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East German border guards are seen through a gap in the Berlin Wall after demonstrators pulled down a segment of the structure at the Brandenburg Gate in this November 11, 1989 file photo.

On March 5, 1946, in his speech at Fulton, Missouri, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the metaphor of the Iron Curtain, descending from Szczecin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, to define the process of political division that spread across Europe after World War II. This metaphor, along with the Berlin Wall, become the symbol of the political, economic and social divisions in Europe for almost 45 years. The countries behind that line, which under the provisions of Yalta in 1945 were subordinated to the USSR as its satellites had been destined to follow a completely different historical path from the rest of Europe.

Our nations have never surrendered to the political destiny that was imposed upon them. Strong opposition to the communist system started to emerge and protests began as early as the 1950s and 60s. In Poland the first mass demonstrations took place in June 1956 in Poznan. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was an attempt of the Hungarian people to free themselves from Soviet domination and break the monopoly of the communist party, began in October with a rally of students in Budapest as a sign of solidarity with Poland. It was bloodily suppressed by the Red Army. Czechoslovak reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968 were destroyed by the Soviet troops and forces of the other Warsaw Pact countries. The strikes and demonstrations of the Polish shipyard workers in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin in December 1970 were bloodily suppressed. The same occurred in Radom and Warsaw in 1976. The culmination of all these protests was the massive outbreak of strikes in Poland in the summer of 1980 resulting in the establishment of the Solidarity Independent Trade Union, the first of its kind in the communist countries.

The democratic breakthrough started with the first partially free elections to the Polish Sejm on June 4, 1989. Its consequence was the appointment of the first non-communist prime minister, an activist of the democratic opposition Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who formed a government based on a coalition of all parliamentary forces. Democracy in Poland had become a reality. In November 1990, presidential elections were won by Lech Walesa, the legendary leader of Solidarity. The process of regaining independence and the re-establishment of democracy symbolically ended with the withdrawal of the last units of the Soviet army from Poland in 1993.

In May 1989, the removal of fences on the border between Hungary and Austria began. The border was completely opened in September, allowing thousands of East German citizens to flee to the Federal Republic of Germany via Hungary. A mass demonstration in East Germany was held in autumn of 1989, which ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

The Candle Demonstration organized by Roman Catholic dissent groups on March 25, 1988 in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, was the first mass demonstration since 1969 against the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The demonstration was brutally suppressed by the police and caused widespread outrage in Slovakia with the ball rolling toward real, sustained popular resistance to the communist regime. It was the beginning of a popular uprising that ultimately led to the Velvet Revolution, from November 17 to December 29, 1989.

In Prague on November 17, 1989, thousands of students went out and demonstrated in the center. The police suppressed a peaceful student demonstration. The event sparked protests across the whole country over the coming weeks. In response, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announced on November 28 that it would relinquish power and end the one-party system. Barbed wire and other obstructions were removed from the borders with West Germany and Austria in early December. On December 10, Slovak Communist President Gustav Husak appointed the first largely non-communist government in Czechoslovakia and resigned. Alexander Dubcek, leader of the Prague Spring, was elected speaker of the Federal Parliament on 28 December and Vaclav Havel the president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989. Free elections were held in June 1990, in which the Citizens Forum (in the Czech Republic) and the Society Against Violence (in Slovakia) won.

In Hungary, the process of political transformation began on June 16, 1989, when 250,000 people attended the solemn reburial of Imre Nagy, prime minister of Hungary at the time of the 1956 Revolution. After the Soviet-imposed end of the revolution, Nagy was taken to custody, and was tried and executed for treason. On July 6, 1989, he was formally rehabilitated. Some consider it symbolic that on the very same day, the long-time communist leader of Hungary, Janos Kadar, died. The declaration of the Third Hungarian Republic was proclaimed on October 23, 1989, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1956 revolution. The first free parliamentary elections were held on March 25, 1990, won by the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). The first political leaders of the newly democratic Hungary were Jozsef Antall as prime minister and Arpad Goncz as president.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the long-lasting rule of Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria. Faced with domestic pressure for political change through massive demonstrations and civil unrest, the communist party started a dialogue with the liberal opposition. Parliament was dissolved and elections were held for a Grand National Assembly, which adopted a new democratic constitution. The attempts of the communist party to hold onto power with political reshuffles met with mass civil disapproval, leading to permanent protests in front of the Parliament and civil unrest during which the communist party headquarters were set on fire. Finally, in 1991, the newly established center-right Union of Democratic Forces won the general elections and in 1992, its leader, Professor Zhelyu Zhelev, was elected president of the Republic.

