Barometer of Political Crisis
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-08-06Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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QUESTION: What is the collective noun to describe an assembly of 2,000 or 80 parasites, exploiters and compromising labour bureaucrats?
ANSWER: A ing.
They came [these parastites etc]; they saw; and then, for the most part, they rushed off home to sort out the political and social problems they faced in their own countries.
Those of the assembled rulers, that is, who were not overthrown during the ceremony. $ 'Undoubtedly for the bourgeois press the most poignant story of the wedding was the overthrow of President Dawda Jawara of Gambia, a man who the 'Daily Express' says is "the kind of democrat Africa needs"
Some of the leaders with whom he rubbed shoulders in the Cathedral, however, might well have been relieved to suffer the same fate, which would at least have released them from the crises they have to conWhile New Zealand premier Robert Muldoon was kneeling in prayer, thousands of his police were engaged, unsuccessfully, in a physical battle with anti-apartheid demonstrators, whose success in stopping one of the matches of the Springboks' rugby tour, has called the whole authority of the right wing government and the police into question.
Muldoon's Australasian neighbour, Malcolm Fraser, nearly didn't make it to the wedding at all as a result of the sharpening wage struggle, which has placed his government under a new threat.
And there were some notable absentees who really didn't make it. The last minute panic withdrawal of the King and Queen of Spain - interpreted by the British capitalist class as an insult about on a par with the French Dauphin's gift of tennis bails to King Henry V - was the result of the extremely delicate political situation which has existed in Spain since the coup attempt of February 23.
Fascist
With fascist forces inside and outside the army growing in strength and confidence, Spain's 'democratic' government took advantage of the Gibraltar honeymoon to stage a public nationalist gesture designed to pull the rug from under the feet of the pure fascist right and the most pro-coup sections of the military.
Another absentee, President Ronald Reagan, was too busy twisting the last few Democratic arms so as to ensure the passage of his tax cut proposals designed to help alleviate the suffering of the rich in the world's richest country.
Jawara