Defend Joe Glenton!

video: ady cousins.

Stop the War reports:

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, the soldier who faces desertion
charges for refusing to return to Afghanistan, has been
arrested and charged with five further offences for leading
Stop the War's demonstration in London on 24 October and for
expressing his opposition to the media in defiance of orders.

The new charges carry a maximum of ten years imprisonment in
addition to the sentence of three to four years that Joe could
get if the desertion charge is upheld.

Joe's mother, Sue Glenton, has spoken out against his arrest:
"You've got government ministers, army commanders and MPs
speaking every day in support of the war. What's so scary
about a Lance Corporal having his say? My son is only speaking
out for what he thinks is right."

Joe's arrest and imprisonment are signs of panic by the government and military commanders, faced with an ever growing majority of the British public opposing the war and an increasing number of prominent voices in the media calling for
the withdrawal of British troops.


Stop the War has organised an EMERGENCY PROTEST at 5pm tomorrow (Thursday 12 November), at the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall (opposite Downing Street). Details of other ways you can help Joe can be found here.

And if you're an anti-war blogger, in the UK or overseas, please do all you can to publicise the campaign to defend Joe. Joe Glenton is not a criminal, he's a national hero. It's the politicians who launch illegal wars which have nothing to do with defending the realm who should be arrested, not the brave soldiers who oppose such conflicts.

Those dreadful Communists......

HUNGARY: NOVEMBER 2009
A woman sits bolt upright in the middle of the night. She jumps out of bed and rushes to the bathroom to look in the medicine cabinet. Then, she runs into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Finally, she dashes to the window and looks out into the street. Relieved, she returns to the bedroom. Her husband asks, "What's wrong with you?" "I had a terrible nightmare", she says, "I dreamed we could still afford to buy medicine, that the refrigerator was absolutely full, and that the streets were safe and clean. I also dreamed that you had a job, that we could afford to pay our gas and electricity bills and the Hungarian national football team was one of the best in the world.

"How is that a nightmare?" asks her husband. The woman shakes her head, "I thought the communists were back in power."

A Magyarised version of this great Bulgarian joke told by Maria Todorova.
Hat tip: Olching.

Why people are so 'ostalgic' for communism and why western 'liberals' still don't get it

video:stalinleninmao.

economic liberalism, a la Professor Hayek, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it...'
I think Sir Ian Gilmour, the old 'One Nation' Tory, had the answer.

Perhaps if the communism had been replaced with other forms of socialism post-1989 there would not now be so much nostaglia for communism in eastern Europe. But it was not. It was replaced by a system which put the interests of Goldman Sachs and international finance capital above ordinary people. The selfish, individualistic ‘elbow’ society, to use Bruni de la Motte's’s excellent phrase, came to eastern Europe and most people, surprise, surprise, don’t like it.

But of course, eastern Europeans aren’t supposed to say that. For so-called western ‘liberals’, it’s ok for anti-communists from emigre families to pen attack pieces on communism, but not for those who actually lived in the countries in question to write about how much they enjoyed their lives there as Bruni de la Motte does here and my wife Zsuzsanna did here.

As our good friend Olching puts in on this thread in replying to a western ‘liberal’ who castigates Bruni de la Motte for writing positively about her life in the GDR:

How dare they, eh, have any fond memories, when clearly they should remember nothing but the cliches we want them to remember!

Postscript: Isn’t it great to have this article published on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall- to remind people who have been the main beneficiaries of the political changes of 20 years ago.

UPDATE: There's a great post by former GDR citizen 'berlin girl' in the comments section to Bruni de la Motte's piece, which I think says it all.

Our lives in the GDR were not just about stasi and the wall, we had parties, got married had kids and had normal lives as well. We didnt take to the streets so that we could have mcdonalds and starbucks, we took to the streets for autonomy and self-determination. We didnt want to be just another part of West Germany, we wanted our own chance at a fairer society. That chance was taken from us by the likes of Kohl and the Western countries who thought they knew best. And the criticism of nostalgia, well, sorry, but how many of you feel nostalgic for your past? Why is it only the east germans who arent allowed to feel nostalgic? As for leaving in droves, yes, we all wanted to travel. But we almost all of us came back. Who wouldnt want to check out the eiffel tower and piccadilly circus, but it doesnt mean youd want to stay!

