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What's new at Links: Thailand, 1 million reads, Neville Alexander on SA, renewables & tax, Besancenot on Greece, William Morris, Philippines, Bolivia, Arabic * * * *For more reliable delivery of new content, please subscribe free to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal at http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=343373 * You can also follow Links on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LinksSocialism or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10865397643 Visit and bookmark http://links.org.au and add it to your RSS feed (http://links.org.au/rss.xml). If you would like us to consider an article, please send it to li...@dsp.org.au *Please pass on to anybody you think will be interested in Links. * * * Thailand: Past the point of no return <http://links.org.au/node/1696> By *Danielle Sabai* [This article was written before the Thai government's crushing of the Red Shirts' protest site in Bangkok on May 19, 2010. However, it provides important background to the events.] May 17, 2010 -- The political crisis engulfing Thailand is not a clap of thunder in an otherwise calm sky. The discourse about a country where "everyone lives in harmony and where there is no class struggle but a people united behind its adored sovereign" has nothing to do with reality. For several decades, the Thai people have been subjected to authoritarian regimes or dictatorships and a king in their service. The Thai élites have however not succeeded in preventing regular uprisings against the established order, including those in 1973, 1976 and 1992, all repressed by bloodbaths. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1696> 1,000,000 articles read, 750,000 visits -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal <http://links.org.au/node/1694> May 21, 2010 -- At 11.59pm on May 19, 2010, the 1,000,000th article was read at /Links International Journal of Socialist (/since records began being kept on April 4, 2008). The article was accessed somebody in Toronto, Canada -- the 744,733rd visit to /Links/ -- who entered site at the fascinating speech by veteran South African revolutionary socialist Neville Alexander. On May 21, at 5.50pm, /Links International Journal of Socialsit Renewal/ received its 750,000th visitor, who was from Thailand and who read one of Giles Ji Ungpakorn's essential articles on the struggle for democracy in that country. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1694> Neville Alexander: South Africa -- An unfinished revolution? <http://links.org.au/node/1693> / / [The following address -- the fourth Strini Moodley Annual Memorial Lecture, held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on May 13, 2010 -- was delivered by renowned South African revolutionary socialist and theorist Neville Alexander. From 1964 to 1974 he was imprisoned on Robben Island. *Strinivasa Rajoo "Strini" Moodley* (December 22, 1945--April 27, 2006) was a founding member of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. In 1976, he was convicted of terrorism in a trial involving members of the South African Students' Organisation and the Black People's Convention, and imprisoned on Robben Island. The speech is posted at /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ with Neville Alexander's permission.] * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1693> Australia: Tax billionaire companies to fund rapid transition to renewable energy <http://links.org.au/node/1699> By *Dick Nichols* May 24, 2010 -- Even as the Australian federal Labor government sticks its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [carbon trading scheme] into the freezer the climate change crisis intensifies, demanding a response adequate to its enormity. The goal dictated by climate science is annual emissions reductions of 5% from now to 2020 -- the critical "transition decade". * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1699> Olivier Besancenot: `We are all Greek workers! <http://links.org.au/node/1698> By *Olivier Besancenot* and *Pierre-François Grond, *translated by *Richard Fidler* and *Nathan Rao* May 14, 2010 -- /Le Monde/ via /The Bullet/ -- The events in Greece concern us all. The Greek people are paying for a crisis and a debt not of their making. Today it is the Greeks, tomorrow it will be others, for the same causes will produce the same effects if we allow it. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1698> Debunking the `Menshevik myth': William Morris and revolutionary politics <http://links.org.au/node/1697> By *Graham Milner* With some great revolutionary figures in world history, and in international labour history in particular, it has been found necessary for historians or biographers to dig out their subjects from beneath "a load of calumny and oblivion", "a mountain of dead dogs". With others, however, a different problem exists. Lenin pointed to this when he wrote that the ruling classes, following upon the deaths of great revolutionaries, often attempt -- after having met the ideas and actions of such men and women during their lifetimes with "furious hatred ... and slanders" -- to turn them into "harmless saints ... by way of `consolation' to the oppressed ... while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge". * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1697> Philippines: The May 10 elections and the left <http://links.org.au/node/1695> By *Sonny Melencio*, Manila** May 17, 2010 -- The May 10, 2010, election has been bandied about as the cleanest and the most peaceful since the restoration of this exercise after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. This is attributed to the computerised election which ensured the quick counting of votes so that there would not be sufficient time for any of the /trapo/ (traditional politician) to cheat. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1695> Democracy Now! debate: Is Thailand's Red Shirt movement a genuine grassroots struggle? <http://links.org.au/node/1692> May 18, 2010 -- In Thailand, the government has rejected an offer by anti-government protesters to enter talks after a bloody week in Bangkok that has left at least thirty-eight protesters dead. Some fear the standoff could lead to an undeclared civil war. The protesters are mostly rural and urban poor who are part of a group called the UDD, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, more commonly known as the Red Shirts. We host a debate between *Giles Ji Ungpakorn*, a Thai dissident living in exile in Britain who supports the Red Shirt movement; and Philip Cunningham, a freelance journalist who has covered Asia for over twenty years. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1692> Thailand: Why Obama is silent on the Bangkok massacres <http://links.org.au/node/1691> By *Shamus Cooke* May 16, 2010 -- When the White House is quiet as protesters are butchered in the streets of Bangkok, suspicions are raised. Silence often equals complicity. One can only imagine what the US government's response would be to a Venezuelan government slaughter: the US media and US President Barack Obama would loudly condemn such an act, in contrast to the muted response to Thailand's bloodbath. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1691> Bolivia's mining dilemmas: Between Mother Earth and an 'extraction economy' <http://links.org.au/node/1689> By *Federico Fuentes*, Cochabamba May 15, 2010 -- The tremendous success of the April 19-22 World People's Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, has confirmed the well-deserved role of its initiator --- Bolivia's President Evo Morales --- as one of the world's leading environmental advocates. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1689> (Updated May 21) Thailand: International left solidarity with the democracy movement <http://links.org.au/node/1688> Statements by the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France, Socialist Alliance of Australia, the Socialist Party of Malaysia, the Fourth International, Focus on Global South, Australia Asia Worker Links. See also Asia-Pacific left statement -- `Resolve crisis through democracy, not crackdown!' <http://links.org.au/node/1613>, by Asian left and progressive organisations. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1688> The Flame, May 2010 -- Green Left Weekly's Arabic-language supplement <http://links.org.au/node/1687> May 2010 -- With the help of Socialist Alliance members in the growing Sudanese community in Australia, /Green Left Weekly/ -- Australia's leading socialist newspaper -- publishes a regular Arabic language supplement. The /Flame// /covers news from the Arabic-speaking world as well as news and issues from within Australia. Editor-in-chief is Soubhi Iskander is a comrade who has endured years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the repressive government in Sudan. * Read more <http://links.org.au/node/1687> * * * Links seeks to promote the international exchange of information, experience of struggle, theoretical analysis and views of political strategy and tactics within the international left. It is a forum for open and constructive dialogue between active socialists coming from different political traditions. It seeks to bring together those in the international left who are opposed to neoliberal economic and social policies. It aims to promote the renewal of the socialist movement in the wake of the collapse of the bureaucratic model of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 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