Keith Bennett of the CPGB-ML talks to George Galloway, on his Russia Today current affairs program ‘Sputnik’, about the latest developments in North Korea.
They discuss Kim Jong Un (5:13), the death penalty (3:35) and the execution of his ‘uncle’, General Jang Song Thaek (2.09), on charges of corruption and treason (4:32), his friendship with Dennis Rodman (5:58), and US imperialism’s hypocritical condemnation of these events (4:00), which should be viewed as another opportunistic, but integral part of imperialism’s ongoing media, diplomatic, and military aggression against the tiny, but defiant, Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea.
Keith refers, in passing to many aspects of contemporary Korean politics, as well as the path that has led them to this point, including Dennis Rodman’s visit to the DPRK (5:58), his – and the wider african-american community’s – friendly attitude towards the North Korean people, the Black Panther Party (7:12) in the USA, the role of SPORT in breaking down artificially erected political barriers (7:25), including the 1966 world cup, and the friendship struck up between the North Korean football team and the people of Middlesborough, in particular (7:55) that persists until this day.
The DPRK, like all other socialist governments and republics, puts tremendous emphasis on providing high levels of social provision, including free education to university level, and universal health care to its people (9:22). These are the reasons that finance capital so despises the government, system and people of the north of Korea.
Find out more – objective information – about the DPRK. Korea is one!
Watch:
DPR Korea – US Nuclear War Threat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3CLgEkAa-g
Hands off the DPRK! No to US Nuclear Blackmail!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v59gOKwKOo
DPR Korea Ambassador Q&A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_kTrbtQpo
DPRK Embassy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZeAd5oFomM
North Korea – Reality check!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCIoYNYNIj4
Kim Jong Il Memorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcCh-r9nG5Q
Jong Il: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b95smc6_aw
Juche: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOwgCPMZ3iI
Cuba and Korea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrY83sD1d9s
Join the struggle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwgDekJTVvc
Read:
Statement – US Stoking flames of war in Korea
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=statements&subName=display&statementId=52
The following short video is from the National Union of Syrian Students and was distributed by them at the World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Quito, Ecuador, December 2013.
The National Union of Syrian Students is an anti-imperialist youth organisation inside Syria struggling alongside the forces opposed to western backed intervention and terrorism. The video details the carnage being caused by booby trapped vehicles and car bombs – methods used by terrorists inside Syria who have no social base or local support. The only support such mercenaries receive is from the imperialists and their Trotskyite chums in the anti-war movement. The film shows scenes with which we are all familiar, hospitalised victims and terrifying bombings. The difference for those of us in “the west” is that when our televisions screens show these horrendous injuries they do so from the make shift tents of the occupiers, set up by imperialism and its lackey’s to treat the invaders and terrorists. This footage shows the terrible carnage being wreaked by the running dogs of imperialism, the vile scum trained in Saudi Arabia by Queen Lizzies royal pals to behead, slaughter and eat human flesh. These rats are being put to the sword by the brave Syrian people and their anti-imperialist government, led by President Assad and the Ba’ath Party and supported by the patriot forces.
Red Youth was part of the British delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students last month. Whilst there we were able to have meetings with Syrian’s including the NAtional Union of Syrian Students and members of the Communist Party of Syria – Bagdash. For more information about the festival please see our earlier posts:
Another inch of liberty is in the process of being clawed away. It seems the Oligarchs are securing their position for the long haul, and it is a long haul, as shown by the Tories proposed cuts for the next term they are confident of winning. They plan to implement deeper cuts to the benefits of the most vulnerable in society, when they are at their most vulnerable and sinking deeper and deeper into despair, destitution and poverty. And to safeguard this utopia of the bourgeoisie they are introducing laws with ever more vague parameters to criminalize the malcontents who will inevitably rise up against such oppression, because to paraphrase Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers.
Until the late 19th century much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town.
Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.
Street life in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquillised shoppers. Spontaneous gatherings of any other kind – unruly, exuberant, open-ended, oppositional – are banned. Young, homeless and eccentric people are, in the eyes of those upholding this dead-eyed, sanitised version of public order, guilty until proven innocent.
