Lukashenko. Europe's last democrat

There is no other nation in Europe so maligned and demonised as Belarus. Since the pronouncement of former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice in 2008 calling the democratically elected president of the country “Europe’s last dictator”, the image and reputation of this noble country has been callously tarnished.
Belarus is deeply familiar with the notion of dictatorship. They, more than any other country, suffered the worst of Nazi atrocities during World War 11.Belorussia has always been a multicultural country with Jews, Christians and Muslims living side by side for centuries. This deep tolerance for cultural and religious differences is still celebrated in Belarus today. Yet the European Union, Israel and their mafia don the United States, never cease from spreading atrocious lies and disinformation concerning the Republic of Belarus. This is because Belarus is a social democracy which refuses to take orders from the IMF, the World Bank and their geopolitical manifestations in the form of the United States, the European Union and their numerous vassel-states.

Unlike the crony regimes in Ireland, Romania, Poland and other states, you will not find complicity in crimes against humanity in Belarus. There are no CIA stop-overs like Shannon, no CIA run -prisons where innocent people are incarcerated without trial or due process and tortured. Unlike Poland, you will not find Belarussian shock troops in Iraq. Unlike Ireland, you will not find Belarussian ‘military advisors’ in the illegal occupation of Afghanistan. Belarussians will pay for their oil and energy resources unlike the US and NATO who will bomb and occupy all of Central Asia and most likely Iran in order to get control of oil and gaz under the pretext of ‘security'.

President Lukashenko, whose salary amounts to a modest 17,000 Euro per year, has no connections to multi-national corporations unlike the crooks in the US and the EU who accuse him of ‘human rights’ violations, corruption and ‘electoral fraud’.
Under Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus has enjoyed some of the highest living standards in the former Soviet Union with little over 1 percent unemployment. But, of course, this constitutes a severe violation of human rights. But isn’t Lukashenko the man who praised Hitler in an interview with the German paper Handelsblatt in 1995? Is that the anti-Semitic guy who called a Jewish town a pigsty. No my dear reader. That is most definitely not he! The interview with Dr. Martin Zeiner was cleverly mistranslated to include references to Hitler. This was confirmed by the interviewer himself who said “"a tape of the interview had been quoted out of context and with the sequence of comments altered” Only an idiot would fall for such lies and only scoundrels like the BBC would repeat them.

Lukachenko is a communist and has spoken out against fascism on numerous public occasions. As for anti-Semitism and the pig-sty comment, the Belarussian president was actually praising the Jews. What he was trying to say is that Belarus is trying to encourage Jews to stay and that the town in question which once had a thriving Jewish community, is now a pigsty since they left for Israel. In spite of the fact that the chief Rabbi of Belarus has praised the Belarussian president for his kindness to the Jewish community, the EU and the US seem to think that Lukachenko is ‘anti-Semitic’ and also opposes ‘free media’. In 2000, a synagogue in Minsk was the victim of an arson attack from a racist group. This patsy group claims to be pro-Lukachenko. They are one of the many groups financed by the United States. When the president condemned the attack and outlawed their racist publications, the US and the EU condemned him for ‘cracking-down’ on the ‘free media’

The list of accusations against the Belarus president is impressive and shows just how effective the agents of capitalism are at destroying social democracies. For example, Amnesty International, whose former board director was US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, published a report accusing the Belarus President of countless ‘human rights’ violations. Among the absurd claims made by Amnesty International is that the scientist Yury Bandazhevsky is a ‘prisoner of conscience’ He was arrested and charged for accepting bribes from student’s parents. This is a crime for which he was justly punished.
As for the arrest of members from so-called ‘opposition groups’ Zubr and Kmara, it is a well-documented fact that these groups are financed by the United States, who has declared itself an enemy of Belarus. The financing of opposition groups in the United States by state openly hostile to the US government is illegal, with the notable exception of Israel. I haven’t seen any Amnesty International criticism of this.

The Belaurus government has also been accused of internet censorship and media control.Th is claim is absolute nonsense. The Open Net Initiative carried out a study recently to see if the claims about Internet censorship were true. They found “found no evidence of systematic and comprehensive interference with the Net. Any regime-directed tampering that may have taken place was fairly subtle, causing disruptions to access, but never turning off the alternative information tap”
Much of this misinformation concerning the Belarus media comes from Reporters Without Borders, another phony US-funded pressure group which targets any government who does not support the Washington Consensus. Reporters Without Borders rarely criticise the totalitarian control exercised by corporations over the media in the United States.

The US finances over 300 ‘pro-democracy’ NGOs in Belarus whose job is to spread neo-liberal dictatorship and fascism to a population happy with the system they have. In 2000, President Clinton appointed Micheal Kozak as US ambassador to Belarus. Kozak is a great champion of human rights. He oversaw the ‘humanitarian’ massacres of the US –trained contra rebels in Nicaragua under the Reagan regime. The contras slaughtered entire villages killing over 30,000 innocent men, women and children. Kozak later told the London Times that the the US ‘democracy’ mission in Belarus would be similar to those in Nicaragua. The EU is firmly behind the US mission threatening sanctions and spreading lies about repression and electoral fraud. But as we in Ireland know too well, the EU seems to have a problem with election results it doesn’t like. So what can we say about Lukashenko? He is anti-racist, anti-war, anti-corruption, pro-democracy and pro-freedom. Yep, he’s definitely Europe’s last dictator!

The problem with Belarussians is that they just don’t understand what we Europeans mean by liberty, democracy and ‘European values’. But don’t worry, we’ll teach them!

On the necessity of a thorough de-Trotskization of the left

"in place of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations.

... in connection with this house, which he said very well had been converted into a fortress, I asked myself very often, from where had come the money for such work. . . . Perhaps the consul of a great foreign nation who often visited him could answer this question for us... .

It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley. . . . Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper."

Ramon Mercader, the man who saved the USSR from a fascist collaborator called Trotsky.



Reading an article by John Waters in the Irish Times recently criticising the activities of the Socialist Workers Party, I was surprised for once to find myself actually agreeing with him, but for all the wrong reasons. I can scarcely imagine ever having agreed with John Waters but I am glad to say that I do agree with him on this issue.

I was struck by the comment John made concerning the protests of the Socialist Workers Party, SWP outside the Dáil. I fully support protests but I do not,however, subscribe to the ‘ideology’ of the SWP. John, citing the work of Slavov Zizek, pointed out the paradox that radical demonstrations, far from being a critique of the bourgeois order, in fact, validate the freedoms granted under that order. There is a certain truth in this but Waters seems to think that the SWP advocates some form of radical revolutionary change. Waters, I believe, unwittingly, points at the central problem concerning the SWP, namely that it is as though capitalism itself had created the space for them to exist, that, far from offering a radical alternative to capitalism, the SWP are in fact a creation of capitalism itself.

Historically this is absolutely true. The key figure mentioned here by Waters is of course Leon Trotsky, the favourite counter-revolutionary of ‘Socialist Workers’. Leon Trotsky is perhaps one of the greatest liars in modern history and those political groups who still admire him, are tragically clinging on to a vicious falsification of left-wing history by claiming that Trotsky was the ‘true revolutionary’ and the ‘real successor to Lenin’. Lenin despised Trotsky and never ceased to point out his mistakes, his bumptious ego and his factional activity within the Bolshevik party in the former USSR. The usual phrase thrown out about Trotsky is that he was the ‘architect of the October Revolution’. This is indeed what Trotsky thought of himself but it bears no reflection on reality. Trotsky only joined the Bolshevik party when they were about to cease power in 1917. He was as Lenin described him an ‘opportunist’.

For years, he had vilified Lenin and the Bolsheviks, supporting every kind of right-wing policy disguised in left-wing jargon. Months before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 while, Lenin , Stalin and others were working indefatigably at organising party activity, Trotsky was wining and dining in New York with the high and mighty of the capitalist world. The only contribution to the October Revolution by Trotsky was his command of the Red Army. The essence of a bourgeois army commander is to dictate and Trotsky was certainly a ruthless disciplinarian and dictator. In fact, most soldiers of the Red Army hated him for his dictatorial methods. He never ceased to criticise what he called the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’ ignoring the fact that Lenin’s chief criticisms of Trotsky concerned his ‘tendency’ to couch right wing ideology in left wing slogans and that he devoted himself almost exclusively to ‘administrative matters’, in other words ‘bureaucracy’.

However, when it came to politics Trotsky, the disciplinarian and bureaucrat, refused to submit to the agreed rules of inter-party democracy. When his own right-wing ideas were defeated at party congresses, he reacted by forming his own faction, the so-called Trotsky-Bukharinite block.

In the famous Moscow‘show trials’ of 1937, many members of Trotsky’s ‘Leningrad Centre’ faction were accused of having conspired with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan in order to form a fascist puppet regime after a joint Nazi-Japanese invasion of the USSR. Trotsky was, of course, living in exile; but his terrorist faction had been infiltrated by the NKVD, the state security police. The prosecution produced a plethora of documentary evidence to convict the men of treason. Realising that they were caught, they all confessed to their crimes, blaming their gang leader Trotsky for their treasonous plans. The trials were observed by many Western diplomats who all concluded that they had been conducted fairly and that there was no question concerning the men’s guilt, including US president Roosevelt’s ambassador to Moscow Joseph E Davies. The Nazi minister for propaganda, Josef Goebbels, later wrote in his dairies, ‘The Fuhrer is furious with himself for having let himself be fooled by the potential of reports from his Bolshevik agents’. Hitler was indeed fooled but his arche nemesis Stalin was not! The trails were only deemed to be show trails after Soviet dictator Nikita khrushchev’s infamous ‘Secret Speech in 1956. But he has subsequently been shown by a number of historians to have been part of the self-same treasonous gang! Professor Grover Furr and Vladimir Bobrov have proven that every single anti-Stalinist tirade in Khushchev's 'Secret Speech' was a complete lie.It would not be too difficult to see why Khrushchev wanted to demonise Stalin.His economic policies were clearly a restoration of capitalism and his method of governance was far more dictatorial than his predecessor. In fact, Stalin had never been a dictator. He was elected by the party to take decisions in accordance with consensus of the central committee, who had the power to remove him at any time. As the great Irish communist Neil Goold Verschoyle pointed out:
‘Under capitalism a dictator may have great power because the powerful capitalist interests in the country agree to sink their differences and hand over the state to the control of one man pledged to suppress the people. But the Soviet Union is not a capitalist state, there are no powerful organised private interests’

Stalin offered to resign from the position of general secretary of the party no less than 4 times and criticised the 'cult of personality'on numerous occasions, a cult fanatically promoted by traitorous sycophants like Khrushchev who would later use it to denounce Stalin and destroy socialism in the USSR.

