More from New Labour here.

 I once did a Red Pepper Labour Party conference fringe meeting in Brighton, I am not quite sure why I was asked I have never been a Labour Party member or had much connection with the Party.

The audience confessed how they had been variously demoted from positions as councillors and carved up in various ways by the Blairites but admitted that mostly because New Labour had put the party in power, they would stick with the project.  Given Labour’s long years of defeat in the 1980s they had a point perhaps.

Neo-liberalism has never been about power for ‘labour’ and now it has run out of steam for the ‘third way’ supporters and no longer even provides electoral success for career politicians.

What happens next?

My feeling is that Crudas and Compass will make the party just about acceptable to some on the left and to the unions to keep the show on the road, after election defeat, thus blocking the creation of any real left alternative.

Perhaps I am being pessimistic but may be we on the Left of the Greens, in Respect, the ideologically imaginative in Plaid,  etc, etc, etc, etc right down to Permanent Revolution and Workers Power…are going to have it tougher too.

Well how will we socialists in all our diversity react to the defeat of New Labour by recession and the right?

Perhaps the dog years of New Labour provided a window of opportunity which will close with Conservative success in the next General Election?

Or am I having a rare moment of undue worry….we certainly need to discuss all this and debate practical strategy for advancing beyond the present marker based madness.

Sometimes the world makes little sense.

Having not only been beaten but convincingly beaten in the test series, England are giving South Africa a thrashing in the one day International series, including a ten wicket rout at Trent Bridge on Tuesday.

At one level it seems a bit odd, because Michael Vaughan was in my view an excellent captain, but replacing him with the Roy of the Rovers figure of Kevin Pieterson as captain has galvanised the team, and Pieterson’s performance in the first ODI in particular was remarkable - building the winning batting partnership with Flintoff, and stepping in as a bowler to take a crucial wicket at exactly the right time.

I think it is because having been soundly beaten in the first four tests of the series, very little was expected from England in the last test or the ODIs, despite the innate ability of the team they were written off as under-acheivers. Strangely defeat lifted a weight of responsibility from their shoulders, and Pieterson’s style of leadership, of taking responsibility and leading from the front just matches their current mood. You can certainly see from Flintoff for example, that he is playing in a carefree manner, and his cricket is all the better for it.

The perenial problem for England teams, in whatever sport, is that too much is expected of them, and they fail to bear the pressure. This is partly the burden of the tabloid press, but I also think it is related to the fact that sports’s patriotism is too important for England. It is all we have. And the England cricket team is in many ways exemplary of modern England, multi-racial and devoid of the class snobbery of previous eras - we even have an African immigrant as captain!

Incidently, the idiot idea of Gordon Brown’s that Britain should enter a football team for the 2012 olympics shows how out of touch he is with public opinion. As Plaid AM, Bethen Jenkins has pointed out, “This could well threaten the Welsh FA, and the president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter has on more than one occasion said that if the UK fields a team at the Olympics, then football associations across the world will ask why there cannot be a single team for the UK at all competitions”

In his desire to prop up the Union at any cost and promote “Britishness”, Gordon Brown is in danger of destroying the dearly loved national football teams of Wales, Scotland and England. To be quite frank, the political bonds between Scotland and England are weaker than the bonds of loyalty that many English people feel to our football team.

“the genuine and serious risks of severe ecological degradation and climate change caused by the capitalist economic model as factors … will shape socialist politics in the coming decades.”

Liam from Socialist Resistance has produced a short document Class Struggle and Ecology.

It is well worth a look.

A number of us in different political organisations are putting forward the common perspective that ecological politics makes no sense unless it faces the reality that capitalism is innately destructive, market mechanism such as carbon trading do not deal seriously with the problems we face on this planet.  Getting a few MPs elected will not on its own usher in ecotopia and sadly many Green Parties have moved firmly to the right, Ireland being in my view a particularly worrying example, what is the point of a coalition government with Fianna Fail that builds motorways and does not challenge rendition?

Socialist politics is equally flawed unless it takes on board green political insights, you can’t have socialism on a dead planet.

Any way have a look at Liam’s contribution, its a good introduction to an essential debate.

I must also try and find time to review Jonathan Neale’s new book on climate change, which looks excellent.

