Friday, September 23, 2005

On how to evade and avoid censorship in countries that censor blogs:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15083

Monday, September 05, 2005

The Village Idiot and Abject Moron is being assailed for failing to react in any kind of responsible way to the disaster along the Gulf of Mexico. But to blame him for operational deficits is going so far beyond what anyone with any powers of observation should even expect of so profoundly stupid and inadequate a man. Americans, I believe, are so benightedly blinded by the historical aura of the presidency that they imagine that any man who is president must have powers of leadership and may be held responsible for his enactment, or non-enactment, of them.
But that is to grant him, already, more than he is even remotely capable of in his besotted state and with his addled and scarred brain, which clearly was never much chop, to begin with.
No, all we can be left with[--]and this, by the way, is mere futile gesture[--]is to spit at how pathetic his personal response has been (he hasn’t had an official one, other than inaction, to judge him on – and, as I contend, it is just wishful to expect one from such a limpdick). So, it makes sense only to address the platitudinous, insultingly puerile-joking crap, undergirded by age-old race and socioeconomic hatred and privilege-fueled condescension, that he has trotted out in his swings via helicopter over the terrain he has left reduced to mayhem and agony. And those driveling pronouncements have contained nothing but fatuousness and inanity, comments that make plain that he is not even capable of understanding the situation, nor of sympathizing with its victims. He just does not have the human capacity, and surely it must be becoming clear, evento the droves ofidiotic Americans who boted for him -- twice!!! -- that they were plain-and-simply duped by their own presumptuousness and criminal irresponsibility. (But, of course, to this point, those who voted for him still are almost all way out front in the ledger of greed and profit, so what do they care?)
And we wonder why the world regards us with a fateful amalgam of mystification and hatred.
Martha goes Down Under
http://www.abc.net.au/dig/stories/s1449381.htm

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Friends:

An anthem for Labor Day, anyone? Given the treatment of the South by the Bushwhackers, the words seem strangely apt, even if the history of Socialism, enacted, gives grounds for sad pause.

I hope we can all take the day off and contemplate what is becoming of labor rights, and human dignity, in these times.

- cedric

(from www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/int/internationale.html)

The Internationale

Words by Eugene Pottier (Paris 1871) 
Music by Pierre Degeyter (1888)

Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
 
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
 
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
 
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.

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The Internationale was written to celebrate the Paris Commune of March-May 1871: the first time workers took state power into their own hands. They established in the Commune a form of government more democratic than ever seen before. Representatives were mandated on policy questions by their electors, they were recallable at any time and were paid wages that reflected those of their constituents. The Commune was a working body, not a talk shop. The distinction between legislative and executive arms of government was abolished. Marx's Civil War in France is a suberb account of the history and significance of the Commune. The Commune was drowned in blood by the conservative French government in Versailles, cheered on by the ruling classes of the world.

Workers have adopted a similar pattern of organisation whenever they have challenged the capitalist class for state power: in the form of the Soviets in Russia in 1917; collectives in Spain in 1937; the Workers Council of Greater Budapest in Hungary in 1956; the cordones in Chile in 1973; and, in many respects, Solidarity in Poland in 1980.
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Original URL http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/int/internationale.html
Author Rick Kuhn. Last revised 20 May 2004. Feedback form