Now this dreary ethos is creeping into places that are not, ostensibly, owned or controlled by corporations. It is enforced less by gates and barriers (though plenty of these are reappearing) than by legal instruments, used to exclude or control the ever widening class of undesirables.
The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands – mostly young and poor – to bespoke laws. They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.
You get an asbo for behaving in a manner deemed by a magistrate as likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to other people. Under this injunction, the proscribed behaviour becomes a criminal offence. Asbos have been granted which forbid the carrying of condoms by a prostitute, homeless alcoholics from possessing alcohol in a public place, a soup kitchen from giving food to the poor, a young man from walking down any road other than his own, children from playing football in the street. They were used to ban peaceful protests against the Olympic clearances.
Inevitably, more than half the people subject to asbos break them. As Liberty says, these injunctions “set the young, vulnerable or mentally ill up to fail”, and fast-track them into the criminal justice system. They allow the courts to imprison people for offences which are not otherwise imprisonable. One homeless young man was sentenced to five years in jail for begging: an offence for which no custodial sentence exists. Asbos permit the police and courts to create their own laws and their own penal codes.
All this is about to get much worse. On Wednesday the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill reaches its report stage (close to the end of the process) in the House of Lords. It is remarkable how little fuss has been made about it, and how little we know of what is about to hit us.
The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or older who “has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person”. It would replace asbos with ipnas (injunctions to prevent nuisance and annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service order on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.
The bill also introduces public space protection orders, which can prevent either everybody or particular kinds of people from doing certain things in certain places. It creates new dispersal powers, which can be used by the police to exclude people from an area (there is no size limit), whether or not they have done anything wrong.
While, as a result of a successful legal challenge, asbos can be granted only if a court is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that antisocial behaviour took place, ipnas can be granted on the balance of probabilities. Breaching them will not be classed as a criminal offence, but can still carry a custodial sentence: without committing a crime, you can be imprisoned for up to two years. Children, who cannot currently be detained for contempt of court, will be subject to an inspiring new range of punishments for breaking an ipna, including three months in a young offenders’ centre.
Lord Macdonald, formerly the director of public prosecutions, points out that “it is difficult to imagine a broader concept than causing ‘nuisance’ or ‘annoyance'”. The phrase is apt to catch a vast range of everyday behaviours to an extent that may have serious implications for the rule of law”. Protesters, buskers, preachers: all, he argues, could end up with ipnas.
The Home Office minister, Norman Baker, once a defender of civil liberties, now the architect of the most oppressive bill pushed through any recent parliament, claims that the amendments he offered in December will “reassure people that basic liberties will not be affected”. But Liberty describes them as “a little bit of window-dressing: nothing substantial has changed.”
The new injunctions and the new dispersal orders create a system in which the authorities can prevent anyone from doing more or less anything. But they won’t be deployed against anyone. Advertisers, who cause plenty of nuisance and annoyance, have nothing to fear; nor do opera lovers hogging the pavements of Covent Garden. Annoyance and nuisance are what young people cause; they are inflicted by oddballs, the underclass, those who dispute the claims of power.
These laws will be used to stamp out plurality and difference, to douse the exuberance of youth, to pursue children for the crime of being young and together in a public place, to help turn this nation into a money-making monoculture, controlled, homogenised, lifeless, strifeless and bland. For a government which represents the old and the rich, that must sound like paradise.
A tribute to the great and much lamented freedom fighter, Nelson Rohilalal Mandela, written by our South African comrade Khwezie Kadalie, who played an active role in the armed struggle to overthrow Apartheid.
The dichotomy between overblown rhetoric about civil, political, economic, social and human rights, on the one hand, and the omnipresent income inequalities and the conditions of squalor which blight the lives of millions of black South Africans, on the other hand, is all too obvious. The sluggish response to the police massacre of 34 miners at Marikana was a brutal reminder of the gulf dividing the ANC leadership and the poorer sections of the population.