In Romania, the beginning of the revolution took place in Timisoara, where, for the first time, crowds of people shouted freedom. The word spread like a shock wave across the country, encouraging more people to go out onto the streets to protest against the communist regime. With courage and determination, Romanians changed the regime, and decided by themselves for a better life, turning a dictatorship into a solid, long-lasting democracy. More than 1,000 people died on the streets in Timisoara, Bucharest and other cities of Romania.

In 1991, a new fundamental law secured the foundation of the democratic institutions in Romania, the rule of law and principles which later on facilitated the harmonization of the Romanian legal and institutional framework with the European acquis. Gradually, Romania became a trustful member of the European Union and Transatlantic Alliance, thus creating and maintaining within the society the enthusiasm of democratic participation.

Summing up, the process of overthrowing the communist regimes, started in Poland, quickly spread through Central and Eastern Europe. In 1990, free elections were held in of our countries. In 1991, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and other ex-Soviet republics proclaimed their independence. This marked the end of the Soviet Union, whose last act was the Declaration of December 26, 1991 on the self-dissolution of the USSR. In the same year, the last communist dictatorship in Europe collapsed in Albania while the Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance were dissolved.

Since then, our countries have been free to take sovereign decisions in foreign and domestic policies. Thirty years after the autumn of 1989, we have all become members of the EU and NATO. These fundamental changes continue to have a deep impact on all aspects of social, political, economic and cultural life in Central and Eastern Europe. We, the new democracies that emerged after 1989, often say, Much rests behind us, but more is yet to come.

Iveta Hricova, ambassador of the Slovak Republic; Jan Bondy, ambassador of the Czech Republic; Erik Haupt, ambassador of the Republic of Hungary; Valentin Poriazov, ambassador of the Republic of Bulgaria; Tomasz Wisniewski, charge daffaires a.i. of the Republic of Poland; Ioana Veronica Ciolca, charge d'affaires a.i. of Romania

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Remember 1989, when Central and East Europe nations overthrew communism | Kathimerini - http://www.ekathimerini.com

The Central Committee Building is an unlikely time machine. With its seven storeys and two wings of offices, it seems too huge to slip between the fabric of the centuries and with its stark Soviet-brutalist stylings, it feels rather more Cold-War thriller than sci-fi movie.

And yet, unchanged by the three decades that have flowed behind it, it also looks like a teleportation device with the coordinates locked on to December 1989 the month when the people of Bucharest booed and hissed on its steps. Standing in front of it on what is now called Piata Revolutiei (Revolution Square), I am 14 years old again, watching agog at the demise of Communism in Romania on a TV in suburban Birmingham.

Romanias self-severing from the Eastern Bloc was the violent footnote to what history has come to regard as the euphoric game of dominoes that played out across Europe 30 years ago. Polands emergence from political suffocation was a triumph of collective will and Solidarity, Czechoslovakias pulling down of the Iron Curtain was a (largely) peaceful process that earned the tag-line Velvet Revolution, and the events that made Berlin a party zone need no explanation. But there were no hands across fractured walls in Romania; no mass singalongs on hated barriers. There was despair, fury and, in the end, in footage which summarised the speed of events, presidential blood on the concrete.

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30 years after the Romanian Revolution, has Bucharest shaken off the ghost of its communist dictator? - Telegraph.co.uk

Mike Selby

Robin Hood has had many enemies over the centuries. He fought against absolute religious authority in the English Ballads of the 14th century; civil authority in numerous stage plays (including two by Shakespeare); the Norman aristocracy in Sir Walter Scotts Ivanhoe,; and Prince John along with the Sherriff of Nottingham in Howard Pyles 1883 novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottingham Shire.

No one could have predicted that the great outlaw of English folklore would come up against Joseph McCarthy. Yet that is exactly what happened in the fall of 1953, when a Mrs. Thomas J. White called for the purge of any text mentioning Robin Hood in all Indiana schools and libraries. White the chair of the Indiana Textbook Committee somehow equated Hoods ethic of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as textbook communism.

There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood, she told the state school authorities. They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. Thats the Communist line. Its just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.

