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).
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!
Dan and Angela of Red Youth speak at the celebration of the Great October Socialist Revolution, shortly before heading up the Red Youth / CPGB-ML delegation to the world festival of Youth and Students in Quito, Ecuador, in December 2013.
Speaking to a packed meeting at Saklatvala hall, in Southall, West London, they describe the attacks of the capitalist class on British workers during the past 5 years of crisis, and the lessons that young British Students and Workers can draw from the inspirational struggle of the Russian workers led by the Bolsheviks leading up to the October revolution in 1917, and their success in overthrowing that decadent parasitic and moribund Capitalism in crisis, that continues to blight our lives today.
In constructing the Soviet Economy, to serve the needs of the masses of working people of those lands, the Soviet people demonstrated that it IS possible to build an alternative world; of peaceful development, cooperation and solidarity, abolishing racial and sexual discrimination, and ending crisis, famine, war, and the crippling and inhuman exploitation of man by man and nation by nation.
The meeting, putting to bed 2013 and looking forward to the great leap we will make together in 2014, is planned to celebrate the outstanding revolutionary life and contribution of Comrade Mao Zedong, and has been planned to coincide with the 120th anniversary of his birth.
Please put the date in your diary, and mobilise friends and comrades for what we can expect to be an inspiring and informative meeting, and an enjoyable end-of-year social!
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, following a protracted revolutionary struggle led by the Communist Party of China, was the second greatest event of the world proletarian revolution following the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution, significantly shifting the global balance of forces in favour of the then existing camp of socialism and people’s democracy led by the Soviet Union of JV Stalin.
The lessons of the Chinese revolution, led by Comrade Mao Zedong, an outstanding Marxist Leninist, also carry huge significance for the revolutionary struggles in all colonial, dependent, semi-colonial, semi-feudal and oppressed nations in a number of areas, including especially, but not limited to, the peasant and agrarian questions, the armed struggle and the people’s army, and the united front against imperialism. Their continued validity and applicability has been clearly demonstrated most recently with the triumphant advances of the Nepalese revolution.
In nearly 60 years since the founding of the People’s Republic, the Chinese people, under the leadership of the Communist Party, and guided by the science of Marxism Leninism, and its concrete application to their specific conditions, Mao Zedong Thought, have weathered and overcome all manner of challenges and difficulties and have scored enormous achievements in rebuilding their country along socialist lines, so that what was, in 1949, one of the poorest, most backward and most wretched societies on earth, is now advancing as a great world power, increasingly in the front ranks of global economy, culture, science and technology.
In the course of this process, the lives of the Chinese people have been improved immeasurably, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty. Only the progress registered by the Soviet Union in the era of Comrade Stalin can compare with this actual, material contribution to the liberation and betterment of humanity.
The growing strength and power of China is increasingly acting as a check on the unbridled aggression and hegemonism of US imperialism. China renders significant assistance to other socialist and progressive countries and, by establishing relations of equality and mutual benefit with China’s booming economy, countries throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere are increasingly able to resist imperialist blackmail, safeguard their independence, develop their economies and improve their peoples’ standard of living.
Faced with this situation, US imperialism, which has only ever attempted to disguise its hostility to the People’s Republic of China for opportunist and cynical reasons, is increasingly expressing renewed open hostility to China, openly labelling the country as the biggest potential threat to US global interests in the 21st century. The US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Yugoslav War, the spy plane incident in the South China Sea, the campaigns against China’s friendly relations with countries such as Burma and Sudan, the counterrevolutionary turmoil in Tibet and the related attempts to sabotage the Beijing Olympics to be held this August are all manifestations of the unrelenting hostility of US imperialism, along with other imperialist powers, including Britain, to the People’s Republic.
Congress completely condemns all manifestations of imperialist hostility towards the People’s Republic of China. We rejoice at all the achievements of the Chinese people in building a modern, strong and powerful country under the leadership of their Communist Party.
As Lenin pointed out, the struggle against imperialism would be a sham without the struggle against opportunism. In Britain, nearly all the opportunist forces in the working-class and progressive movements line up with their ‘own’ bourgeoisie, as well as with US imperialism, to a greater or lesser extent, in their hostility towards People’s China. Congress resolves that the CPGB-ML will continue and intensify our struggle against this opportunism as an integral and essential part of our revolutionary work.
Following the treachery of the Khrushchevite revisionists, the Communist Party of China took a leading role in the great international struggle against modern revisionism. Our party also traces its origins to this struggle. The treachery of modern revisionism, and, finally, the counterrevolutions in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in 1989-1991 created complex and difficult conditions for the building of socialism in China.
In introducing elements of a market economy, the Chinese comrades have pointed out that their country is today only in the primary stage of socialism. Alongside China’s undeniable achievements, serious problems have arisen, including, but by no means limited to, wealth, income and regional disparity, corruption, grave shortcomings in public education and health care, and environmental degradation. The leadership of the Communist Party of China itself openly acknowledges these problems and their gravity.
