Comrade Osborne and the Little Red Book
The chancellor’s autumn statement and McDonnell’s quoting Mao! It’s a joke. A jest. A jolly jape to illustrate just how George is selling off our assets to global profiteers and the Chinese state is buying up the things which we hold dear while the media says... nothing a conspiracy of silence on illiterate economics and structural state violence against the vulnerable and needy the sick, the weak, the poor while under Georgie-boy’s agenda those who have will get still more. So, a quote from Mao. It’s theatre. Or is it thoughtcrime? Watch the spin from a free press owned by powerful men who say the sky is falling in and the world is surely ending and the only thing it took was to point at a pantomime villain and quote from Chairman Mao’s little red book. Because the Mail has wet its knickers The Sun’s gone apoplectic they see the thin end of a fat red wedge of Marxist dialectic. There’s communists in Westminster! The left are going loony! Corbyn causes cancer! He’s a Trotskyist! A Moonie! He hates you and your children! He’s dangerous, and weird! If Labour get their hands on power they’ll make you all grow beards and call your children Karl and Castro, Leon, Che, and Vladimir, while your hope dies in collectives and your lives are lived in fear! Hysteria and hyperbole employed with one sole aim to solidify the status quo fix the rules, and rig the game while the ground is sold beneath our feet our future swept away and airstrip one is put in hock while capital makes hay. And when your children ask who did this? and when, and why, and how remember the chancellor’s autumn statement and McDonnell, quoting Mao. How to Get Everything You Ever Wanted 1. Invent a war. Something bloody and fratricidal. Lose an uncle to barrel bombs a brother to secret police. 2. Three years in, flee. Pack only what you can carry: clothes, smartphone, children, cash. Slip away at night, in silence. 3. Take your leave of the flat, bakery, office, rubble-filled streets where the kids once ran shell of the cafe where old men drank qahwa, played sheesh beesh. 4. Cross a border to camps, to life on hold. Everyone knows someone who’s gone before them, dreaming of better. Here there is only the absence of war. It’s not enough. 5. Moving is what you do. Railway tracks, verges, fields. Rest in olive groves, wake in orchards. One foot in front of the other over and over and over. 6. The world is cold-eyed border guards sandwiches and blankets. You never know what is coming. One day, open hand. Another, fist. 7. You learn the words you need in a new language. Arbeit. Ja. Nein. Thank you. Please. The smile that shows you know to be grateful. 8. Evenings you sit at the kitchen table talk to friends in cities far away about places that have gone about old men who drank qahwa played sheesh beesh. 9. At night you dream of rubble, and of home. Let Us Pretend Let us pretend that we haven’t been this way before too recently and too often that this is the way forward that it is the road to the peace which eluded you when you sent planes and tanks and men into Lebanon, Ramallah, Jenin, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. Let us pretend that this time will be different that this time will be worth it that you can tot up the lives of dead children and collateral families and declare victory that security can be measured in flattened houses burials and tears. And let us pretend that when you build settlements and walls and criss-cross the country with roads and stitch it with checkpoints and cut down olive groves and throw people from their homes let us pretend then that the only terrorism in town is the anger of young men who build rockets they can barely aim who have no hope, who see their homeland dismembered before them. Let us pretend that this tit for tat this tit for bloody tat is the only way is the legacy you will leave your children and your children’s children their children and their children’s children Let us pretend there can be no hope that milk and honey cannot be shared that Israeli and Palestinian can never live together, laugh together, love together two flags flutter together let us press our face to the cross-hairs and close our eyes and stop up our ears and still our beating hearts and let us pretend, Bibi, let us pretend. (For more from this poet please visit-stevepottinger.co.uk/news/)
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