Putin is our new tsar, quite simply. I call him an authoritarian modernizer who stands in the balancing act between neoliberalism and monarchist tradition and wants to reorganize the country from this position.
Mass Protests Rock Iran: No to All Wings of the Mullah Regime! (tags)
For more than a week, Iran has been convulsed by mass demonstrations denouncing election fraud. Hundreds of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets to denounce the government, which is now threatening, and beginning to carry out, a bloody crackdown. This time around, imperialist intervention is veiled: the White House feigns neutrality, the Western media go all out for the opposition, while in the background various agencies provide vital technical aid. In reality, all candidates in the presidential vote swear allegiance to the Islamic Republic, and the supposed moderate reformers are no less butchers and enemies of poor and working people than the conservative "populist" government. The situation cries out for revolutionary leadership independent of all factions of the theocracy, to wage a struggle for workers revolution against imperialism and clerical reaction.
Very few people know that the US military is directly involved in the fierce fighting going on in the Philippines between the Moro insurgents and the corrupt and brutal Arroyo regime supported by the Bush neocons and the warmongering Pentagon planners. Will you continue to allow US tax dollars to be wasted in this barbaric genocidal war against indigenous peoples? Over a thousand extrajudicial killings and "forced disappearances" under Arroyo's tenure, plus a few hundred Muslims dead as "collateral damage," may be the signs of US "benevolent hegemony" (Robert Kagan) and US "magnanimous imperial power" (Dinesh D'Souza). McKinley's "Benevolent Assimilation" lives on!
THE ABC'S OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, 1917. (tags)
THIS IS A REVIEW OF LEON TROTSKY'S HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ORIGINALLY PBLISHED IN 1930-23, BY AN UNREPENTENT DEFENDER OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
FILIPINOS IN THE U.S.A. AND AROUND THE WORLD: WHENCE AND WHITHER? (tags)
About ten million Filipinos are now scattered in the U.S. and around the world, chiefly as exploited migrant labor. Meanwhile, 85 million Filipinos--with the exception of a tiny privileged minority--are sufffering and resisting the current repressive regime in a rapidly deteriorating neocolonized social order. The Philippines has one of the most durable and vibrant revolutionary traditions in the whole world--the first Asian people to revolt against Western colonialism. 4.1 million Filipinos died opposing U.S. domination in the Filipino-American War at the turn of the last century. Today Filipinos are engaged in a popular democratic revolutionary process against U.S. imperialism and its local agents. Can overseas Filipinos contribute to the radical transformation of a world afflicted by the atrocities and terrors of global capitalism?
The Makhno anarchists, Kronstadt and the position of the Russian peasants (tags)
In September of 1920, Ivanov V. (representative of the Southern Front Revolutionary Soviet) visited Makhno. He later wrote this description of Makhno’s camp: “The regime is brutal, the discipline is hard as steel, rebels are beaten on the face for any small breach, no elections to the general command staff, all commanders up to company commander are appointed by Makhno and the Anarchist Revolutionary War Council, Revolutionary Military Soviet (Revvoensovet) became an irreplaceable, uncontrollable and non-elected institution. Under the revolutionary military council there is a ‘special section’ that deals with disobediences secretly and without mercy.”