Stalin's work 'Economic Problems in the USSR' would not be published until 1978 when the Soviet Union was already in terminal decline. Trotsky's pathetic lies about Stalin and the Soviet Union were easily refuted by communist intellectuals of Trotsky's time who had traveled to the Soviet Union themselves. Jr Campbell's book 'Soviet Policy and its Critics' refutes Trotsky's lies one after the other with consumate ease. In the Spanish Civil War, the Trots helped the fascists to seize power by attacking the popular front to defend the Republic. Soviet foreign policy was based on Marxist principles applied to concrete reality. It was not dogmatic Marxism, but rather creative Marxism, that is to say Marxism-Leninism. The concrete reality after the failed revolutions in Germany was that socialism was unlikely to spread to Europe for some time. The Soviet Governement therefore judged that the best way to promote revolution was to build up socialist structures in the Soviet Union and conduct friendly relations with all other countries. The revolution would be permanent but in stages.Socialism in one country would lead to socialism in others. This policy initiatlly adumbrated by Lenin and later developed by Stalin subsequently proved to be correct with the victory of Mao in China, another revolution which Trotsky failed to understand.
By the time of the Spanish civil war, European nations were divided between bourgeois democracies where communist parties could agitate, albeit in a limited form, and fascist states where all oppposition to capitalism was outlawed. The Soviets therefore judged that a popular front composed of communist parties and progressive bourgeois elements to defend the gains of formal bourgeois democracy over fascist degeneration was the correct position to support in their foreign policy. There were, however, two principal forces that attacked this popular front, the Trotskyists and the fascists, the treason of the former ultimately leading to the rise of the latter.

The Trotskyite myth of Stalinist villainy was taken up by British intelligence agent George Orwell and subsequently re-layed by the film director Ken Loach. Shame on you Ken! Only ignoramuses, reactionaries and poor philosophers fall for Trotskyism. Yet there is, sadly, a plethora of such 'theorisits' still ranting and raving about their outcast 'prophet'.

George Orwell was not a fool but he was unquestionably a vicious reactionary. His only knowledge of the Soviet Union came, as he admitted, from the bourgeois press and, of course, Trotsky! Working for British intelligence, he submitted lists of writers who had actually visited and studied the Soviet Union for censorship; people like Anna Louis Strong, Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and others.Once the left was split by Trotsky and Stalin's personality slandered by the traitor Khrushchev, the cold war historians delivered the coup de grace to history's greatest revolutionary Josef Stalin.Nazi sources of disinformation became the norm rather than the exception. Robert Conquest, another British intelligence agent, is the most notorious of the cold war sham historians.Aledandrre Adler, who has close connections with the CIA, is perhaps his equivalent in France.
By whom, then, was the ‘revolution betrayed’ to borrow another one of Trotsky’s phrases? By none other than himself! Shame on you SWP for promoting a convicted and proven fascist agent!

Iosrael san Aontas Eorpach? Is ball é cheanna féin dár le Javier Solana

Is cuid den Eoraip í Iosrael, dár le Javier Solana. Bhí an t-aire eorpach um gnothaí eachtracha ag caint ar chomhdháil sa Jerusalem eagraithe ag Uachtarán na hIosraele Simon Peres. Ba ea ‘Facing Tomorrow’ téama an chomhdhála agus bhí se lán de dhaoine uaisle cosúil le Baron David Meyer de Rothshild, José Maria Aznar, Tony Blair agus mar sin de. Agus cuspóir an chruinniú? Bhí siad ag iarriadh fháil amach na deiseanna a tá ann mar gheall ar an ngearchéim airgeadais domhnanda!

Nuair a smaoiníonn tú ar ce chomh cumhachtach agus ce chomh tábhachtach is é an t-uasal Solana do bheartas eachtannach an t-Aontais Eorpaigh, tá sé soléir anois go bhfuil aicme cheannais na hEorpha ar thaobh na hIosraela agus nach gcuireann a gcuid gcoireanna isteach ar Bhruiséil ar chor ar bith!

Dá bhrí sin, ta gach seans go mbeidh iarrthóireacht na hIosraela i gcróilár na tosaíochtaí ins na blianta amach romhain agus bigí cinnte nach mbeidh aon vóta riachtanach chun doirse na hEorpha a oscailt don Stát ciníoch!

Bithiúnach eile é Xavier Solana. Is cara dlúth é le Henry Kissinger, an coirpeach cogaidh is mó ar domhan. Tuairiscítear go raibh Kissinger ar iarriadh líne díreach a fháil leis an Eoraip agus go fuar sé sin nuair a fuar Solana a phost mar aire um ghnothaí eachtracha. Mar sin, beidh sé i bhfad níos éasca as seo amach deireadh a chur le daonlathas san Eoraip agus an t-uaslathas domhanda a dhaingniú.

Os comhair na troscaireachta dúirt Solana nach raibh aon fhadhb le stát na hIosraela faoi stádus an phróiseas siochána. Má leanann an t-Aontas Eorpach ar aghaidh mar sin , beimid ag breathnú ar dheachtóireacht an aicme airgeadais feasta agus dímheas iomlán do chearta daoine. Cur i gcás, ó roinnt iarrthóirí d’uachtarántacht an t-Aontais Eorpaigh tá Tony Blair, coirpeadh cogaidh, bréagadóir agus bithiúnach amach is amach agus iar-uachtarán na fionnlainne Marti Ahtisaari, fear a bhí i bhfabhar cuimhneacháin a dhéanamh ar Waffen SS na Fionlainne sa Dara Cogadh Domhanda in 1999!

Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate, Mr Netanyahu tear down this wall!

All this maudlin, sentimental, hypocritical and utterly dishonest discourse about the ‘fall of the Berlin wall’ and the destruction of the Soviet Union makes me sick!

Listening to the hollow speeches by the leaders of the imperial powers in Berlin was a surreal experience indeed. Former French president, now regent and shameless nepotist Nicolas Sarkozy, phony labourite anti-socialist Gordon Brown, new Czar of Russia Medvedev and the man himself President Obama as well as former US president Bill Clinton gloating in the audience, all overdosing in a narcissistic orgy of hypocrisy, cheered on by their media courtiers and brainwashed masses!

Angela Merkel had made her prelude to the occasion by addressing the US Congress in Washington on the 3rd of Novemeber where she thanked the United States for bringing ‘freedom’ to Germany. She mentioned Ronald Reagan’s speech where he famously said ‘ Mr Gorbachev open this gate, Mr Gorbachev tear down that wall’. I wonder when we will hear a US president say “ Mr. Netanyahu, open this gate, Mr Netanyahu tear down this wall!”. The ironies proliferated as Chancellor Merkel went on to mention the holocaust and thank President George Herbert Walker Bush for allowing Germany to become ‘partners in leadership’ after German unification. “What a generous offer” she opined. A generous offer indeed! But she forgot to thank his father Prescott Bush, the Nazi sympathiser who handled the Wall Street finances of the Third Reich both before and throughout the war! Here too the US financial elite and the Nazis were ‘partners in leadership!’

It took Germany a mere two years after reunification to resume old habits.In 1992 the US and German ‘partners in leadership’ undertook their first post war joint-venture: the rape and destruction of Yugoslavia. Germany dispatched the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) ,Germany’s secret services whose mission was to arm, train and advise the psychopathic KLA, Bosnian and Croatian rebels, their old World War Two Nazi collaborators. The result was a brutal civil war and the destruction of the peaceful nation of Yugoslavia .

Chancellor Merkel also forgot to thank the United States for giving jobs to all the unemployed Nazi criminals after the war, especially in the areas of biological warfare, military intelligence and space research. After all, what would America have become had it not been for Operation Paperclip, Fort Dietrich and German Nazis who put the first man on the moon? German and American Nazis, partners in leadership!

Since the Second World War, the United States has bombed over 50 countries, killed millions of people and imposed fascist dictatorships all over the world in order to protect the interests of America’s ruling class.

To come back to the Berlin Wall, It should be pointed out that the German Democratic Republic did not want to divide Germany, nor did it wish to build an odious wall. The Soviet post-war proposals were for a unified, demilitarised Germany which would pay reparations to the Soviet Union for the economic destruction and the deaths of 20 million Soviet citizens Germany had caused. It was the Allied Powers who refused to agree to these proposals. This meant that the GDR had to pay the reparations to the Soviet Union for Germany’s Nazi past while the West received significant US investment. It was the Western powers who decided to divide Germany when a currency reform was created for the Western zone in 1948.

But it was the Atomic re-armament of the German Bundeswehr and their refusal of GDR proposals that both East and West Germany withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and NATO, coupled with West Germany’s insistence on annexing the East which lead to the tragic construction of the wall. The GDR and the Soviet Union had a deep fear that the Allied Powers would provoke another war. But there was also other reasons for the wall which I have discussed in a previous article.

It should not be forgotten that it was the Soviet Union which had experienced the worse horrors of the Second World War, and that few if any American civilians were killed. Furthermore, the term ‘Cold War’ was invented by a US financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch in 1947. Josef Stalin’s project was to create socialism in one country. The soviets had no intention of embarking upon another war.

This is the inconvenient truth about the Cold War, a war faught by a greedy minority, a war on the hopes of millions to a decent life, a war on humanity. The Iron curtain that blocked out the stench of capitalist excesses has been replaced by a steel frame crushing the planet, criminalising all dissent, killing hope.

