WSWS.org article about book launch in Sydney
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/31/ybfo-m31.html
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) “Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Rick at Sydney Book Launch--If no working class response, there is only death and disability...
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Sharon--Interview with IYSSE Member at Book Launch in Sydney, AU
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WSWS.org article re: this book launch
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/31/ybfo-m31.htm
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Monday, May 29, 2023
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Friday, May 26, 2023
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Friday, May 12, 2023
Ninety Years Since the Nazi Book Burnings - World Socialist Web Site
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Ninety years since the Nazi book burnings - World Socialist Web Site:
Ninety years ago today, the Nazis made an attack on culture and literature at the beginning of their reign of terror that led to the war of extermination and the Holocaust. Beginning May 10, books burned first in Berlin and later in other cities.
The works of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Kästner and many other writers were publicly burned. Everything humane, progressive and promoting solidarity was to be eradicated.
At the center of the book burning were the writings of socialists and Marxists. One of the fire oaths was: “Against class struggle and materialism, for Volksgemeinschaft and an idealistic attitude to life! I hand over to the flame the writings of Marx and Kautsky.”
Also burned were the writings of Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, August Bebel, Franz Mehring, and also those of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the two leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
Trotsky understood more than any other the character of Nazi terror. “The bonfires which burn the impious literature of Marxism light up brilliantly the class nature of National Socialism,” he wrote in “What is National Socialism?”
And further: “Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.”
The anniversary of the book burning must be a warning to workers and youth worldwide. Today the same contradictions are developing that led to barbarism in the 20th century. The danger of fascism and world war is back.
Above all, the ruling class in Germany continues its crimes of the past. Eighty two years after the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, German tanks are rolling against Russia again.
And the rehabilitation of fascism is also well advanced. At Berlin’s Humboldt University, where the 1933 book burning originated, Nazi crimes are downplayed and justified.
“Hitler was no psychopath, and he wasn’t vicious. He didn’t want people to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table,” Humboldt professor Jörg Baberowski told Der Spiegel in 2014.
In the same interview, Baberowski backed Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, who had already justified National Socialism in the 1980s as an understandable reaction to the Russian October Revolution.
While Nolte was roundly condemned for his theses at the time, the enemy for the ruling class today is once again unanimously on the left. For its criticism of Baberowski and the return of German militarism, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party in Germany-SGP) has been placed under surveillance by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution [the German Secret Service].
As in the 1930s, the bourgeoisie is horrified by the growing radicalization and movement to the left among workers and youth. It fears that this opposition is increasingly coming together with the SGP’s international socialist perspective.
Ninety years ago, the workers were prevented by their leadership from taking up the struggle against Hitler. This time it is necessary to ensure that Heinrich Heine’s warning, “wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings,” does not prove true again.
Necessary for this is the building of the SGP and the Fourth International as a new mass socialist party that will unite the working class internationally and end capitalist barbarism once and for all.
Thursday, May 11, 2023
COVID-19 Is No Longer an Official Emergency. Is That the Right Call? | The Brink | Boston University
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COVID-19 Is No Longer an Official Emergency. Is That the Right Call? | The Brink | Boston University:
Interview with Ellie Murray, a BU School of Public Health assistant professor of epidemiology and a faculty affiliate at the University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy & Research.
EXCERPT:
With all these declarations ending, are you sticking with the precautions that you’ve been taking for the past couple of years—wearing masks, avoiding restaurants?
Yeah, I’m sticking with it. I mask when I’m in public indoor spaces. In terms of indoor dining, I’m generally avoiding it. The only exception would be if it’s a place where it’s relatively empty. And I have this little portable CO2 monitor, which can tell me if the ventilation is good, so sometimes you can find somewhere where the ventilation is very good, then I might eat indoors.
