Matt Wrack General Secretary Fire Brigades Union - National Demonstration London - 20th October 2012

Great Fighting Speech from Matt Wrack General Secretary of Fire Brigades Union against austerity and cuts.

Basque Nationalists Resurgent

The results are mixed for Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy after regional elections.

His party retained control in his native Galicia. But in the Basque region, nationalist and separatist parties were way out in front.

Democracy and Class Struggle says comrades in Basque Country and Galicia should expose the bourgeois leadership of the nationalist movements who speak of defending communities but in practice carry out betrayal like their Welsh and Scottish Nationalists counterparts with neo liberal austerity policies.The Scottish Nationalists are a pro NATO party.

Only the working class can lead the  national movements in the Basque country and Galicia and fullfill social and national aspirations of the people.

Solidarity to comrades in the Basque country and Galicia.

Basque Maoists here : http://odiodeclase.blogspot.co.uk/

Galician Maoists here :http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/construction-committee-of-maoist.html

See Also :http://dazibaorojo08.blogspot.co.uk/

Wales : We shall not surrender Stryveland !

Visit : http://tarianglyndwr.blogspot.co.uk/

         http://cymruncodi.blogspot.co.uk/

A Call for Land and Liberty Occupations in Cymru/Wales

here: http://youtu.be/NO8WY0EBV-c

Sign the petition for a Welsh Land Act and protect Wales against greenwashing for corporate greed.

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/land-act-for-wales.htm

 

Wales : Newport Uprising 1839 - Zephaniah Williams : Insurrection Remembered in Poem by Nickglais and Video Lecture by Les James

Here is a poem I wrote some years ago about how the 3rd/4th November 1839 uprising in Newport inspired the Blaina Rioters of 1935 in their battle against cuts in National,Assistance.

I fervently hope today's generation can take inspiration from 1839 and 1935 to battle the current cuts.

We truely stand on the shoulders of giants. 

Nickglais


Zephaniah Williams

Argoed gave you life

It's where our class was born

But its in Blaina that you spent your eary life

You were a Publican

And the People you did entrall

You told them of the Charter

And of the Rights of Man

But just words was not your vocation

You wanted democracy for your generation

If action it was needed

You would not be hesitate to meet the call

For you were Chartists all.

For leading them with Jones and Frost

In '39 they sentenced you to a hanging

- and to be quartered as well

- for Treason they did say

- for having organised a rising in Newport Town that fateful day

Zephaniah Williams you were a democrat so true

That not only Wales but all this whole Island misses you !

There was a Appeal to Reason by the People and the execution they did stay

But they shipped you off to Australia without farewells they say

Transportation for Life was then the true democrats pay

But you were irrepressible - they could not keep you down

Your escapes they were legend

Until a pardon it was found

Then you became a Tasmanian Man

To the Public Bar you did return

Just like back in Blaina the Launceston people you did enthrall

Your memory today still makes Launceston people in Tasmania walk tall

Your spirit it did return to Wales and muster back in Blaina in '35

At the UAB when the unemployment assistance they did cut

The spirit of Zephaniah Williams was enthused with fighting strength

By then Communist Phil Abrahams and the Blaina Rioters who were hell bent

For the Peoples strength knows no limit when its for right that they do fight.

There were 200 walking wounded on the hills that night !

They halted the unemployment cuts and the government they did cow

What a fighting spirit - but who knows it now ?

The country that gave us Zephaniah Williams

Needs that spirit in the Valleys once again !

The men of 39 and 35 are really Wales's hidden treasure

The people of today up to the men of 1839 and 1935 must measure .

If Zephaniah Williams be our meaure

There is no reason to doubt that the people of the Valleys have the will to fight

Someone said they had heard the spirit of Zephaniah Williams in a pub in Blaina just the other night.

You have heard the call - are you ready for the fight.

Darn' right said Zephaniah Williams

People they must learn they have to fight for their rights

Watch :

Les James on Zephaniah Williams, the Chartist, at the Dic Penderyn Society Annual Chartist Lecture at Dowlais Library on October 17th 2012. Film by Edwyn ap Harri.

