I'm writing this on the ferry on the way back from lovely gigs in Geneva, Bern and Mainz.

The last of the three was on Monday at Mainz's notorious Carnival Day, where tradition has it that most of the local population - plus many visitors from elsewhere - dress up in ludicrous costumes, join a huge procession through the town and get absolutely paralytic.

The local punks and lefties, who mostly view this tradition as rather naff and conservative, crammed into our friend Chris's Hafeneck pub, gave myself and my band Barnstormer a rousing reception and got equally paralytic.

Without doubt, the best Monday night gig I've ever done.

At this point I'm going to stop talking about me and talk about the world, because current events dictate that I go on a wide-ranging and heartfelt rant.

Ukraine? Nationalists, often led by fascists, seized half the country and the role of these fascists is conveniently ignored by the western media, because it doesn't fit with their hallowed mantra of "people seeking freedom."

This "freedom"? At best, freedom to be treated as expendable cheap labour by ruthless multinationals backed by the EU. At worst, freedom to start the same kind of anti-semitic pogroms their nazi collaborationist ancestors wallowed in during the second world war.

Let's go back a bit. War not long ago in Chechnya, now a breeding ground for fundamentalist extremists who in Soviet times were viewed as an irrelevant relic from a bygone era. Same in Georgia too.

An ethnic bloodbath in the '90s in Yugoslavia, once a peaceful socialist country where different groups intermarried and lived side by side. Oligarchs who stole the fruits of 70 years of Soviet power flaunting their obscene levels of wealth at the people whose labour created it, now rotting in poverty. Fascist gangs roaming Moscow, insulting the memory of their grandparents' generation who gave their blood and their lives to defeat Hitler.

And people are beginning to get sick of it all. Opinion polls now point to the fact that a majority of East Germans old enough to remember think they were happier before the Berlin Wall came down than they are now.

I wonder how many people in the other countries of eastern Europe would say the same?

Not the clever, thrusting and pushy ones who cleaned up when socialism fell - of course, they trumpet their new "freedom."

I mean the ordinary people who just wanted, and want, a job, a home and the right to raise a family in peace and security. The ones who had that before and don't have it now.

Why, when the great and the good talk about "human rights," do they invariably mean political rights? What about economic rights? Why is economic and social justice considered irrelevant and unimportant compared to freedom of speech? If you're starving, relying on a food bank, freezing on the street, your human rights are being infringed just as much as someone who is locked up for their political beliefs.

Winners write history. The greedy, the pushy, the me-first won in 1989 and moulded a world in their own image while so many of the left apologised, gave up or, even worse, joined them in creating the world we have today. A world crippled by greed, insecurity, exploitation and war.

It's time people stopped apologising and re-evaluated the past in the light of the present.

www.attilathestockbroker.com.