alanjjohnstone
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Across the world, there are many museums devoted to indigenous peoples. The Holocaust should also be commemorated.But that is not the point. We should not engage in creating a league table the most oppressed.Many Roma were exterminated in Auschwitz and this tends to be forgottenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PorajmosA bit background on the nationalist denial of anti-semitism complicity in the Holocausthttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/poland-antisemitism-holocaust
Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum have described how they were subjected to a wave of “hate, fake news and manipulations” as a result of the controversy surrounding a contentious Holocaust speech law passed by Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party earlier this year. This, in turn, provoked an angry backlash from nationalist and pro-government media in Poland, many of whom accused the museum – which administers the site, conducts historical research, and trains and licenses official guides – of deliberately downplaying the fate of the approximately 74,000 non-Jewish Polish prisoners who perished in the camp, by focusing exclusively on its Jewish victims.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/07/polands-holocaust-law-triggers-tide-abuse-auschwitz-museum
America’s abortion clinics experienced a major upsurge in trespassing, obstruction and blockades by anti-abortion activists in 2017Acts of trespassing increased from 247 in 2016 to 823 in 2017, instances of obstruction tripled to 1,704 and threats of death or other harm nearly doubled to 62. The picketing in 2017 often was more aggressive than in recent years, according to the Feminist Majority Foundation, which operates a national clinic access program. “The protesters are feeling emboldened by the political environment and seeing what they could get away with,” said the National Abortion Federation president, Vicki Saporta. oOne attempted bombing in 2017 involved a pipe bomb that did not explode after being placed in an abortion clinic in Champaign, Illinois, in November. The three men charged by federal authorities are allegedly part of a militia group called the “White Rabbits” who also have been charged in the bombing of a Minnesota mosque last year. A Massachusetts man deliberately crashed a stolen truck into a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Jersey, injuring three people, including a pregnant woman. That was the first major violent attack on a US abortion clinic since 2015, when a man killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic during a shooting attack in Colorado.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/07/abortion-clinic-protests-stats-2017-surge
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/07/trump-and-netanyahu-may-not-want-war-with-iran-but-they-may-fall-into-one-anyway/A balanced view from Patrick Cockburn
Quote:Governments everywhere want to present themselves as the sole defenders of their citizens against some hideous menace from abroad. Iran fulfils this role for the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf and acts as a useful glue for national solidarity and a diversion from domestic grievances. Belief in an all-embracing Iranian conspiracy fuels paranoiahttps://theconversation.com/karl-marx-wouldnt-agree-that-worker-power-has-been-killed-by-the-21st-century-95982Carlo Morelli, Senior Lecturer in Business and Economic History, University of Dundee
Quote:this means that there is a tendency towards a falling rate of profit for each player. To offset this and to make their goods even cheaper, the capitalists either become more concentrated through mergers and acquisitions, or by driving down wages through deskilling jobs and making people redundant. As Marx wrote, it becomes a competition between “the generalists, the capitalists … as to who can discharge most soldiers of industry”.https://cardiffmarxistgroup.com/about-2/You have your work cut out for you but comradely debate and discussion can go a long way to influence those who are receptive to different ideas
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/44359-karl-marx-s-relevance-in-today-s-world
Quote:Nourished by the resistances to the exploitation of wage earners' work and the accumulation by dispossession that punctuate the capitalist globalization that is under way, its future can ultimately be measured only by its practical results, which remain, when all is said and done, the only test of truth and of the power of ideas.https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bibis-information-warfare-operation-against-america/A good essay from Scott Ritter, the ex-UN Iraq WMD inspectorRalph Naderhttps://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/03/wake-trump-distraction-and-war-iran
DW once more http://www.dw.com/en/karl-marx-at-200-what-remains-of-his-legacy/a-43625183
Quote:Certainly Marx cannot be held liable for what Stalin brought about. Nevertheless, one has to consider where the starting points lie, and these are certainly the dictatorship of the proletariat and the question of violence in revolutions. One has to point out in connection to this that there were gaps in Marx's edifice of ideas…For him, it is never about beginning with violence or enforcing any ideas through the use of force.DW againhttp://www.dw.com/en/little-trace-of-marxism-in-africa/a-43654592
Quote:In Africa, there were already barriers which prevented socialism from flourishing. The conditions for increased industrial and agricultural production based on the socialist model were not applicable in poor African countries. In Europe, socialism was based on the class struggle of workers and farmers against the bourgeoisie. In Africa, there was neither a strong industry, nor an organized workforce. The arable land was mostly managed by traditional authorities.The Guardian againhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/karl-marx-200th-birthday-communist-manifesto-revolutionary
Quote:We need Marx to help us understand the state we’re in, though that is only a prelude to the bigger struggle, for which his writings are less helpful: namely, how to get out of it.Independent againhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/karl-marx-anniversary-a8334241.html
Quote:Some of the most switched-on uber capitalists and masters of the universe concede that Marx’s basic analysis of capitalism has never been improved upon. Trump billionaire backer and donor Peter Thiel states that the breakdown of the status quo points either towards libertarianism or Marxism.Quote:Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a ghost who continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights which are today more true than in his own time.The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/04/karl-marx-revived-west-neglected-east-still-divides-germany
Quote:Christina Morina, an East Germany-born historian whose recent book The Invention of Marxism examines the people who turned the philosopher’s ideas into a political movement blames Marx’s interpreters for East Germany’s experiment with authoritarian Marxism, she also suggests that the contemporary revival’s pick-and-mix approach overlooks the 19th-century thinker’s absolutist ambitions.“There was a megalomania – and a dash of Prussian authoritarianism – to Marx’s desire to read and write his way into all sorts of scientific disciplines.”
