Dear people,
'Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
quote from Santayana
Many of those alive today
we're not here in the 1960s,or if
they were they were too young
to have been aware of social and political issues. The cauldron of those
times altered
the world we live in today,and there are many parallels to
today's situations. By not being
aware of the history of those
times, some of the same mistakes are still being made,some of the same
battles are still being fought in
the struggle to end war,only it
seems like the wars never end.
The powers that be have too
many puppet strings in the
willing hands of the military/
industrial complex.
To quote another revolutionist;
'What is to be done?'
Loving life! Iao
On 26 Nov 2015 14:40, "doug" <douglasrankine2001@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Oh! How I remember it well...Mao's Little Red Book. Published when the
Peace in Vietnam movement was reaching its height in the late 1960's early
1970s. Demonstration after demonstration in London, outside the American
Embassy, causing mayhem, breaking windows, demonstrators threatening to
overwhelm US soldiers who were threatening to shoot demonstrators invading
their sacred ground. Police strategies of containment fucked due to the
massive size of the demonstrations. Harold Wilson, Labour Prime
Minister, good old socialist intellectual, supplying secret logistic and
military support to the South Vietnam fascist government via our cousins
across the water, and with CND and the various Peace in Vietnam movements
involved in stopping it all. Women in Black, via American Mr. Spock of
child behavioural fame rather than Star Treck, rolling marbles and bools,
under the feet of Metropolitan Police Horses, causing them to fall over and
get seriously injured. I was there, so was me missus. No Animal Rights
movement then....:-).. All in the name of killing Vietnamese women and
children because they were harbouring the Vietcong...(today's equivalent of
Muslim Terrorists except they didn't get messages from Allah, but from Ho
Chi Min). :-). Ignore a Vietnamese woman and child at your peril, because
they might be working in the rice paddy but they were perfectly capable of
machine gunning you with a Kalashinikov as you passed by. Tunnels built
under US Bases harbouring whole communities of Vietnamese involved in the
war of attrition against the US. How does one bomb an American air base to
bits...the colllateral damage would be far too much...Schools and hospitals
used as cover for the Vietcong, as the terrorists were called at the
time...Nuffink changes...
When, all of a sudden, along comes the Maoist faction (remember, I was a
good young communist at the time, knew my factions, see good soldier
shwieck)
see url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk ),
shouting slogans in complete unison, about the wonderful Red Gaurds and
quoting romantic stuff about flowers and such like, from the "Little Red
Book". Being a curious kind of person, of course I was intrigued with this
new political phenomenon. As a hardened member of the demonstration
faculty of the amateur opposition, for which I received enormous sums of
Soviet gold...according to the Conservative Party at the time, I was most
interested. (Oh! How I dreamed of how I would spend all that Soviet gold
in the land of rent-a-mob...never got a fucking penny....promises,
promises, promisses, typical political crap). They turned up at
demonstrations in London, about 600 of them on occasion, and, how
disciplined they were, with their Maoist caps and coolie garb and holding
up a copy of the little red book, shouting the appropriate slogans). One
cannot have a decent demonstration without carefully thought out slogans.
Meanwhile, in China, the Red Gaurds were forcing the old establisment of
professors and academics out of their ivory towers and on to the fields to
mix with the peasants and gather in the harvest,without the money.
Communist equality of opportunity knew no bounds in Mao's World, tanks on
Tianamen Square...forget it. Removing the academics had its consequencies
of course. Life became simple, peasant oriented. The land and its
explotation was all important, none of this chemical Monsanto shit.
Campaigns such as,... Birds eat the wheat and other grains sown... so a
campaign was launched by the Communist Party, to eradicate birds...all the
peasants in the countryside went about massacring the birds...It
worked...for the first year...but then came a plethora of insects...Shit!!!
Now, the insects gobbled up the harvest. Decentralisation was another
ploy. We must move the casting of iron and metal into the countryside, so
that the peasants...and the peasants were very important under Mao.., after
all, they put him into power and, through the Long March, they destroyed
Chian Ki Shek as leader of the Chinese, and freed the peasants from slavery
and the control of the bourgeousis...and American interference...no mean
feat.
see url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek
By the way, the Long March was a great achievement, and caused a lot of
deaths and suffering, but took the Chinese out of one form of slavery into
another, and progress always comes at a cost. Where would the Chinese be
today if it wasn't for Ma Tse Dung... A real pain in the US's butt.
Nowadays, they have a middle class, which is greater than the population of
the United Kingdom.
see url:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March
And, of course,due to the wonders of the internet...Mao's Little Red Book
can be accessed at url:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
Enjoy...:-).
ATB
Dougie.