America's message to China: dump the dollar and we'll unleash hell.

US President Obama’s visit to China last week to China captured much attention in the world press. Obama’s visit to China was intended to convey three key, carefully calibrated messages. The principal message was obvious: don’t pull the plug on our global empire by dumping the dollar. The second and third messages were a follow up from the first.If you refuse to take orders from Washington, we will use our human rights monopoly to break up your country into separate client states of the US.

Obama’s deeply ironic reference to the importance of human rights was carefully formulated to stress the ‘rights of ethnic minorities’ in China as opposed to human rights per se. What this means is that if China allows the dollar to fall, thereby plunging the US empire into free fall, the CIA will resume destabilisation activities in the Qinyang province and in Tibet. We saw a taste of this in Qinjang this year with the Uigur riots and in Tibet last year when the Tibetan hooligans, funded and trained by the CIA and its numerous front organisations created chaos, murdering innocent civilians and looting shops and industries.

The World Uigur Congress is based in Washington DC and, like the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan separatist movement, it is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, one of the CIA’s numerous front organisations. Like the Tibetan movement, the World Uigur Congress has close ties with Germany and its virtues have been widely extolled in the right-wing German press, which is unsurprising. After all, it was Nazi Germany who taught the US the art of mendacious propaganda and the US ruling class has proven itself to be an dedicated student.

President Obama’s coded mission in China was to make it clear to Beijing that the US does not really care about what the Chinese government does to its own population in general but that Washington is ‘concerned’ about China’s ethnic minorities. So, in a nutshell Obama’s message to China amounted to something like this: do as we say or we will carve you up into little pieces, install pre-trained puppet regimes before plundering your stocks of precious metals.

The World Uigur Congress was formed in 2004 and like the World Zionist Congress it is openly racist and religious fundamentalist. The millionaire leader of the World Uigur Congress is a lady by the name of Rebiya Kadeer. This lady does not even disguise her racist proclivities.

In an interview with Antonella Rampino of the Italian newspaper La Stampa on May 8th 2009, she put the plight of the Uigur people thus: “ As you see, you behave like I do, you have the same white skin: you are Indo-European. Would you like to be oppressed by a yellow Han communist?” Of course, the notion of the Uigurs , who are the majority in the Xinjang Autonomous Region, being oppressed is a bare-faced lie. The Chinese government has been quite tolerant of their religious and cultural identity; they are generally better off than their Han compatriots, and most Uigurs, like the Jews of pre-Nazi Germany, are quite content to live and work in the multicultural Chinese state. But the World Uigur Congress could soon put an end to that if given the green light from their Washington masters. I could say more about the historical and ideological similarities between the World Zionist Congress and the World Uigur Congress but I do not wish to break any dogmatic taboos here.

According to former FBI translator, Sibel Williams, the islamic radicalisation of the Xinyang province was outsourced by the CIA to Bin Laden's(remember him?) Al Qaeda. Williams alleges that Bin Laden was working for the CIA right up until 911. Mrs Williams subsequent dismissal by the FBI in 2002 for 'disruptive' behaviour was strongly criticised by US state department inspector general Glenn A Fine. As in the outsourcing of labour, the outsourcing of terrorism is the secret weapon of the global ruling class.

Some of the Western headlines concerning Obama’s visit to China would be funny were it not for the fact that the US empire is most likely to lead humanity into another world war. In the Ochs-Sulzberger family newspaper, known to the world as The International Herald, I read that the Chinese ‘unfree’ press did not give Obama’s visit the coverage it deserved. Other Western press outlets were outraged when the Chinese spokesman Qin Gang pointed out the embarrassing truth to Obama that the Tibetan population had been serfs of the Lama despots before the Chinese liberated them in 1952; he quickly followed up the attack by stating that Obama’s support for the Dalai Lama was ironic given his skin-colour and admiration for Abraham Lincoln. If I were president Obama I would have retorted thus " ‘touché old boy , but as you know racism has always been the tool of the ruling class to divide and crush the proletariat of the world. Are you not a communist? Have you not read Karl Marx?”

Plean na Colóime: Tá an Cholóim nasc-ghafa leis na Stáit Aonaithe anois agus tá seach-chogadh in ndán do mhuintir na Veiniséala.

¿Tiene algún sentido que el gobierno de Estados Unidos invierta tiempo y dinero en construir bases militares en Colombia para imponer a nuestros pueblos su odiosa tiranía? Por ese camino, si un desastre amenaza al mundo, un desastre mayor y más rápido amenaza al imperio, y todo sería consecuencia del mismo sistema de explotación y saqueo del planeta. Fidel Castro

Nuair a vótáil muintir na Veinséala Hugo Chavez mar uachtarán na tire i 1998 , d’athraigh polaitíocht agus eacnamaíocht na tíre go radacach don chéad uair ó neamhspleáchas na Colóime Mhóir i 1820. Ba mhór an dóchas a mhothaigh muintir na Veiniséala ar an lá sin. Is tír fhíorbhocht í Veiniséala; tá morchuid na ndaoine gan dídean, gan oideachas, gan dóchas ar an taobh amhain agus olagarchacht bhrúidiúlach fhíorshaibhir ar an taobh eile gan aon chomhbhá leis an mórchuid bhocht. Choinnigh an olagarchacht saibhris na tíre ina lámha fein agus faigheann siad gach tacaíocht sheasta ó Washington chun a gcumhacht a choinnéal.

Cé go ndearna an CIA iarracht eile deireadh a chur le daonlathas sa Veiniséala leis an coup d’état i 2002, nuair a tháinig an pobal amach ins na sráideanna chun léirsiú ollmhór a dhéanamh i gcoinne na faisistithe, bhí bua tábhachtach, stairiúl ag na Chavistas. Ó shin i leith, tá geilleagar na Veiniséala ag dul o neart go neart. Ach le 95% de mheán cumarsáide sa tír ag an olagarchacht, beidh sé fíordheacair do Chavez an cogadh inmheánach leis an olagarchacht chomh maith leis an gcogadh atá a teacht in gcoinne Colóime a bhuachaint. Ach más féidir leis chomhobair a dhéanamh le Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia(FARC) bhféidir go bhfuil seans acu na faisistithe a ruigeadh.

Ina ‘reflexiones’ suas luaite, altanna a scríobhann Fidel Castro faoi cúrsaí reatha, dúirt sé go bhfuil an Cholóim nasc-gafe leis na Stáit Aonaithe anois. Shínigh rialtas na Colóime conradh mileata nua le Washington le déanaí chun seacht bunáite nua mileata a bhunú sa tír. Má léann tú an conradh ‘Acuerdo complementario para la Cooperación y Asistencia Técnica en Defensa y Seguridad entre los gobiernos de Colombia y Estados Unidos ‘ is léir go bhfuil baol mór ann do mhuintir na Veiniséala ó nasc-ghabháil mheiricánach na Colóime.

Fáinne fí is ea é caipitleachas agus cogadh. San alt eile a scríobh Castro le déanaí, dúirt sé go scríosfaidh na faisithe sna Stáit Aonaithe Obama sa chéad olltoghchán eile agus cruthóidh siad leithscéal eile don chogadh domhanda. Ach dúirt sé chomh maith go bhfuil súil aige nach bhfuil sé sin fíor. Ar an taobh amháin aontaím le comradero Castro, ach measaim go bhfuil sé ró-dhéanach anois. Tá an cogoadh tarlaithe cheana féin. Beidh me ag dul go dtí an Veiniséala ar ball chun cabhrú leis an bpobal móruchtúil siúd ina thróid in gcoinne los gringos!



Gluais

Nasc-ghafa- annexed

Seach-chogadh-proxy war

Chomhbhá- sympathy.

Móruchtúil- courageous

‘Does it make any sense that the United States would spend time and money in building military bases in Columbia in order to impose on our people their odious tyranny. By this route, if a disaster threatens the world, a major disaster, the more the threat will be to the empire and all will be a consequence of the same system of exploitation and pillage of the planet’ . Castro

