Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
The Lao Peoples Democratic Republic came into being in 1975, after a decade of relentless US bombing against the Lao, Vietnamese, and Cambodian peoples. Laos is per capita the most bombed country in the world. 10% of its population were killed directly by US bombs and a similar number left […]
Thomas Sankara was born on 21st December 1949 in Upper Volta, which was a French colony, and like all African colonies at the time, the white colonisers exploited the natives by forcing them to build infrastructure so that they could more efficiently exploit the resources of the nation. Upper Volta […]
Public outrage at the environmental catastrophe in Lough Neagh has led to calls for the lough to be brought back into public ownership. Lough Neagh is the largest lake in Ireland. It has a surface area of 392 square kilometres and supplies 40 per cent of the North’s drinking water. […]
Unending violence and repression October 2023 will go as one of the bloodiest periods in recent history, in the long struggle of the Palestinian people to end Israeli occupation and to achieve an independent state. The current bloody onslaught against the Palestinian people, while sparked by the attacks of the […]
105 years of the Balfour Declaration Despite Britain’s current state of political turmoil, with three very different Conservative prime ministers in the same year, there seems to be one constant: they all give unwavering support to Israel in its attempts to crush the Palestinian people. But that should be no […]
There has been a lot surmising of over the recently announced results of the census in the North of Ireland. For the first time since partition, Catholics now outnumber Protestants there. The census found that 42 per cent of people in the North are Catholics, 37 per cent are Protestants, […]
The spectre of a democratic and progressive country What on earth was that event last month in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, all about? We were told that it wasn’t a celebration of partition, nor a commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Six-County political entity. Rather, it […]
In what other country would there be web sites offering the equivalent of “funny Irish place-names”?—which in fact are not Irish at all but corruptions. And the great majority of these are not even corruptions in the usual linguistic sense—i.e. changes made over time by the usage of people (in […]
■ Jerry Shanahan, Ireland: A Social History (Dublin, 2021) Much left-wing literature in the twenty-first century seems to suggest that history began in 1848 or, at the earliest, in 1789. This unmarxist view tends towards a blinkered understanding of the roots of modern society and the development of capitalism and imperialism. Therefore, […]
Dialectics says that everything is changing and everything is evolving. Capitalism is no exception—so can tactics for abolishing capitalism be the same? Capitalism was nascent during Marx’s time; and by the time Lenin arrived it had evolved into imperialism, which he said is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx’s assessment […]
One of the defining marks of a colony (or neo-colony) is its adoption of the ideology, and especially the language, of the conqueror.