Barack Obama: A More Effective Imperial CEO

Barack Obama: A More Effective Imperial CEO

The Christmas Truce 1914 - Lenin's View

The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles on trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols, most notably Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British troops in the trenches across from them responded by singing English carols. The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land" where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, jam, cigars, chocolate, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties.
Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respects. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
The truce spread to other areas of the lines, and there are many stories of football matches between the opposing forces. The film Joyeux Noël suggests that letters sent home from both British and German soldiers related that the score was 3-2 in favour of the Germans.  

Lenin, the leader of the working class revolution in Russia, heard about the Christmas truce. He pointed out that if there were organizations prepared to fight for such a policy among the soldiers of all the belligerent nations, there might have been a quick end to the world war in favor of the working masses. Lenin wrote, “Try to imagine Hyndman, Guesde, Vandervelde, Plekhanov, Kautsky and the rest [leaders of so-called socialist parties that supported the world war] – instead of aiding the bourgeoisie (something they are now engaged in – forming an international committee to agitate for fraternization and attempts to establish friendly relations between the socialists of the belligerent countries, both in the trenches and among the troops in general. What would the results be several months from now?”

UNMIN for six more months says UCPN Maoist

Kathmandu, 21 December: Standing committee meeting of UCPN-Maoist
has taken some important decisions to carry ongoing peace process into a
logical end. The meeting has decided to extend time of UNMIN for six months to
come and to write a letter to UNO respectively. The other decisions are on
merging armies on consensus of the political parties, continuing the house of
the constituent assembly, the cancellation of group staying of YCL, if exists
somewhere.

But, the other two major political parties Nepali Congress and UML are not agreed with this decision. They want UNMIN to go back and continue monitoring procedures with special committee for army integration.

Maoist is disagreed with NC and UML because the special committee is under the
care-taker government and that has no full executive power. Likewise, the
intention of the government is to create humiliating situation to People\'s
Liberation Army (PLA). They are going to create the environment to make failure
the Comprehensive Peace Accord by pushing the nation back to conflict.

New document passes in UCPN-Maoist CC meeting

Kathmandu, 18 Dec: The central committee meeting of UCPN-Maoist has passed a unified document in place of three different documents put forwarded in Palungtar party extended meeting. Central committee meeting has decided to pass a single document by submitting principal contradiction, party line and working plan from the three different documents.

The meeting has reached to the conclusion to publish inter-party forum for the debate on the difference of opinion. According to a central committee member, the party has adapted the Leninist organizational principle- freedom in discussion and unity in action. The party has its common thinking to develop ideas and its methods to solve the problems created in the movement and in the party.

Party has decided to run struggle for nationality, people\'s power and people\'s livelihood during one month- from January 15 to February 12. For the preparation of the struggle, party has decided to take schooling for one moth prior to the struggle.

Vince Cable and David Cameron, the BBC and Maoism - A Comment by Nickglais

Picture : Cable and Cameron

This Coalition Government launches the biggest attack on public spending in decades with the lying mantra we are all in this together.

Read the following:

Mega-Wealthy Survivors Have Never Had It So Good by  Matthew Lynn at :
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a79ZqHNmHZDM

Nick Clegg says how Liberal values are at the heart of government and how proud he is of the achievements of this government already.

Well Cameron,Clegg and Cable have put neo liberal values at the heart of this government and the British Isles is fast waking up to how brutal these free market neo liberal yahoo's are.

The alarm bells are ringing on the child poverty front
http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com/2010/12/uk-spending-cuts-will-see-rise-in.html

The alarm bells are ringing on the homelessness front.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-11889056

We have already seen students spurred into miltant action over education cuts and increased fees and even the Trades Union Congress is plodding into militant action in 2011.

And what do we get from the BBC political correspondent Brian Wheeler is this political garbage on Maoism.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12048836

The egalitarian politics of Maoism are the direct opposite of the politics of the yahoo's of neo liberalism Cameron, Clegg and Cable and their progenitors are Deng and Thatcher.whatever lying rhetoric the media and politicans use..

