Monday, 28 September 2015

There are many forces who will try to get you to vote in the upcoming election. Their arguments will range from " It's our chance to get rid of harper", to "Your forefathers fought and died so you could have this democratic right" type of bullshit. WRONG. All this serves is the legitimizing of their lying corrupt system. The LAST thing they want is an actual conscious boycott of their bullshit. They will recruit rock stars and other idiot celebrities in the hopes that having them tell you to vote will make it seem that much more important. And many people are that stupid. And it's all part of their game.

______________________ Sep 14th, 2015 ___

Red Flag №4

On the upcoming federal election and its implications for the working class

Welcome to the second issue of The Red Flag quarterly magazine, a periodical promoting the views of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada [PCR-RCP] as well as those written by the revolutionary milieu of supporters, sympathizers, and fellow travellers. The theme of this issue is the upcoming Canadian federal election, with a particular focus on the PCR-RCP’s boycott campaign.

There has been a lot of noise about how this election is uniquely important, a chance to oust the Conservatives, an opportunity for the NDP to outflank the Liberals and form the government for the first time in history. On the contrary, commentators have said that every single election—whether federal or provincial—since the PCR-RCP began calling for a boycott of the bourgeois electoral circus was “uniquely important,” and they’re just as wrong this time as they were before! In the last Federal election, where the NDP under the late Jack Layton succeeded in winning more votes than the Liberals, some even argued that people should vote for the Liberals instead of the NDP to “get rid of Harper at any cost.”

In our opinion, and as many of our articles will argue, this electoral situation confirms precisely what we claimed in the past: all parties are now part of a rightward drift and the NDP, far from representing the interests of any strata of the working class, is in some ways even to the right of the Liberals. Moreover, whereas the first boycott took place only in Québec when the PCR-RCP was predominantly limited to that province, and the second with only a few supporters in Ottawa and Toronto, we now have a boycott movement that, while still small, will for the first time be in numerous major cities across Canada from coast to coast. Whereas the NDP has accumulated more neo-liberal supporters, we have accumulated more activists who want to boycott the state altogether and openly demonstrate their support of revolutionary politics. As we have argued in the past, for a long time there has been an implicit boycott of the electoral circus amongst the masses; we are slowly and doggedly working to make it more explicit.

But we will let the articles speak for themselves. Also, even if readers are not entirely convinced of the boycott line we believe that much of this issue will still be relevant in its expose of ruling class wheeling-and-dealing, Canadian Imperialism, the failed model of Syriza, etc.

Our next issue will be primarily dedicated to revolutionary culture, broadly understood, and we want to encourage our readers and supporters to submit anything from art work, poetry, short stories, and radical analyses of the meaning of the cultural sphere as soon as possible. Depending on what we receive, we would like to dedicate some space in every Red Flag to cultural production.

The Editorial Team

Thursday, 24 September 2015

RE-READS

I'm currently reading books that I haven't read in many years. It's amazing how much more you get out of a book the second ( or even third ) time you read it.
I've just finished with "The Bridge On The Drina" by Ivo Andric , who won the Nobel Prize For Literature for this book in 1961. He was the only one from the former yugoslavia to have done so. It's a gripping work of historic fiction, based on life under the ottoman empire in Bosnia.

The book I'm reading right now is called "Inescapable Questions", by the first president of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic . An intelligent man who spent years in prison under the tito regime, he comes across as the most reasonable out of all of the statesmen from this region. The one thing that gets me though, is his use of the words "liberty" and "freedom", which come off as incredibly naive. He wonders how the u.s. and other western powers could allow the creation of the serbian entity of bosnia, when it was founded on genocide. How did he think the u.s. was created , out of equal agreements and good will? And what about the u.s. government's greatest ally, israel? Give me a break. Still, it's a deep and good book, very much worth your time.

As soon as I'm done with this one, I'll be reading "Heavy Radicals", which was sent to me by Jay Watts! I cannot thank him enough. I've wanted to read this ever since I heard it existed!
The cover should explain this enough. I'll be into it SOON.

Take 'er easy, and READ, goddammit!

Saturday, 19 September 2015

SHITFEST

Victoria continues it's hunger for mediocre entertainment with the crowds at Shitlandia, a half assed tribute to lukewarm "talent" and all things pedestrian.
There are always exceptions, of course, but they are only exceptions. And you might actually not be a douchebag but still attend this non event, but it's extremely doubtful. I'm glad it's raining, and that I'm not working tomorrow, which is too fucking close to the crap to be comfortable.
Good day to you.

