Josh’s blogg

 Cuban people and humanitarians all over the world are saluting the great leader and revolutionary, Commandant Fidel Castro after his decision to step down after 50 years of progressive leadership of Cuba. He and his comrades have transformed Cuba into an example that less socially advanced countries like the US, Britain and Canada can learn from. He has presided over a country that now has the highest literacy rate in the third world (99.5%), a Scandinavian standard health care system (and free at that), there is a lower infant mortality rate than Washington DC, and people live longer there than in Washington DC. When Castro took over black people couldn’t go to certain beaches or sit on certain park benches and were subjected to the racist policies of the man Fidel and his committed comrades overthrew.

Now black people are among some of the most educated and prestigious figures in Cuba. Cuba is a country where ordinary people go to the ballet and enjoy opera, unlike the so called “developed world” where these pursuits are accessible only to the wealthy few. All of these remarkable feats have been achieved under the most difficult of circumstances, that of a US imposed embargo strangling the Cuban economy and subverting the revolution. We come from a society that worships money. Education, food and medicine are commodities to bought and sold on the market for those able to afford them. Cuba is not a country that worships money; it is one that worships humans and encourages humanity’s progression. Every Cuban can be educated for free from infancy to PhD. Cuba graduates a phenomenal 80, 000 doctors every year, many of whom end up in other 3^rd world countries, sent there out of altruism and fraternity by the Cuban leadership. Castro as a young man picked up a gun and took to the hills to fight for the freedom of the exploited majority. If only Harper, Bush and Brown would put on their tin hats and fight in the wars they send other people’s husbands and sons into then perhaps the military exploits would be far reduced. Not since David brought down Goliath has there been such a victory as that of the Cuban revolution. Castro replaced the US backed junta whom had repressed human rights and murdered countless numbers of protesters to maintain the bordello, casino economy which he enriched himself from.   

Castro is often depicted as some kind of tyrant, a Saddam Hussein or a Stalin which is misleading and down right untrue. I am from Britain and when Hitler was threatening to invade our island and change our society at the point of a gun, many democratic rights were curtailed. There were no elections from 1935 to 1945 in Britain and if anybody had dared to walk around the streets of London proselytising for Adolf Hitler and Fascism then they would have been interned at best, but most likely hanged.

Likewise in Cuba there has been some denial of civil liberties as part of the war effort against the US. Amnesty International say 58 people are currently prisoners of conscience in Cuban prisons, so far less than in the US base at Guantanamo Bay, but a sad bi-product of the Cuban resistance nonetheless.When I hear this folly from the guttersnipe press about Cuba being some kind of repressive dictatorship I am filled with indignation. I am especially angered when the fulminations come from the gold toothed émigrés in Miami whom traduce the Cuban revolution and are so loquacious about democracy whilst living (and harbouring terrorists) in the state of Florida where Bush was only able to claim an election victory because the judges adjudicating were appointed by his father. The people of Cuba do in fact have many forms of democracy but have indeed had some democratic privileges curtailed as part of the resistance to the leviathan 75miles from their shores. The US has engaged in sabotage, subterfuge, assassination attempts (in their hundreds) as well as down right sponsorship of terrorists. This subversion is undoubtedly to blame for hindering democratic developments in Cuba.  

Castro was a man who stood up against dictatorship, against corruption and against inequality and made Cuba the envy of the third world. In Latin America now you can’t get elected unless you profess friendship to Fidel and Chavez and hostility to Bush and his cohorts. Castro is a legend throughout the world and particularly in Latin America, let us all salute him and denounce the biased Fox News style coverage which has been broadcasted this week.  

Human Rights Watch said Sunday that Israel breached international law when it bombed southern Lebanon with cluster weapons in 2006.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch demanded an independent inquiry to determine whether individual Israeli commanders “bear responsibility for war crimes.”
A 131-page report ‘Flooding South Lebanon: Israeli Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006′, made available to reporters at the United Nations Headquarters, said that Israel violated international humanitarian law with hundreds of
“indiscriminate and disproportionate cluster munitions attacks on Lebanon.”
Human Rights Watch said Israel had rained as many as 4.6 million submunitions, or cluster bomblets, across southern Lebanon - mostly in the final days of the war.

The report’s lead author, Bonnie Docherty, said the United Nations must investigate whether Israel deliberately targeted civilians with the munitions.

“Ninety percent of the (bombing) strikes occurred in the last three days of the war when Israel knew a cease-fire was imminent,” she said.

“Many, many of those strikes occurred on towns and villages across South Lebanon. Munitions left behind by those attacks continue to kill civilians today,” she said.