The market is foul play

Thierry Henry’s ‘main de dieu’ (hand of God) has been the thorn in the side of French society since the World Cup qualifier between the Republic of Ireland and France a couple of weeks ago . As an Irishman living in France, I have been inundated with apologies and commiserations from French friends and colleagues. I must admit I have been quite moved by the sense of fairness and sympathy which French people have expressed towards Ireland. As it happens, Henry’s infamous hand ball has in fact coincided with a national debate about French identity.
The French have always been a nation given to introspection. It that insuperable question which became the title one of Gaugain’s masterpieces ‘ D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?’ Where are we from, what are we and where are we going? Among the responses to the question of French identity, the values of human rights have come to the prominently fore. For the French, therefore, the French Revolution is a foundation stone of what it means to be French. But France has long ceased to be a revolutionary society. The May 68 riots were perhaps the last pathetic attempt to resuscitate French revolutionary consciousness, yet they amounted to little if nothing. In fact, French socialism died in May 68. Many of the 68ers would later prove to be among the greatest sell-outs and proselytisers in French history. The Trotskyist Lionel Jospin was one of the students in the 1968 riots is perhaps one of the most notable traitors of socialism. When France finally elected a socialist government under the stewardship of Francois Mitterand, himself a former collaborator with the Vishy regime during the Nazi occupation, the greatest privatisation programme in French history was launched. The Trotskyite dissembler Jospin called it ‘réalisme de gauche’ left-wing realism. George Orwell would have been proud of him!
Mitterand turned socialism on its head, sending military aircraft and warships to the Gulf to be used against the Iranian people in the days when Saddam Hussein was a ‘friend’ of the West. His conduct in Africa was typical French colonialism with a ‘human face’. The attitude of the French ‘socialist’ led coalition government during the nineteen eighties towards Africa’s most progressive leader Thomas Sankara is a case in point. In 1983 in the Republic of Upper Volta, Thomas Sankara took power a revolutionary coup d’etat. His programme was to educate, feed and house all citizens of the former French colony. He re- named the country Burkina Faso, land of the upright men.
Unlike Mitterand, Sankara didn’t just preach and waffle about socialism, he practised it. Unlike former Nazi collaborator Mitterand Sankara’s father faught in the French army against the Nazis during World War II. During Thomas Sankara’s short reign, female circumcision was banned, women were given full and equal rights to men, contraception was promoted and the country’s first supermarket was opened. But that wasn’t enough for Sankara. He sold the government’s fleet of Mercedes cars and replaced them with modest Renault 5s! He himself continued to live with his family in a poor mud cabin. Thomas Sankara promoted socialism,ecologism and feminism; he understood Africa’s problems and dedicated his life to solving them.
But the ‘socialist’ French government had always been less than enthusiastic about Sankara; he had been placed under arrest just in 1983 after a visit by Mitterand’s son Jean Christophe, the crook locals called ‘Papa m’as dit’ Daddy told me. In a state visit to Burkina Faso in 1984 President Mitterand warned Sankara that his socialism was going to far. In other words, France had many interests in the country which were threatened by Sankara’s reforms, such as the super rich French minority who lived in luxury from the labour of Burkina Faso’s poor. Sankara’s reforms could conflict with their priviledges. Such a threat to Burkina Faso’s plutocracy was a problem for the French ‘socialists’.
In 1987 Sankara was murdered in right-wing coup d’état lead by his friend Blaise Compaore. Many people in Burkina Faso suspected French involvement. It would be hard to blame them given the fact that subsequent French presidents have to this day greeted the murderer Compaore as a friend
It is the same old story of hypocrisy and greed. The French nation changed the world in 1789 and changed it again albeit briefly in the Paris commune of 1871. These events marked France’s claim to greatness. But where are the philosophers today? Where are the revolutionary ideas and who will implement them? What has become of this once great nation that no longer understands what it came from, who it is and where it is going?
We live in a world where the greatest liars and cheaters win the greatest prizes. It is a world of capital rights; human rights are irrelevant. In this sense Henry’s handball is symptomatic not only of the crisis in French identity. Rather, the handball is the symbol of our corrupt capitalist world. It is the hidden hand of the market ruthlessly sticking down all hope of fairness and justice, the hand that steals as it gives, the hand of treachery.

Post-democracy and the new dictators

In this post-democratic age any politician who defends democracy is denounced as a tyrant or dictator. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Athmadinejad of Iran and many others have consistently been demonised in the Western press for their ‘anti-democratic’ politics. The reason for this is simple: All three leaders defend economic policies which favour the poor over the rich. This is their biggest crime. Now, before you shout me down, I should say that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Athmadinjad ‘stole’ the presidential election this year. I have pointed out in other articles that the so-called Green revolution agenda in Iran is part of a US-funded regime change project to replace Athmadinejad with a leader propitious to US interests in Iran. It was in reality an anti-democratic agenda.

There is no doubt that most of the young people in Iran want change but this desire for change is more cultural rather than political. I spoke to many students in my last visit to Iran a few months ago. What struck me about many of them was their deeply confused reasoning on international issues. Many students I spoke to admired Israel and the United States as paragons of democracy and progress, flagrantly denying the fact that these are two of the most aggressive states on the planet, both guilty of war crimes and genocide abroad as well as deep corruption at home.

The opponents of Athmadinejad have fallen from the Scylla of Islamic theocracy into the Charybdis of Western pseudo-democracy.The problem with the Iranian opposition groups is that their opposition to the cultural politics of the Islamic Republic has thrown them back into the hands of CNN and propaganda radio stations from Israel. Moreover, many of them express views of Arabs and in particular Palestinians that amount to racism. But in the west racism against Arabs is the norm. Every time the newspapers and TV channels refer the Israeli Defence Forces combating Palestinian ‘terrorists’, they are guilty of racism as they deliberately ignore the fact that the Israeli occupied territories are in breach of international law and if you defy the law you are a de facto criminal. Therefore, the Israeli state is as such a criminal entity. Moreover, Israel’s insistence on describing itself as a ‘Jewish’ state is outright racism, as it favours one ethnic community over others. Hamas is one of the only democratically elected organisations in the Middle East and in view of the fact that Israel chooses to ignore international law, their military struggle with Israel does not constitute terrorism. Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah are no less unlawful than the IDF, they are simply combatants in a protracted conflict.

President Athmadinejad of Iran has also been demonised for his statements concerning Israel. But his statement was as usual taken out of context. He did not call for the destruction of the Jews. On the contrary, he called for an end to Zionism. There are many anti-Zionist Jews both in Iran, Israel and throughout the world. Athmadinejad has Jewish ancestry himself and is supported by a majority of the Jewish community in Iran, the biggest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. He also has support from anti-Zionist rabbis in Israel itself.

As for Hugo Chavez, here the vitriol, lies and anti-democratic propaganda reaches dizzying proportions. Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected president. Since he has come to power, he has provided free schooling for the country’s poor, free health care through generous help from Cuba and a free press for the first time in the country’s history. He has given hope to millions of the country’s poor and has overcome a US backed fascist coup against him and an international campaign to demonise him. Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders are the most notorious examples of mendacious propaganda against Chavez. I will reserve discussion of Venezuela and an exposé of the lies and propaganda of Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders for another article. But before I finish, it is important to debunk one of the biggest lies propagated throughout the world concerning Chavez. Unlike the US-backed dictators the ‘human rights’ activists in the opposition promote, Hugo Chavez has consistently promoted freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Venezuela. 95 percent of the media in Venezuela is privately owned by right-wing pro-us moguls. When the ‘human rights’ opposition supported the CIA-backed coup d’etat against the democratic Chavez in 2002, the Venezuelan media applauded the re-installed fascists. Since then, they have spread the most atrocious propaganda against the president, accusing him of mental illness, among other calumnies. As the media in Venezuela refuses to recognise the democratic leader of the country, Chavez has been forced to open his own TV programme where he answers calls from Venezuela’s poor. In this Orwellian world, leaders who side with the poor, oppose imperialism and favour the interests of their people over those of the US,EU and the international cabal of capitalist hawks are subject to the most callous and outrageous calumnies. It is a deeply worrying sign of how inhuman and decadent Western societies have become when we attack the democrats and freedom fighters and defend the tyrants. The problem is now ubiquitous in this post-democratic age.

Barack Obama: Bush le haghaidh nua

Le seacht bunáite mileata nua faoi thógháil i gColomóim, níos mó lastais d’airm á thraisloingiú chug Iosrael, anord agus sceimhlitheoireacht faoi lánseol san Iaráic agus an slogadh mileata meiricáneach is mó ó chogadh sa Vítneam san Afghanistáin, fuair Uachtarán na Stát Aontaithe Barack Obama an Duais Nobel san Oslo an tseachtain seo caite. Cé a chreidféa? Sa ráiteas a thug sé san Oslo, labhair Uachtarán Obama faoi thábhacht an chogaidh sa troid in aghaidh na sceimhlitheoireachta. Bhí sé ag iarraidh a chur in iúl do dhaoine go raibh an cogadh ceart agus cóir. Bhí sé ag iarraidh a chur in iúl dúinn go raibh Na Stáit Aonaithe ag iarraidh saoirse agus síochán a chothú ar fud an domhain. Ergo, bhí sé riachtanach leanúint ar aghaidh le cogadh, an cogadh buan domhanda ar son na síochána!

O togadh Obama an bhliain se caite níor athraigh Mister Change tada. I dtaobh milteata agus eacnamaíochta de, níl aon dhifríocht idir Obama agus Bush. Go tipiciúil, níl i gceist anseo ach chomhthoradh an fhoirceadail Bush. Ach i bhfírinne, tá Obama níos contúirtí fós. Ní raibh aon chreidiúnacht fágtha do pholaitíocht na Stát Aontaithe nuar a bhí Bush i gcumhacht ach anois tá fear deas, éirimúil i gcumhacht agus is breá an díoscúrsa a dhéanann sé cé go bhfuil an díoscúrsa ceannann céanna le déachtóir Bush!

Nuair a bhí Barack Obama ag canbhasáil agus ag stocaireacht d’ uachtaránacht na Stát Aontaithe an bhliain seo caite, ba mhór an dóchas a bhí agam ag an am. Shíl mé ansin go raibh rúd éigin iontach agus tábhachtach ag tarlú sa domhan. Ach bhí sé deacair ansin a chréidbháil go mbeadh athrú sunstasach docúil. Dúirt mé ansin nach mbeadh ach athrú cosmaideach i gceist agus b’sin an fáth go raibh an aicme cheannais na Stát Aontaithe ag chur chun cinn an Seanadóir Obama. Ach ag an am céanna, bhí dócas agam go mbeadh sé difriúil. Anois Uachtarán Obama sé déistin orm. Measaim nach bhfuil ifreann i ndán do mhuintir an domhain anois agus i ndeireadh na dála, tiocfaidh an t-ifreann sin ar ais do na Stáit Aontaithe féin. Féach ar na tíortha ar liosta na stát rógaire a luaigh Obama in san ráiteas: An tSiombáib, Déanphoblacht Dhoanlathach na Cóiré, an tSomáil , Maenmar, An tSúdáin agus ar ndóigh An Iaráin. Bheadh sé réasúnta do thíortha sin a bheith buartha anois agus an cogadh ‘daonúil’ a bheith i ndán dúinn mura bhfuil siad réidh cloí le leas na Stát Aontaithe agus ECAT!

Gluais

Slogadh- mobilisation

Comhthoradh- corollary

Foirceadal- doctrine

an aicme cheannais- ruling class

daonúil- humanitarian

Leas - interest

Fascism is the cornered rat of capital.

