Communism/Marxism/Maoism

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
— Che Guevara1 To my children (1965)

James Connolly is primarily remembered in Irish history as the Socialist revolutionary hero of the Rising of 1916, executed in Kilmainham Prison while strapped to a chair. Connolly’s place in Irish history is far more than that, however. He was a proud Socialist, the founder of both the Irish Socialist Republican Party and the Labour Party, and the writer of the influential pamphlets Labour in Irish History and The Reconquest of Ireland.

Religion and left revolution may seem like opposite ends of an insurmountable spectrum.  After all, today’s media reminds us constantly of religion’s intolerance regarding the lives of women and its various justifications for war whether it’s waging holy war or justifying imperial ones.  Realistically, though, religion is not always reactionary.  Indeed, if one looks at history, it has often been used to justify liberation and social justice.

In one of the blurbs for Ben Kamin’s book, Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers, Hamilton Sides writes “Kamin continues his keen yet loving exploration into little-known aspects of King’s life and legacy.” While the comment is certainly true, it is important to explain further that similar to his previous books, Ben Kamin provides us with the human stories that surrounded both Martin Luther King’s “life and his legacy.” In addition, Dangerous Friends

The rise of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the late 1960s signified a monumental step toward the development of self-determination in the United States.

Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation–an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.

Author Wei Ling Chua has written two interesting books contrasting western government and media narratives toward China, which Chua exposes as disinformation: Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China (review) Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence (review).

After reading Wei Ling Chua’s second book, Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? and its startling revelations of a western disinformation against the Chinese government, I was eager to read his first book, Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China. His analysis is thought provoking and at stark odds with the preponderent western mass media narrative.
Chua quickly gets to the crux of his thesis:

Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century, has almost had the effect of a tsunami on economic thinking here in the United States after its translation from French into English washed up on our monoglot shores. In France itself it has been treated as more or less just another economics book– no big deal.

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