civil

7th June 1893  Gandhi’s First Act of Civil Disobedience


Young Gandhi in South Africa circa 1893

On this day in 1893, the twentieth century’s most famous non-violent revolutionary, Mohandas Gandhi, committed his first act of civil disobedience when the then 24-year-old Indian lawyer was forcibly ejected from a train at South Africa’s Pietermaritzburg Railway Station. Refusing to move to a third-class carriage while holding a valid ticket for the whites-only first-class compartment, the great future leader was pushed off the train in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, his luggage hastily thrown after him. The incident would change the course of his life – and that of millions of others. Gandhi later recalled:

I was afraid for my very life. I entered the dark waiting-room. There was a white man in the room. I was afraid of him. What was my duty? I asked myself. Should I go back to India, or should I go forward with God as my helper, and face whatever was in store for me? I decided to stay and suffer. My active non-violence began from that date.

It was in South Africa that Gandhi’s world-famous spiritual principles of satyagraha (“holding on to truth”, or “soul force”) and ahimsa (non-violence) were formed. Arriving in early 1893 to practice law under a one-year contract, Gandhi settled in the province of Natal, where Indian Muslims – mainly descendents of indentured servents – outnumbered the white European community, triggering racist legislation denying Indians the right to vote. Following his ejection from the train, Gandhi resolved to remain in South Africa to take up the struggle against these new laws. He formed the Natal Indian Congress, drawing international attention to the plight of South Africa’s Indian population. In 1906, he organised his first satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience, when the Transvaal government sought to further restrict the rights of Indians. After seven years of protest, he negotiated a compromise agreement.

For twenty-one years, Gandhi served his revolutionary apprenticeship in South Africa – one of the world’s most notoriously discriminatory and racist hot spots. When he returned to India in 1914, he was ready to fulfil his destiny as leader of his country’s independence movement.

The radical audacity of Gandhi’s theories and practices is often lost in the benign reverence his name evokes. And so, on the anniversary of the defining moment of his revolutionary life, let us pause to reconsider Mahatma Gandhi’s ingeniously effective vision:

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try new experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could do… Those who believe in the simple truths I have laid down can propagate them only by living them.

Posted in Dissent | 4 Comments

1st April 1939 The End of the Spanish Civil War


Gruesome Twosome: Hitler and Franco

On this day in 1939, Generalissimo Francisco Franco broadcast his final radio communiqué of the Spanish Civil War: “Today, after having disarmed and captured the Red Army, the Nationalist troops have secured their final military objective. The war is ended. Burgos, April 1, 1939. Year of Victory.” Thus concluded one of the most brutal and bloody civil wars in history.

For three violent years this convoluted fratricidal struggle had raged, pitting Left against Right, anti-clericals against the Church, workers against the landed classes, Republicans against Monarchists, Communists against Anarchists. Spain’s empirical glory years were by then a distant memory, but its colonial barbarism was seamlessly resurrected for this war against its own: villages were raped, looted and pillaged; theatrical executions were staged with bodies torn apart limb from limb; the cities of Barcelona and Madrid became urban battlefields – their once cosmopolitan streets reduced to dust and littered with the lifeless victims of civilian vigilantes. In all, some half-a-million perished.

But while the declaration of victory may have marked the official end of the savage conflict, for many the suffering was far from over. In his first dictatorial decree, Franco made clear the fate of all those who had opposed the Nationalists. And so began a near-forty-year reign of vindictive terror, as this unrestrained and merciless tyrant exacted systematic revenge against all democrats, liberals, socialists and – above all others – his most-despised enemies, the communists and anarchists. Between 1939 and 1975, an untold number of alleged political opponents were executed – some estimates reaching into the millions.

While the anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War is an occasion to lament the tragic loss of life and ensuing four-decade absolute rule of one of the twentieth century’s most despicable despots, it is also an opportunity to remember that the sub-plots of this conflict extended way beyond Spain’s polarisation. Franco’s victory was won only with the military support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and the dithering appeasement of Britain and France. Although all the European powers had signed a Non-Intervention Agreement just one month after the war broke out, Germany and Italy both promptly ignored it. Mussolini was happy simply to flex his ideological muscle and consolidate fascism in the Mediterranean. But for Hitler, the Spanish Civil War was an ideal testing ground for tanks and aircraft that were just being developed as part of the German re-armament. The Nazis provided the planes that airlifted Franco’s army from Morocco to Spain, and then successfully converted those same planes into terror bombers. Britain, meanwhile – weary of both the fascist Nationalists and Soviet-backed Republicans – sat passively on the fence. So surprising to the Nazis was their unopposed “dry run” that, during an emergency meeting in Rome on January 14th 1937, Hermann Göring told Mussolini that they must both escalate their aid to Franco at once, as Britain would surely intervene within three weeks. But that intervention never came.

How different might the rest of the twentieth century have been had Göring’s hunch been correct? Neville Chamberlain claimed he wished only to avoid European war but in truth Britain allowed its economic and class interests to outweigh its strategic interests. And so a Red but democratic Spain was sacrificed in favour of fascist aggression. This policy of appeasement, however, only advanced the inevitability of deeper conflict. During their mutual Spanish adventure, Germany and Italy sealed the Axis Pact, experimented with technology, tested and perfected their military techniques, and were emboldened by the impunity with which they acted despite the existence of the Non-Intervention Agreement.

And as a ravaged Spain was forsaken and condemned to Franco’s brutal vengeance, just five months later, the rest of Europe would be plunged into the horrors of World War II.

Posted in World Events | 9 Comments

11 January 2013 The Prophetic Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz


Aaron Swartz – a prophet of the Information Age

Every age has its prophets – those Visionaries and Revolutionaries whose ideas and actions inform us of where we are and anticipate where we’re heading. Aaron Swartz was a prophet of the Information Age. As a child prodigy technological genius – and before most of us even had a dial-up connection – Swartz was creating codes and concepts that would shape the online era. In 1999, aged 12, he founded The Info Network – a precursor to Wikipedia. At 14, he developed the RSS syndication software; if you subscribe to podcasts or websites and receive automatic updates, you can thank Aaron Swartz. At 15, he helped write the code for Creative Commons, which revolutionised the way people can licence and share their work online. At 19, he co-developed Reddit, one of the world’s most popular sites, and one whose aim to provide user-controlled community-led discussion boards for just about any topic is quintessentially Swartzian.

But Aaron Swartz’s foresight was not limited to his pioneering tech contributions. He also helped create the egalitarian philosophy of the Internet: the notion that information should be free. Aaron Swartz advocated a better world through open access. He understood, equally, the potential for authorities and corporations to manipulate, censor and control the Internet. With these fears in mind, Swartz’s interests moved from technology to political activism, where he quickly became an important bridge between those two worlds: Aaron Swartz could identify areas of online injustice, plus he had the skills to do something about it. So when Swartz learned that the U.S. government unfairly charged a fee to access public-domain court records, Swartz liberated these files – an estimated 20% of U.S. law – by moving them all onto a free website. He created Watchdog.net for people to organise against Internet suppression. He founded the online group Demand Progress and led the campaign against two U.S. government bills (SOPA and PIPA) that would have effectively legalised censorship. “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,” Aaron Swartz warned. His zealous commitment to a free and open Internet would, however, come at a very, very heavy price.

In November 2010, Swartz hid a laptop in a basement cupboard, plugged it into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and surreptitiously downloaded millions of academic articles from a subscription-only archive called JSTOR. Swartz believed that this knowledge – locked behind a private company’s paywall – should be freely available to all. Needless to say, Swartz received no remuneration for these actions. In January 2011, however, Swartz was discovered, arrested and charged with computer fraud. What followed was a merciless witch-hunt. JSTOR itself didn’t pursue charges – they even asked the government not to prosecute. But this was the time of WikiLeaks and the Anonymous collective of hacktivists, who were scaring the shit out of the U.S. government. Federal prosecutors from the Obama administration were determined to make an example of Swartz, and indicted him for 13 felony charges. Found guilty, he would have faced thirty-five years in prison and a million-dollar fine. Who would have thought that downloading academic articles could result in such a disproportionately harsh punishment? Despite being warned that Swartz was a suicide risk, his prosecutors refused all settlement offers that did not include jail time. Hounded by the FBI, bankrupt from legal fees and overwhelmed by the prospect of prison, Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment whilst awaiting trial. He was 26.

And so the world was robbed of a brilliant young man – a Prophet, freedom fighter, scapegoat, martyr, Swartz died standing for those same generous democratic principles that had created our public libraries. He believed information should be freely available. He believed a more open world was a better world, declaring:

“There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”

Within weeks following Aaron Swartz’s death, his actions against the privatisation of knowledge were vindicated when 15-year-old Jack Andraka discovered a breakthrough test for pancreatic cancer. Andraka credited his discovery to free access to online journals, which he used “religiously” because “in most online databases [like JSTOR], articles cost about $35.”

Aaron Swartz was right about a lot of things. We need to stay vigilant to ensure that the control of the Internet is not taken away from us by state and corporate

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1st October 1949  Mao Zedong Declares the People’s Republic of China


“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” – Chairman Mao

On this day in 1949, following twenty years of bitter and bloody civil war, Mao Zedong stood victorious at Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace and solemnly proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China.  At last, 500 million poor and downtrodden were liberated from China’s age-old tyranny of imperialism, warlords and landlords.

But the utopian promises Mao made to the masses were not to be. Instead, for three decades, the people of this new so-called republic were nothing more than dispensable victims of a World Tyrant whose megalomaniacal policies such as the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution led to the deaths of an estimated 70 million. This was a democide so horrific and unfathomable that it dwarfs Stalin’s 40 million. This was a death toll so abstract – and of a people so alien to most Westerners – that today there remains a shocking lack of awareness that Mao’s hands were far bloodier than Hitler’s.

Moreover, so shrouded in secrecy was the first era of the People’s Republic that hip New Leftists, including such influential public figures as John Lennon and Jean-Paul Sartre, loudly espoused Mao’s Little Red Bookisms without any awareness that they were in fact condoning a mass murderer who cared nothing for his own people.

Worse still are today’s Western apologists, who point to China’s economic development as some sort of intellectual defense of the indefensible – whilst capitalist interests alone, including the cynical decision to stage the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, preclude any denouncement of what remains a highly dubious regime with one of the most appalling human rights records in the world.

And, perhaps worst of all, Mao’s People’s Republic of China – along with Stalin’s Soviet Union – so comprehensively desecrated the very name of socialism that capitalism has been allowed to reign unchecked for long enough to bring the whole wide world to the brink of economic and environmental disaster.

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2nd July 1937 Amelia Earhart Disappears


"Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done.' - Amelia Earhart

“Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.’ – Amelia Earhart

“…first lady of the skies,  she had no guy holding her down, no one could clip her wings, she was no bird in the hand, she is no living thing now…” from the poem ‘Amelia Earhart’ by Patti Smith

When 10-year-old Amelia Earhart saw an aircraft for the first time at the 1907 the Iowa State Fair, she wasn’t impressed. Her passion for flying was not ignited until December 1920, when she visited an airfield with her father who paid $10 for Amelia to have a 10-minute flight. It would change her life. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground I knew I had to fly,” she said.

Then, as now, learning to fly was hugely expensive. But Amelia was determined and took any job she could lay her hands on to earn the money to train. She found pioneer aviator, engineer and mechanic Anita Snook and asked her: “I want to fly. Will you teach me?” She cropped her hair, pulled on a leather jacket and took to the skies. Just eighteen months later she bought a Kinner Airster biplane and by October she’d flown it to 14,000 feet, then a world record for women pilots. It was to be the first of many firsts for Amelia.

In May 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. The following year, sponsored by a publishing company, Amelia became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. But it wasn’t solo and it was mostly flown on instruments. “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes … maybe someday I’ll try it alone.”

Nevertheless, she was now a celebrity. Her lecture tours and product endorsements would finance her flying. She used her role model status to campaign for numerous causes including promoting commercial air travel, women’s rights and women in engineering and other so-called ‘traditional’ male careers.

Later in 1928 in another ‘first’ she flew solo across the North American continent and back. She also got married that year, to George Putnam, in a union of equality with shared responsibilities. Most notably she kept her own name and was never referred to as Mrs Putnam.

The day when she would at last “try it alone” came in May 1932 she took off from Newfoundland in a single-engine Lockheed Vega 5B and headed east out over the Atlantic towards Paris. Battling icy conditions, strong winds and mechanical problems, after nearly 15 hours ain the sky she landed safely in a field near Derry, Northern Ireland. A farmhand asked: “Have you flown far?” “From America,” she replied. It wasn’t Paris, but who cared? She’d done it anyway.

Amelia’s fame flew to still higher altitudes and she became friends with the rich and powerful, including US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with whom she shared interests in social justice, women’s rights and civil rights.

More flights followed. The first to fly solo from Hawaii to California. The first non-stop from Mexico City to New York. Her legendary achievements, pioneering spirit, cool-headed courage, independence and dignity were already enough to secure her place in history. But Amelia had an even bigger ambition. She wanted to be the first person to fly the 29,000 miles around the world at the equator.

In preparation for her epic global circumnavigation, her Lockheed Electra 10E was fitted with extra large fuel tanks for the tricky transoceanic crossings. She set off on 20 May 1937 from California with experienced navigator, Frederick Noonan. Flying east, with stops over South America, Africa and Asia, by the end of June they’d reached New Guinea having flown 22,000 miles. The Pacific Ocean was always going to be the toughie. With thousands of miles of nothing except only a few tiny islands, any navigational error, fuel shortage or technical fault would be fatal. And so it was. On 2 July she and Noonan took off from New Guinea on a planned mammoth 18-hour, 2500-mile leg to reach Howland Island, a minuscule uninhabited atoll, where the US government had constructed an airstrip and laid supplies for her. The US Coastguard ship Itasca was cruising nearby to maintain radio communications and help them navigate in the Pacific’s vastness.

As the plane approached Howland she reported being low on fuel and unable to see the island despite, she believed, being in the right position. Flying in a methodical zigzag to try to see the atoll, she radioed: “We are running north and south” and then the Itasca lost contact. She never landed at Howland. The Itasca searched for two weeks for any trace of the world’s most famous pilot, but nothing was ever found.

In her song ‘Amelia’, Joni Mitchell sang: “A ghost of aviation, She was swallowed by the sky, Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly”. Amelia would go on to inspire generations of women and girls to do the things they loved, and no matter what the risks, to do them the very best they can. Chocks away, Sisters!

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

Posted in Heroines, World Events | 1 Comment

5th July 1833 the Death of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce


Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Look at the camera and say ‘cheese’ and ‘thank you’ to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce who died on this day in 1833, for it was Niépce who changed the way we view the world.

Born in France 1765 into a middle-class family Niépce was well-educated and comfortably off and from 1801 ran the family estate. He became a ‘gentleman of science’ doing experiments and inventing things. In 1807 he and his brother invented an early combustion engine he called the pyreolophore. When in 1813 the craze of lithography swept France he felt frustrated at not being able to make pictures because he couldn’t draw. Never one to say ‘jamais’, he decided to try to find a way of using light to make pictures for him.

His starting point would be the camera obscura, an optical device used by artists and scientists since ancient times. His challenge was to find a light-sensitive material and create a substrate for it which could be exposed to light and then fixed in some way. By 1816 he’d found a way of creating an image on paper sensitised with silver chloride, but he had trouble fixing the image, that is, stopping the process of light sensitivity, which leads to deterioration and fogging. He experimented with varnishes of bitumen and lavender oil on pewter or glass. He called the process heliography or sunwriting. He began collaborating with Louis Daguerre, who after Niépce’s death continued developing the technique and is today usually credited entirely with inventing photography. But it was Niépce who developed the principles of photography. His invention would change the world and how we see it.

By the middle of the 19th century sufficient improvements had been made to cameras and chemical processes to make photography popular and affordable, and for creative pioneers it offered new opportunities for truth-telling. Because the camera never lies, right? (Well, sometimes it does, but that’s another story.)

In 1862 Mathew Brady took his camera to the battlefields the American Civil War and in doing so became the father of photojournalism. His photos of mud and mangled corpses for the first time publicly revealed the realities of war. In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge used his cameras to investigate the patterns of footfall in The Horse in Motion.

By 1888, George Eastman’s Kodak company had become the Steve Jobs’ Apple of its day. But it was the launch of his box ‘Brownie’ camera in 1901 which finally meant that anyone, anywhere could take photos. We could now all share what we see. And how we have loved to ever since!

The invention of photography may have troubled mid-19th century jobbing portrait painters, but most artists were quick to exploit how different the world looks through a lens. French impressionist painter Edgar Degas loved what it offered and his compositions were heavily influenced by photographic cropping. A century and more later, there is still much to investigate about how we have come to rely on photography as a way of expressing ‘truth’. Artist David Hockney has spent his whole career experimenting with how images differ when we see the world through the lens or projected on a screen, and made us think again and think harder about the nature of truth.

Photographic images continue to influence our collective psyche. I don’t even have to show you Eddie Adams’ 1968 iconic image of the execution of a Viet Cong guerrilla for you to recoil in horror in your mind. The image is fixed in our DNA. Similarly, Stuart Franklin Magnum’s 1989 photography of a young man standing defiantly alone before a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, Beijing says everything we need to know about that terrible moment in historyFinally, Bill Anders 1968 photograph ‘Earthrise’ taken from NASA’s Apollo 8 mission offered us a glimpse of our world as only a few will ever see it. It is surely the most beautiful photograph ever taken.

For helping us to see who and what we really are, for exposing truth, lies, frailties and horrors, and for revealing our glorious planet to us as together we hurtle through the cosmic darkroom of space, merci beaucoup Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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18th June 1815 Waterloo


Battle of Waterloo by William Holmes Sullivan

Today in 1815 near a small town in Belgium, an Anglo-Allied army defeated Napoleon’s imperial army in a twelve-hour battle that even the victorious Duke of Wellington described as a ‘damn near run thing’ with victory only coming in the evening with the delayed arrival of Blucher’s Prussian forces.

The battle of Waterloo marks one of those rare things – an event that most historians can agree on as a defining watershed moment.

In the narrow sense of military history, Waterloo was probably the last time that the fate of nations would be decided in a single afternoon. In the industrial age that followed, the breech-loading rifle, railways and the telegraph would decide battles, not dashing cavalry charges.  And these battles would be grim matters of attrition lasting days, weeks or months.

Most importantly though 1815 marks a political watershed – before it lies the world of the Ancien Regime and its death throes in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and after it is the age of Capital, what historian Eric Hobsbawn described as  ‘the long nineteenth century’ that lasts until 1914 and the outbreak of the Great War.

The forces that defeated Napoleon were a coalition of European monarchies who since 1789 had come together to crush the threat of revolution spreading from France. Against all the odds the isolated forces of France, often armed with little more than the revolutionary fervour of a citizen army, managed to hold off the professional armies of old Europe.

In besieged Republican France it was the resulting economic crisis and political instability that provided the opportunity for a brilliant but impoverished junior artillery officer from Corsica to come to prominence.  Napoleon Bonaparte’s genius as a military tactician in turning defeat into victory when he took command of the ragged and neglected army in Northern Italy was matched by his skill as a political opportunist. Exploiting the political crisis in the Republic, the young general staged a coup to become First Consul in 1799 – and then in 1804 declared himself  ‘Emperor’.

In doing so he unquestionably betrayed the democratic ideals of the Jacobins. But the resulting regime was also a strange hybrid – a popular dictatorship that pursued a policy of foreign expansion and military aggression abroad, whilst maintaining at home the social gains of the revolution. Land reform and the abolition of feudalism were safeguarded, progressive taxation was used to fund public works, church and state were formally separated, religious tolerance extended to Jews and Protestants, and the rule of law replaced the arbitrary powers of the absolute monarchy of the Ancien Regime. The new social order was codified in a set of laws known as the ‘civil code’ or more often today simply as the ‘code Napoleon’. What has now become a constitutional model for many ‘capitalist democracies’ at the time represented a revolutionary break with the past – and marked the emergence of a new bourgeois ruling class.

In response the monarchies of Europe were obliged to sink their differences and combined to resist the threat that France posed to the established order. But twenty years of almost continuous war that lasted from 1792 until 1815, and ranged from Egypt to Russia, saw a succession of alliances fail to defeat France.

Finally after the battle of Leipzig in 1814, the coalition forces invaded France – Prussia, Austria and Russia from the east and Britain and Portugal from the south. Paris was occupied, Napoleon forced to abdicate and exiled to the island of Elba, and a restored Bourbon monarchy was installed in his place.

It is testament to the popular support in France for the Napoleonic regime that the restored Bourbon monarchy lasted for little more than nine months. The returning nobility failed to acknowledge that society had been turned upside down since the revolution and set about trying to return France to the Ancien Regime. Thousands of demobilised veterans drawn from the peasantry were now unemployed, rootless and still loyal to the Emperor. Meanwhile the Coalition powers were preoccupied arguing over the future partition of Europe at the Congress of Vienna – in particular the role of an independent Poland as a buffer between east and west.

Winning over the troops sent to arrest him when he first landed in southern France, Napoleon took his opportunity to march at their head to Paris – and used a plebiscite to restore himself as Emperor with a new constitution that restored the civil code. Royalist opposition swiftly evaporated, and in the space of a few weeks Napoleon was able to mobilise an army of almost a quarter of a million men.

This restored regime – christened ‘The Hundred Days’ – was to be short-lived. The coalition powers also mobilised, and from the outset France was surrounded by hostile powers – although the coalition forces had been severely weakened by so many years of war. On the Belgian border Wellington’s forces were not the battle-hardened veterans of the Peninsula War – most of who had been sent off to fight in America – but a motley collection of untested troops and allies from the Netherlands and minor German states. In fact, despite the subsequent mythology of Waterloo, less than half of Wellington’s troops were actually British.

But the weakening of the monarchies of old Europe was more far-reaching than simply a tactical military disadvantage. In order to defeat first the revolution and then Napoleon, the coalition powers had set into motion forces that they could not control and that would eventually consume them. The previous decisive campaign of 1814 was known as the ‘War Of Liberation’ and Leipzig as the “Battle Of The Nations’. In Prussia in particular after the humiliating defeat at Jena in 1805, the nation and its forces, fuelled by a nationalist fervour, had been reconstructed as a citizen army on the French model. Even in backward Russia, a new type of nationalist consciousness developed which would expresses itself ten years later in the Decembrist revolt of liberal young army officers. In Britain conscription was not adopted and the army remained a professional one, but for the first time government propaganda appealed to the masses as freeborn Englishmen to overthrow ‘Boney the tyrant’.

If Waterloo meant defeat for Napoleon, it did not represent a return to the pre-revolutionary world of 1789. The monarchies of Europe were forced to acknowledge their dependency on the new class now coming into its ascendency – the bourgeois.

In the next century France would go through a succession of revolutions alternately producing constitutional monarchies, republics and even a restored empire – but all would be based resolutely on this class and a new capitalist order that would have been unrecognisable to the court of Louis XVI. And in Germany and Austria nation states would emerge based on a popular nationalism that would have equally been unrecognisable to Frederick The Great.

When Napoleon was finally humbled in battle in the face of overwhelming odds at Waterloo, he was exiled for the rest of his life to the remote island of St Helena. Although popularly remembered as one of history’s greatest generals, he himself saw that the true significance of his legacy was political:

My true glory is not to have won 40 battles…Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. … But…what will live forever, is my Civil Code.

[Written by journeyman]

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3rd May 1915 “In Flanders Fields”


In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses row on row…

Days ahead of his departure for the Great War, Doctor John McCrae wrote to his mother a sentiment likely shared by every soldier going his way: “I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience.” One hundred and one years ago today more poignant words were penned, only this time McCrae’s words would not resonate with his fellow soldiers for just the fleeting moment; those words would represent them as a whole for evermore. During the Second Battle of Ypres, as the Germans’ poison gas ravaged the Western Front and left 70,000 Allied troops dead, wounded or missing, a grieving McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance. He looked to where the dead lay nameless and voiceless in Flanders fields, and, seeing the wild poppies in bloom, began to write.

World War One was a war unlike any other. It was out with the old and in with the new, bayonets outnumbered by machine guns and the cavalry replaced by conscription. It gave rise to a new kind of voice, a poetic voice, as the common man became entangled: we had the vitriol of Siegfried Sassoon, the harrowing recollections of Wilfred Owen and the impenetrable darkness of Isaac Rosenberg. Poems about war, of course, already existed – “Cannon to the right of them/ Cannon to the left of them!” – but never before had war poetry been a genre in its own right. McCrae’s poem, however, stood (and still stands) in a place of its very own, for he wrote not with the voice of one man, but the voice of every man.

Like so many great works of the war, ‘In Flanders Fields’ was inspired by the loss of a friend. On the morning of May 2nd, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was directly hit by a German shell and killed instantly. That same day what remained of him was buried, with McCrae himself conducting the funeral service due to the chaplain’s absence, and a wooden cross that has since been lost was left to mark Helmer’s place. As yet another day of desperate fighting came to a close, the outpouring of McCrae’s emotions began to surge. By morning his work was done. Legend has it that a dissatisfied McCrae discarded the poem soon after its completion, and it was only when his fellow soldiers retrieved it that he was convinced of its worth.

And how worthy it would come to be.

The poem’s path to immortality was almost immediate. As with Decca and The Beatles, ‘In Flanders Fields’ was initially rejected by The Spectator magazine, but McCrae continued his quest for publication undeterred. It was published anonymously by Punch on December 8th 1915, and received with open arms by an adoring public. Captivated by the intense unity exhibited in the short, anthem-like poem, soldiers and civilians alike embraced its sentiment. It acknowledged the “crosses, row on row” and the need for mourning, but more significantly it spoke of the poppies that grew and blew between them, poppies that symbolized hope and renewal despite the tragedy. Looking back with what we know now, ‘In Flanders Fields’ can be seen as a kind of doorway relic, for it reflects a time before the war turned to total despair, before Owen truly needed to denounce ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’).

Among the moved millions was professor Moina Michael, who famously penned a response to the poem when the war ended, ten months after McCrae’s untimely death from pneumonia at age forty-five. ‘We Shall Keep the Faith’ sees Michael pledge to “wear in honour of our dead” the “Poppy Red,” a vow she fought passionately to fulfill on a scale far bigger than herself. She knew that the last traces of war remembrance would fade, that the flags would be taken down and the masses would move on, and so she campaigned with unreserved devotion to turn the poppy into the emblem for those who died. Historically she would come to be known as ‘the Poppy Lady’, because now, every Armistice Day, we in the Commonwealth wear that poppy and ‘In Flanders Fields’ is recited. John McCrae gave a voice to the voiceless, brought hope to the hopelessness. Let’s let the poppies do the rest for the Dead, let their opium take hold, and have faith that they can finally find their sleep.

[Written by Avalon Cope]

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11th February 1650 the Death of René Descartes


René Descartes

Today, on the anniversary of his death in 1650, we remember the life and work of French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes. Although not overtly political, the work of Descartes succeeded in redefining much of philosophical thought, to the extent that it would be more than fair to describe him as a revolutionary thinker. And while many of his ideas have antecedents in ancient Greece, Descartes can stake as firm a claim as anyone to the epithet, “father of modern philosophy”.

In March 1596, René Descartes was born in a small French town called La Haye en Touraine. You won’t find the name on any modern map as the town was later renamed Descartes in his honour; an indication of his great historical importance. His mother died when he was still an infant and the young René was raised partly by his politician father and partly by the Jesuit Order into whose care he was placed at the age of eight. In accordance with the wishes of his father, René studied hard and received a law degree, at which point he turned his back on the career for which he was being groomed and decided instead to see the world.

He wandered Europe and thanks to a combination of education, a sharp mind and an engaging personality, found few doors closed to him. He socialised with beggars and aristocrats and was equally at home in the court of a prince as he was in a seedy dockside tavern. He joined the Dutch army to fight against the Spanish, and later fought alongside the Spanish on the side of the Holy Roman Empire in the 30 Years War.

It was at that time, on the night of the 10th of November 1619, that Descartes experienced the “three visions” that were to so profoundly affect his later life. Today we can speculate as to the cause of these visions and the radical shift they produced within him. Certainly they bear many of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress and coming just two days after the bloody Battle of White Mountain in which 5,000 men died in close combat and many thousands more were maimed, it does not take a qualified psychoanalyst to link the events. Nonetheless, Descartes viewed the visions as a divine message to end his “life of adventure” and make the methodical pursuit of truth and wisdom his goal.

With no firm boundaries between the sciences and philosophy at the time, Descartes decided that he would sift through every field available to him and discover the unifying truths that lay beneath them all. He aimed to unite physics and mathematics, and while his philosophical treatises remain essential reading for any undergraduate in the subject, it is surely his development of the Cartesian co-ordinate system that has had the most lasting cultural impact. Descartes established the standard notification for algebra we still use today and created the method by which algebra could be represented geometrically. Rarely has one man so completely revolutionised such an important field of study and it is genuinely difficult to overestimate the impact he has had on the subsequent evolution of Western civilisation.

Good sense is the most evenly shared thing in the world, for each of us thinks he is so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in all other respects are not in the habit of wanting more than they have.

Thus opens Discourse on Method, which along with The Meditations (he would later fuse the two books into a single volume, Principles of Philosophy), makes up Descartes’ two-pronged assault on the contemporary philosophy of his day. It’s difficult to dislike any book with such a wry first line. And it is within the pages of Principles of Philosophy that we find not only his most famous line, but arguably the most famous line in the history of philosophical thought, I think, therefore I am.

In Cartesian philosophy, all other knowledge must both rest upon and flow from that foundation; what Descartes saw as the Primary Truth. But of course, the world has had more than 350 years to digest the statement and it has been – along with all of Cartesian philosophy – robustly challenged in that time. Indeed, while modern philosophy acknowledges the great debt it owes to Descartes, his work has become almost an ancient artefact rather than a living part of the subject. He tends to be presented to modern students in the context of “finding the flaws” and while it would be naive to attempt to defend the entirety of his work, I do believe in that respect he is being done a disservice.

Now, I admit my own interpretation of Cartesian philosophy falls some way outside the mainstream, but I believe his present-day reduction to an historical footnote is due to a failure to appreciate just how radical his work truly was. Despite the standard view of Cartesian dualism as a proposition about the strict separation of mind and body, I would argue that it is within the work of Descartes that we see the first steps towards a far more subtle relationship between the two and the advancement of a theory that actively undermined the prevailing dualistic view of the time.

His “ontological proof” for the existence of God and avowed Catholicism are well known, and he certainly found himself reaching for the word “God” to provide him with a First Cause. However it must be remembered that Descartes was a contemporary of Galileo and was forced to shelve a book, Treatise on the World he’d spent four years working on as he was convinced it would see him persecuted. Indeed, for all his talk of God – and there is plenty of it – Descartes was accused of atheism, found his work outlawed by the Catholic Church and was denounced by no less than Blaise Pascal for “doing his best to dispense with God”. The work of René Descartes contains the profound and aching inability of a man to reconcile his inner beliefs with the oppressive imposition of the values of his society.

Which is no wonder, for we also find within Discourse on Method the seeds of cultural relativism, a philosophy that remains radical and subversive in much of the world even today. He also discusses, probably for the first time, the interactions between the conscious and unconscious mind in a manner that provides an essential bridge between the earlier work of Plato and the later Freud.

None of which is meant to suggest that we cannot find plenty worthy of criticism within the life and work of Descartes. His justification of live vivisection hardly stands proudly alongside his other more enlightened views, for example. But none of us can completely escape the values of our time and place. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, captives of history. Descartes, however, did a better job than most at throwing off some of those bonds. More than that, he explicitly identified those bonds in a way that I’m not sure anyone had ever done before him.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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3rd February 1468 Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution


Johannes Gutenberg

As befits such a momentous world-shifting event, On This Deity proudly presents two overviews to mark the occasion of the death of Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution he begat. 

These days we are constantly told that the Internet is the most important invention in transforming the modern world. It has impacted all aspects of our lives – from the globalisation of brands through to the emergence of a new kind of radical activism – but it stands on the shoulders of the earlier printing revolution of the fifteenth century.  Today is the anniversary of the death in 1468 of Johannes Gutenberg, generally acknowledged as the father of European printing.

Printing in the form of woodcuts and copperplate engraving had been known in Europe for some time. But it was Gutenberg who developed a process using  ‘movable type’ – characters that could be assembled into a page layout and then disassembled for a new page. It was the same form of printing – known as letterpress – that remained the dominant process until the 1970s.

Gutenburg’s invention had far more than just technical significance. It is not an over-statement to say that without it there would not have been a Reformation, and without that, there would probably be no Western Capitalism as we know it. Nor would there have been its antithesis: radical dissent.

Within a few decades, printing overturned the thousand-year-old monopoly of the Catholic Church over the reproduction of the written word, and by implication, virtual control of the dissemination of knowledge. In an age where even many of the feudal ruling class were illiterate, the scriptoriums of the monasteries of Europe were the only custodians of written knowledge – and jealously guarded their control over the means of its reproduction. Their beautiful illuminated manuscripts represented hours and hours of work by teams of scribes and illustrators far beyond the means of any but the very wealthiest of patrons. Unsurprisingly the vast majority of texts they reproduced were Christian liturgies. It was only through contact with the Muslim scholars of Moorish Spain, and later from the crusades, that some of the secular texts of ancient Rome and Greece were preserved.

Johannes Gutenberg came from the small but growing middle class of medieval merchant-craftsmen. Biographical details are sketchy, but it is known that he was born in Mainz at the end of the fourteenth century. By the 1430s there are records of him as a goldsmith working in Strasbourg and enrolled in the civic militia – a bastion of the city’s affluent artisans.  As a goldsmith he would have acquired much of the technical knowledge required for type-founding and more importantly access to patrons who could finance his business ventures. Some of the few records that survive relate to a court case between Gutenberg and his patron over ownership of his first print shop that left him bankrupt.

The products of this print shop – in particular the ‘Gutenberg Bible’ – are generally considered amongst some of the most beautiful examples of printing ever produced. Although still expensive items way beyond the means of most of the middle class – only about 180 copies of the bible were produced and each cost the equivalent of three years’ wages for a clerk – they were nonetheless accessible to a much wider audience than the products of the monks’ scriptoriums.

But the real significance of Gutenberg’s workshop was what it subsequently made possible. No great radical himself, Gutenberg printed orthodox religious texts, Latin grammars and German poems – but without his invention it is hard to conceive of the Reformation, its challenge to Church authority and the radical movements of Early Modern Europe.

Common to all strands of Protestantism was the belief that each individual could interpret the ‘word of god’ by studying the bible themselves – independently of (Catholic) church hierarchy and authority. As a vital step towards this, John Wycliffe in England and John Huss in Bohemia had pioneered the publishing a study of religious scripture in their own indigenous languages  – and they and their followers had been savagely repressed by the Church authorities. A generation later, Martin Luther took the battle further as a prolific writer of reforming pamphlets.

The inextricable link between printing and Protestantism is evidenced by the fact that by 1525 half of the printed texts in Germany were authored by Luther. And at the same time that sixteenth century was dominated by religious conflicts – and the rise of a new middle class that threatened to overturn the old medieval order – so printing exploded across Europe. It is estimated that by1500, some 20 million volumes had been printed; by 1600, the total was 200 million.

As printing  – and its new middle class readership – grew, so too did a new consciousness. A consciousness based on the individual and his ability to forge his own way in the world. Critics and apologists of Capitalism alike – from Marx to Weber – have seen this ‘Protestant spirit’ as an essential ingredient for the new world order that marked the end of the Middle Ages.

But as the rallying call that ‘every man could be his own priest’ spread, printers and publishers also became the engine-rooms for radical religious ideas that were the first expressions of political concepts of individual freedom and egalitarianism. In England in the years preceding the Civil Wars of the 1640s, there was a golden age of political pamphleteering – and arguably the birth of the first newspapers. Without the printing press, the proto-radicalism of the Levellers and the Diggers would never have reached mass support. Even at a time when rates of literacy were alarmingly low, a small layer of radical artisans was able to have a disproportionate effect by reading aloud these news-sheets at open air meetings. Such meetings were frequent in the New Model Army and the streets of London – just as they would be centuries later in Russia in 1917.

It is ironic then that much as there is a link from Gutenberg’s first use of movable type to the modern Capitalist world, so too can we trace the letterpress to the birth of those radical movements that would overthrow the old world order. As Francis Bacon said in 1620, printing “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.”

[Written by journeyman]

Gutenberg Press

Where would humanity be without the stone axe, the wheel, the plough, the compass and the steam engine? Likewise the printing press, whose inventor Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg died on this day in 1468.

“Yes but” I hear you bookish pedants cry, “didn’t the Chinese T’ang Dynasty have a method of printing from carved wooden blocks?” Indeed they did, but its efficiency was limited. Wood blocks are fiddly to make, can only be used for one edition, will not take corrections, and degrade quickly.

Before Gutenberg books were an eye-wateringly expensive item. Each book took scribes months to produce. They hand-copied the text with quill pens using inks they made from gum, ox gall, soot and water onto sheets of parchment, an expensive product in its own right made usually from calf skin.

No wonder there were so few books and those that there were, were bibles; the only words worthy enough to commit to parchment. Most ordinary people had only ever seen one book – the bible in their parish church.

By the end of the 14th century there was a quiet unsung revolution going on; a water-powered method for making wood pulp-based paper had been developed. (Hence ‘paper mill’, since they were usually located on a river to power the process and provide the water.) Large quantities of uniform quality sheets were being produced cheaply.

Gutenberg was born sometime in the very late 1300s and worked in his native Mainz, Germany as a blacksmith and goldsmith. With his fine metalworking skills he developed his greatest gift to the world: moveable metal type. This he combined the traditional screw press (a Roman invention) to make durable, flexible and speedy printing equipment.

He cast tens of thousands of tiny individual metal letters in an alloy he devised of antimony, lead and tin. The letters could be ‘set’ to make words, sentences, pages, chapters, books, volumes! Initially fiddly to make and cast, yes, but they could be used again and again with no degradation. Letters were set by skilled compositors, inked and pressed onto paper. But wait: pre-existing inks were water-based and did not adhere to the type. No problem for our hero. Gutenberg set about inventing an oil-based ink, sticky like varnish, which would produce a crisp letterform on the paper.

All the elements were now in place to herald a revolution.

