38 Degrees Voting Poster in My Window

Yesterday the poster I ordered from the internet democracy organisation 38 Degrees finally arrived. As you probably know, the Tories have introduced legislation which they claim will stop electoral fraud by demanding that voters must have photo ID before they can cast their ballots. This could disenfranchise very many people, who don’t have driving licenses or passports, for example. The group has therefore produced a poster to make people aware of these laws and to encourage them to get the necessary ID. I’ve ordered one, and have put it up in one of my front windows, as you can see.

Don’t let the Tories steal your right to vote. Get the photo ID.

Two Russian Revolutionary Posters: Victory to the Workers and Peasants or Death Under Capitalism

As I’ve mentioned several times, this is the centenary year of the October/November Russian Revolution. A week or so ago I put up a few Communist era Soviet posters, which I felt still held an important for the contemporary, post-Communist world. They were against Fascism and war, with one in particular against the threat of nuclear holocaust. We now face the threat of a resurgent extreme Right in America and Europe, while Trump has brought us perilously close to a nuclear war with North Korea.

The two posters below come from the time of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

The text in the poster above talks about the workers and peasants arming themselves in order to defend their freedom against the power of the capitalists and the White Russians. The two panels at the bottom state that the power of the bourgeoisie is the power of death.

This poster shows a victorious worker, holding a banner proclaiming all power to the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, underneath which is the slogan ‘Or Death to the Capitalists’ on one side the page. On the other side is a caricature capitalist standing on top a prone worker, waving a banner proclaiming ‘All Power to the Capitalists’. Underneath this the legend reads ‘Or death under the feet of the capitalists’.

I very definitely do not believe in violent revolution, and don’t want British democracy overthrown by anyone, whether of the Right or the Left. But I’m putting these posters up as they are acutely relevant to Britain in the Present.

This government is killing people for the benefit of the rich. On Tuesday Mike blogged about a report by the Trussell Trust that revealed that the roll out of Universal Credit in more districts had resulted in a thirty per cent increase in people using food banks. Between April and September of this year, 2017, foodbanks handed out 586,907 emergency food parcels, which constitutes a 13 per cent rise on the figures for the same period last year. In those areas where Universal Credit has been implemented for six months or more, the number of people using them has risen by 30 per cent.

Mike commented on the way IDS had appeared on the Beeb today, to comment on the misbehaviour of Priti Patel and Boris Johnson without anyone commenting on his crimes against the British people. He concluded

Thousands of people have died. Remember that, whenever you see this man.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/11/07/this-should-be-the-proof-we-need-that-tory-universal-credit-is-starving-british-families/

Absolutely. As in the Russian revolutionary posters above, this government is killing people for the benefit of the rich and big business. It is destroying the welfare state to create bigger profits for industry, an impoverished, crushed workforce prepared to work for starvation wages, and immense tax cuts for the wealthy 25 per cent of the population.

The solution is not armed revolution, but organisation. We just need to keep campaigning, putting pressure on this weak and wobbly government and its blustering, corrupt and incompetent leader, and force them out. And then keep them out.

Before the party of Thatcher, David Cameron and Theresa May murder thousands more people through IDS’ policies.

Two Soviet Anti-Fascism Posters

The threat of Fascism in the years leading up to the Second World War and the Nazi invasion of the USSR also brought forth a number of propaganda posters from the Communist authorities. Several of these are collected in the book The Soviet Political Poster 1917-1987. Most of these are very much of their time, intended to encourage and strengthen the Soviet people’s resistance to the invaders.

But I thought I’d select a couple to put up here, because their message, like that of the anti-war posters I discussed in my last post, has become intensely relevant yet again. Fascist regimes have seized power in Europe. There are genuine Nazis in the coalition governing the Ukraine, while the Hungarian government is also intensely nationalistic and anti-Semitic. And in the former Czech republic many of the parties are bitterly anti-Roma, and, like the Hungarian government to their south, anti-Islam.

In Germany the Nazi Alternative Fuer Deutschland has entered the German parliament, while the Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France has been challenging the last few French presidential elections. And in America there’s the Alt-Right propping up Donald Trump’s government, led by Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, and including figures like Milo Yiannopolis and Katie Hopkins.

All promise their countries’ citizens a future of prosperity and stability, if they purge the country of migrants from the Developing world, Blacks, Jews, Muslims and Roma. And women are to be encouraged to give up their careers, and return to the home and raising children.

The poster below shows the reality behind the Fascist rhetoric. It shows a grieving woman and child while Nazi forces goose-step around them.

The slogan translates at

Fascism spells hunger
Fascism spells terror
Fascism spells war.