Green Left and SOAS Palestinian Society

Anti-Zionism. A Jewish Perspective.

Friday 5^th September @ 7pm (Khalili Lecture Theatre SOAS)

With

Simon Lynn (Editor of Jewish Socialist Magazine)

Tony Greenstein (Palestine Solidarity Campaign)

Chair: Dr Joseph Healy (Co-Convenor Green Left)

Green Party conference runs from next friday to monday.  We agreed a couple of months ago that there would be a GL fringe with the Jewish Socialist Group, I am also very pleased to say we have Tony Greenstein.  Tony is a member of the Alliance for Green Socialism and it is fair to say the AGS and GL do not always see eye to eye.  I think it is important to do common work on the left where as with 90% of things there is clear agreement.  Green Left have been strong supporters of an academic boycott of Isreal and have been strong critics of racists and anti-semites.

Our other fringe is at Bolivar Hall with speakers on ‘Greening Latin America’ with Roberto Perez from Cuba.

Recently, an academic, posted to her union’s (UCU) discussion list a link to an article from David Duke’s web-site. David Duke is former Imperial Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and possibly the most infamous white-supremacist in the English speaking world. The administrators of the UCU list have correctly suspended her.

She has claimed that she did not know, and presumably therefore that she could not reasonably have been expected to know, that this was a far-right hate-site.

So here is the link, see for yourself (warning this links to a Nazi web-site, you may find the content offensive)

The top item on the right hand menu is the link to a video by David Duke. This shows a film of Duke holding a book called “Jewish Supremacism”, he mentions by name Jewish American politicians as being responsible for the Iraq war, and claims that the America was manipulated by a “Zionist fifth column” into waging a war in Israel’s behalf. He invites you to buy his book that explains his belief that Jewish Supremacists have huge influence on world events.

If you skipped the video, you could check out the links on the right hand side, with titles such as:

“Jewish Supremacism by David Duke – a worldwide best seller”, follow the link and you will read a boldly racist text, that mixes together mediaeval religious anti-Judaism, with the Protocols of Zion, and modern anti-Semitism. Here is a taster:

“Organized Jewry can be clearly shown to have had world-wide strategic objectives since the beginning of the last century. For instance, an early 20th Century goal of Russian and World Jewry was the overthrow of what they considered to be the anti-Semitic, Czarist government of Imperial Russia. Jewish communities around the world supported the establishment of a proto-Jewish Communist regime in Russia. They provided most the leadership and financing 22 for the “Russian Revolution,” a revolution that was actually more Jewish than Russian. Its chief financier was the New York Jewish Capitalist, Jacob Schiff. 23
One of the many startling documents I cite comes from the National Archives of the United States. It reveals that in the first government of Communist Russia there were only 13 ethnic Russians and more than 300 Jews out of a total of 384 Commissars. 24 Let that startling fact sink in: there were only 13 ethnic Russians in the first Bolshevik government of the “Russian Revolution.” The chief correspondent of the London Times in Russia at the time described it as nothing short of an “alien invasion” and takeover of Russia by Jews. 25 The same was said by our American ambassador to Russia, David Francis, 26 and by American intelligence officers in Russia. Even Winston Churchill described the Russian Revolution as a takeover by Bolshevik Jews that had “…seized the Russian people by the hair of their heads and become the masters of this enormous empire.” 27 This is just a small preview of the many startling documents you will find in this book.
The successful overthrow of a major national Government (and murder of its ruling family) as part of a world Jewish agenda shows that even in the early days of the 20th century they had considerable world-wide economic, political and media power. In the years since, their power has grown exponentially. Most people are still completely unaware of the paramount role of Jewry in the origins of Bolshevism in Russia and the spreading of Communism throughout the world.”

There is a helpful picture with the caption “No War for Israel”, with a number of Israeli politicians in a montage with a number of American politicians – all of whom are Jewish.

Even if you don’t follow any of these links to look at the articles, you could glance at just the titles of the articles on the front page, all by David Duke:

Black Population Welfare Bomb Ticks
Is Russia the key to White Survival?
The Hypocrisy of Jewish Supremacism
Facts About Black Crime in America
The Costs of Immigration
Innate Intellectual & Psychological Differences
Race and Crime
Race Information Library
Racial Differences

So it is immediately obvious to anyone who visits it with a remotely critical outlook that this is a far right, anti-Semitic and racist web-site.

