We light fires weeklyworker.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from weeklyworker.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Yevgeny Zamyatin shaped dystopian fiction While Wells, Huxley and Orwell invented flawed worlds, the Soviet writer was living in one.
Literary Gazette under the title “Certificate concerning social eugenics”, one of them read: Type: Zamiatin. Genus: Evgeny. Class: bourgeois. In the village: a kulak. The product of degeneration. Footnote: an enemy. With its threatening references to degeneration and eugenics, this ditty would not have been out of place in
Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid that was being published in Germany at the time. For Zamyatin, one of the best known authors living in the Soviet Union, the attack was the culmination of years of dangerous insecurity. In September 1929 he resigned from the Soviet Union of Writers, and in June 1931 wrote to Stalin asking permission to leave the country. Maxim Gorky interceded on Zamyatin’s behalf, and his request was granted. Accompanied by his wife, Lyudmila, he left Russia in November 1931 and settled in Paris, wh
One thing that has truly amazed me in studying the history of ideological battles and skirmishes throughout the course of time has been the repeated pattern of one side (usually the minority) co-opting the name of their opposition and savagely waging a war to achieve a dominant rank before the people, later rewriting the history to obscure these facts. A colleague has suggested this phenomena be described as “political identity theft.” One example LRC readers are especially aware of relates to the struggle over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution which carried over into the first decade of the Early National Period. This was the battle between the “Federalists” and the “Anti-Federalists,” later characterized during the Washington and Adams administrations as that between the “Federalists” and “Democratic-Republicans.”
There is a deceitful and ahistorical myth that frequently resurfaces in right-wing circles seeking to discredit socialism with lies about the Russian Revolution. No matter how many times it has been invalidated as fabrication, the reactionary mythos endures. As might be expected, the author is referring to the preposterous claim that American capitalists or “Wall Street bankers” secretly financed one of the most epochal political revolutions in world history which overthrew the Romanov dynasty and ended the Russian Empire, leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union. One would be hard pressed to find anyone on the political left who has not encountered this mendacious propaganda which has a few variations depending on how far to the right its adherent lands on the political spectrum, but it usually shares the same core set of evidence-free claims.
SCOTLAND SUPPLEMENT III - Separatism, federalism, centralism
Breaking apart existing states is not the road to socialism, but the road to defeat, writes Jack Conrad
Those who rigidly adhere to a moralistic, third-worldist anti-imperialism cannot possibly bring themselves to countenance self-determination for ‘unworthy’ peoples - the most obvious example being Israeli Jews and the British-Irish in the six counties of Northern Ireland.
1 Given its junior role in building, administering and maintaining what was a vast British empire, that must include Scotland too. After all, historically, even “left-of centre”
2 Scottish nationalists sought not an end to that empire, but, as a “mother nation”, equal rights with England to plunder and profit.