tribal/religious complications.Like the Columbian communeros (common land), minga (festive labour and reciprocal labour exchange) and the Russian obshchina, the self-subsistence Afghani local jirga (now devoid of all its communitarian village structures) proves a formidable obstacle to ‘progress’. Its strength is in inverse correlation to the power of the central government. In any case, the small amount of surplus secured by the state makes the seizure of power a dubious victory. Capital has almost given up creating modern structures of domination in Afghanistan, instead it tries to implant itself onto ‘communitarian’ traditions

Read more here; Revolt Against Plenty.

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WE ARE ONE.

      Saturday October 1st. was probably the wettest day for some considerable time, the morning started with torrential rain and slowly modified to monsoon type downpour before turning to heavy rain for the rest of the afternoon. In spite of this, thousands felt angry enough to march the couple of miles from the Glasgow Green, through the city to Kelvingrove Park. A long slow colourful snake of people slithered their way through Glasgow's wet, semi-flooded streets in cheerful and noisy fashion. The march, against cuts to public services and the attack on public sector workers, was the first of many planned for the coming months.

     What we have to realise is that what this government is embarking on is the biggest and most savage attack in living memory, on the living standards of the people of this country. Under such circumstances there is no alternative but to defend ourselves and fight back with the same savageness and determination as this cabal of corporate fascists.  There is no law against self defence, when you are attacked you have the right to defend yourself. This millionaire government and its corporate bed-fellows are well organised and will be ruthless in their endeavour to privatise everything and to transfer all public assets to their millionaire friends in the corporate world. We must be better organised and even more ruthless than our attacker, if we wish to defeat this unbridled onslaught.

   

We are not alone in this growing self defence, across Europe there have been mass demonstrations and occupations, from Greece to France, from Spain to Italy, Portugal and Ireland, it has now spread across the Atlantic. Today is the seventh day of continual occupation of Wall St. in New York with 5,000 filling the area on Friday, and for the last three days the central square in Los Angelos has been occupied. We are one.

    We are governed by consent, we can and have the right to withdraw that consent, the system is corrupt, unjust and cannot work for the benefit of the majority of the people, so the majority of the people have the right to destroy it, and in its place create a system that sees to the needs of all our people, a system based on co-operation, mutual aid and sustainability, free from the greed of the profit motive. We have the right and the responsibility to start that creation process now. We owe it to our children and our grandchildren. We start now or we leave a heritage of repression and deprivation to those who follow.

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COULD THIS BE THE START OF SOMETING BIG??

        

         Occupy LA begins this Saturday Oct 1st! We are Occupying LA in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. (A Peaceful Occupation)

Starting at 10:00am in Pershing Square, marching to City Hall Map Join Us - Bring a sleeping bag, food, supplies, friends!

         The Middle East protests are applauded by the West, protests have been spreading across Europe and now we have them in New York and Los Angelos, could this be the start of something big? I can't wait to hear the Western media ring out the praises of all those brave people facing the wrath of the state machinery. I don't expect anybody to be shot in the West, just pepper sprayed, roughed-up, beaten and arrested, perhaps a few tasered. However, the West is not totally innocent in the field of bring troops on to the streets to handle unrest, Liverpool and Glasgow can testify to that.

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LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY - DON'T LOOK AT WHAT I DO!!!

        As usual the American government is speaking in its customary duplicitous manner. Its mouthpiece Obama, spouts crap regarding the various and many dictators in the Middle East condemning their repression of peaceful protests, calling for restraint, while selling them the arms and equipment to carry out that repression. At this moment in time the state of Bahrain, with the aid of Saudi troops, is trying to crush any protesters that have the courage to criticise the corrupt and brutal regime. So what does our freedom, peace loving Obama administration do? Well naturally, it does what it always does, it wags its finger with a tut-tut-tut and the proceeds to sell them the necessary equipment to crush the protester. While protesters die on the streets of Bahrain, the US Department of Defence is now preparing to sell $53 million worth of armoured Humvees and missiles to the brutal dictatorship of Bahrain. Well in capitalism, business is business and people are dispensable.

        We know we can't take the words that come from the mouths of those nasty dictators in those strange foreign lands that the West is always trying to bomb into democracy, but is there any statement that we can take at face value when it drips out the mouth of any one of those Western corporate stooges that we call the political class?

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WORKERS KNOW YOUR HISTORY - THE INVERGORDON MUTINY.