I realise this is another piece of historical hypocrisy, as Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture was partly achieved through the creation of an artificial famine which killed millions of Soviet citizens. In Ukraine, the Holodomor, as this mass genocide is known, killed 8 million people. It created an atmosphere of bitter hostility to the Soviet state, which resulted in many Ukrainians greeting the invading Germans as liberators. In fact, the Nazis were anything but, and swiftly started persecuting the Ukrainians as ‘subhuman’ Slavs.

But apart from the horrors of Stalin’s Russia, the poster does show the reality of Fascism: poverty, terror and war for its victims and ordinary people at the bottom of the Fascist hierarchy.

The poster below is an attack on Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in breach of the Nazi-Soviet pact. This treaty divided up eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR. Stalin was taken by surprise by the Nazi invasion. The German forces were able to advance hundreds of miles into the USSR in a very short time because for a few days Stalin forbade his armed forces to shoot back. Eventually Stalin recovered, and pushed the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. Historians have said that it was the Red Army that broke back of the Wehrmacht. They’re the reason why we don’t have a Europe dominated by the Third Reich today, with Jews and Gypsies extinct, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians cleansed from a large section of their homelands, and the survivors degraded to a poor, uneducated class of peasant producers raising food for their Aryan masters.

The poster shows Hitler, mask now fallen off, bursting through the Molotov-Soviet pact, being skewered by the bayonet of a squaddie from the Red Army. I put it up because I thought how great something like this would look if you just replaced Hitler with Richard Spencer.

Three Soviet Anti-War Posters

I found these three posters in the art book, The Soviet Political Poster 1917-1987 and was struck by their continued relevance to events today. The book is a collection of Soviet political posters from the Bolshevik coup of 1917 to the time the book was published in the mid-1980s, taken from the Lenin library. In many ways it’s an art-historical chronicle of the great events that shaped the Soviet Union, from the Revolution, through the Civil War, collectivisation and industrialisation, the Nazi invasion, nuclear tensions of the Cold War, Gagarin’s epoch-making spaceflight and then on to the years of stagnation under Brezhnev.

Two of the posters below were part of a number produced to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which the Russians called the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Their message against war is simple and eternal, using the images of a woman and child in one, and a small child in the other, to get the message across.

The Russian behind the little girl reads simply ‘Don’t Need War’.

The slogan in this poster says ‘Not For Wars’.

This last poster is less anti-war, than anti-nuclear testing. Nevertheless, it was painted in 1958 during the Cold War, when the West and the Communist bloc faced each other amid an intense atmosphere of distrust and hostility, and it seemed that nuclear Armageddon could come at any moment. This is the background to the formation of groups in the West like CND. The Russian is a simple cry of ‘No!’

I realise that there’s an element of hypocrisy in these posters, as the Soviet Union was a military superpower, which used its armed forces to dominate its satellites in eastern Europe, and was intent on developing its own nuclear arsenal.

But I wanted to put these images up because of their powerful message now, when our political leaders seem to be intent on driving us towards another useless, dangerous Cold War with Russia, and Trump and Kim Jong-Un, the madman in charge of North Korea, have been threatening each other with their nuclear and conventional weapons over in the Pacific.

In the case of Kim Jong-In, he’s simply the latest scion of a family of brutal ‘Stalinist’ dictators, who hang on to power through terror and mass arrest. In the case of Trump and the western politicians, the new Cold War is another attempt to isolate and weaken Russia on the geopolitical stage, provide a reason for giving more massive government contracts to the arms manufacturers, and in the case of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, divert attention away from their own very corrupt dealings with Putin’s Russia abroad, and Wall Street and big business at home.

America’s wars in the Middle East are killing hundreds of thousands, and have displaced many millions more. They have reduced secular Arab nations to ruins, and created legions of Islamist militants and sectarian death squads, who kill, maim, butcher and enslave in their turn. And now Trump seems intent on forcing some kind of confrontation with Iran.

And so we still need to hear these posters’ vital message, whatever we think of Russia’s Communist past.

During the Cold War of the 1980s, Sting sang ‘Do the Russians love their children too?’ The answer from these posters is clearly ‘Yes’. Just as the Arabs and Iranians do.

No more imperialism.

No more war.

Anti-Kipper Poster on London Lamp Post

I found this poster placard against UKIP canvassers on the SlatUKIP page. It’s really quite hilarious, especially as it requests them not to come to the area because ‘they’re kind of weird’.

If you can’t read it, the text says

You guys are kind of weird. Maybe it’s Nigel’s smoking jacket, or the time you proposed that all taxi drivers should have to wear a uniform. Or the crazy people that your party seems to attract. Whatever. Something’s not right. So beat it.

I have no doubt that after this, the Kippers will be fulminating about no-go areas in which patriotic White Britons dare not enter, and how the Left-wing opposition that maligns them as Fascists is itself deeply undemocratic for not allowing them their democratic right to go around stirring up racial tension, and demanding that women and the proles should be put in their place and like it.

It’s still funny though.