Socialism

The Greatest Traitor: The Secret Lives of Agent George Blake Roger Hermiston Aurum, 2013 362 pages, $39.99 (hb) George Blake was smart, resourceful and committed. A teenage courier with the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance during the war and a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) spy after it, Blake then picked the wrong cause, says Roger Hermiston in The Greatest Traitor, converting to Marxism and becoming a Soviet mole in the SIS.

Stasi Hell or Workers’ Paradise? Socialism in the German Democratic Republic ― What Can We Learn From It? John Green & Bruni de la Motte Artery Publications, 2009 50 pp., $7.25 Red Love: The Story of an East German Family Maxim Leo Pushkin Press, 2013 272 pp., $31.60 The German Democratic Republic (GDR) disappeared a quarter of a century ago after 41 years’ existence. The East German state is mostly remembered as “Stasiland”, as Anna Funder’s history of its secret police is called.

Pride Directed by Matthew Warchus Written by Stephen Beresford Starring Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West & Ben Schnetzer In Australian cinemas now If you haven't seen the recently released Pride yet, you need to get to a cinema. It'll moisten your eyes, swell your heart, make you tap your feet and inspire you to join the next pride parade.

Nearly twenty-five years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist party Die Linke (“The Left”) looks set to form government in the eastern German state of Thuringia for the first time. After two months of uncertainty following September 14 state elections, the way was cleared for Die Linke to head a coalition government in December, alongside the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, on November 4 when nearly 70% of SPD members in Thuringia voted to enter the coalition.

Green Party gubernatorial ticket in New York in the November 4 elections — headed by left-wing activist Howie Hawkins for governor and International Socialist Organization activist Brian Jones for lieutenant governor — scored a large rise in the Green vote.

The Making of English Social Democracy By Peter Cockcroft. Australian Ebook Publisher Kindle edition 236 pages, $1.05 It may seem a strange ask to encourage socialists to examine the politics of late Victorian Britain when there is so much else to be done. But Peter Cockcroft makes a significant case that understanding this aspect of the past can help us to make some sense of where we are now.

Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore finally stepped down on October 31, ending his 27-year rule and handing over to joint chief of staff General Honore Traore. Campaore first came to power in a coup that overthrow the revolutionary government headed by Thomas Sankara, which was leading a profound transformation of the west African nation. The president was forced out of office by a burst of violent protests in which parliament was set ablaze. Protesters refused to accept anything short of his immediate resignation.

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for the 23rd time on October 29 to condemn the decades-long United States economic embargo against Cuba. Reuters said that day that many nations praised the socialist country for its response in fighting the deadly Ebola virus that is ravaging west Africa. Cuba has sent hundreds of doctors to affected countries in west Africa.

I must admit that I don’t know one end of a soccer ball from another, but having read this book I don’t care. I’m now passionately interested in this extraordinary German football club, FC St Pauli, with its skull-and-cross-bones emblem.

Edinburgh’s Augustine United Church is a pretty cold place when the wind is howling, as it was when the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) held its annual conference there on October 25.

Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani activist, has won a well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, putting her and her amazing, tragic story back in the spotlight. But as usual, the corporate media have taken this positive development and exploited it in the service of US imperialism. The corporate media love talking about Malala's remarkable bravery and strength in standing up for girls' rights to education ― and highlight the brutality of the Taliban forces that tried to assassinate her on her school bus.

Left Unity is a new political group in Britain created out of a call last year by filmmaker Ken Loach for a new party to the left of Labour, which has moved rightwards in recent years and supports anti-worker austerity measures. The call was supported by thousands of people and Left Unity held its founding conference in November last year. Green Left Weekly's Denis Rogatyuk spoke with Left Unity's national secretary Kate Hudson, a veteran campaigner who is also general secretary of the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.