Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
In a recent interview on Youtube the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States, Francisco Campbell, had this to say: “Sanctions are designed to destroy, to destabilise, to demoralise, and to deny peoples in smaller countries especially the right to self-determination. You have people who want to give you all kinds […]
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 into the impoverished petty bourgeoisie. His father was imprisoned for debt, and financial circumstances forced the young Charles to leave school at the age of twelve and to work a ten-hour day in a blacking (shoe polish) factory. The adult Dickens’s first jobs were […]
I have been a musician for more than twenty years, playing in various original bands, cover bands, and wedding bands. As the whole industry for working musicians becomes ever more uncertain because of covid-19, I have often found myself pondering the question of the value of being a musician. Many […]
In Venezuela the month of May began with a bang. A group of mercenaries—North American, Colombian, and Venezuelan, armed and trained in Colombia with the participation of drug-dealing paramilitaries, the Drugs Enforcement Administration of the United States, and the benign surveillance of the Colombian government—mounted an invasion of Venezuela. The […]
■Tomás Mac Síomóin, The Gael Becomes Irish: An Unfinished Odyssey (Nuascéalta, 2020) It is difficult to imagine a deeper enslavement of a subject people than to deprive them of their language. Such a condition has a deep psychological effect, which causes the abnormal to seem normal. There is a pretence […]
AMONG OTHER brutal passings, going into May we pay tribute to Marx’s one and only paramour: the Paris Commune. “Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class,” declared Marx, while Connolly, thirty years later, argued: “The Commune, if it had been successful, would have inaugurated the reign of real freedom the world over—it would have meant the emancipation of the working class.”
“Today’s media are exponentially worse than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. They no longer provide news. What they provide are stories that are around 80 percent ideology and opinion, 10 percent lies and spin, and 10 percent fact.” Mitchell Feierstein, investor, banker, and author.
“People can’t criticise Maduro and not criticize the blockade. The blockade doesn’t attack soldiers, it doesn’t kill the guilty, the blockade kills innocents.” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil
Max Blumenthal, The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump(London and New York: Verso, 2019).
THIS IS A valuable book, as it charts how the United States, since the late 1970s up until today, has deliberately funded and supported Islamist jihadists to obtain foreign-policy goals.
May Day message by the Communist Party of Ireland
They told me we couldn’t have a “one-tier health system.” Well we are nearly there. When I was eleven i remember leaving my sister off at the nursing training centre in Belfast, and now at sixty-five she has become my hero, working with covid-19 patients in the Downe Hospital, saving […]
The efforts to form a “government of the willing” following the general election earlier this year rumble on. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have had to pretend to dance and engage in a courting ritual to give the impression that there are significant ideological and political differences between them, thereby requiring such a long period to produce a draft programme for government. Fianna Fáil are desperate to get into government at any cost in order to re-establish a presence in urban areas.
But what drives the state and these two main parties of the establishment is the need to thwart the desire of working people for real, meaningful change, as
UNION LEADERS should be socially and morally distancing their unions and the movement from any deluded notion of returning to social partnership in any of its bastardised forms. “Social partnership” should really be deader than a Star Trek extra beamed down with Captain Kirk.
Unfortunately, the mood music emanating from some union leaders over recent weeks reeks with the stink of social dialogue and partnership.
COVID-19 did not cause the crisis in our two- tier, two-jurisdiction health service. It did, however, expose the utter failure of it.
So Fianna Fáil and the Blueshirts are now an item. Having recognised their obvious compatibility, they have agreed to move in together.
Talk of an end to Civil War politics is simply guff. Whatever ideological differences there were ended decades ago. Existing rivalry was competition between similar organisations. More Tesco vying with Supervalu for market share than Free Staters battling dedicated republicans.
ON 11 MARCH, Cuba had the first three cases of covid-19, detected in three Italian tourists. From that moment the country began to implement the contingency plan for dealing with this virus, which had been developed months earlier.
At the time of writing [24 April] the country has 1,285 people infected, has had 44 deaths and more than 2,000
WHATEVER WAY one looks at it, the reality is that this crisis, and its four forms— environmental, health, economic, and political—will prove to be worse than 2008. The fact that China’s economy has slowed down, for the first time in decades, only shows that this crisis will be a global affair, rather than a Western financial crisis, as happened in 2008. The 2020 crash will be a