17 January 2013
Hmmm… I’ve been watching the ‘left’ here in the UK tear itself apart literally for decades, and it had been going on for decades prior to my arrival on the scene. What’s difficult to swallow is the attitude expressed below (which I’m reprinting in its entirety), where the writer reacts to the events that are currently tearing the SWP apart, as if it’s something new on the ‘left’.
25 December 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
I don’t remember much about my high school years. Some of the highs (few in number) come back to me but it was mostly lows which probably explains why I don’t remember much. It’s not that I was dumb, I just had no motivation, but I was interested in history, jazz and politics (thanks to my parents) and even won a prize for a history essay as well as starting up the school’s first jazz appreciation society (not appreciated by the school I might add, the head of music tore down my posters).
30 September 2011
Note: This is in the way of a continuation of my last essay ‘In the belly of the beast‘.
Nothing could illustrate the paradox better than the Labour Party, ‘the party of labour’, financially supported largely by Britain’s biggest trade unions (representing around five million public employees) bankrolling the party which has led the way in attacking what’s left of the gains made since 1945. In a word, a traitorous political party that once again, faces the task of reinventing itself.
4 May 2011
I know I keep hammering on about this but it still hasn’t sunk in with those who profess to be on the left, bemused, or perhaps it’s bewitched, as they are by the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Take the latest bleat from down under:
“I firmly believe the left and progressive forces have made a serious error in viewing and equating Libya with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Libya is not the same situation; there has been a popular peoples uprising.” — ‘Libya: The left should not oppose call for military intervention‘, Steven Katsineris, Greenleft
28 March 2011
“The world is suffering, at the same time, the consequences of climatic changes; shortages and prices of foods, military spending and the squandering of natural and human resources are increasing. War was the timeliest event that could happen at this time.” — ‘Partnership of Equals‘ By Fidel Castro Ruz
I’m glad someone is on the ball.
18 November, 2009
By now it must surely be obvious to everyone that a vast gulf exists between the rulers and the ruled, so much so that the ruled have all but given up listening. The ruling elite are now so desperate that hardly a day goes by without some political dinosaur telling us that ‘we have to reestablish the trust of the people, a trust that has completely broken down’. But it ain’t ain’t working and with good reason.
Enter the British National Party (BNP).
1 December 2008
In another life I lived in New York City and for about six of the seventeen years I spent in the Big A I was the designer of the US’s first Hispanic museum, El Museo del Barrio, situated in an enormous building, a block long and half-a-block deep, a former Boys Harbor orphanage. New York’s Hispanic community during and after this period was a powerhouse of creativity in all the artistic fields, music, fine art, photography, fashion, theatre and of course, writing. I was extremely lucky and privileged to have been a part of it.
11 July 2008
I was raised in a working class family. My father was a full-time trade union official for the Musicians Union and my mother, before she became a full-time ‘housewife’, had been a chorus girl working in pantomime and a member of the Tiller Girls (the Brit version of The Rockettes) and during WWII she worked in a factory making bomb sights at Fry’s Diecasting where she campaigned on behalf of the female workers for equal pay (in the face of opposition from the male-run union). Not exactly typical of working class life but definitely of it.
The New Dark Age 