There are years when everything changes at once. Conflicts built up over a decade or more suddenly explode and the entire political landscape is transformed. For the British left, 1956 was one of those years.
At the end of last year we witnessed an appalling upsurge of racist violence in Sydney, Australia. In Britain, last year brought the racist murder of Anthony Walker on Merseyside.
‘All night we walked through the sewers, sometimes crawling, passageways booby-trapped with hand grenades let gas into the mains, in a sewer where water reached our lips, we waited 48 hours to get out. Finally two trucks halted at the trapdoor. In broad daylight with almost no cover, the trapdoor opened and one after another, with the stunned crowd looking on, armed Jews appeared from the depths of a black hole."
Two thousand years ago, a Jewish peasant rebellion stirred in the countryside in and around Judaea, an obscure Mediterannean province of the Roman empire.
Some critics are suggesting that Hollywood movies have made a turn to the left. Take Good Night, And Good Luck, George Clooney’s superb newsroom drama set in the 1950s that explores the tensions caused by McCarthyism.
The smoke hadn’t cleared from the Bogside when Captain Mike Jackson, second-in-command of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, standing in the lee of the Rossville Street flats, began pondering the notes that the Bloody Sunday families believe were to become the basis for a cover-up of murder.
Surely one of the most nauseating spectacles in an era that has provided us with so many was the "civil rights tour" that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hosted for her partner-in-war-crimes Jack Straw in late October. During it, they had the incredible cheek to invoke the history of the black freedom struggle to rationalise their ongoing slaughter in Iraq.
"Dear comrade, I shall be very glad to speak at the meeting of 1 November 1890, the more glad that my father was a Jew."
Hassan Jumaa Awad of the General Union of Oil Employees in Basra addressed a meeting organised by Manchester trades council and Greater Manchester Coalition to Stop the War on 24 November.
It has become impossible for anyone with half an eye on Iraq over the last six months not to recognise the widespread presence of death squads, especially in Baghdad and the ring of towns surrounding it.
The Socialist Worker Appeal stands at £108,125. That is no mean achievement and thanks to all who have supported it so far.
A Venezuelan school taken over by parents, students and teachers is the exciting subject of a new photographic exhibition.