Steve Goose, director of the Arms division at Human Rights Watch, said unexploded cluster bomblets have killed and maimed almost 200 people since the war ended.

“The Lebanon story is just the latest example of something we’ve have seen over and over again: Whenever cluster munitions are used, large numbers of civilians get killed and injured,” Goose said.

MALCOLM X’S EULOGY
Eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis at the funeral of Malcolm X
Faith Temple Church Of God
February 27,1965
 

“Here - at this final hour, in this quiet place - Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes -extinguished now, and gone from us forever. For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought - his home of homes, where his heart was, and where his people are - and it is, therefore, most fitting that we meet once again - in Harlem - to share these last moments with him. For Harlem has ever been gracious to those who have loved her, have fought her, and have defended her honor even to the death.

It is not in the memory of man that this beleaguered, unfortunate, but nonetheless proud community has found a braver, more gallant young champion than this Afro-American who lies before us - unconquered still. I say the word again, as he would want me to : Afro-American - Afro-American Malcolm, who was a master, was most meticulous in his use of words. Nobody knew better than he the power words have over minds of men. Malcolm had stopped being a ‘Negro’ years ago. It had become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American and he wanted - so desperately - that we, that all his people, would become Afro-Americans too.

There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain - and we will smile. Many will say turn away - away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man - and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate - a fanatic, a racist - who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them : Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.

Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves. Last year, from Africa, he wrote these words to a friend: ‘My journey’, he says, ‘is almost ended, and I have a much broader scope than when I started out, which I believe will add new life and dimension to our struggle for freedom and honor and dignity in the States. I am writing these things so that you will know for a fact the tremendous sympathy and support we have among the African States for our Human Rights struggle. The main thing is that we keep a United Front wherein our most valuable time and energy will not be wasted fighting each other.’ However we may have differed with him - or with each other about him and his value as a man - let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now.

Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man - but a seed - which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is - a Prince - our own black shining Prince! - who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”

 We are endlessly assured that there is no alternative to the present system and that socialism is dead. Real life suggests otherwise

For nearly two decades, the Thatcherite dictum that “there is no alternative” has been used to stifle serious challenge to the way the world is run, and right now there seems to be an increasingly urgent insistence that there is only one possible social and economic future for us all. It isn’t just the hard men of the moneyed right asserting that capitalism is the only way to order human affairs. Liberals are also now unshakeably convinced that there can be no alternative to capitalism - unless perhaps it is a collapse into some variety of barbarism.

Timothy Garton Ash recently declared here that “global capitalism now has no serious rivals - but it could destroy itself” while Martin Kettle pronounced socialism incontrovertibly dead with no prospect of a second coming. And the latest issue of Prospect magazine polls 35 intellectual movers-and-shakers on “what’s next” for a world moving beyond left and right. Only the historian Eric Hobsbawm and US academic Andrew Moravcsik believe that left and right will remain “plainly central”, in Hobsbawm’s words in the new century. From the rest, we get dystopian warnings of technocracy defeating democracy, new forms of terrorism, random use of nuclear weapons, more God, even something dubbed by Michael Lind the “war of Patria vs Plutopia”. The philosopher Jonathan Rée summed it up best: “We are now facing a crisis both of hope and of serious collective argument.”

That is certainly true of many intellectuals - though, judging by opinion polls, less so of the wider public - but perhaps they have buried left and right and embraced the new world order too soon. As in most of the rest of the world, the gap between rich and poor in Britain has grown under a Labour government. Privatised industries have turned out to be ramshackle rip-offs. Women are still paid far less than men, Britain’s children are the most deprived in the western world, fascists are winning council seats and workers can get sacked in a canteen by megaphone. And that’s before we get on to the neo-colonialism which is making a catastrophic comeback, amid bloodshed and racism.

But our opinion-forming and governing classes have evidently convinced themselves that no form of socialism has anything to do with solving the problems of the world today. A litany of crises like these would once have had Blairite stalwarts like Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn condemning the system that generated them. But we can be confident that there will be no discussion of any alternative to the private ownership and control of our resources or of a transfer of economic and political power to the majority in the phoney Clarke-Milburn “debate” on Labour’s future. This silencing of the S-word might make sense if capitalism, having been given the whole world to itself to do its worst with for the last generation, was delivering the economic, social, moral and environmental goods. Maybe not, the post-socialist would say, but the economics have been settled, with capitalism leaving socialism a distant second in the prosperity race. And anyway, even to the extent that socialism once had something useful to say, the world has now changed out of all recognition.