SOME OF THE MOST IGNORANT....

Some of the most ignorant and stupid things you will ever hear come out of an adult's mouth is either from politicians or top 40 song lyrics.
Some fucking idiot amerikkkan official fartbag said that the Middle East was "better off because of u.s. intervention". I guess the "war on drugs" isn't over yet.

US claims of Iraqi progress is ‘dreaming’ – UN humanitarian coordinator

Published time: 17 Sep, 2015 15:04

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Washington's claims that conditions are improving for the Iraqi people are simply not apparent, Hans-Christof von Shponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General told RT.

READ MORE:‘Refugees to EU made homeless by NATO interventions’

RT: Washington believes its intervention in Iraq was a success. Do you agree?

Hans-Christof von Shponeck: I don’t know what they are talking about. I think all the indicators that we can witness without reading papers, we can just see pictures [which] tell us that the destruction of the state continues. I see absolutely no progress whatsoever. You have a problem in the north; the Kurdish-Arab relations in Iraq are not good. You have an ISIS [Daesh/ISIL] problem, as we can see in Ramadi, in central Iraq; Mosul remains an occupied city as far as ISIS is concerned. There is a division in the government in Bagdad. So where, I ask you, is the progress? This is dreaming. We hoped one could come to that conclusion, but it is far from the reality on the ground.

RT: Why does the US maintain it made things better for the Iraqi people, do they believe what they say or is it politics at play here?

HCS: Unless there is schizophrenia here involved, I would say they can’t possibly believe in the argument that Iraq is better off today than it was a few years ago. The deterioration is very, very obvious. And if you are looking for indicators, go and look at those who are now taking the long journey away from Iraq into the Middle East, across the Mediterranean into Greece, ending up on the fences of Hungary that come from Iraq. Then I think you can come to a different conclusion.

READ MORE: ‘American occupation should be blamed for the rise of ISIS’ – Russian envoy to UN

RT: Washington is maintaining this stance. So has it got an inability to swallow its pride and admit its policy is wrong then?

HCS: No, I don’t think it is just superficial pride involved. I think it is the fear that to the number of serious failures, foreign policy failures, military, security failures that have occurred in recent years. What am I talking about? Go and look at Libya. Is Libya better off since military intervention? Is Afghanistan now at the point where it can start rebuilding its nation on its own? Nowhere. So the number of failures is growing and naturally the political reaction in Washington is to try to cover this up as much as possible.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Thursday, 17 September 2015

FUCK IMPERIALISM

I can't stand the hypocrisy of the western governments and those who defend them, no matter how obvious it is that they are predatory, self-serving, genocidal assholes. And kkkanada is no better than the rest of the motherfuckers, Read this....

The Refugee Crisis is a Crisis of Imperialism

By T. J. Petrowski

Global Research, September 10, 2015

Region: Canada, Middle East & North Africa, USA

The widely circulated photo of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose body was found on a beach in Turkey and whose family was “making a final, desperate attempt to flee to relatives in Canada even though their asylum application had been rejected” [1] by the Harper Government, has caused widespread outrage and forced Western leaders to acknowledge that there is a “refugee crisis”.

In Canada, the leaders of the Liberal and New Democratic parties have used the news of Kurdi’s tragic death, along with the deaths of his five-year-old brother and his mother, to criticize the Harper Government’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Trudeau and Mulcair have called on Canada to accept more Syrian refugees, while the Harper Government, with its lust for military action, insists on more illegal bombing raids in Syria and Iraq as the solution to the surge of Syrian refugees [2].

The real tragedy is the refusal of Western leaders to acknowledge the cause of the refugee crisis – Western imperialism’s genocidal and never ending wars on the people of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.

There are now more refugees than at any time since World War 2, and the number of refugees has increased markedly since the start of the “Global War on Terror” [3]. Wherever the U.S. and its imperialist allies have intervened, whether through direct military action or indirect proxy wars, economic sabotage, and coups, in the name of “democracy”, the “War on Terror”, or the “responsibility to protect”, death and despair have been forced upon millions of innocent people, who have been left no other choice than to abandon their native lands to embark on a dangerous future of desperate struggle.

In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Korea, Vietnam, East Timor, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere the livelihoods of millions have been destroyed by the forces of U.S. and Western imperialism.

