alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Will or won’t he?
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president, has written to Pope Francis to ask for an apology for the Catholic church’s role in the oppression of indigenous people in the Spanish conquest 500 years ago.
López Obrador said the Spanish crown, Spain’s government and the Vatican should apologise to native people for the “most reprehensible atrocities” committed after Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico in 1521.
Collapsologists
Seventy-one per cent of Italians and 65% of French people agreed with the statement that “civilisation as we know it will collapse in the years to come”; 56% of Brits shared that apocalyptic vision – slightly ahead of Americans, at 52% – while Germans came in last with a sanguine 39%.
Chinese ownership of British businesses should be subject to a national security review by the UK government to assess the impact of Beijing’s growing economic power, according to the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.
As always, the Vatican is up to its dirty tide-mark neck in financial skull-duggery
https://news.yahoo.com/francis-loses-patience-vatican-corruption-093313627.html
As for the reason i link frequently to the Pope’s “lefty” beliefs is that they form solid quotes for anyone writing articles on many social issue topics to springboard to our own views.
The politics of the leader of 2 billion “faithful” can’t be so easily neglected even if some like Stalin asked how many regiments the Pope possessed as if military might was the only power, (although millions of women totally ignore the Papacy on contraception and abortion.)
After all, the BBC treats whatever the sainted David Attenborough utters as almost infallible.
Divest
Pope Francis urged people to pull investments from companies that are not committed to protecting the environment, adding his voice to calls for the economic model that emerges from the coronavirus pandemic to be a sustainable one.
“Science tells us, every day with more precision, that we need to act urgently … if we are to have any hope of avoiding radical and catastrophic climate change,” he said. “The current economic system is unsustainable. We are faced with a moral imperative … to rethink many things,” he said, listing means of production, consumerism, waste, indifference to the poor, and harmful energy sources.
Greta Thunberg, the latest lesser evil supporter, calls for vote for Biden.
The Great Barrington declaration, an open letter that is calling for a herd immunity approach to Covid-19 which was said to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners around the world contain numerous false names, as well as those of homeopaths and therapists in massage, hypnotherapy and Mongolian khoomii singing.
Pork and poultry with “unacceptable” levels of salmonella and E coli are reaching supermarket shelves in the US.
A five year study being carried out at George Washington University by Prof Lance Price, which tested meat from US shops and found that about 14% of the poultry samples and 13% of the pork had traces of salmonella.
Testing also revealed that more than 60% of the pork products had E coli on them, as did around 70% of the beef products, 80% of the chicken products, and more than 90% of the turkey products.
“It’s an unacceptable rate given that it is controllable, but the industry has been very successful in fighting any kind of regulations there.”Since several poultry plants were given government permission to increase the speeds of their production lines, the amount of chicken meat being condemned and discarded owing to suspected contamination fell 10% from the same period in 2019.
i also wonder ALB just how much of it was related to their disputes with Bakunin.
We also know how irrationally paranoid Marx was about Lord Palmerston describing him as an agent of the Tsar, happy to promote conspiracy theories on behalf a Scottish aristocrat Urquhart.
Nor should we be too overly sympathetic to Mexico who themselves indulged in land-grabs from American natives and also tried to exterminate them. Geronimo gained his warrior reputation from fighting the Mexicans.
A new word for me “A techno-feudalistic society”
– monopoly control in nearly every industry and sector of society, and the populace pushed further and further into debt with various forms of rent that must be paid to landowners, corporate utilities, rising food costs, insurances, and taxes and fees, … petitioning the lords of the manors while we toil as serfs and give away our labor for a pittance.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/10/nobody-for-president-voting-legitimizes-a-fraudulent-democracy/
Chinese military spokesperson said on Friday that the U.S. destroyer John McCain had entered waters around the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea claimed by China without China’s permission.
“We demand the U.S. immediately stop such provocative actions, (and) strictly control and restrict military operations in the sea and air,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson also said it would take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and security and to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-military-usa/chinese-military-spokesperson-tells-u-s-to-halt-provocative-actions-idUSKBN26U1SIThere is no ambiguity or contemporary language in the endorsement Marx and Engels had for supporting the United States against Mexico. As i explained other radicals were well aware of the motivation – not merely the expansion of the nation-state but the widening of the slave-states.
We can rightly express questions about such statements as “peoples without history” (Slavic ) “reactionary peoples” or “remnants of peoples long gone” (Celtic)
Roman Rosdolsky’s ‘Engels and the Non-Historic Peoples’ is an interesting read on the topic which can be downloaded free at
https://b-ok.asia/book/2378384/66c767?regionChanged=&redirect=4228779
What should we make of Engels words here? Genocide? Germanisation?
“We shall fight “an implacable life-and-death struggle” with
Slavdom, which has betrayed the revolution; a war of annihilation and
ruthless terrorism, not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of the revolution… the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter this Slav Sonderbund, and annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance…”Even Kautsky was taken aback.
“It was proclaimed that, except for the Poles, the Slavs were all by nature
counter-revolutionary, and therefore they had to be fought not merely in the present situation, which found them in the camp of the counter-revolution. No, they had to be exterminated. Brotherhood with them was precluded; the only thing to do was to fight against them until they were annihilated. …This was said a little more than a year after the Communist Manifesto was written, which ended with the words: ‘Working men of all countries, unite!'”Engels again-
“…Amongst all the nations and nationalities of Austria there are only three bearers of progress, which have actively intervened in history and are still capable of independent life: Germans, Poles and Magyars. They are therefore revolutionary now. The next mission of all the other great and small peoples is to perish in the universal revolutionary storm. They are therefore now counter-revolutionary. We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians and at most the Slavs of Turkey [not of Austria and Hungary! (rr)], no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for a viable independence… Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilization, or are forced onto the first level of civilization by the yoke of a foreigner, have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs…”
Was it only early Engels?
Engels to Kautsky, 7 February 1882: “Now you could ask me whether I
have, then, no sympathy at all for the small Slavic peoples and ruins of
peoples who are split up from one another by the three wedges driven into
Slavdom: the German, Magyar and Turkish wedges. In fact, I have damned
little…”Engels’ letter to Bebel, 17 November 1885, “pitiable splinters of former nations—the Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and other robber riff-raff.”
Pirates reminded me of this article