However the truth and the BBC have long since parted company. The BBC in recent times took a work of historical fiction on Mao Zedong - Jung Chang's "Unknown Mao" to be historical fact and broadcast it to the nation hoping that an ad hominem attack on Mao Zedong would invalidate his politics.

Well reality is breaking through and 2011 will be a rude awakening for the neo liberals when a new politics of serving the people and not the bankers of The City of London will reach the political agenda of Britain and some real Maoism will hit the streets at long last..

I am reminded of the coming fate of these neo liberals by Henry CK Liu who said that:

“ A century from now, Mao’s high-minded principles of mass politics will outshine all his neo-liberal critics”.

Murdering Mao by Harry Powell

Here are the opening paragraphs of a recent article in a British national Sunday newspaper:

Chairman Cameron's regime is not a million miles from Mao

Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday 19 December 2010“I put it down to Tony Blair. Also to Margaret Thatcher. And to Mao Tse-tung. To understand this government, you need to appreciate the debts that it owes to these three influences: Labour's triple election-winner, the Conservatives' most radical postwar prime minister, and the Chinese dictator responsible for the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history.

To be fair to the coalition, it is not their ambition to replicate the body count heaped up by the Communist party of China during Mao's lethal reign. Nor does this government share many of the late tyrant's political ends. Yet in its methods, I am increasingly struck by the strange similarities between the regime of Chairman Mao and that of Chairman Cameron.

Some of the coalition's senior figures are conscious of this; some of them are even proud to draw the parallels between themselves and the author of The Little Red Book. In recent weeks, I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a "cultural revolution" in the public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the centre using Mao's old slogan: "Let a thousand flowers bloom."”


Further on:
I have actually heard more than one member of the cabinet explicitly refer to the government as "Maoist".”
And:
“They are urged on from within Number 10 by the prime minister's principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government.”


It is but the latest episode in a never-ending barrage of propaganda to discredit the first wave of socialism in the world and those who led this revolutionary movement. Andrew Rawnsley, a prominent apologist for the New Labour Government that was, now tries to undermine the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat Government in Britain by likening it to the socialist regime in China during the period when Mao Tse-tung was its leader. Rawnsley is trading on an assumption, probably accurate, that most of his readers believe that Mao and his comrades were mass murderers.

Mao, he tells us, was “responsible for the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history”. This is the accolade normally reserved for Stalin but now, it seems, he has been overtaken by Mao. Factual accuracy – like specifying just how many millions Mao was supposed to have killed – is not highly prized in this sort of writing. It was, of course, a hundred and not a “thousand” flowers which Mao called upon to bloom. But the facts don’t matter here. The main point is that Rawnsley thinks that the worst thing he can say about the Cameron/Clegg Government is that it is “Maoist”.

Rawnley’s article is based on what over the last twenty years or so has become a major trait in the dominant bourgeois ideology of Western capitalist societies: the idea that socialism has failed, that attempts to bring about socialist transformation were led by homicidal mass murders and have been complete disasters. Most people in countries such as Britain and America think that they “know” this to be “true”. Rawnsley feels confident that his readers will share this “knowledge” with him.

Recently I was talking with a Trotskyite, a history teacher, who told me that “Mao murdered millions”. I asked him to tell me something about which people were murdered, how, where, when and why. All he could say was that “there is this book which tells you about it” although he could not name the title and author and he had not read it. Further discussion revealed that he knows nothing about the history of modern China and he conceded that this is the case. I quoted Mao to him: “No investigation, no right to speak.” Here we have a person interested in history and socialism but his knowledge of People’s China has no doubt been picked up from exposure to the popular mass media. Like most of us, he assumes that the ideas he absorbs from the general culture in which he lives are true until he comes across contradictory evidence. Given this climate of opinion, communists have an ideological mountain to climb, something I have discussed in my pamphlet Media Representations of the Socialist Period.

There is a linguistic dimension to this reactionary ideological obfuscation. In recent years in Britain I have encountered young people from mainland China, especially students, who think of themselves as “communists” but whose outlook is completely bourgeois. They find it confusing to encounter an English person calling himself a communist but who is highly critical of the present regime in China on the grounds that it is on the capitalist road. One postgraduate journalism student tried to clarify my ideological confusion for me by quoting Teng Hsiao-ping: “For all to become rich, a few must become rich first.” Of course, most people in the West still think of China as “communist” and given the media images of billionaires, corruption and consumerism in China today this simply compounds this linguistic mess.

