Old and proud
Is Green Left Weekly promoting ageism?
Surely not — yet I notice your advert for "Cultural Dissent" describes dissenting alternative culture as "youthful". Which seems to imply that all old people are naturally too conservative to support movements for change.
At 69 years I have been called "youthful", "young at heart", simply because I challenge the status quo! I resent this! I am old — old and proud. Proud of the lines of my face as the physical evidence of my life experience. We elders are the survivors.
Of course ageism works both ways and I hope I would never put down younger folk for being young. So let's destroy all those insidious myths about age. Remember Nelson Mandela is 75 — not a "youthful" but a grey-haired old man — and what a survivor he is!
Connie Frazer
Findon SA
Marijuana
I value your journal as an alternative source of opinion and information in a society dominated by ignorance and, at times, mindless and bigoted conservatism.
However, it bothered me to discover in the last issue I received, a flyer promoting the legalisation of marijuana.
Fred Nile jumps on the bandwagon of any conservative issue that comes his way, without considering the consequences of his position. I would hate to think Green Left Weekly would ever support an anti-conservative position simply for the sake of being anti-conservative, without considering the consequences.
There are already enough people suffering from legal drugs, eg cigarettes and alcohol.
Marijuana has been associated with triggering schizophrenia, and no intelligent doctor would claim that marijuana is not harmful. Bob Marley's death from lung-cancer has been attributed to his heavy smoking of joints.
The arguments of advocates of marijuana smoking, sound as absurd as the arguments put forward by executives from slimy cigarette companies.
Cigarettes, marijuana, and alcohol in excess will harm you, and may even kill you. Too many people already indulge in this dangerous drug, and I cannot help but think that if marijuana was legalised, even more impressionable young people would take up smoking it.
In certain liberal European States, drugs were expansively legalised in the 60s, but soon after, the same authorities who had loosened the controls, had to tighten them again as their drug problem got out of hand.
The argument you might as well legalise marijuana because people already smoke it and will continue to do so, is as short-sighted as the gun lobby's claim that people have guns, and they will get hold of them if they want them anyway, so why control guns or charge people with illegal possession of fire-arms.
Intelligent minds to combat the bigoted, racist, sexist, and everything-else-ist conservative majority, are in short supply. We should not be encouraging anything that could damage our health or our minds. We need both in peak condition if we are to continue the fight for a more just and hopeful future to the best of our ability.
Meg Strang
Longreach Qld
[Edited for length.]
Young Labor and ISO
We write in reply to Sydney Resistance members, who felt the need to attack International Socialist students in their letter to GLW last week. Because the ISO sees the need to work alongside the ALP left and doesn't see them as the main enemy, Resistance argues that the ISO "hands the Labour left a platform on which to defend themselves (and) opens the door for this type of reformist politics."
We agree that our rallies should try "to mobilise the broad mass of students, unemployed people and workers who are hurting under these (ie Keating's) attacks." This is precisely why we voted against Resistance's slogan of "Neither Labor nor Liberal".
It is a simple fact that Young Labor Left is far, far bigger than either the Resistance/DSP or the ISO. Alienating them limits our ability to build mass campaigns from the outset. There are thousand of young (and plenty of not so young) ALP members who hate every attack Hawke and Keating have made on workers, students and the unemployed over the last decade.
If the ALP left is prepared to fight their own party on questions like the "training wage" we want them building our campaigns. We also want left-wing unions to endorse and (where possible) attend our demonstrations. This is made more difficult by slagging off Labor as an undifferentiated mass of economic rationalists.
It's crucial that revolutionaries have a constructive relationship with the ALP left, especially when the Liberals — most notably Kennett and Court — are using Voluntary Student Unionism to attack student organisations and the National Union of Students. NUS current leadership may be conservative, but groups to the left of Labor must defend student unionism with all their might.
We agree that building a "viable left alternative" is an essential task. In the course of our struggles, we can convince disgruntled ALP members of the need for revolutionary organisation. However, this will be achieved more by what we do in practice at demonstrations and at meetings, than by what slogans we happen to put on a poster.