What is more, the article itself that she shared does itself lean towards anti-Semitism. Let us see what the author, Joe Quinn,  says:

Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous “conspiracy theory” actually be closer to a conspiracy fact? I don’t really care, all I want is for someone to explain to me how, in a situation where there is massive evidence that 1.4 million completely isolated Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip are being systematically murdered and starved by the state of Israel with its shiny 21st century military and all the tax dollars and support America can muster, yet somehow the entire world believes that those 1.4 million dispossessed are “evil terrorists” and “only have themselves to blame”. Somebody, please tell me how it comes to pass, if not by control of the mainstream press, and very significant control at that.
… I am also waiting on someone to explain to me what mechanism exists to ensure that these details are systematically denied to the international community, and how Israel is promoted in the mainstream press as the ‘victim’.

The author is not content to see the pro-Israeli bias of the mainstream media as being a general case of political bias in pursuit of US government policy. He argues that there is a specific mechanism – that may be an international Jewish conspiracy – that systematically ensures a pro-Israeli bias.

Personally, despite the fact that this article does contain a persuasive argument about Israeli oppression of the Palestinian, and several useful facts and arguments, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole, because it recycles Jewish conspiracy arguments.

The fact that such Jewish conspiracty theory is alluded to in the article is presumably why it found approval from David Duke, and why he reproduced it in the first place. This illustrates perfectly how the far-right anti-Semites are seeking to exploit and piggy-back on the Palectinian solidarity movement to try to rehabilitate their vile creed.

What is remarkable is why so few left activists are prepared to challenge this, rather than making excuses for it.

It is incumbent upon the left and the Palestinian solidarity movement to both be aware of the conscious effort of far-right Anti-Semites to infiltrate the movement , and also to vigorously oppose and exclude these anti-Semites. Association with the likes of David Duke is extremely damaging for the Palestinian movement.

By linking to this article, that gave credence to anti-Semitic myths of Jewish conspiracy, and that was hosted  by a notorious and obvious neo-Nazi she was at least exhibiting an indifference to anti-Semitism. We have already seen such tolerance of Anti-Semitism in the debates over IndyMedia’s moderation policy, and socialists providing a platform for the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon.

In the specific case of the campaign within the UCU for an academic boycott of Israel ( a campaign I broadly sympathise with, although I am not sure it is currently tactically well-judged) then linking to David Duke’s site has allowed Zionist opponents of the boycott easy ammunition for falsely slurring the pro-Palestinian campaign as anti-Semitic.

Being politically naïve is not a shooting offence, and blindness to anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Semitism. But her supporters are making the issue worse.

To claim that linking to David Duke’s site is an understandable mistake that anyone could make is simply not true. You need to be wilfully blind to not only anti-Semitism but also racism to not detect that this is a far-right hate site. The racism and anti-Semitism is not even coded. (This is nothing to do with the woman who posted the link to Duke’s site coming from Eastern Europe – I can assure you that Anti-Semitism is a live issue there, so any politically aware person from Mitteleuropa would have come across the arguments.)

To claim that contents of the article itself are unproblematic rather ignores the fact that it clearly gives credence to theories of a Jewish conspiracy.

So what of the involvement of the pro-Zionist web-site Harry’s Place?

Firstly, someone on the UCU discussion list is leaking e-mails to HP. There are those who complain that HP publishing these is a breech of confidentially. Welcome to the Internet! Get over it. There is no such thing as a closed discussion list on the internet, and there is no such thing as confidentiality on the internet. This is the new landscape with regards to confidentiality, and you just have to live with it.

Harry’s Place systematically seeks to identify Palestinian solidarity with anti-Semitism, which is part of a political project to discredit anti-Zionism. This has been a stock in trade of supporters of Israel for decades, but HP does so in a particularly unpleasant way.