Gutenberg’s best known masterpiece is his 42 line bible, first sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair. Although it was an expensive two-volume affair, it caused a sensation. He wanted to keep his invention a secret, but the cat was out of the bag and by the end of the century more than 2,500 printing presses were hard at work throughout Europe. The public appetite for printed material proved, then as now, insatiable.

The first books were religious, but it didn’t take long for printers to branch out into classic literary texts, scholarly works, manuals, pattern books, story books. As more were published, books became cheaper, literacy increased and people sought entertainment. Just 23 years after Gutenberg’s bible, the first English printer, William Caxton, published Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. For the first time, English readers could read in their own language the exploits of characters they recognised from everyday life: the Miller, the Squire and the Wife of Bath.

Similarly, in Italy in 1472 Dante’s epic poem the Divine Comedy was published and helped to fix the Tuscan dialect as ‘Italian’, even though 14th century Dante considered himself a speaker of Latin. Books introduced the notion of spelling, helped to stabilise and standardise languages which in turn gave rise to a sense of nationalism.

Most importantly of all, the press had the power to spread ideas and information accurately. Scientific, cultural, technical, artistic, religious and political ideas could be shared and debated by many. The works of great philosophers such as Martin Luther and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam could inform people, and for the first time almost gave them permission to think for themselves, armed with the information to make up their own minds. Governments and institutions couldn’t easily hide behind propaganda and self-serving lies anymore – although many still try.

As words became attributable authorship became important. Copyright laws were established to protect intellectual property. Reputations and fortunes were made. They still are.

Newssheets took a little longer to get going. In gossipy Venice a cheap newssheet costing one gazeta (hence Gazette) was circulated in the early 1500s, but it wasn’t until 1605 that what is widely regarded as the world’s first newspaper was published in Strasbourg with the least catchy title ever: Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien.

In 1900, author Mark Twain wrote: “The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg’s invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened … Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it: for from that source it has all come … the evil wrought through his mighty invention is immeasurably outbalanced by the good it has brought …”

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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2nd December 1547 the Death of Hernán Cortés


Hernán "What a Killer" Cortés

He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns, Looking for the new world in that palace in the sun”- from Cortez the Killer by Neil Young

Hernán (Hernando) Cortés was a glory-seeking, ruthless murderer capable of barbaric cruelty, who more or less single-handedly destroyed the ancient Aztec culture. Using terror tactics, guns and horses he ‘conquered’ Mexico and unknowingly, with his small band of men, spread European diseases such as smallpox, measles and Catholicism to the indigenous peoples of Mexico who had no natural immunity. Today, the anniversary of his death, we remember him as a warning from history.

Born in 1485 in Spain into a family of minor nobility, he quit his legal studies aged 16 to go adventuring. Excited by tales of the exquisite treasures to be plundered in the New World he set sail for Santo Domingo in 1504 and got to Cuba by 1511. It was here, alongside conquistador Diego Velázquez, that he built his reputation for cunning, daring and learned the art of war-mongering.

Defying Velázquez’s orders, in 1518 Cortés sailed to Mexico, which had only very recently been discovered by Europeans. He wanted to be a conquistador, make a name for himself, claim the land for Spain, grab some gold and convert some natives to Christianity. And he had The One True Christian God on his side!

He landed at what is now Veracruz, in Mayan territory, with about 10 ships, a few hundred men, no more than 20 horses and a dozen cannons and established a settlement. The Mayan people, a decentralised farming civilisation, had never seen anything like it before. Massive ships! White men wearing strange clothes! Huge animals on which a man can ride! And very big, loud guns capable of extraordinary damage. Such was the shock of the invasion the frightened local people formed alliances with Cortés who found he could do anything and take anything he wanted. The Mayans told of him the riches of the neighbouring Aztec empire. And boy-oh-boy, he fancied some of that! He would march on the capital Tenochtitlán, ruled over by Emperor Montezuma II, and he would conquer it.

Before he left he scuttled all but one of his ships so that the men remaining at the new settlement couldn’t mutiny and bugger off back to Spain while he was away. There was to be no going back.

As he travelled he took advantage of regional enmities, inciting communities who feared the Aztecs to rise up and come with him. En route he converted people to Christianity. That turned out to be pretty simple: the indigenous people simply added a new god to their Holy catalogue of deities.

After two months on the road Cortés’ men, now numbering thousands, reached the city of Cholula. There he massacred tens of thousands of unarmed people to both frighten the Aztecs waiting for him in nearby Tenochtitlán and to warn his own men that such brutality would be meted upon them if they rebelled. The city was torched. Cortés marched on towards Tenochtitlán. Some say his arrival outside the city co-incided with an Aztec prophecy about the coming of white-skinned men. This might explain Montezuma’s generous welcome of Cortés – or more likely, scouts from Cholula had already informed him of Cortés’ brutality and the welcome was an attempt to appease him.

In November 1519 Cortés arrived in the bountiful, complex and watery city of Tenochtitlán. He was received by Montezuma dressed in feathers and gold, who lavished gifts upon the Spaniard. The good will wouldn’t last. Cortés’ superior fire power and barbarism meant that Montezuma was always doomed, despite the city’s lakeside defences. Montezuma was taken hostage. To cut a two-year-long story short, there were massacres, appeasements, skirmishes, truces and finally a siege – but the end was inevitable. By August 1521, Montezuma was dead, the Aztec empire was history and Cortés claimed Mexico for Spain. Cortés personally governed the territory from 1521 to 1524 from Mexico City, newly built from the ruins of the once-glorious Tenochtitlán.

Once conquered, the indigenous people were brutalised, exploited and died in their thousands from wave after wave of European diseases. An account written in 1528 describes the scene after Cortés’ conquest: “The houses are roofless now, and their walls are reddened with blood. Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, and the walls are splattered with gore. The water has turned red, as if it were dyed, and when we drink it, it has the taste of brine. Our city is lost and dead. We have chewed dry twigs and salt grasses, we have filled our mouths with dust and bits of adobe, we have eaten lizards, rats and worms….” You get the idea.

Later in his murderous career Cortés would explore Central America hoping to find a strait from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He did not. Instead he discovered the territories of what he called California, a name he chose from a popular early 16th-century novel and a word first printed on a map by Diego Gutiérrez in 1562. The name stuck. In 1541 Cortés returned to Spain and retired to an estate near Seville where he died on 2 December 1547.

Mexico would not be an independent self-governing state until August 1821.

“He came dancing across the water, Cortez, Cortez, What a killer.” – Neil Young

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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3rd November 1918  The Kiel Mutiny


Mutinous German sailors of SMS Prinzregent Luitpold

Following the stalemate that resulted from the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the German surface fleet was trapped in its home bases whilst only the U-boats continued a losing battle against allied shipping. By the autumn of 1918 the Imperial German war machine was at the point of collapse. In October a new chancellor was appointed and as a concession to the groundswell of anti-war opinion and radicalization on the home front, the socialist party – the SPD – entered the government. Privately the Kaiser’s advisers were urging him to negotiate a cease-fire.

Against this backcloth Admiral von Hipper, commander of the German fleet, ordered his ships into the English Channel to make one last stand. This futile gesture was derided as “The Glorious Death Ride Of The High Seas Fleet’ – and provided the catalyst for a naval mutiny which would force the end of the war and the start of the German Revolution.

It was not the first time that a naval mutiny would spark wider revolution: In Russia in 1905, and February and October 1917 it was the sailors who were the first to move.  And in 1923 at Kronstadt it would be the sailors’ revolt that marked another turning point in the Russian revolution.  There was even a series of mutinies in 1919 when  British sailors refused to take part in the military intervention against the Bolsheviks.

The radical nature of navies was no accident. The social organisation of a ship  mirrored that of industrial society in a way that armies did not. A ship’s crew had a high degree of mutual dependence and lived in close proximity, with a significant layer of specialists reflecting the skilled and independent–minded artisans who were often at the forefront of workers’ movements.  In contrast the armies of the time tended to mirror a more feudal structure – with a remote officer class and an intermediate layer of NCOs whose role was not generally that of technical specialists but brutal disciplinarians. By 1918 many of the sailors and dockyard workers in the North German ports had been won over to the support of the Independent Socialist Party – the USPD a more radical breakaway from the mainstream socialist whose leaders had largely supported the war. And it was in this context that when von Hipper issued his suicidal order on 24th October for the fleet to move to the channel, sailors in Wilhelmshaven refused to obey.

Using small torpedo gunboats with loyal crews, a mutiny was prevented and 47 ringleaders were imprisoned. In response in the nearby port of Kiel the sailors met in the local trade union offices and voted their support for the USPD’s demands of ‘Frieden und Brot’ or “Peace and Bread’ – an echo of the Bolsheviks rallying call, and the release of their imprisoned comrades. Under the leadership of two USPD members amongst their ranks, Karl Artelt and Lothar Popp, they made an unsuccessful march on the prison – shots were fired and the mutineers turned back with 36 casualties.

However by the next day there were 40,000 sailors and marines on the streets of Kiel and Wilhelmshaven – and the mutineers were in control of the city. Again echoing the Russian revolution, Soviet-style councils of soldiers, sailors and workers were formed and constituted a de-facto power in the city, and soon afterwards throughout Germany. By 7th November a workers’ council controlled Munich, a Bavarian Socialist Republic was declared and King Ludwig forced to flee.

This was the high-water mark of the German revolution: Under the pressure of civil war and facing the collapse of the old order, the Kaiser succumbed to advice and agreed to an armistice. Shortly afterwards he abdicated in favour of a new republic. Contrary to the later Nazi-myth of a ‘stab in the back’, after four years of slaughter the German sailors and workers had managed to end the war by taking matters into their own hands.

However, even at this moment of success, the seeds of the German revolution’s destruction were being sown. The leader of the Socialist Party, and member of the new government, Gustav Noske, was given a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Kiel. Although unknown to many who still looked to the Socialists as the natural leaders of the workers’ movement, he had received secret orders from the government to bring down the mutiny and the developing revolution.

For the next three months the forces of reaction, led incredibly by the official Socialist Party and aided by the proto-Nazi Freikorps waged a battle against the soldiers, sailors and workers’ councils. A new group on the Left emerged in the leadership of these councils; the Spartacist League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.  By January these leaders had been murdered by the Freikorps – paramilitary groups of nationalist ex-soldiers – and the revolutionary councils crushed across the country, with the last in Bavaria holding out until May.  A new coalition led by the socialists precariously held on to order, and established the fragile Weimar Republic that lasted only until descendants of the Freikorps seized power in 1933.

[Written by journeyman]

Posted in Dissent, World Events | 4 Comments

14th October 1066 The Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest


King Harold shot with an arrow in his eye from the Bayeux Tapestry

The British Isles has a long history of invaders: Angles, Danes, Saxons, Vikings. But on 28th September 1066, when William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey in Sussex, an invasion force on this scale had not occurred since the Romans a thousand years before. William’s fleet of ships contained perhaps 8,000 men and hundreds of horses. He meant business.

Two weeks later, on 14 October 1066, William and his army gathered at Senlac Hill, Hastings, and got into position to fight King Harold Godwinson’s English army. But Harold’s army was in a bad way. Depleted in number and war-weary from fighting the Norwegians in Yorkshire only weeks before, Harold’s infantry marched the 300 miles from the north so quickly that by the time they arrived on the south coast they were already knackered. Armed with battleaxes, swords and shields and dressed in chain mail, the English always fought on foot. The Normans were heavily armoured, carried swords, lances and the fiercely accurate crossbow and fought on horseback.

The battle was vicious with heavy losses on both sides. It wasn’t until William commanded his archers to fire over the English defensive shield wall to pick off the ranks at the back that the final blow was struck – so legend has it, an arrow in King Harold’s eye. William’s knights finished him off. The last Anglo-Saxon King of England was dead. Game over.

Having rested his troops, William marched on London. As he travelled towns he passed through submitted to him, as did  towns farther afield to where William had sent messengers. On Christmas Day 1066 in Westminster Abbey, William the conqueror was crowned William the First of England. It was a seismic moment in English history.

Unlike most invaders before him, William intended to stay and colonise rather than loot and run. So he and the few thousand French nobles he’d brought with him had to devise cunning ways to control the land and the population of about 2 or 3 million.

The first thing to do was to confiscate all the land, evict English landowners and give it to his French cronies. But what, exactly, was out there? And so the Domesday Book, possibly the most detailed national statistical document in history, was commissioned. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states: “he sent men all over England to each shire to find out what or how much each landholder … and what it was worth.” It recorded everything: buildings, ownership, woodland, mills, wells, fisheries, abbeys, every ox and swine. He was now armed with facts.

But the English didn’t just roll over and take it lying down. In the first few years after Conquest, English lords resisted the hostile Gallic takeover. But it was hopeless. William’s men quelled uprisings with not just swords but also buildings. Oh, how William loved to build castles! Massive, highly visible and well-manned fortifications sprung up in many towns and cities – a clear sign to all who saw them: this is mine now, so shut yer festering gobs and fuck off. William adored churches too. The Norman Romanesque style of architecture, with round arches and strong columns was used in abbeys and monasteries, and in military architecture, too. The iconic Tower of London was built by William in the Norman style, and even constructed parts of it using French stone imported from Caen.

It wasn’t just the topographic landscape that had changed. The social landscape was turned upside-down. The Domesday Book shows that by 1086 King William personally owned 17% of the land in England, the Church 26% and 40% of the rest was held by just 10 men and 12 clergy, all of whom were French. To the English peasants at the bottom of the social pile, the conquest initially made little difference – whoever was lord of the manor, English or Norman, they still had to pay rent, pledge allegiance, grovel and scrape. Their new lord now simply spoke a different language.

Overnight, the Norman French language became the language of state, justice, the church and the hierarchy. We still use them: abbot, accuse, arch, baron, bigot, brigade, cavalry, chancellor, chattel, count, court, crime, defend, duke, evidence, jury, noble, parliament, plea, priest, prince, punish, revenue, royal, saint, tax, verdict, viscount: there are countless examples. It became the language of the kitchen too where we find:beef, boil, butcher, dine, fry, mutton, pork, poultry, roast and salmon, although for the live animal we preferred Old English ox, sheep and swine. Drinking wine, not beer, became de rigueur.

The English language was now seen as uncouth. But English, that most flexible of languages, quickly adopted new words. As Norman men forged alliances with English nobles, cementing them with marriages to local women, the infants of these unions would learn their mother’s tongue but with the addition of French loan words. Within a couple of generations, a new richness had been injected into the language. Whereas before in English we only had the word ‘motherhood’, we added the French ‘maternity’, a quite different meaning. Babies were given French names: Richard, Robert and William replaced Aelfric, Godfrith and Wystan.

The French invasion of 1066 is etched into English DNA. Despite attempts by subsequent forces to invade England by, for example, the Spanish Armada or Nazi Germany, our collective subconscious memory screams: never again! And indeed a foreign army has never since conquered our nation. But to our shame, we remember it selectively. The upheaval and change wrought by the Conquest is conveniently forgotten when we become the invading force. We justify it with words like liberator, civiliser (both words, incidentally, of Norman French origin). What shameful hypocrisy we have exhibited.

And yet we, tucked away in the top left hand corner of Europe on our little island, have always been invaded: by new ideas, new words, new peoples, races and cultures. And when we are wise enough to adopt these great new things, what a richer, more beautiful rainbow nation we become.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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13th September 1922 The Destruction of Smyrna


The Great Fire of Smyrna

At the beginning of the 20th century, the great city of Smyrna on the Anatolian coast was one of the world’s richest, most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse metropolises – containing large Armenian and Jewish communities, as well as twice as many Greeks as then lived in Athens. Indeed, as the possible birth place of Homer himself, Greece had a long and deeply-embedded history with this most ancient city. But on September 13th 1922, victorious Turkish soldiers at the end of the three-year-long Greco-Turkish War lit fire to Smyrna’s Armenian and Greek quarters and went on a rampage of rape, pillage and mass murder. Soon, all but the Turkish quarter of the city was in flames as hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded the waterfront, desperate to escape. In the harbour were no less than twenty-one international battleships – including eleven British, five French and three large American destroyers. But on orders of their respective governments anxious to protect oil and trade interests in the area, all watched on passively as thousands of people were massacred in cold blood. The British poured boiling water on desperate refugees who swam up to their vessels, while America’s official representative insisted that journalists cable home reports favourable to the Turks. In a week of utter bloody carnage, the ancient city of Smyrna was entirely snuffed out; by the time its dying embers cooled, as many as 100,000 people had been killed and millions left homeless. There followed a massive cover-up by tacit agreement of those same Western Allies who had defeated the Ottoman Empire just four years earlier in World War I. The destruction of Smyrna – one of the great atrocities of the early 20th century – has subsequently been all but expunged from historical memory.

This colossal catastrophe had many causes. While Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s conquering soldiers were the same mass murderers responsible for the Armenian genocide, the Greeks themselves were not guiltless of perpetrating acts of atrocity upon the Turks throughout the course of their somewhat overreaching quest to reclaim and re-Christianise the Asia Minor territories lost to the Ottoman Empire. But the primary finger of culpability must be pointed squarely at a reckless and imperialistic post-WWI policy of meddlesome intervention that went disastrously wrong.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and American President Woodrow Wilson both shared a simplistic support for the Greeks that lacked any deep understanding of the wide-ranging and longstanding ethnic complexities in the region. The landing of the Greek army in Smyrna in May 1919 was in truth part of a cynical campaign by the Western Allies to carve up the territories of the fallen Ottoman Empire for their own self-serving purposes, and they were only too quick to change sides when it suited them. Just one year after the tragedy at Smyrna, the Allies formally recognised the Republic of Turkey with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, thus legitimising the Turkish Nationalist program of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and reversing all terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres which had legally obligated the Turkish government to bring accused war criminals to justice.

And while those Allied troops ignored the screams of the burning, drowning victims of their leaders’ machinations – some admirals even going so far as to order marching bands to play in order to silence the desperate pleas for help – it is interesting to note that the only rescue bids launched were by heroic civilians, and a nearby Japanese freighter that dumped all of its cargo and filled itself to the brink with refugees.

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7th August 1933  the Simele Massacre


Monument to the Simele Massacre and Assyrian Genocide

“Who, after all, speaks, today, of the extermination of Armenians?” asked Adolf Hitler in 1939. But, then as now, even less speak of the genocide of the Assyrians – the torchbearers of the earliest civilisation – who fell victim to the same maniacal plan for the elimination of non-Muslims culminating in the massacre of hundred of thousands of Armenians and Greeks. The genocide of the Assyrians has yet to be officially recognised by any country, but the survivors have chosen this day – August 7th – to commemorate the tens of thousands of Assyrians systematically slaughtered by the Ottoman Turkish army during and after World War One because of their ethnicity and faith. Today also marks the beginning of the Simele Massacre in 1933, in which some 3000 Assyrians were brutally annihilated by the Iraqi Army only a year after Iraq declared its independence.

The Assyrians – whose roots date back to the mid-4th millennium B.C. – are the indigenous people of Upper Mesopotamia. Today that area straddles Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Not an easy place for a nationless Christian minority. At the conclusion of WW1, land had been promised by the British government in return for support from the legendary Assyrian fighters, but the game-playing imperialists never delivered. Instead, the British exploited ethnic and religious divisions in the region for their own gain – primarily oil fields and railways – and recommended Iraq be admitted to the League of Nations. After the establishment of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, the Assyrians refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to King Faisal. And so, in August of 1933, the new Iraqi government unleashed its army on the Assyrian communities. The largest massacre was in the village of Simele. In his eyewitness report, Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII the Catholicos Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East recounted how “girls were raped and made to march naked before Iraqi commanders. Children were run over by military cars. Pregnant women were bayoneted. Children were flung in the air and pierced on to the points of bayonets. Holy books were used for the burning of the massacred.” Over the course of a 4-day killing spree, over 3000 Assyrians were targeted and massacred.

The Simele massacre might have been entirely forgotten had it not compelled Raphael Lemkin to write “The Crime of Barbarity” which he presented to the League of Nations just months after the massacre. Post WW2, Lemkin’s conclusions would evolve into the concept of “Genocide” as the world discovered the tragic truth about the Jewish Holocaust. But although the Simele massacre was the “inspiration” for the international laws against genocide, the international community has persistently failed to acknowledge the Assyrian genocide. For over one hundred years, Assyrian people have been repeatedly victimised by genocidal assaults. And the killings continue today. “What is happening in Iraq is, at the minimum, ethnic cleansing,” says Dr. Elmer Abbo – the executive director of the Assyrian American National Coalition.  “Other people will say it is genocide, even if the numbers are not there, because the Assyrians are being killed in a deliberate and strategic way.”

What then is the point in the United Nations Convention of Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the International Criminal Court?

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3rd August 2006 the Death of Arthur Lee


Arthur

Today we honour Arthur Lee – the African American protest singer, metaphysical poet and leader of LA’s pioneering psychedelic refuseniks Love – who quit this planet on this day in 2006 after an arduous battle with cancer.

Like Lou Reed, Arthur’s work was almost entirely ignored in the ‘60s because he was too at odds with the zeitgeist – thereafter gaining popularity not with black-power audiences but with white intellectuals and psychedelic freaks who found themselves drawn to his highly erudite, overly wordy and wholly apocalyptic world vision. And therein lies the irony in his legacy: at the peak of the civil rights movement, when other black musicians were celebrating their afros and skin colour, Arthur Lee was making his personal revolutionary statements in a style that was quintessentially white. By the time he pitched himself into black consciousness, even fewer people were listening. None of this, however, changes the overriding fact that Arthur Lee was a total genius and a supreme psychedelic motherfucker.

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31st July


Nought to report on this day. Instead, here’s something for you to chew on:

“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it has long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice that it entails, as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others, or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elite should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must — namely to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.” – Noam Chomsky

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28th July 1968 the Founding of the American Indian Movement


The flag of the American Indian Movement

From the first contact with their invaders, American Indians have striven to be treated with the respect deserving of an indigenous, sovereign and culturally distinct people. In turn, they’ve faced overt attempts by their conquerors at removal, forced assimilation and genocide. Prior to the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the sixteenth century, the American Indian population was as high as ten million. By 1920, at its lowest point, it had plummeted to less than 300,000. Stripped of all their land, surviving twentieth-century Indians were isolated on remote reservations or urban ghettos, trapped in oppressive poverty with few opportunities for education or employment and virtually no access to health services. Government programmes prohibited them from practicing their ancient traditions. For one hundred years and up until the 1980s, nearly half of all American Indian children were forced from their families and communities and transferred to remote boarding schools – often hundreds of miles from their homes – where they were systematically “deculturated”. This governmental policy was in direct violation of the United Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, which explicitly prohibits the forced “transfer of the children” of a targeted “racial, ethnical, or religious group”. It was in this milieu of oppression, poverty, disease, overt racism, police brutality, discrimination and hopelessness that the American Indian Movement was founded on this day in 1968.

AIM emerged during the height of anti-Vietnam War activism and the shift in the African American civil rights movement to Black Power. Although there were few formal links between the Red and Black movements, the racial grievances, ethnic pride and political demands of African American activists resonated with the dissatisfactions and resentments of many urban and reservation Indians. At its inception, AIM sought to advance the cause of American Indians by blending civil rights and anti-war protest strategies – marches, demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins – with historic and symbolic targets of Indian resistance. The organisation was catapulted to national attention in November 1972 when its members seized the Washington D.C. headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in protest of the agency’s discriminatory policies. The following year, a gun battle and 71-day standoff erupted between two hundred AIM members and the FBI at Wounded Knee, South Dakota – the very site of the infamous 1890 massacre and symbolic end of the centuries-long Indian Wars. In 1975, more violence occurred between AIM and the FBI leading to the deaths of two Indians and two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Reservation. High-profile AIM member Leonard Peltier was convicted in 1977 for the murder of the two federal agents and has become a worldwide symbol of American Indian oppression as he continues to serve a life sentence in prison following a kangaroo court conviction.

Throughout the 1970s, AIM was brutally and relentlessly targeted by the FBI’s nefarious Counter-Intelligence Program and – just like the Black Panthers – the organisation found it difficult to withstand the assault. During the 36-month period beginning with the Wounded Knee standoff, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on or near the Pine Ridge Reservation. At least 342 others suffered violent physical assaults. Unsurprisingly, by 1993, AIM had splintered into two factions. But in Dennis Banks and Russell Means, the movement has produced two of America’s most inspirational activists. Both continue their struggle to hold the United States government to account for its broken treaties and genocidal crimes against American Indians, the degrading and discriminatory use of Indian mascots by athletic teams and to protect and maintain Indian rights. Despite the movement’s many gains, at the onset of the twenty-first century, American Indian reservations still had a poverty rate of 31 percent – six times the national average.

And the American government, meanwhile, continues to expose its total disregard for its ignominious past and utter contempt for its native citizens by slanderously code-naming the operation to kill Osama bin Ladin “Geronimo”.

Posted in Dissent, World Events | 3 Comments

26th July 1953 the Birth of the 26th of July Movement


The Maconda Barracks today, memorialising the 26th of July attack

Today we recall the most revered date in Cuba’s history. For it was on this day, 26th July 1953, that Fidel Castro led the failed attack against the corrupt Fulgencio Batista dictatorship that would serve as the namesake and inspiration for the twentieth-century’s most successful national revolution.

Under Batista’s corrupt and incompetent leadership, 43% of Cuba’s rural population was illiterate, 60% lived in huts with earth floors and thatched roofs, typhoid and tuberculosis was endemic, while the United States controlled nearly all of its industry. But beyond Havana’s intelligentsia, there was no popular unrest. Fidel Castro knew he had to do something spectacular to wake and rally the masses. Timed to correspond with the centennial of the birth of independence hero José Martí, Castro, his brother Raul and 150 fellow revolutionaries launched an attack on the famous Moncada Barracks in eastern Cuba. The group formed a sixteen-automobile caravan to give the appearance of a delegation headed by a high-ranking officer. But the plan was a spectacular disaster from the get-go. The convoy was separated en route and the vehicle carrying most of the weapons went missing. Upon arriving at the barracks, Castro lost control of his car and crashed into a group of soldiers on duty at the gate. The element of surprise well and truly gone, half of the guerrillas were killed in the ensuing shoot-out while the rest were captured – including the Castro brothers.

As news spread of the dramatic attack and ferocious military response, the audacity and ideals of the young revolutionaries sparked the imagination of the Cuban people – just as Castro had hoped and predicted. The Batista government succumbed to public pressure agreeing to a trial rather than executing the captured rebels. 27-year-old Fidel Castro – a qualified lawyer – elected to defend himself. Incarcerated and without the aid of books, legal papers or counsel, he penned an extraordinary 4-hour plea: from Cromwell and the English Civil War, to the French, American and Russian revolutions, and on to Rosseau, Milton, Locke and Thomas Paine before focusing specifically on Cuba’s social dilemmas and injustices, Castro recounted from memory the history of humanity’s struggle against tyranny. The result was one of the most astonishing and brilliant revolutionary treatises of the twentieth century, concluding with the immortal lines: “Condemn me; it does not matter. History will absolve me.” He was sentenced to fifteen years.

Castro’s trial captivated the nation. As his name and message spread like wildfire across Cuba, the Batista government remarkably once again yielded to public pressure and released him after only two years. The Moncada attack had been a total fiasco. But Fidel Castro emerged from it a national figure, replete with a legendary manifesto and a rousing name for his revolution: The 26th of July Movement. He went into exile in Mexico, where he met the Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Just five-and-a-half years after the Moncada assault, Castro’s guerrillas would march triumphantly into Havana.

“Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.” – Fidel Castro

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23 July 1967  the Detroit Riot


Motor City is Burning

On this day in 1967, the Detroit police raided an after-hours bar in the city’s poor black ghetto where nearly 100 locals had gathered to celebrate the return of two African American soldiers from Vietnam. Typically in such raids, the cops would have arrested the proprietors and perhaps a few customers caught with illicit drugs. On this occasion, however, they arrested every single person – pushing and shoving, wielding their batons, and calling their prisoners “boy” and “nigger”. A few disgruntled onlookers started tossing insults at the heavy-handed officers, followed by bottles and stones. Within an hour, the melee had escalated into a full-scale riot as decades of pent-up hatred ignited and spread like wildfire across the central city. Los Angeles’s Watts neighbourhood had similarly exploded in 1965. Chicago in 1966. Tampa, Cincinnati and Newark earlier in 1967. But Detroit was the worst. Amidst ongoing violence, looting, arson, and gun battles, for the first time in a quarter-century, the U.S. Army was called in to contain civil strife. The week-long riot was the deadliest urban disturbance of the turbulent 1960s, resulting in 43 deaths, 1,200 injuries, more than 7,000 arrests, and in excess of $300 million in damaged property – destroying huge swaths of the city’s most impoverished neighbourhoods. Between the Michigan National Guard, U.S. Army paratroopers, the Michigan State Police and the Detroit Police Department, it took some 17,000 heavily armed men to put down the rebellion. Standing alongside 12th Street’s smouldering ruins, Detroit’s mayor likened the city to Berlin in 1945.

When the smoke cleared, genuinely bemused authorities were left wondering how Detroit had in one horrific week gone from being the hub of American industry – the Motor City, the “Model City” – to the disgraced host of the most devastating civil disorder America had ever seen. “What happened?” a shaken President Lyndon B. Johnson asked. Didn’t the black population of Detroit have the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban area of the country? Hadn’t the auto industry provided unskilled black workers with higher-than-average wages? Such was the cluelessness at all levels. The stark reality was that since the post-Civil War mass influx of blacks to the manufacturing north, Detroit had restricted its “coloured” population to its oldest, most decrepit neighbourhoods. Segregation inevitably spawned discrimination. Schools in black areas were overcrowded and under-funded. Services were delivered sporadically. In the 1950s and 1960s, the urban black economy tumbled into crisis as factory work started to disappear. In the city’s ghetto, unemployment skyrocketed, poverty intensified, crime increased. Then the planners ploughed through the heart of black Detroit to make way for Interstate 75 so that affluent whites from the suburbs could get into the city more easily. It cut the black community in two, devastated local businesses and worsened the housing problem. Policing was beyond oppressive. The Detroit police force was nearly all white and more than half were known to be “extremely anti-Negro”. Gestapo-like, they’d stop blacks for no good reason, arresting those who couldn’t produce identification.

The oblivious President Johnson appointed a Special Advisor Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the cause of the riot. Headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, the Commission correctly concluded that America was sharply divided into two societies – one white, one black – which were separate and increasingly unequal. “Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.” It advised the government to pour money into providing blacks with better jobs, housing and education. Johnson ignored the recommendations. Instead, in the aftermath of the riot, the white exodus to the suburbs of Detroit accelerated at an alarming rate. By the early 1970s, inner Detroit was almost entirely black. According to the 2000 Census, it remains the most segregated metropolitan region in the country with its 8-mile de facto cultural dividing line between the poor black city and its wealthier white suburbs. Half a century after de-industrialisation began, the city continues to haemorrhage jobs; Detroit has a higher unemployment rate than any other major American metropolitan area, with joblessness exceeding 50% in its poorest sections. One-third of Detroit’s population live below the poverty line. Its infant-mortality rate is comparable to that of the West Bank. The school system is almost completely segregated and criminally ineffective: only 22% of Detroit’s youth graduate from high school. The only trades that continue to flourish are drugs and crime. More than 20,000 Detroiters have been killed since the riot of ’67.

The Summer of Love completely bypassed Detroit, and the one-time “emblem of progress” would never recover from its Summer of Hate. After decades of decline, the Motor City declared bankruptcy in July 2013.

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17th July 1946 the Execution of Draza Mihailovic


Draza Mihailovic: Fooled the Axis, fooled the Allies, but ultimately fooled himself

Today, we make brief note of the execution 70 years ago of the notorious Serbian Chetnik leader – General Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović – for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazis and Italians during the Second World War.  Rejected at the end by all his family save his wife and forgotten in an unmarked grave, the tragic demise of ‘Uncle Draža’ would have been unimaginable just five years previously, when – claiming the title ‘The Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland’ for his Chetnik guerilla force – Mihailović ‘s widely-reported will o’the wisp behaviour had led General De Gaulle to call him the ‘pure hero’ and 20th Century Fox had lauded Mihailović in the Hollywood propaganda movie ‘Chetniks! The Fighting Guerillas’. But all the while handsome Hollywood 30-ish hunk Philip Dorn was, on the big screen, portraying the 50-plus specky beardo as the unequivocal and unconditional Balkan hero, thousands of miles away in the field of battle, General Mihailović was in truth so afraid to act against the Germans for fear of reprisals against the Serbian civilian population that, after much prevarication, he even preferred to turn his guns on Tito’s Partisans, for fear that their anti-Nazi behaviour might ignite more German atrocities. From the Zorro character that had inspired Hollywood moguls, General Mihailović gradually, inexorably performed a 180’ volte face and even began to collaborate with the Nazis, taking money from them while still collecting supplies and weaponry from the Allies. And there could be only one cruel and conclusive final outcome for this one-time national hero once Tito’s Partisans came to power after the war: summary execution. Perhaps grasping the enormous tragedy of his failed opportunities, Draža Mihailović declared in his final statement before execution:

“I wanted much; I began much; but the gale of the world carried away me and my work.”

[Written by Julian Cope]

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12th July 1936  the Murder of Jose Castillo


José Castillo (left), and José Calvo Sotelo

At 9.30pm on 12th July 1936, José Castillo – a Spanish lieutenant in the governing Republic’s special police Guardia de Asalto and a high-profile anti-fascist – left his house in Madrid to walk to work. When he reached the corner, a gang of Falangists, Spain’s principal fascist movement, shot and killed him. The murder of Lt.  Castillo was to the Spanish Civil War what the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to World War One – the spark that ignited a long-festering powder keg. This one murder would set in motion an unstoppable chain reaction that heralded the onset of a savage three-year national conflict, and cataclysmically altered the course of the twentieth century.

News of Castillo’s murder spread like wildfire, his outraged colleagues determined to seek immediate retribution. Less than six hours later, a police van arrived at the nearby home of monarchist José Calvo Sotelo, the political leader of one of the main Nationalist opposition parties. Forced out of bed and into the police van, one of the guards shot Calvo Sotelo in the back of the neck. His body was dumped at a municipal undertakers.

A rising wave of violence and terror had cut a swath across turbulent Spain throughout 1936 as Republicans and Nationalists jockeyed for position, compounded by the threat of a Communist revolution. But of all the many political murders in the first half of the year, it was these two that accelerated the impending disaster. The reprisal assassination of Calvo Sotelo by a government police guard provided the perfect public justification for the Nationalists’ planned military coup – which, within hours of the murder, was given the final go-ahead. And just five days later in Morocco, General Francisco Franco signalled the start of the uprising.

The Spanish Civil War has featured numerous times in the annals of On This Deity with good reason. We need look no further than the bloody streets of Madrid and Barcelona for manifest representations of virtually every twentieth-century political ideology: backwards-looking reactionaries; self-serving monarchists; blundering Republicans; two-timing Communists; monolithically evil Fascists; naively idealistic Anarchists. And, as the direct precursor of World War 2 – an unimpeded “dry run” for Hitler’s technology that sealed the Axis Pact. The Spanish Civil War begets an endless stream of monumental “what ifs”, namely: would World War II have happened had Hitler not been emboldened by his Spanish Adventure?

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10th July 1985 the Bombing of the Rainbow Warrior


The stricken Rainbow Warrior

On July 10th 1985, French intelligence agents acting under direct orders of President François Miterrand bombed the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour to prevent its protest voyage to the nuclear testing site of Moruroa in French Polynesia. The French denied, lied, and – after the truth emerged – rationalised that they’d intended only to disable the Rainbow Warrior while it was docked. But the French agents did not simply attach one explosive charge to its propeller as they might have. No. Two bombs were detonated, with no warning given either before or between the two explosions. The ship was manned by civilians on a well-publicised mission of hope and peace for the future of the human race. A Portuguese photographer aboard the Rainbow Warrior was murdered by the French government. His name was Fernando Pereira. He had a wife and two children. For New Zealand, a declared nuclear-free zone, the attack in its waters was little short of an act of war. After two of the French agents were arrested, tried and imprisoned, the French economically blackmailed its long-time ally with trade embargoes, while those two other Western imperialist possessors of nuclear weapons – the USA and UK – turned a blind eye. Appropriately codenamed Opération Satanique, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior stands as one of the most cynical, arrogant and cowardly acts of state-sponsored terrorism.

While we lament the tragic death of Fernando Pereira and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior – named in honour of a Cree Indian prophecy foretelling of a group of people from all nations calling themselves Warriors of the Rainbow who would band together to defend the Earth from human poison – this woeful anniversary is an opportunity to also bemoan France’s little-known environmental vandalism and crimes against humanity during its thirty years of nuclear testing. Between 1966 and 1996, the French military conducted over 200 nuclear tests at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in the Pacific, forty of them atmospheric. Throughout that entire period, French authorities steadfastly and officially denied that these tests caused any significant environmental or human damage. In August 2006, an official report by the French government confirmed the link between nuclear testing and an increase in the cases of cancer in the French-occupied Polynesian population. A massive crack in the atoll is still guarded by French Forces to inhibit independent assessments of environmental damage in the area.

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8th July 1822 the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley


Shelley

Today we lament the tragically early death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned when his schooner sank in a sudden violent storm in the Gulf of La Spezia. He was twenty-nine years old. Ten days later, his body washed ashore and, in accordance with Italian quarantine laws, was burned on the beach in front of a small group of mourners including his friend and fellow Romantic, Lord Byron. As the flames subsided, the writer Edward Trelawny plucked the poet’s undamaged heart from the funeral pyre. Shelley’s famous widow, Mary, kept it for the rest of her days. In a final cosmic joke, the unfinished poem in which Shelley was engaged at the time of his death – The Triumph of Life – breaks off with the last line the young visionary would ever write: “Then what is Life?” He died before he could give us the answer.

So spectacularly dramatic was the death of this World Genius that his artistic legacy has been hijacked by the otherworldly realm of Myth. The unruly and often scandalous events of Shelley’s brief life equally hastened the sensationalising: expulsion from Oxford, disinheritance, passionate love affairs, elopement, reckless excursions, intense friendships with other remarkable poets, utopian idealism, experiments with free love, exile, ostracism. All conspired to create a legend that has oftentimes eclipsed his brilliance. The most neglected of all the great Romantics – dismissed during his lifetime and for decades afterwards as a tortured, ruffle-collared “beautiful but ineffectual angel” – Shelley’s legacy remains askew. Though recognised as one of the finest lyric poets in the English language, his best-known poems – Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and his elegy to John Keats, Adonais – are in fact amongst his least representative. For Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most radical poet since Lucretius and one of the most revolutionary figures of his day.