The glaring contrast in the lives of those who tweet on the best technology and those who do not have sufficient food to eat hardly needs pointing out. Wealth is still dominated by the white minority. According to a 2007 survey, white South Africans earn seven times as much as their black counterparts. A white person born in 2009 can expect to live to the age of 71, as against the 48 years that a black person can expect. It is a shameful statistic, but true, that inequality of income presently is worse than even during the decades of apartheid, with the second-worst Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) among 136 countries.
The black masses of South Africa have achieved political freedom – doubtless an historic advance. They have, however, yet to achieve economic freedom. The power base of monopoly capital, local and foreign, as well as white economic privilege, is intact.
Lack of economic justice is a festering sore and a source of great frustration, anger and sheer hate bubbling just beneath the surface, without addressing which there will be no peace in South Africa. The next phase of the liberation struggle in South Africa is bound to tackle this question and usher in changes which will not be to the liking of the privileged minority.
Amidst the media frenzy following the death of Mandela, with one-sided saturation reporting and wall-to-wall coverage emphasising Mandela’s powers of reconciliation, the following thoughtful comment furnished a healthy antidote to the sickening extravaganza aimed at rewriting the history of the South African liberation struggle with the sole purpose of influencing the future course of its development to the advantage of imperialism and the local elites alike:
” As Mandela led South Africa through the peaceful transition to a ‘rainbow nation’ at the 1994 election, white support for him became near-universal, particularly among the young. But there is a negative side to this near-adulation: many still seem to think that after his journey from a prison cell to the presidency, no further change is required, and that the whites’ overwhelming economic privilege can be maintained.
“Whites often appeared to cling to Madiba, Mandela’s clan name as if to banish the thought of what might happen when he was gone. They are probably right to fear that without his forgiving presence, chillier winds may blow around them.
“South Africa has lost the greatest figure in its history, but Mandela’s death merely marks the end of the first phase in the country’s revolution. There is much change yet to come, and little of it will be palatable to those who imagine things can stay the same” (Raymond Whitaker, ‘Chillier winds may blow through the nation’, The Independent, 6 December 2013).
Birmingham Communist Party has begun the new year with a campaign highlighting the massive profits which are being made by local bus operator National Express at a time when Birmingham has some of the most deprived communities in the country who can ill afford another increase.
Despite making profits of £92million in just the first six months of 2013, National Express continue to put up the prices across the board for passengers. As a prelude to a sustained campaign comrades began the year with a spot of leafleting and spent the day chatting to passengers in the town center and distributing some leaflets which highlighted the gross extortion which is taking place and the need for working class organisation to oppose it.
In a number of wards in Birmingham official unemployment is well over 10% and illness and diseases such as TB which were for many years nearly eradicated are making a comeback. Social housing is in a dire state; damp, dank, rotted and crowded flats and houses are surrounded on all sides by streets that are plagued by rats, especially in the inner-city areas of Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath, Highgate and Small Heath where the problem is even worse than it is in Handsworth and other deprived working class areas. This is the reality for hundreds of thousands of residents who live in neglected and semi-derelict properties and streets with the connivance of local Labour Party Councillors who continue to push through cuts to services. Spiraling costs of travel are just one further problem and the numbers of youth who are being forced to skip fares and travel on outdated tickets is leading to an increased presence of heavy policing on the bus routes as the old bill step in to help the bus companies enforce their profiteering (yet another example of the police being mainly concerned with protecting the interests of business).
Of course for the “usual suspects” who play the role of the Birmingham “Left” the real issues for workers are making sure the British imperialists invade and slaughter Ba’athists in Syria, and when they’re not spending their week doing that they’re gossiping with other troto-revisionist octogenarians at the trades council. What Birmingham needs is a number of campaigns on issues that affect the working class, led by people not poisoned with the debilitating effects of trotskyism or social democracy. We’ve already got a stinking Labour council and no matter what the Morning Star says we don’t want any more of these “socialist” cuts!
Labour, Tory same old story. Fight the cuts, all the cuts!
Expose and target the robbers and scroungers; National Express, Starbucks, Poundland!
