alanjjohnstone
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An SPGB calendar has been suggested before a few times but again an idea that never ever got taken up
As i feared in my very first message on this thread there are serious knock-on effects for us all. I worried about the refugee crisis and we see indeed that they are now being increasingly demonised and rejected. The escalation in military actions is happening.Now, the Climate Change protest march which was going to be massive has been cancelled by the city authorities. The French government proposed a stationary rally of 5000 in a location well away from the COP21 venue to compensate.Will there now be unofficial protests which will result in police repression? For all the talk that ISIS will not accomplish its objective of closing down democracy, the restrictions on the environment movement shows that they have succeeded.
This should be interesting since it will be after COP21 and we'll have a clearer picture of what capitalism intends doing about climate change.
Condemned from their own lips in regard to escalating air-strikesOn 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”.Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October.Speaking at a Nato summit on 8 October the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, warned of the “consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks”On a BBC panel discussion the Telegraph’s Janet Daley referred to the crash as “a direct consequence of [Russia’s] involvement in Syria”, adding: “[Putin] has perhaps incited this terrorist incident on Russian civilians.”http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/17/russian-bombs-terror-vladimir-putin-syria-david-cameron
ALB,Here is a related thread which i think may be one you are thinking of and as usual my failing memory misrepresented. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/spintcom/conversations/topics/5031The proposed debate was with Hizb ut-Tahrir that didn't happen (as an aside, there are very many important exchanges and debates on Spintcom and Spopen and WSM FORUM that are inaccessible to most folk these days. I wonder if they can be made more accessible
Why is this sort of image being permitted. Pick and choose what is racial hatred and incitement. Shameful. http://www.thecanary.co/2015/11/17/daily-mail-sunk-time-low-despicable-response-paris-attacks-image/
Once more you will be hard pushed to find it headline news. A bomb planted by Boko Haram explodes in a market square killing over 30. Buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. The bombing came less than a month after at least 55 died when suicide bombers hit two mosques in north east Nigeria. Regardless of our grief for our French fellow workers, we have to express the same degree of mourning for our Nigerian fellow worker and sadly we play into this hierarchy of the deserving and the forgettable victims of the terrorist war. I await Cameron's expression of sympathy to all those Nigerian people living in the UK…and it will be a very long waithttp://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/nigeria-market-bombing-151117213718605.html
Still not convinced.LBird wants to equate ISIS with the RAF. Now that might be just about doable when it comes to convincing fellow workers. You tried to compare ISIS with Marks and Spencers. That will an almost an impossible task when it comes to persuading our fellow workers. All politics is gangsterism seems to be the cynical position you are putting forward. Certainly it may possible to argue that Cameron is part of a criminal elite – crony corrupt capitlism. But can we also place Corbyn into that category? Certainly we say the capitaist class robs the worker of surplus value but that is a specific form of exploitation. You are right that our fight is against capitalism but i'm not so sure we can button-hole it as SPECTRE, SMERSH or any other supranational criminal organisation. Yes, overall, i think our best approach, is to advocate socialism, Banish gods from the sky and capitalists from the Earth. I've proposed a couple of practical ways to do that and still no one has agreed or disagreed, leaving me still not knowing if they were good proposals to be taken up or bad suggestions to be dismissed but this thread want to take the discussion beyond what the SPGB is capable of doing.We are not able to compete even with the ISIS at an ideological level because we decline to challenge them on their own ground…i.e. at a religious level. I vaguely recall a long time ago DannyL when he was a regular orator at Hyde Park becoming involved with some radical Muslims speakers there and the idea of a formal debate was raised…and we shit our pants – so to speak – scared that the debate would become a physical confrontation and HO would be damaged and no more was said about the possibility.