In the 1980s, Afghanistan had a “genuinely popular government”, according to John Ryan, retired professor from the University of Winnipeg, that was implementing widespread reforms [4]. Labour unions were legalized, a minimum wage was established, hundreds of thousands of Afghans were enrolled in educational facilities, and women were freed from age-old tribal bondage and able to earn an independent income. U.S. and Western imperialism, fearful of that kind of equitable distribution of wealth, supported the feudal landlords and fundamentalist mullahs to sow chaos across the country, bringing rise to elements that later formed al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Afghan people were once more dealt a severe punishment by the forces of Western imperialism following 9/11, despite a lack of conclusive evidence linking either the Taliban or al-Qaeda to the attacks. 30 years of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan have left the people of Afghanistan impoverished, traumatized, and desperate.

The conflicts in Libya and Syria are eerily similar to the Western destabilization of Afghanistan. In 2011, when the Arab Spring protests swept across the Middle East and North Africa, Western imperialism hijacked legitimate grievances of the masses as a pretext for intervention in the name of the “responsibility to protect” and “democracy promotion”.

Prior to the 2011 U.S./NATO intervention, Libya was among the wealthiest and most stable countries in Africa, with the continent’s highest standard of living. Housing was enshrined as a human right, education and healthcare services were free for all citizens, and the country was pushing to establish an African currency linked to gold to help end the endless cycle of debt and impoverishment of the African masses by Western imperialism [5]. Under the cloak of the United Nations, Western imperialism, using the pretext of protecting the people of Libya from Gaddafi’s murderous rule, launched airstrikes on Libya and allied themselves with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Libyan extremists [6]. NATO airstrikes killed hundreds of civilians and forced Libya back into the Stone Age; Gaddafi was mercilessly tortured and murdered by the rebels. Thousands have been killed as rival tribal and extremist factions, some now allied with ISIS, battling for control of the country.

The conflict in Syria has frequently been referred to as “Libya 2.0”. U.S. imperialism with the support of Israel, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States, trained and financed “moderate” rebels to overthrow the secular and popularly supported government of Bashar al-Assad. The “Free Syrian Army”, i.e., the “moderate” rebels, has been virtually eliminated in the conflict despite millions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and its regional allies [7]. FSA fighters have deserted to the ranks of ISIS en masse, itself a product of the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq that killed 1 million Iraqis. There is overwhelming evidence that the U.S. and its allies have been actively training and supporting ISIS elements since the start of the proxy war in Syria [8][9]. It wasn’t until ISIS invaded Iraq with its new Toyota technicals, curtesy of U.S. imperialism, that ISIS was declared a threat to the world. Western imperialism changed its tactic from supporting ISIS to airstrikes on Iraq and Syria, with the support of other Western imperialist states, Turkey (which is also conveniently bombing anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters [10]), Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States, but without consultation with the Syrian government, Iran, or Hezbollah that have been fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda elements since the start of the conflict. Hundreds of thousands have died in the West’s proxy war against the Syrian government.

From Libya to Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and Somalia, U.S. and Western imperialist interventions, coups, and sanctions have displaced and killed millions of people. Physicians for Social Responsibility estimates that in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone Western imperialist interventions have caused the deaths of 1.3 million people [11]. It is no wonder then that hundreds of thousands seek asylum elsewhere; however, after traveling huge distances overland and on water, refugees find themselves abused, discriminated against, held in detention, or rejected from Europe, Canada, the U.S., and Australia.

More than 2, 500 have died this year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, while the International Organization for Migration estimates that 30, 000 could die by the end of 2015 [12].

Refugees attempting to enter Europe, even if they are granted asylum in a mainland European country such as Germany, have been met with police violence in Greece, Italy, and other countries on the Mediterranean that are the first landing points for boats sailing from North Africa and Turkey.

Greek riot police have beaten refugees protesting the failure of local governments to process their applications. Conditions are so poor for refugees that while waiting for processing newborn babies have died in Greece [13].

On the Macedonia-Greece border, where more than a thousand refugees are crossing daily, refugees that broke through the barbed wire fences were shot at with stun grenades, and the Macedonian police have treated refugees as rioters, according to Amnesty International [14].

Italian police forcibly removed African refugees camping out at the French border after France refused to grant them asylum [15]. Hungary is building a fortified wall, similar to the barbaric wall that divides the U.S.-Mexico border, to stop refugees from crossing the border [16].