The twelve turbulent years of Shelley’s adult life was a period of uninterrupted tyranny. And with astonishing feats of vision, intellect and imagination, the young Romantic gave poetic voice to the yearnings of the underclasses. In epics like Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, the Revolt of Islam and the Masque of Anarchy, he took to task the institutions of oppression – class, religion, education, the State – and, like a proto-Marx in rhyme, urged the British masses:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Anarchist, feminist and utopian, Shelley’s thinking would inspire such radical luminaries as Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Mahatma Gandhi. And nearly two centuries after his death, he remains a relevant, prescient consultant on any of the multifarious topics he addressed – from vegetarianism and nature to war and class division. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Shelley asserted – and his poetry and ideas continue to reverberate with eternal truth. He was a peerless revolutionary poet. He was The One.

As Paul Foot wrote in Red Shelley, he should be read today by radicals of every hue: “Read him, learn him by heart and teach him to your children.”

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6th July 1934 the Death of Nestor Makhno


Nestor Makhno

Today we recall the Ukrainian revolutionary leader, Nestor Makhno, who died on this day in 1934 in poverty, illness and oblivion. Fellow exiles who’d watched Makhno drink and cough himself to death in the slums of Paris could scarcely believe the tragic fate that had befallen the legendary “Little Father” of Ukraine who, just fifteen years earlier, had been one of the most heroic, glamorous and indefatigable figures of the Russian civil war and the inciter of one of the few historic examples of a living anarchist society. As the leader of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, this self-educated peasant-born military genius had waged a wildly creative guerrilla war against native tyrants, foreign interlopers and counter-revolutionaries. On behalf of what was always an uneasy alliance with the Red Army, Makhno’s forces had twice immobilised the seemingly unstoppable White advance in South Russia; indeed, so decisive were these against-all-odds victories that the Bolsheviks might never have won the civil war and consolidated power but for Makhno and his insurgent peasants. As the instigator, military protector and namesake of Ukraine’s simultaneous anarchist revolution – the Makhnovshchina – few have come closer than Nestor Makhno to establishing an anarchist nation. For nearly a year between 1919 and 1920, some 400 square miles of Ukraine was reorganised into an autonomous region known as the “Free Territory” in which farms and factories were collectively run and goods traded directly with collectives elsewhere. In his heyday, Nestor Makhno was an unmitigated living legend and folk hero – a real-life Robin Hood and proto-Che. But by the time of his death at the age of forty-six, so comprehensively dragged through the filthiest, shittiest mud was the name of this once unassailable revolutionary that it has yet to fully recover.

So what happened?

In 1917, 29-year-old Nestor Makhno was released from a Tsarist Russian prison where for nine years he’d been chained hand and foot until liberated by the February Revolution. He returned to his Ukraine homeland to begin a peasants’ movement, expropriating land from the wealthy few to redistribute to the many poor. But when the Bolsheviks sold out Ukraine and handed it to the Germans and Austrians in the 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Makhno’s band of peasants were redeployed as guerrilla warriors who somehow managed to expel the interlopers within a year. By this time Makhno’s reconstructed anarchist society covered most of the Ukraine, in the face of strong opposition from Moscow. In the ensuing chaos, the Revolutionary Insurrectionary or Black Army fought a bewildering multi-front civil war – sometimes against the Reds, sometimes against the Whites, sometimes with the Reds against the Whites. After the Whites were defeated, Lenin and Trotsky conspired to destroy Makhno’s army – the very forces that had enabled the consolidation of their own power. The Bolsheviks even went so far as to prepare an ambush by inviting the officers of the Crimean Makhnovist army to take part in a military council, where they were immediately arrested and summarily executed.

The then all-mighty Trotsky ordered Makhno’s assassination on sight. Makhno eluded his pursuers for nearly a year, but was soon forced into retreat as the full weight of the Red Army and the Cheka bore down on him. Makhno managed to escape to Paris via Romania and Poland. Having failed to kill him, the Bolsheviks determined instead to morally destroy him – branding him a bandit, counter-revolutionary and worst of all a rampant anti-Semite Jew killer. Never has any proof emerged to support these accusations. Rather, there is an abundance of evidence to the contrary. Makhno possessed numerous close Jewish comrades (all of whom vigorously defended him), had issued proclamations forbidding pogroms and even personally and publicly executed the chief of a White band of notorious pogromers as an object lesson.

But the Bolsheviks had their way. The unceasing stream of Soviet-orchestrated slander, vilification and propaganda in the form of history books, novels, short stories and even a spurious diary of “Makhno’s Wife” succeeded in blackening the Ukranian hero’s name for the rest of his days.

As he lay dying from tuberculosis in a Paris hospital, it would have been scant consolation to Makhno that the architect of his ruin – Trotsky – was in the same city, by then also betrayed and driven out of Russia into exile.

Posted in Anarchists, Heroes | 2 Comments

4th July 1980 the Death of Gregory Bateson


Gregory Bateson

There is no shortage of events to remember on July 4th. So I’m extremely pleased that On This Deity finds room today to celebrate the life and commemorate the death of Gregory Bateson. The first time I encountered Gregory Bateson’s name, he was described to me as “the most important thinker you’ve never heard of”. And that’s the description I tend to use when recommending his work to others. Because although his ideas have indeed been influential, and despite the fact that his work is finally beginning to leak into popular consciousness, the fact remains that the vast majority of educated, informed people are wholly unfamiliar with Bateson and his legacy.

Which is perhaps no big surprise; for unlike most of the revolutionary thinkers who have graced this site over the past eleven months, it is my contention that Bateson’s time has yet to come. His seminal work, Steps to an Ecology of Mind sits comfortably on the same shelf as Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Marx’s Das Kapital, Einstein’s Relativity or Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The primary difference being that the cultural impact of Steps to an Ecology of Mind is still ahead of us. For it seems clear to me that should modern humanity survive the crises that seem certain to confront us this century, it will be by adopting the kind of thinking to be found in the work of Bateson.

Gregory Bateson was born in the small village of Grantchester, just outside Cambridge, in 1904. His father – the biologist William Bateson – was arguably the world’s first geneticist (he coined the term “genetics” and founded the first “school of genetics” at Cambridge University in 1900 to champion the work of Gregor Mendel, in honour of whom Gregory was named). Gregory’s mother was Caroline Beatrice Durham, herself a towering intellect who collaborated on much of William’s later work. William and Caroline had three sons; Gregory and his two older brothers, John and Martin. All three boys were academically gifted and appeared to have extremely bright futures as scientists. However tragedy was to strike when John, the eldest, enlisted to fight in World War I despite his father’s conscientious objection. Less than a month before the war ended, John Bateson was killed in action and while the whole family was hit hard by this event, the middle brother, Martin, was unable to recover. Four years later, having been rejected by the woman he loved and on what would have been John’s 24th birthday, Martin publicly commit suicide by shooting himself in the head beneath the statue of Anteros in Picadilly Circus.

Gregory initially coped with his grief by burying himself in work. The year after his brother’s suicide he completed his BA in biology at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Three years later he had completed postgraduate work in linguistics and was lecturing on the subject at the University of Sydney, Australia. By the early-1930s he had switched to anthropology and conducted lengthy fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali where he spent several years living with indigenous tribes. Together with the controversial Margaret Mead, who he married in 1936, Bateson helped revolutionise the field of anthropology by attempting to exorcise the spirit of imperialism that dominated the discipline. He insisted that western civilisation had far more to learn from these supposedly “primitive” cultures than they had from us (“If there’s one thing the west has to offer other cultures”, he said, “it is a terrible warning”). At the same time he realised that the relentless expansion of industrial capitalism would soon overwhelm the few untouched cultures that remained, and he sought to document and preserve as much of their wisdom as he could.

It was while carrying out this anthropological fieldwork that Bateson’s involvement in cybernetics / systems theory began. Until then, systems theory had been largely confined to studying mechanical systems, with a minor branch leading into biology. Bateson realised that the same kinds of feedback loops that were being studied in engineering and biological settings also existed in other complex systems, including societies and cultures. He developed the concept of “schismogenesis” (literally: “creation of division”) to explain these feedback loops in a cultural framework and used it to provide the first detailed systemic analysis of such phenomena as class war, arms races and national character. He suggested that two distinct forms of schismogenesis existed (symmetrical and complementary) but that both were ultimately destructive for an society in which they manifest and that sustainable cultures contained inbuilt mechanisms to prevent runaway schismogenesis. In his 1949 essay, Bali: The Value System of a Steady State Bateson describes a culture that has evolved such inbuilt mechanisms. And although it would be another decade before he explicitly stated it, he implies in 1949 that western culture must learn from such cultures and develop analogous mechanisms to prevent it from tearing itself apart.

By 1950, however, Bateson had moved to the United States to immerse himself in yet another new field. This time it was psychotherapy that drew him. The mind, he believed, was yet another complex system that could be analysed and understood better by relating it to other complex systems – cultures, ecosystems and so on – than by simply examining it in isolation. Working initially with traumatised war veterans and alcoholics, he found himself eventually treating schizophrenic patients in Palo Alto, California where he developed the ground-breaking “double-bind” theory to explain the development of schizophrenia. However, even as his theory was being heralded as a psychotherapeutic breakthrough by colleagues at Palo Alto, Bateson had begun to reject what he called the “medical metaphor” of psychology and suggested that the double-bind theory was more a general analysis of why complex systems break down than it was a tool of mental health.

And so, by the late 1950s Bateson was on the move again. This time, tangentially revisiting his earlier work in linguistics, he collaborated with John C. Lilly on his research into dolphin communication patterns. Bateson and Lilly spent months analysing dolphin behaviour and “language” in the hope not only of discovering a way to communicate effectively with these mammals but also of better understanding the notion of communication itself. Ultimately, however, Bateson became convinced that meaningful, complex communication between humans and dolphins was not possible and he split with Lilly. “They have no hands, you see” was how he summed up the essential obstacle. Human language is “thing-orientated”, he suggested. It’s all about objects… things we can touch and hold. Nouns. Because the world of dolphins contained comparatively few “objects”, they have little use for a language structured around nouns. As a result, any attempt at translating one into the other was doomed to failure.

However, his time with Lilly was far from wasted, and his observation of dolphin behaviour convinced him that his double-bind theory did not merely provide a model for the development of schizophrenia, but also offered insight into such phenomena as creativity and humour. “There’s no doubt in my mind”, he said, “that a world without schizophrenia would be a world without humour… a world without art. The three are closely and peculiarly related.” It was also during this time that Bateson first met Alan Watts and the two were to become firm friends. The work of both men would shift in subtle ways as they incorporated one another’s ideas into their worldviews. And although they never directly collaborated, their later work is obviously coloured by their friendship.

By the mid-1960s, arguably aided by his LSD experiences, Gregory Bateson had begun to synthesise his wide experience into a single, coherent position. It would be over-stating things (and a little glib) to describe him as the first ecologist, but it was a trail he helped blaze; the hugely influential book, The Limits to Growth owes a huge debt to his work. Not so much to any particular book or paper, but to the way of looking at the world that he pioneered. And it is this way of looking at the world – this epistemology – to which he devoted the last decade and a half of his life.

Reading his great collection of essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind is not always a particularly easy task. It covers a vast array of subjects, sometimes with a level of technical depth that the casual reader simply cannot match. It is this – perhaps more than anything – that has prevented Bateson from reaching the kind of mass audience that his ideas deserve. A knowledge of anthropology will serve the reader well for parts of the book, but won’t be much help when Bateson begins discussing the “symmetry and metameric regularity exhibited in the morphology of animals and plants”. And while that may be second-nature to a biologist, they might find themselves wondering what they have to gain from an essay entitled The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism. Or Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art. His revolutionary ideas redefine such basic concepts as “mind”, “evolution” and “the sacred”. He developed key concepts in a half a dozen different fields. He was a sociologist, philosopher, semiotician and historian as well as biologist, anthropologist, linguist, psychotherapist and cyberneticist.

But for all that, what Bateson is trying to teach us is not a collection of “facts”. Steps to an Ecology of Mind is not primarily a collection of essays on different topics; it is a singular demonstration of why these different topics are, in fact, closely inter-related. He’s not imparting information in the traditional sense. Instead he’s offering an alternative method of thinking about the world. A method rooted in the indigenous cultures he lived with, but tailored to the culture he was hoping to change. So although it’s a word that has since been hijacked by the New Age, Bateson’s underlying message is that the only way we can hope to understand the world around us is by adopting a truly holistic attitude towards it.

When Bateson died in 1980 he was still trying to produce his “instruction manual” for looking at the world. The previous year he published Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity and two more books were published posthumously. Despite their relative obscurity, they comprise – along with Steps to an Ecology of Mind – a body of work that is the equal of almost any of the great thinkers in history.

In The Future of an Illusion Sigmund Freud wrote:

there are only a few people who can survey human activity in its full compass. Most people have been obliged to restrict themselves to a single, or a few, fields of it. But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future.

It is difficult to think of anyone during the past century who has surveyed more of human activity than Gregory Bateson. He was no dilettante, dipping his toe in several disciplines never reaching far below the surface. He spent his life diving into the deep end and as a result emerged with a near-unique breadth of vision and a rare wisdom. He saw clearly, perhaps sooner than anyone else, the dangerously unsustainable nature of industrial civilisation and identified the root cause for this disastrous course we had taken. He understood that humanity is an integral part of a wider network of systems, an ecology of mind which we are slowly but inexorably driving insane. And although he provides us with no concrete solutions, he does present us with a revolutionary way of looking at the problems. One that might just offer some hope.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Heroes | 7 Comments

2nd July 1940 the Sinking of the Arandora Star


The Arandora Star

Today marks the anniversary of the sinking of the Arandora Star – the killing of hundreds of people due to the British government’s callous disregard of their welfare simply because of their nationality. It also demonstrated the common humanity and dignity of troops from Britain and Germany in the moment of crisis. More especially, it showed the ready compassion of the British and Irish people who, finding a grim tide of bodies washing up along their shores, buried the dead among their own, finding the money for funerals from the meagre sums their rural poverty afforded.

When the Nazis rolled across Western Europe in 1938-1940 they seemed unstoppable, and the British were the last nation to make a stand. With American support a long way off and the recently independent Irish avowedly neutral, they stood alone.

As their allies collapsed in early 1940, British policy towards enemy nationals within their borders rapidly became paranoid, Churchill reportedly issuing a decree on 10th June to ‘collar the lot!’. German and Italian men aged 17 to 60 were rounded up and held in internment camps.

Much of Britain’s Italian population had arrived 30 years earlier as economic migrants and were a well settled, integrated part of society. Indeed, many had British sons serving in the forces who could have ended up guarding their fathers. The Germans had mostly come more recently, many as refugees fleeing the Nazis. They were all regarded as potential Axis agents. Foreseeing the imminent prolonged pressure on food and resources, the British decided to deport internees to Canada and Australia.

The Arandora Star was a cruise ship that, like many others, had been requisitioned by the government for war use. Painted battleship grey, she had retrieved British troops after the fall of Norway in early June 1940, and played the same role later that month after the fall of France.

She was designated to sail from Liverpool to Newfoundland, carrying 712 Italians, 478 Germans and 374 British guards and crew. Even though this was more than three times the peacetime occupancy, the number of lifeboats had not been increased. Layers of barbed wire were placed between decks. Captain EW Moulton had protested, demanding the number of passengers be halved and the barbed wire be removed, saying, ‘if anything happens to the ship that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating death-trap.’ He was overruled.

At 4am on 1st July 1940, across the river from the Birkenhead shipyard that built her 14 years earlier, the Arandora Star left Liverpool. She was unescorted, unmarked, and steamed at cruising speed. Had she been painted with a red cross it would have been apparent she was not on a military mission. As it was, she looked like what she had so recently been, a troop carrier.

At 7am on 2nd July, north west of Ireland, a German U-boat spotted her and fired. The unarmoured ship was deeply penetrated and took on water for just half an hour before sinking.

There was a scramble for the lifeboats that were held in place by stout wires and only movable with special tools. Many could not be moved, others broke as attempts were made to launch them. The British crew marshaled people as best they could, guards pulled the barbed wire with bayonets and their bare hands as prisoners wrenched at it from the other side.

In the days afterward, where it was mentioned at all, the talk in the British press was of animalistic and selfish prisoners, The Times’ headline declaring ‘Germans and Italians fight for lifeboats – Ship’s officers on bridge to End’. This is an outrageous slur on those who gave their lives for others.

Captain Otto Burfeind and his crew had been interned since their ship, the German cruiser SS Adolph Woermann, had been captured in November 1939. Experienced sailors, they knew how to evacuate effectively, a skill augmented by their ability to speak the same language as many of those they were helping. As with the British troops and crew, even as they filled the scarce lifeboats so efficiently to maximise survivors, the German seamen must have known that they were in effect denying themselves any hope of escape.

The Arandora Star’s distress call had been heard, and the Canadian destroyer St. Laurent arrived at 1.30pm, managing to rescue 850 survivors, around half of those who had been on board (no complete list of passengers had been made). The Italians had been on the lowest decks, the first to flood and with the greatest amount of wire to imprison them. Consequently, the majority of those who died – about 470 from a total of over 800 – were Italian.

Anthony Eden, Minister of War, told parliament that all internees on the Arandora Star were Class A, the highest possible threat to national security. Racism is rarely logical, and the politicians fearful of ‘the other’ readily brushed aside the Italians’ strong roots in British communities. Some, like German Jewish refugee Hans Moeller, had already been scapegoated in Germany and were now suffering it a second time. Yet this is just official designation. In the midst of the emergency itself both the British and German sailors worked together to evacuate passengers. Captains Moulton and Burfeind gave up their survival for others.

A month later, the dreadful tide began. Along the western shores of Scotland and Ireland, bodies and wreckage came in. The corpses of British troops had identifying metalwork, but most of the internees had nothing. Some were identified by personal papers, such as letters or in one case a membership card for Pontypridd Bowling Club. Despite the impoverishment of their communities, over and over again these remote coastal villages paid and organised to bury the victims as if they were their own. In Scotland, these were not only enemy nationals but ones singled out for vilification by the government, but no matter; they were given the same reverence and respect as anyone else.

This colossal maritime loss of civilian life – around half that of the Titanic that we all know so well – has no place in our common historical consciousness. It is, however, well known among the British-Italian population, and amongst the Scottish and Irish communities who tend the graves of the dead to this day. It deserves to be remembered both as a warning against racism, and as evidence that no matter what adversity or political pressure we find ourselves labouring under, compassion need never falter.

[Written by Merrick]

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 26 Comments

23rd June 1937 George Orwell flees Spain


The square in Barcelona re-named in honour of George Orwell

On the morning of June 23rd 1937, George Orwell boarded a train at Barcelona station with his wife, Eileen, and two companions, John McNair and Stafford Cottman. The train was bound for the French border and Orwell (or Eric Blair – he had yet to adopt his now famous nom de plume) was posing as a wealthy English businessman travelling with his wife and associates. In reality, they were fugitives, hunted not only by the fascist forces they’d come to Spain to fight, but also by the communists. McNair was leader of a contingent of fighters organised by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) who had left England to try and stem the rising fascist tide. This small group of revolutionaries and idealists – one among many such groups from all over the world –included Orwell. Prior to boarding the train that morning he had spent much of the previous six months in the trenches until a sniper’s bullet pierced his throat. By the time he’d sufficiently recovered to leave hospital, the internal divisions within the anti-fascist forces had shattered whatever slim chances they’d had of defeating Franco and his allies.

When Orwell arrived in Spain at the end of December 1936 Franco’s forces were already receiving support from the Nazi Condor Legion. Hitler saw the Spanish Civil War as the ideal testing ground for his new equipment and tactics and the grim results were encouraging for the Nazis. Despite this, the Republican side was holding firm in many areas of the country. In Catalonia, in the northeast, the opposition was composed of three primary factions: the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT – Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC – Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya), a wing of the Spanish Communist Party supported by the Soviet Union.

Orwell’s ILP was affiliated with POUM, and upon his arrival in Barcelona he contacted John McNair, introducing himself with the words “I’ve come to fight against Fascism”. In his remarkable book, Homage to Catalonia, which must surely rate as one of the definitive pieces of wartime journalism, Orwell recounts – with a mixture of amazement, admiration and near-disbelief – his initial impression of Barcelona and the surrounding countryside. Largely controlled by the anarchist CNT, the farmland surrounding the city had been collectivised as had all of the buildings and businesses within Barcelona itself. Simultaneously the institutions of oppression (including the church) were being torn down.

McNair assigned Orwell to a unit commanded by Georges Koop on the Aragón Front where he noted how the CNT had radically transformed Spanish society.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilised life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

Sadly, the success of the anarcho-syndicalist experiment in Catalonia would be short lived. Squeezed between the brutality of the fascists and the incoherent intolerance of Soviet state communism, it hardly stood a chance. This “perfect equality” being enjoyed by the Spanish peasants was all very well, but didn’t they realise – to steal a line from one of Orwell’s later works – that some were more equal than others? However much they might have denied it, the Soviet-backed communists would no more tolerate freedom, equality and a refusal to bow to a hierarchy than would Franco’s fascists. And so the internal power-struggle within the Republican forces became almost as bitter as the Civil War itself with the Masxist POUM (along with the affiliated ILP) soon targeted by the communists.

At first, stuck out on the Aragón Front in mid-winter, Orwell had little knowledge of this in-fighting. The area where he was initially stationed saw little action and he sat freezing in trenches simultaneously lamenting the terrible stories he’d hear of fascist atrocities and at the same time enjoying a comradeship that can only be engendered by such circumstances. After several months anxiously awaiting an onslaught that did not come, Orwell returned to Barcelona in the hope of being assigned to the International Brigades fighting near Madrid. However, his timing wasn’t good and he wandered into the infamous Barcelona May Days when the rivalry between the factions in the Republican forces spilled over into street-fighting, irrevocably splitting the anti-fascist movement.

The communists, better armed and financed thanks to Soviet support, decided to impose their authority on the region. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with the anarchists. POUM, although a Marxist organisation, sided with the anarchists. As a result they were demonised by the communists who printed posters and leaflets denouncing POUM and accusing them of collaboration with the fascists. Later, after he’d escaped Spain, Orwell would note with anger and dismay how these accusations had become The Truth in the European press. The “memory hole” of Nineteen Eighty-Four was born during those terrible Barcelona May Days.

Disheartened by the disunity and disarray within the anti-fascist forces, Orwell returned to the Aragón Front in order to “point my gun at the real enemy”. The fighting had become more intense in Aragón and it was then that a bullet from a fascist rifle struck him in the throat, missing his main artery by less than half an inch. Rushed to a hospital a few miles from the front line, a blood-covered Orwell was operated on and transported back to Barcelona. We have the skill of the POUM field-surgeons to thank for the incredible body of work produced by Orwell after the Spanish Civil War.

Within two or three weeks of being shot, Orwell was forced out of his hospital bed and into hiding. The communists had gained the upper hand in Barcelona and on June 16th outlawed POUM, declaring all members to be fascist sympathisers and Trotskyists. This odd contradiction didn’t seem to concern the mainstream media which printed the accusations as though they were statements of fact. Orwell’s commander at Aragón, Georges Koop, was arrested and imprisoned by the communists and it became apparent to the ILP members of POUM that it was time to leave Spain.

With his wife recently arrived in Barcelona, Orwell spent the next couple of weeks living an odd double-life. By day they would frequent the cafés of the city posing as a “respectable English couple”, while by night he would sleep rough with his ILP comrades, plotting the liberation of Georges Koop. In the end, despite a daring attempt, they were unable to free him from the communist jail and were forced to flee Spain before they too landed in the cells.

In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first class and a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had been only one class on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the train taking the names of foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking like a proletarian that made you respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to Cerberes a French commercial traveller in my carriage had said to me in all solemnity: “You mustn’t go into Spain looking like that. Take off that collar and tie. They’ll tear them off you in Barcelona.” He was exaggerating, but it showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the frontier the Anarchist guards had turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife, solely – I think – because they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about; to look bourgeois was the one salvation.

There’s no question that much of Orwell’s later work – beyond the obvious Homage to Catalonia – was heavily coloured by his experiences in Spain. Many of his wonderful essays, along with his two great novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, bear the blood, sweat and tears of those six and a half months fighting fascism in Spain and watching as a glorious social experiment was crushed by the twin steel-tipped boots of Franco and Stalin.

Ultimately, just as it did for Orwell, the Spanish Civil War provides us with both a warning and an inspiration. Today we face a more subtle crisis than that posed by fascism, but one that’s no less dangerous. Indeed, despite the inevitable criticism one invites by daring to suggest that humanity’s darkest days may not be behind us, safely bound in the pages of history books and yellowing newspapers, but in fact face us even now; it seems to me that now – more than ever – we need the inspiration of POUM, of the CNT and of the International Brigades. As free-market consumer-capitalism drives us to the abyss of ecological catastrophe and towards suffering on a scale undreamt-of by the fascists of yesteryear, we must ask ourselves whether the spirit of the international brigades still lurks within us. Are we capable of looking beyond our petty individual desires and uniting against a common foe? Dare we set sail towards an uncertain horizon to take up arms against the forces that threaten us? Or shall we remain content to await the oncoming tide? Or worse yet, will we succumb to in-fighting and factionalism as catastrophe overwhelms us?

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in World Events | 5 Comments

15th June 1962 the Port Huron Statement


The defining document of the New Left

On this day in 1962, a small group of American students authored a mission statement that would serve as the defining document of the revolutionary 1960s.

“We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” begins the so-called Port Huron Statement – the manifesto of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society. This extraordinary 75-page tour de force went on to challenge every fundament of American rule: its politics, economics and imperialistic policies; the Cold War, anti-communism and the nuclear arms race; and, on the homefront, inherent racism and the civil rights movement. It asked the critical questions: Why was there poverty in a land of such plenty? What gave America the right to forcefully intervene in foreign countries? How could a nation rife with political and racial repression claim to be “democratic”?

With startling intellectual breadth, these young students painted an unsavoury portrait of America in thrall to the quest for material security, willing to tolerate – indeed, able to ignore – racial injustice and the rise of, in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, “a military-industrial complex” that controlled all aspects of American society. More than anything, it dared to challenge the basic assumptions about America and its place in the world. By calling for “participatory democracy” to self-determine a better and more responsible future, the Port Huron Statement gave voice to a new generation of radicals and marked the birth of the American student movement.

Ambitious and imaginative, idealistic and uncompromising, the authors of the Statement proposed a radical new vision:

… to replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity … If we appear to seek the unattainable, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

Central to this vision was the involvement of youth. Port Huron condemned an educational system geared only to reinforcing the status quo rather than sparking genuine inquiry, and called on students to open their own eyes and become active participants in a reordering of American values.

And lo, American students did heed the call.

When the Statement was drafted at the first ever convention of the Students for a Democratic Society that June of 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan, its members numbered only a few hundred. Skip ahead another half-dozen years, and SDS had become a militant organisation of over 100,000, with chapters in over 350 American universities. Galvanised by the escalating war in Vietnam, campuses erupted across the country. Buildings were occupied, strikes were called, mass protests held as students made their feelings known, their voices heard.

The Port Huron Statement claimed to be articulating an “agenda for a Generation.” Its principle author and lifelong activist Tom Hayden would later reflect:

Some of that agenda has been fulfilled: The cold war is no more, voting rights for blacks and youth have been won, and much has changed for the better in the content of university curriculums. Yet our dreams have hardly been realized … there is a new movement astir in the world, against the inherent violence of globalization, corporate rule and fundamentalism, that reminds us strongly of the early 1960s. Is history repeating? If so, “participatory democracy” and the priorities of Port Huron continue to offer clues to building a committed movement toward a society responsive to the needs of the vast majority.

Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton said, “The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.” Today’s student activists owe an enormous debt to the bold vision of the Port Huron Statement, and would be well advised to acquaint themselves with its utopian tenets.

So here it is, and all power to you.

Posted in World Events | 2 Comments

13th June 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt


Wat Tyler leading the Peasants' Revolt

On this day in 1381, 20,000 peasants and townsmen from Kent and Essex stormed into London, led by John Ball an itinerant priest and Wat Tyler a craftsman. They had come to present the young King Richard II with a set of demands that amounted to the abolition of serfdom, and for two days their rebel forces were in control of the capital.  Ultimately the rebellion was to be betrayed and crushed but their ideas inspired later generations of radicals as the ‘first planting of the tree of liberty’.

Under the feudal system that had operated in England since the Norman Conquest, the life of a serf was one of drudgery and oppression. The majority of the population lived in the countryside at the sufferance of landowners to whom they paid rent in the form of unpaid labour and military service. A small amount of their produce was their own, but could only be milled or processed if they made payments to the landowner. Theoretically a serf could buy himself out of his bondage but the opportunities for any sort of paid labour were severely limited. A rigid social structure was enforced by a legal code that stipulated what clothes a serf could wear and what food could be eaten, but most importantly of all, forbade them to leave their villages.

There was no strong centralised apparatus to enforce this in the modern sense but the feudal state was a three-headed creature: The Church – often a landowner as well – provided ideological legitimacy; the Nobles acted as a form of privatised law enforcement; and the Crown sat in the shadows behind it all. Consequently whilst peasant resentment was aimed at the church and landowners, the king was generally seen as some sort of champion of justice for the common people – an illusion was ultimately to prove the undoing of the revolt.

Ironically it was the Black Death of 1348-9 – the pandemic that killed off a third of the total population – that created the cracks in the system that made rebellion possible. Wide-scale depopulation and a resulting chronic labour shortage gave serfs and craftsmen an opportunity to earn higher wages. An embryonic urban working class was created by peasants leaving their villages and taking up trades in the towns, and there were the first glimpses of a new kind of economic system springing up around the wool trade.

The landowners were rattled by this threat to the social order.  In response a draconian Statue Of Labourers was introduced in 1351 that reinforced the restrictions on serfs and most significantly limited wage levels to pre-plague levels. As a result the next thirty years saw social conflict with peasants, craftsman and merchants forced into an alliance by laws that penalised both worker and master who agreed to higher wages than those specified. At the same time the life of the medieval court, based on lavish conspicuous consumption made increasing demands in terms of taxation. In 1381 the uncle of the teenage king and the effective power behind the throne, John Of Gaunt, raised a poll tax, a flat levy on every person over the age of 15. It was the third such levy in a short number of years, and was to prove the catalyst for rebellion across South Eastern England.

Inspired by hatred of the unfair tax, and regarding the virtual-regent John Of Gaunt as a hate figure the ‘evil councillor’ who had abused the powers of the Crown, crowds of peasants and townspeople gathered in Essex and Kent. Leaders came to the fore although little is still known about their backgrounds or ideology: Wat Tyler – an independent atrtisan with some military experience –  was the man of action, whilst John Ball – a wandering preacher who may have been influenced by the proto-Protestant Lollard sect –  provided ideological leadership. Ball had a biblical view of social justice as the divinely ordained natural order, preaching: “In the beginning all men were created equal; servitude of man to man was introduced by the unjust dealings of the wicked and is contrary to God’s will. For if God had intended some to be serfs and others lords, He would have made a distinction between them at the beginning.” However he was not a revolutionary in any modern sense – he sought recourse for injustices by corrupt nobles and churchmen from the king as God’s appointed judge on earth.

Having gathered at Blackheath and elected Wat Tyler as their leader the rebels march on London to seek a meeting with the king to present their petition. Along the way they destroyed property – although their actions were not indiscriminate; the main target was primarily the destruction of manorial rolls – documents that recorded serfs’ obligations. When they got to London, the homes of particularly hated figures where singled out for looting and destruction – including John Of Gaunt’s Savoy palace. Seeking to keep fighting away from the capital, and with limited military forces available, the young king arranged to meet the rebels at Mile End. There he agreed to the demands to give serfs the right to buy and sell goods and labour, and to provide a general pardon to all rebels.

However this virtual abolition of serfdom was only a cynical attempt to play for time whilst the king actually gathered his forces. At a second private meeting on the 15th June, Wat Tyler was murdered by the Lord Mayor of London William Walworth. Unaware of this, the rebels agreed to disperse and leave London. When they had done so the king immediately renounced his previous promises and having now gathered an army, over the next two weeks defeated the remaining rebel forces in Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent. A month later John Ball was captured and then hanged, drawn and quartered.

Although the rebellion was defeated, feudalism was in terminal decline and by the start of 15th Century had in effect all but been abolished. The costly French  wars played their part in this, as did the emergence of trade and manufacture. But John Ball’s rallying cry ‘When Adam delved and Eve span – Who was then the gentleman?’ endured to inspire later radicals of the English Civil Wars and Victorian socialists. For six hundred years no government would attempt to again introduce a flat-rate poll tax. When she did so in the late 1980’s, Thatcher, like John Of Gaunt before her, would fatally underestimate the anger she unleashed.

[Written by journeyman]

Posted in Dissent, Heroes, Revolution | 5 Comments

12th June 1963 the Assassination of Medgar Evers


Medgar Evers

On this day in 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in the driveway of his home while his wife and young children watched in horror as he bled to death on the doorstep. Lynchings were still an ugly fact of life in the Deep South, but Evers was the first high-profile black activist to be murdered. In the wake of the assassination, John F. Kennedy gave his most impassioned speech about America’s moral crisis and the need for racial tolerance. Both Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were prompted to write protest songs in Evers’ memory. And – of greatest significance – future black leaders were radicalised and galvanised. While the assassination of such a prominent black figure foreshadowed the violence to come, it also infused the civil rights movement with a new fervour and sense of purpose. Apprehension was replaced with anger. No longer were African Americans afraid to stand up to their white oppressors. As Esquire contributor Maryanne Vollers wrote: “People who lived through those days will tell you that something shifted in their hearts after Medgar Evers died, something that put them beyond fear…. At that point a new motto was born: After Medgar, no more fear.’”

As the Mississippi state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1950s and early 1960s, Medgar Evers held one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. In the epicentre of the Jim Crow South, Evers travelled alone through the rural back roads investigating racial violence, challenging school segregation and talking up voter registration. His wife Myrlie later recalled: “Medgar felt the deprivation of every Negro as though it were his own. He suffered with every Negro whose suffering he knew.” He was not a “personality cult” leader who dazzled with rallying speeches – but rather a “servant-leader” whose courageous fieldwork made a tangible difference to hundreds of terrorised blacks and their beleaguered communities. And that made him dangerous. For daring to confront the white world, Evers was featured on a KKK hit list as early as 1955. He and his family endured numerous death threats, but still Evers persisted with his work.

On the night of his assassination, Evers returned home just past midnight after attending an NAACP function. As he left his car with a handful of t-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go,” he was shot in the back. The still-smoking gun – bearing the fingerprints of staunch white supremacist and Klansman Byron De La Beckwith – was recovered within the hour in some nearby bushes. Eleven days after the assassination, Beckwith was arrested and charged with Evers’s murder. Tried twice by all-white juries, both cases ended in mistrial despite unmitigated evidence. Beckwith remained free for over thirty years until Evers’s widow finally forced the Mississippi courts to bring him to justice. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison.

Myrlie Evers carried on her husband’s work, and became the first fulltime chairperson of the NAACP. She was also an influential campaigner for Barack Obama. When Obama was elected, Myrlie visited her husband’s grave at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and told him: “We won.” Medgar Evers would no doubt agree that a black president represents a major victory, but he would also be all too aware of the work still to be done. He made the ultimate sacrifice for his cause. May the memory of Medgar Evers continue to endure and inspire new generations to finish what he started.

Posted in Heroes | 5 Comments

11th June 1963 the Revolutionary Suicide of Thich Quang Duc


The self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức

On 11th June 1963, 67-year-old Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức sat down in the lotus position at a busy crossroads in Saigon, doused himself in petrol, lit a match and burned to death. This spectacular public act of self-immolation in protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of Buddhists sent shockwaves throughout the Western world, galvanising judgment and triggering alarm bells that – despite the American government’s assurances – all was not tickety-boo in Vietnam. The burning body of Thích Quảng Đức remains one of the most singularly vivid images of the 20th century. So just what caused this Most Venerable Buddhist monk to sacrifice his life so spectacularly?

French colonists had long favoured Indochina’s minority Roman Catholic population and had passed several punitive laws discriminating against Buddhists. In the wake of France’s withdrawal, the Buddhist position worsened under South Vietnam’s first president, Ngô Đình Diệm – a devout Roman Catholic authoritarian and American stooge. A full-fledged crisis was sparked on May 8th 1963 in the central city of Huế by the shootings of nine unarmed civilians protesting a national ban of the Buddhist flag. Diệm blamed the deaths on communist terrorists, but the barefaced lie fooled no one.

Buddhist leaders demanded an end to religious oppression. Diệm refused to respond. As tensions mounted, on 10th June a spokesperson for the Buddhists privately informed US journalists that “something important” would happen the next day on the road outside the Cambodian embassy in Saigon. The few reporters who bothered to turn up bore witness to an elaborate ceremony as 350 Buddhist monks and nuns marched in two phalanxes carrying protest banners. Thích Quảng Đức emerged from a car along with two other monks, who placed a cushion on the road. As the marchers formed a circle around him, Quảng Đức chanted a prayer to the Amida Buddha before striking a match. He remained eerily still and composed amid the flames.

The unprecedented television coverage of the Vietnam War brought the brutal realities of human conflict into the world’s living room for the first time, but few images would shock the world more than Thích Quảng Đức’s suicide-protest. President John F. Kennedy said that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” Many Americans viewed Thích Quảng Đức’s act as a demonstration that Vietnamese lacked the most cherished of American liberties: freedom of religion. Such was the outrage that officials genuinely feared that it would lead to the end of Diem’s reign and the US effort to combat communism in Vietnam.

