alanjjohnstone
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On a personal note, Janet, my father being from an impoverished “tinker” family joined the army in 1936. His early posting was to India and to the Afghan region.
Whenever news of the Russian intervention there in the 1980s was being reported he always said that they would be doomed to failure as the British.
He died before the US invasion of 2001 but I am sure he would have been offering the same prediction.
A useful essay in Weekly Worker where our class loyalties lie – with our Iranian fellow-workers and our solidarity with their struggle against the Iranian State and mullahs
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1357/into-the-light-of-hope/
“…Working class nationwide strike action has opened a window of light and hope in the long, dark night of the ayatollahs’ rule…”
Dave Douglass, former miner militant, on how his occupational pension scheme is being robbed.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1357/great-pension-robbery/
And what is the policy of the supposed “socialist” wing of the Labour Party,
According to Weekly Worker’s remedy, it is not to abandon the Labour Party, but to remain members and to “demand that Labour be refounded as a united front of all socialist and working class organisations… we urge the militant left not only to stay and fight back against Starmer’s latest attacks, but also to use the opportunity he has given us to deepen the struggle to win the working class movement to the Marxist programme of republican democracy, ecological sustainability and universal human liberation.”
In reality, they will continue to sharpen the axe to a razor’s edge that will be used against them.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1357/sir-keirs-road-to-brighton/
It is as myopic as those in American DSA who decline to recognise the Democratic Party as the class representative of a section of the capitalists.
Taliban have gained “strategic momentum” in Afghanistan and now control about half the countryside as they drive to cut off population centres from the Western-backed government in Kabul, the United States’s top military general, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley told reporters
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/21/taliban-seek-to-cut-off-population-centres-top-us-general
“This is going to be a test now, of the will and leadership of the Afghan people, the Afghan security forces and the government of Afghanistan,”
Bill Gates and Big Pharma said it couldn’t be done
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/21/pfizer-biontech-to-produce-covid-19-jabs-with-s-african
Pfizer and BioNTech have said they struck a deal with South Africa-based company Biovac for the production of COVID-19 vaccines
A week before the assassination, on the night of 29 June, 15 Haitians died in targeted killings, including political activists and journalists.
The UK has launched an attempt to substantially rewrite the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol that enables either the UK or EU to suspend part of the arrangements in extreme circumstances.
Britain announced that it will permanently deploy two warships in Asian waters.
A Pentagon spokesperson congratulated Britain for its “commitment to an inter-connected network of allies and partners, who mutually cooperate and support freedom of navigation and a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Meanwhile, the strike group, Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, carrying F-35B stealth jets, two destroyers, two frigates, two support vessels will sail to Japan through the disputed South China Sea.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/21/uk-to-permanently-deploy-two-warships-in-asia-pacific
Ben and Jerry ice-cream will no longer be sold in the Israeli-Jewish settlements in the Occupied territory.
To be expected Israel’s government called it a “disgraceful capitulation” to anti-Semitism and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demanded its own boycott of Ben and Jerry he would ask the 35 US states with anti-BDS laws to enforce them against the company.
Our Twitter feed is picked up
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13669
If the Socialist Party of Great Britain is an authority on such things, it is official: in light of recent anti-communist protests and civil unrest, Cuba has been demoted to “Not Real Socialism” and reclassified, along with the USSR and other failed socialist experiments, as “actually state capitalism.”I like the description – “sugarcane stalinism”
https://libcom.org/blog/sugarcane-stalinism-18072021
A rather lengthy essay but thoughtful
The U.S. recession touched off by the coronavirus lasted only two months, ending with a low point reached in April 2020 after the start of a sharp drop in economic activity in March of that year, the U.S. Business Cycle Dating Committee announced Monday.
The committee, a group of macroeconomists who assign the start and end dates of U.S. business cycles, said that while the country had by no means gotten back to normal operating capacity at that point, indicators of both jobs and production “point clearly to April 2020 as the month of the trough,” with a rebound beginning in May.
Since the source is Dominic Cummings we can take it with a pinch of salt but Johnson was reluctant to tighten Covid restrictions as cases rose last autumn because he thought people dying from it were “essentially all over 80”. Johnson had wanted to let Covid “wash through the country” rather than destroy the economy.
UK and EU have accused China of carrying out a major cyber attack earlier this year saying the attack came from “the territory of China”, while the UK said Chinese state-backed actors were responsible. The US is expected to follow suit.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57889981
Microsoft said the hacking was conducted by a Chinese group called Hafnium. Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, an arm of GCHQ, said it was “highly likely that Hafnium is associated with the Chinese state”.
I may be completely off-beam but I can’t help comparing how the Israeli government is not held responsible for the phone hacking actions of NSO.
