The State, No Room For Dissent.

 Your friendly cop on the street, Greek style?

 

      Since the recent election in Greece where the "New Democracy" Party gained power, the Greek state has moved rapidly to the right and joined that band of brutal authoritarian repressive regimes. All states will attempt to stifle dissent, some more savagely than others, and those most vociferous in their struggle against the injustice, inequality and corruption within the present system, will receive the harshest of treatment. At present the Greek state is in open battle against any voice or action of dissent and at the forefront of that brutal battle are anarchists, migrants and autonomous centres. The "New Democracy" Party has made it an open statement that it will crush all anarchists and there autonomous centres, putting then under the label of criminals and terrorists. So there is now a concerted effort to crush that avenue of resistance and dissent. The present police system in Greece was formed during the military junta era and were 90% ultra nationalists. When the junta was overthrown and the representative system formed, the police system was never reformed and today the majority of the police force are members of "New Dawn" the Greek fascist party. So they will do the state's bidding with relish and brutality.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

        After the solidarity gathering in Evelpidon on the 7th of December, I went to my second home in order to avoid going to my home in Ano Patissia. Usually, there is a cop bus parked right in front of the building entrance, so in order to enter the building I have to pass right in front of the MAT (riot police) unit there. They were there on the 7th too, but this time they spoke to me and by spoke I mean harassed verbally. They told me in English “We will send you in prison, like your friends, or we will make you disappear like your friend Dimitris (Ch.)“. I didn’t respond and I just entered the building.
It’s obvious to me that they’re trying to intimidate me in order to either repress myself or do something that will expose me and give them the reason to take me once and for all. Targeting me will not stop my presence in the movement and not my solidarity towards my comrades. What is not obvious to me is whether the threat was an initiative by the cop or an order. In any case, it’s an effort by the state to terrorize me.
Solidarity to comrade Dimitris Ch. and Vangelis St.
Abtin Parsa, 15/12/19
via: Athens Indymedia

More info on Abtin Parsa's situation:

        Days after being followed and days after my home in ano patissia was being watched by the anti-terrorist unit, I published a political statement that also includes a report about the events on 27/10/2019. https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1600684/
       Later, 09/11/2019, the anti-terrorist cops that were near my house started acting differently. At the same time, anti-terrorist unit repression against the movement became more severe, like arresting comrades with the accusation of being involved in the revolutionary organization “Revolutionary self-defense”.
       10/11/2019, 22:00 to 22:30, while I was going home, I saw many undercover cops around my home, more than usual in the past few weeks. I decided to not go home and publish immediately the information in indymedia athens about this event. https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1601003/
       11/11/2019, in the evening, while my flatmate and his friend were coming out of the building, 15 to 20 anti-terrorist cops stopped them. First, anti-terrorist cops handcuffed them, put them in the car and probably 30 minutes later the anti-terrorist cops entered my home with the key that they took from my flatmate. Anti-terrorist cops started searching the house. After that, they arrested my flatmate with the accusation of having a military knife that was found in our home.
      12/11/2019, my flatmate had a trial in the court of evelpidon, building 7, and he will have another court sometime soon (in one of the previouw updates that I published in indymedia Athens, I wrote that my flatmate got arrested because of a gun, but it was wrong information given to me by the lawyer and when days later I found my flatmate, he corrected me).
      After the raid of the anti-terrorist unit in my house, these things were missing:
1) all my legal papers that recognized me as a legal refugee in greece
2) personal things like a toothbrush, a pillow and some clothes
3) a laptop
4) some money
5) some political texts
6) a cell phone (not smartphone)
      I am an anarchist political refugee who has been imprisoned and tortured for 1 year and half in the secret prison of IRGC in iran. I was arrested at the age of 16, in 2014, in zarghan city in iran, accused of insulting the religion and with activity against the iranian regime. In 2016, I escaped from iran to greece. I was in the concentration camp of samos for 8 months, and during this period, I got the political asylum from the greek state. In 2017, I arrived in athens and since 2017 I am active in the local anarchist movement.
       The regime is trying to terrorize the movement but the regime should know that for those who have nothing left to lose, fear does not exist. The resistance will survive and the system will die because our will for freedom is stronger than its weapons and its cops. I will continue participating in the movement. If I get abducted by the anti-terrorist unit, I will immediately start hunger striking.
      Solidarity to comrades who got arrested or are wanted by the anti-terrorist unit.
Abtin Parsa 23/11/2019

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The Pragmatic Anarchists.