To get the new year off to a positive start, here’s an insightful comment from a recent applicant who applied to join Red Youth and wanted to get involved. More and more of us are starting to question all the dogma forced down our throats by the state and its running dogs the troto-revisionist fraternity; whether its about Assad, Gaddafi or the old enemy – Stalin and Mao(!), and Red Youth continues to grow and attract to its ranks the best amongst the British working class youth who want to actually do something rather than take out paper membership of a defunct Communist Party and receive the “honour” of being made “General Secretary” or “President” of some 3 member regional organisation of a party with nothing going for it but some semblance of officialdom.
If you feel the same as this comrade, if you shun paper membership or keyboard warrior status, and want to avoid the cultish excesses of those organisations run by two-man leadership committees on the pretext that its not the right time to build a “party”; do the right thing and get involved with Marxism Leninism! Red Youth is not the mover and shaker of the movement, but we set our goals high and fully intend to bring about the restoration of a revolutionary youth movement free from sickening ties to the imperialist blood soaked Labour Party and the weirdo’s and freaks of the Trotskyist grooming clubs. This comment is reproduced as it came and we’re proud to be associated with such honest observation:
“I am joining the red youth because I am sick of this rotten capitalist imperialist government that we have that is doing everything it possibly can to destroy the life’s of the working class in this country. Since they came to power they have already proven this for example in 2010 they raised the tuition fees to £9000 a year. Why they have done this well I will tell you comrades it is because they do not want the working class of this country to gave a good education or to achieve the best jobs I society instead they want these to be reserved for the rich ruling elite (not as if they already have the best chance of getting the best jobs). They want to keep the working class out of the top universities and to make these places no go areas for the poor and instead to turn them into some kind of breeding ground for the future ruling class.
They are cutting all of the welfare that is reserved for the poorest in society and to plunge them deeper into poverty meanwhile the capitalist media of this country constantly portray the poor as something for the rich to vet their anger at and are described as lazy, stupid and good for nothing scum. We are constantly told that to get up and look for jobs. Well how can we do this if they are not enough jobs to go around for example the city where I come from Glasgow there was a small Tesco that opened up as a part of a luxury flats complex along Great Western Road that had no more than 25 jobs going and 1000 applied for these. If they constantly tell us that there are enough jobs then why are things like this happening.
One more example of the Government’s attack on the poor is the rotten bedroom tax which means if you are a poor person that has only a tiny spare bedroom you will loose money that you desperately need to survive while the capitalist swine that are pushing all of these policies are all multi millionaires with large mansions, luxury cars and millions of pounds in their bank account makes me sick, and the whole time on the television and in the newspapers we are told by a bunch of over privileged greedy swine that why should pay for some poor person to be out of work for no fault of their own and cant get work and have a small bedroom because one of their children has grown up, moved out and has a life of their own. They are doing this because they want to demonize the working class and turn the rest of society against them to distract us from the crimes which they are committing.
This whole vile capitalist system that we have in place in this country is also a murdering imperils one because of all of the wars of aggression which they have waged around the world in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya destroying the countries and killing millions of people in the process. Why do they do this in the name of democracy and freedom so they say. But do not believe any of this bile the only reason why the imperialist powers invade these countries is because they want to occupy and to steal their resources and take them back and sell them to line their own pockets.
We should all take a stand and boycott these wars, the government and the army for these crimes which they are all guilty of committing. We as citizens should all take a stand and don’t support them. This can be done by not celebrating this British army or supporting armed forces day or the Royal (murdering) British Legion or the Poppy Appeal as they are nothing but lies and war propaganda to force us into supporting the war.
Now I want to talk about the rotten parasites of the British monarchy. These people are scum who do nothing but leach of the taxpayers of this country and pay no tax and live in a life of privilege and luxury that we can only ever dream of. I am sick of the media constantly pushing the pro royalist propaganda down our necks. This has been most evident over the last 2 years. In 2011 we had the royal weeding when we where supposed to celebrate two multi millionaires getting married while we paid for the whole thing and in 2012 we where supposed to celebrate 60 years of crap. These people need t get rid of and all of their riches should be taken away from them and the wealth redistributed among the workers.
I would now like to say I am joining the movement because I have been reading all of the stuff on both the red youth and the communist party of great Britain Marxist – Leninist and see the good work which they are doing and I agree with every one of the things they say.