Unemployment has returned with a bang to the forefront of Irish economic discourse but this time round the Irish unemployment phenomenon is likely to manifest a degree of nastiness hitherto unknown on this island. We are, after all, one of the most globalised countries on the planet with immigration figures over the last decade that have superceded many of our European neighbours. So what are we going to do about all the foreigners who now constitute the work-hungry reserve army of our national economic shambles? What are we going to do about the foreigners? The first thing that should be said about the unemployed foreigners in Ireland is that they will inevitably become new unwitting actors in the psychopathology of basket-case Ireland. In psychoanalytic jargon, the foreigner will now begin to assume the traits of a deep structural symptom; the unwanted foreigner as symptom of our national depression. But he is also a comfort to us in the sense that his foreignness enables us citizens born in Ireland to blame him for our troubles.

We can now say that the immigrant is a burden on Irish society, a ruthless opportunist, a parasite competing for ‘Irish’ jobs. We have now entered the period of radical reaction and could be facing a golden age of racism and xenophobia.

The paradox of xenophobia in modern capitalist societies is that the ruling class, that is to say, the bankers, investors, developers and their media propagandists tend to support the idea of a multicultural society. This is fundamentally different from the situation in, say, Nazi Germany during the 1930s. In today’s Europe, being racist or xenophobic is politically incorrect, whereas the opposite was the case in German and throughout Europe during the economic crisis of the 1930s. Here we can see that a fundamental shift has taken place in Europe. There are various reasons for this. The most important of course is that racism as a political ideology was based on pseudo science. But in times of economic crisis, science and rationality have very little to do with social phenomena.

In spite of the fact that anti-racism is more or less espoused by all the right-wing, neo liberal regimes in Europe today, racism is in fact on the increase and the radical right is on its way back. Two British fascists MPs were elected to the EU parliament last year. However, this new emergent fascism has fundamental differences to this social phenomenon during the last century. Spanish, German and Italian fascism were reactionary ideologies designed to counter what seemed like the unstoppable march of communism throughout Europe since the rise of the Soviet Union. Fascism is in essence the attempt to rescue a failed capitalist system by appealing to the emotions of disgruntled workers.

Unlike communism which seeks to unite and educate workers of all races and nationalities, fascism subverts this tendency by superimposing racism and nationalism upon the ignorant masses. This divides the workers and the unemployed by distracting them from the true origins of their misery. In Nazi Germany, the racist subversion took an even more perverse form. There the Jews, long associated with the ruling banking class could easily be scape-goated. The communist leaning workers would then be encouraged to the ruling class with a particular race. To the ignorant masses, it became obvious who the enemies of Germany were. This scape-goating of the Jews in particular also benefited the radical international Zionists who were also anxious to see an exodus of European Jews to Palestine. As Theodor Herzl said “anti-Semitism is our best friend”. The concept of anti-Semitism still remains, paradoxically, the best friend of Israel today as it is the only concept which could justify the occupation of the West Bank and the oppression of Gaza. It is no surprise that the neo-Nazis in Germany today support the state of Israel. Fascism is simply the attempt to defend the worse excesses of human greed by subverting rational analysis of its correlative, namely, poverty.

Speaking on the international situation in 1924 Josef Stalin said “Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism" What Stalin meant by this is that bourgeois parliamentary democracy is designed to defend the interests of capitalism. When the capitalist system crashes, the bougeois liberals and social democrats will be more inclined to support the intensification of capitalism represented by fascism rather than supporting a revolutionary atlternative.This is precisely what happened in Germany after the rise of Hitler when the social democrats refused to form an anti-fascist alliance with the communists. Fascism is simply captialism's last stand.

What can we in Ireland learn from this? The problem in Ireland and throughout Europe today is that we no longer have a radical united egalitarian opposition to the boom and bust theory of political economy. There is no longer a communist international capable of uniting workers of all races and nationalities. So, what the racist reactionaries, who are very often from working class backgrounds, do not see is that the Polish, Nigerian and other foreign workers should be their allies. They have had to leave their own country to find work just like the Irish who are leaving for Australia and Canada. Yet, they too are unable to see the reality of their situation. The real enemy of paddy Irishman is not paddy Polishman or Paddy Nigerian, it is the paddies in IBEC who represent the interests of a transnational global elite that is imposing this hardship on peoples of all races and nationalities.The question then for Irish workers is not ‘what are we going to do about the foreigners’. The question is ‘what are we going to do about the dictatorship of the bankatariat? Workers of all lands unite!

Pléaschán ina thóin, Al Qaeda mó thóin!



O am go chéile, cloistear scéal nua faoi bhagairt an Al Qaeda sna meáin chumarsáide, eachtra sceimhlitheoireachta eile a chuireann eagla orainn. Fear arabach gafa san eitleán le pléaschán ina thóin. Seo é an scéal nua. Go bhfóire Dia orainn, an féidir linn aon rud níos áiféisaí a shamhlú? Pléaschán ina thóin? I n’dáiríre! B’in a scéal a chualamar cúpla seachtaine o shin nuair a bhíomar ar tí ár ndeocheanna a ghabhadh siar don Athbhliain. Caithfidh mé a rá go bhfuil amhras orm anois faoina scéalta sin. Ní gá dom a rá leat nach raibh i gceist le Al Qaeda i dtosach báire ach sócmhainn do sheirbhisí slándála iartharacha.

Bunaíodh Al Qaeda san Afganastáin i 1978 agus bá tionscadal de CIA iad i gcónaí. Ag an am, bhain siad usáid as an ISI( Interservices Intelligence) de Phacastáin chun na moslammaigh a ghríosú in aghaidh na Sóvéadaigh. Cloiseann tu a lán seafóid faoi láthair maidir le ‘ionsaí’ a rinne Aontas na bPoblachtaí Sóvéadachta Sóisialacha san Afganastán ag an am. Ar dtús báire, níl sé sin fíor in aon chor. Is fíor gur ndeachaigh na trúpaí sóvéadeacha go Kabul ach bhí drogall orthu é sin a dhéanamh ar an gcéad dul síos. I bhfírinne ní raibh na Sovéadaigh ag iarraidh an tír a rialú. Tháinig siad arna iarraidh sin ag rialtas sóisialach na hAfganastáine nuair a bhí na mujahedeen/CIA ag chothú sceimhlitheóireachta ar fud na tíre. Sin difríocht mhór idir an cogadh anois agus an cogadh ansin.

Faidhmíonn Al Qaeda mar shocmhainne na seirbhísí rúnda iartharaigh ó thosaigh an scéal mór na sceimhlitheoireachta domhanda. Ní folóir dúinn é sin a thuiscint. Mar sin, nuair a chlóisim scéalta faoi fhear éigin arabach eile gafa sna san éitleán éigin sna Stáit Aontaithe, tá fhios agam céard atá i gceist anseo. Ciallaíonn sé sin go bhfuil céim nua ag teacht sa chogadh in aghaidh na sceimhlitheoireachta. Ar ball, béimid ag caint faoi sceimhlitheoireacht sa Nigéir chomh maith. Tá an cogadh ag leanúint ar aghaidh sna tíortha eile anois chomh maith. Tá an Araib Shádach, comhghuaillí na Stát Aontaithe ag píolótú thar Phoblacht Éimin faoi láthair agus beidh siad ag cabhrú le maoirseacht na Somáile ar ball chomh maith. Déan dearmad ar ‘Al Qaeda’, tá cluithe i bhfad níos casta i gceist anseo. Pléascháin ina thóin, Al Qaeda mó thóin!

Gluais

Bagairt - threat

níos áiféisaí- more absurd

sceimhlitheóireacht- terrorism

cogadh- war

maoirseacht- supervision

a ghríosú- to incite

The Somali pirates: Long may they prosper!

Most of us grew up reading stories or watching cartoons and films about pirates. Hollywood’s release of the Pirates of the Caribbean films a few years ago have brought piracy back into public consciousness. But the fictional accounts of piracy recounted in children’s stories and films bear little resemblance to the historical phenomenon called piracy. It is important to bear this in mind when one hears one-sided reports about the current piracy problem off the coast of Somalia.

We should begin by asking what the word piracy means. Piracy came into English around the 13th century via the French pirate. This word in turn was derived from the Latin pirata “sailor or sea robber”. The root of the word goes back to Ancient Greek peirates from the Greek verb peiran to attack, make a hostile attempt on, try. But the Greek word empeiros gives us the English experience in the sense of a trial, risk, experiment or danger. The Greek word denoting attack, trial risk and danger is an Indo-European cousin of the Irish word for vigilance ‘aire’.

Keep these notions of vigilance, trial, risk and danger in mind we will ask: who were these pirates and what did they do? Professor Marcus Rediker of the University of Pittsburgh has made a cogent contribution to our understanding of piracy. In his most recent book ‘Villains of All Nations’ he explains the historical causes of piracy. Pirates were predominantly poor and abused sailors who worked for pittance on the international trading ships of the French and British empires. These renegade groups consisted of sailors of many nationalities and races who could no longer bear the cruelty of their masters , the inhuman hardship of their working conditions and the obscene poverty of wage-slavery on the world’s imperial ships.

Far from the covetous, one-eyed barbarians, the Long John Silvers of folklore and fiction, pirates tended to come from highly skilled sailors who rebelled against the tyranny of their imperial masters. Once they had procured their own ship, articles were drawn up governing the conduct of the pirates. These articles were remarkably egalitarian. The captain of the ship was elected by the sailors and a quartermaster was elected to administer booty and to act as a counterweight in order to keep the captain’s power in check. Profits from shipping raids were distributed equally among all the sailors. When a pirate misbehaved, a meeting of all the sailors was called to determine the appropriate punishment. Far from being criminals, the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries developed a unique form of distributive justice; they were, in fact, proto-communists.

Once a ship was raided, the captains were often lined up on the deck before the crew. They would then ask the crew members if they had been beaten by their captain. If the crew responded negatively the captain received his just merits.

In many respects today’s pirates off the coast of Somalia are similar. They too have deep grievances with European countries. Why? Because since 1991European companies have been dumping nuclear and toxic waste in their waters; polluting their fish; scaring the skin of their children, spreading cancer among their people and destroying their livelihood. Because European, Chinese, Indian, Russian, Japanese and Korean ships have taken over their waters looting and pillaging what is left of the fishstock that is safe to eat.