A message from A Pritchard at Anarchist Studies Network:

      Ken Barlow, one of the commissioning editors at Pluto, has been in touch to ask if I knew of anyone that would be interested in writing a primer on anarchist praxis. I said I'd put out a general call if he could tell me what exactly he was after. This is what he said:

     "The image the general public have of anarchists (if they think of them at all) is often of 'all or nothing,' sometimes violent, diehards who are only willing to operate through complete non-compliance with the state. In reality, anarchist/non-hierarchical practice can be applied widely in day-to-day life to make the world a better place, even in contexts of having to engage with the state, and even by those who might not consider themselves 'anarchists'.  I am therefore envisaging a book (provisionally entitled 'The Pragmatic Anarchist') aimed at a wider (i.e. general, non-anarchist) readership that addresses this misnomer.

      Such a book would make the case for a 'practical' anarchism that acknowledges (which is obviously not the same as liking) the current primacy of the state, and in this context setting out how ordinary people can make use of anarchist ideas and principles 'pragmatically' in everyday life, whether in their social, work or political environments. The above is just a sketch of the book as I envisage it, and I would be open to alternative avenues drawing on the same theme."

           If you're up for it, I'm sure he'd like to hear from you (no need to email me). Ken Barlow <kenb@plutobooks.com>

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Magic Winter Morning Light.

 

      And now for something completely different. This morning sitting at the computer I became aware of the strange magic light that only a winter morning can produce. The dark winter cloud covered sky, and the dazzling sun low in the sky. It passes so quick, so I just had to open the window and grab a few photos. The photos were taken around 9:15am. by 9:45am. it had gone and it was that familiar Scottish dull greyish morning, which has its own beauty of course. Hope you get as much pleasure from the photos as I got from the window view.

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The Human Right To A Safe Home.

        What right does a landlord have to evict an elderly, 67 year old tenant of 27 years residence, in the middle of our Scottish winter weather? Our laws seem to allow that to happen, then the system sheds crocodile tears for the homeless. Of course as a citizen of this democratic country you can challenge that decision in our loaded judicial system, but first you have to arrive there with a suitcase of money, not everybody's possible option. The insanity and inhumanity of this profit driven, greed infested system.

From Andy Whightman's Blog

 

 

     Over the past few months I have been assisting a constituent to resist a Notice to Quit served on him to evict him from his home. I have set a Crowdfunder up to raise funds to pursue a legal case on human rights grounds to halt the eviction of 67 year-old Colin Brown from his home of 27 years in Leith, Edinburgh.

We are raising funds via Crowdjustice here
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/colinbrown/

       Colin’s landlord is a company called Express Investment Company Ltd. The
company owned 29 residential properties as at March 2018 and is disposing of all of them. In the case of eleven tenants who have secure tenancies, their homes have been sold with the sitting tenants remaining in their homes. Notices to Quit on the remaining properties have been served and the tenants have left. Colin Brown is the last remaining tenant. He is challenging his eviction in the First Tier Tribunal at a hearing on 17 January 2020.

      This crowdfunder is not concerned with this tribunal hearing but with a wider planned challenge to the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988 on the grounds that in the circumstances of this case, the legislation violates Colin Brown’s human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 8 Right to Respect for Private and Family Life and Article 1 of Protocol 1 Protection of Property).
      We believe that it may not be proportionate under Article 8 to evict a tenant who is 67 years old and has lived in his home for over 27 years. We believe that it may violate Colin’s rights under Article 1 of Protocol 1 as it may be disproportionate to remove his property rights (the 27 year tenancy) in favour of a corporate landlord who by definition cannot e.g. live in the property.

Why does this matter?

     This case clearly matters for Colin Brown but it could also be of wider significance to the 15% of the Scottish population who live in the private rented sector. We believe that there are elements of private tenancy law that do not adequately uphold the human right to a home, to a private and family life and to possessions because it is too easy in too many cases to evict a tenant at short notice.

What do we propose to do?

       We propose to obtain an Urgent Opinion by a leading Advocate as to the likely grounds and chances of success of this action. We have already secured pro bono advice from a leading academic authority in the field of ECHR.

How much we are raising and why?

 

      We propose to raise £10,000 to secure this Opinion and to review the options open to use once it has been given. if we then decide to proceed to litigation, we will launch a new and separate crowdfunder. This is about the worst time of year to ask anyone to donate money but Colin faces eviction and too many other private tenants live insecure lives. Thank you for whatever support you are able to provide.

Crowdfunder here:

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/colinbrown/

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

Public Being Groomed To Do Cops' Work.

     Facial recognition is the new eyes of big brother, and in this society big brother  is co-joined twins, one the state, the other big corporate business, they are joined at the hip. Each piece of technology sold to the public finds itself firmly linked to the state surveillance wing, and the public are the unsuspecting assistants in the control and monitoring of the population. Your are monitored and profiled every where you go, from the CCTV in places indoors and out, and there is always the cop in your pocket, the smart phone. Believe we it is smarter than you could believe.

      Now their is a new toy being sold by big business that is being incorporated into the state surveillance system, the door bell camera.

