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“Kurt Vonnegut on ‘Rule Britannia’:
“The equation which links a strong defense posture to not being enslaved is laid down in that stirring fight song, much heard lately, ‘Rule Britannia’. I will sing the equation:
‘Rule Britannia; Britannia rule the waves’
That, of course, is a poetic demand for a Navy second to none. I now sing the next line, which explains why it is essential to have a Navy that good:
‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.
It may surprise some of you to learn what an old equation that is. The Scottish poet who wrote it, James Thomson, died in 1748 – about one quarter of a century before there was such a country as the United States of America. Thomson promised Britons that they would never be slaves at a time when the enslavement of persons with inferior weaponry was a respectable industry. Plenty of people were going to be slaves, and it would serve them right, too – but Britons would not be among them. So that isn’t really a very nice song. It is about not being humiliated, which is all right. But it is also about humiliating others, which is not a moral thing to do. The humiliation of others should never be a national goal. There is one poet who should have been ashamed of himself”.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 142.
Physics is just an extremely epistemologically self-confident social science.
“Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true.”
— Russian joke from the 1990s.
or ReblogOn this day, 10 March 1919, Polish-German communist Leo Jogiches was murdered in Berlin while trying to investigate the killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Karl and Rosa had been killed earlier that year by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps, who had been tasked with crushing a working class uprising by the social democratic government. Leo, who was a former lover of Luxemburg, was also arrested by the Freikorps, tortured and then killed. This is a detailed history and analysis of this period of German history: https://ift.tt/2p4L9Xy https://ift.tt/2TGTvGd
“…in the United States… no strategy for socialism is particularly plausible… the crucial immediate question for the American Left is less ‘how to make a revolution’, but rather 'how to make the social conditions within which we can know how to make a revolution.’”
— Erik Olin Wright, 1978, Class, Crisis and the State, London: Verso, Footnote to p.233.
or Reblog“Red Rosa
Now has vanished too
Is hid from
View
She told the poor
What life is about
And so the rich
Have rubbed
Her out”
— Epitaph 1919, Bertolt Brecht, Poem Lost
or Reblog“…it is our very HATE of the work that keeps us going. Speaking just for myself, I want REVENGE for all the years
they’ve ALREADY TAKEN. They’ve extorted ¾’s of my waking hours, half my dreams, and have no doubt shaved 20 years off my lifetime thanks to hypertension, stress, etc. I WILL DIE OF WORK. Even if I can eventually make a living off the things I like - i.e., endless rants like this - instead of corporate uselessness, it’s STILL ALL WRONG. I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO. I don’t mind DOING it - what I mind is the fact that I’m not given a CHOICE.”
— Rev Ian Stang, Introduction, in Black, B. (1986). The Abolition of Work and other essays. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited.
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