Laughable I know. Except at the time the United States was at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Telling White she was crazy or even disagreeing with her was a great way to find ones name on a list of subversives, which typically ended in the loss of ones job. Family, friends and neighbors would be investigated as well, with serious consequences awaiting those not in step with this political agenda of fear and repression.

A handful of Indiana University at Bloomington didnt care. They felt it ridiculous and morally repugnant to equate Robin Hood with communism. Not only does the story predate the origins of communist thought by centuries, but it has nothing to do with the ideology at all. All versions of the story are about the misconduct of the privileged. There is no hint of the workers paradise promised by Marx and Engels. If anything Robin Hood would be the hero of the oppressed living in a communist country.

So the students began what history would call the Green Feather Movement. After gathering thousands of feathers from Indiana poultry farms, they went around to all campus classrooms and tacked a feather on each bulletin board (after they had dipped each one in green dye). They had white buttons with green feathers made, and sent these out to universities all over the United States. Green Feather movements took hold at Illinois State University, Purdue, and Harvard.

This story quickly made it across the Atlantic, where the real Sheriff of Nottingham (sadly reduced from a medieval arch villain to head of courtroom security) chimed in: Why Robin Hood is no Communist, he told reporters. Although if were alive today, wed probably call him a gangster. It even made its way to Russia, where the Soviets not known for their sense of humor laughed at the notion.

No one was laughing back in Indiana, where the F.B.I. began surveillance of Green Feather members. A file was created for each student involved, with agents set to infiltrate this most subversive of causes.

And then it all became moot. The Indiana State School Administration voted against Whites recommendation, and any and all versions of Robin Hood remained in the states schools and libraries. This was quickly followed by Joseph McCarthys censure by the U.S. Senate, the beginning of the end of his reign of domestic terror.

No man in all merry England shall be my master, Robin Hood famously said to the Sheriff of Nottingham. Neither will a mid-20th century Hoosier woman.

Mike Selby is Information Services Librarian at the Cranbrook Public Library

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BookNotes: The un-American and communistical Robin Hood - Cranbrook Townsman

The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) has recently announced that it will hold three major meetings in Turkey's three biggest cities, Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir. Turkey's communists have called on the working people of Turkey to attend the gatherings "calling for hope, organizing, celebrating to win 2020."

The major event in Izmir will be held December 21, in Istanbul on December 22 and in Ankara on January 4.

In its statement calling for the events, under the slogan "To win 2020" (2020' yi kazanmak iin),TKP said "We will change this country we love, we are determined."

The full statement is as follows:

People have to work for a pittance. They are dismissed without compensation pays.Our forests are being destroyed. The prices ofelectricity, natural gas, water, public transportation areconstantly rising.Education and health systems arecollapsed.The most basic human rights are suspended.Our women are being killed. Our children are being raped.

Of course, we do not want to live in such a country. We do not want and we arenot going anywhere!

We will change this country we love, we are determined.

Nobody is going to touch women, children. We will not leave nature and our historical heritage at the mercy of corporations who see nothing but money in them. Education and health services will be provided equally and free for all and our schools will be in control of reason and science, not of dark minds and bigotry. Basic requirements such as heating, housing, and water will be provided free of charge. Since no one can exploit the workers, everyone will live humanely. Everyone will be employed. Our industry and agriculture will be re-planned in line with the interests of the country and society. An egalitarian and emancipatory order will be established.

For this, we are thrusting out our friendly hand. To share our words, our songs, our hearts, and our minds, to share our goal of a bright future for Turkey...

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"To win 2020": Communist Party of Turkey to hold gatherings in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir - In Defense of Communism

The science fiction writer H G Wells, in his socialist blueprint A Modern Utopia (1905), envisaged the construction of a new world by a cadre of chosen volunteers collaborating in mans struggle with the elements a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks. Encouraged by the development of technical science over the previous decade, Wells whose other principal interests were Fabianism and philandering prophesised the creation of a fair and great and fruitful global state in which women are to be as free as men. It would be universalist in outlook with a great number of common public services, including energy and transport, in citizens hands.

In the 1922 and 1923 elections, Wells stood as the Labour candidate for the London University constituency, coming last on each occasion. He had to wait until the end of his life, with the United Nations Charter and the nationalisations of Clement Attlees post-war Labour government, to witness the first signs of his dream becoming reality.

