GODFREE ROBERTS—During his years in Beijing the young man had forgotten Tibet’s political realities, where the nobles and abbots had murdered the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Dalai Lamas for reformist tendencies. Drepung Monastery, the seat of fierce resistance to the Chinese, owned one-hundred-eighty-five manors and twenty-five-thousand serfs, and employed sixteen-thousand herdsmen. Its lamas forced boys into monastic slavery, pilfered the country’s wealth, and sold serfs along with the land. American journalist Anna Louise Strong10 found handcuffs of all sizes at Drepung, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs, hot brands, whips, and disembowelling implements.
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GEORGE GALLOWAY—George and Nick analyse the multitude of ways in which the US political class—now fusing into warmongering Democrats and Republicans—push openly for a thinly-disguised fascist regime and never-ending wars likely to plunge the world into a terminal nuclear war. “We will advocate for war, anyone who advocates for peace will be locked up.’ Expect the Democrats and the whole united establishment’s war on free speech to get more vicious in the near future.
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INDRAJIT—The colonizers of the Raj played political Jenga, corrupting local elites with imported goods, education for their children, and filthy lucre from the enslavement of their own people. Splinter colonization is still the policy of the day, divide and conquer the masses using local elites. It goes back to the great grand pappy of White Empire.
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—I have long argued that the current global tension is the direct outcome of the determination by increasingly plutocratic, pseudo-democratic – but in reality, authoritarian – neoliberal Western powers to do whatever they must to sustain their hegemony over the “rules-based” (or “we-make-up-the-rules-as-we-like-without-any-accountability-whatsoever “) order. They are trying to suppress the emergence of a more democratic, pluricentrist world whose order is underwritten by a system of international law and which may eventually be monitored and regulated by a profoundly reformed United Nations, whose current Security Council will be summarily dismissed.
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EDITOR—After a historically brief postwar period when the working class (especially in Europe) could enjoy a more tolerable standard of living thanks to the adoption of social democracy out of fear for the Soviet example— better wages, unemployment cushions, healthcare, free education, etc.—the inexorable capitalist crisis is forcing a shrinking of the “goodies” with which the ruling class bought the passivity of the masses. This is inherent in capitalism which, due to its internal dynamic always goes from boom to bust, a problem now magnified with the extension of capitalism to global dimensions under US imperialism.
Thus, the working class today in practically all capitalist countries is feeling the pain of living under totally non-representative increasingly tyrannical oligarchies and fake democracies, a situation aggravated by a decadent set of blatantly hypocritical “civilised values” (i.e., the rise of “WOKE imperialism”), and the grotesque lies implicit in the pretend fight for human rights and against anti-semitism, that serve to muzzle free speech, protect Israel from retribution for its multitude of heinous crimes, and facilitate the deletion of democratic norms.