The global outrage, however, did not compel Diệm to end his persecution or even meet with leading Buddhists. In August, Diệm used regular troops to arrest and imprison more than one thousand Buddhists in Hue and Saigon. Protests spread, and Quảng Đức’self-immolation was followed by similar acts. People around the world began to question a regime that would oppress peaceful Buddhists and provoke such shocking sacrifice. The U.S. government found it increasingly difficult to continue its support of the man they had put in power. The JFK administration demanded that Diệm find a way to end the protests. Diệm refused, outrageously claiming yet again that communist infiltration lay behind the Buddhist protests. The Americans lost patience. On November 1st 1963, the CIA orchestrated a coup against the no-longer-useful Diệm. He was assassinated the following day.

For his extraordinary martydom, Thích Quảng Đức was deemed a bodhisattva – an enlightened being who delays nirvana to help those in need. And that he did. His heroic act precipitated the end of Diệm’s oppressive reign, and the regimes that followed pledged to accommodate the Buddhists.

Thích Quảng Đức’s heart, which miraculously survived the immolation intact, has become a holy relic.

Posted in World Events | 18 Comments

9th June 1938  the Yellow River Flood


Chinese soldiers wade through the flooded Yellow River

On this day in 1938, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Nationalist troops under the orders of Chiang Kai-Shek blew up the dikes holding back the Yellow River in an attempt to stop the invading Japanese. The mighty river was known also as “China’s Sorrow” or “The Ungovernable” for its long history of natural disasters. But no previous disaster compared to the devastation caused by this ‘scorched earth” military tactic. The explosions ferociously flooded the provinces of Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu, destroying some 21,000 square miles and shifting the mouth of the Yellow River hundreds of miles to the south. Nearly one million Chinese peasants drowned, starved or died of diseases. Over 12 million were made homeless. Thousands of villages were destroyed. And it was all for nothing, as the Japanese advance was not halted. This deliberate flooding of the Yellow River has been described as the “largest act of environmental warfare in history.”

Murderous warlord Chiang Kai-Shek issued no warning to the civilian population before blowing up the dike at Huayuankou on the south bank of the river. But Chinese civilians have never been protected by any authorities during any war. The sacrifice of one million civilians – even for a minor gain – would never have been a military consideration. The late scholar and political analyst Liang Qichaonever summed up China’s brutal policy: “Never mind if the people die for our victory.”

No other country in the twentieth century showed such merciless contempt for its own population as China. But is it not altogether shocking that this atrocity – the loss of nearly one million lives for no good reason – is barely known? That fucker Joseph Stalin never spoke truer words when he said: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

Posted in Atrocities | 8 Comments

6th June 1961 the Death of C.G. Jung


C.G. Jung

Today we pay tribute to Switzerland’s Carl Gustav Jung, the analytical psychologist who – like the artist William Blake and the civil rights leader Malcolm X – has risen to become a modern day World Prophet of the West not through any contemporary public’s mass reaction to his heroic deeds of the day, but through the sheer continued U S E F U L L N E S S of his New World View which, having filtered down through the decades to this present time, still daily presents we 21st Century Moderns with a rigorous enough paradigm to keep on keeping on. So hail to thee, mighty Carl Jung who dared not only to split with Freud, but whose Visions (and extraordinarily thorough research papers) regarding the so-called Collective Unconscious made of him nothing less than a latter day Zarathustra, better still a northern Odin in the truest frontiersman sense, for Jung DARED to judge, to stand one before the other, point a finger and say: ‘That one!’

Whereas Freud in his concept of the non-personal mind saw only murk and jettisoned human debris, C.G. Jung’s vision of the Collective Unconscious was an almost infinitely-levelled  psychic ocean of all past collective human experience from whose unfathomable depths even the most forgotten experiences could with consideration yet be retrieved. Nothing was lost forever, only buried deep in the silt of time. And Jung it was who set the West on its head with his research into UFO’s, alchemy and the occult, his adventuresome spirit always craftily concealed beneath his fierce reputation as a cold analyst and hefty scientific credentials, which the good doctor, throughout his long career, cannily deployed at any opportunity in order to trespass into the kind of obscure areas of bizarre, unauthentic research that would have ruined the careers of lesser men.

So let us raise our glasses to C.G. Jung, this Sage of the Scientific Age, this Freer of the West whose decades of visions, research and literature has so aided our first tentative steps into this post-Christian Age.

[Written by Julian Cope]

Posted in Heroes | 6 Comments

4th June 1989 the Tiananmen Square Massacre


The Tiananmen Square "Tank Man"

In the early hours of the morning on June 4th 1989, the Chinese military began a brutal crackdown of the protest movement that had seen up to 100,000 people camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for more than a month. What had begun, back in April, as a series of small student gatherings to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang – the erstwhile General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party who had been expelled for his vocal support of political reform – had, by June, grown into a mass demonstration of civil disobedience by a number of disparate groups.

More than twenty years later we should be aware that not only do the events of June 4th remain a taboo subject within China, they are significantly misunderstood outside the country; without a doubt, the version provided by western media is better than the total information blackout instigated by the Chinese authorities, but it’s nonetheless misleading. In fact, even the title of this article – “The Tiananmen Square Massacre” – is a misnomer. Sure it’s a handy catchphrase, but it illustrates the inaccuracy and misunderstanding that surrounds the events of that tragic day. As James Miles, a BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time of the massacre, was to later write, “I and others conveyed the wrong impression. There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.” For while it is true that the bulk of the protests occurred within Tiananmen Square, the bulk of the violence occurred elsewhere. This may seem like a trivial point, but it is indicative of the fact that the full story of what happened is not well known either within China or elsewhere.

Part of the reason for this is, of course, the totalitarian nature of China and the effective media controls put in place by the government. But it’s also partly to do with the sheer complexity of the events and the fact that they do not fit within the convenient “evil commies crush pro-democracy students” narrative favoured by western news sources. Which is not to suggest that the One True Version can be found within the text you are currently reading. Such a claim would be beyond presumptuous. No, the purpose of this short article is twofold; firstly to commemorate those who risked their lives – and in many cases paid the ultimate price for that risk – by pitting their voices against the guns and tanks of a totalitarian government. We salute their breath-taking bravery. Secondly, to remind ourselves – if such a reminder is needed – that even in the “freedom-loving, liberal west”, the version of world events we are fed often comes with a specific agenda. Or at the very least excludes elements that might add inconvenient complications to a story.

One of the more fascinating misconceptions about the Tiananmen Square protests is that they were exclusively “pro-democracy” protests. While that was certainly a central element, it is a long way from the whole truth. It’s true that the initial gatherings mourning Hu Yaobang had political reform and greater democracy at their heart. And it is also true that pro-democracy elements formed a significant part of the larger protests and were the most vocal; though there is a suggestion that the western media tended to exaggerate this impression by consistently focusing on that issue, to the exclusion of all others. However, the pro-democracy element was but one strand of a coalition that – paradoxically – also included elements who felt that the economic reforms of the 1980s had been too extreme and had happened at too fast a pace. As Wang Hui, a Beijing university professor, said of the protesters… “their hopes for and understanding of reform were extraordinarily diverse”.

By the early 1980s reform of the Chinese economic system was underway. At the same time the government was determined to maintain the political status quo at all costs. Initially these reforms were universally applauded both within China and overseas. However, by the mid-80s problems were beginning to emerge as government price controls began to bump up against market mechanisms and government employment policy began to disintegrate. Previously, university graduates had been guaranteed a job, but the economic reforms began to undermine this security. While at the same time, the friction between price controls and a limited free market sent inflation on a steep upward trajectory.

Foreign free market ideologues – most notably Milton Friedman – insisted that China’s economic problems were not a result of the reforms but were happening because the reforms weren’t going far (or fast) enough. They also insisted that a capitalist-orientated economic liberalisation would inevitably, in and of itself, produce democratic political reform. “Free market capitalism”, it was argued, “demanded democracy”. Of course, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore seems to have demonstrated the falsehood of that claim and in recent years China has followed suit. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, the controversial cultural theorist, “capitalism no longer naturally demands democracy but works even better within an authoritarian political structure”.

In late-80s China however, the tension between economic reform and political orthodoxy was threatening to pull the nation apart. The previous decade had seen an almost four-fold increase in the university population to meet the demands of the burgeoning economy and rapid urbanisation, but the removal of many of the traditional social safety-nets was creating widespread fear and anxiety. A paradox was developing at the heart of Chinese culture, and it was this paradox that drove students onto the streets in their tens of thousands, rather than simply a demand for more democracy and political transparency. Just as was happening half a planet away in Yugoslavia, economic liberalisation was undermining certainty and security, resulting in social unrest. It would be foolish to try and portray the Tiananmen Square protests as “anti-capitalist” protests, but it’s noteworthy that the two most prevalent non-Chinese songs sung by the students were John Lennon’s Power to the People and the worldwide socialist anthem, The Internationale.

It’s important that we understand the dual nature of the protests; not merely so we may fill the gaps in our knowledge left by a media narrative unable or unwilling to differentiate between democratic and free-market capitalist reform; but also so that we may better appreciate the depth of the tragedy of the brutal military response. For as the intervening decades have demonstrated, the Chinese government has worked hard to deny both sets of demands. They have failed to significantly reform their political system so as to provide greater democratic participation or transparency. While simultaneously they have enthusiastically embraced the free-market capitalism that breeds so much economic insecurity and social division.

Back in May 1989, however, that bleak future was as yet unwritten. By mid-May the Tiananmen Square protests had reached a critical mass and rumours were sweeping the crowd that the government was preparing to listen to their demands. Mikhail Gorbachev visited the country and despite couching his words in the language of diplomacy, clearly extolled the virtues of political reform. Meanwhile rumblings had begun in Eastern Europe, and while it would still be a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a tangible sense of hope that genuine political change was not only possible, but underway. The General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, visited the protesters upon hearing the news that over a thousand of them had begun a hunger strike. His speech hadn’t gone so far as to offer concrete concessions, but like the words of Gorbachev left the protesters with the clear impression that he sympathised with their demands.

What none of the protesters could have known was that it was to be Zhao Ziyang’s final public appearance. An internal struggle within the Chinese Politburo was underway and the reformers would not prevail. Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng were both opposed to his conciliatory stance and viewed any concessions to the protesters as likely to lead to social chaos and the dissolution of the Chinese State. So even as the hopes of the Tiananmen Square movement were reaching their zenith, a decision was being made to crush them.

In the last week of May 1989, Zhao Ziyang was ousted from his position in the Communist Party. He would spend the next 15 years – until his death – under house arrest. Simultaneously martial law was declared and the military mobilised. Years later it emerged just how close the internal power struggles had come to tipping in the other direction as certain elements of the military were sympathetic towards the protesters. Nonetheless, on June 1st the Politburo officially declared the protesters to be “terrorists” and ordered two divisions of loyal troops into the city. They were ordered to “clear the streets of Beijing” and while the order did suggest that this be done with the minimum amount of bloodshed, they were left in no doubt that if non-violent means did not prevail, they were to use any means necessary.

On June 2nd an army vehicle was involved in an accident that left four civilians and one soldier dead. This unforeseen event massively increased tensions city-wide and led to the protesters erecting barricades in a number of locations around Beijing, setting the scene for what was to come. The following day saw the first shots fired (mostly into the air as warnings) and skirmishes breaking out between soldiers and protesters, though both sides were still exercising a degree of restraint. Tragically this reluctance disappeared in the early hours of the morning of the 4th when troops of the 27th Division of the Chinese Army were ordered to disperse a crowd that had set up a barricade about a half mile from the square. It was the beginning of a massacre.

While the enduring image of that day was and will always be “Tank Man” – the lone protester standing defiantly in the middle of the road, preventing the advance of a column of tanks – elsewhere the army was less reluctant to crush those who refused to move. As a further example of just how little we know of what happened in Beijing that terrible day, casualty numbers vary from between 186 and 10,000 dead (with the Chinese Red Cross estimating up to 30,000 others injured). Over the course of that single day not only were so many innocent lives snuffed out by a brutal government determined to maintain absolute control whatever the cost, but the internal conversation about political reform that had begun – albeit in hushed tones – within Chinese society came to a premature end. Even as economic liberalisation has continued apace and the rapid industrialisation of China is leading inexorably towards ecological catastrophe, so the ability of the general populace to influence these changes has remained almost non-existent. Despite the official silence surrounding the June 4th massacre, the people of China have not forgotten that lesson in brutality and continue to live in fear of a government that refuses even to acknowledge the possibility of an alternative perspective.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Atrocities, Dissent | 9 Comments

3rd June 1943 the Zoot Suit Riots


Zoot Suit victims: stripped, beaten and humiliated

On the night of 3rd June 1943, as American men of all ethnicities shipped off to service in World War II, the city of Los Angeles witnessed a violent outbreak of racism when a group of fifty U.S. sailors ran amok viciously attacking any Mexican-American youths they found to be wearing zoot suits – those long vibrantly-coloured jackets-and-pants so beloved of ‘40s black jazzers. These young Hispanic victims – deemed by the sailors to have been too provocatively unpatriotic by wearing such flamboyant garb during wartime – were stripped, beaten and even pissed upon. Their ‘inappropriate’ clothing was then ritualistically burned. For almost the next two weeks, thousands of servicemen-on-leave joined in the hunt for young zooters, fuelled by a racist local press that lauded the “cleansing” of “miscreants” and “hoodlums”. A few days into the riots, Los Angeles city council banned the wearing of zoot suits – not to protect the victims, but because such clothing had become viewed only as a “badge of hoodlumism.” Soon even civilians joined in the attacks. Thousands of whites roamed the streets ministering summary justice – taxis even provided free transport to the “mass lynching”. The Los Angeles Police Department, meanwhile, turned a blind eye to the attacks and instead indiscriminately arrested hundreds of Mexican-American youths. Finally, the citywide rampage was brought to a halt by California’s military chiefs-of-staff who, understanding at last the gravity of the situation, confined all men to their bases.

The so-called Zoot Suit Riots would expose the polarisation between White America and the growing Mexican-American community, and would intensify the USA’s collective wartime paranoia; a grand and selective paranoia that would permit Americans to treat all non-whites as a threat to homeland security.

But why had the behaviour of these young Zooters caused such extreme reactions among white Los Angeleans? Well, the previous two decades had seen such a large influx of Mexicans into the Los Angeles area that their children were now growing up disenfranchised both from their own culture and from American culture. Caught between two worlds, these socially disadvantaged second-generation young Mexican-Americans had created their own dialect, named themselves ‘pachucos’ and had adopted the flamboyant zoot suit from the black jazzers as a peacock-like badge of their own marginalisation. Unfortunately for them, while most Americans across the colour line considered the zoot suit garish and inappropriate at best, at worst, some Americans considered such garb to be an affront to that unwritten code of segregation; a code which demanded racial minorities at all times act discreetly, decorously and deferentially. In this context, we can soon see how, for the rioting servicemen, destroying the detested zoot suit was as much a show of power designed to reassert the norms of white supremacy as it was an expression of wartime patriotism.

The Zoot Suit Riots triggered similar attacks against zoot suit-wearing ethnic minorities in Chicago, San Diego, Detroit, Philadelphia and New York, and became an international embarrassment for the United States. However, the committee set up to determine the riots’ causes concluded that it had been delinquency, not racism, which had been the main the factor. We know that’s a barefaced lie, but if we’re to reduce the victims to mere delinquents, well, let’s give them their due: as the first fashion-led youths to be associated with rebellion, the zooters’ influence would reverberate profoundly for future generations of disaffected teenagers. Indeed, the riots would spawn a powerful breed of civil rights leader, including a young zooter pimp known as Detroit Red whose experience when the fighting spread to New York was pivotal in his transformation into Malcolm X. Moreover, the Zoot Suit Riots was the precursor to the widespread moral panic over the nation’s juvenile delinquents which deepened after the war and heralded the birth rock ‘n’ roll. Uh oh!

Posted in Atrocities | 10 Comments

1st June 1968 the Death of Helen Keller


Helen Keller: A woman of vision

Today we pay tribute to one of the twentieth century’s most potent symbols of courage and fortitude, the legendary Helen Keller. Rendered deaf and blind at nineteen months as a result of what was probably scarlet fever, the extraordinary story of her extraordinary communication breakthrough at the age of seven – with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan – catapulted Helen to international fame. The “wa-wa-water” moment – re-enacted time and time again in motion pictures, plays, dramatisations and storybooks – is as iconic to American schoolchildren as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Defying her disabilities, Helen went on to graduate from Radcliffe, America’s most prestigious university for women, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. A gifted and prolific writer, she authored twelve books and numerous articles and essays for national papers and literary journals. And, as a world ambassador for the American Federation for the Blind, no one did more to raise awareness of the plight of others with disabilities. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, her image honoured on a postage stamp and the Alabama state quarter, Helen Keller is an unmitigated American Folk Hero.

But what the endless accolades and history books almost always fail to mention is that Helen Keller was a militant radical activist. Her views mirrored the likes of the era’s most notorious dissidents – Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs – who were respectively deported and imprisoned for ten years. “I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals,” she famously proclaimed; indeed, she leaned so far to the left that the FBI kept a file on her for un-American activities. She was co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union; a lifelong socialist who campaigned for Eugene Debs’ presidential candidacy; a member of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World; a suffragist and crusader for birth control; an anti-fascist (the Nazis publicly burned her books); and a pacifist, who condemned America’s imperialistic motives in both world wars. Having benefited from a privileged background, Helen recognised the social injustices facing those denied the same opportunities – and blamed industrialism and capitalism as the root of poverty and disability-inducing diseases. Her anti-capitalist and pro-worker stance was such that at the 1919 Hollywood premiere of a silent film about her own life, she refused to cross an Actors Equity Union picket line. Instead, she joined the striking workers on their march.

In her lifetime, Helen Keller was one of the most recognisable women in the world, and those who flocked to bask in the radiance of her fame were positively scandalised by her beliefs. After publicly supporting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, admiring the Russian Revolution, and fearlessly lambasting the powerful John D Rockefeller for his role in the Ludlow Mine Massacre (“Mr Rockefeller is a monster of capitalism”), Helen’s radicalism became a source of extreme embarrassment to those who required her to be true to The Myth in order that they might gain. In her own words:

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘archpriestess of the sightless’, ‘wonder woman’, and ‘a modern miracle’ … But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics – that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world – that is a different matter!”

And so the woman who had captured the world’s imagination with her courageous struggle to find her voice became the victim of a silencing campaign. The FBI began to monitor her activities, even while the State Department was benefiting from her celebrity as an unofficial ambassador. The American Foundation for the Blind, on whom Helen was financially reliant, demanded that she maintain an apolitical public stance. And her beliefs were systematically airbrushed out of all “official” accounts of her story. “My cause will emerge from the trenches stronger than it ever was,” Helen defiantly declared.  “Under the obvious battle waging, there is an invisible battle for the freedom of man.”

Yes, she overcame unimaginable odds to break through from the darkness, and her story will rightly continue to awe and inspire future generations. But the neutralisation of Helen Keller’s beliefs belies an equally important aspect to her legacy: she heard things that most close their ears to, and saw things that most turn a blind eye to.

Posted in Heroines | 9 Comments

27th May 1980 the Kwangju Massacre


The rounding-up of Kwangju dissidents

Today we lament the brutal suppression of the Kwangju Democratisation Movement. Ten days earlier, the citizens of the liberal South Korean city of Kwangju joined a student-led uprising in opposition to the illegitimate authoritarian rule of General Chun Doo-hwan. In response, Chun’s Special Warfare Command Troops beat, bayoneted and shot their way through Kwangju in an orgy of violence. Before it ended with the storming of the provincial capital in the heart of the city, hundreds were dead. Some human rights groups say the death toll was as high as 2,000. The United States failed to intervene, despite the fact that it maintained operational control over South Korea. The Kwangju Massacre represents a crucial turning point in modern Korean history, galvanising radicalism and anti-Americanism among a generation of youth, and heralding a new democratic movement.

Chun Doo-hwan’s reign of power was dodgy from the get-go. He’d staged a barely successful coup at the end of 1979 – but when he moved to cement his illegitimate grip by declaring martial law on May 17th 1980, protests erupted all over the country. Most demonstrators were met with the tear gas and truncheons of the ordinary riot police. But for the students at Kwangju’s Chonnam National University, Chun Doo Hwan sent in his most brutal, American-trained special forces. The commandos burst in to the university, shot the ringleaders then rampaged around the town for a week beating or killing anyone who looked vaguely radical, or those who simply got in the way: children, pregnant women, Red Cross volunteers. Shocked by the frenzied brutality, the student demonstrations escalated into a full-scale uprising. Citizens armed themselves with weapons from police stations deserted by officers unable to stand against the army and unwilling to turn against the townspeople.

The “Kwangju liberation period” began on May 21st, when the army withdrew to the outskirts in the face of the furious citizenry. The Citizens’ Settlement Committee and the Students’ Settlement Committee were formed. Not since the days of the Paris Commune had a city claimed autonomous rule. But at 4am on May 27th, massively reinforced martial law troops with tanks and machine guns stormed the city. The civil militias were gunned down and defeated in just over an hour.

The short-lived Kwangju Democratisation Movement was founded on the principle of defending democracy from military usurpation. Chun, however, defended the massacre on the entirely false grounds that the demonstrators were armed communists trying to destabilise the country in anticipation of a North Korean invasion. He also accused well-known local dissident Kim Dae Jung of organising the uprising, even though Kim was in prison at the time.

The US government, meanwhile, said it was shocked and disturbed by Chun’s coup, his declaration of martial law and the Kwangju Massacre. But there were no economic or military sanctions, nor any kind of outcry. Instead, a mere two weeks after the Kwangju massacre, the Carter Administration assured Chun of continued financial support. Less than a year later, Chun was the first head-of-state invited to the White House by the newly elected president Ronald Reagan. What explanation could there be for brown-nosing such a turd? Under an agreement signed in 1953 after the Korean War, all forces in the South fell under American command. Verily, the United States was technically responsible for what happened in Kwangju. “American colonizers are behind all oppression in Korea,” asserted South Korean student leader Song Kap Suk, a speaker at the massacre’s 10th-anniversary memorial service, to rousing applause.

When democracy finally came to South Korea in the late 1980s, Chun was put on trial and convicted of mutiny and treason for the 1979 coup that brought him to power, and for instigating the Kwangju Massacre. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. His henchman and successor, Roh Tae Woom, was sentenced to 22.5 years. Both were later pardoned. The protesters who died in the uprising were all declared martyrs for democracy, and the South Korean government has paid compensation to more than 4,000 who suffered injuries. Kim Dae Jung, the dissident whose arrest touched off the uprising, was elected president in 1997 and won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years later for his efforts to end the divisions between North and South Korea.

And America has swept the entire incident under its imperialistic carpet.

Posted in Atrocities, Dissent, World Events | 7 Comments

26th May 1830 the Indian Removal Act


1830 Indian Removal Map

Today we lament the passage of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act – paving the way for White America’s long-wished-for heave-ho of all American Indians to lands west of the Mississippi river. “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic…filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” asked Jackson – a renowned racist – in his very first address to Congress as president just one year earlier. And he wasted no time in forcing through the controversial Act – ultimately passed after bitter debate by a narrow margin of just 15 votes. All previous treaties were voided. Resettlement was in theory “voluntary,” but those who resisted could be forcibly removed. Even a Supreme Court ruling in favour of the land rights of the Cherokee was overturned at Jackson’s behest.

The principal victims of removal were the so-called Five Civilised Tribes – the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole – but numerous smaller tribes were also targeted. The infamously brutal westward journeys of these Native Americans have been well documented; the Cherokees, force-marched by military escort along the notorious Trail of Tears from Georgia and North Carolina to the Indian Territory, lost one-fourth of their people. Those who survived the ordeal to reach their destination faced a host of new difficulties. They quickly came into conflict with hostile indigenous tribes while the territory set aside for them was alien, harsh and often untenable. The United States government, meanwhile, acquired millions and millions of acres of fertile Southern lands, which it sold at little or no profit to speculators and settlers, in effect subsidising the expansion of the cotton industry and the slave system.

White Americans, believing that the United States would never have need to expand beyond the Mississippi, accepted Jackson’s self-serving and short-sighted argument that removal was in the interest of the Indians; once resettled, they could govern themselves in peace.

And so, for ostensibly ending the long-running conflict with the east-of-the-Mississippi Indians, Jackson was hailed as a hero. But it wasn’t long before the next land-grab began. With the great migration westward a mere decade later, white settlers clashed with the Indian inhabitants. Ignoring earlier treaties, including those agreed in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States once again forcibly removed Indians from their land and sent them to reservations that became ever smaller in size. The Indian Removal Act, originally conceived as a final solution to the Indian problem, was thus just another step in the long process of illegitimately removing nearly all Indian claims to land desired by the United States.

President Andrew Jackson was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Indians. As historian Bettina Drew asserted:

More than any one other individual, Jackson banished Native Americans from our visual realm, our culture and our gene pool, and this should be recognized as his legacy.

Instead, Andrew Jackson’s face is commemorated on the twenty-dollar bill. The only thing that guy should be ‘noted’ for is genocide!

Posted in Atrocities | 6 Comments

25th May 2000  Lebanon Liberation Day


On the morning of May 22nd 2000, Israeli armed forces began to pull out of Southern Lebanon, signalling the end of a military occupation that had lasted more than two decades. Within three days the withdrawal was complete and by the evening of the 25th of May, the state of Lebanon was no longer occupied by its southern neighbour. However, although we celebrate May 25th as “Lebanese Liberation Day” – just as we celebrate the ending of any military campaign or foreign occupation – our celebration is tempered by the incomplete nature of that liberation. Syrian forces continued to occupy parts of Lebanon right up until 2005, and even today the nation is riven by internal tensions as a host of domestic and foreign-sponsored groups struggle for influence and power over a land whose inhabitants have spent the past sixty years hostage to the recklessness, insanity and power politics of their neighbours.

In fact, the history of foreign dominion over the lands of Lebanon stretches back a good deal further than the 20th century. The cities of Lebanon have long been centres of culture and commerce. And as homeland to the Phoenicians, Lebanon can justly claim a huge influence over the development of Mediterranean civilisation, founding cities and setting up trade routes throughout the entire region. But as is so often the case with major trade centres, Lebanon found itself frequently over-run by the empires that surrounded it. History has seen the Lebanese people become subjects of the Egyptian, Persian, Assyrian and Hellenistic Empires. Then the Romans took over and Lebanon remained part of the Roman / Byzantine Empire until the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century. Then, aside from a stint as a Crusader State in the Middle Ages, Lebanon spent the next millennium as a province of the great regional powerhouse to the north, Turkey; alternately under the flag of the the Seljuk, Mamluk and Ottoman Empires.

With the final collapse of Turkish power after World War One, Lebanon again changed hands. The British and French, having become accustomed to drawing borders and planting flags, decided that Lebanon should be French territory, which is how it remained until World War Two when it finally declared independence and saw foreign troops leave its soil for the first time in thousands of years. By 1946 the people who had once dominated the Mediterranean region, founding great cities such as Tyre and Carthage, were once again in charge of their own destiny.

But it was to be a short-lived sovereignty and within two years the seeds of tragedy were being sown in Lebanon. Having drawn up a progressive constitution that guaranteed power-sharing between the various religious and ethnic groups within the country, and a tolerant and liberal civil society free of many of the oppressive and discriminatory policies of their neighbours, the nation found itself dragged into the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Despite having a tiny standing army, and being involved in little more than border skirmishes with Israel, Lebanon made an enemy of the emerging regional superpower and suffered the consequences. Over one hundred thousand Palestinians were driven into Southern Lebanon by the Israeli military and subsequently denied permission to return. The consequences for Lebanese society were to prove disastrous as the massive refugee camps became a breeding ground for militancy in the guise of the newly formed Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

For the next quarter century Lebanon struggled to cope with growing unrest in the South as tensions between the PLO, Israel and the locals increased. All the while, the nation attempted to reposition itself as a regional trade hub and for a while it seemed as though it might actually prosper; avoiding the spiral of violence that, with the clarity of hindsight, appears almost inevitable to us now.

By the mid-1970s the Palestinian population in Southern Lebanon had risen to over a quarter of a million and the PLO was using the area as a base from which to launch attacks against Israel. Israeli expansion during the previous decade had rendered the entire Palestinian people effectively homeless and the pressures created by this displaced population threatened the stability of several countries. In 1975 those pressures erupted into the Lebanese Civil War. The brief flowering of peace and optimism in Lebanon during the 1960s was brutally snuffed out.

The details of the Lebanese Civil War are staggeringly complex. As one commentator put it, “by the end of the conflict every group had been both an ally and an enemy of every other group at least once”. And that’s only a slight exaggeration of the truth. The civil war involved several domestic Lebanese factions, the PLO and other Palestinian groups, the militaries of both Syria and Israel, plus a number of militias sponsored by external powers (Israel, Syria and Iran). Into this mix were also thrown UN troops, a peace-keeping group answering to the Arab League and the lurking presence of the US navy just a few miles off the coast. It was chaos, and by the end of the civil war Lebanon had been reduced to rubble, perhaps a quarter of a million people were dead, a million injured and half the population had been displaced. On top of that Syrian troops occupied parts of the country and Israel had assumed control over the south .

When discussing the Middle East, it’s traditional to take either a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian position. But viewed from a Lebanese perspective it’s tough to have sympathy for either Isreal or the PLO in the context of their activities in South Lebanon. The inhabitants of those Palestinian refugee camps had (and still have) a legitimate grievance. But when the PLO began to wage a war against Israel from Lebanon, it was clearly not going to end well for those caught in the crossfire.

In 1978, three years into the civil war and with Syrian troops already on Lebanese soil, the PLO carried out the Coastal Road massacre in which 38 Israeli civilians were murdered. The attack was planned in – and launched from – Lebanon. Within three days Israeli troops had crossed the border.

Over the next five years, the Israeli presence was relatively small and confined to a “buffer zone” in the far south. But the war of attrition between Israel and the PLO continued, all the while destroying Lebanese civil society and economic life. In the early 80s Israel concluded that the only way to defeat the PLO was to drive them completely out of Lebanon. A full-scale invasion and military occupation commenced that saw attrocities carried out by both sides, but given the overwhelming military advantage enjoyed by Israel and the militia groups it sponsored, the disparity in casualties isn’t surprising. In the Sabra and Shatila massacre alone, as many as 3,500 Palestinian refugees were murdered during three brutal days in September 1982. At the height of the occupation, Israel occupied the country as far north as Beirut and both Lebanese and Palestinian alike were living under martial law. The carefully crafted constitution of the 1940s and the peace and prosperity that followed was already a fading memory by the time the complete collapse of the Lebanese state occurred in the late 1980s and the President of Syria became the de facto leader of unoccupied Lebanon.

Lebanon found itself stuck in this tragic situation for the next decade or so. Even as Israel succeeded in driving the PLO out of Lebanon, it paved the way for the arrival of Iran-sponsored Hezbollah to fill the power vacuum in the refugee camps after the PLO leadership structure had been killed or forced to flee. By the mid-90s Lebanon was hosting a proxy war between Syria and Israel, a proxy war between Iran and Israel, and a proxy war between Iran and Syria. And whether it was the Lebanese, the Israelis or the Syrians… everyone was at war with the Palestinians. The rubble got reduced to dust and still the wars raged.

But by the late 1990s the Israeli casualties were starting to mount and the realisation that the occupation of Lebanon was making things worse, not better, had started to filter up the command structure. Unlike other military occupations, this one did not end with a decisive battle or a painstakingly-negotiated Home Rule treaty. Instead a political decision was made in Tel Aviv and less than a week later the army checkpoints and patrols, the twenty-year tyranny that had become a routine in Southern Lebanon, were gone.

And yes there was celebration. The end of the occupation did not signal the end of Lebanon’s problems, but it provided a reminder to the Lebanese people that things don’t always have to get worse. It’s not an inevitability. Five years after the Israelis pulled out, the Syrians withdrew their forces as a result of popular pressure from within Lebanon. Another step forward. And although the problems of Lebanon will never be completely resolved as long as it has a large, angry and unintegrated refugee population within its borders, and although the fragile national unity government collapsed earlier this year as a result of a dispute about Hezbollah, still we celebrate Lebanon Liberation Day, as much in hope as in remembrance; as a reminder that even the most intractable of problems might be solved one step at a time.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in World Events | 2 Comments

22nd May 1885 the Death of Victor Hugo


Victor Hugo

Today we pay our respects to that towering giant of French letters, visionary poet, epic novelist, revolutionary playwright, Romantic, mystic and political activist – Victor Hugo. An unqualified hero to his countrymen, when he died on this day in 1885 aged eighty-three, his funeral prompted mourning hitherto unprecedented anywhere for a literary figure. Over two million flocked to Paris in a spectacular display of grief for this beloved larger-than-life icon, whose radical reversal from royalist to republican resulted in a powerful champion of the downtrodden. In two enduring works of genius – Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) – he exposed to the world the unsavoury underbelly of French society. Boldly called for an armed uprising against the tyranny of Napoleon III, he subsequently endured 19 years of exile; his triumphant return to France saw him participating on the barricades during the Prussians’ 4-month Siege of Paris, famously forced to eat “the unknown” from the Paris Zoo along with the rest of the starving masses.

Hugo’s statesman-like funeral sounded “the death knell of a century that is ending,” commented Le Figaro. Indeed, in a lifetime that spanned nearly all of the 19th century, Hugo serves as an emblem of French social transition – his life not only coincided with but also actively influenced that turbulent passage from the ancien régime to the democratic republicanism of modern France. A royalist under the Bourbons, an Orléanist under the July Monarchy and a republican under the Second Empire, Victor Hugo bore witness to two monarchies, two republics, two revolutions, two empires and the civil combat and brutal suppression of the Commune. As an observer, participant and monumentally prolific writer, he challenged all the major issues central to society, literature, politics and religion through that epochal period of violent and frequent change.

Victor Hugo was an unlikely combination of radically innovative artist, fully engaged in the task of transforming society whilst simultaneously commanding near universal popularity. He claimed to have a “crystal soul” reflecting the same struggles and evolution as that of the French people. Perhaps only England’s Charles Dickens or Russia’s Tolstoy have enjoyed such a similarly deep, mystical national connection and resonance. As Hugo’s literary contemporary Jules Claretie observed, “No genius was more vast… Our hopes, our passions, all has been encapsulated by Victor Hugo: we have made an altar of his tomb, and the man…has become our symbol.”

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18th May 1955 the Death of Mary McLeod Bethune


Mary McLeod Bethune

In that grim 100-year period between the end of the American Civil War and the onset of the Civil Rights movement, the only thing more challenging than being an African American was the double whammy of being both black and female. Today we recall one of the great heroines of those dark days – the civil rights activist, educational pioneer, social visionary and “First Lady of the Struggle” – Mary McLeod Bethune.

The fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves, Mary’s commitment to her cause would take her from the cotton fields of South Carolina all the way to the White House where she advised four different presidents on the African American crisis. Renowned for her cunning diplomacy, she forged useful alliances with influential whites – but, unlike many of her male contemporaries, she succeeded in doing so without ever compromising the principles of her cause. “If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination,” she insisted, “we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence.”

And while her black male counter-parts engaged in heated debates about accommodationist versus militant tactics, this 5’4” spitfire – who walked with a cane because it gave her “swank” – was quietly busy getting on with the task at hand. In 1904, after raising the necessary $1.50 capital by selling sandwiches to railroad workers, Mary opened the first school in Florida for black girls. Starting out with just five students, within forty years she guided the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls all the way to university status as the Bethune-Cookman College. But she didn’t stop there in her quest to emancipate her people. Mary went on to found a national organisation for the development of black youth. She risked lynching by the KKK to personally register the names of hundreds of black female voters. Almost single-handedly, she raised black women from their social and political invisibility to a viable presence in national affairs. Mary understood that education alone was the key to liberation from the oppressive social, economic and political shackles of White America. And, as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s special advisor in his so-called “Black Cabinet,” she succeeded where countless others had failed in securing substantial and much-needed cash injections for African American education and vocational training. In addition to her presidential advisory appointments, Mary served on the executive committees of several African American national organisations and founded the National Council of Negro Women.

For over four decades, she worked tirelessly, resolutely and fruitfully for the advancement of African Americans. So where is her name in the history books?

If remembered at all, the legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune – once considered “the most influential black woman in America” – has been relegated to that traditionally-acceptable female role of “great educator.” A memorial sculpture in Washington D.C. shows her not as the first black woman to serve as a Presidential appointee, but handing a book to children. There is no comprehensive Bethune biography; the introduction to a compendium of her writings suggests that she is too “multi-faceted” and defies “sociological categories and stereotypes” to render assessment.

“The Freedom Gates are half-ajar,” Mary declared not long before her death. “We must pry them fully open.” But just as her own legacy as a black female leader has been conspicuously misserved by the annals of history, today’s African American women continue to suffer from the same twin set of prejudices. They earn on average 85 cents for every dollar earned by a white woman, 87 cents for every dollar earned by a black man and 63 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. Despite carrying the burden of primary caretaker and breadwinner of nearly half of all black households with children, the unemployment rate for black women is nearly double that of white women.

Mary McLeod Bethune’s visionary agenda is unfinished. Sixty years after her death, it’s high time to pry those gates fully open.

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14th May 1940 the Death of Emma Goldman


Emma Goldman at work

The one and only Emma Goldman

Today we celebrate the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman – orator, writer, agitator, firebrand and revolutionary anarchist – Emma Goldman. Known as “Red Emma,” “the mother of anarchy in America” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” she was the most prominent and notorious radical of her day – an incendiary voice of dissent who unwittingly inspired President William McKinley’s assassin. But her message was “dangerous” only to the Establishment. For five decades, this feisty, ornery, vivacious Russian Jewess struggled tirelessly and relentlessly against inequality, repression and exploitation of the world’s have-nots – raising people’s consciousness, transforming their political assumptions and forcing them to ask questions. With passion, boundless energy, chutzpah and a remarkably sustained level of intense focus, Emma Goldman dedicated her life to the ideal of absolute freedom and the creation of a radically new social order.

Galvanised by the events of the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago shortly after her arrival in America, Goldman became a leading voice in the burgeoning anarchist movement. Convinced that the political and economic organisation of modern society was unjust and fundamentally flawed, she embraced the self-governing ideal of anarchism for the vision it offered of liberty, harmony and true social justice:

“I consider Anarchism the most beautiful and practical philosophy that has yet been thought of in its application to individual expression and the relation it establishes between the individual and society. Moreover, I am certain that Anarchism is too vital and too close to human nature ever to die. It is my conviction that dictatorship, whether to the right or to the left, can never work–that it never has worked, and that time will prove this again, as it has been proved before. When the failure of modern dictatorship and authoritarian philosophies becomes more apparent and the realization of failure more general, Anarchism will be vindicated. Considered from this point, a recrudescence of Anarchist ideas in the near future is very probable. When this occurs and takes effect, I believe that humanity will at last leave the maze in which it is now lost and will start on the path to sane living and regeneration through freedom.”

