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MAY DAY! MAYDAY!

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By John Helmer, Moscow

Every spring, when it’s certain no more snow will fall on Moscow, it helps to remember these things, and look forward with hope.   

In English and many other languages including Roman Latin, May Day [2] meant the return of fecundity, flowers, food harvests, and so hopefulness after winter, with entertainment from the randiest, cleverest,   and silliest of the field creatures, the hare and the goat.  

Mayday! Mayday! That started in 1927 as an internationally recognized distress call put out on radio, which had nothing to do with the month of May. It started in French – m’aidez! Help me! That replaced the Morse code for SOS which was first adopted internationally in 1905.  Mayday! [3], the radio call for help, was needed when radio replaced the telegraph and a speaking voice was required instead of taps and pips.  

These days it’s the traditional left wing, based on workers’ movements, which need help. In France they have been superseded by the spontaneous mobilizations which are signalling with the French symbol of roadside breakdown, the gilet jaune (pictured below, left) There is no leftwing movement in the US; instead, there are now symbols of clowns and frogs (centre) which cry out with  the two-syllable Honk Honk. That’s a call for white nationalist attack [4], not a call for help. 

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In Russia the party of Marx and Engels has one leader embalmed and horizontal in Red Square; and a stone’s throw away in the State Duma, the current leader embalmed and vertical (above, right). Read the file on him [6].  

NOTE: At bottom of the lead image of a Moscow May Day poster of 1920, the Russian repeats the well-known words from the Communist Manifesto: “Workers have nothing to lose but their chains, and they will win the whole world —  K. Marx and F. Engels.” These days the map of the red flag  is no longer ideological, but it is Russian. It’s the spread of Russian arms, in particular missile defence systems  which put a stop to the air and naval superiority of the US and the NATO alliance on every battlefield they have chosen —  so that they can’t risk choosing new ones. The war in Syria was the turning-point [7] for them.   The starting point of this new world under Russian arms cover is the central power bloc — Russia, India, China. Theirs to come will be the new power strategy. Read their defence doctrines —  Hostile Intent [8]; the 12-Minute Red Line [9]; and Cross-Hairs [10].