Sadly, the poppy acts more as a rallying cry to support military solutions to the world’s problems, instead of a heart-felt and genuine plea for an end to the suffering of war.

classe: the article is about Canada but works well for UK too.

The part on “Non-violent fighting” for me does not make too much sense, the Russian way (interrupting their fight in the WWI) has always been the way. Soldiers refusing to fight and then fighting the bourgeois pigs back. If it has to be war, it must be class war.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Workers World editorial, May 29, 2012:

Spokespeople from the NATO countries and their loyal media outlets have seized upon a massacre at Houla, Syria, to mobilize for open imperialist military intervention against the Syrian government and — and no one should doubt this — against the people of Syria. NATO governments have already begun expelling Syrian diplomats.

There seems to be no doubt at this time — May 29 — that a massacre took place. There is, however, much confusion about who exactly carried out the massacre. The corporate media is blaming the killings on the Syrian government and calling for foreign intervention. The Syrians, however, deny that their armed forces or police have taken part, blame the killings on the armed opposition and have themselves condemned the killings and are organizing an investigation.

While we have no special knowledge about what did or didn’t happen, we do have a treasury of knowledge of how the imperialists have manipulated such events in order to justify a war or intervention on a “humanitarian” basis. It is this type of manipulation that anti-war and anti-imperialist forces should be most on the alert for.

classe: this is exactly my position about the massacre. And about Syria’s crisis in general.

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Sukant Chandan, Sons of Malcolm

April 19 - Many secret papers exposing the atrocities of the british empire have come to light, papers which should have been in the public realm in the 1980s. Nothing especially new has come out of these papers, but it is another reminder of the white supremacist massive violent nature of the british empire.

michael white, a sour-faced stupid white man at the Guardian, who happens to be its associate editor, decides these atrocities were to the benefit of Asian peoples when he writes:

”But just because it is easy with hindsight to condemn or mock the excesses of the time doesn’t mean our parents and grandparents weren’t right to be nervous – or even that the often-brutal suppression of the Malayan insurgency didn’t do modern Malaysia, conspicuously prosperous and relatively open, a historic favour. Just think about neighbouring Burma.”

Another indicator that the britain is desperate to white-wash its colonial crimes in a pathetic attempt to resuscitate the british empire just as when we are living through a historical period when the british state and its international reach is disappearing into oblivion.

This futile attempt to bring the british empire back from the dead also has some dangerous elements to it:

1, the whole western imperialism system is in existentialist crisis, and in this crisis will go to desperate lengths to maintain its position in relation to the emerging anti-imperialist process of the Global South. Regime-change, sanctions, organising coups and outright war are the physical methods by which empire tries to maintain and bolster itself.

2, there is a campaign of lies and manipulation in the media, with empire trying to make people think white supremacy has gone, and that subjugation is actually freedom and liberation. So the nato blitz of Libya and regime-change there was actually freeing the Libyan people, and the rule of scores of murdering militias there is actually democracy.

This is also done cultural level with the white power structure managing to succeed in convincing many of our young people that they not need be concerned with the freedom struggle of the African/Afrikan people especially, but all the while using black cultural forms to divide young people from anti-imperialist concerns.

a british soldier doing us Asians ‘a favour’ in Malaya

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

What a pitiful spectacle.  Ozzie Guillen, the hard-partying eccentric who manages the Florida Marlins, sits weeping in the harsh glare of TV lights, forced by his bosses to recant his praise for Fidel Castro.  He’s already been punished with a five-game suspension, but the baseball thought-police won’t be placated until he does a literal “mea culpa.”

So, in his wonderfully mangled English, he begs forgiveness for saying “I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that fucker is still here.”  But what he really meant, he now says, is ever-so-subtly different: “Everybody in the world hates Fidel Castro, including myself.”

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Although the liberals at The Guardian try to dismiss her with snide anti-communism, Comrade Margot Honecker’s words are well worth reading.

Margot Honecker, 84, who as education minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) served alongside her husband, describes her homesickness for a “lost nation” and calls its demise a tragedy in an interview due to be broadcast on German television on Monday evening.

The documentary, which was years in the making due to Honecker’s dogged insistence she would never give an interview to “West German” media, shows her at home in Chile where she escaped to with her husband after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s.

“It is a tragedy that this land no longer exists,” she tells the interviewer, Eric Friedler, adding that, while she lives in Chile “my head is in Germany”. She does not, however, mean united Germany, rather the “better Germany” of the GDR.

