Sellafield is a great vote winner for political parties come election time. It has got to be the single issue on which almost every person in Ireland agrees: Sellafield is bad and it should be shut down. So in the next months we can expect pickets of the British embassy, press conferences and the promises of European court cases as the parties vie for our vote.
The mouthpiece of millionaire Tony O’Reilly, the Sunday Independent, got terribly excited when it ‘discovered’ there were anarchists involved in the bin tax campaign. Or, as it oddly put it, anarchists of the Workers Solidarity Movement had "infiltrated the campaign in significant numbers"
WHAT USED TO be called the white man’s civilising mission has returned with a vengeance. Suddenly white Europeans and Americans once more have to bring peace and harmony to the rest of the world by stamping on dictators, stopping the Islamic bomb and introducing economic stability.
When Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492 he had little interest in the new plants and animals of this land. Instead he was confident that the Spanish crown could make the Arawaks and Caribs collect and give "what was needed".
10 years after the Gulf War offically ended Britain and the US continue to bomb Iraq. It only occasionally gets into the headlines, normally when civilians are killed. It is ironic that it is the Western soldiers who carried out the mass killings in that war who have become its most prominent victims in the media.
A look at media coverage of the ending of the siege of the Japanese embassy in Lima in which the MRTA were executed. This article written at the time in 1997 also documents early attackes on radical news sites and archives on the internet.
The long running struggle in Erris (Rossport) against Shell’s attempt to impose an experimental gas pipeline on the local community has erupted in recent days with repeated local direct actions against the compound Shell are trying to construct. Meanwhile the state at the behest of Shell continues to press vindictive prosecutions against local activists. Back in March retired school teacher Maura Harrington for jailed for 30 days, today the state returned for another pound of flesh and she was sentenced to another 7-10 days in Mountjoy prison. At very short notice over 20 activists from Dublin Shell to Sea gathered at the prison gates and showed their outrage by blocking the entrance of the prison van containing Maura in to Mountjoy for about twenty minutes.
May 1st is a day of special significance for the labour movement. While it has been hijacked in the past by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, the labour movement festival of May Day is a day of world-wide solidarity. A time to remember past struggles and demonstrate our hope for a better future. A day to remember that an injury to one is an injury to all.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once wrote that "to tell the truth is a communist and revolutionary act." If we apply this maxim to most of the left, we would draw the obvious conclusion that it is neither communist nor revolutionary.
The Socialist Workers Party is a classic example of this mentality, rewriting history to suit the recruitment needs of the organisation. One of the ironies of history is that the Trotskyists who spent so much time combating the "Stalin school of falsification" have created their own.
This work, volume 11 of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin, is in two parts. The first part is Kropotkin’s classic book "Modern Science and Anarchism." The second part is concerned with his thoughts on the latest theories and experiments in biology and evolutionary thought. As will become clear, the combining of these two very different works is not as contradictory as it first seems.