All Quiet on the Western Front and the warmongers of 2009

video: Inspector Foyle

It’s Remembrance weekend- so to mark the occasion here’s a clip from what for my money remains the greatest- and most powerful- anti-war film of all time: All Quiet on the Western Front.

At about 7.15 in to the clip, you can watch the wonderful scene when Paul, who has returned from the horror of the trenches, visits his old school and turns on his warmongering teacher Professor Kantorek who is still urging pupils to go out and fight.

Whenever I read articles like this one and this one in the British press, I always think of Kantorek and the other armchair warriors in the bar.

For, as Paul says in the clip, it is much, much easier to tell others to ‘go out and die’ than it is to do it yourself.

Eastern Takeover

This piece of mine, on the human cost of the political changes in eastern Europe in 1989, appears in the Morning Star.

Make 1989 the year you visit the GDR, the brochure of Berolina Travel proclaimed. So that's what my university friend Rob and I decided to do.

Neither of us were card-carrying members of the Young Communist League, but neither were we anti-communist cold war warriors. We were just two young people keen to find out for ourselves what life was really like behind the so-called Iron Curtain.

Twenty years on, the memories of my trip to the German Democratic Republic are still extremely vivid. We travelled to East Germany by rail via Frankfurt. The contrast between Frankfurt and Erfurt, the first city we arrived at over the border, could not have been more striking.

There was the lack of neon and the refreshing absence of advertising. Everything seemed less frenetic - the pace of life was much slower.

The GDR was getting ready to celebrate its 40th birthday. The country had come a long way since its foundation from the ruins of World War II, as John Green has described in recent Morning Star articles.

We had been conditioned to expect a very poor country, but were surprised to see that most people were better dressed than back home in Britain and that the shops, far from being empty, were well-stocked. It was nice to see main streets not dominated by chain stores - and not a Mcdonald's in sight.

Instead of Western fast-food chains serving unhealthy junk food, the GDR, in common with other socialist countries, was full of publicly owned self-service restaurants where ordinary people could eat good hearty fare at affordable prices in a communal atmosphere.

I remember going to one restaurant in Magdeburg and chatting to a young married couple sitting on the same table. We got on so well that we exchanged addresses after just half an hour together.

Contrary to its usual depiction in the West as a grey, unwelcoming place, I found the GDR to be one of the friendliest places I had ever visited. The best thing about it was the people - kind, friendly and extremely helpful. Interesting, well-read and well-educated people who always looked you in the eye and didn't want to cheat you.

I experienced the same thing on my other visit to a European communist country, Yugoslavia, also in 1989. I stayed in a small guest house close to Lake Bohinj. The owner was a committed communist and strong supporter of the partisans. Each evening he would invite the guests to sit, eat and drink with him and he would tell stories of how the partisans defeated the nazis in WWII.
He told all the guests to feel as if they were at home. He even washed his guest's dirty laundry for no extra charge. He not only advocated socialism, he lived a socialist life - helping others for no monetary reward. He was one of the kindest men I have ever met in my life and I remembered thinking there and then that a system that can produce such warm-hearted and generous people surely must have something going for it.

Not long after my visit to the GDR, the Berlin Wall came down. People I had spoken to in the GDR said that their main criticism of the government was the restriction on foreign travel. But, as the recent BBC documentary series The Lost World Of Communism showed, there was no desire, even among those who did take part in street demonstrations in the autumn of 1989, for a wholesale dismantling of the socialist system. What many people had wanted was a less authoritarian form of socialism - no-one was calling for mass privatisation and the introduction of Thatcherism.

In the mid-1990s I returned to eastern Europe to live and work in Hungary. After four years of harsh economic reforms the Hungarian people had just voted into power the Hungarian Socialist Party. But the hopes of the voters for a government which would retain the best aspects of the communist system were to be dashed. Capital had no intention of allowing any vestiges of socialism to survive in eastern Europe.
Under pressure from Western financial institutions prime minister Gyula Horn, who had earlier attacked the idea of energy privatisation, changed tack. He appointed a fanatically neoliberal economics professor called Lajos Bokros to introduce an austerity package.

