July 2011
5 posts
Reflecting on Winston Churchill - time for a new...
We love a good demonisation campaign, don’t we? Fidel, Gaddafi, Saddam, Ahmedinejad, Mugabe (and, in a different generation, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and Ho Chi Minh) are/were evil masterminds hell-bent on destroying civilisation as we know it. Being British, we love to mock the uncivilised, unsophisticated ways of the rest of the world while we quietly drink tea grown by Indian peasants...
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Celebrating Sandinista Day with an extremely brief...
As tweeted a few minutes ago…
Happy Sandinista Day! On 19 July 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the vicious Somoza government in Nicaragua.
Sandinista principles: literacy, nationalization, land reform, unionisation, education, women’s rights, democratic liberties.
Within six months of the revolution, the national literacy rate rose from under 50% to...
An African viewpoint on Libya.
An exceptionally interesting article by Cameroonian analyst Jean-Paul Pougala. First published in http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72575
It was Gaddafi’s Libya that offered all of Africa its first revolution in modern times – connecting the entire continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance...
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Why has the anti-war movement developed so little...
This evening I went to a protest outside Parliament demanding an end to the bombing of Libya. The protest was organised jointly by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War Coalition.
It was wack. These two enormous left-wing organisations were not able to organise more than around 35 people to protest in London against our government’s participation in the brutal assault...
Reasons to oppose the planned privatisation of...
The press is so focused on the phone hacking scandal, nobody seems to have noticed that the government is planning to privatise, erm, everything. Here are a few quick points about why privatisation is bad for ordinary people.
Services that don’t generate profit can be stopped. Free markets are about profit, not social obligation.
The interests of private companies often run counter to...