Is it possible for communists to undermine this sort of reactionary ideology which proclaims that socialism has been a disastrous failure? However hard we may strive to do so, we are only likely to meet with some success if the objective conditions are favourable for us to do so. Now in Western capitalist societies we may be entering a period when it is possible to begin to undermine some of this reactionary nonsense. The imperialist wars on Iraq and Afghanistan followed by the world-wide financial crisis of two years ago have considerably weakened bourgeois ideological hegemony, the dominance of reactionary ideas. The student protests in Britain over raising university fees together with the general movement across Europe against public spending cuts on services and benefits could provide the right climate of opinion for an ideological fightback. But are there any communists left to do it?

Harry Powell

December 2010

Democracy and Class Struggle protest the hearing on the 22nd of December in Bologna Italy of Angelo D'Arcangeli, Vincenzo Cinque, Rosalba Romano and Fabrizio Di Mauro

We express our protest against the trial that the Public Prosecutor Morena Plazzi (of Prosecutor’s Office of Bologna) is trying to orchestrate against Angelo D'Arcangeli (Member of the National Direction of CARC Party), Vincenzo Cinque (national leader of Struggling Workers Union), Rosalba Romano (Association for Proletarian Solidarity), and Fabrizio Di Mauro, accused of having promoted the democratic watch and to have worked to show police officers’ faces by publishing photos on the site “Cop Hunt” realized by the(new) Italian Communist Party.

We hope that the preliminary hearing that will be held on 22 December at the Court of Bologna will put an end to the repressive and intimidating stunt against those who fight to safeguard the conquests and democratic rights won by the Resistance and sanctioned by the Constitution.

Democracy and Class Struggle (Britain)

Medine and Rap - The Culture War in France

visit: LA CAUSE DU PEUPLE
http://lacausedupeuple.blogspot.com/

DRAPEAU ROUGE
http://drapeaurouge.over-blog.com/

the coming crisis will introduce new forms of struggle that we are now unable to foresee.

– V.I. Lenin

Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live.—KRS One

Read the Coming of a New Revolutionary Movement

By Comrade Tommy Joshua Al-Rafiq
Chairman, Poor Righteous Party of the Black Nation
http://peacecomrade.org/2010/05/10/the-coming-of-a-new-revolutionary-movement/

Mumia Abu Jamal - the Injustice continues - Free Mumia Abu Jamal Now !

Join the Free Mumia Abu Jamal Defence Campaign UK

free2mumia@googlemail.com

Christmas drive for Republican Socialist POWs

The following was taken from
http://irspscotland.wordpress.com/

Below we print a request from Teach na Fáilte requesting support for IRSM prisoners both financially and materially through book donations, or even sending a xmas card. All expressions of support are always welcome.

The IRSP Alba/Scotland Support Group will be playing our part to support the prisoners and would encourage you to do likewise. All donations gratefully received.

*************************

Teach na Fáilte

Republican Socialist Ex-Prisoners Support Group

Costello House

392 Falls Road

BT12 6DH

Belfast

A Chara,


As I’m sure you are aware there are a number of Republican Socialist prisoners incarcerated in prisons throughout Ireland at this point in time. Some are serving lengthly sentences and are incarcarated many miles from their homes so they would be glad of your support especially around the festive season.

Has e festive season is approaching I was wondering if you or any of your family, friends or comrades would be interested in sponsoring one of our prisoners or even sending them a Christmas card at this time.

In relation to sponsoring a prisoner you can send your correspondence directly to me at the address below. If you would prefer to send cards etc to me I will see that they get it or you can send cards directly to the prisoners themselves.

Anything that you choose to do would be greatly appreciated by the prisoners themselves as it would let them know that there are people still thinking about them

Fundraising efforts have also begun in many areas and we ask you to continue to support these.

Thank you for your time and effort

Gerard Murray.



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