This is dodgy history and worse futurology. The Britain of the 1960s and 1970s was only socialist in the nightmares of capitalists, but it had some of the elements which made for a better society. Public ownership and full, stable, employment underpinned not merely high levels of economic growth, but also a radical improvement in the lives of the working class, protected by a strong trade unionism which, while far from as mighty as subsequent myth-making has suggested, did at least prevent those at the bottom being pushed around at will by those at the top.

Even the Soviet Union’s place in history looks different depending where you stand. Russians today miss its relative egalitarianism, welfare and public economic control, not to mention the more stable inter-ethnic relations, if not the one-party authoritarianism. Meanwhile in Venezuela, for the first time in a generation, there is a government committed to establishing socialism. Of course, the movie can’t be rewound. Twenty-first century socialism in Britain or elsewhere cannot look east for inspiration, nor will it be the work of coal-miners and shipyard workers. But what could it offer?

For a start, socialism makes possible the re-establishment of democracy whether at national, multinational or global level. Capitalist globalisation has become synonymous with democratic powerlessness as all important decisions are taken further away from the people affected and concentrated in the hands of ever fewer corporate bosses, private equity and publicly traded alike, for whom the common weal cannot be their priority. It also raises the prospect of a more peaceful world. The idea that unchallenged capitalism meant universal peace - quite popular in the early 1990s - hardly takes much debunking now. A system that replaced fighting for scarce resources with the global management of them offers the chance both of sparing lives and of the decisive action necessary to save the planet.

And there is social justice. There is little sign of gender or race inequality within countries, or between the rich world and the poor, being eroded, much less eliminated, despite recent global growth. Rather the opposite. If you think greater inequality is fine, then you’d better get back to your hedge fund desk. But there are far more people in trade unions and the anti-war movement than there are selling guns to despots or trading oil futures. And of course there is an alternative.

LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups.

The research covered 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Those that not covered included two of Iraq’s more volatile regions — Kerbala and Anbar — and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work.

Estimates of deaths in Iraq have been highly controversial in the past.

Medical journal The Lancet published a peer-reviewed report in 2004 stating that there had been 100,000 more deaths than would normally be expected since the March 2003 invasion, kicking off a storm of protest.

The widely watched Web site Iraq Body Count currently estimates that between 80,699 and 88,126 people have died in the conflict, although its methodology and figures have also been questioned by U.S. authorities and others.

ORB, a non-government-funded group founded in 1994, conducts research for the private, public and voluntary sectors.

The director of the group, Allan Hyde, said it had no objective other than to record as accurately as possible the number of deaths among the Iraqi population as a result of the invasion and ensuing conflict.

 On Sunday, the weekly “left-wing” British newspaper The Observer ran a shameful attack on the Venezuelan political process and President Chávez in particular. Under the title “Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe,” it is made up almost entirely of quotes from unnamed sources and attempts to portray Venezuela as a rogue state which promotes drug trafficking. The heading is especially misleading as even the writer admits that there is no evidence to connect Chávez with any alleged “narco-guerrilla” smuggling network.

Sign your name

Protestors have staged a demonstration outside Downing Street against Gordon Brown and Condoleezza Rice’s military talks on Afghan war. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice visited London for talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Wednesday.

The visit comes as Washington mounts a diplomatic offensive to persuade its NATO allies to step up their military commitment in Afghanistan.

But as the talks went on the demonstrators just outside Downing Street were determined to make it known to her she was not welcome there.

“I don’t want people of the world think Rice has been welcomed as some kind of a dignitary here,” a demonstrator told PressTV correspondent.

“As far as I’m concerned she is a war criminal. [She is] part of Bush’s complete devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan,” she added.

British MP George Galloway also told PressTV that the problems in Afghanistan should be left to its people to fix, not outside forces.

“Afghanistan is a sovereign country and must reach its own arrangements. Go home Rice. You are a dangerous person…You are here to cause more problems in the world,” Galloway said.

PEACE campaigner Brian Haw is currently walking to High Wycombe along the London Road as part of his journey to Oxford.The activist from Redditch, Worcestershire has camped in Parliament Square for the past six years in protest of the Iraq war.He is marching to Oxford Union to debate the motion “This House Would Under no Circumstances Fight for Queen and Country”.Mr Haw said: “It’s a bit of leg work and a bit of shoe leather - not the biggest contribution to the cause really.“People are making fortunes out of this war and all of us are paying for it.“How many more of our kids have to die?”Mr Haw will be staying in High Wycombe tonight, before setting off tomorrow from the town centre on the next step of his journey.The debate will take place on February 7. Mr Haw will be proposing the motion with George Galloway MP among others, and will be opposed by Colonel Bob Andrews and MP Nick Harvey.