Weekly Shaarli
Week 30 (July 21, 2014)
I've never heard of the "National Communist Front" before. I started reading this interview assuming it was some sort of fascist "communist" party, but the interviewee was both informative and came across as rather reasonable (and they explicitly denounced so-called nationalist "communist" groups like national Bolshevism)
This article reports that Öcalan, the founder of PKK, has moved towards anarchism while in prison (after reading Murray Bookchin, apparently)... but I'm still getting a pretty strong Marxist-Leninst cult vibe from their website (http://www.pkkonline.com/en/).
Here's a quote from a 2012 interview with members of the Kurdistan Anarchist Forum:
"We are aware that Ocalan’s ideas have changed since he has been in prison. But we are not very optimistic about these changes. Also these changes have not, at least for the time being, been reflected in practice or organisationally in the PKK and PJAK. It is certainly true that the PKK has got many followers among the Kurdish people and have a big impact on Kurdish mass movements. They also talk about federalism. But none of this makes them in any way Anarchist organisations, nor does it make them compatible with Anarchism. They are, in fact, as far as one can get from Anarchists and Anarchism because Ocalan, first has not given up his authority and dominance over the mass movement, and second, they are still advocating nationalism and patriotism."
Still, anyone who would defy Turkish borders in order to resist ISIS sounds okay to me.
This Methodist pastor burned himself to death in the parking lot of a Grand Saline, Texas, shopping center last month. In his suicide letter he wrote, "I will soon be 80 years old, and my heart is broken over this. America (and Grand Saline prominently) have never really repented for the atrocities of slavery and its aftermath."
A local paper talked to Larry Compton, the chief overseer I mean chief of police in Grand Saline: "Compton said the preacher’s death disturbed him. He added that while Grand Saline might once have been racially divided, today it is a community of acceptance. 'It might have been that way in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s like a lot of places, but today we are a community of different ethnicities and racial makeups,' he said." [1]