No to Cuts Demonstration In London - Clashes with Police

Anger over government austerity measures spilled onto the streets of London. Tens of thousands marched through the streets of the capital to protest against wide-ranging public spending cuts. Simultaneous marches took place in Ireland and Scotland in the largest anti-austerity demonstrations so far this year

50 years since India declares War on China - Himalayan Adventure by Suniti Kumar Ghosh

 

Democracy and Class Struggle publishes this study by Suniti Kumar Ghosh on the 50th Anniversary of the 1962 Indo - China War , it resonates with many contemporary problems and shows the progressive character of Chinese Foreign Policy under Mao Zedong.

 

A college teacher for a number of years, Suniti Kumar Ghosh has been associated with the Communist movement since the Telengana days of 1946-47. He was expelled from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1949. He was a member of the All India Co-ordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), formed after the Naxalbari uprising in 1967, and was a founder-member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Lemnist).

‘India declares war on China’

While leaving for Sri Lanka on 12 October 1962, the prime minister of India declared that he had given orders to the army to throw the Chinese out from the India-China border area on the north-east. Next day the New York Herald Tribune carried an editorial entitled “India declares war on China”.[1]

This declaration of war against China was the culmination of a policy that Nehru and his associates had been pursuing since as early as April 1947 when India was still a British colony. On 25 April, the external affairs department of the government of India, of which Nehru was in charge as a member of the viceroy’s ‘interim government’, informed the British secretary of state for India that “Government of India now wish to be represented in Tibet ... and should be grateful to know whether His Majesty’s Government desire to retain separate Mission there in future. If they do not, it would seem feasible to arrange transition from ‘British Mission’ to ‘Indian Mission’ without publicity and without drawing too much attention to change, to avoid if possible any constitutional issue being raised by China.”[2] At the time a civil war was going on in China. Nehru and his associates sought to resort to surreptitious methods to fulfil their expansionist aims.

On 15 August 1947, the day Britain’s direct rule of India ended, the British mission in Lhasa (Tibet’s capital) formally became the Indian mission. The last British representative in Lhasa, H.E. Richardson, became the first Indian representative there. Richardson wrote: “The transition was almost imperceptible: the existing staff was retained in its entirety and the only obvious change was the change in the flag.”[3]

Llanllwni Mountain Choir video of "We need a Welcome Not a Wind Farm"

The people of the Llanllwni Mountain, Carmarthen Wales sing a song against the industrial scale windmilling of Welsh Mountains against the greenwashing of corporate greed.

A Call for Land and Liberty Occupations in Cymru/Wales

here: http://youtu.be/NO8WY0EBV-c

Sign the petition for a Welsh Land Act and protect Wales against greenwashing for corporate greed.

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/land-act-for-wales.html

Just a Reminder for London and Cardiff of past Rural Struggles in Carmarthenshire - Ysbryd Rebeca .

The Spirit of Rebecca inspires the Great Unrest Group 2012 for a Welsh Socialist Republican Party

"We'll be Loyal our Land and we'll Defend our Country

Aquino's pessimism in peace talks with NDFP is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- CPP

 
Picture : Benigno Aquino

PRESS STATEMENT
Communist Party of the Philippines
18 October 2012

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) chided Benigno Aquino's pessimism over the prospects of peace talks between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) as a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

The Aquino regime "has been actively blocking peace negotiations from Day 1 of its term," said the CPP. "Aquino himself gave the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) marching orders to 'decimate the NPA' in three years, to dramatize his regime's militarist approach in resolving the raging armed conflict," pointed out the CPP.

"This has set the framework of the Aquino regime's Oplan Bayanihan under which the AFP has been intensifying its war of suppression especially in the countryside and causing grave abuses of human rights and widespread terror."

“In his very first address before the reactionary congress, Aquino insisted that the revolutionary forces enter a ceasefire as precondition for peace negotiations, claiming that without it, discussions cannot move forward. Aquino obscures the fact that no ceasefire preceded negotiations on every major agreement forged between the NDFP and the GPH over the past twenty years.”

"Still, as a gesture of goodwill, and in order to celebrate the mutual reaffirmation of peace negotiations, the NDFP declared a unilateral 19-day ceasefire towards the end of 2010, the longest-ever ceasefire since 1986, together with a similar unilateral declaration by the GPH," said the CPP. "The revolutionary forces welcomed the reaffirmation of previous agreements such as The Hague Joint Declaration of 1992, the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) and the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG)."

