Fire Under The Sun

          I finished Fire Under The Sun last night. It's a very harrowing account of the thirty plus years spent by a Tibetan monk called Palden Gyatso in Chinese jails being "re-educated". Horrific really. Re-education in Chinese jails is something I read an account of earlier in the year. That time it was a British radio operator caught when the Chinese first invaded Tibet. But what happened to him was a picnic compared to what was dished out to the Tibetan monk.

          The west is currently trying to crawl up the arse of the Chinese as fast as possible these days of course, but the Chinese empire will collapse at some point as surely as the Russian one did in 1989. Remember how it seemed that the Soviet Union would go on forever? Well, it didn't.

           To bring a bit of cod Marxism in here, the dictatorship of the party is not the same as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The latter is supposed to eventually lead to the dissolution of the state, but the dictatorship of the party just sets up another thesis. Then we have a antithesis before we have synthesis again.

           I learnt that at school from a brilliant history teacher called Paddy Welsh, who was visiting Dublin in 1916 at Easter. What I thought of the history education I got at university is detailed in Alma Mater.

            Anyway, the communist party in China is in the same boat as the one in the Soviet Union. The Chinese empire will collapse due to its internal contradictions. First of all, it's not communist, run by a so called communist party, and is riddled with corruption. It will got the same way as the Kuomintang. All compounded things are subject to dissolution.

           The British empire, of course, collapsed from the end of the Second World War. Since then it has been increasingly pointless for Scotland to be part of a United Kingdom. The British state is only any good for the folk in London, the Home Counties and the aspirational, forelock tugging evil bourgeois. It's a shame when it splits it won't do so along the line of what used to be known as the Black Country, but the British state is funged and I expect it to break up sometime in my lifetime.

           Of course, independence is an illusion. Nothing exists independently. As someone with socialist leanings - now we are called social democrats, I think - I know that socialism cannot exist in one country (cf  the Soviet Union, China and Trotsky), but with globalisation I think there is a chance of improvement on a world wide scale eventually. Until then, I hope that Scotland can be like a light on the hill to at least the rest of the United Kingdom. No bedroom tax; no tuition fees; no Tory governments; and no free market economics as we have now.

          Marx did not expect socialism to come from peasant economies, by the way. You can't blame him for the Soviet Union or the basturns who are running China right now.