Two descendants of Wells utopian tradition are Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani, whose respective books Clear Bright Future and Fully Automated Luxury Communism explore their wish to socialise technological advances as the basis of a flourishing society.

Both hold radical credentials: Mason, once a journalist at Computer Weekly and best known as the former economics editor for the BBCs Newsnight, agitated in Trotskyist groupuscule Workers Power during the 1980s a time when his future employers at the BBC were meticulously vetting Marxist sympathisers at the behest of MI5.

Bastani cut his teeth in the student protest movement around University College London in 2010, which was sparked by austerity policies implemented under the newly-elected Conservative-led government. The following year, he co-founded the insurgent comment and broadcast platform Novara Media, beginning on community radio before cultivating a devoted audience online.

Two of the most pugnacious public voices on the left, Mason and Bastani found themselves in high demand following Jeremy Corbyns election as Labour leader in 2015. British broadcasting, having spent years interrogating ever more triangulated, milquetoast political tendencies (Blue Labourism, Red Toryism), had missed the groundswell of support for socialist alternatives to yet more of the same. Casting aside a youthful disdain for staid parliamentarism, both figures became active in south London constituency Labour parties, their informal advice sought by Labour shadow ministers.

As commentators, they advocate the revolutionary potential of technology, championing the digital sphere as a possible agent of political change Bastanis Novara was sufficiently established by 2018 to offer Mason a continuation of his column after his contract with the Guardian newspaper was abruptly terminated. Aware that constant, dizzying advances in artificial intelligence can cause societal instability and existential malaise, they argue for citizens to check the rise of the machines and urgently take back control.

Mason believes that humanity may be hopeful for a hi-tech, automation-driven, green future but technological euphoria is tempered by geopolitical despair governments and corporations hold all the power, exerting control over us via algorithms. Though he thinks that somehow democratising information technology makes Utopian Socialism possible, currently our behavioural and intellectual defences are weak. This makes us easy prey for a nefarious (and rather broad) coalition incorporating ethnic nationalists and woman-haters, not to mention the Nietzscheans of Silicon Valley, Vladimir Putins online troll army and the Chinese Communist Party. Their single project: technologically empowered anti-humanism which Mason claims has been theorised in advance must be ideologically defeated for us to ever reach a clear bright future (the book title derives from Leon Trotsky).

Short on practical examples of how the reader should go about this, Mason promotes the creation of clear safety codes around AI and tiny acts of rebellion such as refusing to use automated checkout machines thereby forcing supermarkets to employ humans.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism goes one step further, mapping out Bastanis alternative post-scarcity eventuality for a finite world fast approaching its limits. The author believes that mankind, having enjoyed the bounteous benefits gifted by agriculture and industry, is now in the opening decades of the Third Disruption, marked by an ever-greater abundance of information with machines performing cognitive as well as physical tasks.

He proposes the popular embrace of exclusive, datadriven technologies that have appeared in recent years from synthetic meat to devices mapping the human genome. As capitalism is about to end, FALC will sweep to the rescue, harnessing the mining potential of near Earth asteroids, renewable energy and bioengineering to counter the civilisational threats of climate change, resource shortages and an ageing population. Chastising us for an absence of collective imagination, Bastani conceives a world where work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and labour and leisure blend into one.

Though evidently future-focused, Mason and Bastani argue for revisiting the 19th-century theories of Karl Marx. Indeed Marxs spectre haunts both titles, with the authors mounting a spirited defence of his philosophy and its centrality to todays challenges. Unsurprisingly given their subject matter, they are stimulated most by The Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse (Bastani adding, irritatingly, youve likely never heard of either before). Mason, mangling a mechanical metaphor, makes the case that Marx cannot be uninstalled from western thinking, his outlook boiled down to having believed that, There is nobody coding the great computer of the world nobody to press the start button.

For British authors, writing with a global audience in mind produces mixed results. Masons scrutiny of Donald Trumps election, though briefly acknowledging the complacency of Hillary Clintons campaign, mostly emphasises the role played by tech giants. He implicates Google, Facebook and Twitter as forging an alliance with a mob denigrated as whey-faced Christian fundamentalists living in deadbeat towns, or porn-addicted right-wing bigots spending time leering at the waitresses in the Hooters fast-food chain.