This from325:

      Report from insurrectionary anarchist publication Anathema on the growth of networks of surveillance being developed by Amazon and local police departments.
     In November, The Intercept reported that internal documents at Ring, the home security company owned by Amazon, reveal that the company is planning to create automated neighborhood “watch lists” by incorporating facial recognition technology into its increasingly vast network of “smart home” doorbell cameras. The feature would alert camera-owners via smartphone when someone deemed “suspicious” pops up on their cameras. Like the old-fashioned “neighborhood watch” that Ring wants to replace, the feature would extend the power of the police and as well as make certain areas of town more dangerous for anyone Ring camera owners deem “suspicious.”
      Ring’s documents do not define what “suspicious” means. In practice, this will likely be defined by gentrifiers and cops, whose systemic racism is well documented. At its core, the watch list would identify people who “don’t belong” in certain areas; this means black and brown people, poor people, and anyone whose appearance deviates from social norms. Ring’s Neighbors program — an online discussion forum between camera owners — is already well known for its aggressive racism and for generally heightening distrust and paranoia within neighborhoods. For many people, Ring’s new feature would make it dangerous to be in certain neighborhoods at all — a victory for the forces of gentrification everywhere. Ring doorbell cameras have already allowed police to significantly expand their operations, simply by appropriating private citizens’ technology for no additional expense. The technology therefore has immense “value,” not only for the company, but for the state. For decades it’s been steadily expanding policing in order to keep its increasingly immiserated people under control, while struggling to balance its own budgets.

  Read the rest of this entry

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Anarchist Bookfaiirs, Where?

     Anarchist Bookfairs, great events for meeting like minded people, new people, swapping ideas, getting your nose into other people's literature and pushing your own. However, surely the whole idea is to bring new people to anarchism, not to fly around in the same circle. So where should they be held. In some back street squat, a small autonomous centre, a hired room in a local pub? I have always felt that we should be more ambitious and go as much in the mainstream as possible and meet the unconverted, the apolitical, the apathetic, the one searching for something different. We live in a capitalist society, so cost of course plays a part in where they can be held, perhaps we could all take a leaf out of the recent Manchester and Salford Anarchist Bookfair. 

     

One person's opinion from Anarchist News:

 

       The 9th Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair was dedicated to Donald Rooum (1928-2019), illustrator and long term anarcho. His image of anarchism's three personas (the punk, the bomber and the academic) was used on the bookfair's flier, and a very nice flier it was too. While it’s true that Rooum's work is often associated with the red and black Freedom, it's less well-known that Rooum himself identified as ‘a Stirnerite anarchist, provided "Stirnerite" means one who agrees with Stirner's general drift, not one who agrees with Stirner's every word.’ I’ll come back to that later.
      After following my friend’s directions from the tram stop, I was surprised to find the venue this year was not the backroom of a pub or the basement of a ‘social centre’, but was a museum in the centre of town. Maybe this says something about anarchists' desire to move from the fringes; maybe it's about the public opinion of anarchists in 2019. Either way, the People’s History Museum couldn’t be further from the underground Euro squat aesthetic of last year’s venue. I'd heard rumours that it was going to be hosted at the university this year, so it sounds to me like the organisers were trying their best to move from the Partisan into a more accessible, more mainstream location, and were somehow able to come up with the large deposit needed to book a space like the PHM. As I met my friend in the museum's hall, they admitted they missed the dinge of previous venues, but I for one was glad to be able to see the books and faces in the sunlight, and to be able to breathe as I moved from stall to stall.
      There were around thirty stalls in total, including Freedom up from London, Active Distro from Bristol, AK Press from Edinburgh, and PM Press from the North East. The other stallholders ranged from definitely anarchist (Elephant Editions), through questionable (Anarchist-Communist Group), to definitely not anarchist (New Internationalist). Also present were MARC and Footprint, two local printers who have long provided anarchists with affordable zine and booklet printing; Advisory Service for Squatters keeping it real in the back corner; Hunt Sabs with their latest Saboteur magazine plus fox teddies(!), and many more. Looking at the lineup, one can't help but wonder whether it is really a ‘book’ fair or is, in fact, an ‘organisation’ fair under a different name. One curious friend who came along for the morning noted that ‘lots of people here are determined to make more anarchists’ - I told them to be glad they’ve never been to the London ‘book’ fair, where the organisations wanting to sign you up outnumber the book publishers/distributors two to one. Next year I’d like to see fewer membership forms and more zines, magazines, booklets and books.
      Alongside the stalls were a series of talks and workshops that I didn’t attend. The ‘Education Space’ included book launches by PM Press (‘Journey Through Utopia’) and Ruth Kinna (‘Government of No One’ on Pelican), and a Q&A from The Anarchist Party (sadly not a rave but an actual political party). I heard The Anarchist Party were given hell by the audience for ‘working with the enemy’, which seems kind of hypocritical considering how many of the organisations present directly engage with the state and capital as their modus operandi. Speaking of which, a talk by the IWW’s local branch was apparently planned but didn’t go ahead. The final talk of the day, and the busiest, was by D. Hunter about Lumpen Magazine. I regret missing this one - Hunter's work articulates the horror of the daily grind like no other I’ve read this year.
       Bookfairs in the UK are mostly the same rotation of stallholders travelling from city to city with mostly the same stock and having mostly the same conversations. I’m always on the lookout for people who are doing something different. If, like the late great Donald Rooum, they are more into Stirner than they are into Bakunin and Bookchin, all the better. This year I found three: Elephant Editions, Gay Plants, and Forged Books. Elephant Editions you know. The other two I’ll let you discover yourself. Enjoy, you rebels, and let’s hope the organisers can tempt out Return Fire next year.
        As the day came to an end, I sat in the PHM’s cafe and wondered why so few bookfairs have a space like this, where you can retreat from the fray and read your new books. Am I meant to wait until I’m home? I spent the last hour sat sulking over a coffee, a slice of toast and At Daggers Drawn. There was no official afterparty, but Radical Routes had an evening film showing nearby, someone called ‘MCR Punks 4 West Papua’ had a gig in town, and Partisan had a queer karaoke a bus ride away. Tempting as all three were, come closing time I said my goodbyes and, with a pile of books under my arm, disappeared into the frozen northern night.

