EDITOR—Garland Nixon and the inestimable Joti Brar, a leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP-GB), clarify in a few minutes, in plain language, who really rules our lives. Forget about the party and election circus. Or what the President is up to in the White House. That’s NOT where power really resides in capitalist society. Instead, a huge machinery of distraction —the media, entertainment (films and sports), phony politicians, etc.—hides the actual ruling class [the billionaires and financial blocs who make all the big decisions behind closed doors, in practical anonymity and without any accountability, acting in fact as a dictatorship), while the charade of bourgeois democracy plays on for the masses…
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Also incredibly repressed in allegedly freedom-respecting America is the 2nd Great Red Scare, exemplified by McCarthyism and which is supposed to run from 1947-1957. However, after reading this article you should find it easy to agree that a far better ending to this era would be in 1963 with the assassination of JFK. From the Walker book: “Prior to 1954, anti-Semitic groups seemed to outnumber the few responsible and respectable anti-communist groups or publications then in existence.”
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ERIC ZUESSE—In accord with Hitler’s famous “Big Lie” technique of deceiving the masses as any dictatorship needs to do, Germany’s proposed resumption of WW II by means of its now coming to allegedly lead Europe to the restoration of America’s Cold War against communism but this time instead against two nations (Russia and China) that both are independent nations and consequently more democratic than any nation in the U.S. (or any) empire can even possibly be — including Germany itself (with its 231 U.S. military bases) — starts from false assumptions.
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GODFREE ROBERTS—Social discontent – rooted in workers’ material lives – was real. Workers’ productivity had increased by 250% since 1957 and the cost of living had increased by 10% but their incomes were 5% lower. Their protests about wages, benefits and work conditions expressed a yearning for human dignity and democratic control over socioeconomic life. One temporary worker recalled, “We were simply inferior. In the factory, if people didn’t know your name, they would just call you linshi gong [temporary worker], which sounded contemptuous. Therefore the word linshi gong was a taboo among us. We would rather call one another lin xiong or ‘temporary brothers’”.
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—What an objective view reveals is this: Revolutionary France saw not just one but seven “Coalition Wars” to restore monarchy, privilege, feudalism, torture, inequality, racism and the oppression of an aristocratic elite. From 1792-1815 Europe’s elite refused to make peace with the socio-political advances of the French Revolution, which the French people democratically chose again and again and again. England was the only nation which participated in every war, and it repeatedly paid off other nations to join them.
