This afternoon I stumbled across a website called Well Red Books, which proved to be a treasure trove of information on today’s Trotskyite Left. As a card-carrying member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, I clicked through the site’s links in dread fascination, wondering what gargoyle I might find waiting for me around the next virtual corner.
The organization behind the site is the Workers International League (apparently not to be confused by a body of the same name that existed in the 1930s), and its flagship publication is called Socialist Appeal. The magazine doesn’t seem to have an online version, so I can’t tell you much about it. However, Well Red Books engages in a significant amount of revolutionary commerce, selling, besides books and magazines, such attractive accessories as can be seen at the top of this post.
When I was a teenager in England my brother was a student at the University of York. During his final year he had the privilege of squiring around some visiting students from the Soviet Union, and for his efforts he came home with a few rubles in Soviet coinage and a pocketful of Lenin pins, hammer-and-sickle buttons, and so on. We both wish he still had the stuff, because people will actually pay money for such items these days.
I have seen Soviet nostalgia merchandise marketed ironically, for the hip, cool, up-to-the minute youth of today. But this is the first time I’ve seen Young Lenin pins being sold in earnest, in order to further the cause of the Revolution. These people are serious; they’re hoping that red star buttons and Karl Marx key chains will inspire people to join their cause.
Meanwhile, they have shopping carts, a PayPal link, and rafts of merchandise to sell, generally behaving like your typical exploitative capitalist pig website.
But this, as far as I can determine, is their mission statement:
| Make a Donation to the Socialist Appeal Press Fund! | |
| Help us continue our work of spreading the ideas of Marxism and building a genuine revolutionary force among workers and youth in the U.S. and internationally! We rely solely on our members and sympathizers for financial support, so if you like what you see, please donate to our fighting fund, and help us expand our work! Enter the amount you wish to contribute in the field below. |
The most chilling link I saw led me to Hands Off Venezuela, a British site whose basic principles are:
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One of the news items listed is this:
| Venezuela: Eyewitness report from the heart of the revolution | |
| By Ramon Samblas | |
| Wednesday, 07 September 2005 | |
| This summer up to 17,000 young internationalists from 144 countries gathered in Caracas for one week to attend the World Festival of Youth and Students. Ramon Samblas who was there from Britain gives his impression of the festival and the general mood in Venezuela. |
| Motion in Pakistan Parliament against threats to assassinate Chavez | |
| By Hands Off Venezuela Pakistan | |
| Tuesday, 13 September 2005 | |
| A group of Pakistani MPs has moved a motion condemning threats on Chavez’s life. At the same time the HOV campaign is being launched in a big way all across Pakistan together with the publication of the Urdu edition of Alan Woods’ book, The Venezuelan evolution. | |
| Read more... |
The Great Islamic Jihad and the Marxist World Revolution are slowly but inexorably converging. When the Revolution is complete, when the Mujahideen and the Red Brigade lock arms in fraternal solidarity to raise high the Hammer & Sickle & Crescent & Star banner over the smoking ruins of the world’s great infidel capitalist cities, what will happen next? When they turn on each other, whose boot will end up resting on whose neck?
Or, more accurately, whose hand will raise high whose severed head?Fortunately, I won’t be around to learn the answer.
9 comments:
So much fun. It reminds me of when I was in grad school and one of my lefty friends invited me to an apartment warming party. It turned out to also be the May Day party for the local chapter of the International Workers of the World, a wobbly affair indeed.
Overheard.
“ I admire XXX’s revolutionary commitment, but he could take a shower once a week or so.”
Two mothers talking about potty training.
“I don’t think I’m oppressing him enough, but I really hate to oppress him.”
“You have to oppress him, it is the only way.”
They, much to their surprise, actually organized an employer’s work force, however there reasonable demands convinced the employer to dissolve the business.
Person1 “I wonder if we have some obligation to the workers we represent”.
Person 2 “ this is good, it will increase discontent and advance the revolution.”
I would not doubt their sincerity, but their ideas would be the nightmare of every actual working person I know.
Hank, those are great anecdotes! You hang out in such lofty circles...
The numbers of Americans and Europeans who delight in ostentiously rejecting their nationality, much less nationalism, and giving aid and comfort to their countries' enemies is surely among the most salient political facts of our age. It's considered bad form to even acknowledge that this tendency exists, but we all know that it does.
To the extent these people don't have a subconscious death wish I can only assume that they think they can somehow personally avoid the consequences of victories by our Communist and Islamo-fascist enemies. More probably these persons believe that there are really no consequences for their noxious sedition, because the ignorant fools cannot conceive of a world in which they could possibly be really poor, hunted, their country figuratively trussed up and ready to be shot for the pot.
You're quite right to comment on the convergence of the worldwide Marxist tendency and the Islamo-fascist tendency; which should not surprise, much, given that so much of it is a product of German scholastic/academic influence on the growth of Marxism, and on education and political development in the Muslim world.
On the subject of Commie souvenirs, I have me some cool ones: an East German Stasi 30 year service pin, a sleave-band from the Nationale Volksarmee Wachregiment, and a couple of DDR military academy pins. Can't imagine what sort of people would be interested in it beyond kitsch value.
Yes, assuming your scenario is correct (The Great Islamic Jihad and the Marxist World Revolution are slowly but inexorably converging.} they will turn on each other. Would be nice to promote that infighting before forces join, heh?
Muslim proverb, more or less: "It's me and my brother against our cousin. And when we finish our cousin off, it's me and my brother against each other."
"You know that the Revolution is really on the rocks when it has to align itself with Hugo Chávez’ bands of armed thugs"
Except that the left has always aligned itself with such thugs. After all, what's the point of being a commie if you can't dream of the pleasures of killing and terrorizing (as well as seizing vast wealth for yourself, natch.)
Leftists' deranged fantasies remind me of a commie songbook I ran across many years ago, containing new lyrics for various popular songs.
One, a pastiche of "Mammy's Little Baby Loves Shortening Bread" was "Mammy's Little Baby Hates Shit In the Bread." The conceit, you see, was that the evil capitalist system permits the sale of adulterated and contaminated food. Never mind that in actual fact our food inspection laws and procedures do a very good job, and that the natural feedbacks of a free enterprise system motivate a bakery to produce only bread that people will want to buy and that will not cause it to go out of business due to such a scandal. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, there were no such free-market constraints and no honest government safeguards. Instead of destroying bread contaminated by bird droppings, bakeries would actually grind it up into the next day's product.
So much for the advantages of socialism. It's not about altruism or love of humanity. It's about power and control and utter callousness.
Ik, the Communist Party somehow survived Saddam's regime, and is now one of the functioning legal parties in the new Republic of Iraq.
File Closer --
Yes, I've heard that about the Communists in Iraq. I wonder how much under Moscow's thumb they were back in the old days, when Saddam was a Soviet client.
I took a look around your blog, noticing that you've resumed after a long hiatus.
I feel the same way, since the Communists are no longer backed by the power of a huge totalitarian state with an enormous army and nuclear weapons. They are actually less worrisome than the Greens (who are the West's most likely collaborators with the Great Jihad).
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