Till next year.

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

Austerity, Nothing New!!

       Workers rights are being shredded across Europe and elsehwere, no matter the particular colour of the cabal in power, right, left, centre, centre right, centre left, the legislation is much the same. Easier to be fired, more casual, precarious and part-time jobs, longer hours, less attention to health and safety, and much more. It's called reforming working conditions, according to the corporate bosses it will boost efficiency and profitability, though nothing there to improve the living standards of the ordinary people, on the contrary, we pay for the so called boost in efficiency and profitability by deteriorating living standards.

           Though it would be foolish to think this is a phenomena of today. Far from it, it has been the pattern since the start of this insane, unjust system of capitalism first raised its ugly head. The system has always been to get as much labour and effort out of the employee for as little an outlay as possible. That is the foundation stone of capitalism. Austerity has been part and parcel of the capitalist system, it just that it has gone under different names. Its true title should be plundering the poor.

         If we look back at the trend of wages away back  in the 1800's we will see the same pattern, wages going up and then down, according to what the bosses could enforce. It has never been an ever growing improvement in our living standards. Yes, conditions have improved, but always on the back of determined struggle of those employed, not through the generosity of the boss.

Wage trends (weekly)

1836-37

1841-42

1846-47

Cotton spinners (machine)

35/-

25/-

26/-

Cotton spinners (power)

11/-

7/-

8/-

Coalminers

25/-

15/-

20/-

Bricklayers

21/-

21/-

24/-

Joiners

20/-

?

22/-

Stone masons

22/-

18/-

22/6

Handloom weavers

6/-

6/-

7/-

Railway labourers

14/-

?

15/-

Railway masons

21/-

21/-

31/-

    Looking at these rates and comparing it with my wage as a first year apprentice in the shipyards in 1950, it appears I was living in the 1800's as my princely sum was 19/- a week. 

      Our income from our selling our skills to the parasite class has stagnated, risen and then fallen, and this pattern has continued right up to today. Though I believe to day it is becoming more brutal as capitalism struggles to survive with its need for ever expanding growth in a world of finite resources.

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

Murderers In Fine Suits.

    They walk around in expensive suits, live in large mansions, are driven around in limousines, are seen as "respectable" members of the community. They are paid unimaginable wealth, CEO and high-flyers in the arms industry. Their wealth is produced by the deaths of thousands if not millions. They grow fat on the destruction of towns and cities, the pile of their wealth is only out sized by the pile of maimed and dead children. With a smile and a friendly hand shake, they sign another contract and another city is crushed, its inhabitants, killed maimed and displaced. Their vile business is seen as a vital part of the "economy" in this insane world of wealth before morality. If you make weapons of mass destruction and their ancillaries, you are complicit in the deaths of millions of innocent people, every penny you have is stained in blood, you are a murderer in an expensive suit. Those victims of your crimes will seek justice.

      This from Act For Freedom Now:

PDF Flyer EN, + ES, IT
     “On the altar of technological development we are sacrificing
every breath of our individual freedom and the possibility
to live a life that is really worth it.”
NICOLA GAI.

      “Anarchy rejects that life becomes an ideology,
shit or a little more, at best, an impotent exit for frustrated men and women.”
ALFREDO COSPITO.