According to Nick Nuttal of the United Nations Environmental programme “European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne." The EU talks about the disruption of Aid to Somalia due to the actions of the pirates but the people of Somalia. As in other Third World countries, EU aid is simply the payoff to their client regimes for our looting of their resources. The looting of Africa by the west is the cause of its poverty. Aid is our way of showing we care. Letting them starve would be bad publicity.

This is the reality of the Somali piracy crisis. The Somali fishermen have organised a hitherto effective resistance to the international looting of their waters. To their credit, they have also made a huge contribution to their local economies, extracting just ransoms in exchange for the Western terrorists who patrol their shores in our name. They treat their hostages well and often pour the ransom money back into their villages, buying generators for electricity and building up the local economy while the barbarians from the USA shoot and kill them with impunity.In one of the world’s poorest countries, these Somali pirates, these vigilantes of the people, these intrepid combatants of international criminality are worthy heroes.

The Berlin Wall and the victory of the White Terror

Among the many anniversaries being celebrated this year, the fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most important. We all remember the sense of hope and elation which accompanied that momentous event. The oppressed people of the DDR, so long immured in a dystopian world of media disinformation, violations of individual liberties and constant surveillance by the secret police were now at last marching on the road to liberty and democracy. The evil empire of the Soviet Union which had imprisoned its citizens in a police state was crumbling before our watering eyes as we watched those moving images on TV.

Communism had failed. The fall of the Soviet Union proved that communism in practice equals fascism. How could anyone disagree with that proposition now? This is indeed the story recounted by thousands of publications and documentaries today in the ‘free world’. It is, however, a vicious lie.

Western historiography of the Soviet Union is replete with deliberate omissions, ideological distortions and in many cases, downright lies. Any serious analysis of how good or bad Soviet communism was, must take account of the fact that the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who had the support of the vast majority of Russia’s poor, were ruthlessly attacked by the White Russian counter-revolutionaries in cahoots with 16 imperial powers, who invaded Russia after 1918.n fact, White Terror occured in many countries throughout the twentieth century. Communists and the poorest classes of society all suffered the terror inflicted by counter-revolutionaries in Finland, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain,Greece, China, Taiwan and Korea.Hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered in the name of liberty. The victory speeces of history arrogantly omit this uncomfortable fact.

Our libraries and bookshop shelves are keeling over with books on the ‘Red Terror’ and the purges of Stalin, yet there are only a handful of books at most which talk about the White Terror unleashed upon the Russian population by the agents of the imperial powers. These mass murderers are presented as agents of ‘democracy’ who fought to ‘save Russia’ from the evil of Leninism. But who has read about the careers of White Guard leaders such as Lavr Kornilov who declared ‘the greater the terror, the greater our victories’. Kornilov had very little mass support but that didn’t bother this terrorist; he had the support of the Western powers and was prepared to ‘ set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-fourths of all Russians’.

And what about White Guard general Krasnov who ordered his troops to deliberately murder workers en mass ‘"It is forbidden to arrest workers. The orders are to hang or shoot them." Who has heard of general Kaledin who declared: "The orders are to hang all arrested workers in the street. The bodies are to be exhibited for three days". What about the counter revolutionary terrorist Admiral Kolchak who was an admirer of Japanese genocidal techniques? His advice was to “follow the example of the Japanese who had decimated the local population in the Amur Region of Russia

What about General Semenov who decimated entire villages killing thousands of Russian peasants. Genocide in the Soviet Union was a result of Marxist Leninism, the so-called historians tell us. But the Russian civil war imposed by the Western ‘democratic’ powers claimed the lives of over 15 million people!

There are many more lies widely disseminated concerning the Soviet Union. I will talk about those in another article. But to come back to Berlin, was not the wall the proof that the Soviet Union was totalitarian? The Berlin Wall was constructed for two principal reasons. Firstly, many East German workers were being recruited in the West, causing a brain drain on the socialist economy. Secondly and more importantly, the CIA and their puppet agencies in Europe had undertaken a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in the DDR. The US strategy was to make communism fail at any cost. They poisoned children’s milk with soap, derailed freight trains, damaged power stations, set fire to factories and destroyed factory machinery.

The sabotage, terror and infiltration perpetrated by the CIA and MI6 in East Germany became a nightmare for the fledgling socialist state. The CIA were experts in anti-communist terrorism. They had, after all, recruited thousands of NAZIs after the Second World War and the US ‘de-Nazification’ programme had resulted in the rehabilitation of prominent ex-Nazis in the Federal German Republic, who became the zealous guardians of ‘capitalist democracy’

When the Soviets launched complaints with the UN to take action against the CIA/MI6 terror and sabotage campaign, the Anglo-American dominated UN ignored their concerns. Nobody in the DDR wanted the Berlin Wall but what do you do when you are being attacked by a neo-fascist empire? The Soviets had been attacked by fascists before resulting in the slaughter of over 20 million people. They knew the kind of fanaticism which the CIA Nazis were capable of unleashing. Terrorism and war are the dark reality of profit-driven societies.

When I lived in East Berlin I spoke to many people about the old DDR. Most of the people I spoke to had fond memories of life in a socialist society, where there was guaranteed work, free health and education and hope for the future. “Capitalism offered us wealth and liberty but now we are unemployed and poor” they would tell me. Almost all the people I spoke to hated the wall and the excesses of the Stasi but most of them still believed that socialism was possible but that history had betrayed them.

The Limerick Soviet and the concept of meitheal

Bruree Workers' Soviet Mills, 1921 ( http://gaelart.net/ )


In this time of strikes, mass unemployment and general discontent, historical examples of successful worker solidarity movements could serve as useful templates for debate. Perhaps the most impressive episode of Irish working class revolt has to be the formation of the Limerick Soviet in 1919. As the war of independence was raging, the British government decided to impose a military curfew on the city of Limerick in April 1919. Limerick was proclaimed as a special military area. This policy enabled the British authorities to gather information about every worker in the city. Henceforth, all people going to and from the city would have to produce identification and receive permits from the British army. These draconian measures enraged the population of Limerick. Henceforth, factory workers would be harassed up to four times a day going and coming from work. Apart from harassment, vital supplies of food, milk and fuel were also disrupted by the military curfew. To discuss the issue a meeting was convened by Limerick United Trades and Labour Council was convened, where a motion was passed to declare a general strike in the city in protest against the British government. The Limerick United Trades and Labour Council’s proclamation was as follows:

‘The workers of Limerick, assembled in Council, hereby declare cessation of all work from 5am on Monday April 14, 1919, as a protest against the decision of the British government in compelling them to procure permits in order to earn their bread.’ For the next 14 days, the strike committee became the effective local government of Limerick. The city was being run directly by a council of workers. The Limerick Soviet was born. All business ceased in Limerick with the exception of the Post Office, which was kept busy through the international media attention the strike would provoke. Once the strike was declared all businesses of the city co-operated. But in order to feed the population, the bakers were allowed to work part-time. Farmers co-operated by delivering vegetables, meat and eggs directly to the workers at prices well below the market value. To communicate their revolutionary ideology to their fellow workers, they printed their own newspaper: The Workers Bulletin. Although the Unions agreed to pay the workers strike pay, some unions such as the National Railway Union refused. Money became particularly scarce, so the Soviet decided to print its own money! The security for the notes, which were rather like food vouchers, would be provided by the stocks of food donated from Cork, Clare and other counties.

However, the British eventually found a zealous ally in the Catholic Church who ordered the workers to abandon the strike, and they in their ignorance submitted to their ecclesiastical masters. Thus the Limerick Soviet came to an end. It could have continued for much longer had not the Church intervened. But, then, one could say the same about so many progressive moments in Irish history. However, the workers did force the British to abandon its military occupation of the city. The Limerick Soviet was not the only worker commune in Ireland at the time. Another soviet was formed in Broadford village in County Clare, when labourers took over a landlord’s estate and ran it themselves. There was another soviet in Knocklong creamery county Limerick when workers took over the premises and ran it themselves. They hoisted the communist red flag over the building with the slogan ‘ Knocklong Soviet Creamery :We make butter not profit’. There is an Irish word which existed long before Karl Marx formulated the theory of communism: meitheal- a group of workers or working party. It is a concept of worker solidarity deeply embedded in Ireland’s historical culture, a unique word the meaning of which we have tragically forgotten. It is the ninetieth anniversary of the Limerick Soviet this month. These stories and the ideals they proclaim are still too little known in Ireland today. When one considers the mess we are in now, one realises why they are consigned to oblivion like rusty machinery in the closed factories of our history.

For more on the Limerick Soviet, read the book ‘ Forgotten Revolution-The Limerick Soviet 1919’ by Liam Cahill.

The rightwing subversion of egalitarian discourse

Since the rise of Obama in America, the question concerning Europe’s immigrant children has come increasingly to the fore. Will Europe produce prime ministers or presidents who are themselves a reflection of the cultural diversity of European nations? To be sure, the Americans have outclassed us in the past few months. The euphoria that follows every foreign visit by the American president is not unlike the heady days of the Beatles. But this exaggerated optimism vis-a-vis the Obama phenomenon is more a reflection of a world in despair, screaming out for an alternative to the politics of destruction than a belief that someone who transcends traditional racial codes can actually make a fundamental difference to how the world is run. Nevertheless, it is not just Obama’s race and cultural heritage that is different; his rhetoric and demeanour also mark a significant break with the past. Europe’s reception of Obama has manifested a serious contrast with his predecessor. In France, for example, the Bush years nurtured an implacable anti-Americanism throughout the French political scene. However, this anti-Americanism, widespread throughout Western Europe, was not directed at the essence of what the United States could or should be; rather it a reaction to what the US was at that time under the bellicose unilateralism of the US administration. The ‘anti-American’ accusation has too often been used by both the American right and their supporters here in Europe to insinuate an irrational antipathy to all things American among those opposed to certain if not all aspects of US foreign policy. Now, however, the tide has definitively turned. On a symbolic level, America has taken the lead internationally in terms of racial and cultural diversity. The question now is, will Europe follow suit and when will this happen?

