There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
How should we respond to people who equate communism and fascism?
There is a renewed effort to lump those that started the Holocaust in with those that ended it based on simplistic ideas of 'totalitarianism' — this ignores fundamental differences in intent and outcome, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
A Soviet anti-war poster
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
ANTI-COMMUNIST propaganda takes many forms. A recent trope, associated with the Prague declaration promoted by European right-wing forces, claims that abuses of human rights by communist governments were as bad as those of the fascists. Fascism is almost universally condemned; so if people can be persuaded that communists committed similar atrocities, they will shun communism too.
To challenge this distortion it’s not enough just to point out that communists have always been the most active opponents of fascism, that fascists have targeted communists as the first group to be eliminated, that it was the efforts and sacrifices of the Red Army and the Soviet peoples that did most to defeat the Nazi armies and liberate eastern Europe.
This is necessary — but not sufficient. The propagandists can reply that communism and fascism are rival “totalitarian” systems so of course they are each other’s main enemy.
More from this author
Most currently popular arguments for degrowth describe a real problem without recognising its true cause – capitalism’s insatiable need to accumulate, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Most phenomena have an explanation, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY, but occasionally ‘anomalous’ events have led to new scientific understanding
The fight to defend public services is as important as the struggle over wages, but presents different challenges to workplace organising — especially with regards to bourgeois propaganda and conditioning, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Marx and Engels’ concern with soil provides a focus for understanding the relationship between capitalism and the environment, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