      It is a fact that the Italian war industry represents one of the “excellencies” of the national economy, as it is one of the few sectors that knows no crisis, it is certainly not a novelty, this field of investment that produces such high profits that are considered indispensable for the economy of any government, of any colour, with the due respect of all those who enjoy, for example, the hypocritical condemnation of the aggression carried out by Turkey towards the inhabitants and rebels of Rojava and who call for the formal blockade of the export of weapons produced in Italy to Turkey announced by the current government.
     And if it is true that “the war begins here”, which is where the weapons are produced, this is even more true because here, in Genoa, is one of the offices of Leonardo (formerly Finmeccanica), a state-controlled company, which is a world leader in the research and production of advanced technological systems for the military industries and for social control: Helicopters, fighter jets, drones, radars, attack systems, military land and sea vehicles, ammunition, electronic warfare systems and tele-operated, coastal and border protection systems, electronic social control systems to be applied in cities, ports and airports, and much more; Their catalogue is very wide.
    Leonardo “guarantee the principles of democracy in the digital society” (as the company slogan says) and they produce weapons of mass destruction responsible every day for the death of men and women on the borders of the European Fortress and in several corners of the world, just to give some examples; from Rojava to Syria, from Libya to Yemen.
     The company also manages and controls many other war-related companies, including Agusta Westland, Selex Es, Oto Melara and many others.
    Until 2017, the Leonardo-Finmeccanica group had control of Ansaldo Energia based in Genoa, a company that produces structures for power plants, thermal plants and, especially with the Ansaldo nuclear division; Another company that produces death, desolation and the devastation of nature through technological progress that is necessary and essential for subsequent and unstoppable industrial development.
    And for this reason, right here in Genoa, on May 7, 2012, two anarchists decided to specifically express their rejection of this techno-industrial system by confronting Roberto Adinolfi, CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare at home, and returning to him, with a pistol shot to the leg, a sample of the harmful effects of the company’s projects he has guided and sown around the world.
      For this reason, Alfredo Cospito and Nicola Gai were arrested on September 14, 2012. On October 30, during the first hearing of the trial, the two fellow anarchists claimed responsibility for the attack on Ansaldo Nucleare and Finmeccanica, membership of the Olga Cell FAI / FRI and were subsequently sentenced to 10 years and 8 months prison for Alfredo, 9 years and 4 months for Nicola. They are charged for a criminal terrorist attack (without the possibility of having access to parole, house arrest, conditional release, etc.).
     They are still detained in the high surveillance section of Ferrara prison. Since then, they never stopped making their voices heard, by participating, from behind those walls, in the anarchist debate about the radical fight against state repression, about solidarity inside and outside prisons, about the ways to oppose the system’s domination of individuals and to recover the possibility of a life free from authority. From Alfredo’s statement read in the courtroom: “There are many ways to objectively oppose nuclear energy (and not only that, we would say), by blocking trains that transport waste, to sabotage of the pylons that transport the electricity produced by atomic energy. It occurred to me to hit the biggest person responsible for this disaster in Italy: Roberto Adinolfi, CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare.”
     And again: “The time has come for the great rejection, a refusal made of a plurality of resistances, each of which is a special case; some are possible, necessary, unlikely; others are spontaneous, wild, lonely, concerted, explosive or violent. Ours was lonely and violent.”
      In our opinion, any struggle that, rightly, opposes the production of death and destruction through which these monstrous companies accumulate their profits, cannot ignore solidarity activities to those who have tried to jam the gears of this industrial techno-system: This system will not fall by itself, it will not extinguish itself. Only the action of men and women of certainty, based on the rejection of slavery to the authorities and who reject the commitments imposed by the system itself, and generous in their action, can undermine this prevailing logic of profit and technological order.

FREEDOM FOR ALFREDO AND NICOLA

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

Free And Fair Elections, Aren't We Lucky!!

          Meddling in elections is seen as something other nations do to us in the "free democratic" West, but our system guarantees "free and fair" elections!! Aren't we lucky? According the the powers that be in this country we have just   completed another "free and fair" election, well done Britain.
     Does anybody actually believe that the smear campaign launched against Jeremy Corbyn was based on unbiased honest reporting of facts?
       Of course anyone with an open mind and a knowledge of past elections should know that anybody who stands up and talks about changing the system radically to make it much fairer, and mentions "socialist ideas", will be viciously attacked by the system, they will have their character assassinated and their chances of winning the election completely demolished. That's how the rich and powerful protect their wealth and power, and it is not likely to change for the next election.

     Caitlin Johnstone explains it nicely in her article:

Someone Interfered In The UK Election, And It Wasn’t Russia.

       Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my fingertips indisputable proof that egregious election meddling took place in the United Kingdom on Thursday.
      Before you get all excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for revealing this evidence to you, nor am I going to draw in millions of credulous viewers waiting with bated breath for a bombshell revelation of an international conspiracy that will invalidate the results of the election.
In fact, hardly anyone will even care.
       Hardly anyone will care because this election interference has been happening right out in the open, and was perfectly legal. And nobody will suffer any consequences for it.
      Nobody will suffer any consequences for interfering in the UK election because the ones doing the interfering were extremely powerful, and that’s who the system is built to serve.
      As of this writing British exit polls are indicating a landslide victory for the Tories. Numerous other factors went into this result, including most notably a Labour Party ambivalently straddling an irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit, but it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.
      Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been described as the most smeared politician in history, and this is a fair description. Journalist Matt Kennard recently compiled documentation of dozens of incidents in which former and current spooks and military officials collaborated with plutocratic media institutions to portray Corbyn as a threat to national security. Journalistic accountability advocates like Media Lens and Jonathan Cook have been working for years to compile evidence of the mass media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the other day The Grayzone documented how establishment narrative manager Ben Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the election, a psyop that was uncritically circulated by both right-wing outlets like The Telegraph as well as ostensibly “left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.
      Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by billionaire media outlets, his view of Palestinians as human beings saw him targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby as exposed in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. For a mountain of links refuting the bogus antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check out the deluge of responses to this query I made on Twitter the other day.
      This interference continued right up into the day before the election, with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg flagrantly violating election rules by reporting that early postal votes had been illegally tallied and results were “looking very grim for Labour”.
      The historically unprecedented smear campaign that was directed at Corbyn from the right, the far-right, and from within his own party had an effect. Of course it did. If you say this today on social media you’ll get a ton of comments telling you you’re wrong, telling you every vote against Labour was exclusively due to the British people not wanting to live in a Marxist dystopia, telling you it was exclusively because of Brexit, totally denying any possibility that the years of deceitful mass media narrative management that British consciousness was pummelled with day in and day out prior to the election had any impact whatsoever upon its results.
     Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media have no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.
      I am not claiming here that the billions of dollars worth of free mass media reporting that was devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had a greater effect on the election results than Brexit and other strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just saying that it definitely had a much greater effect than the few thousand dollars Russian nationals spent on social media memes in the US, which the American political/media class has been relentlessly shrieking about for three years. To deny that a media smear campaign the size and scope of that directed at Corbyn had an effect is the same as denying that advertising, a trillion-dollar industry, has an effect.
      Which means that plutocrats and government agencies indisputably interfered in the British election, to an exponentially greater extent than anything the Russians are even alleged to have done. Yet according to British law it was perfectly legal, and according to British society it was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly legal and acceptable for powerful individuals to have a vastly greater influence on a purportedly democratic election than any of the ordinary individuals voting in it.
      A free and healthy society would not work this way. A free and healthy society would view all forms of manipulation as taboo and unacceptable. A free and healthy society would not allow the will of members of one small elite class to carry more weight than the will of anyone else. A free and healthy society would give everyone an equal voice at the table, and look after everyone’s concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a few individuals who already have far too much abusing their power and wealth to obtain even more.

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Gees, What Have They Done!!!

      So after the manufactured phony excitement over the recent crooks and liars competition, our as our lords and master like to call it, the general election, the people have spoken, and the result is that we have a far right government. So for the next five years you will be expected to get your head down and in a subservient manner work your arse off, and try to remember that some multi million private yacht needs repaired. Abandon your interest in politics, you have done your bit with that little cross on that little bit of paper. Now just knuckle down and let the rich and powerful get on with their plundering of the poor. Or you could look across the seas to Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Haiti, France, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, and many more areas where the people have taken to the streets saying, enough is enough, we will not be impoverished any more, we will not pay homage to the rich parasitical corporate class.

Jacob Rees-Mogg at work on a salary of £76,011, paid by you.

  

   Over the last ten years, under a less far right regime, we have seen our social services decimated, our education system crumble, our National Health service, starved to breaking point. Now with old Etonians like Jacob Rees-Mogg, personal wealth estimated at £55 million ( £150 million if you include his wife's little bundle), and his other greed driven, power crazy Etonian buddie, Boris Johnson, he who thinks the truth is an illusion, do you think that they will act with the welfare of the people at heart, or will they give free rein to their friends and cronies in  corporate exploiting and plundering machine?

    In my mind, the real people have still to speak, if they do, it will have to be loud and clear and quick.

Boris Johnson, sacked twice for lying, now Prime Minister.

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From Baghdad To Beirut---

Iraq 2019.

 

      It is difficult to grasp the full extent of what is happening in Iraq, Iran and other places where the people are battling the state on the streets. Most of our information is filtered through the mainstream media, and as most of us realise, that comes with its own particular bias. Getting information from the place of struggle can be difficult and can pass through many hands, receiving a little distortion as it travels.
 

 Iraq 2019.

 

      This morning I received this unsolicited email this morning, it may seem to be rather long, but certainly contains passion and appears to be from the area, and perhaps gives us a little bit more insight to what is going on. It is not my place to edit it, but I feel it is my place to pass it on, and hope you do likewise.

