UNITED KINGDOM

Although this essay is written with mainly British Green Party activists in mind, the Greens are a steadily growing international community, and the points made here will be as relevant to Greens in Argentina,  say, as they are in Japan, Zimbabwe, or anywhere else. The vitally important questions that I will address is this: when the Green Party wins a general election for the first time what exactly will it do in the first days and weeks of forming a government? Are the Greens just a toothless pressure group, or are they serious about changing the world for the better?

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.
— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

London, New Year’s Eve 2018.
It is a very English middle-class trait: the world will end if the price of a certain life style goes up. Certain services will be cut. Access to certain travel destinations might be restricted. (The usual European haunts in France and Spain rendered dearer if not inaccessible.) But there is no denying that the attitude to the New Year from this side of the world is one of gloom made normal.

Enslavement by the Enlightened in Revolutionary Times
In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Saint Domingue, now Haiti, was the world’s richest colony. The source of this wealth was the exploitation of half a million black slaves who furnished the labor for the sugar, indigo, cotton, cocoa, coffee, and tobacco extracted from over 2,000 plantations.

End-of-year polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over the past year and predict where things are heading in the next.
But a recent poll of European Jews – the largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, left wing form of anti-semitism.
The survey was conducted by the European Union’s agency on fundamental rights and was given great prominence in the liberal-left British daily the Guardian.

Gilad Atzmon

Following the intense smear campaign against me, my work, my writing and my livelihood, I decided to produce this short Christmas message and address the ludicrous accusations against me and also to wish you all merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you all for your support.

Believe it or not, but not long ago, Cyprus used to be the only country in the European Union that was governed by a Communist Party. And it was not really too long ago – between 2008 and 2013.
Also, relatively recently, unification of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish administered northern part of the island, appeared to be achievable.
And when Cyprus, like Greece, almost collapsed financially, it was Russia which offered to bail it out (before the EU did all it could to prevent this from happening).
Now it all seems like ancient history.

Jazz saxophonist and writer Gilad Atzmon was recently banned from playing at an assembly hall in Islington, a borough of London, by order of the Islington Town Council. This came about as a result of an e-mail from one person—Martin Rankoff saying nothing more than that if Atzmon was going to be at the venue on December 21 he would give a ticket that was given to him to someone else.

As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac, 2017 was “The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.” This year, having given it considerable thought, and having consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I’m designating 2018 “The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia.”