People’s World readers offer their take on a number of recent articles featured in our pages. The comments below have been proofread and edited for length. Join the discussion on the PW website and on Facebook. Your thoughts could be the next to appear in this space.
Re: ‘Voting lesser evil’ is no way to think about elections
Beth Edelman says:
I agree with this article. My first brush with the “lesser evil” theory of elections was as a kid smitten with the progressive movement after WWII. I heard and experienced the powerful voice of progressives like Henry Wallace, Paul Robeson, and the Progressive Party. The political atmosphere was exhilarating. The result of the 1948 election, however, was an enormous let down; the Progressive Party did not live up to their own expectations and in a few years went out of business. A result of the 1948 election, participation in a third party amounted to the isolation of left and left-leaning people. Instead of being a cohesive part of a high water mark for democracy coming from WW II movements, the left was out of touch with the demands and practical alliances and lost influence.
Re: India’s Congress party asks Communists for support
Norman Markowitz says:
What is the Congress Party’s program today? Nehru was socialist-oriented, as was his daughter Indira Gandhi. Her son moved away from those policies decades ago, and Congress has never returned to them.
In the past, the BJP adopted anti-working class policies and were quickly voted out of office. Modi, though, is smarter, more ruthless, returning to the fascistic tactics of the RSS (one of whose members murdered Mohandas Gandhi).
But you can’t save Indian parliamentary democracy with conservative, a.k.a. “neoliberal” policies, since those were the policies which brought Modi and the present ultra-right BJP government to power in the first place.
Hopefully, Congress will come forward with a “neo-Nehru” socialist program which India’s Communists can wholeheartedly support and which will defeat Modi and the BJP.
Re: Hundreds march in Nashville against climate change
Amy Robinson says:
President Trump has created an environment in which citizens of the United States, as well as the international community, view the horror of climate change in a skewed and incorrect perspective. In this article, it says Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord emboldened the mindset of blindness regarding climate change. In fact, the article continues to acknowledge the lack of federal recognition that involves the reality of climate change, and how indigenous people are one of the few communities within this nation that are making any sort of movement to change the situation. It is appalling that those who run this government refuse to accept the notion of this largely human-caused catastrophe.
This article articulates how, while indigenous people have recognized climate change for far longer than most of the Western world, they are able to have a lesser impact than before due to President Trump’s decisions. And yet, they still strive to sustain the planet which, in turn, sustains all of humanity. These groups, only days following Trump reneging on America’s role in the struggle against climate change (which the Paris Accord was aiming to do), came together and protested against this decision, not only in the United States but also in Europe.
In fact, the protesters, even if not so certified legally, can be considered environmental advocates, and their positions embody the concept of environmental advocacy. The fact that indigenous people have aligned themselves against something that could be destroying our world is the epitome of how they utilize traditional ecological knowledge in order to better the land that supports them. As the article states, indigenous individuals, although being consistently oppressed by the federal government, continue to rely on their education and the fact that they, not the colonizers (largely ancestrally-linked to our current governmental leaders), have been able to create a world that is both helping and receiving help from its people.
Re: The Russian Revolutions: 1905 and 1917
Mariana Leal Ferreira says:
I never realized the Russian Revolution could, in many ways, be a part of of the history of the United States. Ethnic cleansing against Jews was going on 100 years ago in Russia by the czarists; now we have the president’s travel ban against Muslims, the idea of a wall to keep out “Mexicans,” a tax plan for the wealthy, deregulation of everything, and destruction of anything Obama created. This article is a must-read for all of us to understand where some of the administration’s ideas come from.
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