Join us to celebrate and mark the life, work and struggle of Comrade Mao Zedong on the 120th Anniversary of his Birth
Harpal Brar, Chairman of the CPGB-ML, gives a presentation summarising Marx’s teachings on the state. Key quotations and ideas are drawn from Marx and Engel’s seminal work, “The Communist Manifesto”, Engels’ “Origin of the Family, private property and the state”, Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program”, Engels’ “Anti Duhring”, Marx’s “18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” and “The Civil War in France”, and Lenin’s “The State and Revolution.”
It’s an excellent introduction to Marxism, and totally exposes the commonly peddled fallacy that workers can simply vote for socialism – or a social democratic party, such as Labour in Britain – in order to solve their problems.
Workers cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery (the capitalists’ parliament, army, police force, judiciary, etc.) and use it to achieve their own ends. Bourgeois rule, connections and interests run through these institutions, like the lettering in a stick of Brighton Rock.
The capitalists’ ‘democratic’ state must be smashed, and the working class must have a state of its own, to ensure society and the economy are actually organised in our own interests.
This workers’ state – the dictatorship of the proletariat – will then wither away over a historical epoch, as its functions cease to be necessary, in the transition to the higher stage of communism, when the economic formula “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need” will be applied to production and distribution of goods, well-being and culture.
Exxon Valdez oil-spill, Alaska, 1989 – 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled
The only possible alternative to private profiteering at the expense of the planet is communism – you have to be Red to be Green! But if we are to steer ourselves away from the cataclysmic climate change that looms, it is vital that we identify our most immediate enemy: the first genuine obstacle in the path of building socialism … and that obstacle is imperialism.
The past two months have seen an endless stream of print and audiovisual propaganda force fed to the British public concerning the arrest and detention of a collection of European Greenpeace activists, who have been dubbed the ‘Arctic 30’ by the imperialist press.
The stereotypical allegations of human-rights and environmental abuse against the Russian Federation, however, bring with them only imperialism’s trademark stench of hypocrisy and greed.
Hypocritical acclaim for ‘environmental campaigners’
Arctic oil exploration
The state of the Arctic is of grave concern, and acts as a barometer of global environmental damage. It is an issue dear to the hearts of the world’s people, which explains why imperialism has made it a key propaganda plank in its portrayal of a ‘backward’ Russia (along with its alleged persecution of female punk bands, etc).
Global warming has led to a significant reduction in the Arctic sea-ice volume, which in 2012 stood at just one-fifth of what it was in 1979. Oil spills (such as that from the Exxon Valdise in 1989), particularly from the heavily-polluted Alaskan region of the US, have contributed to the degradation of our planet’s environment.
Now, the decreased ice covering of the Arctic region, alongside technological advances, has led to some oil stores that were previously seen as being inaccessible are now open to drilling.
As part of the drive to take advantage of this new bonanza, Britain has declared its ambition to become a ‘hub’ for Arctic oil exploration. The Foreign Office stated recently that “The UK government will promote the UK as a centre of commercial expertise with direct relevance to many industries that are growing in the Arctic.”
Meanwhile, the US is aggressively pursuing Arctic oil exploration, and is busy bartering to acquire Canadian territory in its most immediate vicinity.
Quite clearly, neither US nor British imperialism have any moral capital or high ground from which to sermonise when it comes to the question of environmental degradation in general or the matter of Arctic energy exploration in particular.
Imperialism is the harbinger of environmental destruction, and has rarely shown any concern for the effect of its fanatical profiteering. Whether it be pollution from manufacturing and extraction processes, the safety of workers, or the survival of flora, fauna and human inhabitants that live near mines, plants and factories – particularly in the oppressed world or among poor, working-class communities – the piratical exploitation of the capitalist system is legendary.
As for humanity on a broader scale, or the threat that climate change could pose to the very existence of the human race – the finance capitalists stand utterly helpless before, and unwilling to alter, the cynical cash calculations of an exploitative system that should have been discarded long ago.
Right to protest
Much of the ‘outrage’ presented in the corporate media has been around the alleged denial by the Russian Federation of its citizens’ ‘right to protest’.
One does not have to think too hard to imagine how the US or Britain would react to a group of Russian and Chinese activists disrupting the polluting activities of Shell or BP in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic – or, indeed, the Nigerian people in the Niger delta. It would meet them with military engagement, and terminate them with extreme prejudice.
This bare-faced hypocrisy is made all the more obvious, coming at a time when British councils, for example, are being given the powers to make any peaceful protest or demonstration illegal under the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill.
Of course, that’s not the limit for the imperialists when it comes to oppressing the masses and protecting what they consider to be rightfully theirs, using the good-old British bobbies domestically, and the army abroad. The countless genocidal wars of plunder waged from Korea to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are an ongoing and revealing testament to the depraved and inhuman ‘logic’ of imperialist greed.
Imperialism’s true position
Ultimately, the story pushed by western media is no more than one propaganda piece in a many-pronged attack, which is being aimed at the Russian Federation for its key part in frustrating US domination – and particularly its recent defence of the legitimate government of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria.
