Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky
By Bertrand Patenaude
Faber and Faber, 2009
340 pages, $50 (pb)
821
Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of the West African nation Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987, was killed in the belief that it could extinguish the example he set for African youth and progressive forces across the continent. This idea could not have been more wrong.
On November 23, 57 people were massacred in the Filipino Magnindanao province by the ruling Ampatuan clan that governs it. Many of those killed were journalists. On November 27, the primary suspect in the massacre, Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr, was arrested.
The shooting of two Aboriginal boys in Townsville on November 25 shows that racism isn’t going away in the North Queensland town. The two boys, aged just 8 and 10, were playing in a park in Wulguru when they were fired upon by a drunken Townsville soldier wielding an air rifle.
December 5 — “It feels like we're going to war”, I overheard one teenager say to his friend. Such was the atmosphere of serious, creative resistance to government inaction on climate change that marked the London’s December 5 Wave demonstration.
“Today Bolivia has once again shown its democracy, and that change is possible”, Bolivian President Evo Morales said on December 6, after he was re-elected that day with more than 63% of the vote, the December 7 Granma said.
On November 26, after four months of negotiations, workers at industrial air conditioning manufacturer Buffalo Trident walked off the job indefinitely.
The workers are fighting to have income protection and wage increases of 4% in the first year and 5% in the second year included in their enterprise bargaining agreement. Management at Buffalo Trident is ferociously anti-union. Evidence of this is that there have been no new union members at the plant since the introduction of Work Choices.
A recent study by Foundation for Young Australians has shown that racism permeates Australian schools. Eighty percent of students from a non-Anglo background said they have been the subjected to racial prejudice. Even white Australians feel they have been subject to racism when at schools.
In all, more than two-thirds of young people in Australia feel they are the victims of racism while at school.
What a disgrace! We should all feel disgusted and ashamed that racism is still an issue we are yet to overcome. It truly is a sad reflection on the world we live in.
To read the November-December edition of The Flame, an Arabic-language supplement in Green Left Weekly, please click here.
“I’m gon’ die for the People. ’Cause I live for the people. ’Cause I love the People. Power to the People!” — Fred Hampton.
About 300 supporters from more than 30 groups rallied in Melbourne to call for the Australian government to let refugees into Australia. The rally opened with a motion of support for the 255 Tamil asylum seekers in the Indonesian port of Merak.
Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit, where world leaders will discuss the greatest threat facing the planet, are going as expected — including a rare sighting of the African elites’ stiffened spines.
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