socialist | trade unionist | legal academic | foghlaimeoir Gaeilge | denouncing the abyss | ✊@This_is_Rise
Joined September 2016
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I’m really proud to be part of this new initiative - we desperately need independent working class organisation and power, get involved and help build the better world we need and deserve ✊
On International Workers’ Day, we are proud to launch Rise! A movement dedicated to building independent working class power to change the world - on this May Day we must recommit ourselves to building a better world for all, find out more here: risemovement.co.uk/the-time-…
The working class does not need 1000 days to get ready for war - we are at war now, under constant attack from the ruling class and their politicians - and now they want to send our kids off to die for their profits - we must be organised to resist this attack on our class
The drive to war – it’s always the working class who pay!
There is a growing push by the British establishment towards more militarism, through increased military spending. The government talk about ‘warfighting readiness’, and broader conversations about ‘sacrifice’ and conscription stoke notions of an impending threat-that we have to be prepared for war.
Working class people have the most to lose from this establishment narrative taking hold. It makes way for the justification of cuts to services and social security, more military spending and makes war sound like an inevitability rather than a choice.
Harry Patch (one of the last living Tommy’s from WW1) said it best when he said:
“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder”
Rise resolutely opposes increased military spending, conscription and the drive to war. We won’t see our kids and our class butchered for the profits and interests of the rich and powerful.
Paul O’Connell retweeted
The drive to war – it’s always the working class who pay!
There is a growing push by the British establishment towards more militarism, through increased military spending. The government talk about ‘warfighting readiness’, and broader conversations about ‘sacrifice’ and conscription stoke notions of an impending threat-that we have to be prepared for war.
Working class people have the most to lose from this establishment narrative taking hold. It makes way for the justification of cuts to services and social security, more military spending and makes war sound like an inevitability rather than a choice.
Harry Patch (one of the last living Tommy’s from WW1) said it best when he said:
“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder”
Rise resolutely opposes increased military spending, conscription and the drive to war. We won’t see our kids and our class butchered for the profits and interests of the rich and powerful.
Paul O’Connell retweeted
"Similar to Gaza, the Commission finds that, in the West Bank, Palestinian children are deliberately targeted on discriminatory grounds based on their age." ohchr.org/en/press-releases/…
Paul O’Connell retweeted
Pregnant, living in a tent with your family, and hearing gunfire every day, knowing that your lives are in danger but having no money or means to escape.
Donate here: chuffed.org/project/113222-t…
This was the reality for Mahmoud and his pregnant wife, displaced near the yellow line in eastern Hamad City, Khan Younis.
On October 18, The Sameer Project responded to their plea for help. Using one of our free buses, our team evacuated the family to a relatively safer location in Khan Younis. The entire evacuation cost just $40 sign commission for fuel. Less than $50 to escape a dangerous life or death situation.
Our transportation program does more than bring people to hospitals and essential services. Sometimes, it is the difference between remaining in danger and having a chance at safety. Your donations make these life-saving interventions possible.
Support The Sameer Project through our General Fund link: chuffed.org/project/113222-t…
Other ways to donate include:
paypal.me/mahertali (Paypal option, please make sure to add a message saying "GENERAL")
account.venmo.com/u/Maher-Al… (Venmo option, please make sure to add a message saying "GENERAL")
Paul O’Connell retweeted
We’re just casually talking about the U.S. using a nuclear weapon against Iran in a criminal war of aggression driven by the maniacal ago of one man and the imperialist objectives of a settler colonial state. This is not normal. Don’t let anyone treat it as such.
Paul O’Connell retweeted
In the lead up to next years Durham Miners’ Gala @This_is_Rise will be running a political school for working class activists and trade unionists - you don’t have to be a Rise member to attend - save the dates for now and look out for updates coming soon 👇✊
It shouldn't need saying, but extending support and solidarity to an occupied people is the bare minimum, and absolutely right (internationalism 101) – making the form in which a national liberation struggle develops a moral litmus test in another country is cosplaying nonsense
Paul O’Connell retweeted
1. Debate made sense 20 years ago. Oslo is dead. Israel is expanding. 2 States Solution is as unrealistic and utopian as any one state alternative (other than the existing one state apartheid). So, yes, distraction.
Paul O’Connell retweeted
The liberal fantasy of the disinterested creative, professing to be aloof from the society and politics around them, all while of course needing and seeking its approbation and support
‘Second-rate artists and mediocrities can take a stand. Real artists don’t take a stand on anything’ — John Banville buff.ly/HSmql5q
Paul O’Connell retweeted
Reminds me of Ellen M. Wood: "discursive construction has replaced material production as the constitutive practice of social life. There may never be a revolutionary reconstruction of society, but there can always be a ruthless deconstruction of texts."
“most British Marxists have long ceased to attend to British actualities and, at a time of unparalleled socialist opportunity, play to each other their amateur revolutionary theatricals” - E.P. Thompson in 1975 - I'd say "Marxists", but otherwise, plus ça change ...
Paul O’Connell retweeted
The debate on one state/ two state is a political distraction. And it is even more so when debated within a British political party. I wrote about this in 2016 (in Arabic, link below).
The focus should be on an anti-colonial struggle for freedom and equality.
Ashok Kumar replies to criticism made by two-state supporters that promoting one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine is “speaking over Palestinians” who might favor two states.
“Marx, ends famously, the Communist Manifesto by saying: ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.’ What he means by that is many things [including this:] … “No matter what our differences, no one, anywhere, throughout history, wants to live in chains.’ … Nobody demands to live in a ghetto. Nobody demands to live in permanent dispossession. Nobody demands to live in a Bantustan.”
That isn’t a demand anyone is making. That’s a demand to be in chains. And [the two-state supporters, who say we’re talking over the Palestinians are] saying ‘No, no. Some people want to be in chains.’”
Support for a decolonized democratic Palestine which recognizes all people as equal, regardless of their ethnic or religious identity, is a call for “a universal claim” for freedom from oppression and discrimination.
youtube.com/watch?v=-nlRDJKT…
Paul O’Connell retweeted
Manchester Saturday: Zionism is the ideological belief that Israel should have a homeland by ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Palestine. They stole a whole country in 1948, violently and brutally stole 79% of the land to create Israel, then in the decades since occupied and forced out as many Palestinians as they could from the last part of the land remaining in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Zionism is what zionism does.
Ask yourself one question. What does Zionism mean to the Palestinians living in Palestine? The answer is the last episode of Zionism - the abominable genocide in Gaza, destroying 90% of the houses and schools, bombing all 36 hospitals in Gaza, murdering over 1000 medics, and killing over 20,000 children, with many more tens of thousands left under the rubble. Zionism can only be described as what it is in practice - Israel's ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people and shame on all those here in Britain who turn their backs on the Palestinians and pretend it was ever anything else.
Paul O’Connell retweeted
An Introduction to Zionism: Your Sunday reading list:
1. Walid Khalidi, “Introduction”, in: From Haven to Conquest (1971), yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/…
Paul O’Connell retweeted
6️⃣ Days Away! We’re so excited to share The Complete Shorter Works of James Connolly.
Crafted to support the resistance of those fighting imperialism everywhere, this indispensable collection shows why Connolly is considered required reading for revolutionaries around the globe.
