hauntedavenuetidalwave-blog

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Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 29 Nov. 2018

“I’ve been told that no one sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. Or the word ‘love’.” Billie holiday  “Holiday’s voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain. David Ritz The government has failed us; you can’t deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you’re walking around here singing We Shall Overcome, the government has failed us.…

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The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History-By Laurence Rees Public Affairs, 2025

We meet ordinary Germans who fell in line with a regime that promised them peace and prosperity. Interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, some still looked back wistfully to the days before the war. “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets,” recalled Erna Krantz from Bavaria. “There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”. Laurence Rees The…

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How to Spot a Fascist: Umberto Eco Harvill Secker Paperback – 13 Aug. 2020 Alastair McEwen (Translator), Richard Dixon (Translator)

 “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.” Leon Trotsky, in ” Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, “ “It would be so much easier for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying “I want to…

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Letter to Deutsche Bank in protest at its termination of publisher Mehring Verlag’s account

I want to condemn in the strongest terms possible the action of your bank to terminate the account of Mehring Verlag and the managing director’s private account. This act of censorship is aimed at sabotaging Mehring Verlag’s work and impeding the distribution of its books. No other reasonable explanation can be found. Mehring Verlag and its predecessor have maintained an account with Postbank,…

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The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny Laura Bates Simon & Schuster, £20, pp320

“We are hurtling towards a seismic shift in terms of really every aspect of our society is on the brink of being transformed by emerging technologies and, in particular, artificial intelligence.” Laura Bates “I’d also like to live in a world in which women can do whatever they want, without fear of what men might do to them. But we don’t live in that world. Our present reality demands that both…

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Trotsky in Exile by Peter Weiss- Atheneum-Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1972

Horatio, I am dead, Thou livest, report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2 “But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought…

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Lost Boys

Lost Boys by James Bloodworth (Atlantic Books, £14.99).

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Lost Boys by James Bloodworth (Atlantic Books, £14.99).

‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’  Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here “A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not…

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Diary of a Nobody

In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website. This year, I hope to expand the website…

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A Rebel's Guide to Malcolm X by Antony Hamilton, Paperback – 29 Sept. 2016, Bookmarks Publication

“The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, ‘donate’ self-rule to a colony and that the application of some element of force might be necessary.” FR Kankam-Boadu “If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom.” WEB Du Bois “Every Negro…

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Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024.

“Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements.” Richard Seymour “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.” Leon Trotsky,…

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A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition (Palgrave Studies in Utopianism) by James Crossley 22 Jan. 2025

I think that the celebration of 1640—and especially of 1649—did something for the Party in giving it confidence in a non-gradualist tradition to an extent that it is difficult for the younger generation perhaps to realise. Christopher Hill “Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he…

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Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries- Verso-Hardcover – 20 Sept. 2016-

“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” Walter Benjamin “A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my…

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Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War by Ash Sarkar, published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). 2025

“I’m literally a communist, you idiot.” Ash Sarkar If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought based on his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method…

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George Orwell and the "Marxist Left"

“Who Controls the Present Controls the Past… George Orwell 1984 “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” George Orwell 1984 “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Animal Farm “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell In the most recent edition of The Orwell Society Journal,…

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Hitler’s People- The faces of the Third Reich 624pp. Allen Lane. £35. Richard J. Evans

 “Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”. Leon Trotsky “For the first thirty years of his life, Adolf Hitler was a nobody. Here lies the utterly compelling paradox. Richard Evans “Because I knew better, I was disturbed from the start by the one-sided delegation of blame on German industry, banks,…

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Alex James: Life Of A Football Legend, by John Harding, 16.99. Empire Publications 2024

The term “Arsenal legend” is used so frequently in the modern era that it can lose all its meaning or aura. But in the case of Alex James, it is an apt phrase. Even the legendary Matt Busby thought he was one of the all-time greats, and the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly called him a “genius” and a “nightmare to play against”. The first thing that comes to mind when reading this book is…