The nomination of Rachida Dati as French Minister for Justice in 2007 has made her one of the most talked-about high-profile ministers in recent French history. The daughter of Moroccan and Algerian immigrants, the second eldest in a poor family of eleven children, Rachida Dati is indubitably a symbol of cultural integration. However, her appointment to the ministry of justice has been fraught with controversy, malicious rumours and hyper-mediatisation. Dati has an extremely strong personality. Academically brilliant, her determination to succeed knew no bounds. While she was a student in economics, for example, she tapped into every possible social network in order to meet the kind of people who could open doors for her. Her indomitable ambition paid off. At a French-Algerian cultural event in Paris she met the wealthy and influential Jean Luc Lagardere, whom she managed to persuade to support her professional advancement. After spending a few years working as an auditor for Lagardere’s company Malta Communication, she entered the prestigious École Nationale de Magistrature to become a magistrate, again with Legardere’s financial assistance. Upon leaving law school, Dati worked her way up the social and political sphere becoming the spokesperson for Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential campaign in 2007. After his election as president, Sarkozy made Dati Minister for Justice in his new government. Dati’s unbridled ambition, Sartorial elegance, sometimes shameless opportunism, together with a peremptory if not downright dictatorial approach to legislative reform, have raised the eyebrows of many political analysts in France. But apart from her shortcomings as a politician-and here she differs decidedly from Obama in having no real political convictions- she is in a sense the symbol of the modern European Muslim woman. She recently gave birth to a daughter. But she remains unmarried and refuses to disclose the identity of the father. This is, given her Muslim background, a radical change with the past.

What the recent accession of minority races and cultures in the USA and Europe to the highest levels of political power has shown is that political affiliation and race are no longer linked. Perhaps one of the most right-wing presidents in US history nominated two black people to the post of Secretary of State. Similarly in France under Sarkozy, the racial diversity of the government has been significantly widened. This means that racial and socio-economic equality are no longer inextricably linked. This also means that the distinction between left and right wing politics has been in a sense obfuscated by right-wing governments’ promotion of minorities. Yet the struggle for racial equality was traditionally never on the right-wing agenda. The worrying issue here is that this new right-wing consensus on racial equality has resulted in an adroit side-stepping of the question of socio-economic equality, so when we talk about equality we no longer understand what it really means.

Coláiste Lurgan: an oasis of culture in the land of the philistines

Those culture-vultures among you will be pleased to discover that the “crisis” has not yet inundated all spheres of Irish life. The demand for Irish language courses is rapidly increasing. An interesting example of this nascent cultural revival can be found in Connemara where the numbers signing up for summer courses in Colláiste Lurgan, the Irish language school based in Connemara have risen significantly over the past couple of years. If your hoping to sign up your teenage daughters or sons for a course there this year, brostaigh ort! Of the 1900 places for this year’s summer courses, over 90 percent of available places have already been filled. That’s a staggering 40 percent increase from this time three years ago!

It augers well for the intellectual development of the island and proves just how effective Coláiste Lurgan courses are in teaching and imparting the joy of speaking the oldest literary language in Europe. In order to cope with this burgeoning linguistic renaissance, Coláiste Lurgan have plans to build a new Le Corbusier style building which will enable them to expand their language programme as well as providing an attractive space for cultural and social activities in Irish. One look at their new high tech website leaves me lamenting the fact that the Bainisteoir Micheál Ó Foighil is not the minister for the Gaeltacht. This is clearly a man of vision: vitreous corridors welcoming the light of the Atlantic ocean, spacious rooms fully equipped with the latest in digital technology, a continental style cafeteria for students to mix and converse, theatres and audiovisual rooms to inspire creativity as Gaeilge. Coláiste Lurgan has created all its own pedagogical material utilising the best in information technology. Students taking the courses pursue a wide variety of outdoor activities through Irish. If Micheál Ó Foighil were running the department of education, this country would no longer have a problem with its own language. But the finance required for the implementation of this project will depend on the sagacity of our Government. I realise that the ‘sagacity of the government’ sounds like a contradiction in terms! They don’t exactly have a reputation for knowing what to do with our money, apart from dumping it into the banks in order to re-fuel the ignorant plutocracy. However, assuming that the present incumbents are ditched and the opposition minister for the Gaeltacht is progressive( imagine that!), the funds will be provided for this project in the next few years, thereby ensuring that at least the next generation of multi-cultural Irish people will have an educated view of what it means to be Irish. But what has been achieved so far by Micheál Ó Foighil is due in the main to his own pertinacity and he is highly critical of the government’s role in the promotion of the language. But will they listen?

I can hear cantankerous voices asking me again “but what’s the use in learning Irish?” “ what effing good is it?” You should ask my colleague Michal Boreslav Mechura, a Czech Gaelgeoir and regular contributor to this page. Ask him why, having wandered from the taverns of Bohemia, he decided to learn Irish? He not only speaks the language fluently, he writes and teaches it as well. His blog ‘An cainteoir dóchais’ meaning ‘a hopeful speaker’ is a pithy inversion of the common term ‘cainteoir dúchais’- native speaker. He organises conversation circles in Irish every fortnight in Dublin. He is another example of the contribution to Irish culture being made by so many emigrants in this country. Panu Höglund from Finnland is an Irish language blogger , who has made an enormous contribution to the promotion of Irish on the web. Ann Paluch, the Polish contributor to this paper, is another Gaelgeoir, who has presented a radio programme as Gaeilge for Radió na Life. There are many more. In fact, there are too many to name here. I have always believed that just as the culture of emigration lead to the decline of the Irish language, immigration will save it. If we could combine the energy and passion for culture of the cainteoir dúchais exemplified by people like Micheál Ó Foighil, with the originality of the cainteoir dóchais, Ireland could yet become a country worthy of its noble heritage.

On St Obama's letter to the Muslims

>'the powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole'.
Professor Caroll Quiqley, Tragedy and Hope

Last week was a momentous one for the US president, starting with a visit to Saudi Arabia, America’s closest despotic friends, then Obama’s erudite discourse in Cairo where some magnanimity was shown in mentioning at least one of the USA’s nefarious interferences in the affairs of other countries, namely the 1953 CIA coup in Iran which overthrew the democratic reformer Mohammed Mossadegh.

The mainstream media were unequivocal in their praise of the US president’s diplomatic overtures, yet many people remain unconvinced of the USA’s sincerity in this regard. After the Cairo visit President Obama visited Germany and the Buchanwald concentration camp where reference was made to Mahmoud Athmadinjed’s holocaust denials. President Obama’s tour ended in France with the D-Day commemoration.

The day-day commemoration was a chance for the US establishment to remind us about the ‘good wars’ it fought to save us all from tyranny. Now, I am not going to suggest that Hitler should not have been fought and that people should have said no to world war II. However, the real question about world war II concerns the international machinations which enabled Hitler to come to power in the first place. Who were Hitler’s financiers? Who financed the rise of Nazism in Germany from 1933? How could a bankrupt economy like Germany suddenly rise to the level of a world power capable of global destruction? Why, Wall Street of course, with a little help from the Bank of England!

Hitler’s rise to power was initially facilitated by a handsome loan from the Bank of England. The governor of the Bank of England was one Mantagu Norman a close personal friend of Hjalmar Schacht, chancellor of the Gearman Reichs Bank. The pro-Nazi British aristocracy were hoping to form an Anglo-German alliance against Franco-American hegemony in Western Europe. They also hoped that a strongman in Germany would attack the Soviet Union and defeat international communism. That’s why they pursued a policy of pacification with Germany. They didn’t want to lose interests on their investments!

Internationale Gesellschaft Farben was the most powerful chemical corporation in Hitler’s Germany. It played in integral part in the rise of the German war economy, producing, inter alia, explosives, fuel and the deadly poison gaz used in Auschwitz.

IG Farben’s American subsidiary American IG Farben was controlled by many of the top-brass in Wallstreet. Paul Warburg, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil, Edsel T Ford and Carl Bosch of Ford Motor Company were all directors on the board of the American IG Farben subsidiary. JP Morgan, City bank, Henry Ford and a host of others all traded and profited from the German war machine before and throughout the Second World War.

In his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, the historian Antony Sutton writes ‘Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I. G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II’.

It was US loans to the IG Farben and corporations in Germany which spawned the Nazi military-industrial complex. As one US senator put it before the end of the war, ‘Farben was Hitler and Hitler was Farben’. There is also little doubt that the Wallstreet gang were aware of what was happening. The historian Gabriel Kolko writes.

‘The business press [in the United States] was aware, from 1935 on, that German prosperity was based on war preparations. More important, it was conscious of the fact that German industry was under the control of the Nazis and was being directed to serve Germany's rearmament, and the firm mentioned most frequently in this context was the giant chemical empire, I. G. Farben

The story of US financial and technological support for Hitler is far to detailed for this column. I could mention IBM who supplied the punch-card proto-computer technology for the Holocaust. There are many more examples of full-scale collusion. In short, Wallstreet and criminals of global finance were the real cause of the Second World War. Has America really progressed since then? If you look closely at the top brass in Obama’s administration you will see Wallstreet written in capital letters. Henry Ford realised the danger of Wallstreet’s little secret. In his dairy, he wrote

'It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.'

The outsourcing of labour and war

Le Clem, French patriots affectionately call it. The Clemenceau Aircraft carrier has finally come to rest at Graythorpe in England where it is to be scraped. But this ship’s post marine twilight is likely to be of more historical significance than its heyday when it patrolled the Middle East.

Serving from 1961 to 1997, the Clemenseau took part in several missions to protest French interests. Most notably, Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Western powers supported the Bagdad Butcher in his quest for regional supremacy, providing their puppet dictator with weapons of mass destruction. The USA was particularly generous to Sadam, offering him chemical weapons which he used to commit atrocities in Iran and even in his own country. The French provided significant aviation technology, while the Clemenseau took care of French ‘commercial interests’ in the Persian Gulf, protecting its capitalist looters from Iranian military boats.