   I particularly like the paragraph---- This proletarian struggle is not an “anarchist” struggle, it is neither a “socialist” struggle, nor a struggle for the sake of democratic power, or the national State – it’s a revolutionary, class and international struggle against the capitalist dictatorship over life (over the Earth)… It is a struggle to liberate life from all forms of human slavery…

"From Baghdad to Beirut, no Shia no Sunni, let's continue the struggle."

    The Iraqi government is made up of all bourgeois factions in Iraq, and it is accepted by regional forces and the world bourgeoisie, but the proletariat tried to bring it down… The “Green Zone” in Baghdad is the centre of the world capitalism; the proletariat tried to occupy it and lost a lot of lives for it…The port of Basra is a global corridor for oil exports and international trade and proletariat blocked it, and tried to control it.
     The Iraqi police, security forces, special forces and military forces are forces of global capitalism (with the participation of Shia, Sunni, Christian, Kurdish, and Turkmen bourgeoisie, with a large numbers of regional and international forces, including troops of America and Europe, Turkey, Iran, etc.), but the proletariat attacked them, their centres and detachments in the streets, and as many as 650 proletarians have been killed by them and more than 20 thousand wounded (this is not to mention the number of abducted and imprisoned…).
      The proletariat in all rebellious areas of Iraq burned down the headquarters of the political parties (religious and national without exception), they burned down the houses of members of parliament and State officials and they also attacked security and police stations, media, judicial institutions and the Ministry of Justice, newspapers and television stations… By doing this, the proletariat attacked the whole State.
    According to the prime minister Adel Abd al-Mahdi, this movement destroyed the national economy (capitalism) in all its aspects. The proletariat in its struggle attacked without exception everything, any symbol, any person, any base attached to the history of the authority and repression including military, diplomatic institutions, trade centres and secret services, internal as well as external. All the attacks on the repressive forces of Pasdaran in the city of Karbala are not really anti-Iranian as the media said, but it is a part of the class action against the repressive forces and centres in all their forms just like the attack on the Green Zone and the other places. Isn’t it clear from proletarian united action and its slogans: “Down with all the thieves”, “From Baghdad to Beirut, no Shiite and no Sunni”, “No country, no work, we all stay in the street!”, “No country, no work until the downfall of the system” – that the proletariat targets counter-revolution in its totality, just like it did in Basra in September 2018!?
    The bourgeoisie has always tried to distort the class path of our revolutionary movement. They have resorted to various methods to empty the revolutionary content of our struggle; they create stories of conspiracy and call it names. All of this in order to cover up its bloody crackdown and the destruction of our revolutionary movement in bourgeois conflicts. The proletariat has risen up on a social level against all the exploiters and it intends to terminate the whole of their power.
      The proletariat understands very much that external and internal capitalists (Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Jews…), the wealthiest from all over the world are part of the State and they are all united in exploiting the humanity, therefore, proletarian struggle is without a doubt a united struggle against all of them…
    The militant proletariat does not allow anyone to represent it; it has no demands and it does not negotiate. It is not attached to any political programme… Isn’t this rebellion a deep class struggle against the capitalist system in its entirety? The only programme of the proletariat is its determination to continue and direct the unified struggle against the dictatorship of Capital and State.
     “We are against all of you, and we take everything.” That’s the autonomy of the class and the strength of the struggle of our movement… And therefore, it is not easy for the State to extinguish or to root out this movement. The proletariat is not in a waiting situation or in a depressed mood… Since the beginning of the movement and until now, even with massive repression and murdering of the State, this movement continues and it is expanding the scope of its struggles and tactics day after day. For example, in Baghdad, the movement formed combat units and spread all around the city to interrupt the traffic, and take control of the bridges and important points. It set up its collective coordinating activities to extend and expand its struggle to plan the next day and the next target, it published leaflets about its struggle, and it treated injured comrades… all of this is the coordination, organization and expansion of their struggle capacity.
     The proletarian struggles in the past always took energy from each other. That is how the struggle continues and exercises its class interests and internationalism as well. By breaking the geographical borders, ideological, economical and democratic frameworks and the national State… this movement targets the Capital and global capitalism. And today the exactly same struggle exists in reality. The proletariat nowadays (from Haiti, France, Hong Kong, Egypt, Latin America, Lebanon to Iraq and Iran) is in the same struggle, we are fighting the same enemy, we have the same interests and the same hope: the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of community of human life without wage labour, exploitation, profit, Capital, work, pollution, injustice, wars and destruction.
     This proletarian struggle is not an “anarchist” struggle, it is neither a “socialist” struggle, nor a struggle for the sake of democratic power, or the national State – it’s a revolutionary, class and international struggle against the capitalist dictatorship over life (over the Earth)… It is a struggle to liberate life from all forms of human slavery… If today young militants have come out on the street and they take a lead in the struggle and heavily participate in it, it is something natural!
      Because this generation, while running daily from the catastrophe of capital, is dreaming of life. They are those who have no stability in life… what they have today may not last until tomorrow. What they feel was close to them today; tomorrow seems to be very far. The greed of capitalism, its wars, and its successive disasters left them in a constant struggle. This situation intensifies more and more at the global level and becomes a hell that pushes the proletariat into the struggle… Their struggle is a struggle of life against this capitalist hell. The proletarians in the struggle understand capitalism and its catastrophe and they feel alive and they are happy in their struggle for life.
     The proletarian struggle is the struggle of the exploited class against the world capitalism. It is a struggle for life, against the exploitative and deadly relations of the global Capital. The proletariat continues to struggle: from France to Lebanon, from Iraq to Chile, from Hong Kong to Iran… and calls upon all other neighbouring areas where it is possible to unite and to co-ordinate class action in this struggle against capitalism.
     From our region the participation of the proletariat in Turkey, Israel and Iran… blocks the possibilities of the capitalist war and pushes our international class war towards a better perspective. Down with exploitation and oppression… Down with war… Down with capitalism… For the continuation of the class war all over the World.