The thousands of refugees that seek asylum in Australia are detained in Australia’s detention facilities in Papua New Guinea and the small island nation of Nauru, dubbed the “Guantanamo Bay of the Pacific” [17]. Refugees can be detained for several years in these facilities, where social workers have observed “profound damage” to those detained through “prolonged deprivation of freedom, abuse of power, confinement in an extremely harsh environment, uncertainty of future, disempowerment, loss of privacy and autonomy and inadequate health and protection services” [18]. An Australian Senate investigation received reports of guards raping women on tape and sexually exploiting children as young as 2-years-old [19]. Just as Britain refuses to assist drowning refugees in the Mediterranean out of fear that it will encourage more migrants to seek asylum [20], the unannounced policy of Australian authorities is to make refugees suffer abuse and inhumane living conditions to deter them from seeking asylum in Australia, as if Australian imperialism hasn’t inflicted enough suffering on the people of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.

U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the “refugee crisis”. Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the “War on Terror” will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries.

Notes

Wednesday, 16 September 2015

REFUGEES

Once again, we are faced with western idiots and hypocrites solemnly proclaiming from the safety of their living rooms, "We just can't afford to take in any more migrants". Afford?! What the fuck does money have to do with fucking anything? This is also how these parasites frame any opposition they have to the various wars their governments are either actively participating in, or funding in other ways. "We've spent billions on this war". Fuck you. Bombs are falling on families, who are doing anything to get away from hell on earth, and these fucks talk about affording something. The world can no longer afford parasites who have been so dutifully educated by the mainstream media. And they are REFUGEES, not fucking "migrants", like geese migrating peacefully to the south. They are seeking refuge from the western funded bombs falling on and destroying their homes and lives.

Unwanted Refugees: EU Countries Block Borders

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, September 16, 2015

Region: Europe, Middle East & North Africa

The 1995 Schengen Agreement established open borders between 26 of the 28 EU countries. A Schengen visa issued in one nation is valid in all, permitting free movement throughout the area. A single external border alone exists.

Things are changing. Refugee floods caused by US-led imperial wars aren’t wanted. Record numbers risk life and limb to reach European destinations out of desperation – enduring enormous hardships en route, then mistreated like hostile invaders when they arrive.

German willingness to accept huge numbers appears fading. On Sunday, it closed its border with Austria, suspending train traffic, the way most refugees entered the country this summer.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said only EU citizens and others with valid visas are permitted to enter Germany until further notice. Schengen is suspended – dead for all practical purposes as long as US endless wars continue displacing floods of victimized people.

German police are patrolling Austrian border crossings. Der Spiegel said soldiers may guard road and rail borders. Closing Polish and Czech Republic access may follow.

Germany is in Europe’s heartland, sharing borders with nine European countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

If free movement is halted from all or most of them, Schengen is effectively dead, perhaps never to be revived, at least no time soon.

Merkel wants a refugee quota system established, requiring other EU countries to share the burden based on size and economic ability to handle it. So far, no agreement was reached. Britain’s Cameron categorically rejects it. He’s not alone.

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said Germany is “reaching the limits of its capabilities.” An EU response is needed. “By the time thousands of people are walking on the Autobahn, it’s too late.”

Other European countries are increasingly unwilling to accept growing numbers of desperate people seeking safe haven. Some openly express or suggest anti-Muslim sentiment. As NATO members, they bear full responsibility for either partnering in US wars or failing to forthrightly condemn them.

As long as they continue, so will endless human floods. The obvious solution not taken is stopping them, devoting military budgets to rebuilding ravaged countries, helping desperate people in war theaters and displaced refugees rebuild their shattered lives.

Instead, countries aim to stop the flood. Hungary blocked its border with Serbia. It introduced legislation making illegal border crossings punishable by imprisonment.

On Sunday, Austria closed its border with Hungary. Chancellor Werner Faymann said “(w)e have always said this is an emergency situation in which we must act quickly and humanely…Now we have to move step-by-step away from emergency measure towards normality, in conformity with law and dignity.”

Slovakia closed its borders with Hungary and Austria. Police were deployed to keep unwanted refugees out. The Netherlands may follow. Spot checks are being conducted along its border with Germany.

As human floods continue, expect to see other European countries blocking or greatly restricting their entry.

It should share the greatest burden – not when enormous resources go for causing it. Perhaps it’ll ally with EU nations planning military action to seize and destroy vessels operating from ravaged Libya – because of US-led NATO aggression.

In June, the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR Med) was launched “to undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and dispose of vessels and enabling assets used or suspected of being used by migrant smugglers or traffickers.”

Escalating efforts are planned. Declaring war on human traffickers is a pretext for stopping an unwanted human flood.

So far this year, over 400,000 refugees and asylum seekers reached Europe by sea. Numbers leaving war theaters continue growing exponentially – increasingly unwanted when they reach European destinations.

Imperial arrogance is entirely responsible for what’s happening, Washington and rogue partners contemptuous of human life and welfare.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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