Again, that simply is part of the political landscape, and the political response to it should be to not give them ammunition, which means that the left needs to police the boundary itself between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

But the left also has to be careful that we don’t just assume that any genuine concerns about Anti-Semitism, or more specifically toleration of Anti-Semitism, is just the boy crying wolf. Nor should we assume that people (whether they are Zionist or not) challenging anti-Semitism are motivated by bad-faith. In many parts of the world Anti-Semitism is a real and present danger, and it is slowly rehabilitating itself in Britain as well.

As left-wing political opponents of Israel it is incumbent upon us to challenge anti-Semitism when it surfaces in the Palestinian solidarity movement (and of course everywhere else), not only because it is intrinsically wrong in its own right, but also because it plays into the hands of the Zionists. That also means that we should guard against the idea that anti-Semitism is somehow the lesser evil that we can tolerate in our campaign against Zionism.

Well there is life beyond Harry’s Place…this is from Richard Gott at Comment is Free

The leftist winds of change blowing strongly through South America in the 21st century arrived this month in Paraguay, where the latest member of the extraordinary coalition assembled over the past 10 years by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela assumed office in Asunción. President Fernando Lugo, a former radical bishop well-versed in liberation theology, who won an election in April with the support of a hastily-assembled Alliance for Change, is the new hope of the left, joining Chávez, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and President Rafael Correa of Ecuador in a fresh alliance of political leaders putting social and economic reform at the top of the agenda. Lugo’s victory marked a significant moment in the history of Paraguay, defeating a corrupt and exhausted Colorado party that had ruled the country for more than six decades, most of the time under the leadership of a military dictator.

On the morning after his inauguration, Lugo travelled with Chávez to the northern town of San Pedro where he was once the bishop, and received from the hands of the Venezuelan president a replica of the sword of Simón Bolívar, a symbolic act that welcomed the new recruit into the radical band of “Bolívarian” brothers that Chávez has created. Chávez’s ambitions had been confined heretofore to the Andean countries once liberated by Bolívar from Spanish rule at the beginning of the 19th century, but this new friendship with Paraguay is a historical first. In his southward march from Venezuela, Bolívar never got beyond Bolivia, and indeed was a sworn enemy of Paraguay’s founding father, the ascetic lawyer José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia.

After a week in office, Lugo has left no one in any doubt where he stands. Like Correa in Ecuador, he sees no further use for the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund, preferring the advice of the US economist Joseph Stiglitz who has suggested that a 10% tax on beef and soya exports would do wonders for the country’s low tax base. The wealthy landowners would complain, as they have done in neighbouring Argentina, but they are unlikely to risk alienating Lugo’s support among the rural poor so early in his presidency.

Another bastion of the old conservative order is the legal system, where root and branch reform is expected imminently. Lugo has already begun clearing the decks with the military and the police, traditionally the arbiters of Paraguay’s political affairs. He has put a definitive end to the “period of transition” that has constrained the country’s democratic practice since the downfall of General Alfredo Stroessner, nearly 20 years ago in 1989, and brought in an entirely fresh high command.

A purge of the diplomatic service will follow, with the removal of an entire generation of ambassadorial placemen. The appointment as foreign minister of Alejandro Hamed, a leftist historian who has been the ambassador in Beirut, has already alarmed Israel and the United States. The Israelis have a supporter in the vice-president, Federico Franco of the Liberal party, but Franco does not form part of Lugo’s inner group of political advisers. This is a matter of some irritation to Franco, since Lugo’s electoral victory was won in part with the support of the powerful Liberal machine.

In his inaugural speech, Lugo called for an unusual combination of austerity and happiness. He had already renounced his presidential salary, and he called upon young people to embark on the task of reconstructing the country with a smile. He invoked the great political leaders of Paraguay in the 19th century like Francia and the López family, but, in the presence of President Michelle Bachelet of Chile, whose father was a member of the government of Salvador Allende, he quoted Allende’s last words on the morning of his overthrow in September 1973. Allende had famously expressed the hope that “much sooner than later the great avenues will re-open along which free men will pass to build a better society”. Lugo echoed these words with the thought that the avenues would be “covered not with asphalt but with the dreams of the founders of the Patria Grande (the great fatherland of Latin America)”.