At the forefront of the key struggles in a revolutionary era, Goldman’s life was rich and colourful and, unsurprisingly, filled with ups and downs. She endured constant jeers, relentless harassment from the police, frequent imprisonment and ultimately deportation from America. Nevertheless, she was one of the most powerful and popular public speakers of her time. Throughout her thirty-year residency in the United States, she regularly criss-crossed the country – fervently addressing large crowds on workers’ rights, union organisation, freedom of speech, radical education, atheism, equality and independence for women including the right to birth control and free love. For eleven years she published the anarchist movement’s foremost journal, Mother Earth. She was at the epicentre of some of the turn-of-the-century’s most controversial events: together with her life-comrade Alexander Berkman, they plotted the “propaganda by deed” assassination attempt of wealthy industrialist and Homestead Strike villain Henry Clay Frick; during the Panic of 1893, she incited the starving poor of New York City to steal bread from the rich; and, at the outbreak of World War I, she and Berkman founded the controversial No-Conscription League – which ultimately led to their deportation in 1920 back to Russia.

Devastated to leave America – the land of possibilities that had so inspired her – she nevertheless embraced the opportunity to witness the aftermath of her homeland’s recent revolution. But after two dismal and bitterly disappointing years, she and Berkman fled. Emma would devote the next phase of her life atoning for her support of the Bolsheviks and exposing them as revolutionary traitors.

Thereafter, until her death in 1940, she led a transient life – mainly writing her astonishing 1000-page autobiography, and pining for America. With high hopes she went to Spain to support the anarchists during the civil war but, after enduring yet another revolutionary failure, she wished to get as far away from Europe and as close to America as possible, and made her last home in Toronto. She died there on May 14th following a stroke at the age of 70. In death, she was finally permitted to return to America and is buried near the Haymarket Martyrs.

Emma Goldman was anarchism’s most ardent proponent. The intensity of her convictions and her powerful means of communicating them popularised the ideal as never before or since. An enemy of smug contentment and blind acquiescence, she was a bright and beautiful prophet of personal liberation and self-fulfillment. She struggled, she strove and never gave up the good fight.

Hers was a noble dream, and she is one of my greatest heroines.

Posted in Anarchists, Heroines | 4 Comments

8th May 1903 the Death of Paul Gauguin


Self-Portrait

“In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of ‘revolutionary’; and it is they alone who are masters.” – Paul Gauguin

When artist Paul Gauguin’s 54-year-old dead body was lowered swiftly into his grave on the remote Pacific island of Hiva Oa, it was already rotting fast and stinking in the sweltering tropical heat.

His legs, scarred and oozing with syphilitic sores, had two years before carried him to this last wild outpost of the known world, 900 miles northeast of Tahiti and 4,000 miles from the nearest continent, South America. Here, far from ‘civilisation’, he chose to spend his final years, continuing to make great art and to irritate the Catholic church. On hearing of his death the local priest said he was “an obscene and sad character, an enemy of God and all that is decent.” How Gauguin would have loved that!

I’ve had a strange relationship with Gauguin over the years; I’ve always admired his bold compositions, heavy with meaning, and his daring use of colour, but his personal behaviour had troubled me; abandoning his family and taking teenage Tahitian brides. For years I blamed him for the sharp deterioration in van Gogh’s mental health culminating in that infamous ear-hacking episode. Gauguin stirs up powerful emotions. It wasn’t until I discovered more about this complex character that I came to admire his courage, wit and drive.

Gauguin was always an outsider, different. Born in Paris in 1848, he grew up in Lima, Peru. The folk art of these early years in Peru would later haunt his paintings. When he returned to France aged 7, he spoke only Spanish. After years in the stifling cloisters of Catholic boarding school, he joined the navy, keen to get out into the world. Returning to France he became a stockbroker, got married and had five children. For 10 years he tried to conform to a respectable middle-class existence. But it wasn’t enough. He took up painting and immediately displayed astonishing talent. His search for something meaningful and authentic had begun.

He abandoned “everything that is artificial and conventional” and set off first to Panama to try to make some money, but became seriously ill. Recovering in Martinique he was dazzled by the simple life of the native people there. He wanted to pursue his artistic goals among such people and sought out a more ‘savage’ life. His travels would take him to Provence, Brittany, Tahiti and finally the Marquesas.

He quickly made a name for himself with his extraordinary paintings, the like of which had never been seen before. In Gauguin’s world, reality and fantasy are fused. His paintings are dripping with cultural references, symbols and religious iconography. He inseminated his work with the raw power of totems and objects from native or ‘primitive’ cultures.

“I shut my eyes in order to see.”

He used distorted and flattened forms and non-naturalistic colours to express fear, lust, jealousy, temptation, power, death, gods, the devil. His potent compositions deliberately leave the viewer asking questions not just about the painting or the artist but about themselves. And he didn’t limit himself to just painting either: wood carving, pottery, sculpture, printmaking, even publishing, his hands were never idle.

One or two art dealers, including Vincent’s brother Theo van Gogh, flogged a few of his pictures, but generally they didn’t sell. “No one wants my painting because it is different from other people’s… [the] peculiar, crazy public demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter’s part and yet won’t accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!”

Gauguin’s life is a story of rebellion, restless global quests and uncompromising passion. All these elements came together in his paintings which are pioneering, dramatic and beautiful. A giant of modern art, his work influenced most ‘isms’ that came after him: Fauvism, Cubism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Primitivism.

Despite the nagging poverty, he never wavered. “I am a great artist and I know it.… I’ve known for a long time what I am doing and why I am doing it. I am strong because I am never thrown off-course by other people and because I do what is in me.”

Today, more visitors come to the cemetery in Hiva Oa to visit the grave of legendary Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel (1929 – 1978) than come to visit Gauguin. The two refuseniks are buried just metres apart; they were kindred spirits.

In 1897 he painted his great masterpiece in which he asked the greatest question of them all: D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) But the answer?  Take a look at the painting and work it out for yourself.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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6th May 1862 the Death of Henry David Thoreau


Henry David Thoreau: A Hero for All Seasons

Today we pay tribute to author, naturalist, abolitionist, poet, prophet and unrepentant individual – Henry David Thoreau. When he died on this day in 1862 from tuberculosis aged 44, this giant in the American pantheon was still virtually unknown. Indeed, when delivering his eulogy, Thoreau’s great mentor, fellow Transcendentalist and best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented: “This country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.” Today, however, the once-neglected life and works of Thoreau resound with an almost Nostradamus-like prescience: environmentalist, direct activist, insurrectionist, anti-materialist, advocate of self-sufficiency, individualist, intuitive anarchist – 150 years after his death, Thoreau’s polymathic footprints are surely amongst the most relevant and useful. Since his “rebirth” in the mid-twentieth century, Thoreau’s natural history and polemical writings have significanlty influenced environmental movements and the struggles of the world’s oppressed. His anti-authoritarian convictions profoundly inspired Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the anti-Vietnam generation. His retreat from the material world to seek a more meaningful life close to nature is an apposite blueprint. Ecologists, naturalists, radical reformers and libertarians alike thus claim him as their own. But as one of the great champions and prophets of self-reliance and individualism, Thoreau in truth belongs to all who are governed by passion, principle and purpose. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them,” he wrote. Throughout his too-short life, Thoreau sought instead to forge a path that refused compromise – to “follow the beat of a different drummer.”

Born and bred in Concord, Massachusetts – the town where the first shot of the American Revolution was fired and, as the hub of the American Transcendentalists, the epicentre of the young nation’s “second revolution” – Thoreau’s universal philosophy emanated entirely from his local surroundings. An almost mystical naturalist, scholar of Native American lore, eminent botanist and skilled surveyor, Thoreau walked every day with his eyes wide open and knew every tree, plant, animal species and river around Concord. A proto-practitioner of “think locally, act globally,” for Thoreau, there was no separation between Nature and the conduct of life. Disdainful of America’s growing commercialism and industrialism (he foresaw environmental disaster with the growth of railroads; the telegraph, he predicted, would lead to the inane obsession with idle gossip), on the 4th of July 1845 – as his fellow countrymen celebrated sixty-nine years of independence – Henry David Thoreau famously walked out of Concord to live in solitude in a self-built hut two miles outside of town on Emerson’s land in the woods. The resultant account of this extraordinary two-year experiment in observation and simplification – Walden, or Life in the Woods – conveys at once a naturalist’s wonder at the everyday and a Transcendentalist’s quest for inner spirituality, self-reliance and personal freedom:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

But even in the very midst of this gnostic adventure, Thoreau never entirely separated himself from worldly matters. Whilst venturing into town one day for supplies, he was incarcerated for refusing to pay poll tax to the commonwealth of Massachusetts in protest of the state’s endorsements of slavery and the Mexican War. Although he spent only one night in jail (much to his chagrin, the next morning an unknown benefactor cleared his six-year tax debt), it caused him to wonder why it is that we obey laws without asking if they are just. And, worse still, why others will obey even if they know them to be wrong. The experience resulted in “Civil Disobedience” (or “Resistance to Civil Government”, as it was first titled in 1849). A polemic on the individual’s right, nay duty, to dissent from government policies in accordance with his or her own conscience – “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty” – it would in the twentieth century become one of the most famous and important essays in American literature.

It is impossible to shoehorn the numerous and disparate key points of Thoreau’s life; as the emblematic practitioner of Transcendentalism, his life itself was the key point. He cleaved to no system, trusting only his inner morality. And for we Moderns, few ancestral voices speak with a greater truth. As our governments continue to trespass on our personal freedom, he reminds us that we are at liberty and indeed duty-bound to follow our own convictions. As the excesses of globalisation continue to wreak havoc on our planet, he is our great champion of simplification. And in this age when we are sorely lacking visionaries to lead the way, what a comfort it is to find such eternal wisdom and solace in the words and deeds of Henry David Thoreau.

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4th May 1886 the Haymarket Affair


The Haymarket Martyrs

Today we recall the Haymarket Affair – the most sensational American labour incident of the 19th century, whose legacy even today continues to surreptitiously reverberate. What began as a nationwide movement for the 8-hour work day on 1st May ignited just a few days later during a peaceful rally in Chicago and ended eighteen months later with the hanging of four innocent men. The Haymarket Affair would deepen the divide between labourers and the new ruling class of industrialists, expose the fallacy of free speech and the American justice system, exacerbate the anti-immigrant sentiment and tarnish the labour movement irrevocably.

“Eight hours for work. Eight hours for sleep. Eight hours for what we will.” So how did it come to pass that this wholly reasonable demand for an 8-hour work day would result in such devastating and consequential tragedy?

After the Civil War, the United States underwent a period of unparalleled industrial growth. Men became rich and famous building new industries and establishing vast corporate empires. But this new wealthy elite had no interest in sharing their gains with the workers who made their terrific success possible. In response to near-slave conditions – 16-hour workdays, pitiful pay, unsafe and unregulated environments – disgruntled workers began to mobilise.

May 1st 1886 was decreed by the federated unions as the date when workers throughout the country would join together to demand an 8-hour work day. In Chicago – the hub of the nascent labour movement – a day of demonstrations passed without incident. But just two days later during strike protests at the appropriately-named McCormick Reaper Works, trigger-happy policemen fired indiscriminately into a crowd that included women and children, killing several workers. August Spies, editor of the German pro-labour newspaper the Arbeiter-Zeitung, witnessed the attack firsthand. In response, he printed and distributed a leaflet calling for a meeting the following evening to denounce the police violence.

On the drizzly night of 4th May 1886, over 2000 gathered in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the murders at the Reaper Works. The peaceful rally had nearly concluded when – without provocation or warning – police advanced towards the speakers’ wagon demanding immediate dispersal. At that precise moment, a bomb was thrown from within the crowd. PC Mathias Degan died instantly, and seven other officers were killed by “friendly fire” after the well-armed police countered like headless chickens. Over a hundred demonstrators were injured, an “unknown” number of them killed.

Mass hysteria ensued. With the near unanimous backing of the public and media, the authorities set out to crush the labour movement – which it tarred with the generic brush of “anarchism” led by “reckless foreign wretches” who threatened the very core of American institutions with their dirty radical ideas. Martial law was declared. No more than two people at a time were allowed on street corners; union newspapers were closed down; and – in what amounted to America’s first “red scare” – police raids overstepped all legal authority as hundreds of labour leaders were rounded up and arrested.  Eight of Chicago’s most prominent anarchists were charged with the murder of Officer Degan, despite the fact that most of them hadn’t even been present during the incident. Without any evidence to connect the defendants to the bomb throwing, Anarchism itself was put on trial. Illinois law stated that anyone inciting murder was guilty; the Chief Prosecutor implored the jury to “make examples of them. Hang them, and you save our society.” The jury duly returned guilty verdicts for all eight defendants; all but one sentenced to death. Two had their verdicts commuted to life imprisonment, one committed suicide in his prison cell, but – despite worldwide condemnation and calls for clemency – on November 11th 1887, the four remaining anarchists were executed in a particularly brutal hanging by slow strangulation in full view of shocked witnesses.

August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel are remembered as the Haymarket Martyrs – executed for their radical ideas perceived to be fundamentally un-American: Fair working conditions. A greater sharing of the wealth for a workers’ own toil. Exposing state repression. Unionisation. Resisting the cynical attempts to drive a wedge between native-born workers and immigrants.  “Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc.,” wrote August Spies. “These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all.”

The Haymarket Tragedy sparked protests around the world and galvanised a new generation of radicals and revolutionaries. It was the political awakening of such stalwarts as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Voltarine De Cleyre. But despite the radical agitators Haymarket impelled and a momentous wave of strikes in its aftermath, in truth the American labour movement never fully recovered from the backlash. For when it came down to it, the masses didn’t want “revolution.” They didn’t want autonomy. They just wanted a few measly crumbs. And as soon as those in power figured that out, they stopped fearing revolt and the pendulum shifted forever in their favour.

The enduring tragedy of Haymarket is that no single event did more to destroy the American labour movement, and we can only rue the lost opportunity to eradicate the evils of embryonic capitalism. Today, Western workers are at the mercy of the global free market, dominated by neo-liberal corporations who care not one jot for the individual. “Union” is once again a dirty word. The 8-hour day – the very thing the Haymarket workers were demonstrating for  – doesn’t even seem inviolate any more. To be anti-capitalist is to be un-American. And the story of the Haymarket Affair has been all but erased from American history.

A monument to the Haymarket Martyrs Monument has been federally dignified as a National Historic Landmark, despite the fact that there has never been a posthumous pardon for the four executed innocents.

It was never discovered who threw the bomb.

Posted in Anarchists, World Events | 1 Comment

29th April 1916 the Easter Rising


Pádraig Pearse, President of the Provisional Government, surrenders to General Lowe

On the 29th April 1916 poet, teacher and revolutionary, Pádraig Pearse, issued the following statement from a beseiged building on Dublin’s Moore Street,

In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government present at headquarters have agreed to an unconditional surrender, and the commandants of the various districts in the City and County will order their commands to lay down arms.

It signalled the end of the Easter Rising, the most significant campaign in the struggle for Irish independence since the rebellion of 1798. The Rising had left large parts of the city decimated and resulted in thousands of casualties. It was also, unambiguously, a spectacular military failure. And yet it was the spark that lit the fuse on the War of Independence which would, within five years, force the British government to the negotiating table to discuss the terms of Irish independence.

Five days prior to Pearse’s declaration of surrender, on Easter Monday 1916, three revolutionary organisations – under the command structure of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) – executed a plan a long time in the making. Controversially, the leaders of the movement knew even at the outset that the plan was doomed to failure. The IRB had struck a secret deal with Germany, and were expecting to receive a shipment of arms and ammunition with which to kick off the rebellion. The ship, however, was intercepted by the Royal Navy and scuttled. Despite this, the Army Council of the IRB decided against cancelling the rebellion in the hope that – despite being completely ill-equipped to take on the British military – their actions would spark a mass uprising among the population.

At midday on that fateful Monday, Pádraig Pearse’s Irish Volunteers, James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army and Kathleen Lane-O’Kelley’s Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen’s Council, a women’s paramilitary organisation) numbering about 1,200 men and women marched openly through the streets of Dublin. Badly armed and completely unprepared for what was to come, the rebels then divided into several units and took up positions around the city. The General Post Office (GPO) on Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, was the first location seized and served as the headquarters of the Rising. It was here that the rebels raised the flag of the Republic and Pearse read The Proclaimation of The Irish Republic to a small crowd of curious onlookers.

Within minutes the other units sprang into action. Ned Daly’s 1st Battalion stormed The Four Courts, another central landmark and symbol of British Justice in Ireland. The 2nd Battalion under Thomas MacDonagh seized the Jacob’s Biscuit Factory just south of Dublin Castle while Éamon de Valera’s 3rd Battalion took control of Boland’s Mill, overlooking the docks. A number of other locations were fortified and for the remainder of that first day the unprepared British forces were forced to fall back to their own positions under a hail of gunfire.

This early success was to be short-lived however. Pearse and his comrades were dismayed to discover that far from sparking a mass uprising, their actions had alienated much of the city’s population. Stories of ordinary people cut down in the crossfire spread quickly and two notorious incidents in which rebels deliberately shot civilians for failing to follow their orders ended any possibility of popular support.

Martial law was declared the following day and Brigadier-General William Lowe was placed in charge of the city. Rather than ordering his Dublin garrison into combat, which he regarded as fighting the rebels on their terms, he called for reinforcements and heavy artillery. By the end of the week there were more than 16 thousand British troops in the city. Artillery had been set up in two locations and a gunboat brought up the River Liffey. The main rebel positions saw very little combat until the very end. Instead they were surrounded and mercilessly shelled from a distance. O’Connell Street, the Four Courts, Boland’s Mill and the Biscuit Factory – plus the areas around them – were reduced to rubble. Artillery barrages were also targeted on several other districts when rumours of rebel activity reached the British High Command. It was this tactic that resulted in the vast majority of the casualties sustained during the Easter Rising.

After the big guns fell silent, British troops stormed the weakened rebel positions. It was then that the fighting was fiercest and casualties were taken on both sides. Atrocities were carried out by British forces in retaliation for casualties sustained, most notably the North King Street massacre in which 15 civilians were murdered as a reprisal for a rebel ambush that left 11 soldiers dead. Elsewhere the pacifist activist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, along with five others, was executed by British troops when he tried to mediate between a rebel group and the forces besieging them. It was acts such as these, along with what happened to the rebels who surrendered, that was to turn this military disaster into a victory for the independence movement.

Emerging from their fallback position in Moore Street where they’d been forced to flee when the GPO had been stormed, the rebels were rounded up and arrested. As word of Pearse’s surrender filtered through to the other positions, they too laid down arms and were taken into custody. Only de Valera’s decimated Battalion refused to admit defeat upon hearing the news, but another round of artillery fire soon forced his hand. So by the night of Sunday 30th April 1916, less than a week after Pearse had proclaimed an Irish Republic on the steps of the GPO, the Easter Rising had been crushed.

Much of the city was in ruins. Or in flames. Or both. The initial anger felt by the population towards the rebels began to be redirected towards the British forces when the scale of the destruction became apparent and news of the brutality and massacres became public. But it’s what followed that effectively ended British rule in Ireland.

Within three days of the last shot being fired, more than 3,500 people had been arrested, most of whom had little to do with the Rising though they might have been involved in nationalist politics or the labour unions. 90 of these were identified as “rebel leaders” and a secret military tribunal held on May 2nd sentenced them all to death. On May 3rd, the executions began.

First the seven signatories of the Proclaimation of The Republic were shot in Kilmainham Jail, including James Connolly who was badly injured during the fighting and had to be tied to a chair in the jail’s courtyard to face the firing squad. Pádraig Pearse allegedly welcomed his execution which he saw as a blood sacrifice which would further the cause of Irish nationalism. By May 12th, fifteen of the 90 scheduled executions had been carried out and Irish popular outrage was growing. It was one thing to imprison the rebels, it was quite another to carry out mass executions without trial. When news reached the public that James Connolly – who had been a popular champion of the Irish labour union movement – had been carried out on a stretcher to be shot, it sparked street protests.

The last thing the British authorities wanted, just days after putting down a rebellion, was to precipitate another. And so, the remainder of the executions were cancelled (including that of Éamon de Valera who was to play such a central role in Irish politics for the next half a century). But the damage had been done. And the War of Independence was already brewing.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Revolution, World Events | 2 Comments

26th April 1937 Guernica


Picasso’s “Guernica”

It was market day on April 26th 1937 in Guernica, a small town in northern Spain considered to be the spiritual capital of Basque culture.

In late afternoon, without warning or provocation, Luftwaffe aircraft swooped down over Guernica. Wave after wave bombarded the town with huge bombs and more than 3,000 incendiaries. The merciless firestorm destroyed three quarters of the town’s buildings. No one knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of people were killed or wounded.

This was the height of the Spanish Civil War. Fascist dictator General Franco was waging a campaign against the legitimate elected government and had generously invited his nasty little friend Hitler to practice terror bombing to help demoralise his enemies.

As the flames engulfed Guernica, one of the first on the scene was war correspondent for The Times newspaper, George Steer, who wrote: “The whole town of 7,000 inhabitants, plus 3,000 refugees, was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces.” And so news of the atrocity reached the outside world.

The legitimate Spanish government had commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at that summer’s Paris International Exposition. Horrified by news of the annihilation of Guernica, Picasso abandoned his initial idea and immediately began work on a gigantic canvas; 11 feet tall and nearly 26 feet wide. Its scale is important; it makes the scene overwhelming and inescapable, as it was to the victims. He completed his work in a matter of weeks – it is one of the most astonishing, emotionally-charged paintings ever created.

Painted in black and white to mirror newspaper photographs and newsreels of the time, it depicts in grotesque detail the suffering and tragedies of war and its consequences for innocent civilians. A horse run through with spear squeals in agony as it dies from its wounds. A woman is trapped in a burning building; her eyes have turned into tears. A mother cradles the body of her limp, lifeless baby and howls in grief.

A bull silently surveys the scene, symbolising Spain itself and humanity’s domination of nature. The deliberate irony is that since ancient times is it usually the bull who is sacrificed. At the apex of the painting within an eye-shape is a light bulb, perhaps symbolic of the all-seeing media.

And yet there are flickers of hope if you look for them; a little flower and a candle are firmly clutched in the hands of the dying.

In the years since its creation Picasso’s Guernica has lost none of its power. It has gained monumental status, a perpetual reminder of the horrors of war and an embodiment of peace. Indeed the authorities deemed its anti-war message so powerful that a tapestry of the painting, hanging at UN in lead-up to the Iraq war had to be covered for a media conference taking place in front of it.

Artistically, politically, historically, culturally it is surely the most important painting of the 20th century.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 2 Comments

25th April 1974 the Carnation Revolution


Guns n’ Carnations

At twenty minutes past midnight on 25th April 1974, Lisbon night owls heard the unthinkable coming through their radios. “Grândola, Vila Morena” – a folk anthem well-known to young people and intellectuals, with lyrics extolling the virtues of brotherhood and equality – had long been banned by Portugal’s fascist government. Which is precisely why the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA), the organisation of lower-ranked left-leaning officers of the Portuguese Army, had deliberately chosen it to signal the start of their revolution.

As the song blared across the airwaves, MFA-manned tanks rolled into the main square in Lisbon. Main arteries and bridges were seized. The airport, national radio and television stations were taken. Key members of the government were arrested. The headquarters of the secret police was surrounded. By sunrise, the near bloodless coup had toppled the Estado Novo (New State) – the longest-running dictatorship in Europe, having prevailed for nearly fifty years. Despite repeated radio appeals from the MFA’s “Captains of April” beseeching the population to stay safe inside their homes, thousands of Portuguese took to the streets in support of the insurgents. When a young woman handed a red carnation to a soldier who fastened it into the muzzle of his gun, she unwittingly created one of the most powerful symbols of the era… before long, most of the soldiers had placed carnations in their guns in a gesture of peace, and the coup became known around the world as the Carnation Revolution.

Ever since António de Oliveira Salazar took power in 1933 – joining Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in Europe’s unrighteous club of totalitarian dictators – Portugal had been ruled with an iron fist. Salazar deployed secret police (the dreaded PIDE) to suppress civil liberties, whilst under his incompetent social and economic policies, Portugal degenerated into one of Europe’s poorest countries. Yet in spite of its descent as a world power, the Estado Novo clung to its antiquated colonial interests in Africa; in 1415 Portugal had been the first European power to establish an African colony, and it would be one of the last to leave. In 1961, in response to independence movements in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, Salazar initiated the Portuguese Colonial War –a Custeristic and catastrophic conflict, unanimously condemned by the international community, which raged for 13 brutal years. Even when Salazar died in 1970, his successor Marcelo Caetano persisted with this futile campaign that was crippling Portugal’s already fragile economy and held no political solution or end in sight. Finally, after Caetano announced a cynical new programme whereby recruits who completed a brief training program could be commissioned at the same rank as military academy graduates, the nascent rebellion mobilised.

In the wake of the revolution, a rapid and hasty programme of decolonisation was pushed through; over the next few years Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde Islands, Sao Tome and Principe and Angola were all granted independence. In Portugal, meanwhile, a civil war pitting far left against far right was narrowly avoided before a democratic two-party government emerged. Hundreds of political prisoners were released, a major redistribution of land was carried out and the economy began its long climb towards recovery.

But up against such a stubborn bulwark as the Estado Novo, how on earth had the MFA managed a near bloodless revolt? The peacefulness of the coup has been credited to a determined desire on the part of the revolutionary soldiers to avoid violence, as well as the citizens who came out on to the streets to make their voices heard. Said Captain Salgueiro Maia, the most notable leader of the MFA: “I came to see a mass of people, all raising their voices, placing flowers in the muzzles of the rifles. No one needed to kill or to be killed. No one needed to order an assault, or even the arrest of the king and his vassals.”

A bloodless revolution and the overthrow of a decrepit authoritarian regime… what’s not to love about that? Happy Freedom Day, Portugal!

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23rd April 1968 the Columbia University Student Protest


Students take Columbia's Hamilton Hall

It was the spring of 1968, the “year that rocked the world”. In America, the anti-Vietnam movement was intensifying, stirred by the Tet Offensive and My Lai Massacre. The women’s rights movement was mobilising. And Black Power and the Black Panthers had unseated the non-violent civil rights movement – Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination serving as the final ironic nail in its coffin. Today we’re remembering a seminal event in that epochal year.

On April 23rd 1968, students at New York City’s elite Columbia University held a demonstration which escalated into a week-long occupation of five campus buildings before police moved in. 712 students were arrested, while over 100 were injured during the forcible eviction. In the wake of such a heavy-handed response from the police, who’d acted on the orders of the university trustees, students called a strike and the campus shut down for the rest of the semester. The Columbia upheaval was the loudest and most reported university protest in a landmark year of global unrest, and is widely seen as the pivotal moment of radicalization of hitherto politically indifferent students.

So just what were these privileged Ivy Leaguers so pissed off about? And what happened?

A month earlier, the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had learned of the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War through its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA). When SDS petitioned Columbia’s president to sever the university’s ties with this military research group, six of its members were placed on disciplinary probation. The April 23rd rally was ostensibly in support of the “IDA Six”. The demonstrators, numbering in the hundreds, attempted to storm the library but were held off by security guards, and proceeded instead to Morningside Park – where construction was underway on a 10-storey Columbia gymnasium on public land. Local Harlem residents – primarily poor blacks – were to have only limited use of the facilities, and would be expected to use a separate basement entrance. Just three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the gym was seen as a repugnant symbol of the university’s racist contempt for its neighbours, and the angry students – both white and black – began tearing down the fence around the site. Pushed back by the police, the students returned to campus to “liberate” the main hall – taking the university’s dean as their hostage. Over the next six days – against a backdrop of tense negotiations, communal living, news cameras, supportive telegrams from Chairman Mao, folk songs, Black Power activists and the hoof clops of the massing NYPD – four more buildings were seized in what had become a mammoth struggle between the New Left and the Old Order. For although the protest superficially centred around three specific issues, these demands were merely symbolic of the far broader issues of racism, imperialism and authoritarianism. Said Columbia SDS president (and future Weatherman) Mark Rudd:

“Any particular issue we raise probably can’t change things all that much, but changing people’s understanding of society, getting them to understand the forces at work to create the war in Vietnam, to create racism: this is the primary goal of radicals. And the harvest of this planting will not be seen in this year when we gain a modicum of student power, not in ten years…but sometime in the future when this understanding of capitalist society bears fruit in much higher level struggle.”

The students ultimately won their goals: the gym was never built, Columbia’s weapons research contract was terminated, and amnesty was granted for most demonstrators (with the notable exception of Rudd and a few other ringleaders). There was the additional victory of the not incidental resignations of Columbia’s president and provost. But the most significant implications of the 1968 occupation and strike extended far beyond Columbia. Campuses around the world exploded. From Paris and Prague to Tokyo and Mexico City, students took to the streets – and for a while it seemed that revolution was just a shot away. Before the year was out, however, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks, the Chicago police violently beat protesters at the Democratic Convention and Richard Nixon was elected President. But, for a brief moment at least, these committed and highly organised students proved that protest is our essential duty and change is possible.

Today’s young revolutionaries would do well to study closely the tactics of and lessons from Columbia’s extraordinary Class of 1968.

Posted in Dissent, Revolution, World Events | 4 Comments

20th April 1911 the Lynching of Will Porter


“Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.”

Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. And that astonishing figure only accounts for those that were recorded. Behind every one of those 4,743 extrajudicial “mob rules” executions, there lies a tragedy – but today we are remembering a particularly sick episode. On 20th April 1911, in the small town of Livermore, Kentucky, a black man named Will Porter allegedly shot and injured a white man during a barroom brawl. Fearful that the jailhouse would be wrecked by local vigilantes, the local sheriff opted to hide Porter in the basement of the Livermore Opera House. The angry mob discovered the ruse, stormed the building and – after finding the terrified Porter hiding in the basement – bound him hand and foot and dragged him upstairs. Taking in the theatre’s stage decorated with woodland scenery, one of the mob leaders was perversely inspired to turn Porter’s fate into a public performance. The vigilantes took over the box office to sell tickets to the spectacle: those in the balcony would be limited to one shot only, while those willing to pay extra for orchestra seats could empty their guns. Fifty men paid the admission and took their seats to find Porter centre-stage, tied to a pole. The organisers were unsure how to turn on the stage lights, so the lynching occurred in an eerie semi-darkness. “Of about 200 shots fired,” reported the New York Times, “nearly half entered the body of the black man and the remainder tore to shreds the woodland scenery arranged for the presentation of a much milder drama.”

The sickening story of Will Porter might have been forgotten along with most of the other 4,743+ lynching victims if not for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Founded in 1909, the NAACP vowed to wage war on this gruesome practice. Following the American Civil War, the lynching of African-Americans in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method to terrorise blacks and maintain white supremacy. Hangings, shootings, burnings at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration – lynching was a peculiarly American combination of racism and sadism. Widely held to be acceptable, newspaper articles regularly told of “determined men” seeking to give “black brutes” a hearing in “Judge Lynch’s Court”. The Federal Government, having abandoned its post-war pledges, betrayed African-Americans through its persistent failure to enact a Federal anti-lynching law. On June 13, 2005, the United States Senate finally formally apologised. Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu noted, “There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility.”

As for the tragic case of poor Will Porter, two weeks after his death, the NAACP adopted a resolution condemning the lynching and sent letters to President William Taft, Congress and Kentucky Governor AE Wilson – who demanded the arrest of the lynchers. Warrants were issued for the arrest of the three ringleaders, who were separately indicted and tried on the charge of murder. All were acquitted.

Posted in Atrocities | 5 Comments

17th April 1975 Pol Pot Declares Year Zero


Pol Pot's Gruesome Legacy

On this day in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh and declared revolutionary Year Zero. After five years of bloody civil war, the conquering Communist guerrillas were welcomed as heroes by a relieved population desperate for peace – but the relief was to be short-lived. Within twenty-four hours, members of the deposed Lon Nol government, public servants, police, military officers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim leaders and middle-class citizens were identified and executed. Schoolteachers, students, doctors and those who simply wore glasses or knew how to read were murdered for being “intellectuals”. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed and the currency abolished. Markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices and private property were forbidden. The Khmer Rouge then set about evacuating the entire city of Phnom Penh: schools, hospitals, factories, offices and homes were raided at gunpoint and their occupants force-marched into the countryside. Soon, the country’s entire population was forced to relocate to the agricultural labour camps, the so-called “killing fields”, as part of Pol Pot’s master plan to transform the renamed Democratic Kampuchea into a self-sufficient Maoist agrarian state. And so began Pol Pot’s reign of terror – one of the most evil and brutal regimes of the twentieth century. In just three years and eight months, an estimated 3 million Cambodians would be annihilated by bullet, axe, shovel blow to the back of the head, plastic bag suffocation, unspeakable torture, or by starvation – the auto-genocidal victims of Pol Pot’s ruthless bid to “purify” Cambodia.

But lest we forget that U.S. military action against Cambodia was probably the single most significant factor in Pol Pot’s rise from leader of a small sectarian group with no popular base to tyrannical despot. Between 1969 and 1973, American B-52s dropped 2,756,941 tons’ worth of explosives in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites – more than was dropped by all parties in World War II. The secret and illegal bombing of then-neutral Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger caused such widespread death and devastation that it drove recruits directly to Pol Pot. “[The Khmer Rouge] are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men.” New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg confirmed that the Khmer Rouge “… would point… at the bombs falling from B-52s as something they had to oppose if they were going to have freedom. And it became a recruiting tool until they grew to a fierce, indefatigable guerrilla army.” In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half-a-million innocent people and verily ushered in Year Zero.

America’s Cambodian guilt does not end there. In the face of mounting evidence of Pol Pot’s atrocities, the U.S. government – still reeling from its Vietnam debacle – was suddenly not so very eager to stick its nose into Southeast Asia’s business. Unbelievably, the Khmer Rouge even enjoyed support from the United States because of its opposition to Vietnam. While the self-styled World Police ignored the Cambodian Genocide despite its obligation under the terms of the 1948 Geneva Convention, it was left to their old Vietnamese enemy to eventually overthrow Pol Pot’s murderous regime.

Oh the hypocrisy of selective American democracy.

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15th April 1865 the Death of Abraham Lincoln


Cometh the hour, cometh the man

Seven score and twelve years ago today at 7.22am, Abraham Lincoln died – nine hours after an assassin’s bullet entered the back of his head. This self-educated, rough-hewn lawyer from Illinois with virtually no administrative or military experience had for four years led a divided nation through its greatest constitutional, moral and military crisis – only to be slain a mere six days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at long last brought an end to the American Civil War. “Now he belongs to the ages,” the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton famously said at Lincoln’s deathbed, and indeed America’s Redeemer remains the nation’s greatest hero – an almost mythological saint. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of Lincoln’s martyrdom is that he did not live to finish the job. In his extraordinary Second Inaugural Address just one month prior (701 perfectly crafted words: he was a literary genius), the narrowly re-elected president set out his vision for his second term as Union victory edged ever closer. The “scourge of war,” he reasoned, was divine punishment for the sin of slavery, a sin in which all Americans – Northern as well as Southern – were complicit. But if America was to be reborn, there must now be compassion and reconciliation. With his customary patience, shrewd calculations, careful timing and iron resolve, Lincoln planned to forgive the South, help it rebuild and bring it up to speed with the more industrialised North. When he died, however, Reconstruction was taken over by Radical Republicans hell-bent on punishing the impudent former Confederates. They ended up driving a Treaty of Versailles-like wedge between the North and South, creating an alienation that led directly to Jim Crow and 100 years of discrimination and segregation.

Lincoln wasn’t without fault. His critics are quick to quote his racist remarks in the 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, and remind us that his initial objective in the civil war was not the issue of slavery but to save the Union. By 1863, however, Lincoln was as convinced as Frederick Douglass that America could only become its idealized self with the abolishment of slavery – and midway through the war he boldly issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He genuinely came to believe that “all men are created equal,” and carried these democratic ideals through to their logical and constitutional conclusion. He is universally acknowledged as America’s greatest ever president, and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.

“I love him, not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed… The world is full of folk born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet became Abraham Lincoln.” – W.E.B. DuBois

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13th April 1873 the Colfax Massacre


Gathering the dead victims of the Colfax Massacre

On March 13th 1873, a brutal massacre occurred in Colfax, Louisiana that remains shockingly little-known considering the magnitude of the violence – it is one of the largest incidents of race-related mass murder in America’s non-combatant history – and the colossal implications it would trigger. Occurring just eight years after the end of the American Civil War, not only would the Colfax Massacre herald the end of the Reconstruction Era and the so-called “second birth” of the United States, but some modern historians have also pinpointed it as the precise moment that “freedom died”. Henceforth, America would descend into a dark age of segregation so systematic and endemic it would endure for almost 100 years. So what happened on that Easter Sunday in Louisiana? What were the implications? And why don’t we know about it?

Following the war, the Radical Republicans were committed to enfranchising blacks and incorporating them into the political system, while the Democrats and white supremacists were doing all they could to restore the South’s pre-war power and intimidate their former slaves from voting. In 1868, these two irreconcilable agendas clashed head-on in Louisiana when Republican pressure resulted in the election of 137 black state legislators. White supremacists mounted a sustained campaign of terror against the new government; black and white Republicans were threatened, beaten and killed in a desperate bid to drive them away from the polls and out of office. When Louisiana’s gubernatorial election of 1872 ended in dispute as both the Democrat and Republican candidates claimed victory, whites seized the opportunity to destroy once and for all this new black stronghold. As the violence escalated across the state, some 150 black men assembled at the Colfax courthouse in central Louisiana to rally for and defend their civil rights. For several weeks, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers solicited support from surrounding parishes and, at noon on Easter Sunday, a mob of more than 300 white men on horseback, armed with rifles and cannon, descended on Colfax. A shoot-out ensued, and the courthouse was set on fire. The outnumbered black defenders showed a white flag of surrender but were gunned down as they tried to flee the burning building. At least fifty blacks were captured but were later summarily executed. By dawn on Easter Monday, Colfax was littered with the mutilated corpses of over 100 black men.

