MAX PARRY—Unlike far rightists in Eastern Europe or Greece’s Golden Dawn, the Sweden Democrats are part of a slick and optical re-branding of ultra nationalism that emphasizes Islamophobia over anti-Semitism, with other examples such as Ukip and France’s Front National. This pragmatic approach has not gone unpunished, however, as Viktor Orban of Hungary just saw his country slapped with sanctions by the European Parliament for enacting measures restricting immigration as the clash between anti-globalists and neo-liberal ‘inclusive capitalists’ appears to be escalating.
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PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—What could occur if our nation was a mix of socialism and capitalism? Well, all major industries that are vital to the public’s health and well being would be nationalized. Imagine if Banking, Energy, Pharma, Health care, Defense, Real Estate were owned and operated by the citizens through local and federal government. No more excess profits from our taxes going for mortgages, residential and commercial real estate rentals, doctor visits and medicines, home heating and electric, surgeries, dental care, weapons systems and military needs… all working at non profit or low profit.
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Punto Press, a publishing house affiliated with The Greanville Post, has just published a much awaited history/memoir by Ron Ridenour, an anti-imperialist fighter, radical journalist, and author whose uncompromising trajectory spans six decades and three continents, with first-hand experiences in Cuba, Nicaragua, Europe and naturally the country of his birth, the United States. A life spent struggling for justice and peace is a life morally well lived. In The Russian Peace Threat—Pentagon on Alert, whose focus is the century-old tug of war between two deeply antithetical societies, the US and Russia, Ridenour has not only provided activists and the public at large a dependable and compelling history that is aimed at dissolving the thick layers of disinformation and ignorance still keeping the two nations apart, but a wealth of details and insights seldom found in comparable works, written by a man who does not pretend to a non-existent “objectivity” but simple, liberating truth. MUST READ for people of the real left.
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MIKE FAULKNER—What was particularly disturbing was the way in which most of those who regarded themselves as Marxist-Leninists made no attempt to apply Marxism in any meaningful way to what was happening. They seemed happy to accept whatever issued from Beijing as the truth. In fact, a prominent member of the editorial board of a publication with which I was connected told me that he thought it was our job to be clear about what the Chinese were saying and to repeat it in language more suited to an English readership. They often acted more like followers of a religious faith, accepting edicts from an infallible priesthood. This became impossible to accept when the Chinese leadership, on the basis of what was claimed to be the application of Mao’s theory of contradiction, came to the conclusion that the principal contradiction in the world was no longer the contradiction between the peoples of the world and imperialism, led by U.S. imperialism, but rather that between the peoples of the world and what they had now come to call “Soviet-Social Imperialism”.
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JOSEF SKALA—To this day the left remains the victim of the so-called “new” thinking invented by Gorbachev and his associates. This, of course, is a serious distortion of left thought. But many modern theoreticians are still under the pressure of the stereotypes propagated by this “new” thinking. After all, this thought was nothing new!
