25 January 2007

Links To


What are links to Al Qaeda? Nobody knows. The accusation is kept as vague as possible. It is not a charge, made in a court of law. It comes from no due process, and does not lead in that direction. It creates an expectation that other links will soon be treated in this way. And then all your political links will have to pass approval by the hooded accusers of the USA. And if your links don’t pass, you can end up in Guantanamo, or some other place without even a name.

On this
Communist University distribution, links are given nearly every day. In total there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of them. There are no links to Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda does not exist in the real world. But if the hooded accusers of the USA want to find something to call such a link, they can do it, even if it is not there. Nobody is safe.

It is good that the South African Communist Party has quickly come to the defence of the two South African Dockrat men who have been picked on by the anonymous listers of the USA, who are in fact quite likely to be outsourced employees of KPMG or some other accounting consultancy with an inside track to tenders from the Langley, Virginia headquarters of the CIA. See the SACP’s statement linked below.

The links to the COSATU film work very well indeed. With the help of Malapati Productions and others, COSATU has thereby created a new benchmark in the publishing of films. Its one-hour documentary goes out in sufficient quality in four parts. After some initial “buffering”, it can be watched while it downloads. When it has finished playing, it can be saved instantly because at that stage it is already in your PC in the form of a temporary file. Once you have the files in your PC you can reproduce them locally via flash drives or on CD. They play on the near-universal and free
Windows Media software.

The half-hour or one-hour political documentary is a long-standing format. Thousands of such films have been produced over many decades, many of them first class. New ones are being produced all the time. But it has always been a problem to distribute them and to get them shown and discussed. Now we have an easy standard way of propagating such films. If you have not already tried the links to the COSATU 9th Congress film, please do so below.

One of the people involved in the development of this benchmark has been Shafiur Rahman, often mentioned here as one of the founders of the electronic CU. The COSATU film that you can download today is “hosted” in his Internet space.

Comrade Shafiur, together with some other comrades, has now made a film himself. It is about the garment workers of Bangladesh and is called Bostrobalikala. The Bangladeshi garment industry has sprung up in a few years by exploiting the labour of women, mainly young women – up to 2 million of them at this stage. They have to live and work in terrible conditions. See the link below for the very neat and fine web site of the film, which also has a link on it to an excerpt from the film (but in
Quick Time, which is a downloadable free software.)

Click on these links:

SACP on US labelling the two Dockrats as terrorists (510 words)

COSATU 9th Congress film (links to play and download)

Bostrobalikala (the web site of the film about the Bangladesh clothing industry)

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Post a Comment