"However, on December 17, 2010, within that ceasefire period, the armed forces of the GPH would arrest Pedro Codaste, a consultant of the NDFP in Mindanao, in violation not only of the ceasefire, but of the JASIG as well which was supposed to cover Codaste," pointed out the CPP.

"Codaste's arrest would prove to be just the first in the string of arrests that the GPH would carry out against JASIG-covered consultants of the NDFP engaged in peace negotiations," said the CPP. "Two weeks later, the GPH would arrest NDF consultant Tirso Alcantara (Ka Bart) in Quezon province, just a few days before the resumption of formal peace negotiations. Just over a month later, the GPH would arrest Alan Jazmines, a key NDFP consultant for socio-economic concerns. Jazmines' arrest on Feb. 14 was suspiciously timed on the very eve of the resumption of formal talks."

"Over the next two years, Aquino's armed forces would carry out the arrest and detention of several other NDFP consultants including Renante Gamara and Jaime Soledad, and adamantly refuse to release at least a dozen other consultants including Eduardo Serrano and Eduardo Sarmiento," added the CPP. "The GPH has subjected the NDFP consultants to grave abuses of their rights, including the isolation and denial of third-party medical treatment for Alcantara, and the confiscation of reading and writing materials from Jazmines."

"Aquino, as head of the GPH, has also refused to face responsibility for the abduction and disappearance under the Arroyo regime of NDFP consultants Leo Velasco, Pedro Calubid, Rogelio Calubad, their staff and relatives," added the CPP.

"It is becoming very apparent that the Aquino regime and its armed forces carried out the arrest and detention of JASIG-covered NDFP consultants as a means to hinder peace negotiations with the NDFP, knowing full well that negotiations cannot be formally resumed with the constant threat of abduction, arrest and detention of NDFP consultants," said the CPP.

"The Aquino regime is busier waging its Oplan Bayanihan war of suppression than in engaging in serious peace negotiations," said the CPP. "There is heightened militarization in the countryside characterized by martial law-style occupation of civilian communities, population control and food blockades. People accused of being active in armed resistance are being brutally murdered or massacred with their families."

"Activists are being harassed, arrested, tortured and detained. Children are subjected to situations that violate their rights. More than a hundred activists have been summarily executed by state armed forces and its paramilitary death squads. There are at least 400 political prisoners, more than a fourth of which have been arrested under the Aquino regime."

"Behind Aquino's 'peace and human rights' rhetoric, his record of human rights violatioins are not much different from that of the Arroyo or previous regimes," said the CPP.

"Thus, Aquino's pessimism about the prospects of NDFP-GPH talks is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the first place, he has no serious intentions of engaging in profound dialogue to address the roots of the armed conflict," added the CPP. "To Aquino and the AFP, peace negotiations are a minor track to confront the civil war and are relevant only if they effect the surrender of the revolutionary forces and the decommissioning of the people's army."

"Aquino's low regard for peace negotiations is explicit in his Oplan Bayanihan, to wit: 'the AFP's internal peace and security initiatives shall focus on rendering the NPA irrelevant, with the communist insurgency abandoning the armed struggle and ultimately engaging in peace negotiations with the government.'"

More Militainment from Hollywood - Hollywood Beats the War Drum

The military entertainment complex is an old phenomenon that binds Hollywood with the US military. Known as militainment, it serves both parties well. Filmmakers get access to high tech weaponry - helicopters, jet planes and air craft carriers while the Pentagon gets free and positive publicity.

See : http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/militainment-pentagons-grip-on.html

See Also: Kevin Rashid Johnson on US Culture here :

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/its-raining-pigs-rats-and-moles-vermin.html

Stop Cartel TV - Live Greek Coverage - English and Greek Languages

Watch live streaming video from stopcarteltvgr at livestream.com

Thousands of people protested across Greece on Thursday against the next round of spending cuts, required in return for another bailout instalment. The 24-hour strike is the country's 20th national stoppage since the debt crisis erupted two years ago and comes as EU leaders met in Brussels. Taxi drivers, doctors, teachers and air traffic controllers were among those taking part in the rallies.