Jenny Baxter and 14 others
Sydney
South African women
In vain I searched the chronology in Norm Dixon's excellent piece "From Slavery to Democracy" for that wonderful day for women, August 9th, 1956 when 20 000 women of all races, from all parts of South Africa marched on Pretoria.
... we come from the cities and the towns, from the reserves and the villages — we come as women united in our purpose to save the African women from the degradation of the passes.
Raids, arrests, loss of pay, long hours at the pass office — weeks in the cells awaiting trial, forced farm labour — this is what the pass laws have brought to African men ... punishment and misery, not for a crime, but for the lack of a pass. We African women know too well the affect of the law upon our home, upon our children. We who are not African know how our sisters suffer ...
We shall not rest until all pass laws and all forms of permits restricting our freedom have been abolished.
We shall not rest until we have won for our children the fundamental right to freedom, justice and security.
This letter was delivered by Lilian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa, Sophie Williams and Helen Joseph with four other women from remote areas. Then the new song "Wathint' a bafazi" or "You have struck a rock, you have tampered with the women, you shall be destroyed!" was sung for the first time of many.
That was on August 9th, 1956, now celebrated world wide as South Africa Women's Day. In the prophetic words of Helen Joseph, writing in the dark days of 1980, this day is "even more a part of the story of South Africa's liberation from fearsome racist oppression and domination. It is a story that continues even to this day. It is a story that will be told by others in the years to come, perhaps by some now in gaol."
So add in August 1956 to your chronologies, comrades and friends, after the Freedom Charter and before Sharpeville, and start organising support for South Africa Women's Day on the 9th.
Jane Widdess
Victoria Park WA
Extortion
The Oxford English Dictionary describes "Extortion" as "The action or practice of extorting or wresting anything, especially money, form a person, by force or by undue exercise of authority or power; an act of illegal extortion. In law, the act of any officer unlawfully taking by colour of his office, any money or anything of value that is not due to him, for more than his due, or before it was due". The Mafia are known to be experts at this kind of thing!
Imperialist countries have refined the "anything" from the above definition to include the lives, the property, the natural resources and the human rights from the chosen "third world" victims. All this was and is still accompanied by the sounds of dissenters being tortured to death.
Apprentice imperialists watch and learn, corrupted and silent.
The extortion payment in all such counties is the productive soil, and the repression of the poor and indigenous, who were content to live as they had for centuries. Uncle Sam often uses the excuse for invasions — Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile etc. — as fear that those poor little countries are about to invade the USA. Their enforcing "teeth" are the Marines and C.I.A. But even the US Mafia itself has been given the OK to try to kill off people like Fidel Castro. To Uncle Sam, Cuba and Vietnam at the moment seem to be the only flies in the ghastly ointment.
Noam Chomsky also confirms that Washington inaugurated a brutal repression in Korea, Vietnam, and in parts of Africa including Burundi.
Imperialism now masquerades under the names "Democracy, GATT, NAFTA, the United Nations, and the New World Order". No human rights in that lot!
John R. Clancy
Sutherland NSW
[Edited for length.]
Commercialised?
Pardon me if I'm wrong but is the GLW becoming commercialised?
It seems odd that GLW states that it can't pay for original contributions and finds it difficult to pay for recycled paper. The full-colour front page May 4 edition was very nice, but could the money used to print it this way have been better spent?
I've been a little concerned about the introductory comment on page 2 of late. I find I'm almost embarrassed to leave GLW in the kitchen at work, which I've been in the habit of doing lately.
The "Why be a Socialist insert" comment on the cover of the March 30 edition sounds very gimmicky.
If I didn't know better I'd say that on the surface GLW appears to be competing for the Herald-Sun readership.
Julie Cartier
Carlton Vic
[Our occasional full-colour covers are prepared without charge by a supporter. — Editor.]
East Timor
This is a sincere vote of thanks for the coverage you give the issue East Timor, especially the article of GLW 20th April, by John Pilger
I recently received a reply from one of Gareth Evans' offsiders on the "second massacre" in Dili in 1991, which included Senator Evans' statement to the Senate made on 21st February. In it Evans describes Father Marcus Wannandi, who denies the second massacre, as a "reasonably credible" witness.