While in Britain Thatcherite media commentators enthused over the eastern European countries' transition to a "free market economy," I witnessed at first hand the pain that such policies were causing to ordinary people.

Pensioners who had lived relatively well under the old regime were now having to go from shop to shop to try to save a crucial few forints as prices of basic foodstuffs rocketed. People who had never experienced unemployment under communism, when it did not exist, were forced on to the scrapheap as their factories closed. Beggars - almost non-existent during communism - appeared once again on Budapest's streets.
Yet as harsh as conditions were in Hungary in 1995, they are even worse today.

With the economy shrinking by 7.5 per cent in the second quarter this year and unemployment up to 10 per cent, it's hardly surprising that, according to a recent poll, just one in five Hungarians believe their country has changed for the better since 1989.

It's a similar story of economic hardship across the region, yet the rise in poverty in eastern Europe since 1989 is seldom mentioned by neoliberal commentators in the West when they pen their articles celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the "liberation" of the people from communism.

Twenty years on from the historic events of 1989 it is clear that what occurred was not so much a liberation but a colonisation. For while ordinary people have seen their living standards plummet and have lost many of the things they once took for granted, such as secure employment, affordable gas and electricity prices, cheap public transport and good-quality education and health care, the giants of Western capital have enjoyed a financial bonanza.

In Hungary alone, over £97 billion of publicly owned assets were sold off in the period 1990-2007, many to Western multinationals.

There was no office of Goldman Sachs in Budapest in 1989. There is now.
There were no Tescos in Hungary in 1989. There are now over 100.
And there was no Coca-Cola for sale when I visited the GDR. The Coca-Cola corporation now dominates the soft drinks market throughout the region.

So if you watched multimillionaire pop-star Bono perform last night in the MTV concert in Berlin to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, remember that it's capital - and not the ordinary people of eastern Europe - that's been the main beneficiary of the political changes of 20 years ago.

Never in the history of the world has the fall of a single wall proved quite so profitable.

America (and the world's) best hope: A Manifesto for X Street

What this country needs is a new direction, possibly driven by a new foreign policy lobby that recognizes that while all nations have an inalienable right to be treated fairly by the United States, Washington has a clear and compelling responsibility to avoid involvement in other countries’ quarrels so it can put its own people and interests first.

Though "America First" might sound like a crude reversion to some forms of 1930s nationalism, in reality the lobby could spearhead a withdrawal from empire in reaction to the American people’s having been sold down the river by a succession of politicians of both parties who have adhered to an agenda that is completely hypocritical, blindly globalist, and persistently interventionist.

The inside-the-beltway political class has grown fat on empire, shielded from the consequences of its own folly and never held accountable for its sins, largely because both parties adhere to the same basic policies, albeit with slightly different packaging. The sorry result has not benefited the American people in any way unless one is a defense contractor or a Wall Street banker or a politician writing a self-exculpatory book.

You can read the rest of Philip Giraldi's Manifesto for X Street here.
I urge all American readers in particular to take a look: it's the best idea I've heard for ages.

Seumas Milne: Bring the troops back from Afghanistan

video: ady cousins

For those weren't able to make it to London, here, thanks to the wonders of You Tube is Seumas Milne's brilliant speech at the recent anti-war rally organised by Stop the War. As you'll see from the clip Seumas is a great speaker as well as being a great journalist, but to the best of my knowledge he has never appeared on the BBC1's Question Time programme, nor has he ever been a panellist on Radio 4's Any Questions. In fact, ask yourself how many true socialists you have seen/heard on Question Time or Any Questions. Pro-war neoliberals and faux leftists are invited every week and dominate the panels-(they even had a fascist on a few weeks back, I believe), but how many true socialists like Seumas, John Pilger or Jeremy Corbyn ever get invited?

It's supposed to be 'our' BBC, so shouldn't we try a little bit harder to get panels that actually represent public opinion?

Where have all the flowers gone?

(video: egonchris)

Another day, more dead soldiers in Afghanistan. The British public wants out. So too does former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells. It's time to say enough is enough and bring British troops back from Afghanistan without further delay. And let those who want this wretched, unwinnable war to continue go out and fight it themselves.