We all possess a history – both familiar and personal. Mine is a mixture of working-class slums, Socialist Britain, and British imperialistic tendencies (I am part Irish and Chinese). Of course, I am not an American, and I am not Black – at least in the conventional sense – although in the 1980s people like myself were often referred to by other Black people as being “politically Black”. I have also had good relationships with Vietnamese visitors to the UK (the victims of US militarism and their eventual conquerors)- so you can imagine my surprise when I realised Chinese and Vietnamese often do not “get on”. This is an attitude I expect regarding Japanese and Chinese people, etc. And this is just me!
The comedy duo – “Laurel and Hardy” (Stan Laurel being from the UK) still make millions of people laugh all the time. It would seem that like many people living in the Southern States, the family of Oliver Hardy were originally from England. I find the Confederacy to be a complex period of US history – often misrepresented by the over-simplistic prevailing narratives. It is as if the dominant narrative-writers want to hide something that was present in the South between 1861-1865 – but which is inconvenient to know today. My own view is that there was Revolutionary dialectics in operation that could have led the US in an entirely different direction. I find that this observation is just as unpopular with neo-Confederates as it is with the Federal government in Washington DC!
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 