Spirit of Eureka shares below two recent statements from the International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) on recent US provocations and aggression against Iran. Spirit of Eureka is an affiliate member of ILPS, an international alliance of anti-imperialist organisations, and a founding member of the ILPS-Australia Chapter.

TRUMP COMMITS MULTIPLE MURDER IN LINE WITH US IMPERIALIST TERRORISM

By Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson Emeritus, International League of Peoples’ Struggle
January 4, 2020

By ordering the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and the Iranian and Iraqi officials accompanying him at the Baghdad airport, US President Trump has blatantly committed multiple murder as well as aggression against the sovereignty of Iraq and Iran in violation of international law as well as US law which prohibits such aggressive act without the prior declaration of war by authorization of the US Congress.

Trump himself has boastfully and arrogantly admitted the criminal act that he ordered the assassination of Soleimani and his Iranian and Iraqi companions in two cars. His crime of multiple murder is in line with the aggressive and terrorist character of US imperialism. As the No. 1 terrorist in world history and contemporary times, US imperialism has committed acts of aggression, destroying the lives and properties of millions of people, even without the formal declaration of war. Imperialist aggression is the worst kind of terrorism which the people suffer and abhor.

Read more: ILPS Statements on Recent US Aggression Against Iran

By John Bailey and Lindy Nolan

"Dozens of Elders travel 7,500km to front Dirty Origin Energy at its Shareholders Meeting in October"

On Thursday 5 December an awards ceremony took place in Sydney. The Scummos were awarded in nine different categories, with 34 nominees. They all had one thing in common. Nominees and winners were all corporations that put the need to maximise profits ahead of the needs of people and the environment.

The event provoked plenty of laughter. But there was a serious undertone. Nominees’ profits are achieved by exploitation of people and the environment we depend on for survival.

Read more: Grand Scummos and the smell of smoke

by Dr Binoy Kampmark

Despite the Internet, connectivity, and linking technologies, distance has not shrunk the Australian sense of self, an often provincial appraisal of the world seen in slow motion and stills.  Whether it’s the “flower revolution” or Michel Foucault, trends and ideas are often delayed, and seem almost cutely anachronistic by the time they make landfall down under.  Wedded to the insatiable urge to reap, rent and remove from the earth, and you have the ultimate myopic: Australia, the exceptional country, outside the stream of history and, dare it be said, the inconveniences of science.

With some 11,000 scientists warning that planet Earth “clearly and unequivocally faces a climate emergency”, some sense of it was registered on the Australian political scene, if only barely.  The “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” published in BioScience does not shy away from the language of catastrophe and emergency.  “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations… we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament.”  Climate change had not merely arrived but bulldozed itself into recognition, “accelerating faster than many scientists expected.”

Read more: Incinerating Logic: Bush Fires and Climate Change in Australia

by Professor Clinton Fernandes, UNSW Canberra.

MUA Hall, 46-54 Ireland St, West Melbourne.

28 November 2019

15 minutes. 15 minutes is all it took, and the effect has reverberated through Australian history 165 years later. Up to 40 miners were killed in the assault on the Eureka stockade, along with one officer and four soldiers.

The Eureka rebellion has become a formative event in the national mythology. For some, it’s a democratic uprising against imperial authority. For organized workers, it’s the first great event in the emergence of the labour movement. For others, it’s a tax revolt by small business. But however we interpret it, it’s clear that it was about class. As David Hosking sings in “Backbone River”, “You're put in your place while [another group] wins the race without running … So at Bakery Hill, they said it's either be killed or be mastered.”

It’s a mistake to think the people in Ballarat in the 1850s were more independent minded than Australians are today. One future Conservative prime minister of Great Britain was “aghast” at the “submissiveness” he sometimes encountered on the goldfields. The legend of the independent, free-thinking Australian mind puzzled observers, who saw plenty of evidence of “spineless timidity in the face of authority.”

Read more: Clinton Fernandes' Speech - 165th Eureka Anniversary