Easter rising

Bitterly has the thought been fought, with imagination, explanation, historical excuse, a lifetime's commitment, it cannot be denied: Socialism is dead.

The striving towards fairness, impartial justice, the commitment to reason not faith, and to the technological, not use-of-force solution to inadequacies of physical provision (with social provision for diversely occurring vulnerability - youth, sickness, age, disbility), is undimmed. But socialism as it is determined in and by all its nineteeth and twentieth century glory, is history. Worse, by failing to bury what is dead we contaminate everything we wish to achieve for our lives. And provide easy targets for the wicked of the world to deny goals and denigrate achievments that are wholly to be endorsed.

Surveying the dreary deathscapes produced by Stalinism, and all its lesser manifestations from Cambodia through the miserable post 1945 years for everyone east of Berlin, to the (so minor in comparison, but nonetheless deeply repugnant) BrownLabour party, we are defenceless in proposing the good if we associate ourseves with socialism. The self-seeking of apparatchiks and their client-state producing tactics when threatened by democratic votes, subverted everything that wasn't killed.

What is to be done?