Although 97 were indicted for the Colfax Massacre, only nine of the ringleaders were eventually charged – not with murder, but with conspiring to deprive their victims of the civil rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The defendants’ lawyers countered that the amendment didn’t empower the federal government to prosecute citizens; that responsibility remained with state governments. Most of the cases ended in botched mistrials, but three of the defendants were found guilty. The appeal went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of the United States v. Cruikshank. And, on 27th March 1876, the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 based on the Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment applied only to actions committed by the state, and not to those committed by individuals or private conspiracies. In other words, the Colfax prosecution was unconstitutional, and white supremacists were free to wage war against blacks with absolute impunity. The Cruikshank case effectively enabled political parties’ use of paramilitary forces, the way was opened up for all manner of discriminatory laws against blacks, and Reconstruction was abandoned.

The Colfax Massacre remains a buried episode in American history. In Colfax itself, the events of 13th April 1873 are remembered not as a massacre, but as a “riot”. There is a memorial obelisk, but not in honour of the 100-plus murdered blacks – rather, its inscription is “in loving remembrance” of the three “Heroes…  Who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy”. As the author Nate Blakeslee observed, it was there in Colfax and in the unkept promise of Reconstruction that “the battle lines were drawn not just over civil rights for African Americans, but over what kind of nation [America] would become.”

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10th April 1919 the Death of Emiliano Zapata


Emiliano Zapata

Today we lament the death of the great Mexican revolutionary, natural anarchist and prophet ­– Emiliano Zapata – tragically betrayed and ambushed on this day in 1919 by federal forces after an heroic 9-year struggle to bring self-reliance and autonomy to his beloved people of Morelos and to reject the very concept of Mexican nationalism as too geographically flawed to put into practice. Zapata refused ever to play a national role in the Mexican Revolution, encouraged his Zapatistas to wear white in defiance of Mexico’s history of violent militaristic regimes, dressed always as a dandy – decked out in powder-blue satins, always the largest sombreros, each item studiedly chosen to symbolise the ultra-civilian, the very antithesis of each and every other Mexican revolutionary leader. With 100 years of hindsight, none of the other Mexican revolutionary leaders – save of course for Pancho Villa – should even really be regarded as having been revolutionary at all. Zapata however was revolutionary throughout, and adhered so steadfastly to his dream of Morelos self-reliance that he must genuinely be considered worthy of the title ‘prophet’. Zapata was in no way faultless, but he was inspirational to an extraordinary degree – exhibiting several of those same local freedom-fighter characteristics that we see in the antics of Jesus Christ as told not through the eyes of Paul but through his Nazarene disciples. Tragically, it was Zapata’s insistence on representing only his own Morelos homeland that ultimately caused his assassination. For as the ever-changing political landscape shape-shifted around him, Zapata’s national-minded enemies nevertheless always regarded his Morelos homeland as one day theirs. That his refusal to become a national figure ultimately created Zapata’s downfall can hardly be disputed. But it is surely this stubborn refusal to divert his gaze from that glorious Morelos end-game that continues today to create freedom-fighters who bear his name. Like Jesus Christ, Emiliano Zapata achieved his position as a global figure only by acting extremely locally. His vision was sound, true and beautiful.

[Written by Julian Cope]

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9th April 1865 Robert E. Lee Surrenders


The Surrender. But not for long.

On this day in 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to the Union’s Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. In the parlour of the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, these two great adversaries – Lee in his finest gold sash and sword, Grant in muddied field uniform – exchanged pleasantries and reminiscences of the Mexican-American War before arriving at the business at hand. When the terms for surrender were finally presented, they were as generous as Lee could hope for: his men would not be imprisoned or prosecuted for treason, they would be allowed to take home their horses and mules to carry out the spring planting, and Grant even extended a supply of food rations for the starving Confederate army. A grateful Lee said such gestures would have a very happy effect among the defeated men and do much toward reconciling the country. As for Lee himself – this brilliant general who had consistently outsmarted the Union against seemingly insurmountable odds – he was told to get back on his horse and just “go home”. And so he did. And as he did, the Union army began cheering in celebration. But Grant ordered an immediate stop. “The Confederates were now our countrymen,” he said. “We did not want to exult over their downfall.”

Thus concluded the American Civil War: four brutal and bloody years, some 630,000 deaths and more than one million casualties – it remains the bleakest chapter in America’s history. But what had actually been the verdict at Appomattox? What had the Union won? What had the Confederacy lost? How could this Humpty Dumpty of a nation put itself back together again? Could there be genuine reconciliation? Lee’s surrender at Appomattox set the scene for America’s so-called Reconstruction Era, the immediate post-Civil War period that would attempt to address all of these massive questions, but would ultimately fail to resolve any of them.

Lee might have been grateful for such generous terms of surrender on that afternoon of 9th April 1865, but the real terms emerged with the 13th 14th and 15th amendments to the US Constitution, respectively abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection, and granting voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” For the White South, these amendments were akin to the Treaty of Versailles: a red rag to a bull. The North’s revolution of Reconstruction quickly resulted in the South’s counter-revolution of White Supremacy; and there could be no reconciliation for white supremacy and black equality. Between 1868 and 1871, the Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators emerged as semi-legitimate bodies hell-bent on taking back control of the political South, and – through the most widespread use of political violence in American history – re-establishing a social order based on racial subordination and labour control. Without a great leader to usher in a new era, the Northern Republicans gradually tired of and betrayed its post-war ideals, culminating in the disgraceful Compromise of 1877. And so it happened that just twelve years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender, blacks in the South were once again under the yoke of a white master through the Southern Democrats and Jim Crow laws.

As W.E.B. DuBois observed: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”

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5th April 1992 the Siege of Sarajevo


Cellist Vedran Smajlović performing amidst the ruins of Sarajevo's National Library

On April 5th 1992 units of the Yugoslav People’s Army on orders from Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, in combination with Bosnian-Serb militia groups, took up positions in the hills surrounding the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. From there they opened fire on the city below with artillery, mortars and sniper rifles. It was the beginning of a three and a half year siege that left many thousands dead and heralded the disintegration of Yugoslavia in a decade-long series of conflicts, bringing to an end Tito’s dream of unifying the Balkans.

Of course, by the time it laid siege to Sarajevo, the Yugoslav People’s Army was already an anachronism. Yugoslavia had begun to fragment some years earlier; the process being set in motion by the death of Tito in 1980. For almost forty years a lid had been kept on the religious and ethnic tensions in the Balkans… a remarkable achievement by the Yugoslavian government for all its faults and transgressions – of which there were many. Unfortunately, the twin pillars upon which this fragile union had been supported both disappeared in the early 80s. Firstly, the sheer force of will (and attendant cult of personality) of Marshall Tito and secondly, the strict doctrine of his communist party.

With Tito’s death, and without an adequate replacement, that first pillar began to crumble. Simultaneously the Reagan administration adopted a strategy of undermining the Yugoslavian communists despite their longtime policy of engagement with both East and West. In Reagan’s black-and-white view of the world, any communist or socialist regime was regarded as an enemy to be vanquished and, with the help of the IMF, his economic assault on Yugoslavia during the 1980s helped prepare the ground for what was to come.

This is not an attempt to deflect blame from Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies. Far from it. But just as The Treaty of Versailles set the stage for the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany, so the role of Western economic policies must be acknowledged in the rise of Serbian ultra-nationalism in the 1990s. Otherwise we learn nothing from history and may find ourselves doomed to repeat it.

After the second world war, Marshall Tito recognised the great internal stresses in his pan-Balkan Yugoslavia. In response he declared nationalism to be one of the great political crimes and insisted that the Partisan slogan, “Brotherhood and Unity”, be a cornerstone of Yugoslavian communism. Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin nationalists all found themselves breaking rocks along with unrepentant Stalinists on the prison island of Goli Otok. There is a school of thought that suggests this harsh treatment of separatists merely forced nationalist sentiment to fester beneath the surface of Yugoslavian society and made its re-emergence all the more violent. Others believe that the suppression of nationalism simply wasn’t given enough time. They point to the significant integration of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian populations under Tito; the widespread inter-marrying and the numerous mixed communities… making the subsequent conflicts all the more cruel of course. Would another couple of generations of integration have eliminated those tensions? Had the bitter memories of the atrocities of the second world war been allowed to fade, would Milosevic have been able to exploit Serbian nationalism and drag the Balkans into violence?

Sadly, we’ll never know. With the death of Tito and the economic collapse of the 1980s, the federation began to fragment. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia all began to make moves towards independence and Milosevic began to arm and finance Serb milita groups in Bosnia. Despite his communist background, it quickly became apparent how little belief he had in the principles of Yugoslavian communism and how much he sought power as an end in itself. That famous line from Einstein – “Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels” – captures perfectly Yugoslavia’s transition from Tito to Milosevic.

Whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment among Bosnian-Serbs and reminding Croatian-Serbs of their treatment at the hands of collaborators during World War 2, by late 1991 Milosevic had tapped into, and amplified, a mass psychosis within Serbian society. He gave speeches calling for the establishment of a Greater Serbia, a new state that would include significant portions of Bosnia and Croatia. He purged the Yugoslav People’s Army army of non-Serbs and massively increased his support for the nationalist militias. So that by the time the Bosnian referendum calling for independence was passed in February 1992, there was little doubt that it signalled the beginning of a nightmare. Bosnian Serbs, who made up about a third of the population and had boycott the referendum, declared an autonomous Serbian Republic in the north and east of Bosnia. Simultaneously Bosnian Croats declared an autonomous republic in the west. Arms and troops flooded across the borders from both Croatia and Serbia, though Milosevic’s control of the former Yugoslavian army gave him an distinct advantage.

By the end of March 1992 the situation was chaotic. What started with political assassinations and attacks upon strategic targets soon descended into outright war. And worse. That terrible phrase, “ethnic cleansing”, entered the lexicon of the western media. Muslims were driven out of both Serb and Croat areas and atrocities were carried out by all sides. But it was the Serbian militia groups led by Radovan Karadzic who perpetrated the worst of the massacres. Whether you call it “psychotic” or instead reach for the word “evil”, the ultra-nationalist fervour that gripped the Serb militia in Bosnia resulted in some of the most heinous acts committed on European soil since the defeat of the Nazis. And while some may speak of the Prijedor or Srebrenica massacres, it was the siege of Sarajevo that came to symbolise the campaign of genocide and terror.

Sarajevo was one of the most integrated cities in the entire Balkan region. It is a bitter irony, but one that does nothing to lessen the horror of what happened. Through marriage, my own family includes a Serbian woman whose Muslim husband died during the siege. So while the siege of Sarajevo involved Serbian forces attacking a Bosnian city, on another level it was the vicious response of narrow-minded nationalism to a society that sought to move beyond it.

More than ten thousand civilians were killed and almost sixty thousand badly injured during the years the city was under siege. It would be an insult to every single one of them to try to break those numbers down into ethnic or religious groups. The artillery shells may have come from Serbian gun emplacements, but they did not discriminate upon impact. The siege of Sarajevo was carried out by Serbian forces, but the lessons to be learnt – about the dangers of nationalism, the ease with which perceived grievances can be whipped into frenzied violence by those in power, and the insanity of demonising The Other – are lessons that should be learnt by us all.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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4th April 1968  the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Today we commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. – the inspirational leader, moral arbiter and emblematic martyr of the U.S. civil rights movement.  A prophet who led America out of its Jim Crow darkness, for thirteen turbulent years, this devout Baptist preacher harnessed the energy of the African-American masses and presented their grievances to the white-controlled governments. From the triumphs of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott through to the March on Washington with its stirring “I Have a Dream” speech, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, King brought momentum to and legitimised the African-American revolution of the mid-twentieth century.

Yet at the time of his assassination, the movement which Martin Luther King Jr. so nobly served had begun to turn its back on him. With the emergence of Black Power, “by any means necessary” had superseded “I have a dream” – and for a new generation of revolutionary black leaders, King’s edict of non-violence was submissive and Uncle Tom-like.

It is ironic, therefore, that by 1968 King had in fact never been more radical. A year before his death, after being shown photos of napalmed Vietnamese children whilst he was eating a meal, King pushed away his food and declared: “Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.” His subsequent and infamous “Beyond Vietnam” speech – which condemned the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – saw his powerful white allies, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, turn sharply against him. During his career as a civil rights leader, King had been no stranger to the FBI microscope – but this new treasonous direction gave J. Edgar Hoover and his lackeys the green light to go after King without restrain. And go after him they did. The FBI repeatedly attempted to discredit King with accusations from communist sympathies to philandering, and kept him under constant surveillance. Indeed, on the evening of King’s assassination in Memphis, FBI agents observed the entire incident from an adjacent fire station. The well-known antagonism between King and the FBI, the inexplicable absence of an all-points-bulletin to find the killer, and the nearby agent presence have led to speculation that the FBI, and not James Earl Ray, was the real assassin.

Whatever dirt the FBI had gathered, however, was swiftly swept under the carpet following the tragic events of 4th April 1968. In death, the U.S. government was content to whitewash this black man whose anti-war stance threatened to deprive the Vietnam draft of its seemingly endless pool of poor black youths. Forgotten was King’s lack of patriotism and records of civil disobedience and Marxist tendencies. In 1983, he became one of only three persons to receive an American national holiday in his honour.

For White America, the sanitised legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. provides a convenient detraction from an inconvenient past. For many African-Americans, however, it is yet another example of the U.S. government’s hijacking of their history and continued subjugation.

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3rd April 2000 the Death of Terence McKenna


Terence McKenna

On this day in 2000 the world lost a great champion of freedom, creativity, and our inalienable right to increase both of these by partaking of nature’s rich pharmacy. Terence McKenna was a thinker, explorer, writer and raconteur obsessed with the role of drugs in human evolution and culture, with our modern failure to truly take on board the invisible alien landscapes that substances such as dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and psilocybin unravel, and with a bizarre model of the nature of time that, for him, indicated a profound transformation of reality itself in the year 2012.

Born in 1946, Terence was raised, alongside his brother Dennis, in the tiny Colorado town of Paonia. They fed each other’s thirst for the strange and fantastical, hunting for fossils and reading H.P. Lovecraft. In 1963, having relocated to California, he became aware of the world of psychedelics through reading Aldous Huxley and the underground press. He began experimenting with morning glory seeds and LSD (imbibing huge doses of pure Sandoz in San Francisco’s summer of ’65), as well as beginning a life-long daily relationship with cannabis.

During the Summer of Love he was introduced to DMT, smoked in its pure synthesized form – “a benchmark, you might say.” He was gobsmacked by his encounters with “objects which looked like Fabergé eggs from Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures,” and the compass of his life, already in the grip of the magnetic pull of psychedelics, began to point in a direction tangential to the realities of even the most arcane literature he knew. He travelled through Asia, paying his way as a hash smuggler, covering his underworld activities with the engrossing diversion of collecting butterflies, and staying in Nepal to study Tibetan art. He was convinced through his LSD use that some hallucinogenic experience lay behind this tradition’s radiant Buddhas and enflamed demons. But further DMT experiments convinced him that here was something way off any known map of mystical experience.

Besides helming a Magellanic ship into the unchartered realms of our collective consciousness, that summer of 1968 also found Terence “fighting the police at the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian Fuckers and the Acid Anarchists.” But while radical politics certainly fuelled his ideals, his practice – while more informed by scientific empiricism than by cosmic hippydom – was firmly in the smaller-scale and larger-pupilled world of psychedelic research. Following his mother’s death in 1971, he, his brother Dennis, and a few other friends, set off for the heart of the Amazon. While the initial draw had been the indigenous shamanic use of DMT-containing plants, it was the plentiful golden psilocybin mushrooms they found luxuriating in the Zebu cattle shit that really fired their alchemical furnaces. Dennis went off the rails with his fantastical theories about altering their DNA with ‘shrooms and harmonic chanting, convinced that their world was being engineered by a post-mortem James Joyce. Terence briefly become a “psychedelic bliss bunny”, and then had his ontology severely rattled by a close encounter with an honest-to-god flying saucer that condensed out of a group of lenticular clouds.

Out of this heady mixture of gnostic curiosities, Terence distilled a theory of time. He extracted a waveform from the internal structure of the I Ching, using some highly dubious reasoning, and mapped the wave’s peaks and troughs onto history. Deeply idiosyncratic events and synchronicities in his own life formed initial anchor-points, but then he extended his correlations to our collective history. He became intrigued by the fact that the wave – which he took as revealing the influx of novelty into the universe – seemed to reach an end, a climactic zero-point. After fudging it around a little, the end-point seemed to fall somewhere in 2012. Later, discovering that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ calendar seemed to reach the end of a cycle on December 21st of the same year, he shifted his wave to match this.

What is omitted from ‘True Hallucinations’, his otherwise in-depth account of the formation of his “timewave”, is the fact that when he returned to the Amazon later in 1971, he expected the end of time then and there, on his 25th birthday:

“I met my natal day by sitting down and sincerely preparing myself for an Apocatastasis, the final Apocalyptic ingression of novelty, the implosion really, of the entire multidimensional continuum of space and time. I imagined the megamacrocosmos was going to go down the drain like water out of a bathtub as the hyperspatial vacuum fluctuation of paired particles that is our universe collided with its own ghost image after billions of years of separation. The Logos assured me that parity would be conserved, all sub-atomic particles except photons would cancel each other, and our entire universe would quietly disappear. The only particles that would remain, according to my fantastic expectation, would be photons, the universe of light would be exposed at last, set free from the iron prison of matter, freed from the awful physics that adhered to less unitary states of being. All mankind would march into the promised garden.”

Like the very early Gnostics who expected Christ’s return to be immanent, gradually revising their hopes as reality failed to meet them, McKenna lost his initial impatience, and shifted his predictions forward – far enough to give reality time to catch up, but not so far that the hope for eschatological salvation was unreachable by his lifetime.

Terence and Dennis went their separate ways after their Amazonian escapades, Dennis forging the beginnings of a distinguished career in enthnopharmacology, and Terence gestating the public speaking and writing skills that would see him become a sought-after ‘stand-up philosopher’ and advocate of psychedelic plants during the ’80s and ’90s. They found time in the ’70s to co-author a pioneering guide to growing psilocybin mushrooms at home, an underground achievement whose impact on the wider culture is as impossible to fathom as the mycelial root structure of a few scattered fruiting fungi in the forest. Certainly, they did more than their share to bring mushrooms to the masses, to infuse our shared reality with the rich marvels of this humble, humbling fungus.

As I write these words, we are less than nine months away from the McKenna-Mayan end-date. Yet Terence himself is more than twelve years dead. It is certainly a great tragedy that he did not live to see this year, though one can only guess what he would be saying by now. He was temperamentally as far from fundamentalist as can be, and those who have latched on to his more fevered pronouncements about 2012 must inevitably brush aside his tricksterish inconsistency about what this “end-date” may involve. He once said he thought it might simply see everyone starting to behave appropriately – which would, of course, be a gargantuan change in itself. Timewave acolytes must also ignore his repeated, emphatically anarchist calls for individuals to find their own way.

“People love to give away their power, and follow Christ, or Hitler, or Shree Bhagwan… They don’t understand that no one is smarter than you, no one understands the situation better than you, and no one is in a position to act for you more clearly than you are yourself. But people endlessly give away this opportunity, and subvert their identity to ideology.”

Timewave was far from an ideology, but in the end it was Terence’s own map through reality, certainly extending a little into all our territories, but ultimately grounded in his corner of the world. The great gift of this aspect of his thinking is the effort to see resonances in time, to see the fractal interconnections between large and small events, and to break out of the linear nightmare that so many have been happy to call “progress”.

Amplified by psychedelics into a baroque meshwork of theories, intuitions, historical poetics and rip-roaring yarns, Terence’s life’s work was ultimately a bold, inspired, and compassionate attempt to sincerely grapple with living in the terminal phase of Western civilization. Forget dates on your calendar to fuel expectation, prepare disappointment, and excuse inaction. The cherished ideals and lazy assumptions of the historical stream we have fallen into are being dissolved and unravelled right now, every day, all around us. There may be catastrophes to dwarf our fears; there may be a slow-motion unravelling that sees each generation gradually acclimatized to increasing deprivation and horror; there may be utterly unforeseen twists of joyful liberation. Most likely, there will be a strange hybrid of these fantasies, mixed with a whole load of mundanity, that will be lived through suffering, boredom and exhiliration, in a world always in need of the expression of whatever courage we might be saving for our own “end-date”.

Facing his death from a rare form of brain cancer, Terence showed great courage, and reflected on the silver linings of imminent mortality. “Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you’re going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.” And such empathic intensities naturally extended to his final thoughts on our collective achievements:

“I’m much more resonant and in tune with the Buddhist demand for compassion. The world needs to be a more compassionate place. It is not moving toward that as I see it. More and more people are exploited by fewer and fewer people, more and more effectively. And the tools of exploitation, which are advertising and propaganda and all of that, grow ever more powerful and irresistible. This is really the challenge for the future. We can build a civilization like nothing the world has ever seen. But can it be a human, a human civilization? Can it actually honor human values?”

It is a challenge that is met continuously, or not at all.

[Written by Gyrus]

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2nd April 1917 the First Elected Female Politician Assumes Office


Jeanette Rankin First Female in Congress

“We’re half the people; we should be half the Congress.”

On this day in 1917, the first woman elected to any national legislature in a Western democracy took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. And Sisters, our first-ever political representative didn’t let us down. Three full years before most American woman would win their battle for the right to vote, militant suffragist Jeannette Rankin was elected to represent the state of Montana – which, thanks to Rankin’s own efforts, had in 1914 enfranchised women. Only a month into her term, on 2nd April 1917 President Wilson called a special session of the 65th Congress to decide if America should enter World War I. Like most reformers, the suffragists opposed this misguided war of the ruling classes. Rankin’s sisters nevertheless urged her to approve the resolution – believing that opposition would damage the women’s cause. But when the House gathered to vote, Rankin defied this hypocritical policy of appeasement. As the Clerk of the House called out her name, Jeannette Rankin broke with congressional precedent by rising to her feet and announcing: “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote No.”

Three decades later –  following a twenty-year break from the politics of Washington, during which time she travelled the world as an ambassador for peace – Rankin was re-elected to Congress just in time to vote on America’s entry into the second world war. Convinced that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was provoked by President Roosevelt’s deliberate policies, on December 8, 1941 Jeannette Rankin cast the one and only vote against the U.S. declaration of war on Japan. “As a woman I can’t go to war,” she stated. “And I refuse to send anyone else.”

Rankin was pilloried for her unpatriotic convictions, but in the ensuing scandal, The Emporia Gazette recognised and acknowledged (if somewhat bregrudgingly) a rare bird of integrity:

“Probably 100 men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. [The Emporia Gazette] entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord, it was a brave thing.”

Jeannette Rankin blazed the trail for future generations of female politicians, and in her we could ask for no better exemplar. In addition to her courageous stance against imperialistic war-mongering, she leveraged the congressional debate on women’s suffrage, introduced legislation to provide state and federal funds for health clinics and midwife education, and called for radical political reforms including civil liberties, birth control, equal pay and child welfare. And on this day back in 1917, taking her seat amongst 434 congressmen as the first and only female House representative, Jeannette Rankin had a clear and decisive vision of the future. “We’re half the people; we should be half the Congress,” she declared.

Today, women hold fewer than 13% of the world’s parliamentary seats, while here in the so-called progressive UK, only 19% of our MPs are women. For as long as the balance of power remains with men, they will continue to represent only their own world views and interests. We know from other countries like Sweden and Rwanda that quotas produce results, and only with equal representation can we even begin to redress our sham of a political system. Is it not high time to finish the job Jeannette Rankin started?

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26th March 1892 the Death of Walt Whitman


Whitman deliberately chose to depict himself as a swaggering vagabond for the first edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’. Abandoning the traditional “head and shoulders” portrait of the intellectual, here – for the first time – was a Poet of the people, and for the people.

In the middle of the 19th century, the barely-united states of America was in grave trouble. Stymied by its inability to reconcile a mandate for economic growth that depended largely on that “peculiar institution” of slavery, the so-called “Land of the Free” was increasingly divided and lurching ever closer towards conflict.  America’s most highly esteemed man of letters – Ralph Waldo Emerson – proposed a bold solution. In his 1845 essay “The Poet”, Emerson described the urgent need for a poetic voice that could liberate the troubled young nation. “The poet is representative,” wrote Emerson. “He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth … I look in vain for the poet whom I describe.” Meanwhile, in New York City, a self-educated reporter whose feisty diatribes had earned him the sack from no less than six newspapers over four years, read with interest this essay of Emerson’s as if it were a help-wanted ad. And as the collective psyche of the nation sank deeper beneath the hypocrisy of its own Constitution, the young writer resolved to heed Emerson’s call – to force America to confront itself, and set the nation on a new and noble course. And so began an extraordinary journey. Today we celebrate America’s first and greatest national poet: Walt Whitman.

Whitman would devote the rest of his life to composing, expanding and editing his great gift to his country, Leaves of Grass. He’d served his apprenticeship on the crowded and colourful streets of Manhattan and New Orleans, obsessively recording in his numerous notebooks everyday observations of everyday people. In this vast new nation of immigrants, with its vast and seemingly irreconcilable divides, the national poet could not speak for one. He must, Whitman concluded, speak for all. He must be the Everyman:

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between
the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both
so that both shall understand
me alike.

From carpenters to presidents, from sea to shining sea, Whitman sang a love song of and for all America. First published in 1855 at the poet’s own expense, Leaves of Grass was met with scathing criticism. Of the 795 printed copies, only two dozen sold. But when Emerson himself proffered praise and encouragement, Whitman reprinted a much-expanded second edition and would do so again four years later. Both the 1856 and 1860 revised and expanded editions of Leaves of Grass can be read as appeals to prevent civil war. Its failure to do so plunged Whitman into depression, and at the war’s onset he despondently abandoned his great labour of love.

In December 1862, eighteen months after the American Civil War began, Whitman ventured South upon learning that his brother had been wounded in battle. The horrors of war – the endless heaps of amputated limbs – would profoundly affect him, and he relocated to Washington D.C. to volunteer in the capital’s many army hospitals. For the next three years, companionship, tobacco and candy, and often the final words of comfort for hundreds and hundreds of dying soldiers, were provided by Walt Whitman. The bloody four-year conflict finally ended in April 1865, but not before claiming its last victim a mere week after the Confederacy’s surrender – President Abraham Lincoln. As the nation grieved for its slain redeemer, Walt Whitman resumed his poetic duty. In his ode to Lincoln – “O Captain! My Captain!” – as well as Drum-Taps and the 1866 edition of Leaves, Whitman aspired to single-handedly absorb the nation’s pain. This must stand as one of the most extraordinary and altruistic poetic sacrifices.

Spanning thirty-five years from its first edition of just twelve poems through to its ninth and final 400-page edition of some 300 poems, Leaves of Grass is a Homeric tale of a momentous era in America’s history as the nation sought and struggled to define and redefine itself. In an extraordinary twist, Whitman casts his narrative voice far into the future, to tell us of his present as if it were the past. I heard his call from the womb. While she was pregnant with me, my beloved mother read and re-read Leaves of Grass; when I emerged into this world, I did so in Huntington, New York – just a stone’s throw from Whitman’s own birthplace. He has verily and always informed my conviction that Poet is Priest; there is none more noble or sacred than our poets, and Walt Whitman was one of our noblest. And so on the anniversary of his passing, let us sound a collective barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world to America’s finest, Uncle Walt!

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24th March 1989 the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill


Exxon Valdez oil spill victim

At four minutes past midnight on March 24th 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Despite not even being in the top 50 global oil spills by volume, the Exxon Valdez disaster quickly came to symbolise the destructive impact of modern industry on the natural environment. The remote location made mitigation and clean up efforts next to impossible (less than 10% of the oil was recovered) and the incredible beauty of the pristine wilderness into which the tanker dumped half a million barrels of crude oil served to magnify the tragedy. Even the more recent Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – though it involved more oil and had a far greater direct human impact – does not compare to the Exxon Valdez spill in terms of the stark imagery it produced, graphically demonstrating humanity’s utter disregard for the planet that supports us.

In the subsequent investigation, much was made of the fact that the ship’s Captain, Joseph Hazelwood, was drunk when the Exxon Valdez ran aground. Let us here and now put that particular red herring to bed. The Exxon Corporation seized upon Hazelwood’s condition in an attempt to deflect blame… to play the “one bad apple” game and absolve themselves of responsibility. But the reality is that while the Captain had indeed been drinking, he was off-duty and asleep when the tanker ploughed into Bligh Reef. On lengthy sea voyages which can last several days, even weeks, the ship’s captain is obviously not expected to be awake for the duration. We can certainly question the wisdom of a man in his position getting drunk in the first place, but we can hardly hold him responsible for an accident that occurred while the duty roster had him sleeping in his cabin.

It is a testament to the power of the Exxon public relations machine that even today most people will shake their heads ruefully at the “drunken captain” of the Exxon Valdez whenever the subject is brought up. This, despite the official enquiry clearly pointing the finger of blame at the Exxon Corporation for a number of cost-cutting measures that dramatically increased the likelihood of an accident – most notably their failure to repair the tanker’s Collision Avoidance System which had been offline for over a year.

The destruction wrought by the crude oil upon the flora and fauna of the Prince William Sound and the surrounding area was massive. A couple of days after the tanker ran aground, the area was hit by a storm which drove the oil onto large swathes of the coastline, effectively ending any hopes of capturing the spill using floating booms and surface skimmers. An estimated quarter of a million seabirds, thousands of mammals (otters, seals, whales and more) and countless fish perished as a direct result of the spill. Even today, more than two decades later, the region has not recovered from the blow it was dealt by our relentless pursuit of petrochemicals.

To compound the damage caused by the oil, many of the strategies employed to clean up the spill were counterproductive. Chemical dispersants were used that turned out to be more toxic than the oil itself; sections of the coastline were hosed down using hot water at high pressure destroying colonies of microbes that would have facilitated the biodegrading of the oil as well as killing a large amount of the plankton that had escaped harm, further damaging the ecosystem.

… the lines between man and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.
[…]
You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system – and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.
– Gregory Bateson (Pathologies of Epistemology)

While we should not lose sight of the individual tragedy of the Exxon Valdez spill – from the damage done to the Alaskan wilderness to the multiple suicides among local residents whose livelihoods were decimated – we should also remember that as an event, it is a symptom of a far wider malaise. Industrial civilisation suffers from a collective psychosis… a schizophrenia that warps our perception of reality to the point where we’re unable to recognise the astonishing levels of self-harm we engage in as a species, and in the rare occasions when our attention is drawn to this self-destructive behaviour, we demonstrate time and again our inability or unwillingness to change.

We have developed a distinction between ourselves – as a species or a culture – and the wider environment in which we exist. Yet this distinction is wholly imaginary. We achieve this separation only by virtue of our flawed perception… epistemological lunacy. It allows us to view of our world in terms of resources to be exploited as we see fit. And it allows us to carry out that exploitation with an apparently clear conscience; to accept disasters like the Exxon Valdez oil spill as the sad but inevitable cost of “doing business” instead of as the psychotic acts of self-harm that they truly are.

To suggest that industrial civilisation is simply not worth the damage it causes is seen as absurd luddism… crazy talk. And yet, we know corporations will always cut corners and that even if they didn’t, human error cannot be legislated away. So those who dismiss such suggestions as crazy talk are really telling us that the agonising deaths of hundreds of thousands of birds, whales and other animals – along with the wanton despoiling of our home, planet earth – is a price worth paying to drive our SUVs and watch our plasma televisions. We have decided to collectively shit in the well, and those who object are labeled village idiots.

So today, on the anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, let us not only pause to remember the terrible tragedy that occurred in Alaska 23 years ago. Let us also reflect on the fact that we have learnt absolutely nothing from it.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 2 Comments

20th March 1852 the Publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”


"Yes Eliza, it's all misery, misery, misery!"

Today we commemorate the anniversary of the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly – one of the few works of fiction that can lay genuine claim to changing history. A literary incendiary, Beecher Stowe was the first to dare to polemicize slavery – to portray an African-American slave as a central, heroic figure. Christ-like, even. “The most cussed and discussed book of its time,” this verbal earthquake galvanised slavery’s critics, enraged its defenders and laid the psychological groundwork for the American Civil War. Uncle Tom’s Cabin would very quickly outlive its purpose – engendering future controversies, stereotypes and accusations of inadvertent racism – but its sociological and political impact at the time cannot be underestimated. No other novel – before or since – has done so much to alter the thinking of an entire nation.

The daughter of an outspoken religious leader, Harriet Beecher Stowe was compelled to respond to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law that forbade citizens of free states from in any way assisting in the flight of runaway slaves. And so she took one of the few options available to nineteenth century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel. A huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul and consciousness of pre-Civil War Americans. In its attempt “to show the institution of slavery just as it existed,” Stowe cannily sugar-coated the indigestible – portraying her fictional slaves as mothers, fathers, sons and daughters with (Christian) souls. Pushing home the immorality of slavery on almost every page, Stowe deliberately tugged at the heartstrings of women who – in their guise as the “ethical and structural model for all of American life” – were the only ones who could “change the moral fibre of society.” This proto-feminist appeal would spark another movement in addition to the the abolition of slavery, as women in their droves at last began to actively challenge their husbands’ political stances and their own roles as ‘domestic slaves’.

The success of this highly controversial melodrama surprised everyone; readers responded on a scale hitherto unknown in America’s publishing history. Within the first eight weeks, sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached an unprecedented fifty thousand copies. Six months later, it had sold a quarter of a million. A cultural phenomenon, it proved to be the bestselling novel of the entire 19th century, outselling the Bible in its first year of publication.

Harriet Beecher Stowe had not intended war to be the solution to the problem of slavery. At the novel’s conclusion, she asks readers to “feel right.” Once they did, she was certain Americans would come to their moral senses and slavery would be abolished. History, however, chose a different ending. Nine years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the American Civil War began. Shortly afterwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln who reportedly said to her: “So you’re the little lady whose book started this big war.”

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19th March 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom



On March 19th 2003 US President George W. Bush announced that US and UK armed forces had launched strikes against “targets of military opportunity” in Iraq. It marked the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom; a disastrous conflict that would drag on for the rest of the decade resulting in massive casualties, a huge economic cost and the further destabilisation of a region already beset by conflict and strife.

Of the many strange things about Operation Iraqi Freedom, perhaps the strangest is the fact that even now – eight years after the invasion began – no convincing, coherent rationale for the conflict has emerged. Certainly reams of newsprint have been filled with the words of apologists for the war… from well-meaning liberal interventionists who insist that Western governments have an obligation to remove tyrants from power when the opportunity arises, to hard-nosed neoconservatives who openly speak of the strategic value of the Iraqi oilfields and the necessity of installing a pro-Western government in the area. There are even a few WMD-obsessed commentators who insist that Iraq posed a potential threat to the world and that threat needed to be neutralised.

Ultimately, however, none of these attempted justifications stands up to scrutiny. Those who wish to believe the story that the US and UK governments truly saw Iraq as a threat are, of course, welcome to do so. Perhaps they’d like to email me their bank account details as I have 30 million dollars I need to transfer out of the Bank of Lagos…? Iraq spent the entire 1980s engaged in a war of attrition with Iran and then had the remainder of its armed forces comprehensively annihilated during the first Gulf War. Afterwards the nation was systematically decimated by international sanctions which – as is so often the case – caused massive suffering among the populace while doing little to harm the tyrant at which they were supposedly aimed. So the fact is, by 2003 Iraq posed no threat to its immediate neighbours, let alone the nations who claimed they were acting out of self-defence by invading. And those who suggest that the US and UK governments were unaware of this fact are either deluded or lying.

The notion that Iraq was invaded to liberate its populace from a terrible tyrant is similarly flawed. It simply does not tally with the facts as we know them. Firstly, and most obviously, the world is filled with tyrannical regimes guilty of terrible crimes against their own people. And there’s just no evidence that the US and/or UK have a general policy of intervening in such situations. Secondly, the manner in which the invasion was conducted completely contradicts the notion that it was carried out on behalf of the Iraqi people. This fact can be illustrated with two words… “cluster bombs”. If you are launching a military offensive in which the liberation of the local population is the primary goal, then the very first question at the very first planning meeting must be, “how do we conduct this operation without the use of cluster bombs?” If that is not the first item on your agenda, then any claims that you have the interests of civilians at heart are sheer nonsense. According to Human Rights Watch, over 2 million cluster munitions were dropped on Iraqi population centres in 2003 alone (by both US and UK forces). The resulting casualties number in the many thousands. These weapons, particularly when dropped on urban centres, are guaranteed to kill and maim children. Everybody knows this. If you use them, then the interests of the civilian population are not your first priority.

What’s perhaps most curious is that even the blunt neoconservative claims that Operation Iraqi Freedom was conducted to further US economic and strategic interests isn’t entirely convincing. At the very least, if that was the original reason, it has backfired. Prior to the invasion, Iraqi oil was finding its way to market via the UN’s “oil for food programme”. The year prior to the invasion, this programme saw Iraq selling 2.5 million barrels per day on the global market which – according to the US Energy Information Administration – is just short of the 2.8 million barrels per day that Iraq is capable of producing for export. As to be expected, production dropped significantly after the invasion and is only now beginning to approach the levels it achieved under the oil for food programme. Furthermore, the invasion has not produced the kind of stable pro-Western nation which would justify Operation Iraqi Freedom from a strategic perspective. Instead Iraq now has a government divided along sectarian lines under constant siege from an insurgency that threatens to split the nation into several zones – the largest of which could perhaps fall under Iranian influence.

On top of this, the invasion of Iraq pretty much squandered whatever global goodwill the United States had received as a result of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. The retaliation against Afghanistan arguably lacked proportion and was badly planned and executed, but in the world of Realpolitik, it was both expected and accepted as the response of a superpower to the actions of Al Qaeda. Operation Iraqi Freedom, on the other hand, caused confusion and outrage. It made such little sense that it could only be viewed as an unjustifiable and blundering projection of imperial power against a former enemy. Indeed those who claimed that Operation Iraqi Freedom was little more than a son’s attempt to clear up the unfinished business of his father were as close to the truth as any of the “official” explanations.