Lugo also invoked the writers and poets of the 20th century. These of course included Augusto Roa Bastos, the country’s most famous novelist; Elvio Romero, a popular communist poet who died in exile in Buenos Aires, and Rafael Barrett, an Anglo-Spanish journalist who made Paraguay his home and wrote from an anarchist perspective about its social life and the conditions of slavery that existed in the countryside. (Typically, the British government has closed its embassy in Asunción and could only afford to send its ambassador in Argentina to Lugo’s inauguration. Spain sent their crown prince.)

Lugo has received the almost unprecedented support of the Latin American media, perhaps because he is seen to deserve the respect accorded to a former bishop and perhaps too because it is hoped that he will prove more moderate than seems likely to be the case. “This is a victory for the Latin American revolution,” said Chávez in Asunción, but Ecuador’s Correa warned that Lugo’s international reception might not be so delirious once his reforms begin to bite.

Never in a million years did I think such a title would appear on this blog, especially considering the “history” me and “Harry” had way, way back in the early years of the UK Left Network. But now I feel compelled to stand with Harry’s Place.

Why?

HP is under attack - and not for the first time. The (hopefully) temporary stand-in while HP is off the air takes up the story:

Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with. We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters. Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory. This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain. Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS.

More background is available courtesy of Modernity Blog here, here and here.

Personally, I have very little time for the politics peddled on HP. Warmed over social democracy plus humanitarian imperialism plus trenchant Zionism do not suit my radical palate. But they have as much right to push their rubbish politics as any other blogger, regardless of how distasteful they can be at times. So down with the complaints, the writs and the threats of court action, and away with those of censorious intent. If you’re stupid enough to make the kind of mistake Jenna Delich did, then you should take the blowback on the chin, not scrabble around for a lawyer’s letter.

In the immortal words of the HP masthead: “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”.

Learn about the recession and what it means for you next Tuesday in a meeting hosted by the SWP’s People before Profit Charter, where economic analyst and SWP/Left Alternative supporter, Graham Turner will discuss the recession with economics editor of Newsnight, Paul Mason.

The Recession - What does it mean for us?
6:30pm Tuesday, September 2nd in Friends Meeting House, London (opposite Euston station)
with speakers:
-Paul Mason, economics editor of Newsnight
-Graham Turner, GFC economics and author of The Credit Crunch

There has been some recent discussion on this blog about whether or not the circumstances over the last decade have been favourable for building the left.

If we look at England alone, and judge by results then we would reasonably deduce that the situation has been unfavourable.

But let us compare ourselves with Germany. Christian Rickens new book “The Left! The revival of an attitude to life” simply couldn’t have been written in Britain.

As it says on the back cover: “The left is fashionable again – that is evidenced not only in the electoral success of Lafontaine and co [the Left party], but also the [right wing] CDU, SPD and Greens have rediscovered their social conscience and demand more equality, a greater role for the state and more security. So what actually is the left? And why at the moment are left-wing positions making a surprising comeback?”

The Left Party has transformed German politics. In the last national elections they broke through with a remarkable 8.7% nationally and won 54 seats in parliament.

As Victor Grossman reports: “Last spring it won seven seats in the city-state of Bremen, finally breaking the East-West spell. However, Bremen is small, strictly urban, and always a bit more liberal. But then came Lower Saxony, where the Christian Democrats had a popular winning candidate, the Social Democrat got walloped - and the Left won eleven seats, creating, for the first time, a genuine opposition. At the same time, in the state of Hesse (where Frankfurt/Main is located), a far more bitter battle was waged. The ruling Christian Democrat Ronald Koch used every dirty anti-foreigner trick in the bag to keep his ruling position, while the attractive young Social Democrat, Andrea Ypsilanti, stole most of the demands of the Left - like calls for a minimum wage and a return to free college education - to steal its thunder and win against Koch. She gained greatly, Koch lost significantly, but in the end he still had a plus margin of a single tenth of one percentage point and earlier this year for the first time the Left crossed the 5% hurdle to win seats in Hesse – in the West.”

So for the left there was a win-win situation – a credible and electable left alternative not only won seats, but also moved the whole political climate to the left. It is plausible that the Left Party may emerge as the third party in Germany next year.

So what is different in Germany?

