Archive for the ‘Revolutionary History’ Category
The Strange Rebirth of Stalinism – Colm Breathnach (Independent Left)

THE STRANGE REBIRTH OF STALINISM
The editors of this blog offer recommended reading – an article By Colm Breathnach of the Irish Left-Wing organization Independent Left.
Source : https://independentleft.ie/rebirth-of-stalinism/
A more colourful literary description of this phenomenon was offered by Yuliya Yurchenko at a November 2022 Dublin public meeting organised by Irish Left With Ukraine. The Ukrainian Marxist and Feminist offered us the idea that the USSR is dead – it is not coming back. The worst features of the dead ☠️ USSR have been imported into a new capitalist-imperialist-genocidal monster headed by Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. The good bits have been discarded and killed off permanently. Think of Stephen King’s horror story Pet Sematary :
A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery(misspelled “sematary” on the sign) where the children of the town bury their deceased animals.
A cat called Church dies, then :
after Church is run over outside his home around Thanksgiving. Rachel and the kids are visiting Rachel’s parents in Chicago, but Louis frets over breaking the bad news to Ellie. Sympathizing with Louis, Jud takes him to the “sematary”, supposedly to bury Church. But instead of stopping there, Jud leads Louis farther on to “the real cemetery”: an ancient burial ground that was once used by the Miꞌkmaq Tribe. There, Louis buries the cat on Jud’s instruction. The next afternoon, Church returns home; the usually vibrant and lively cat now acts ornery and, in Louis’s words, “a little dead”. Church hunts for mice and birds, ripping them apart without eating them. He also smells so bad that Ellie no longer wants him in her room at night. Jud confirms that Church has been resurrected and that Jud himself once buried his dog there when he was younger. Louis, deeply disturbed, begins to wish that he had not buried Church there.




WHAT IS STALINISM?
Read the rest of this entry »Tributes to Arend van de Poel, Librarian at the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE)
I met Arend van de Poel on a small number of occasions. He was great company. He is pictured below with his IIRE colleague Alex de Jong. Colleagues and Comrades who knew Arend much better than me have written warm and interesting tributes – see below :
John Meehan, January 7 2023

Maral Jefroudi :
We lost our dear comrade, librarian at IIRE, Arend van de Poel last Wednesday.
He was one of a kind (nevi şahsına münhasır in Turkish) person.
I am glad I could enjoy his friendship (Enjoy?! he would be surprised)- his reactions could be compared to the famous grumpy cat.
He hated vegetables, loved cats, and didn’t enjoy hospitals…
We would talk about a lot of random stuff besides politics, from jogging to playing piano and he would listen to my ventings periodically.
Also he was one of the few old white men who understood the current debates on race, gender, and sexuality and managed to be an anti-racist, anti-sexist socialist being at the right side of the debates.
I will miss him a lot…
Read the rest of this entry »Voters in the British State Reject Brexit – The Emperors Have No Clothes
Lots of recent data tells us that voters in the British state – in the nations of England, Scotland, Wales (and in the statelet called Northern Ireland) – reject Brexit. Here is the latest graphic :

The polling expert John Curtice publishes lots of interesting information on this and other related subjects.
Read the rest of this entry »Christmas Subversion 2022 – by Sarah Springer
Trotskyist Subversion Again – “By far the favorite of all the miniatures I’ve made: my Merry Marxmas house!”. – Sarah Springer.




Readers might like to see and read more articles written by Sarah Springer. I recommend this short essay “Literature from a Marxist Perspective”.