By Jayantha Somasundaram
The 50th anniversary of the first JVP insurrection falls today. The 1971 rebellion was the first armed uprising against the state in modern times.
The JVP was the brainchild of Rohana Wijeweera. Born in 1943, at Hunandeniya, in the Matara District, his father was a supporter of the Communist Party of Ceylon (CPC). However, while studying medicine in Moscow, Wijeweera became critical of the Soviet Union, and, on his return, he joined the Communist Party (CP), which was Maoist. Not long after, in 1966, Wijeweera, along with his supporters, broke ranks with the CP to form their own movement, which would later become the JVP. Wijeweera had concluded that the agricultural labourer -̶ the rural proletariat -̶ was the largest and most important component of Sri Lanka’s working class, not the urban or plantation worker.
IMPERIAL DISINFORMATION: The Independent Report Claiming Uyghur Genocide – The Greanville Post greanvillepost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greanvillepost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The celebration of New Year’s Day as a moment to contemplate renewal, usually personal renewal, follows the calendar adopted by Julius Caesar in 46BC. Designed by Greek mathematicians and astrologers, its sole purpose was to attain greater mathematical accuracy in the alignment of dates to the solar year.
In recent years, Antonio Gramsci’s column that was published on 1 January 1916 in the Turin issue of
Avanti! has been circulated in progressive circles on New Year’s Day. In the column, Gramsci rejected the idea that New Year’s Day should be an annual day of renewal and insisted that “I want every morning to be a New Year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself.”
Africa: The Revolutionary Promise of New Year s Day allafrica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from allafrica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Music and Politics
Wednesday 30 December 2020, by Jon Wiener
When John Lennon was murdered forty years ago, on December 8, 1980, we believed Richard Nixon had been the worst president ever because of the war in Vietnam, because of the repression that he called “law and order” and the racism of the Southern Strategy, and also because of his treatment of Lennon. Nixon had tried to deport Lennon in 1972 when the former Beatle made plans to lead an election-year effort to challenge the Republican president’s reelection with a campaign to register young people to vote.
In the end, of course, Lennon stayed in the United States and Nixon left the White House in disgrace. But the seemingly endless battle in the immigration courts ruined his life for the next few years. To recover, in 1975 he left Los Angeles, where he’d been living apart from Yoko Ono in a kind of exile, and returned to New York and the Dakota.