            This September marks the 80 anniversary of the Invergordon Mutiny, an event that caused a run on the pound, a panic on the London Stock Exchange and Britain to leave the gold standard. Then, as now, it was a conservative government that was implementing pay cuts on public sector workers, which also applied to naval ratings. Most of the ordinary seamen were to see they pay cut by 10% and in some cases by 25%. The North Atlantic Fleet had put into Invergordon and the sailors learnt of the pay cuts from the newspapers. Meetings were held on shore and the Red Flag was sung by groups of sailors. They had decided to refuse orders except essential duties and on some ships, refused to put to sea. The strike action was spreading throughout the whole North Atlantic Fleet and messages were flowing from the Rear-Admiral Tomkinson, who was in charge of the fleet, the Admiralty and Downing Street. Eventually the Fleet set sail for its home base and some concessions were agreed on the ratings grievances. However, Rear Admiral Tomkinson was held responsible for the problem escalating, claiming he didn't take severe enough action at the start of the strike. Several of the organisers of the mutiny were jailed, 200 sailors from the North Atlantic Fleet were discharged from the service and a further 200 from elsewhere in the navy were discharged for attempting to incite similar actions across the service. One of the organisers, Len Wilcot accepted an invitation to go to the USSR, while another, Fred Copeman, commanded a British battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

That was 1931 and here we are in 2011 and we have a conservative government trying to implement savage cuts to pay and conditions of public sector workers. It seems we the ordinary people never learn, we tolerate a system that every so often takes away everything it can from what the people have fought for, and won. Under this capitalist system what we the ordinary people have is never ours, it is grudgingly surrendered to usafter many a difficult strugle, and then at the first opportunity the parasites try to take it all back. I'm sure we have the imagination to come up with a better and more just system that sees to the needs of all our people, a system built on co-operation, mutual aid and sustainability, free from the greed drive motive of profit for the few. Time to get the parasites off our backs.

ann arky's home.

BNP NOT WELCOME HERE.

          The Nazi BNP is planning to hold a protest, outside the BBC’s Question Time, this Thursday 29^th September, when it is filmed at the Contemporary Urban Centre in Liverpool.

Join the counter protest, from 5pm Thursday 29^th September 2011, outside the CUC, Greenland street (off Jamaica street ) L1 0BS.

         Everyone, please turn out to demonstrate against racism and fascism and to congratulate the BBC, on refusing to have Nick Griffin on BBC’s Question Time. At this point in time, the police are trying to stop this demonstration, so we need the largest numbers turning up, to ensure everyone in Britain knows that the BNP is NOT welcome in Merseyside.

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THE BLIND MEDIA.

              They are still there, though according to the mainstream media, it's a big secret. Pissed off Americans have for the last 5 days been occupying Wall St. New York, but there's not a lot appearing on the TV nor the papers, compare this with any protest in the Middle East, it would get lots of air time and lots of comments and pundit's analysis. Here of course, in the "free democratic" West, we don't do that sort of thing, so if we all just shut our eyes they will all disappear and the rip-off capital can get on with its business.
       Across the West unrest is growing, protests in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, UK and America, but to the parasitical elite it is business as usual.



The world over, a cop is a cop, is a cop.

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ETHICAL KILLING.

A short extract from Stop the War.  

    A defining feature of state power is rhetoric about a ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ role in world affairs. Errors of judgement, blunders and tactical mistakes can, and do, occur. But the motivation underlying state policy is fundamentally benign. Reporters and commentators, trained or selected for professional ‘reliability’, tend to slavishly adopt this prevailing ideology.

How an "ethical" war looks from the receiving end.

         Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush's desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.

Continue reading HERE.

WAR = TERRORISM.

WAGING WAR ABROAD AND WAR ON PUBLIC SERVICES AT HOME.

An appeal from Stop the War Coalition.

      The war in Libya will soon have cost the UK two billion pounds. We were told at the start of the NATO intervention that the cost to Britain would be "tens, not hundreds of millions". The war is in its seventh month and British planes have flown around one in five of all the bombing raids on the country, destroying or damaging more than 900 sites. The £2 billion spent on Libya comes on top of £5 billion a year on the war in Afghanistan and the £2 billion a year spent maintaining the Trident nuclear missile system.

