Socialist Standard-Events-Blogs ➤
Small Axe (BBC One) is a polished and engaging collection of five dramas directed and co-written by filmmaker Steve McQueen, most well-known for 12 Years A Slave. As he explains, ‘the anthology, anchored in the West Indian experience in London, is a celebration of all that that community has succeeded in achieving against the odds’
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Right from the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk recognised that to build a modern, secular society those he described as the ‘true owners’, the villagers, could become the nation’s greatest asset but only if the ‘light of education’ could be passed to them
The events in Northern Ireland since 1968 caused a split in the ranks of the IRA but while the immediate problems posed by the troubles in the North may have triggered off this split it was the growing influence of Leninist ideas within the movement, and the effect these had on dividing the IRA’s reaction to events in the North, that formed the core of the division.
The preponderance of state capitalism in Belarus does not make it a welfare state. For example, Russia has more progressive labour legislation than we do. In Russia there are several alternative trade union federations, while Belarus has only one trade union independent of the state. It was created and registered under Lukashenko’s predecessors. In Belarus it is almost impossible to conduct a strike…
The problem is not so much fake news, which is often reasonably easy to identify and debunk, as partial truths, which are much harder to disentangle and can look convincing even to a discerning eye. One of the problems with vaccine scepticism is that much of what the sceptics say about Big Pharma is correct. For instance, it’s quite true that Big Pharma exists primarily to make profits and only secondarily to make drugs, so if more money can be made out of bad drugs than good ones, it will make bad ones…
Open the atlas and look at a political map of Africa. Many borders consist of straight lines, and it is clear that these are arbitrary consequences of colonialism, of which colonial power ruled which area and where it was convenient to draw boundaries, rather than reflecting any genuine distinctions between nations. Instead, the lines were put in place, and nations were created as a result. Iraq, too, was assembled a century ago as an artificial entity that served the interests of the British ruling class, with special regard to access to oil reserves…
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