John Pilger's article tells of his family's extensive contacts with Suharto regime, and his own comment to an Australian Bishop, demeaning the East Timorese. This leaves no one in any doubt about the "credibility" of this witness. I have written a letter to this effect to Evans.
So thanks again for printing John Pilger's excellent article, without which we would not have known this information about the Indonesian regime's star witness.
Stephen Langford and 14 others
AETA (NSW)
North Korea
Senator Gareth Evans' latest intemperate and defamatory outburst against North Korea over the inspection of nuclear power facilities shows once again that he is temperamentally unsuited to represent Australia in external affairs.
North Korea has denied having any nuclear weapons or any intention of acquiring them and there is no evidence of any North Korean nuclear testing ever being carried out.
On the other hand, the United States of America, whose interests the good Senator is furthering with his inflammatory remarks, has a massive nuclear arsenal, a fraction of which could destroy civilisation as we know it.
Senator Evans shows no inclination to condemn the existence of that arsenal but instead supports the belligerent attitude of a country with a vested interest in destroying any socialist or quasi-socialist country still extant.
C.M. Friel
Alawa NT
Conscience vote
You do well to highlight the stupidity of the A.L.P., the Liberal Party, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens who "allow their members a conscience vote on abortion" for again this exemplifies the confusion of thought that exists today in most of the mainstream political parties in Australia.
Members of Parliament are not there to indulge their own personal preferences, but to act in accordance with the wishes of those who elected them. Consequently, where there is no previously stated policy, they should get out among the members of their electorate and try to find out what is the mainstream opinion, and then to vote in the house in accordance with that. On the other hand, if there is a policy, announced before their election on, presumably, a Party ticket, then they should vote the Party line, for this is no doubt, what their electors would expect of them.
It is not so much the "rights or wrongs" of abortion on demand that should concern the members, but rather that they have a responsibility to represent those who were responsible for their election. I would that more of their kind thought so.
David Horton
South Perth
Vietnam
The GLW of April 27th maintained its usual high standard in its aim to inform and inspire.
But there was one jarring note, a Brian Day of Vietnam Veterans had the luxury of substantial space in which to criticise the Prime Minister for not laying a wreath "for the fallen Australians in Vietnam". He states that there were 6 Australian MIA's, would he like to gloss over the fact that there were 200,000 Vietnamese MIA's? Keating rightly stated that the war in Vietnam should never have taken place. $100,000 was spent on a memorial in Canberra, what more does Brian Day want?
The long suffering Vietnamese had to defeat the Japanese, then the French, and lastly at enormous cost America's war of aggression, aided to our shame by Australians.
I was proud to march with 100,000 Australians in Melbourne in opposition to what had become known as a "dirty war".
I benefited greatly from my study tour of Vietnam last year and it was a pleasure and a privilege to be among its warm, friendly and hospitable people.
Norman Taylor
Adelaide
Growth and progress
Ted Trainer's comments (GLW 13/4) regarding "ultimate solutions" and the green/socialist synthesis are I believe essentially correct. His last point however needs elaboration.
Green socialism calls not so much for "zero economic growth" as for economic growth and development which is based on the notion of "progressive utilization" where "progress" has cultural, intellectual and spiritual (i.e. inner) dimensions, and thus demands and prioritizes evolving human consciousness and psycho-economy (to harness more fully the "higher" faculties of humankind) in concert with the foundation material changes which move the more conventional economic parameters (such as per capita GNP and differentials of income distribution/wealth gaps between rich and poor etc.) towards sustainability.
In a sense, I guess Trainer does argue for this via his allusion to "simpler lifestyles", for instance. But the point I am trying to make is that rhetorically, if not actually, unqualified "zero" economic growth seems far too negative in its principle conception by ignoring the unrealized potential for human progress and development which remains in the mental and spiritual spheres, virtually unconstrained by physical environmental finitude ... The pie can grow! Human consumption is not the enemy, it is corporate greed!
James Roxburgh
Clayton Vic