       Just as we're being told there is no alternative to deep cuts in the NHS, in disability allowances, pensions, and every area of the public services, £9 billion is being spent on two wars opposed by the majority of the British public, and on maintaining the militarily pointless Trident system. Britain is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, but David Cameron in his speech last week to the United Nations, called for yet more war, adopting from Tony Blair the justification of "humanitarian intervention" for western powers to wage war wherever they please. (SEE: http://bit.ly/rk11ZC).

       It will be the main purpose of the Antiwar Mass Assembly on 8 October (see below) to mobilise as big a display of popular opposition as possible to this government's policy of spending billions on wars abroad while waging a war at home to cut billions from our public services.

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THEIR ROYAL HIGHNESSES, GOLDMAN SACHS!!

    
         So the IMF (International Mankind Fuckers) ECB (European Central Bank) and European governments are going to sort out the financial crisis by adding more zeros to the end of their bank balances and everything will be just fine. Well not according to those in the top echelons of the big boys gambling casino. It seems what I have been saying for some time now has been openly spouted on BBC TV, governments are no more than the managers for the banking system and Goldman Sachs rules the world. It makes you a proper twat, running to the ballot box and thinking that will sort the problems. When will we wise up and get this bunch of parasites off our backs?

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PEOPLE FIRST - OCTOBER 1st.

 

                 The Scottish Trades Union Congress, in parnership with a growing number of faith, equality, anti-poverty and campaign organisations will hold the People First march and rally on 1st October 2011.

The march will go from Glasgow Green to Kelvingrove Park where thousands will assemble to hear speeches and music before attending a range of fringe events held in places of worship, student unions, public buildings and hotels in the vicinity of the park.

The event will also feature a specific initiative to raise funds for the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal created to help those hit by famine in Africa. Sponsoring and supporting organisations for the event will be very diverse, but have in common the aim of working together on a non-partisan basis to:

• challenge poverty levels and campaign for redistribution of wealth across Scotland and the UK;

• campaign to protect those hardest hit by service and benefit cuts; and;

• help to build and reconnect Scotland’s communities.

To be kept updated on developments contact

demoupdates@stuc.org.uk

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MODERN IMPERIALISM - CORPORATE FASCISM!!

            We can go through the wars that the UK, as a Western imperialist power, has been involved in since the beginning of the 20^th century, World War 1, 1914-18, World war 2, 1939-45, Korea, 1950-53, Suez, 1956-56, and the short but bloody Falklands 1982-82. All these wars have one thing in common, the all have an end date. However in 2001 Western imperialism entered a new phase, we entered the era of the war without end, the war on terrorism. Not long after the 9/11 attacks in America, president George W. Bush announced a new doctrine, a new national security strategy of pre-emptive war, to strike at terrorist groups and states that allegedly pose a threat, or are developing a credible threat, to the United States, Britain and most of the Western nations actively supported this stand. Obama continued this doctrine, and what it is, is basically a licence for the West to wage aggressive war whereever they think fit. Ironically, Obama endorsed the doctrine of pre-emptive war, when giving a speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. What he endorsed was the type of action that the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War 2, had outlawed and condemned.

        There is absolutely no doubt that our cynical political class have been using the war on terror to keep the population in a permanent state of fear and to push through military and surveillance contracts, handing the corporate world trillions in tax payers money. In America since the 9/11 event, the US ruling political elite has spent US$8 trillion on homeland security. The war on terror is also intended to give their imperialist wars across the globe, a stamp of legitimacy. Of course we can ask, is the world any safer because of the illegal war on terror and its accompanying financial cost and human death and suffering? Has the obliteration of Iraq as a functioning country and the 10 year slaughter in Afghanistan made the world a safer place to live?

         I think it is safe to say that the war on terror has failed miserably to stop attacks on Western countries. We are told that it has foiled numerous attacks on Western cities, but we never get the information to verify these stories. What we can be sure of is that the actual manifestation of the war on terror, extraordinary renditions, unmanned drones with their death and destruction, barbaric torture and inhumane treatment at Guantanamo and Bagram prison, Western forces killing thousands of Muslim civilians across large swaths of the planet, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, to mention a few, is and will continue to build up an unstoppable anger and hatred of the West. You can't make friends with people while you destroy their homes and kill their family and friends. The war on terror is one method of securing natural resources for the West and feeding trillions of tax payers money to the massive corporate military industrial complex that controls our subservient and complicit political class. In the West, imperialism is alive and well.

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HOW MUCH SHIT WILL WE TAKE???

