Archive for the ‘Mexico’ Category
Tributes to Adolfo Gilly August 25 1928 – July 4 2023 – A Mexican revolutionary who visited Dublin in September 1979
Adolfo Gilly has passed away.
Suzi Weissman drew our attention to the tribute below, written by Olivia Gall :
Today Adolfo Gilly, a great among the great historians of the revolution and the post-revolution in Mexico, passed away.
Our beloved teacher has also gone. The first time I took class with Gilly was when he came to Mexico from Italy to give some classes at UNAM, before the Mexican government decided to grant him naturalization. The Faculty of Economics class was crowded. Every time he referred to something very critical about Mexican politics he told us “if I say this they’re going to apply the 33″…….. but, he laughed, “there they go.”
Later I attended, over several semesters, his Seminar on the History of the Mexican Revolution at the postgraduate degree of the FCPYS. Adolfo was a great teacher, perhaps the best of all the teachers I had back then and ever had.
Today also left Gilly my mentor, who accompanied the process of my doctoral research on Trotsky in Mexico very closely. I was fortunate to have his wisdom, his irremediably critical spirit, his ironic gaze, his strong passion for history and politics, his rigorous opinions, his scorn, and his relentless recommendations and warnings.
Years later, when Adolfo was talking about Friedrich Katz, he referred to him as “my Katz commander.”
Last time I saw him I mentioned his Argentinian origin. He reprimanded me: “Argentinian me? Ain’t no way I’m Mexican! ”
Dear Adolfo, we’ll miss you a lot, we’ll always miss you.
Adolfo Gilly in Dublin, September 1979
On August 27 1979, on the same day:
- The IRA killed 18 members of the British paratroop regiment at Narrow Water County Down
- The IRA killed a British Royal Family member Lord Mountbatten, in Sligo.
A tsunami of ruling class condemnation blitzed across the world’s media. Pope John Paul II joined the chorus. The Narrow Water ambush was not universally unpopular in Ireland.
Read the rest of this entry »Revolutionary, peasant leader : Hugo Blanco (1934 – 2023)
Article Source : https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article66912
Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian revolutionary, peasant leader, former member of parliament, fighter for the rights of indigenous people and for the environment, has died after a short period of acute illness. [1] He was born in 1934 in Cusco in Peru, in the indigenous heartland, and he constantly returned there. At the same time, throughout his life he was always on the road, living in several countries, repeatedly deported by those in power whom he criticised. As late as in March he arrived once more in Sweden, yet again because of political turmoil after a coup in his home country. He died, as he had wished to, close to his two daughters in Sweden, Carmen and Maria.
For many years, Hugo was a member of organisations affiliated to the Fourth International, first in Argentina where he arrived as a young student and then after his return to Peru in the late 1950s. That is where he participated in and played a leading role in the campesino movement against the cruel, neofeudal latifundista reign in the Peruvian Andes. The peasants’ demand for land was met with brutal repression. Hugo took part in the forming of armed self-defence. In one confrontation a policeman was killed. Hugo was put on trial in a military tribunal and the prosecutor argued for a death sentence, but in the end he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Read the rest of this entry »“On the 1937 Sino-Japanese War” – Leon Trotsky – Parallels to the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine
This is simply brilliant. Parallels with the 2022 Russian Ethnic-Cleansing, Imperialist and Racist invasion of Ukraine 🇺🇦 should be obvious to all readers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/10/sino.htm?fbclid=IwAR0Q41Y8r88mV9n-dpLazaWcnyqnbE1ByhFovRM09yYDn7rTMc9ntAH5lNU. Leon Trotsky wrote a letter to the outstanding Mexican Painter Diego Rivera.
“In my declaration to the bourgeois press, I said that the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity. But that is “social patriotism!” the Eiffelites cry. It is capitulation to Chiang Kai-shek! It is the abandonment of the principle of the class struggle! Bolshevism preached revolutionary defeatism in the imperialist war. Now, the war in Spain and the Sino-Japanese War are both imperialist wars. “Our position on the war in China is the same. The only salvation of the workers and peasants of China is to struggle independently against the two armies, against the Chinese army in the same manner as against the Japanese army.” These four lines, taken from an Eiffelite document of September 10, 1937, suffice entirely for us to say: we are concerned here with either real traitors or complete imbeciles. But imbecility, raised to this degree, is equal to treason.
Abortion Rights in the USA Shredded to Bits – Supreme Court Likely to Overturn Historic 1973 Roe V Wade Ruling
The USA Supreme Court, dominated by far-right Justices such as Donald Trump nominee Amy Coney-Barrett, is likely to overturn the constitutional right to access an abortion. Joan McKiernan, an Irish-American activist, reports from New York.
We Won’t Go Back!
This was one of the slogans shouted by angry protesters gathered in the thousands in cities across the US after the leak of the Supreme Court’s plan to overturn the constitutional right to abortion provided in the Roe v Wade case. We know the Supreme Court as the place to go to fight for rights. But this time the Court is taking away a right – to control our bodies, which is fundamental to the quest for women’s independence.
Diane Feeley, speaking at a rally in Detroit, explained what we fought for fifty years ago. “Before 1973, the women’s movement called for free abortion on demand, 24-hour childcare available to all, opposition to sterilization abuse and equal pay for equal work. We testified at legislative hearings, brought class-action lawsuits, organized speak outs and tribunals, picketed and marched, built networks of support for those who needed underground abortions, told our stories and reached out to women internationally.” Unfortunately, the middle class dominated feminist movement settled for much less in the Roe decision. This based the right to abortion on the tenuous notion of privacy implied in the 14th Amendment, rooted in the end of slavery and Reconstruction, which prohibits states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property without due process”.
Read the rest of this entry »Apologies and Recantations – The Strange Cases of two Elected Representatives from Ireland and England – Brian Stanley TD (Sinn Féin, Ireland) and Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour Party, England)
We start with a tip, and two savage cartoons.
All political apologisers – such as the Sinn Féin Laois-Offaly TD Brian Stanley – forced to swallow and spit out his words of praise for IRA ambushes in 1920 and 1979 – do not believe any of the sentences they are forced to utter in humiliating public recantations!
Nobody ever believes the recantation :
The same applies to apologies uttered under duress by former British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Nobody believes the apologies. The effect is to censor debate on issues which ought to be publicly aired.
Every honest person knows Brian Stanley’s Kilmichael/Narrow Water Tweet about British soldiers successfully ambushed by the IRA in Ireland – Black-and-Tans (1920) and Parachute Regiment (1979) – is a public picture of his own personal opinion and the opinions of many members of his own party.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tomás Ó Flatharta 