The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state.
Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given to him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.
The persecution of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange must end. Even the British government clearly believes it must end.
Britain
Tom Waits once said that writing songs against war was like throwing peanuts at a gorilla. Which may be true, but no one said gorillas liked peanuts in their face.
After all, the veteran American songwriter made the comment as a self-deprecating reference to the anti-war songs on his 2004 album Real Gone 鈥 inspired by the Bush adminstration's wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Waits noted: 鈥淏ut then I think, look how important soul music was during the civil rights movement.
This week, by law, I have to deride Russell Brand as a self-obsessed, annoying idiot.
No article or comment on Twitter can legally be written now unless it does this, so by the weekend the Sunday magazine recipes will go, 鈥淕oose and marmalade paella, serves six 鈥 unless one of the six is Russell Brand in which case he can make his own dinner as he鈥檚 such a rebel I suppose he doesn鈥檛 agree with ovens鈥.
How does capitalism survive? This was the question that greeted the 11th annual Historical Materialism conference in London. Held from November 6 to 9 at the Vernon Square Campus, it was a four-day long broad marriage of global leftist activists and academics run by the Marxist journal of the same name.
Posed as a simple question, it quickly developed into as many answers and narratives as there are positions within the left.
The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake
Roger Hermiston
Aurum, 2013
362 pages, $39.99 (hb)
George Blake was smart, resourceful and committed.
A teenage courier with the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance during the war and a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) spy after it, Blake then picked the wrong cause, says Roger Hermiston in The Greatest Traitor, converting to Marxism and becoming a Soviet mole in the SIS.
Pride
Directed by Matthew Warchus
Written by Stephen Beresford
Starring Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West & Ben Schnetzer
In Australian cinemas now
If you haven't seen the recently released Pride yet, you need to get to a cinema. It'll moisten your eyes, swell your heart, make you tap your feet and inspire you to join the next pride parade.
The statement below was released by the British (FBU).
***
The FBU Executive Council is appalled by the ongoing siege of the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria by Islamic State (IS) forces.
The executive council notes:
鈥 The IS attack on Kobane and resistance of Kurdish and other local forces.
鈥 The role of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE (all British/US allies) in building, assisting and encouraging the growth of IS.
The Making of English Social Democracy
By Peter Cockcroft.
Australian Ebook Publisher
Kindle edition
236 pages, $1.05
It may seem a strange ask to encourage socialists to examine the politics of late Victorian Britain when there is so much else to be done. But Peter Cockcroft makes a significant case that understanding this aspect of the past can help us to make some sense of where we are now.
Left Unity is a new political group in Britain created out of a call last year by filmmaker Ken Loach for a new party to the left of Labour, which has moved rightwards in recent years and supports anti-worker austerity measures. The call was supported by thousands of people and Left Unity held its founding conference in November last year.
麻豆传媒 Weekly's Denis Rogatyuk spoke with Left Unity's national secretary Kate Hudson, a veteran campaigner who is also general secretary of the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a 鈥渕assive鈥 bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said: 鈥淎nything that flies on everything that moves.鈥
As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery 鈥 including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields 鈥 I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again.
鈥淏ritain needs a pay rise!鈥 That was the main running theme through this year鈥檚 annual congress of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) of England and Wales, which covers 6.2 million workers in 58 unions in England and Wales, held in Liverpool from September 7 to 10.
Its key demand 鈥 for a 锟1-an-hour wage rise across the entire public sector 鈥 was the main factor behind the successful July 10 public sector general strike.
Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies & Revolution
Laurie Penny
Bloomsbury, 2014
English author Laurie Penny describes herself as a 鈥渏ournalist, activist, feminist, troublemaker, nerd and net denizen鈥. Her book, Unspeakable Things, is a collection of polemical essays in which Penny takes aim at mainstream (liberal) feminism, which she says 鈥渞emains tepid and cowardly鈥.
- Previous page
- Page 31
- Next page