If you want to learn about the powerful movement that ended the brutal Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, this movie misses the mark. It focuses on Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was cold bloodedly lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. But it shows very little of how Mamie Till decided to step up and lead years of protests against the acquittal of the two racists who lynched her son, and how it helped build the civil rights movement....
[....] as long as everyone agrees to advance the fight for civil and human rights for those who identify as Transgender and as long as everyone agrees that Transwomen will not uproot females from private spaces and/or hinder the ability of females to participate in all facets of society such as sports, and as long as everyone upholds the right of freedom of expression without the fear of bodily harm, cancellation, intimidation or the firing from one's job, then it becomes a distinction without a difference.
Children, Tweens and teenagers should not be medicalized as they go through a trying period in their lives, i.e., puberty, and no one under the age of 18 should have access to plastic surgery or hormones because they were told by an authority figure that they were born into the wrong body. However, young people should have access to an abundance of psychological counseling and therapy in order to get a handle on what's usually a difficult time for all of us, but especially for those who have a same sex attraction, a gender dysphoria (rare but not unheard of), autism, extreme shyness or other mental and physical challenges.
In a word, I'm an advocate of watchful waiting….
Full:
https://theunionofworkers.wordpress.com/2022/12/30/another-note-to-another-friend/
First, do no harm!
And here lies the problem, as so many professionals these days, backed by the liberal meritocracy, the liberal media and the Democratic Party, have fallen prey to the metaphysical notion that huge numbers of youth are suddenly (in the last ten years) being born into the wrong bodies. There are signs this is changing as the forces of rational thinking mount a counter-attack, a counter-attack that will be none too soon in arriving....
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[....] In recent weeks, both the Iranian and Turkish governments have stepped up military attacks on Kurds. Tehran has launched deadly attacks on protesters in Iran, and missile assaults on Kurdish-Iranian organizations based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has bombed Kurdish towns in both Iraq and Syria. Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil have protested these violations of Iraq’s sovereignty, at the same time promising these two regional bullies to clamp down on exile groups.
These events, central to world politics, were on the minds of those who talked with volunteers at the Pathfinder Books stand, which featured books by communists and other working-class leaders. This was the fourth time the London distributor of books from New York-based Pathfinder Press participated in a book fair in the Kurdistan region.
What’s happening in Iran is not just a women’s movement, said university student Nwa Abdullah, “but also a Kurdish movement and a movement for freedom all over Iran.”
The struggles of Kurds in Iraq and Iran have been intertwined across history. Many have family or other links on both sides of the border imposed by these capitalist states, a mere 70-mile drive from Sulaymaniyah. A worker at a print shop turned out to be from Saqqez, the hometown of Jina Amini. She showed us videos on her phone of ongoing protests.
A book fair participant got a first-hand report from the Ekbatan area of Tehran Nov. 20, after a brutal government crackdown in Mahabad and other Kurdish cities. People were chanting “Mahabad, Kurdistan, setting example for Iran” into the night. Other fairgoers smiled and said they had heard this was being chanted elsewhere in Iran, too....
Ukrainians are commemorating the 90th anniversary of the 1932-33 Holodomor, which literally means killing by hunger. Millions starved to death across the Soviet Union as the counterrevolutionary Stalinist regime in Moscow imposed forced collectivization on the peasantry, measures carried out with special brutality in Ukraine.
Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars and other ethnic minorities across Central Asia and the Caucasus region had long been oppressed under czarism. They couldn’t use their native language, practice their religion or control their cultural, economic and political affairs.
With the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, self-determination for all the oppressed nationalities, who had revolted against czarist tyranny, was championed by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Ukrainian workers and farmers were among those who formed their own voluntary Soviet Socialist Republic, expanding use of their language, history and culture.
After Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin consolidated a political counterrevolution against this communist course, driving working people out of politics and imposing Moscow’s control, crushing Ukrainians’ national aspirations. The Stalinist regime executed thousands of writers and officials who Lenin had led to advance the “Ukrainization” of Ukraine.
In 1929 Stalin launched forced collectivization of the countryside. This shattered the working-class alliance with the peasants, the backbone of the revolution, and devastated agriculture.
The brutality of these measures against the peasants was severest in Ukraine, as Moscow was determined to crush the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for self-determination. Some 3.5 million starved to death there.
To meet Moscow’s impossible quotas for grain requisitions, peasants were robbed of their harvests, leaving nothing to sell or even eat. Backed by the death penalty, this produced famine across the Soviet Union.
Leon Trotsky, who led the fight to continue Lenin’s political course, said in 1939 that a source of the “irreconcilable hostility of the Ukrainian masses” to the Soviet bureaucracy was “the suppression of Ukrainian independence.”
[....] FBI’s accusations of conspiracy and hidden goals were pure projection. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that conceal their aims and methods. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that maintain a covert structure to carry out what they cannot openly proclaim. It turned out to be the White House and FBI, not the SWP, that rely on conspiratorial modes of operation to achieve their goals behind the backs of the people of the United States....[....] This book puts a special focus on the Democratic administration of President Franklin Roosevelt in the late 1930s, as the US rulers prepared to enter the imperialist slaughter of World War II. It describes the growth and consolidation of the “national security” state in the wake of Washington’s military, political, and economic victory in that war over its imperialist rivals, both “foes” (Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan) and “allies” (the United Kingdom, France, and others)....
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