From the comrades of international struggle

Internationalist Proletarians

Middle East

November 2019

International and Class Communication: internationalist@riseup.net

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Our Struggle Ends When We Win The World.

        Glasgow/Clydeside was once known as the Red Clyde, a period of radical action by thousands of ordinary people from the area. However some historians  seem intent in watering that history down to a wishy-washy very pale pink. However, no matter how the establishment historians and their sidekicks in the media, try to portray the Red Clyde as a wishy-washy very pale pink, the real history defies them. The people of the Clydeside have a proud history, they have a heritage, and it is one of continuous struggle for justice and a better world. There were more industrial strikes on Clydeside during the first world war than before or after, Hundreds of thousands organised rent strikes from Clydebank to Glasgow, and successfully forced the UK government to bring in the 1915 rent restriction act. The Clydeside history is littered with hard and sometimes brutal struggles, struggles of people who demanded more, who demanded change, and in many case got it.

      However the struggle is not over, we are now in the midst of the most brutal attack on the living conditions of the ordinary people for many a decade. Despite the struggles and victories of the past, we are once again heading back to the poverty of the thirties, increase homelessness, increased child poverty, working families relying on charities. It is once again time to reignite that fighting spirit of the Red Clyde, time to call on that solidarity, that unity of purpose. We don't have the shipyards, we don't have the engineering factories, but we do have the people of Glasgow/Clydeside and their history of determined struggle, and their desire for justice. Now more than ever, we need that Red Clyde radical spirit to defend and improve our living conditions and those of tomorrow's generation.

           A poster from the 80's. calling on that Red Clydeside spirit. We are alive, from the rent strikes, to bloody Friday, to the poll-tax and beyond, our struggle will end when we win the world.

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When A District Gets Milked.

      I was born in Garngad and move to the Springburn area, where I lived the largest slice of my life and it is still my part of the world. In my many years I have seen some very dramatic changes to our city and to my patch, Springburn.

 Springburn Road at Balgrayhil, around 1940/50s

     

       Springburn, once a busy industrial centre, known as a railway town in its own right. A mass of different industries supplying the massive steam locomotive industry in its area, the expansive St Rollox railway repair yard, Tennant’s Chemical factory on Sighthill, once the largest chemical plant in Europe, with its tall chimney belching out its noxious fumes over the area, it even had the killing hand of a Cape Asbestos factory. Its main street, Springburn Road was a busy highway of trams buses and shops. Springburn Park was a shining jewel in the dirt and grim of this densely populated industrial area, the park boasted a magnificent winter gardens, once the largest glasshouse in Scotland at 842 sq. m.
       Today Springburn is a shadow of its former self, dominated by a very busy dual carriageway that split the community asunder, that magnificent glass structure in the park now resembles the skeletal structure of some bygone dinosaur. Its industries gone, its houses demolished and most of its people dispersed to other parts. 

Springburn Park winter gardens today, photo by Stevie Douglas.

      So what now? Here are some statistics for the area. Though a few years old, I doubt if they have improved that much, if at all, due to the ensuing years of austerity, benefit cuts and social services ravished.

        Life expectancy for both males and females has risen in recent years in Springburn but has remained below the Glasgow average. In the most recent period shown (2008-12), life expectancy was notably lower than the Scottish average, particularly for men.

Adults in income deprivation,       3,610 – 29.9%   2012.
Working age in employment deprivation,    2.120 – 27.8%   2012
Children in poverty,       1,100 – 46.4%   2011

    Springburn ranks in the most financially distressed 10% of constituencies in Glasgow.  2016.

     That’s how capitalism works, it milks you for all it is worth and then when it deems fit, moves on and abandons you to poverty and deprivation. Surely we can do better than this!

Springburn Road today. 

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