Certainly there are differences from Britain in term of specific history, but the overall pattern is similar – the transformation of the mass social-democratic party into an unashamed party of neo-liberalism, and a low level of trade union struggle. But whereas the transformation of the British Labour Party has created no national, credible left opposition, in Germany the SPD split and merged with the regional, Eastern based PDS to create a sensational left revival.

What is different is that the Left Party in Germany has embraced a broad understanding of what we could describe as coalition politics. We need to understand the political diversity of the Left. Again, as Victor Grossman explains:

“For years, the little PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) was confined almost entirely to the five eastern provinces of Germany, the former German Democratic Republic, and to some extent to Berlin. It had hardly a tiny toe-hold in the far more populous ten western provinces, limiting it to the role of a rarely-needed extra in a B-Film.

But then it merged with a small but dynamic new West German party, made up largely of disgusted ex-members of the Social Democrats and Greens, who rejected the miserable anti-social, pro-corporation positions and the growing military readiness of both their two parties. Add to this mixture the people’s rapidly-growing dissatisfaction with the whole economy, with the wealthy perching atop more and more millions and billions while working people and the jobless had more and more debts to sit on. The new, merged party started chalking up gains in both the west and the east.”

So what do I mean by coalition politics?

In the narrow sense, then whether or not the Left are prepared to form coalition administrations with the SPD or the Greens is clearly a dividing line within the Left Party. In some Eastern cities the Left are already in coalition, whereas other members are completely against this in principle.

But in the broader sense, the whole of the Left Party believes in forming a broad coalition of all those who oppose foreign military intervention, who call for a minimum wage, for preserving the weakening medical insurance system, for winning back free education, for saving the many unemployed from compulsory, menial jobs at starvation wages, and for ending discrimination against immigrant minorities. Coalition politics means working with everone who is broadly on the left to build an ideological and political alternative to neo-liberalism.

They are creating a national mood that expects a change towards greater social justice. This involves a mass, popular re-imagining of what is politically possible, and the rebirth of a credible, mainstream political alternative to neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

In contrast, in Britain the left is locked into a quarrelsome decline, fighting like ferrets drowning in a sack. The fallacy is that if the left can somehow engage with trade union struggle and local activism then this can build an alternative from the bottom up. This is impossible, and most damagingly is doesn’t connect with the 200000 members who have left New Labour since 1997, or the five million voters who have abandoned Labour over the same period.

In the absence of a credible, mainstream national political challenge to neo-liberalism then trade union and community struggles will remain constrained by sectionalism and localism, and those left groups who base their political perspectives on these struiggles are doomed to a treadmill of chasing one campaign after another while building nothing significant.

What we urgently need to do is build a political vision of an alternative to neo-liberalism, that popularises economic alternatives to the market, and promotes the ideals of social justice and equality. If it is to be effective this must be wider than the activist left, and must connect with the much wider layer who wish there to be a social democratic government – which of course includes the trade unions. Tragically, even the proposed left contender for the leadership of the Labour Party last year did not appear as a credible alternative Prime Minister, which meant that he got little support among the affiliated unions and MPs.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Are the political conditions more favourable for the rebirth of the left in Germany or England? Are trade unions struggles in Germany or Britain more likely to connect with a national mood that social justice is achievable?

In truth the left in England have largely squandered an opportunity, where there was a real crisis in social democracy that coincided with a mass movement against imperialist war. The resulting space simply couldn’t be and cannot be filled with politics derived from “Leninism”, however this is dressed up as different flavours of “united front”. The gap between that set of politics and the potential audience is too large. The opportunity that is perhaps still just within our fingers’ grasp is to start to build a radical but pragmatic alternative – an alternative that allows millions to believe that a better world is not only possible, but is also credible and achievable.

Had this from Hugo Blanco the Peruvian ecosocialist and editor of Lucha Indigena, his son Oscar who lives near Bristol has translated but is far too modest,!  My Spanish is a few words here and there but lets call ’selva’ rainforest….

Hi Derek,
 
I have translated dad’d article. I hope you can use it somehow. I find it a bit difficult to translate stuff so you should probably have a read through it and make it into a moe powerful message in English. I have very much kept the original structure and that may not be the best.
 
Oscar Berglund

Hugo Blanco - August 2008