The French and German governments have been hard at work over the last
few weeks berating the Greeks for being unable to organise their
finances. Now, according to reports in today’s press, it turns out that
these self same governments have been pushing hard to get the Greek
government to spend like mad – on arms.
Conditions in Greece are becoming
desperate as unemployment continues to rise, wages and pensions are
slashed, many small businesses close and the country slides towards a
likely disorderly default. The pressure on ordinary working people is
relentless.
February 11 saw 300,000 people march
in the Portuguese capital Lisbon against the reform of the labour law
and the austerity measures proposed by the government as part of the
bailout agreed with the troika. The CGTP trade union, which
organised the demonstration under the slogan of “no to exploitation,
inequality and impoverishment”, described it as the largest in 30 years.
The Greek crisis has now reached the point of a pre-revolutionary
situation. On Sunday we saw the biggest demonstration in the history of
Greece. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered to protest the
reactionary deal before the Athens parliament. Here was the real face of
the Greek people: workers and students, pensioners and shopkeepers,
young and old, came onto the streets to express their rage.
Saturday February 11 marks the one year
anniversary of the fall of Mubarak. Summer, Autumn and Winter have
passed since the beginning of the “Arab spring”, and the Egyptian masses
are still taking to the streets. Despite all that has happened over the
past 12 months, nothing has fundamentally changed for the majority of
ordinary Egyptians. There have been a series of victories and defeats
for the workers and youth of Egypt, but now, with the anniversary of the
Revolution, the movement is entering a new phase.
For many of us older comrades who were
politically active in the Labour Party Young Socialists in Coventry in
the late 1960s and 1970s, Fernandez Montes was the living embodiment of
the Spanish Civil War.
IRELAND: The nineteenth century was
proving to be another age of poverty, oppression and starvation for the
mostly Catholic tenant farmers. They were still at the mercy of the
landlords who charged increasingly exorbitant rents and would not
hesitate to evict any family who could not pay. Keeping his tenancy was a
matter of life or death to the farmer and his family.
One year after the revolutionary
overthrow of Ben Ali, Tunisia faces a wave of strikes, regional
uprisings, sit-ins and protests of all sorts. For hundreds of thousands
of Tunisian workers and youth who bravely defied the bullets of the
dictatorship to get jobs and dignity nothing has fundamentally changed.
It is not ruled out that if the
democratic facade of imperialism creates a crisis that threatens to
unravel the economic system, the imperialist bosses would not hesitate
to revert back to military dictatorship.
The Syrian revolution has entered a
higher stage in the last few weeks. The number and size of
demonstrations have reach record numbers, towns are falling under the
control of defecting soldiers- including areas surrounding the
capital of Damascus and embryonic forms of popular power are appearing in the form of popular councils.
William of Orange allied himself to
two popes: Pope Innocent XI (1676/89) and Pope Alexander VIII (1689/91).
These two Popes were more than happy to support William III in his
fight against the Catholic James II, and he was equally happy to support
them in their war against France’s Louis XIV.
When the Irish Catholic priest Fr. Hugh O’Donnell decided it was time to
build a Catholic church in Belfast he had a problem: it costs a lot of
money to build a church. The Catholic population of Belfast was too
small and too poor to provide enough money, so if he had to rely on the
Catholics alone it would take forever. He had to seek help elsewhere. So
he asked the Protestants of Belfast to help him out. As you do.