Solidarity 110, 19 April 2007

By Mark Osborn John Pilger warns British citizens not to sit by while the government leads us all towards a crisis over Iran (Guardian 13 February also “Iran: a war is coming”, in New Statesman 1 February). In the process he gives us a good example of how the degenerate left gets it all so badly wrong. His material on Iran has these features: • The real enemy is the US: “The one piece of ‘solid evidence’ is the threat posed by the United States” with its “facile concerns for democracy.” “Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one”. Apparently: “In...

Robin Blackburn, author of ‘The overthrow of Colonial Slavery’ (VERSO, 1988) talked to Martin Thomas Q. About the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, you wrote: “Britain's rulers were being asked to decide the abolition question at an extraordinary time... Britain’s oligarchy had a world to win if they could pull through — and a kingdom to lose if they could not”. So it was not just a matter of gradual moral improvement making Britain eventually see the wisdom of abolishing an ancient evil. Moreover, it was in large part not an ancient evil but a comparatively new one. The Atlantic...

By Sofie Buckland After refusing to debate at the Feminist Fightback conference organised by socialist feminist students last year , the feminist anti-porn group Object have continued their campaign of trying to silence anti-censorship feminist voices. In a press release last week, Object claim that Ladyfest, the feminist non-profit DIY festival, is in fact more like a “porn fest” — the extremely thin evidence being a claim that Ladyfest Leeds held a pole-dancing benefit for the event, something that the organisers flatly deny. Ladyfest Leeds, which took place over 14-15 April, also held a...