Imperialism holds no green credentials, but it is becoming increasingly adept at spinning its anti-popular crusades by manipulating the growing global concern for our environment. BP, Shell, Exxon, Texaco – all these companies are now ‘green’ we are told. But China and Russia? Increased consumption by the masses of the oppressed world? Well, these are clearly a ‘dire threat to the environment’, opine the tame media pundits of imperialism in a globally-orchestrated cacophony that many on the left seem powerless to resist.
Imperialism continues to seek domination, not democracy, in order to sustain its decrepit, decaying interests and rule. A little more critical and independent thought on the part of those who pose as ‘leaders’ of the anti-war and working-class movements in Britain would not go amiss.
In this regard, returning to the basics of Marxist and Leninist teachings should be the departure point for all who would not loose their bearings in the rapids of these revolutionary times.
Genuine global change
In order to bring about the changes so badly needed by our society and the environment, we must build socialist states, built on satisfying the needs of the broad masses of humanity in a planned, organised and sustainable way. We must make humanity the master of production – rather than the anarchy of capitalist production being the blind ruler that frustrates all reasonable control over human endeavour, as is currently the case.
Working people have an overriding need and deeply-held desire to preserve our miraculous, lone blue planet as the source of all nourishment and shelter. There is no question of a communist movement or society leaving ecological questions unaddressed.
The most critical task before the environmental movement and all who cherish our planet, however, is to identify the most immediate enemy that stands in the way of safeguarding it!
In the last analysis, the imperialists are the ones who put the needs of short-term profit, of preservation of the current class-based economic inequalities, and the unjust and barbaric madness that stems form them, above all other concerns.
They think that vast personally amassed riches will enable them to buy their individual way out of all the problems they have created for the masses of humanity. They are the callous kings of capital – the financial oligarchs, the imperialists and their servants. They are the ones who declare a system – socialism – that embodies the needs and interests, the political rule, of the vast masses, to be the most evil end that could befall humanity. They are our implacable enemies, and the greatest danger to human civilisation.
“Their wealth is built upon our poverty – their joy upon our misery!”
As it was essential for the Bolsheviks to overthrow the tsars before advancing on the path to the overthrow of capitalism, it is essential that we identify our most immediate target.
That target is imperialism, and only with the overthrow of this rotten, decadent, parasitic and corrupt system, can we set out on the path to save humanity from poverty, unemployment, mass starvation, famine, misery, war and environmental disaster – whether desertification, pollution, over-fishing or climate change.
We must refuse to be led by the nose into following the capitalists’ lead – either by coercion or by accepting spurious claims of ‘environmental concern’. Let us remember that our ruling class’s new-found concern for ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘the environment’ does not stop it from bombing entire countries into the stone age, dumping chemical and nuclear waste into the Red Sea off the coast of Somalia, or liberally spreading depleted uranium across swathes of the globe.
We must refute all of imperialism’s predatory propaganda so that we can germinate a mass movement that aims at achieving a genuinely peaceful, sustainable and progressive society.
We must repudiate our rulers’ warmongering lies and oppose their predatory, criminal wars. All workers must unite, regardless of race, sex, religion or nationality, and bring to an end the devastation of civilisation and the destruction of our planet!
Russian poster on saleDan getting a BrazillianAmerican delegates get interviewed by Red YouthYCL comrade and Lalkar subscriber from the USAAt the rally in QuitoRed Youth comrades look back fondly to sleeping on the floor at Sak Hall!
The head of the Syrian delegation Dr Saleh Al Rashed (President of the Syrian Revolutionary Youth Union) speaks at the world festival of youth and students to the British delegation.
Despite the brutal and bloody campaign which has been unleashed against the Syrian people by imperialism the Syrians understand and continue to draw the distinction between the mass of ordinary British workers and the thoroughly corrupt and wicked parasite class that rules on behalf of finance capital.
Since the very first days of this conflict the CPGB-ML were the only organisation in Britain to stand squarely behind the Ba’ath Party, the National Patriotic Front and the Syrian Communist Party (Bagdash), as well as all the other progressive and anti-imperialist organisations united in Syria against the imperialist inspired war of intervention.
As Dr Al Rashed confirms, the Syrian people, much to the dismay of the revisionist and Trotskyite pigs who tie our anti-war movement to imperialism, have only strengthened their resolve and friendship during these hard years of life-and-death struggle, despite all personal hardship and loss. As Mao Zedong said long ago, “the imperialists pick up a rock only to drop it upon their own feet”!
The imperialists they have funded and equipped cannibals, maniacs and fundamentalists who’s sole mission inside Syria has been carnage, mayhem and destruction. Yet despite all their crimes, including the stomach-churning and cynical ‘propaganda stunt’ of gassing kidnapped children in attempt to stir up direct US military intervention, have only succeeded in bringing the Syrian people together in resistnace, forging an un-breakable bond between the radical and patriotic forces inside Syria.