          Our mainstream media seems rather reluctant to report on the ongoing occupation of Wall St. in the good ol' US of A. They are always keen to show protests in those nasty foreign countries where the people don't behave like us here in the free and democratic West. When they do report mass demonstrations in the West it is always in a bad light, we in the West are never portrayed as freedom fighters but more as thugs and hooligans intent on mindless criminality. However, the demonstrations against the Western corporate capitalist mess we are in at the moment will not just stay in Greece. There have been mass demonstrations in Italy, Spain, France and here in the UK there are plans for mass demonstrations later in the year, (organise now). We can accept that the ordinary people will take so much shit and then they start to hit back, and that applies across the globe. I think we in the West are just about at that limit of shit we will take, before we hit back.

ann arky's home.

NOT THE TEN O'CLOCK NEWS???

       

         While NATO pulverises the Libyan people in the name of freedom for the Libyan people, our subservient media paints a picture of peace loving rebel fighters running around the country freeing their fellow citizens. The method they use to free them is to sit back and wait until NATO blasts the hell out of them and then rush in all guns blazing. If that doesn't work, then they lay siege to the town or city, starve it of food, water and medical supplies, after which they will ask NATO to go back in and terrorise the citizens with a massive bombardment from the air. Thus, Western style freedom crawls its bloody way through Libya.

       What is vomited from the mainstream media has no relation to the truth as it is happening on the ground in that unfortunate country. What is happening is tribal faction killings, looting and ethnic cleansing of towns and cities across Libya, aided and abetted by NATO and its paymasters. The following is a short extract from BEFORE IT'S NEWS.  It is well worth reading the whole article. You certainly will not get the information on the Ten O'clock News.

        ---- Despite desperate attempts by Wall Street and London to proclaim their intervention in Libya a success, even going as far as sending their political proxies Nicolas Sarkozy of France and David Cameron of the United Kingdom for a quick photo opportunity at the rebel held airport in contested Tripoli, vast swaths of the nation are still fiercely resisting NATO and their proxy rebel forces. This includes entire cities still standing in defiance against rebel attempts to "starve them out" and dozens of daily NATO airstrikes (NATO report for September 22) aimed at breaking the population's will to fight on.

         Weeks ago, the rebel forces, led by US State Department and UK Home Office listed terrorists from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a subsidiary of Al Qaeda, boldly announced plans to starve out cities resisting their unelected, foreign backed seizure of the North African nation. The London Telegraph reported in an article aptly titled, "Libya crisis: Rebel leaders hoping to starve Gaddafi stronghold of Sirte into submission," that under the cover of heavy NATO bombing rebel leaders hoped "to starve Col Gaddafi's home town of Sirte into submission, laying siege to his last remaining stronghold in an attempt to avoid mass bloodshed, according to the man spearheading efforts for a peaceful takeover."

A NATO PEACE MISSION!!

       Fox News would relay an AP report on September 2, 2011, that rebel commanders declared, "we want to save our fighters and not lose a single one in battles with Qaddafi's forces. In the end, we will get Sirte, even if we have to cut water and electricity and let NATO pound it with airstrikes." AP cited Mohammed al-Rajali, a spokesman for the rebel leadership in the eastern city of Benghazi. Ironically, the article was titled, "UN Warns Libya is Short of Water, Fuel, Medicine," a crisis admittedly being caused by the premeditated denial for entire cities of critical supplies for their civilian populations, enabled by NATO bombing and under the cover of UN recognition of the terrorist rebels - a move that has soundly resigned the UN's legitimacy and stated purpose to the scrapheap of history. ___ READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE.

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SETTLERS - ARMY OF OCCUPATION.

        Like most rational people I have always seen the Israeli settlers  in the Palestinian lands as part of the Israeli army, an army not wearing the usual uniform, but still an army of occupation. They move in, occupy and secure the foreign territory and defend it against the rightful owners, the Palestinians. If need be, they call in reinforcements in the shape of the unformed Israeli army. It seems now that even the Israeli army is admitting this, as they are starting to train the settlers to defend the land they have occupied. Settlers occupying land frees up the uniformed army to get on with the job of repressing the local indigenous people. A similar type of genocide that was pursued by the settlers on the indigenous people of that land we call America, but with a much more efficient weaponry. Palestine is the "Wild West" and the Palestinians are the "indians" of the 21st century.

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THE ANARCHIST CRITIC.

The latest issue of Radical Glasgow's Anarchist Critic free paper The Anarchist Critic, is now available as download PDF  HERE.

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