It is good see that there are people that are standing up and making a difference and no longer putting up with this rotten capitalist class and making a real difference.
I would like to join because I want to make a difference and get up and do something instead of sitting about doing nothing about it.”
To get the new year off to a positive start, here’s an insightful comment from a recent applicant who applied to join Red Youth and wanted to get involved. More and more of us are starting to question all the dogma forced down our throats by the state and its running dogs the troto-revisionist fraternity; whether its about Assad, Gaddafi or the old enemy – Stalin and Mao(!), and Red Youth continues to grow and attract to its ranks the best amongst the British working class youth who want to actually do something rather than take out paper membership of a defunct Communist Party and receive the “honour” of being made “General Secretary” or “President” of some 3 member regional organisation of a party with nothing going for it but some semblance of officialdom.
If you feel the same as this comrade, if you shun paper membership or keyboard warrior status, and want to avoid the cultish excesses of those organisations run by two-man leadership committees on the pretext that its not the right time to build a “party”; do the right thing and get involved with Marxism Leninism! Red Youth is not the mover and shaker of the movement, but we set our goals high and fully intend to bring about the restoration of a revolutionary youth movement free from sickening ties to the imperialist blood soaked Labour Party and the weirdo’s and freaks of the Trotskyist grooming clubs. This comment is reproduced as it came and we’re proud to be associated with such honest observation:
“I am joining the red youth because I am sick of this rotten capitalist imperialist government that we have that is doing everything it possibly can to destroy the life’s of the working class in this country. Since they came to power they have already proven this for example in 2010 they raised the tuition fees to £9000 a year. Why they have done this well I will tell you comrades it is because they do not want the working class of this country to gave a good education or to achieve the best jobs I society instead they want these to be reserved for the rich ruling elite (not as if they already have the best chance of getting the best jobs). They want to keep the working class out of the top universities and to make these places no go areas for the poor and instead to turn them into some kind of breeding ground for the future ruling class.
They are cutting all of the welfare that is reserved for the poorest in society and to plunge them deeper into poverty meanwhile the capitalist media of this country constantly portray the poor as something for the rich to vet their anger at and are described as lazy, stupid and good for nothing scum. We are constantly told that to get up and look for jobs. Well how can we do this if they are not enough jobs to go around for example the city where I come from Glasgow there was a small Tesco that opened up as a part of a luxury flats complex along Great Western Road that had no more than 25 jobs going and 1000 applied for these. If they constantly tell us that there are enough jobs then why are things like this happening.
One more example of the Government’s attack on the poor is the rotten bedroom tax which means if you are a poor person that has only a tiny spare bedroom you will loose money that you desperately need to survive while the capitalist swine that are pushing all of these policies are all multi millionaires with large mansions, luxury cars and millions of pounds in their bank account makes me sick, and the whole time on the television and in the newspapers we are told by a bunch of over privileged greedy swine that why should pay for some poor person to be out of work for no fault of their own and cant get work and have a small bedroom because one of their children has grown up, moved out and has a life of their own. They are doing this because they want to demonize the working class and turn the rest of society against them to distract us from the crimes which they are committing.
This whole vile capitalist system that we have in place in this country is also a murdering imperils one because of all of the wars of aggression which they have waged around the world in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya destroying the countries and killing millions of people in the process. Why do they do this in the name of democracy and freedom so they say. But do not believe any of this bile the only reason why the imperialist powers invade these countries is because they want to occupy and to steal their resources and take them back and sell them to line their own pockets.
We should all take a stand and boycott these wars, the government and the army for these crimes which they are all guilty of committing. We as citizens should all take a stand and don’t support them. This can be done by not celebrating this British army or supporting armed forces day or the Royal (murdering) British Legion or the Poppy Appeal as they are nothing but lies and war propaganda to force us into supporting the war.
Now I want to talk about the rotten parasites of the British monarchy. These people are scum who do nothing but leach of the taxpayers of this country and pay no tax and live in a life of privilege and luxury that we can only ever dream of. I am sick of the media constantly pushing the pro royalist propaganda down our necks. This has been most evident over the last 2 years. In 2011 we had the royal weeding when we where supposed to celebrate two multi millionaires getting married while we paid for the whole thing and in 2012 we where supposed to celebrate 60 years of crap. These people need t get rid of and all of their riches should be taken away from them and the wealth redistributed among the workers.