“Margot Honecker showed no remorse, or discernment, she expressed no word of regret or apology,” he said.

“She might be in Chile, but she is very well connected to a whole guard of old comrades. She regularly spends hours reading the internet, knows exactly what’s going on in Germany, but says her desire for Germany is restricted to … the GDR.”

Honecker predicted the socialist Germany for which she and her husband, who died of cancer in 1994, fought for, would have its chance again. “We laid a seed in the ground which will one day come to fruition,” she says. “We just didn’t have enough time to realise our plans.”

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

I spent most of the afternoon at the Pentagon with the USAF strategic
studies group - guys who spend their time trying to understand and explain to the USAF chief the big picture in areas where they’re operating in. It was just myself and four other guys at the Lieutenant Colonel level,
including one French and one British representative who are liaising with
the US currently out of DC.

They wanted to grill me on the strategic picture on Syria, so after that I
got to grill them on the military picture. There is still a very low level
of understanding of what is actually at stake in Syria, what’s the
strategic interest there, the Turkish role, the Iranian role, etc. After a
couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF teams
(presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce missions and training opposition forces. One Air Force intel guy (US) said very carefully that there isn’t much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway, but all the operations being done now are being done out of ‘prudence.’ The way it was put to me was, ‘look at this way - the level of information known on Syrian OrBat this month is the best it’s been since 2001.’ They have been told to prepare contingencies and be ready to act within 2-3 months, but they still stress that this is all being done as contingency planning, not as a move toward escalation.

I kept pressing on the question of what these SOF teams would be working toward, and whether this would lead to an eventual air camapign to give a Syrian rebel group cover. They pretty quickly distanced themselves from that idea, saying that the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within. There wouldn’t be a need for air cover, and they wouldn’t expect these Syrian rebels to be marching in columns anyway.

So. There you go.

(Fonte: so-treu)

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

The dangerous situation in which our country is living makes us highlight the basic points made public by our party from the time the crisis has broken out until now:

1. To defend our homeland against any foreign intervention regardless of its name and justification, and to consider this mission as the fundamental circle and a compass guiding our political stances.

2. To restore security, stability and tranquility for citizens; through putting an end to devastation, sabotage murder and terrorism against citizens, public and private installations.

3. The emphasis that a political solution should be based on dialogue with all patriotic powers, which raise the following (no’s); no to foreign intervention; to violence, and sectarianism and ethnic orientations, on one hand and, to persist political dialogue with their powers, on the other.

4. To put an end to all security irregularities, to avoid hurting innocent civilians and to pay attention to the humanitarian and living conditions in areas where tension prevails.

5. To take all measures necessary for regaining the confidence of citizens, through releasing political prisons and detainees holding those who committed security transgressions accountable, and to make public the findings of the committee formed to investigate out law deeds, and to punish those who committed them severely.

6. To quicken the steps taken for the purpose of declaring an all embracing national reconciliation, spread the spirit of tolerance and forgiveness and to remove all the remains of the sorrowful fighting which took place in those areas.

7. - To have the articles of the constitution instantly implemented in letter and spirit once it has been adopted and to continue applying reforms in every field.

8. - To take to take all measures necessary for putting an end to the chaos in prices, to use an iron fist against “war merchants” who exploit the current circumstances to achieve narrow material gains at the expense of citizens.

9. - To strengthen the militancy of the party, widen its contacts with the masses as well as all patriotic forces and parties, whether they be old or new under the motto “Homeland is First”.

Politbureau of the Syrian Communist Party (Unified)
Damascus 22-2-2012

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

From Stephen Millies:

In 1965, Indonesia—which has the largest Muslim population in the world—also had the largest communist party in the world outside the socialist bloc. Three million people belonged to the PKI (the initials of the communist party), which was the oldest CP in Asia, with roots dating back before World War I. Twenty million people belonged to trade unions, women’s groups, peasant leagues and other organizations that were affiliated to the PKI.

The biggest political massacre since Hitler began in the fall of 1965. One million Indonesians were murdered, including 1 out of 10 people on the island of Bali. The U.S. embassy prepared lists of communists to be executed. The political genocide in Indonesia became the template for fascists around the world. The code name used by the coup plotters in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973 was “Jakarta.”

After many years of silence, the Jan. 19 New York Times has a large article on what happened in Indonesia. Using the search feature on the Times web site, I found that this is the first time in at least 31 years that this so-called paper of record has even mentioned the PKI.

New York Times: Veil of Silence Lifted in Indonesia