Alexei Sayle

Israel's freedom of action is not only due to American tolerance and UK support. It is also a tribute to the success of Israel's own propaganda. A huge effort and very considerable resources are devoted to putting Israel's case to the world. Israel has managed to brain-wash a large part of the world into believing that it is a victim of Palestinian terrorism, whereas the truth is that Israel's own state terrorism -- its targeted assassinations, armed incursions, land theft, massacres and cruel siege of the Palestinians -- has been far more lethal than anything the Palestinians have ever managed to do themselves.

The record of the last eight years shows that between 200 and 300 Palestinians have been killed by Israel for every Israeli victim of Palestinian violence.

On a visit to President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris last week, Tzipi Livni did not hesitate to declare that Israel was being attacked by Hamas?s rockets because it was "defending the values of the free world."

:PDT_Xtremez_42:

Vigil is held for Gaza
Jan 8 2009
by Mary Murtagh, Liverpool Echo

http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/ar.../12467762.jpeg

A CANDLELIT vigil for peace was held in Liverpool city centre last night.

The event on Church Street, which was attended by around 80 people, was organised by Liverpool Friends of Palestine and Merseyside Stop the War Coalition.

Peter Reilly, of Liverpool Friends of Palestine, said: ?People are frustrated about what is going on in Gaza.?

Source: Liverpool Echo

Alexei Sayle fondly recalls his Liverpool roots
Apr 22 2009
by Luke Traynor, Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL comic Alexei Sayle last night spoke of his experience growing up in the city, during the first of this year?s university lectures.

The 56-year-old delivered an address to a packed Liverpool Philharmonic Hall entitled, Stalin Ate My Homework: Growing Up in the radical environment of Liverpool.

The Anfield-born author and actor spoke of his childhood and being brought up in a family with Communist values. He said: ?I grew up in a particularly Communist environment, in that my parents told me it was Lenin who came down the chimney at Christmas.?

Sayle also spoke of his rebellious youth as a member of the Merseyside Marxist Leninist Group, selling a newspaper called The Worker on the streets of Liverpool.

And he touched upon trips with his parents through the ?swingdoor? into Eastern Europe.

The comic described his memory of how the city?s beautiful pubs and buildings were ?destroyed overnight? in the huge redevelopment of Liverpool.

Recalling the people?s relocation from their homes to ?terrible flats and estates?, he added: ?This forced rehousing and destruction of this chaotic but enthrallingly beautiful city burns me to this day.?

Source: Liverpool Daily Post

I went to see him last night.

It was a good turn out - a full house mainly - just a few odd seats left.
He gave an interesting and entertaining talk.

May 3, 2009

20 years on: Alexei Sayle

I felt foolish about my left-wing ideals when the Berlin Wall came down, admits Alexei Sayle

As the son of communist revolutionaries, I am used to having a different response to everybody else in the course of Earth-shattering incidents.

During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 ? which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war ? our version of events was that it was all a plan by the Soviet Union to bounce the US into agreeing to never again attempt to invade Cuba, and to force Americans to remove their nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Russians simply dismantling some rockets they didn?t want to put into Cuba anyway.

So, throughout those two frantic weeks while everybody else was running around weeping, digging air-raid shelters, engaging in extermination-of-the-race sex or holding candlelit vigils, I ? 10 years old ? was strolling through the centre of Liverpool, whistling, grinning and giving everyone the thumbs-up sign.

Seven years later, when the Americans put a man on the moon, our family was so angry that they?d beaten the Russians that we didn?t even bother to watch the TV along with more or less the rest of the world, but instead ostentatiously went shopping.

I looked up my diary entry for November 9, 1989, the day the crossings in the Berlin Wall were opened: it says that I went for a walk to Edgware Road, caught the No 10 bus home, and went out for dinner in the evening at somebody?s house in Islington. There is no mention of the implosion of the economic and philosophical system that my parents fought for all their lives and which to a great extent formed my own view of the world. The foundations of our global outlook crashed along with the wall. But, though it is not mentioned in my diary, I do recall very clearly the emotion I felt on seeing those images of men with mullets hacking at the wall: I felt foolish.

By 1989 I was no longer any kind of communist, but as I watched the pictures from East Germany, I realised there was still a part of me that had hung onto the ridiculous idea that there was a kind of equilibrium between East and West: that for every good thing in capitalist society ? for instance, material wealth or free speech ? there existed an equal benefit in communist countries, such as a universal safety net or a greater sense of communal life.

It was only when news of the true state of affairs in Eastern Europe began to emerge ? the corruption, the constant snooping, the crime, the chaos and inefficiency, the endemic racism ? that I realised my hopes that somehow, as Gorbachev had planned, communism could be reformed and the best of the system preserved, were idiotic. There was no best.

I felt stupid and guilty watching the happy Ossis [East Germans] streaming through Checkpoint Charlie, because I realised that I?d fallen into the trap that so many on the left constantly fall into.

The good side of radicals, progressives, liberals is that they wish for a better, fairer world and they try to speak for those whose voices are trampled by governments and big business. The bad side of these positivist tendencies is that there is an inclination for us to turn a blind eye to the imperfections of any society or organisation that asserts that it?s fighting for the rights of the oppressed.

We want to think that we are on the side of goodness and justice, and can?t cope with the moral ambiguities that attend most human affairs. Thus we can find ourselves defending despots, terrifying terrorist groups and plain madmen because they said they were socialists or anti-imperialist or just poor, and we so wanted to believe them, simply because their struggle had begun with a justified impulse.

Yet, while realising that I had not been clear-sighted enough over the catastrophic Soviet experiment, I still did not want to make the journey that so many writers, entertainers and journalists have made, that journey from wild-eyed lefty to curmudgeonly old rightist.

So in middle age I continue to campaign for any number of doomed radical causes: justice for the Palestinian people, animal rights, an end to vivisection, prison reform. But the only way I can make amends for my previous myopia is to become obsessive in trying never to ignore the deficiencies of my own argument, to never glorify the people I am fighting for ? to not assume that just because they are oppressed they are intrinsically noble (why would they be?) ? and to keep in the back of my mind the idea that I could always be wrong.

All this makes me a highly ineffective campaigner. Those whose causes I support sigh when I turn up at a rally or press conference, and they would much rather have me on the other side, since I?m constantly saying confusing things and agreeing with my opponent. But I hope in the end it is more important to do that than to resort to bombast and sloganising, and when I falter I always keep at the front of my mind the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima ? the corruption of the best is the worst.

Source: Times Online