I would now like to say I am joining the movement because I have been reading all of the stuff on both the red youth and the communist party of great Britain Marxist – Leninist and see the good work which they are doing and I agree with every one of the things they say.
It is good see that there are people that are standing up and making a difference and no longer putting up with this rotten capitalist class and making a real difference.
I would like to join because I want to make a difference and get up and do something instead of sitting about doing nothing about it.”
Mao, it turns out, brought into being 800 million, well fed, well clothed and well educated human beings: A fact that not only China, but all of us should celebrate. China’s rise has been a great source of enlightenment that exercises a positive influence on human civilisation.
Carlos Martinez, secretary of the “Hands off China” campaign, gives a speech on the legacy of Mao Zedong’s Life, and the impact that his outstanding leadership of the Chinese revolution had upon China and the wider world, at a meeting held jointly with the CPGB-ML to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. It is a legacy that all progressive humanity should celebrate and applaud.
And yet the neoliberal imperialist narrative, ground out by official capitalist academia and popular media, tries to pass off Mao as some kind of social criminal and mass murderer – when in fact he helped to lift fully one quarter of humanity out of feudal and colonial oppression, and the stultifying and backward mode of existence, rife with starvation, disease, famine and war, crushing oppression of the masses, and of women in particular, that characterised pre-revolutionary china.
For detailed refutation of the standard bourgeois lies regarding the Great Leap forward, this article from LALKAR is instructive: http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/nov2012/china.html
The question we should ask, is not how many people died during the years of industrialisation in china, but rather, how many Chinese and other human beings owe their lives to the communist revolution that gave birth to the People’s Republic of China, and the development of modern china; a revolutionary process that Mao played such a major part in initiating, leading and trying to secure against capitalist restoration.
Carlos points out that the population of China was long stagnant at 500million, with a miserable life expectancy of just 35 years in 1949, on the founding of the PRC, when Mao famously declared “the Chinese people have stood up!”
At the time of Mao’s death, 27 years later, in 1976, the population had reached 900 million, and life expectancy 67. If today China is a modern, enlightened, broadly socialist country – not withstanding the encroachments of capitalist economy upon its economic and political life – then 1.3 billion Chinese have much to thank Mao for.
All those countries who rely on China to give them some economic and political breathing space from the crushing weight of Anglo-American imperialist oppression, likewise have much to celebrate on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.
Long live Socialist China! Long live the memory, teaching and example of Mao Zedong!
Harpal Brar makes some insightful remarks while closes a meeting to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Birth. He notes that despite the towering achievements of Mao, and the CPC and the huge advances in literacy, life expectancy, economic and cultural standing, made since the revolution by the masses of the Chinese people, the overwhelming narrative in the western imperialist world is that Mao, like Stalin, we are told, was a monster.
This is not an accurate reflection of the facts, as shown by Utsa Patnaik’s excellent work, previously reproduced in Lalkar.
We note that the same (now Prime Minister) David Cameron, who Lauds Nelson Mandela to the skies after his death, as a young conservative actively campaigned for the (living, political prisoner) Mandela’s death by hanging – along with all other ANC terrorists – who, he declared, unlike their masters among the ‘civilised’ apartheid regime, ‘are Butchers’.
Mandela is being rehabilitated by the bourgeoisie, to console the toiling masses of Africa and the world, but his revolutionary essence, his anti-imperialist history, his advocacy of the armed struggle against apartheid and imperialism, his communist understanding, sympathies, membership and leadership – all this is being air-brushed out of history.
This is simply because the capitalist class currently hold the purse strings, and pay the most mercenary historians handsomely for painting their despotism in pretty colours, while defaming all liberation struggles of the oppressed.
“History has been turned into a commodity, and the best paid historiography is that best falsified to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.” History is for sale; and if you are planning the ultimate theft, robbery of the masses of humanity of their collective productive wealth, you CAN pay to have it re-written.