The ship also played a distinguished role during the First Gulf War. Saddam hoped to regain control over the oil fields of Kuwait, a kingdom which he felt, with some justification, was part of Iraq. The American ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie brought up Saddam’s plans for Kuwait when she met him just before the war, expressing ambiguous concern but then assuring the dictator that America has “ no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America." Saddam, himself a creation of the CIA, should have known better. He fell for the trap and the US-led Western imperialist criminals went on another killing spree to ‘liberate’ the oil fields of Kuwait. The French made sure they played their part in America’s bogus war. Le Clem came in handy when it transported 40 helicopters (SA-341F/ -342 Gazelles, SA-330 Pumas), three Br-1050 Alizés and trucks to Iraq during 'Desert storm & Desert shield'.

After such a noble career of collusion in mass murder and looting, the French authorities decided it was time to dismantle their precious Clem. As the 27 ton ship contained so many noxious toxins such as lead, PCB, mercury and asbestos, there was only one option open to them: ‘outsource’ the problem to India. “The workers of Alang have nothing. Who cares if they fall seriously ill or die from our toxic waste. It’s cheaper for us and it gives these people a job.”

Outsourcing is the euphemism the plutocracy employs to cover up their despicable exploitation of the world’s poor. Sure, many of them like their sweat shops and scrap yards; are happy to have a job, buy more commodities, become credit-slaves etc. They are just like the African-American slaves who sang happy ditties in the cotton fields of South Virginia before the US Civil War. Exploitation works much better if you make the exploited believe they are free.

It was Greenpeace, the bete noire of the Elysée Palace, who exposed Alang scandal, once again. The last time they messed with the French government was 1985 during their war on Iran. President Mitterand had enough of their moralizing and got the secret service to blow them up! However, due to legal pressure from within India, the French were forced to concede and the Clem was sent to England where it lies today.

Working conditions in the Alang shipyard in India are to be expected: appalling. These people are the lumpen proletariat of the New World Order, salvaging and recycling the components of capitalism’s shipwreak. We live in a world of pathological externalization. The capitalist powers continue to grow by outsourcing labour and war. It’s the only way financial capitalism can continue to reward the few and enslave the many. There are two billion children in the world. Over half of them are living in poverty. Neither charity nor plutocratic philanthropy will do anything to change this. Mass poverty is the sine qua non for the globalisation of capital.

Further thoughts on the Irish language

Irish language media took a blow recently with the news that Foinse, the Irish language weekly newspaper, was to be taken out of circulation due to financial difficulties. Nevertheless Irish academia published a positive report last week concerning the advantages of bilingual education in Ireland. The research was carried out by Dr. Judith Wylie and Dr. Gerry Mulhern from Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Psychology. The school’s research concerns the cognitive development of children educated in Irish medium schools in Northern Ireland. The cognitive advantages shown in Irish medium schools were particularly striking in the areas of short-term memory and working memory. According to Dr Wylie “Short memory and working memory are centrally important in all learning, indeed everyday tasks such as reading, reasoning and mental arithmetic rely heavily on these processes. Using standardised tests of verbal and visual memory, our research compared
groups of children from Irish-medium schools with children from the more usual English-only schools in Northern Ireland “ .

The Irish language revival movement has proved to be particularly strong throughout nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. But there was also been a significant increase shown among Ulster Protestants in the Irish language and heritage. The divide and rule policy of British imperialism in the North has often led to a warped view of Irish identity on both sides of the political divide. The Irish language is too often seen as an instrument of Irish nationalism, a way for Northern nationalists to dissociate themselves from the hegemony of British culture in the province. In many respects this is true. But there is a significant number of nationalists in the north who are deeply cognisant of the importance of Protestantism to Irish language heritage. After all, the Bible was first translated into Irish by a Protestant clergyman William Bedel in the 17th century . Queen Elizabeth herself showed a healthy curiosity in Irish. She even asked Christopher Nugent the Baron of County Westmeath to provide her with an Irish primer! The Presbyterian clergyman William Nielson was a champion of the language writing a grammar and phrase book to encourage learning of the language among his congregation. In fact, a significant number of the original Scottish planters in Ulster were Gaelic speakers. The language, then, is as most a feature of unionist Ulster as it is of nationalist Ireland.

There was, of course, a significant number of Protestant nationalists too who contributed to the revival of Irish, Douglas Hyde being the most obvious example. A survey done by Smith and Robinson in 1991 revealed that 23 percent of Northern Irish Protestants believe that Irish should be a compulsory subject in schools. This is surprisingly high given the level of cultural confusion that exists among Northern Ireland’s divided communities. There have, however, been pockets of Irish learners among Ulster’s protestants, most notably, a group of female Irish learners in the staunchly loyalist Shankill( Sean Cille- Old Church) Road. The Unionist politician Chris McGimpsey is a speaker of Irish and the Irish language daily Lá featured regular columns from the Unionist writer Ian Malcolm.
According to Dr. Reamaí Mathers of Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta

“This groundbreaking work adds further evidence to the increasingly indisputable body of good science that shows that children
who are educated in Irish-medium schools are not only receiving the benefit of two languages but are also receiving tangible educational advantages. Earlier this year, Key Stage 2 assessments (Primary 7),which focus on the areas of English and maths, demonstrated that for the last three years attainment in Irish-medium education has been higher than the Northern Ireland average. What the Queen’s research provides is a deeper insight into the mechanisms at work in the superior performance by Irish-medium children when compared to the more usual English
language schools.”

There is a compelling case for Irish medium education in this country North and South. When one considers the diverse and often paradoxical ideologies that promoted the language throughout our history, it does not seem impossible that Northern Ireland could yet become the leading province promoting Gaelic culture in these Islands.

Lunar landing or lunacy expanding?

The 30 year anniversary of the NASA moon landings was universally celebrated this year with universal praise of the USA’s technological superiority in furthering human enlightenment. But there is another side to the lunar story that has been carefully concealed from the public’s attention, one which raises deep questions concerning the historical narrative of human progress, namely NASA’s direct links to NAZI Germany.

When Germany lay in ruins after the Second World War, American officials gained access to the secrets of Germany’s military-industrial complex. While many soldiers and officials were horrified by the savagery of the concentration camps in such places as Auschwitz, Dachau and Dora, certain commanders saw an opportunity to profit from the research and technological knowledge of the NAZI war machine. With the Red Army triumphant in East Berlin, military strategy to contain the advance of communism took precedence of moral integrity. The Cold War had already begun. The Americans were overwhelmed by the superiority of NAZI technology and feared lest such knowledge pass to the Soviets.

The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which encompassed all branches of US military intelligence, was determined to track down and employ these NAZI researchers in the interests of the United States. However, they failed to convince President Roosevelt of the necessity of giving high-level jobs to NAZI scientists in the expanding US military –industrial complex. William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, expressed grave concern over certain officials desire to recruit the NAZI scientists. But many of the scientists had already been captured after the D-Day landings in 1944 by the T-Forces of the Allies. The T-Forces’s mission had been to search for NAZI soft power and employ it in the services of the Allied Powers.

When President Truman assumed power in 1945, he took of the JIOA’s plan. When the CIA was founded in 1947, the drive for NAZI expertise became a covert plan known to history as Operation Paperclip. However, when the NAZI documents were initially presented to the US State Department, they were rejected as the dossiers proved that the scientists were ardent NAZI war criminals. The refusal of the US State Department to Nazify America infuriated Bosquet Wev, director of the JIOA who commented ‘the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in 'beating a dead Nazi horse’ Wev’s dead NAZI horse would soon gallop across the prairies of an liberty –loving land, corrupting it from within unbeknownst to its own people. The CIA proceeded immediately to falsify the files of the NAZIs they wished to smuggle into the United States. They did this by bleaching the backgrounds of the NAZI criminals and covering them with new ones secured by paperclips, hence the name. Many of the scientists were located when a Polish lab technician discovered a list kept Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineer–scientist, head of the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (English: Military Research Association) the scientific research section of the Gestapo, which he had recovered from a toilet bowl!

Among the beneficiaries of the CIA covert operation were Werner Von Braun, Hubertus Strughold and Arthur Rudolf. These were to be the men who would lead the Apollo Program putting the first man on the moon in August of 1969. Werner Von Braun aged just 32 in 1945 was a key engineer for the NAZI war machine. Commandant of the SS, Von Braun was in charge of developing the V2 rockets in Peenmunde, Germany. The parts for the rocket were constructed by slave labour in Dora concentration camp. After the war Von Braun was interned in Garmisch which was under the supervision of Colonel Holder Toftoy, who convinced Von Braun to move to the United States to work for the Americans. E.W Gruhn, one of the directors of the JIOA, then began to recruit hundreds of NAZIs to be employed in prestigious US military and academic research centres. The drive to recruit NAZis proved so intense, Operation National Interest was also launched in 1947. By now Allen Dulles the director of the CIA, had established a close an amicable relationship with Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s ex chief of intelligence. Gehlen was rewarded with a position as station chief in Germany for the CIA. He proceeded to recruit old NAZI comrades, people such as Emil Augsburg and Dr. Franz Six, who had formed death scuads during the war, murdering Jews and communist intellectuals en mass. Jews would now be safe but the mass murder of communists would continue throughout the developing and third world until the end of America’s cold war. The United Stateswould never be the same again. Henceforth all qualms about past NAZI crimes were to be disgarded as NAZIs were smuggles en masse into the United States to work . In the summer of 1947 Operation ‘National Interest’ was launched. Now NAZI war criminals were to be recruited into the highest echelons of US business. Otto Ambros the director of IG Farben, the company that was financed by the US during the war and the producer of Zyklon B used in the holocaust was awarded with executive positions in Dow Chemicals, WR Grave Company and the US Medical Corps.

There were hundreds if not thousands more. The NASA NAZIs would later be given the highest awards of the from the Us Government. Strughold would even receive the Americanism Medal from the daughters of the revolution. Others such as Rudolf were later indicted for war crimes. Few were ever convicted. The lunar landing in 1969 was the triumph of a Nazified America, the triumph of criminal lunacy.