ON THE WSWS
Donate to
the WSWS!

News Feed
Contact the
WSWS
Editorial Board
New Today
News & Analysis
Workers Struggles
Arts Review
History
Science
Polemics
Philosophy
Correspondence
Archive
About WSWS
About the ICFI
Help
Books Online

OTHER
LANGUAGES
German
French
Italian
Russian
Polish
Czech
Serbo-Croatian
Spanish
Portuguese
Turkish
Sinhala-
Tamil
Indonesian

LEAFLETS
Download in
PDF format

WSWS : Correspondence

Letters from our readers

28 May 2008

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

The following is a selection of recent letters sent to the World Socialist Web Site.

On “US Secretary of State Rice defends torture at Google event”

Great read. I am an American. Americans do not torture. These baby-killing war criminals must be brought to trial. We need an initiative in Europe to first issue arrest warrants for the Bush gang when they leave office and lose their immunity. This will cut down their travel time. Then we need to go after the Swiss and other offshore bank accounts these war profiteering thugs have amassed.

Please continue in this effort. We need to bring these heinous criminals to trial to set a precedent for future American leaders of what they might expect when they lie a country into war to enrich themselves and their friends.

Please help push the legal envelope for the good of everyone.

Sincerely,

MM

Beijing, China

24 May 2008

It may be too much to expect for Rice to stand trial as a war criminal in The Hague, but one can fervently hope that she is plagued by uncomfortable questions like this for the rest of her career. Most likely she too, like Henry Kissinger, will be obliged to take legal advice before traveling abroad.

CB

Amsterdam, Netherlands

24 May 2008

On “FBI files indict Bush, Cheney and Co. as war criminals”

Dear Sir,

Thank you for keeping the dirt out from under the rug. The country ought to be reeling in shame at so much ugliness being perpetrated to our fellow men. A patriot becomes an insurgent in the foreign press, if he resists foreign invaders. Who is the ugly one—the patriot or the invader, and which of the two deserves to be tortured?

Bush certainly is no Alexander the Great. He is only qualified as a leader of thugs, which there are more of in this country than I realized. I am particularly disgusted that our leader, who is a member of one of the more elite families, has such primitive instincts, that they hearken back to the Dark Ages. I fear for America and the world if this is the clarion call for every ugly creep and sadist in the world to bring out his whips and knives and go to town on his fellow men. It will be a slaughterhouse.

I thought that the huge military budget pays for the high-tech weapons, to keep human damage to a minimum. What are we doing with sticks, buckets and dogs if we intend to show the world that our way is the only way? Where are all the Christians with their self-satisfied opinions about who God loves and doesn’t care about, as if God could abhor his own creation? Into what abyss are we falling, and who needs to be exorcised before we all lose our needle on the spiritual compass?

Thank you for letting me rant after reading your article. I am grateful that you shine the light into our darkest national psycho closet and I am very, very sorry that it is so dark in there. I wish that my little penlight could do better, but I’ll never give up trying to get everybody out of that closet.

We need more authors such as you, to keep us honest with ourselves. Keeping quiet at times like these is a shameful thing to do, because it constitutes a passive form of consent, which by extension makes us active participants in this ugly torture script, whether we are hooded or not.

MT

Venice, California, USA

23 May 2008

On “Actors and Hollywood studios, networks far apart in negotiations”

[The author] has done a masterful job of illuminating the issues and pointing out the divisions between labor and management in the SAG negotiations now going on with the producers association.

As one who has worked with actors and members of all entertainment unions for a few years, and from all I hear, a strike seems inevitable. This according to members of SAG and other unions. Brad Pitt and his peers, I see by the worldwide production reports, are starting new films and don’t want to lose $20 million or so. Thus they remain aloof to the very issues that affect them and actors that make less—far less—than they do.

Thanks for standing up for actors in their time of need! Keep your penetrating eye and comments trained on what’s really happening in the world of entertainment.

DK

26 May 2008

Excellent article on the SAG negotiations and the spinelessness of the negotiators. If the creative community in Hollywood and elsewhere caved in during the writers’ strike, one cannot be surprised at the cringing subservience demonstrated by Alan Rosenberg and his “team.” The scaling back of the wages and benefits package is a case in point. As always happens, it seems, the union representatives are so terrified of the studios and AMPTP that they continually scale back on their demands and wind up with nothing. Less than nothing, because they have sold their self-respect to the entertainment conglomerates. How much longer can this go on?

I did not know about the “product” lines being added to scripts. This is just disgusting. But then, most American television productions and a large proportion of its cinema releases are just junk, anyway. Actors already have to cope with appearing in less-than-stellar vehicles. Adding insult to injury is requiring them to babble the names of products. And I suppose that the writers’ cave-in earlier on has no protection for the writer against having his/her dialogue littered with the names of junk food franchises and the like.

Thanks for writing an informed article on this battle. Actors are now learning that, apart from the tiny percentage of the famous and wealthy, they are just working people after all. Perhaps now they will awaken to the fact that they are held in equal contempt with factory workers by their corporate bosses. What a blow!

CZ

San Francisco, California, USA

23 May 2008

On “Sydney hospital nurses impose work bans: not enough beds for the mentally ill”

In the US, we have the prison industrial complex, where predominantly black and Latino males are targeted for prison incarceration. As one of the leading nations in inmate population, we are also known for financially capitalizing off the exploitation of our own inmates for meager slavery wages. Well, I was hoping you could further address the consequences said incarceration of mentally ill/impoverished people has for the Australian economic sector.

I thoroughly enjoy reading WSWS on a daily basis before I head off to join my students.

Thank you,

DL

California, USA

23 May 2008

On “Detroit American Axle workers speak out against UAW betrayal”

It’s tragic that the workers didn’t reject this contract. So much sacrificed and now they’re going to be subjected to pay cuts and rollbacks on the number of employees and benefits, for the enrichment of corporate bigwigs and union tops. When will it all end? Hopefully, a movement of workers in the auto industry and in all other lines of production will gather together to form soviets, councils and factory committees to oust bourgeois management in the workplaces and also eliminate the unions. Combined with local and general strikes, this movement has the power to oust the bourgeoisie worldwide and form the basis of the Socialist mode of production leading to the Communist society.

SH

23 May 2008

On “But who, after all, was Victor Serge?”

I enjoyed your piece on the Unforgiving Years. I’ve been an avid reader of Serge for some time now, and this is the first review I’ve discovered on Serge’s book. I heartily agree with your assessment of Weissman’s biography. It doesn’t really probe Serge’s novels, history or poetry in any depth. I was a little disappointed that you characterize Serge as a centrist. The Serge-Trotsky correspondence shows that Serge was earnestly thinking through contemporary issues (the POUM, Bolshevism, etc.) from a revolutionary perspective, although he didn’t hold out to the end.

Sincerely,

DG

22 May 2008