Because perhaps controversially, it seems to me that the war genuinely did not have a rational explanation. It was instead the expression of the collective psychosis of western civilisation; an incoherent and largely unconscious lashing out at the most convenient enemy when it became apparent that Afghanistan simply could not provide the kind of catharsis-through-destruction that the United States required as a response to the September 11th attacks. Which brings us back to George W. Bush’s initial statement upon the commencement of bombing. His military had discovered “targets of opportunity” and was busy causing shock and awe by levelling them. When Afghanistan turned out not to have the kind of infrastructure against which the technological military of the west could conduct an effective campaign, they needed to find somewhere that did. And Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was just that… a convenient target of opportunity.

The result of this expression of mindless fury is a decimated nation, well over a million Iraqi casualties, the death of almost 5,000 US / UK troops, the sinister rise of western “private military contractors”, the conversion of three trillion dollars of public money into death and destruction, the accelerated destabilisation of an already precarious region, the final sinking of any collective morality possessed by ‘The West’ under the weight of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the indescriminate murder of civilians. Perhaps worst of all, by responding to the Al Qaeda attacks in such a manner, the US and UK may have set the tone for the coming century. As western capitalism begins to collapse and comes under both internal and external threat, have we used the desert surrounding Baghdad to set an ugly precedent?

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in World Events | 2 Comments

17th March 1921 the Kronstadt Tragedy


Red Army troops charge on Kronstadt

On this day in 1921 after two weeks of siege, a rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base fell to Soviet government forces. Anarchist and sometime Bolshevik-ally Victor Serge described the events as, ‘Seventeen dreadful days, more dreadful than anything I had known in Russia.’ On 7th March, Trotsky as commissar for war had offered the rebel garrison an ultimatum to unconditionally surrender or prepare for assault. The ultimatum was ignored, and the Red Army turned on its own navy. 1,000 rebels were killed outright, 6,000 more captured –some to be summarily executed although many were later freed – and 8,000 more fled to Finland and were subsequently pardoned under a general amnesty. Before the revolt, Kronstadt had acquired a special status in Soviet mythology as the home of those revolutionary sailors whose mutiny had ignited the 1905 revolution, and whose signal shot from the cruiser Aurora had begun the October Revolution in 1917. However, after the suppression of the revolt, the name of Kronstadt was to take on a new significance – and to this day it still constitutes a fault-line between Anarchists and Trotskyists, ironically otherwise united as the opponents and victims of Stalinism.

How did it come to pass that the Bolsheviks turned their guns on these former icons? Civil war had begun even before the revolution with former Czarist generals organizing White armies, but when the Bolshevik government withdrew from the war with Germany the allied powers all sent expeditionary forces to intervene against the new regime. On top of this, long-frustrated nationalisms fractured the former Russian empire into a patchwork of regional warlords. Successive years of drought and disruption to agricultural distribution produced famines, and war damage to the industrial infrastructure reduced production to levels at 20% of 1914 levels. Most of all, the expected imminent revolutions in the industrialized west either never materialized or were crushed – leaving the Soviets isolated to face all these problems on their own.

Against all the odds – literally fighting on all fronts – after five years the infant Bolshevik regime emerged with a precarious victory. But not without a heavy price: The government brought in a policy of ‘War Communism’ with the rapid nationalization of all industry and, most significantly, the requisition of peasant grain surpluses. A period of ‘Red Terror’ curtailed civil liberties and suppressed political opposition.  In cities that had supported the Bolsheviks there were protests against food shortages and rationing, whilst in the countryside there were peasant revolts at the policy of forced requisition – enacted in order to feed the cities. At the start of March 1921, in support of rationing protests in Petrograd, a mass meeting of the sailors’ garrison at Kronstadt voted to agree a fifteen-point manifesto of political reforms that would restore some of the pre-civil war freedoms and undo much of the War Communism policy.

A rebellion at the strategically vital base – with its garrison in a complex of forts and the ships of the Baltic Fleet frozen in the winter ice – presented the government with a political and military crisis. Lenin claimed that the rebellion amounted to a counter-revolutionary plot that could allow the British and French navies access to Petrograd. Victor Serge, although sympathetic to the rebels’ manifesto, at the time essentially took the same view and so reluctantly supported the government’s position: “…insurgent Kronstadt was not counter-revolutionary, but its victory would have led inexorably to the counter-revolution.”

The rank and file Kronstadt rebels were certainly not ‘counter-revolutionaries’ although amongst their leaders Admiral Dmitriev and General Koslowsky were both openly reactionary and hostile to the Left. However Lenin’s much-derided claim that the rising was inspired by counter-revolutionaries has in fact been supported by evidence only available after the fall of the Soviet Union that reveals how former Czarist ministers and the French prime minister tried to provide support and funds for the rebellion.

The rebels were not necessarily anarchists either, although anarchists subsequently came to champion their cause and saw the crushing of the rebellion as the ultimate Bolshevik betrayal of the revolutionary ideal. In fact Victor Serge was not the only anarchist to be found on the side of the government; the anarcho-syndicalist ‘Workers’ Opposition’ faction even joined the government assault against the garrison. There was actually far from unanimous support for the rebels even within the Kronstadt base – some ships-crews declared against the mutiny and civilian dockyard workers secured parts of the base for the government.

Essentially the rebels are probably best defined as a coming-together of those groups alienated by the War Communism policies. Many of the rebel sailors of 1921 were not actually the same revolutionary icons of 1905 and 1917 – that generation had been diluted when many amongst them had volunteered in the early stages of the civil war. Their places were taken by conscripts from peasant backgrounds who opposed the Bolsheviks’ policies in the countryside. Victor Serge even claimed that the rebellion could have been averted if the government had only introduced New Economic Program a year earlier than it did. These reforms replaced War Communism and permitted small-scale private production and a degree of autonomy for the peasants.

Although defense or denunciation of the Bolsheviks at Kronstadt has become almost an act of faith amongst the various tribes of the Left today, these inconvenient truths suggest that the facts were more complex if no less tragic than the polemics permit.

The ambiguity of Kronstadt is personified by the extraordinary story of one of the better-known mutineers – Stepan Petrichenko. The peasant/sailor from the Ukraine was originally an anarcho-syndicalist who later joined the Bolsheviks. After the defeat of the rebellion he fled over the ice to Finland. There he was an opponent of the far-right regime and even worked as an agent for Stalin’s GPU. When the Soviets invaded in the Winter War of 1940 he was arrested and deported by the Finns to the Soviet Union, where he subsequently died in prison.

[Written by journeyman]

Posted in World Events | 4 Comments

16th March 1968 the My Lai Massacre


American bloodlust gone mental: The South Vietnamese victims of My Lai

On March 16th 1968, the American combat soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Division swept into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai and massacred 504 unarmed, unresisting women, children and elderly men. Babies were shot at point-blank range. Women and girls gang-raped. Boys sodomised. Over 100 civilians were herded into an irrigation ditch and mowed down with automatic weapons. Villagers attempting to surrender were tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some were mutilated with the death-signature “C Company” carved into the chest. Four hours later, the entire village had been burned to the ground and the corpses of its former residents – ostensibly the very people America was meant to be ‘defending’ – were strewn everywhere. This was no ordinary ‘search and destroy’ mission. This was a cold-blooded murder spree, later described by a member of Charlie Company as “a Nazi-like thing.” But while Nazi war criminals were tried and executed for similar crimes, the American army and government endeavoured to cover up what came to be known as the My Lai Massacre – the most brutal and notorious U.S. military atrocity of the Vietnam War.

So what caused these typical American boys to go so utterly berserk? Charlie Company had only been in Vietnam for three months, but the unit’s arrival coincided with the beginning of the Viet Cong’s unexpected Tet Offensive. In response, the US Army initiated a programme of destroying the food and water supplies of villages suspected of harbouring or sympathising with the communists. On March 15th, Charlie Company received its orders to clear out possible V.C. sympathisers in My Lai. Just weeks earlier, these very soldiers had visited the very same village, played with the children and given them cake. But since then the unit had come under relentless guerrilla attacks, suffering five deaths and 23 injuries from landmines, booby-traps and snipers. For the besieged soldiers of Charlie Company, the line between enemy and civilian had become dangerously blurred. On the eve of the attack, Captain Ernest Medina told his soldiers: “They’re all V.C. – now go and get them.” And that’s just what they did.

In the wake of the massacre, the entire chain of command complied in a systematic cover-up. Misled by army misinformation and publicity reports, American news agencies even reported an “impressive victory” by American soldiers at the “battle” of My Lai, while General Westmoreland congratulated Charlie Company on an “outstanding job”. The American public remained unaware of the horrific truth of My Lai until – a year-and-a-half later – reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story following conversations with Ron Ridenhour, a former member of Charlie Company who had sent letters to various government officials urging them to investigate “something rather dark and bloody” that had happened in Vietnam. As Hersh’s story and the accompanying photos of the atrocities were splashed across the pages of national newspapers and television screens, Americans for the first time were directly confronted with the brutality of their own soldiers, contradicting not just their propagandised notion of the war in Vietnam, but also the longstanding American tradition of depicting the enemy – whether Indians, Nazis, Japanese, or Vietnamese – as the exclusive perpetrators of monstrous atrocities. Notwithstanding the Indian Wars (which obviously “didn’t count”), Americans just weren’t supposed to do such things.

Spurred by the controversy, the Army ordered a full-scale investigation of the My Lai Massacre. Thirteen soldiers were indicted for war crimes, but only Second Lt. William Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for murder (he would ultimately serve less than four years). The U.S. Government and Army had its scapegoat, and hoped to return to the more pressing business of its futile war in Vietnam. But the American public refused to let the matter die. As the nation struggled for a rationale, the concept of the exploited and psychologically scarred Vietnam veteran emerged – and the government was blamed for a war that corrupted its good ol’ American boys.

We shouldn’t forget who the real victims are here… those 504 innocent civilians of My Lai. And there can be no excuse for the collective insanity of an entire unit. But in its arrogant zeal to police the world and save us all from the Red Threat, the U.S. government undoubtedly engaged its own in an irresponsible war without any cultural understanding or proper respect for its “sub-human” enemy. And clearly not much has changed in the half-a-century since the My Lai Massacre, as evidenced by some one million civilian casualties in Iraq. This is the same imperialistic and willfully world-ignorant mindset that dropped peanut butter and Pop Tarts of all things to people accustomed to a Middle Eastern diet shortly after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan for supposedly sheltering Osama bin Laden. If that is the arrogance from the men at the top, how does that translate to the foot soldiers?

Posted in Atrocities | 7 Comments

14th March 1883 the Death of Karl Marx


Karl Marx

“On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” Those were the words of Friedrich Engels at the funeral of his close friend and creative collaborator, Karl Marx. The funeral took place in Highgate Cemetery in London. The year was 1883 and there were less than a dozen mourners present. The world had yet to be exposed to the work of the man laid to rest in that small ceremony. But it would only be a few short years before the established political order would tremble at the name of Karl Marx and – in some places – be ripped down entirely by the words that flowed from his pen.

It’s not easy to write about Marx. Everything that could possibly be said about the man and his ideas has already been said a thousand times over. He has been raised to the status of a secular god by some, while others have done their best to cast his memory into the fiery pit of hell. A powerful case can be made – if one were so inclined – to label Marx as the single most influential philosopher in history… right up there with the semi-mythological figures of the Sacred Texts of the world. At the same time, there are those who would argue that the historical transformations attributed to his works had more to do with the lust for power of those acting in his name, than anything Marx himself wrote. Just as the words of Nietzsche were ripped from their original context and violently twisted into an ugly justification for German fascism, so the words of Marx have been brutalised almost beyond recognition to fit the ambitions of tyrants. Of course, some would say that a utopian philosophy inevitably leads to tyranny. And despite the protestations of some Marxists, there’s little doubt that Marxism contains a utopian vision within it.

Karl Marx was born into a relatively wealthy family in the oldest city in Germany, Trier, a couple of miles on the German side of the Germany-Luxembourg border and only 20 miles from the border with France. His upbringing in this uniquely Franco-German environment exposed the young Marx to an eclectic mix of influences and he enjoyed an education that was extremely liberal for the time. Indeed his high school was stormed by police in his second year after accusations that the liberal humanist philosophy of the headmaster had crossed the line into outright sedition. By his late teens, Karl Marx was something of a rebel and gained a reputation as a party animal. Despite this he was awarded his PhD by the age of 23 – his thesis, an attack on theology as a source of knowledge about the world – and was writing for a radical newspaper in Cologne. Soon however, he fell foul of Germany’s censorship policy and fled to Paris where he met Friedrich Engels and would commence one of the most influential collaborations in history.

Just as had happened in Germany, Marx’s writing fell foul of the French authorities who accused him of attempting to incite rebellion and he was expelled from the country. His arrival in Brussels was not met with much enthusiasm from the authorities and he was permitted to remain only a few short years before he’d worn out his welcome. Using a large portion of his inheritance after his father’s death to purchase arms for a radical Belgian workers union turned out to be the last straw. Significantly, however, his time in Belgium did produce one of his seminal works, The Communist Manifesto.

Marx would spend the rest of his life in relative poverty. After expulsion from Belgium he returned briefly to Germany but was quickly forced into exile once more and Paris would not take him. So it was that he arrived in London in 1849 where he would spend the rest of his life. Here he would write arguably the most significant book in the history of political and economic philosophy, Das Kapital.

With the possible exception of Sigmund Freud, it’s difficult to think of anyone whose work has been so influential and yet so radically misunderstood as Karl Marx. Yes, the road to utopia invariably gets diverted into authoritarianism, but to suggest that Soviet Stalinism or Mao’s Cultural Revolution embodied the vision of Marx is nonsense of the highest order. Even the most famous of Marxist quotes are invariably taken so far out of context as to render them misleading at the very least… Religion is the opium of the people has become a cliché. Yet few are aware that the full quote subtly alters the message that Marx sought to convey…

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx was certainly not defending religion – which he saw as an illusion – but he was pointing out that it was an entirely natural reaction to a world in which the vast mass of humanity was being oppressed by economic forces over which they have no control and by kings and presidents who used their power to maintain this oppressive environment. Thus, said Marx, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. Marx never suggested that the abolition of religion was in any way desirable within the existing social order. Such a thing would be almost barbaric; to brutally stamp out “the sigh of the oppressed creature”. The point was to remove the oppression… the need for that sigh… not simply to silence those in pain.

Over the years, the fortunes of Marxism have risen and fallen. Despite almost every implementation of Marxist ideas becoming a perversion of those ideas, there were few areas of 20th century culture that did not bear his fingerprints. Marx virtually invented the social sciences. Art, economics and politics all found themselves radically transformed by his ideas – as well as by the reactions against his ideas. During the 1990s, as the dust settled on the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China’s Communist Party began its journey towards Authoritarian Capitalism, the theories of Marx were declared obsolete. The End of History had finally arrived, we were told, and far from winding up in Marx’s socialist utopia, it was capitalism that had triumphed.

But now, as we watch the edifices of capitalism start to shake. As rampant inequality, resource depletion and environmental catastrophe begin to undermine history’s end, suddenly those who called time on Marx are beginning to look a little premature. Only a fool would predict the crisis facing western civilisation will result in a glorious international communist revolution ushering in a new socialist utopia. Such an outcome seems suprememly unlikely from our vantage point here in March 2011. Nonetheless, Marx’s critique of capitalism; the assertion that it contains the seed of its own destruction, that it must eventually collapse beneath the weight of the greed it inevitably generates (“the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest”) and that “stock-exchange gambling” would lead to a “bankocracy”; all appear more relevant now than ever.

Despite the terrible things that were done in his name, we should remember Marx not for the actions of those who twisted his ideas to fit their own agenda. Instead we should remember him for the ideas themselves. For his belief that no man should be oppressed by another, that a better vision of society is possible if people stand shoulder to shoulder rather than eyeball to eyeball, and that humanity is capable of far more than crawling around in the filth searching for sticks with which to beat one another into submission.

WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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11th March 1941 The Commencement of Lend-Lease



The ultimate symbol of Lend Lease was America’s Bell P-39 Airacobra. Rejected by the RAF for its dangerous engine layout and poor altitude, these duds fetched up as slow-moving tankbusters with the Red Army.

Today marks the anniversary of the commencement of Lend-Lease, the controversial programme through which America gave aid to Great Britain’s war effort as she struggled alone against Hitler’s Nazi Germany in those dark days after the fall of France. Cajoled, pestered, nay bullied into Lend-Lease by Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt – prevented by the neutrality acts from donating money to his allies – chose instead a circuitous route by which all of American industry could only gain. Obsolete shipping, obsolete war planes, failed war planes, even dangerous war planes were suddenly packed up and sent off to the desperate British navy and air forces, Roosevelt triumphantly proclaiming to his own people their high moral role as the world’s “Arsenal of Democracy”. In Britain, however, aghast at the poor quality of the single-seater fighters they were being fobbed off with, the RAF demanded huge changes to the P-51 Mustang (including fitting a Rolls Royce engine), whilst outright rejecting both Bell’s shaky P-39 Airacobra and the dreadful Brewster F2A Buffalo – the latter opportunistically manufactured by a New Jersey carriage company and nicknamed ‘The Flying Coffin’ by US Navy flyers at Midway. None of these winged failures returned to the USA, however. Instead, America’s Lend-Lease programme simply spread its largesse elsewhere targeting China and Russia with similar so-called deals, so those appalling P-39 Airacobra fighters were pretty soon re-directed to the USSR and re-painted with Soviet red stars.

As a political act, Franklin Roosevelt’s execution of Lend-Lease was regarded in the American homeland as a stupendous success. In truth, however, just as Hitler and Mussolini had used the Spanish Civil War as a vehicle for testing the mobility of their own brand new warplanes, Lend-Lease had enabled American industry to test its war machines in real life situations far from its mainland, thus preparing the country for war without engaging with an enemy AND getting rich in the process. Indeed, as the economic historian Alan Milward notes: ‘the United States emerged in 1945 in an incomparably stronger position economically than in 1941 … By 1945 the foundations of the United States’ economic domination over the next quarter of a century had been secured … [This] may have been the most influential consequence of the Second World War for the post-war world.’

[Written by Julian Cope]

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10th March 1913  the Death of Harriet Tubman


Harriet "Moses" Tubman

“Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people,” wrote Frederick Douglass of the abolitionist and freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman – who we honour today. Born into bondage on a Maryland plantation, she endured twenty-nine years of slavery before escaping, with only the North Star to guide her to Pennsylvania and freedom. But just one year later, Harriet re-entered Maryland of her own volition to rescue her niece and guide her too to the safety of the North. The following spring, she returned again to lead more family members to freedom. When she returned yet again for her husband, he chose not to accompany her – so she rescued some other slaves. Between 1850-60, Harriet Tubman re-entered the South an estimated 15 times to liberate some 300 slaves. That would be like a Jew willingly and repeatedly returning to Nazi Germany. Time and time and time again, Harriet Tubman crossed rivers, trudged through swamps and navigated through dense forests by night deep in enemy territory to conduct her extraordinary rescue missions that earned her the nickname “Moses”.

Of all the Underground Railroad’s ‘conductors’ guiding fugitive slaves along the vast and highly dangerous network of secret routes and safe houses to the North, Harriet Tubman was undoubtedly the most daring and best known. This evocative description from a 1907 edition of the New York Herald described a typical Harriet-led escape scene:

“On some darkly propitious night there would be breathed about the Negro quarters of a plantation word that she had come to lead them forth. At midnight, she would stand waiting in the depths of woodland or timbered swamp, and stealthily, one by one, her fugitives would creep to the rendezvous. She entrusted her plans to but few of the party… She knew her path well by this time, and they followed her unerring guidance without question. She assumed the authority and enforced the discipline of a military despot.”

So outraged were Maryland slaveholders by the exploits of this diminutive, impudent woman that they put a price of $40,000 on her head. But time and time again, Harriet outfoxed and outmanoeuvred her would-be captors – and she never once lost a passenger.

As her almost mythological fame spread, Harriet became an increasingly important player in the push to abolish slavery. In 1858, John Brown sought “General Tubman’s” assistance in planning his revolutionary raid on Harpers Ferry. She provided him with information regarding her secret routes through Maryland and recruited former slaves for his troops. When the Civil War began in 1861, Harriet provided a similar service for the Union Army – organising a network of slave spies and, with her second-to-none knowledge of the terrain, advising from the trenches where best to attack. In 1863, she became the first American woman – black or white – to lead an armed assault.

Harriet emerged from the war a hero and national figure. She was one of the first African-American women to obtain icon status, and accordingly turned her energies to the women’s suffrage movement – working alongside Susan B. Anthony. After sheltering impoverished former slaves in her own household for decades, she opened a charitable home for elderly blacks in her adopted hometown of Auburn, New York – and it is there that Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia on 10th March 1913 at the age of 89. She was buried with full military honours.

Harriet Tubman was one of the great symbols of courage, strength and resistance during America’s darkest chapter. “Land of the Free” it most certainly was not, but Harriet defied the yoke of slavery to become a towering figure in American history. Her own words serve as a fitting epitaph, and continue to resound today:

“If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.” 

Posted in Heroines | 10 Comments

8th March International Women’s Day


“Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation, and it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development, and peace.” – UN Secretary General Kofi Annan

Today is the 104th International Women’s Day, a day when women all over the world celebrate their many achievements. And I’m not just talking about women becoming prime ministers or astronauts. No, I mean the really big stuff like the 67-year-old-woman from Yorkshire who, after years of abuse, says ‘no’ to her husband. Or the girl in Cornwall, just come out of social services ‘care’, with no family and crippled by poverty and self-doubt, who finds the courage to pick up the phone and ask someone for help. Or the young women in Nottingham, going cold turkey, trying desperately to leave sex work behind her.

Women and girls today in every society I can think of, face problems of one kind or another. Some are extreme: in Afghanistan, its being treated worse than a dog; in Congo, its systematic rape; in Saudi, its being the property of your male relatives; in Chile its being unable to get a legal abortion. In the so-called ‘civilised’ world the problems are often subtle or misunderstood, even by women themselves, but they exist nonetheless. Despite shifts in attitude and changes in the law, women are still second-class citizens. Is it any wonder so many turn drugs or alcohol, self-harm or suffer from eating disorders?

At the beginning of the 20th century women in Europe and America were finding their voice. They wanted decent jobs, better pay and the right to vote. It was out of this dissatisfaction that International Women’s Day grew. And yet, over a century since the first International Women’s Day was celebrated, many women don’t know about it.

Kealy, 21, from London, said: “I only found out that this day even existed last year. Not once during my five years at an all-girls secondary school was there any mention of it. How are girls meant to learn from the achievements of other women if they don’t know about them? Is it any wonder girls don’t aspire to more?”

Yes, yes, we can now go to university (if we have enough cash), we can combine a career and a family (though that’s damned hard to do), we can vote (if there’s anyone worth voting for), we can control our fertility, and many of us have real choices. It’s not surprising then that many people, men and women, feel that the battles fought by the 1920s suffragists and the 1970s feminists have been won. But they haven’t.

Ever since Eve scrumped that damned apple, our culturally Christian society still retains prejudice against women in its DNA.

Women still are not equally represented in business or politics, and women’s education and health is universally worse than men’s. Statistics are not sexy, but bear with me, dear Reader, for the rest of this paragraph. The gender pay gap (the difference between what men and women are paid) stands at 17% for full-time workers and 37% for part-time. In the UK an estimated 10,000 women are sexually assaulted every week, and a quarter of all women need treatment for depression at some time in their lives, compared with one in 10 men.

And now, girls face sexual objectification from an ever earlier age. Naomi, 22, from Bristol told me: “It’s wrong that girls feel they have to grow up so fast. There’s a pressure for girls to behave like they’re sexually active when they’re still just children. They see videos of pop stars prancing around in G-strings. It’s not easy for girls to just accept who they are.” And Sarah, 18, from Wolverhampton agrees: “At school everyone read celebrity magazines and were obsessed by who’s got a boyfriend and who’s had sex. Looking back I remember the pressure and feeling so bad about myself.”

With norks-out models plastered all over the media it’s not surprising that 63% of teenage girls now aspire to be glamour models; 25% lap dancers; and just 4% doctors. How sad is that? We need to teach our daughters that getting their jugs out is not empowering, it’s embarrassing and degrading; they can be so much more than just a pair of tits.

Tell your daughters that they deserve respect, fair pay, worthwhile work and to have their opinions heard. Tell them that the world is crying out for them to use their brains, their creativity, their compassion, their common sense. Tell them what’s possible, and tell them today! If you don’t tell them, who will?

It’s still a man’s world. And that’s why, for one day out of 365, International Women’s Day still matters.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

Posted in World Events | 8 Comments

7th March 1942  the Death of Lucy Parsons


“More dangerous than a thousand rioters”

Today we pay tribute to one of the great figures in the battle for working class rights – a woman whose impact was so powerful that the Chicago Police Department branded  her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” As a Native-, African- and Mexican-American woman born into slavery, raised in poverty and terrorised in the hate-fuelled KKK milieu of post-Civil War Texas, Lucy Eldine Gonzales Parsons probably had more reasons than most to dedicate her life to turning the world upside down. And so it was that,  for almost seven decades, she fought tirelessly on behalf of the oppressed.

Lucy’s life as a revolutionary began in 1873 when she moved to Chicago after she and her new husband, former Confederate soldier Albert Parsons, were forced to flee from persecution to their interracial marriage. The Parsons soon became prime movers in Chicago’s burgeoning anarchist movement – Albert as a labour organiser, while Lucy was catapulted to infamy following the publication of her incendiary written plea “To Tramps,” which encouraged the poorest to rise up against the rich.

Her place in history was unwittingly cast when, on 1st May 1886, she and Albert led 80,000 striking workers in a peaceful demonstration as part of the general strike for the eight-hour workday. Three days later, during a labour rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square in response to police violence against strikers, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb killing seven police officers. Without any evidence connecting them to the crime, eight leading Chicago anarchists including Albert Parsons were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder simply because of their revolutionary beliefs. Lucy travelled across the country leading the charge in organising the Haymarket defence, but the eight were found guilty and on November 11th1887 Albert Parsons and three of his comrades were hanged. So accustomed were the authorities to hounding Lucy that they arrested her on false suspicion of carrying a bomb as she tried in vain to see her husband one last time.

The infamous Haymarket Affair would outrage and unite America’s radicals. But for Lucy Parsons, bereavement, abject poverty, police harassment and yet more bereavement followed with the death of her 8-year-old daughter. She nevertheless remained indefatigably committed to her cause. In 1905 she co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World and, as editor of its periodical, The Liberator, provided a much-needed voice for poor women. Through her fiery speeches and popular columns in radical papers, she continued to challenge the ruling class and defend the oppressed until her dying day.

On 7th March 1942, Lucy Parsons died in a fire in her home at the age of 89. A threat even in death, her personal papers and books were seized by government authorities while the ashes of her gutted house still smouldered. Her achievements have sadly often been subordinated by her role as a Haymarket Martyr widow, but – from her roots as a victim of slavery and KKK terror, to the judicial murder of her husband and the U.S. government’s war on the IWW – she defied all obstacles thrown her way to become one of the most powerful agitators of her time. She never sought less than total revolution to eradicate the fundamentally flawed patriarchal system surrounding her.

Posted in Anarchists, Heroines | 7 Comments

6th March 1857 the Dred Scott Decision


Dred Scott

On this day in 1857, African-Americans were delivered a conclusive and seemingly fatal blow to their prospects for freedom. It was official. The United States Supreme Court – the highest bastion of law and morality – ruled that ‘Negroes’ were not people. They were property. And this was their truth wherever they stood on American soil, even in so-called “free” states. Dred Scott v. Sandford is more than a landmark case in America’s history. The decision would prove to be a catalytic event with catastrophic consequences. With this ruling, six justices decided that the fate of America would lead inexorably to civil war.

Eleven years earlier, Dred Scott – an illiterate slave – had sued for his liberty in a Missouri court, holding that he had by rights become free after residing for a decade in the free North with his now deceased master before being returned to the slave state of Missouri. So contentious was this case that it eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court for its ruling on three critical issues: (1) whether Scott was a citizen of Missouri and thus entitled to sue in a federal court; (2) whether his sojourn in free territory had made him legally a free man; and (3) the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise – the agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress to regulate slavery in the western territories.

On March 6th 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered the majority opinion of the nine justices – five of them southerners – of the U.S. Supreme Court  in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. By a majority of seven to two, the Court ruled that – as a Negro – Scott was not a citizen Missouri or indeed the United States, and therefore had no right to bring suit in the federal courts on any matter; Scott had never been free because slaves were personal property; and, furthermore, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had in fact been in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution: a person’s right to life, liberty and property. Except the rights being violated were not a black person’s right to life and liberty; but, rather, a white person’s right to property, i.e. slaves.

Delivering this crushing verdict, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney did not stop there. In one of the most odious and shocking statements ever recorded in an American Supreme Court decision, the slaveholding chief justice from Maryland  declared that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.”

In deciding the fate of one man’s claim for freedom, the Supreme Court delivered a verdict on the entire – and highly divisive – issue of slavery. This broad decision, largely engineered by the recently inaugurated President James Buchanan, gave the South everything it had hoped and long argued for. Henceforth, the Federal government would have no authority to exclude slavery from any U.S. territory. The North, however, responded in outrage. Northern abolitionists – utterly astonished that the court had invoked the Bill of Rights to deny a man his freedom – refused to accept the ruling against African-American citizenship and its denial of congressional authority over the territories. For African-Americans, the devastating verdict was met with hopelessness and – as Frederick Douglass put it – “manifold discouragements.” But for the fledgling Republican Party coalition of the North, the decision served to crystallise their purpose. Founded in 1854 to prohibit the spread of slavery, the Republicans now renewed their fight to gain control of Congress.

And in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln – a relatively obscure railroad lawyer and one-term Congressman – was compelled to re-enter politics solely to denounce the ruling. Lincoln was far from an abolitionist; early on in his career, he famously held his own racist views. But he, like the rest of the Republicans, could not abide the Dred Scott decision. Abraham Lincoln no longer had a choice. John Brown no longer had a choice. As Civil War historian Professor David Blight explains:

“[The decision] destroyed any conception of consensus or compromise … and that’s when you see danger in American political history … when the side that loses a debate cannot accept the result.”

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3rd March 1985 The End of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike


Before the Dream Faded. NUM leader Arthur Scargill at Orgreave

On this day, the UK Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 ended in defeat for Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers when miners reluctantly and bitterly voted to return to work. The strike, lasting just two days short of a year, was Britain’s longest and largest industrial dispute. It was also a pivotal turning point in post-war British history – the seminal moment when Britain’s Left was brutally, comprehensively and thus far subjugated. Before 1984, Britain had been an industrial nation – resuscitated from the ashes of the Second World War by Clement Attlee‘s socialist-democratic vision of a welfare state with its National Health Service and nationalised industries. But when Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government came to power in 1979, they determined to unleash privatisation and free market policies on the whole of society – and the only way to do that was by destroying the trade unions.

The miners’ strike began on 5th March 1984 after the Tories announced a programme of pit closures; by 12th March, half of Britain’s 187,000 miners had downed tools. But Thatcher – riding high from her victory in the Falklands – had secretly and cynically prepared for battle by stockpiling two years’ worth of coal before announcing the closures. And she was hellbent on defeating “the enemy within” by any means necessary, even if it meant turning the full force of the state against its own people. For the first time in a postwar national strike, British police were openly used as a political weapon. Civil liberties were forgotten as miners were beaten and arrested even when standing still. Agent provocateurs and spies were deployed. State benefits were withheld in order to starve the miners back to work. And the media was used to portray the miners as thugs. What had begun as an industrial dispute degenerated into a clash of ideologies and civil class war.

For an entire year, some 130,000 miners and their families suffered unimaginable hardships in order to save jobs and preserve communities. But despite the strikers being pitted against the full force of the ruling class, and additionally betrayed by the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party’s refusal to mobilise support, some extraordinary stories of grassroots British solidarity emerged: the refusal of print workers at The Sun to allow the publication of a doctored photo of Arthur Scargill appearing to make a Nazi salute; rail workers blocking the delivery of coal to the Orgreave coking plant; attempts by the alternative media to counter the shameful distortions of the mainstream coverage; the generosity of the Sikh community which regularly provided free meals; and the indefatigable work of the local miners’ support groups, especially the remarkable Women Against Pit Closures.

Fundraising allowed the strikers to hold out for as long as they did, but in the early months of 1985, increasing numbers began to drift back to work as the hardship became too much. And, on 3rd March 1984, an NUM delegate conference narrowly voted to end the strike. The miners marched back to work together, brokenhearted but their heads held high in defiance. Thatcher was graceless in victory. “There is no such thing as society,” she infamously declared. Her neo-liberal blueprint would result not only in the selling off and selling out of the coal industry, but also the decimation of Britain’s manufacturing industry, the subjugation of all trade unions, and the doubling of unemployment and inflation. Indeed, the roots of the UK’s current financial chaos can be directly traced to the defeat of the miners’ strike and her subsequent privatisation policies.

The coal industry was never going to survive as it had been, but that’s not the point. A government has a moral responsibility for its population, but Thatcher heartlessly snuffed out thriving communities. The Tories spent £6 billion during the strike to defeat the NUM and would eventually spend £26 billion to dismantle the mining industry, leaving a nationwide residue of ghost towns rife with unemployment, drug addiction and anti-social behaviour.

Arthur Scargill recently gave his verdict on the strike’s legacy:

“Britain in 1984 was already a divided and degraded society – it has become much more so in the 25 years since … The NUM’s struggle remains not only an inspiration for workers but a warning to today’s union leaders of their responsibility to their members, and the need to challenge both government and employers over all forms of injustice, inequality and exploitation. That is the legacy of the NUM’s strike of 1984/85, a truly historic fight that gave birth to the magnificent Women Against Pit Closures and the miners’ support groups. I have always said that the greatest victory in the strike was the struggle itself, a struggle that inspired millions of people around the world.”

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21st February 1965 Assassination of Malcolm X


“Snakes couldn’t have turned on me faster than the liberal” – Malcolm X

Today we pay tribute to America’s extraordinary 1960s ‘Black Muslim’ leader and future World Prophet Malcolm X – assassinated 53 years ago  – whose audacious and inflammatory words, infamous autobiography and extraordinary TV appearances as the Nation of Islam’s spokesman inspired millions of young Afro-Americans to abandon their long cherished ideas of racial integration with white society in favour of embarking on a new and controversial path of militant separatism. A fierce opponent of Rev. Martin Luther King’s Christian non-violence and pacifism, Malcolm X was instead so committed to liberating the black man in American society that he even envisioned a separate and temporary Afro-American homeland within America, and an eventual return to Africa itself, declaring: “For the black man in America, the only solution is complete separation from the white man!”

Raised as Malcolm Little in the far northern state of Nebraska, X endured a catastrophic childhood that left him entirely without faith in white society, his mother in a mental asylum, his father violently murdered by white landowners, and his six siblings scattered across the country. Still believing that hard work at school could radically alter his destiny, this untutored but brilliant young man was cruelly humiliated when his teacher – unimpressed by his wish to become a lawyer – commented that it was: ‘no realistic goal for a nigger’. Malcolm X concluded thereafter that it was not the openly racist white Southerner that was holding back black civil rights, but the prevaricating of so-called liberal Northerners, commenting in his Autobiography of Malcolm X:

“I know nothing about the South. I am a creation of the Northern white man and of his hypocritical attitude towards the Negro. The white Southerner you can say one thing – he is honest. He bears his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony ‘integration’.”

Indeed, ‘phony’ integration was Malcolm X’s pet aversion: “The truth is that ‘integration’ is an image, it’s a foxy Northern liberal’s smoke-screen that confuses the true wants of the American black man.”  He continues: “400 years of black blood and sweat invested here in America, and the white man still has the black man begging for what every [white] immigrant fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the gangplank.”

Without job prospects and fostered by white families, the still teenage Malcolm Little now adopted the nickname Detroit Red, embarking upon a highly successful career into his 20s as a ‘hoodlum, thief and dope peddler’ as the banner headlines splashed across the front of his future best-selling autobiography would one day proclaim. But when, in 1946, his violent lifestyle resulted in an ‘8-10 year’ jail sentence, the erstwhile Detroit Red used his copious free time to get some of that education he’d lacked for so long. He began by reading the dictionary from cover to cover, straining his eyes in the near darkness. A timely visit by his estranged brother Reginald introduced him to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, a radical sect of interpretive Islam whose Afro-American members had all adopted the surname ‘X’ as a revolutionary alternative to that which had been forced upon their great grandparents by their white slavemasters. Jettisoning the hated surname ‘Little’, the newly revolutionary Malcolm X began a long correspondence with the Nation of Islam’s leader Elijah Muhammad, and joined the religion full time on concluding his jail sentence in 1952. And for the next twelve years, Malcolm X became the public face of the Nation of Islam, speaking always only those words prepared for him by his leader Elijah Muhammad. But so charismatic was Malcolm X that his radical public persona dramatically increased membership of the Nation of Islam, and inevitably caused jealousy among other high-ranking members. And when Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964 on account of hearing reports that his religious mentor Elijah Muhammad was a serial adulterer, X was also informed whilst on his subsequent pilgrimage to Mecca that the central racist core of the Nation of Islam’s teachings had absolutely nothing to do with the revelations of the Prophet Mohammed. And so it was as a Sunni Muslim that Malcolm X returned to the USA.

Malcolm X was therefore most likely murdered because he was perceived as having shamed the Nation of Islam by eschewing its singular creed for that of Orthodox Islam. But Malcolm X was a visionary and a truth seeker whose mission – even in death – could not be thwarted. Malcolm X’s rallying cry of Self-Reliance would be taken up soon after his death by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton’s Black Panther Party, thereafter by New York’s The Last Poets, hell, by each and every radicalised Afro-American youth determined to free themselves from the white values of their slavemasters. For, as Malcolm X described the Afro-American dilemma:

“We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters – Plymouth Rock landed on us!”