Monday, May 08, 2023
Sunday, May 07, 2023
Saturday, May 06, 2023
SARS-CoV-2 and "Textbook" Immunity - John Snow Project
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SARS-CoV-2 and "Textbook" Immunity - John Snow Project
EXCERPT:
The term ‘textbook’ should not be comforting. Textbooks tell us we can expect SARS-CoV-2 to have a detrimental impact on human health and life expectancy if it is allowed to continue to spread and reinfect the population.
A new trope that aims to minimize the seriousness of COVID-19 has been doing the rounds recently – that SARS-CoV-2 is a ‘textbook’ virus that behaves like other common viruses. This trope promotes the views that first, nothing extraordinary has happened with SARS-CoV-2’s establishment in the human population, and second, that uncontrolled transmission is actually beneficial, because it will somehow build immunity and make subsequent reinfections inconsequential. Talking about SARS-CoV-2, one social media commentator stated, “As with other respiratory viruses, symptomatic re-infections tend to sharpen – not weaken, your immunity.”
There are two key issues in such statements. The first is the fundamentally misguided idea of a virus being or not being `textbook’ – viruses objectively exist independent of human textbooks, and if textbooks make false generalizations, then the problem is with the textbooks, i.e. the properties of each novel virus need to be considered on their own, not with a reference to a textbook model. The second is whether infection of SARS-CoV-2 or, indeed, any other virus is a net benefit because it ‘sharpens’ one’s immunity, and whether any ‘textbook’ virus in fact behaves in the claimed way.
It is worth noting that this is not a new assertion. Infection as a conduit for immunity has been made by commentators throughout history, and it is usually raised as an argument to counter any impetus for change. It was raised as a reason not to treat water and has been used by people resistant to mass vaccination campaigns1,2. Some members of the medical and scientific community, and a significant proportion of the general public, believe exposure to pathogens through infection toughens us and is a net benefit to our health.
They could not be more wrong, and ill-informed statements about infection sharpening immunity show a lack of understanding of what the textbooks actually tell us about infection.
Friday, May 05, 2023
A Kingly Proposal: Letter from Julian Assange to King Charles III
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Julian Assange speaking in 2009. (Photo: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen / Creative Commons)
A Kingly Proposal: Letter from Julian Assange to King Charles III: WikiLeaks founder calls for “mercy” from King Charles as the political prisoner highlights England’s jail conditions.
To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.
It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.
As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.
During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.
Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.
You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.
Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.
Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.
But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.
I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.
Your most devoted subject,
Julian Assange
A9379AY
The 1619 Project and the New York Times’ Promotion of the Racialist Ideology of Ukrainian Nationalism - World Socialist Web Site
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EXCERPT:
“For many Ukrainians,” Bubola writes, “the idea of saving soldiers’ sperm is at once personal and patriotic … It leaves open the possibility, at least, of preserving Ukrainian bloodlines even as the Kremlin insists that Ukrainian statehood—and by extension Ukrainians as a separate people—is a fiction.”
The phrase “preserving Ukrainian bloodlines” appears in the article without irony, qualification or quotation marks. Indeed, the whole thrust of the passage in context is that Ukrainians, in fact, are “a separate people,” contrary to the claims of “the Kremlin.”
Behind this talk of “Ukrainian bloodlines” and Ukrainians as “a separate people” is an utterly toxic racialist ideology that was developed by the Ukrainian fascists parallel to German and other European fascist movements in the period leading up to the Second World War. The idea, which the Times does not dare to say out loud, is that “pure” Ukrainian blood will be corrupted if it is “mixed” with the blood of “impure” or “subhuman” people, including Russians, Jews or Roma people who are not part of the Ukrainian “national identity” being extolled by the Times.
The editors of the Times know very well that the government-backed “bloodline-preserving” endeavor they are celebrating is tainted by precisely that brand of poison. In the service of war propaganda, the Times not only conceals the hateful subtext but actively glorifies these conceptions, which have their American counterpart in the racist “great replacement” theory promoted by figures such as former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. The Times passes this filth on to American readers with an approving quote from a Ukrainian politician who claims that it represents “a continuation of our gene pool.”
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