The shares of the weapon dealers rise https://theintercept.com/2015/11/16/stock-prices-of-weapons-manufacturers-soaring-since-paris-attack/
Fisk at his best again bringing some perspective to the problem…and asking a poignant question ….if the French could retaliate by taking out an arms depot and training base, why didn't they do it a week ago rather than in revenge attack?…If it was the Americans who offered them this inteligence for a target, why didn't the American's bomb it themselves. If the Russian's are accused of not aiming attacks at ISIS, why are the Coalition holding back their attacks upon ISIS? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/france-s-unresolved-algerian-war-sheds-light-on-the-paris-attack-a6736901.html
I'm still not convinced, YMS. You'll have to offer a better case. For sure, many illegal political organisations use gangsterism to provide the cash to finance their activities, particularly if they have embarked upon armed uprising. The IRA and the UDA, were into drug deals or so we are led to believe. The Bolsheviks had its illegal phase. Some German communists after the Sparticaists were into bank robbery…You would perhaps claim the difference is just a matter of degree and extent. But i'd still argue that nationalism was behind the IRA and it was not a criminal organisation for profit even if it did use such methods as protection rackets to pay its soldiers a wage. But i'd like more explanation from you that trying to create a nation state, a theocratic based one, is gangsterism and simply a cover to steal oil and loot archeological artifacts to sell. IS arose from specific conditions in Iraq that tapped into the Sunnis who had just been dislodged by the Shia in the power pyramid . I quoted the view of British intelligence that Sunni tribes in Iraq and Sunni princes in Saudi supported the rise of IS and are still supporters, even id somewhat reluctant, nowadaysAs for cutting funds by cutting the IS oil market, what is the going price for several AK-47s. The attacks in Paris were very cost-effective, and to think stopping funding IS is going to work, isn't being realistic. We see in Jerusalem, you don't even need guns…a few kitchen knives or using a car as a weapon is sufficient to create an atmosphere of terror.
YMS, i have seen your comments that you seek to equate IS with some criminal cocaine cartel and i expect that this is what you mean by talking down IS.I'm not sure your analogy is the right one but i cannot claim even any confidence in my own opinions. IS regardless of what we want to think do possess an ideology, political and religious and it has an appeal well outside its home in Iraq and Syria. It has replaced or supplanted Al Qaida. So to a degree it is successful in the battlefield of ideas and cross cultural. I'm first to hold up my hands and express ignorance and bewilderment and i am only posting to see if we can determine an understanding. From my first post, things are going as i feared…refugees are being used as a scapegoat and will endure more suffereing, mass protests in Paris will be strictly policed and the resistance to COP21 will be somewhat muffled, and calls for increased military action are being called and we can expect public opinion to swing over to Cameron and his hawks. Robbo, why bother responding in anyway to religious fundamentalism, whether it is IS terror or assassination of abortion clinic doctors? I agree that we don't end social ills by arguments which i think is what you mean. Only by the creation of a just equitable economic system removes the core root causes of religion. Like the State religion withers on the vine when socialism is established , but we cannot have socialism without the acceptance and cooperation of the majority of people which means we have to devise an approach that is inclusive of those with religious beliefs.You will say you have the better way than than the exclusivity of the SPGB. But you yourself if i interpret your past posts have a fairly narrow definition of socialists with religious ideas, ie you also cannot accommodate any who adhere to various church canon or whatever, there has to a "revolution" within many religions…some say the process is now going on in christianity but can we say that with the election of Modi and murders of beef-eaters in India, just to use another example that is not muslim fundamentalism, is this "revolutionary" transformation of religion really happening? I tend to feel that even if we don't have any effective influence, and we don't have that effect on many aspects of life eg economics etc but what we can do, we do. That means exposing religions even if we don't get the audience LBird rightly says we won't because of the unpopularity of our message. But we have to keep that message alive and not let it get confused by the "new atheists"YMS says we should talk down IS? How? Isn't the fact that the vast majority of commentators are already pushing that line. Should we widen the debate to include all the religious as potential and possible extremists?Again, i emphasise i have no answers and seek only to learn what we can do as a socialist party with what resources we possess, admittedly not much but certaily more resources than we all possess as individuals