Extended passages on the influence of virtual communities composed of technoliterate fascists the Gamergate fringe and the digital realm of Kekistan populated by alt-right shitposters and Pepe the Frog avatars suggest he has been spending too long in his own online bubbles. Both he and Bastani blunder on Europe, the latter claiming UKIP and Frances Front National made big gains in the continent-wide elections of 2009, when in fact they lost support on their previous showings in pre-crash 2004.

Mason insists that hard right-led administrations in Hungary and Italy are copycat projects inspired by Trump, ignoring the fact that both Fidesz and Legas presence in government pre-date Trumps win by a number of years, as does that of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which first entered a government coalition two decades ago hardly, as the author believes, occurring overnight. Brexit, the most pressing and paralysing issue their country has faced for a generation, is considered fleetingly and only then coupled with Trumps victory as, in Masons words, tsunamis to hit the liberal political centre.

At least Bastani acknowledges initiatives in the global south, including meanderings around East Asian rice production and mobile phone schemes in Africa. Masons inordinate focus on wealthy countries reduces analysis of developing nations to imagining what life might be like in a Rio favela : Once you had bought your gun, looked after your family and paid for sex, what else was there to spend your money on but branded sports shoes and cheap jewellery?

Attempts to bring together disparate events under a unifying historical narrative invariably fall flat. Era-defining moments offered up by our authors Fukuyamas end of history, the fashionable nonsense of postmodernism, Moores Law on the exponential growth rate of microprocessing capacity, the advent of the Anthropocene geological era are well worn and pedestrian, more elegantly executed elsewhere. Clichs abound as they fail to agree whether the dawning of a new technological age was announced when a computer beat the world champion at chess in 1997 (Bastani) or an entirely different board game, Go, in 2016 (Mason).

Fleshing out their arguments, Bastani favours a pop-anthropologist style (during this period the human animal asserted its mastery above all others, he says of neolithic times), while Mason makes do with bland film theory. A pound-shop Zizek, he declares that almost all the ethical questions raised by the philosophy of post-humanism were explored in Blade Runner and at one point informs us of the existence of a 2010 Japanese movie called Big Tits Zombie.

Inspirational figures cited in Fully Automated Luxury Communism tend to be, surprisingly, CEOs of private companies or scientists, although in its closing chapter Bastani tries aligning himself with 14th-century English theologian John Wycliffe, whose bible translations were widely distributed a century before Martin Luther was born. (The author believes certain visionaries have such powers of foresight that their ideas arent consonant with the times in which they live.) Mason, too, concerns himself with the theories of long-dead thinkers, putting on trial everyone from Hannah Arendt (the patron saint of liberal angst) to Louis Althusser.

Though Clear Bright Future is pitched as a radical defence of the human being, only a handful of living humans are quoted. Figurative individuals abound the transgender activist in London, the female factory worker in Guangdong, the Kanak teenager fighting for independence on New Caledonia though none is offered a direct voice. The reader is left unaware whether the author has encountered them in real life.

Utopian tracts invariably see the present moment as a turning point or fork in the road. Bastani informs us, however, that fully automated luxury communism will require decades to play out. Rousing in its expression (You can only live your best life under FALC and nothing else, so fight for it), his manifestos promise of a luxurious, technophoric future is tempered by its championing of the think tank-tested policy of universal basic services. This has been seriously considered by Labours shadow chancellor John McDonnell. He may not agree with Bastani, however, that UBS begins the work of communism in the present.

For Mason, we cannot afford to wait for a radical administration to take the reins our digital overlords in Moscow, Beijing or California are already preparing software that will ultimately allow them to exercise mind control. To resist the looming threats, we are told to begin at the level of the self, not waste time building grassroots alternatives to a world in crisis.

Whereas a global mass of downtrodden workers, exploited for hundreds of years, emerged as a political force to spearhead moves towards decolonisation, universal rights and benefits, Mason thinks their successors will be a scattered, social media-wielding precariat of networked individuals very much a millennial revolutionary subject. I want to defend human beings against algorithms that predict and dictate our shopping choices, our voting patterns and our sexual preferences, he assures us, dignifying a popular platform whose time has yet to arrive.

Paul Masons Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being is published by Penguin; Aaron Bastanis Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Verso.

K. Biswas is a member of the Red Pepper Editorial Collective.

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Book review essay: 'Clear Bright Future' and 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' - Red Pepper