[Written by Julian Cope]

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20th February 1895 the Death of Frederick Douglass


The brilliant and heroic Frederick Douglass

Today we pay tribute to a true colossus – the abolitionist, writer, orator and America’s first black leader of national stature, the inimitable Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, separated in infancy from his mother and shunted from one pitiless Maryland plantation to another, Douglass never even knew what day or year he was born. But through luck, pluck and bona fide brilliance, Douglass would cast off the shackles of his slave roots to become one of the most important Americans – black or white – in the whole of the 19th century.

Following a daring escape to freedom at the age of twenty, Douglass published an account of his struggle that captivated the world and launched him as a public figure, great orator and star spokesman of the burgeoning abolitionist movement. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave recounted the horrors of human bondage in a prose so eloquent that many sceptics doubted such radiant talent could possibly have poured forth from a former slave. But the intelligentsia embraced this brilliantly written narrative that not only blew the whistle on American racism and its two-tiered structure of Freedom but, at its very fundament, challenged the ignorant notion that blacks had no intellectual aptitude. Douglass was the first African American to prove otherwise, achieving international fame as a writer of almost mystical genius and an orator with few peers. And, of greater significance, he provided an indomitable voice of hope for his people:

“Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence? Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out a solution to the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man that afforded the true explanation of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake.”

Frederick Douglass’ life intersected with some of the most momentous events in American history: the abolitionist movement, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Civil War, Reconstruction, black suffrage and women’s emancipation. And, in a public career that spanned fifty years, Douglass’ actions and influence throughout such epochal times would be pivotal. In thousands of speeches and editorials, he levied an inarguable indictment against slavery and racism. He personally helped more than four hundred slaves reach freedom through the Underground Railroad. For 16 years, Douglass edited the most influential black newspaper of the mid-19th century. During the Civil War, he advised Abraham Lincoln and fought for the inclusion of black soldiers in the Union army which ultimately led to victory for the North. After the war, he crusaded for voting rights: “Slavery is not abolished,” Douglass said, “until the black man has the ballot.” Throughout Reconstruction, he unyieldingly pursued his commitment to civil rights for African Americans. And, for twenty years, he was at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement. On the very day he died, he’d just returned home from speaking at the National Council of Women.

A symbol of his age, Frederick Douglass was a new and unique American voice for social justice. By demanding and daring to learn to read and write, he unearthed within himself a rare command of the English language that helped free millions of Americans. His incisive writings and electrifying lectures edified a doubtful American public far more directly and emotively than any white apologists could ever have hoped to match. Who but the wholly inhumane could not be shamed by the unflinching words in his now-famous 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”?:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

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19th February 1942 Roosevelt Issues Executive Order 9066


Newspaper Headline delighting in the imminent "ouster" of all Japanese Americans from California

On this day in 1942, in response to the Imperial Japanese Army’s attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which cleared the way for some 120,000 Japanese Americans to be relocated to concentration camps for the duration of World War Two. This segregationist government decree – one of the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history – suspended the writ of habeas corpus and for over three years denied American citizens their rights to life, liberty and property as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.

Justifying the order on the grounds of military necessity, Roosevelt declared that Japanese Americans were a threat to national security. But the internment had nothing to do with national security; even the infamously paranoid FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had just three months earlier concluded that Japanese Americans posed no security threat and indeed there is not one recorded instance of sabotage or espionage by Japanese American citizens or residents before or during the war. Executive Order 9066 was in truth the government’s racist strategy to whip up patriotic pro-war, anti-Japanese hysteria. While it officially included all citizens and residents of America’s three Axis enemies, both German and Italian American suspects were granted individual hearings. But Japanese Americans were regarded wholesale as an enemy race. The order indiscriminately applied to “all persons” of Japanese ancestry regardless of age, sex or citizenship – even orphaned babies with just a fraction of Japanese blood were not exempt. And for the West Coast with its long tradition of anti-Japanese sentiment, the war was a welcome excuse to rid itself of what it deemed the scourge of immigrants. Roosevelt’s own racist roots can be traced back to 1925 when he wrote:  “Californians have properly objected on the sound basic grounds that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population… Anyone who has travelled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”

Two months after Executive Order 9066 was issued, the “relocation” process of Japanese Americans from the entire West Coast began. Public notices were posted announcing that all Japanese Americans – even those with as little as 1/16th Japanese blood – had 48 hours to sell their property and possessions and gather at assembly points. Farmers and business owners, forced to sell their interests far below market value, suffered financial losses estimated in the billions of dollars. Each family was issued a number, instructed to bring only what they could carry and then herded onto crowded trains to be transported to “concentration camps” – as FDR himself referred to them. All ten camps were in remote, desolate areas; some were hastily assembled on Native American reservations, without prior agreement or consultation. Surrounded by fences with barbed wire, armed guards were stationed in watchtowers with orders to shoot to kill anyone who attempted to escape. Most of the able-bodied internees were used as a sweatshop labour force for the U.S. military, while many of the young men – deemed such ‘threats’ to national security – were astoundingly still subject to the draft. Sixty-three second-generation Japanese American men interned in Heart Mountain, Wyoming resisted – insisting that they would not serve until their rights as U.S. citizens were restored. They were tried for draft evasion in the largest mass trial in Wyoming’s history, and each sentenced to three years in prison. There were further attempts to challenge EO 9066; a few cases even reached the Supreme Court. In 1966, Tom Clark – the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court – would confess: “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. One is my part in the evacuation of the Japanese from California in 1942… I don’t think that served any purpose at all. We picked them up and put them in concentration camps. That’s the truth of the matter. And as I look back on it – although at the time I argued the case – I am amazed that the Supreme Court ever approved it.”

Thirty-four years after the signing of Executive Order 9066, President Gerald Ford admitted that the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans had been “wrong.” Surviving victims were offered $20,000 in reparation for the loss of their civil liberties and property. Following this paltry gesture, the unsavoury matter was once again swept under the carpet. But with US nationalism never more rampant, America would do well to remember this cautionary tale from the annals of its own history. Despite the virtuous and supposedly fail-safe laws of the Constitution, the American government illegitimately targeted a race of people for removal from the general public. And the rest of the society let it happen. Does that not sound eerily familiar?

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 4 Comments

12th February 1909 The Founding of the NAACP


Today we celebrate the anniversary of a momentous gathering of sixty intellectuals: reformers and socialists, blacks and whites, and all dedicated to securing the civil and political rights of African Americans as guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Specifically, we celebrate the petition that these citizens issued, urging America to re-dedicate itself to the ideals of racial justice that had been all but forgotten in the post-American Civil War decades. This bold statement, entitled “The Call”, heralded the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – America’s very first civil rights organisation.

The NAACP was founded as America faced a national crisis of racism. A new generation of politicians had abandoned the post-Civil War commitment to racial justice in favour of economic growth. Southern Democrats, meanwhile, had been quick to mete out revenge on their former slaves by legally segregating the black population with the passage of the infamous and odious Jim Crow laws. Lynching had become endemic; between 1860 and 1900, some 5,000 African Americans were murdered by vigilante mobs. But at the turn of the century, racism was no longer confined to the Deep South and had migrated North along with thousands of blacks fleeing from the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. And with fierce competition for jobs in the industrial northern cities, racial tensions quickly escalated. In the summer of 1908 a major race riot erupted in Springfield, Illinois – the hometown of Abraham Lincoln himself. Reporting on the riot in an article entitled “The Race War in the North,” socialist William English Walling issued a powerful appeal on behalf of the disenfranchised black population: “Who realizes the seriousness of the situation, and what large and powerful body of citizens is ready to come to their aid?”

Walling’s battlecry would lead directly to the founding of the NAACP. Spearheaded by the socialist activist Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the NAACP’s mission from its inception was:

To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.

Although largely financed and controlled in the early years by sympathetic whites, it was W.E.B. Du Bois who led the NAACP in developing its agitation and education program. Through his brilliant editorship of The Crisis – the NAACP’s magazine – Du Bois became the principal philosophical voice of the black freedom struggle. In its pages, Du Bois exposed the scourge of racial oppression, educated both black and white readers on the nature of the struggle, and endeavoured to instill pride in his people by introducing works of African-American writers, poets and artists.

Today, the NAACP continues to be America’s largest and most influential civil rights organisation. Over a century on since its inception, it has survived the changing landscape of its long and ongoing struggle – including the far more radical Black Power ideology of the 1960s. Through endless legal challenges, political protests and lobbying, the NAACP succeeded – county by county – in dismantling the Jim Crow segregation statutes, and its labours were largely responsible for landmark changes in legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

And lest we forget the NAACP’s indefatigable efforts to eradicate lynching. Just 100 years ago, in Livermore, Kentucky, tickets to witness and participate in a public lynching were sold at a local theatre: those in the best seats could fire unlimited shots at their black target, while those in the gallery were limited to only one. The NAACP spent decades seeking federal legislation against this barbaric and routine practice, and its 1919 study – Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States – remains an indelible testimonial to America’s shame.

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9th February


No event has as yet occurred on this day that warrants an On This Deity entry. Budding politicos and future revolutionaries please therefore take note of 9th February for all potential world-changing international incidents. And don’t forget to do your homework!

Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government), Henry David Thoreau
Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge
Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin
Prison Writings of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman
Living My Life, Emma Goldman
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevera
My People Shall Live: Autobiography of a Revolutionary, Leila Khaled
Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton
Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, John Sinclair

“Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

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7th February 1992 the Maastricht Treaty



Today we look back to 1992 and the signing of a treaty that would cause delight, despair and scepticism. A treaty that announced a radical evolution of the European Project from an economic trade pact to a political union. But taken in isolation, the Maastricht Treaty tells us very little, so let us use its anniversary to instead take a look at the remarkable history of that European Project as it rose from the ashes of two world wars and eventually brought us European passports, a pan-European currency and a continent-sized home.

By 1945 the population of Europe had endured two devastating world wars in the space of a quarter of a century. World War One had seen the massacre of a generation of young men in a pointless squabble between imperial powers possessed of a 19th-century mindset and 20th-century technology. It was brutal and tragic and spelled the beginning of the end for the European empires. Despite simplistic fairytales about the first world war being caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the roots of the conflict lay in the imperialist ambitions of the ruling elite on both sides and their insatiable desire for global influence and control over resources. The wealthy and the powerful had an economic dispute and sent millions of young men to kill and be killed in an attempt to settle it.

World War Two was a very different matter, and although imperial ambitions certainly played their role, they were mixed up with a clash of ideologies and a very real and powerful sense of national grievance at how The Great War had finished. Germany was ripe for the rise of fascism in no small part due to the punitive Treaty of Versailles that had been foisted upon them at the end of World War One. It was a disastrous policy enacted by the victorious powers in that Paris suburb and one that would come back to haunt them. Which is no way an attempt to shift culpability away from the fascists; merely to point out that one of the unintended consequences of the treaty which ended the first world war was to prepare the ground for the second.

Gregory Bateson, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, suggested that the Treaty of Versailles was one of only two events in his life which were of genuine historical importance. It was, he suggests, “one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization. A most extraordinary event which led fairly directly and inevitably into World War II.”

Fortunately for Europe, and the wider world over which she still exerted some influence, the same mistake was not repeated at the end of World War Two. Rather than economically persecuting the defeated nations, the United States instigated the Marshall Plan which would help rebuild a continent destroyed by war. It would be nice to think this was a result of learning the lesson of Versailles, and we can charitably assume there was an element of that, but in truth it was mostly about ensuring that Western Europe did not slip behind the Iron Curtain being hung around the nations of the East.

But while the Marshall Plan was America’s way of creating a sphere of influence, a movement began in Europe not long after the end of World War Two that was a direct reaction to the senseless brutality and viciousness of the previous 25 years. At first this movement was little more than a handful of tentative suggestions by the governments of France and Germany. Determined to learn from the mistakes of the past, a simple question was posed… “How do we stop this ever happening again?” The Great Powers of Europe had all been brought to their knees by the war, even those on the winning side, and the dark shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the prevention of future conflict even more vital.

And so, very slowly, a vision of a pan-European community was crafted. The primary goal was to maintain peace, and a decision was made that the easiest (even if not the best) way to achieve this was to link the economic fate of European nations so that the intense competition of the past – competition that could spill over into conflict – would be replaced by cooperation. And so, in 1950, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed up to the Schuman Plan and the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was born. This placed the heavy industries of the six nations under collective management, ensuring that no single nation could ramp up military production.

The ECSC proved a major success, not only at promoting trust between the members, a commodity that had been severely lacking by the end of the war, but also at promoting prosperity. While much of the credit for the swift European recovery must clearly go to the Marshall Plan, the ECSC allowed the massive influx of US resources to be effectively managed. Indeed the ECSC was such a success that with seven years the scope was expanded with the Treaty of Rome. And the EEC was born. It was at this point that members first began planning for greater political, as well as economic, integration.

Five years later, the Common Agricultural Policy was adopted. A year after that, the EEC began negotiating with other nations as a single entity; the first concrete step towards political union. In 1968 all trade tariffs and barriers between the six members were abolished and a common trade policy between the EEC and non-members was adopted.

What so many of us fail to realise today is just how radical a change this all was. There’s just no way to make a succession of treaties and policy agreements seem exciting, but when you compare where Europe was 20 years after the first world war, and where it was 20 years after the second… well, how can you fail to find it remarkable? And even a little wonderful? For all its mundanity, the gradual integration of the core members of the EEC had something magical about it. Something noble even.

During the 1970s and 80s the EEC expanded; first bringing in Ireland, the UK and Denmark and later admitting Greece, Spain and Portugal. Through the European Regional Development Fund, resources were redistributed from wealthy nations to poorer areas. Another remarkable achievement, and one that has perhaps lost is lustre through familiarity and the rather undramatic way in which it was implemented. Even so, by the end of the 1980s Europe had a common set of courts, a parliament, a system for redistributing wealth and even bigger plans for the future. At the same time though, the noble goals of European Union were rapidly becoming subsumed by the forces of capitalism and the international financial institutions that sponsored them. If the original aim of the EEC had been to protect the peoples of Europe, by 1990 moves were well underway to use it as a vehicle for exploiting them.

Which finally brings us to a small town in Belgium on February 7th 1992 and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. This was by far the single most significant step on what had been a complicated journey. At Maastricht plans were drawn up for a single currency, for the abolition of all internal borders, for greater integration in foreign and defence policy as well as in the areas of justice and home affairs. In the eyes of many it was a template for a Federal Europe and, as such, extremely controversial. Yet those who were around at the very beginning would insist that this was the logical outcome of the project they had set in motion. Indeed, it was the very essence of what those six nations had set out to achieve when they formed the European Coal and Steel Community back in the post-war years. Albert Einstein once described nationalism as “an infantile disease… the measles of mankind” and on a continent where that disease perhaps caused the most damage, the EU can be seen as a brave attempt at immunisation.

Today, two decades after Maastricht, the European Union faces perhaps the greatest crisis in its short history. One that may prove fatal. It is straining beneath a mountain of debt generated by private financial institutions, and the subjugation of the European Project to those institutions is starkly demonstrated by the transference of that debt onto the shoulders of an undeserving public. The forces of global capitalism have hijacked our attempt to expand the borders of Europe beyond the narrow nationalism of the past. Yet even now, as The Market runs rampant across Europe, toppling governments and causing social unrest, even now there is hope for the EU. For while none of us can know the future, and while there’s certainly a chance that – in the words of WB Yeats – the centre will not hold, we nonetheless remember that the spirit of the European Project was not built upon capitalism, nor even upon economics though that may have been the form it first took. And we dare hope that original spirit may survive the collapse of an outdated, exploitative economic system.

For the spirit of the European Project was always one of peace. Of recognition that the borders that divide us are artificial constructs. That our family is not defined by blood nor by national identity, but by our common humanity. And today, when I pull a pile of coins from my pocket and see symbols not only of my home country, but of eleven others, even the very currency of capitalism reminds me of that fact.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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3rd February 1787 Shays’ Rebellion


Rebel Rebel: Engraving depicting Daniel Shays (left) and fellow insurgent Job Shattuck

Today we consider Shays’ Rebellion – otherwise known as “the American Revolution’s Final Battle” – which very nearly led to America’s first civil war. This major grassroots uprising raged for six months and shared much in common with the ideologies that most of the armed insurgents had risked their lives for just four years prior against the British. But now, in a milieu of post-war economic depression, the ruling class of this embryonic nation imposed upon its beleaguered citizens a similarly onerous taxation to that which the Colonists had revolted against. At this stage, the thirteen states of America were anything but “united”. Independent of one another, each with their own governments and laws, they were loosely bound only by the Articles of Confederation. Shays’ Rebellion would expose the weaknesses of America’s congressional power under this system and have a profound impact on a move towards Federalisation and what was to become the U.S. Constitution, as the Founding Fathers responded not to a plea for democracy, liberty and equality – but rather to protect the rights and property of the elite, and ensure a standing army would henceforth be available to quash any future insurrections.

In the economic turmoil that followed independence, tens of thousands of smallholders risked losing their farms through mortgage foreclosures. By 1786, social tensions in the western counties of Massachusetts heightened as farmers’ debts piled up. Many had their land confiscated and sold to speculators way below market value; some were even thrown into debtor’s prison where they endured brutally inhumane conditions. The farmers petitioned, held town meetings, called to reform the state constitution, agitated for paper money and picketed outside courthouses – all the same tactics that had so successfully been deployed in the build-up to the Revolutionary War, but were now to no avail. The protests escalated to open insurrection when Daniel Shays – a Revolutionary War veteran who’d fought with bravery and distinction at the battles of Lexington, Saratoga and Bunker Hill – took command of the disgruntled farmers. Under his leadership, a group of disgruntled “Shaysites” rebels armed themselves with muskets, swords and pitchforks and began closing down the debtors’ courts. Without issued writs, property could no longer be seized.

The ruling class was irate. They responded by drawing up a Riot Act and suspended habeas corpus in order to keep people in jail without trial. Samuel Adams – architect of the Boston Tea Party and verily Father of the Revolution – even urged death sentences for the leading Shaysites. With the federal government financially and politically powerless to intervene, the wealthy merchants of Boston paid out of their own pockets to raise a private militia. Anticipating John Brown, Shays’ response was to raid the state armory in Springfield, march on Boston and burn it to the ground. On 25th January 1787, Daniel Shays and 1500 of his men trooped in heavy snow into Springfield headed for the arsenal. But unbeknownst to the rebels, a message to an ally had been intercepted, and the private militia defense was waiting for them. The Shaysites retreated to the western hills where, on the morning of February 3rd, the majority were captured and the uprising was at last quelled.

One hundred and fifty imprisoned rebels were sentenced to hang – all but three, including Daniel Shays, were eventually pardoned. But the fear of the revolutionary initiative of the masses and the threat to property and privilege had shaken the ruling class to its core. After Shays’ Rebellion, a majority of the confederated states were won over to the Federalists’ arguments for a stronger central government. In the wake of America’s first class uprising, the U.S. Constitution was passed by a minor fraction of the population – representing only elite males, with no voice for women, men without property, indentured servants or slaves.

And so the great tragedy of Shays’ Rebellion was that what began as a protest against centralised government ended up consolidating political power at federal level – creating a new oligarchy that would betray all of the American Revolution’s principles of equality.

Posted in Dissent | 2 Comments

30th January 1649 the Execution of Charles I


Off with his head

Today we commemorate the execution of King Charles I of England, executed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell after a trial by the Rump Parliament found the king guilty of being ‘a tyrant, traitor and murderer.’ It is not the place of this On This Deity entry to relate the details of this World Famous event, rather it is an opportunity to make note that the so-called ‘English Civil War’ of 1649-60 was more truthfully ‘The English Revolution’, as the Marxist author Christopher Hill has long maintained, being the direct precursor to both the French and Russian Revolutions. That the English killed their king well over one hundred years before the French Revolutionaries did the same is a fact often overlooked because our Commonwealth failed after only twelve years and the English monarchy returned in 1660. The regicide of Charles I having taken place so much earlier than other European regicides, however, scared future English parliaments into passing just enough reforms to appease subsequent generations, thus averting any real justification for total revolution.

[Written by Saoirse Ó Gradaigh]

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28th January 1939 the Death of William Butler Yeats


WB Yeats

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the death and celebrate the life of William Butler Yeats. Poet and politician, mystic and modernist, revolutionary and traditionalist, WB Yeats lived a life filled with glorious contradiction. A man of rare wisdom and questionable judgment, his Nobel Prize-winning poetry graces us with some of the 20th century’s most enduring imagery. Steeped in mythological symbolism — mostly Celtic, but drawing also on the mythpoetry of Greece, Rome and beyond — the spellbinding blend of mysticism, contemporary commentary and Romanticism provided Ireland, and the wider world, with a truly illuminating voice (as well as revealing the debt this Irish poet owed to his English inspiration, William Blake).

Not that one should spend too long seeking similarities between the work of the two men, for their styles are quite different. Both ploughed their own unique furrow. But it is telling that one of Yeats’ early projects was the compilation of the first ever edition of the Complete Works of Blake. And there’s little doubt that much of Yeats’ Greek and Biblical allusions arrived through a Blakean filter.

What the two visionaries did share, however, was a deep unease about the profane nature of the world being built around them. The march of rationalism, for all its many wonders, left them both lamenting the willingness of humanity to trample upon The Sacred in the name of progress. More than a century after the birth of Yeats, the words of a song would declare “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, echoing a sentiment woven into the fabric of much of the poet’s work. For just like Blake before him, Yeats saw clearly the ultimate destination of scientific progress without spiritual guidance. And it was a cold, grey place with little room for the human soul. In the 1940s, Albert Einstein would write… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. He might well have been channeling Yeats when he did so.

And yet WB Yeats, a product of the Romantic interpretation of Irish mythology prevalent in the late 19th century, inspired by Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and deeply rooted in the rural landscape of Ireland’s west coast, nonetheless formed friendships with Ezra Pound and other modernists and lived much of his life in the cities of Dublin and London. A supporter of Irish independence and yet enamoured with aristocracy and monarchy – institutions he felt might be capable of preserving traditional values in an increasingly materialistic world – Yeats was shocked and humbled when Irish independence emerged from working class socialism, a movement he had openly scorned.

But true wisdom possesses a willingness to leave behind even the most cherished of beliefs when they are discovered to be without merit, and although Yeats was certainly never a revolutionary socialist, he acknowledged the clear debt that Irish independence owed to that movement and graciously accepted the invitation from the socialists to join the first Senate. Learning from the terrible mistakes of the Civil War, it was understood that a multitude of voices would strengthen the fledgling nation and that harmony could not be achieved by insisting all sing the same note.

His time in politics lasted less than a decade and was curtailed by ill health, but his fiercely anti-clerical stance and championing of sexual liberalism (in 1920s Ireland!) remind us, like the work of James Joyce, that the chokehold gained by the Catholic Church on the Irish body politic was not inevitable and that the explosion of creativity and revolutionary fervor that gripped the nation in those post-1916 years could have led anywhere at all.

But it is not the man’s political career that we remember all these decades later. His strange blend of aristocratic nationalism or his attempts to keep the Church out of Irish politics. It is not his many love affairs we recall; the broken hearts and unrequited promises that haunted and inspired his work. Not his championing of Gaelic culture, nor even his great project of recording and preserving the ancient myths and folklore of Ireland (albeit clothed in a garb woven by himself and Lady Gregory). No, what Yeats is remembered for — and rightly — is his poetry. And I’d be a fool to try to tell you about that. For his own words will do the job a thousand times better. So I’ll leave you with what might be considered an obvious choice… a poem that left a deep mark on me when I first read it as a young teen and which has dwelled within my soul ever since…

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Heroes | 3 Comments

26th January 1788 Australia’s “First Fleet”


Australian Aboriginals commemorating the 150th anniversary of the First Fleet as a ‘Day of Mourning’

On this day in 1788, the “First Fleet” of eleven ships arrived at Sydney Cove, Australia. Its passengers were the first white settlers of this remote continent: some 750 convicted petty criminals and 500 marine guards and officers shipped out of Britain to a barely explored fringe of the world in order to establish a penal colony and take possession of New South Wales in the name of King George III and the British Empire. Eighteen years earlier in 1770, Captain James Cook ‘discovered’ Australia and declared it “terra nullius”, or “no man’s land.” But the land was not no man’s; it was of course already inhabited by over 500,000 Aboriginal people who had been there, as the Latin translation of ab origine indicates, “from the beginning.” Their stone-tool technology pre-dated that of Europe and Asia by thousands of years, their social organisation was highly sophisticated, their religion deep and complex, their art and myths rich and varied, and their relationship to the land profound and sacred. Relations between the settlers and Aboriginals were hostile almost from the beginning. Theft of land, the introduction of deadly European germs and diseases, kidnapping of children, rape of women, poisoning, shooting, beheading… is it any wonder the Aboriginals were ‘hostile’? By 1824, colonists were even authorised to ‘hunt’ these ‘wild animals’ for sport. One hundred and twenty years after British settlement, the Aboriginal population had been reduced to only 31,000.

The anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia came to be a day of celebration amongst the colonists – a tradition that’s continued to the present is recognised as “Australia Day”. But to celebrate this national public holiday on January 26th perpetuates the myth that Australia was peacefully settled and is, for the indigenous population, a painful and offensive reminder of the theft of their sacred land, the White Australia Policy, the Stolen Generations and racial genocide.

On 26th January 1938, the first Aboriginal activists to protest this objectionable celebration declared a ‘’Day of Mourning’ to mark “the 150th anniversary of the Whitemen’s seizure of our country … You took our land by force … You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim to be civilised, progressive and humane.” In recent years, the Indigenous population has adopted “Invasion Day” as an alternative observance of Australia Day – while a movement spearheaded by the Australian Natives Association has called for the nation’s official holiday to be held on a different date in order to ‘truly reconcile’ Australia. According to Mick Dodson – Aboriginal Law Professor and Australian of the Year for 2009:

90 per cent of people are saying Australia Day should be inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. I firmly believe that some day we will choose a date that is a comprehensive and inclusive date for all Australians.

Ninety percent? That so many feel so strongly should be evidence enough of the need for the extension of a symbolic and long overdue olive branch to the First Australians.

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 2 Comments

23rd January 1976  the Death of Paul Robeson


Paul Robeson

Today we pay our respects to the great singer, actor, scholar, All-American athlete and human rights activist, Paul Robeson, who died on this day 1976. In the 1930s and 40s, this son of an escaped slave was the most famous and widely respected African-American man in the world, having thrilled thousands with his commanding presence and magnificent deep baritone voice on the Broadway stage and Hollywood screen. He popularised black spirituals, and became a global hero when he learned over twenty languages in order to sing international folk songs in their original tongue. For two decades, he was the world’s most popular concert performer. But, by the time of his death at the age of 77 from complications following a stroke, he was a forgotten and broken man. For the last twenty years of his life, Robeson suffered a series of mental breakdowns and even twice tried to kill himself. How could such a brilliant and gifted world figure have been so comprehensively destroyed?

At the height of his fame, Paul Robeson made the bold decision to become a political artist. One of the earliest civil rights activists decades before the movement mobilised, Robeson was also an outspoken opponent of imperialism, capitalism and fascism and a vocal advocate for workers’ rights and international peace.

But his politicisation took a decisive turn following his first visit to the Soviet Union in December 1934. An unapologetic fan of Soviet Socialism, Robeson was moved to discover resounding similarities to Afro-American spiritual music in the Russian folk traditions. Furthermore, in Russia he found no racial prejudices. “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life,” he declared to the press. “I walk in full human dignity.”

His glowing admiration for the Soviet Union earned him an amber warning with the FBI. But, after World War 2, this escalated to a full-scale Red Alert. And Paul Robeson became one of the most prominent and battered victims of the anti-Communist Cold War hysteria that swept the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s.

Whilst attending the 1949 Paris Peace Congress, Robeson declared it “unthinkable” that Black Americans could go to war against the Soviet Union on behalf of a country that had only ever oppressed them. Already tarred as ‘unpatriotic’, this statement caused an uproar throughout America. Robeson was thereafter branded an ‘enemy.’  Violence erupted at two of his concerts; dozens of subsequent engagements were cancelled as a boycott against him gained momentum.

Robeson sought refuge abroad where his popularity remained intact. But when he spoke to the foreign press about America’s mistreatment of its Black population, the U.S. State Department determined to silence him by revoking his passport and denying him a new one until he signed an oath stating that he was not a Communist and would cease political speeches overseas. Robeson refused. For eight long years, he fought to regain his passport – during which time he saw his income as well as his American fan-base dwindle to almost nothing. It became nearly impossible to hear Robeson on the radio, buy his music or see any of his films – even the widely celebrated Show Boat. All evidence of his athletic achievements and majestic career was so comprehensively erased that very little newsreel footage of him remains. A great artist and humanitarian effectively became a ‘non-person’.

Paul Robeson had always argued that he was a true American – true to the revolutionary and progressive spirit of his country’s foundations, as portrayed in the lyrics of the patriotic cantata “Ballad for Americans” which he’d popularised. In 1956, Robeson was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked why he did not wish to move to Russia, he replied: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you … And you, gentlemen, are the non-patriots and you are the un-Americans and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Robeson regained his passport in 1958, but it was of little consequence. Despite several attempts to rebuild his career, the damage was permanent. Shunned even by Black leaders, Coretta Scott King – Martin Luther King Jr’s widow – would later admit that Robeson had been ‘buried alive.’ His mental and physical health swiftly deteriorated, but he remained unrepentant and true to his beliefs to the end.

Robeson’s own stirring words – spoken at a “Save Spain” anti-fascist rally at the Royal Albert Hall in 1937 – serve as his enduring epitaph:

The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their culture destroyed … denied equal protection under law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows. Not through blind faith or coercion but conscious of my course, I take my place with you.

Posted in Heroes | 9 Comments

11th January 1943 The Assassination of Carlo Tresca


Carlo Tresca

On this day in 1943, Carlo Tresca – Italian-American anarchist leader and thorn in the side of just about everyone  – was assassinated on the streets of New York City. One of the most colourful figures of the American labour movement, he’s been all but forgotten by his adopted country hellbent on obliterating its long-gone radical past. But to the American leftists of the first half of the twentieth century – particularly the large (and largely radical) immigrant population – Tresca was a national hero. Indeed, influential writer Max Eastman considered him “the most universally esteemed and respected man in the revolutionary movement.” Tall, handsome, a riveting and passionate speaker, Tresca was one of the brightest stars of the Industrial Workers of the World – putting himself on the frontline of some of the most significant labour strikes of the era at Lawrence, Paterson and Ludlow. He also played a key role in the unsuccessful attempt to save his fellow Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from execution. As an editor and journalist for several underground anarchist papers including his own publication, Il Martello (The Hammer), Tresca wrote scathing attacks on labour agents, bankers, consular officials, and priests. In the 1930s, he turned his pen against the communists – condemning Stalin’s repressive tactics and, particularly, the liquidation of anarchists and other non-communist loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. But his most fervent vitriol was reserved for Italy’s Fascist regime. Tresca’s relentless war of words against the Fascisti would prove to be the greatest crusade of his life, prompting the Italian Ambassador to America to request that Tresca be deported or ‘silenced’. But deportation attempts failed, and the indefatigable Tresca refused to be silenced. When one of his papers was closed down, he’d simply start another. By the early 1940s, he was a bona fide hero of the non-communist left and America’s most outspoken anti-Fascist.

Tresca’s list of enemies, however, was growing rapidly. Besieged as always from the right, Tresca found himself attacked on the left by communists riding the wave of wartime popularity. And he was simultaneously embroiled in an ongoing battle with the powerful Fascist newspaper publisher, Generoso Pope, who had even more powerful Mafia allies. And so, when a short, heavy-set man emerged from the shadows and fired four shots at Tresca as he and an associate crossed 15th St and 5th Ave on the night of 11th January 1943, the assailant could have been one of many foes. Indeed, when the District Attorney’s office took a look at the long list of possible suspects, they decided to not even bother pursuing an investigation.

Many of Tresca’s comrades believed the hit was ordered by Generoso Pope. Another suspect was Vittirio Vidali, an agent of the Third International, whom Tresca had accused of murdering anarchist leaders in the Spanish Civil War. In Italy, Mussolini made no secret of wishing his most effective American opponent dead. But the most plausible theory is that Tresca was killed on the order of the Mafia. The actual triggerman was in fact eventually identified as an Italian gangster – yet the Tresca murder remains officially “unsolved”.

One of the greatest champions of exploited immigrants, Carlo Tresca’s own words serve as a fitting epitaph:

“I have sought with all my strength to elevate the moral & material conditions of the Italian workers here, & I have sought to instill in their souls the same faith in their emancipation that is alive in me. I am a soldier of the ideal.”

Posted in Anarchists, Heroes | 4 Comments

9th January 1996 The Third Battle of Newbury


The Battle for the Trees at Tot Hill, Newbury

On 9th January 1996 the bulldozers and chainsaws moved in to clear the route of the Newbury bypass. This nine-mile stretch of Berkshire countryside had been under threat since a public inquiry in 1988 approved the building of a four-lane road.

With the rising environmental awareness of the late 80s and early 90s came a new commitment to direct action. Open cast mines, peat extraction works, golf courses and many other places were targeted by the new generation of Earth First!-style actions. But the movement really congregated around the issue of roads.

Treehouses were constructed with rope walkways between them so that it would be a difficult, lengthy and expensive job to remove them. It began four years earlier at Twyford Down and spread to numerous threatened woodlands, including Newbury.

Along the Newbury route were three Sites of Special Scientific Interest, ancient woodland, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, rare wildlife in some of the cleanest rivers in the country, organic farmland, and a dozen archaeological sites from a nationally important stone age axe factory site to the two historic battlefields of the Civil War that lent their name to the road protest. Anything that made a piece of land special, precious, worth saving, it was there.

The idea that roads generate rather than solve traffic was long proven by studies. If there is a new road, people will use it. However, it was still a tad counterintuitive for simple-minded ministers, and the cloud of bullshit from construction firm lobbyists made it even harder to see clearly.

What Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car culture’ was an assault not only on our land and lungs but on social justice. The out of town developments really were making motorway services into the new cities, and they excluded those who couldn’t afford the four-wheeled entry fee. A third of British citizens had no access to a car – the poorest third. Meanwhile, because poor children walked and played in the street they were far more likely to be run over than their rich counterparts.

Beyond this, it was about a clash of values. The profitable versus the sustainable, the greedy versus the stewardly, the acquisitive versus the humane. Some people came just to defend a favourite piece of woodland, but whatever brought people there it was soon apparent to all that the road was not a one off; nor was it about all roads; this was just one prong of an insane bloated vision that placed endless profit above all else. Visions and bonds forged at the road protests became the seeds and strength of the anti-capitalist movement that came at the turn of the century.

Protesters were largely drawn from the untold thousands of unemployed youth, but supporters came from across all demographics. Here were people empowering themselves to challenge the most unpopular government in living memory, so encouragement tsunamied in from mainstream environmental organisations, commentators and the public at large.

On 9th January work began. They came for thirteen trees in a field at the top of the route next to Mary Hare School for deaf children. Protesters repeatedly charged at the lines of security guards, some got arrested but some got through and up three of the trees. After a stand-off, the chainsaw crews went home. That night, a camp was set up among the trees.

Every morning, protesters would patrol the lanes in the area, using CB radio to relay information. As soon as workers were spotted, people descended on the area and charged at the trees. Those that got caught became a diversion that let others through to the trees. The security had no training or insurance to come up the trees; those that were occupied would live to fight another day, and the workers would have to come back.

But as the weeks wore on protesters focused more and more on fortifying their camps. There were over thirty along the route. Some, like Mary Hare and Bagnor, were a few people and even less trees. Others, like Snelsmore, and Rickety Bridge down on the River Kennet, were vast sprawling villages of walkways. Sod what the designers of tower blocks said, these were the real streets in the sky.

Once the main tree felling finished, the evictions of the treehouses began. Rope access workers were brought in with cherry-picker cranes. Huge risks were taken with safety. The evictions’ overseer, Under Sheriff of Berkshire Nicholas Blandy, looked glibly on and said that protesters were fortunate not to live in a country where they’d be machine-gunned from the trees.

As the media grew tired and began to stay away, and as the police became bored with standing round outdoors, so the violence increased. Bailiffs would smash protesters in the face with riot shields. The police would turn and face the other way. ‘They can make a complaint later, if they want to,’ said one officer.

By the time the last tree fell at Tot Hill on 2nd April, the policing and security costs had added £25m to the cost of the road, about 20% of the cost of construction. There had been nearly a thousand arrests.

We lost at Newbury. It was always going to be that way. Contracts had been signed, and there was a lot of money as well as face to be lost. But because of the defeat there, there have been victories elsewhere. The continued presence of the protest in the national consciousness had created the space for real discussion on road building. What had started out being treated as a wacky idea had become a new orthodoxy.

The government cancelled great numbers of road schemes, slashing the roads budget by two-thirds at a stroke and saving the public purse £17bn. Remember that number next time someone complains about the waste of money giving dole to scuzzy hippies in trees. You can walk in places such as the water meadows around Salisbury today and be thankful to those who ignored the law at Newbury that it is not under concrete.

[Written by Merrick]

Posted in Dissent, World Events | 3 Comments

7th January 1649 The Re-Discovery of Avebury


Avebury Stone Circle today: with its ditches excavated, unsightly cottages demolished, and unnecessary enclosures removed, it’s difficult to imagine the snarl of 17th-century domestic chaos that greeted John Aubrey’s visionary gaze that January morn.

Today, we must celebrate John Aubrey’s dramatic rediscovery of Avebury – the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle – whilst out hunting with fellow royalists during the English Civil War, exactly 373 years ago. For Aubrey’s heroic retrieval of this vast but (by then) long forgotten Stone Age temple confronted the then-accepted notion that only the coming of the Romans had forced a degree of culture upon the barbaric Ancient British, and also confounded the then-popular 17th-century belief – propounded by the highly influential Scandinavian antiquaries Olaus Magnus and Ole Worm – that all such megalithic culture had its archaic origins in Europe’s far north. Indeed, so rich were the cultural implications of John Aubrey’s re-discovery that – come the fall of Oliver Cromwell’s 11-year-long Commonwealth and the subsequent Restoration of the Monarchy – even the returned King Charles II would himself insist on taking one of Aubrey’s celebrated tours of the Avebury area. But how could the world’s largest stone circle have suffered such a total cultural extinction in the first place? Why, the Avebury standing stones themselves must average at least ten feet in height apiece, while the temple’s enormously bulky northern and southern entrance stones rivalled even nearby Stonehenge’s celebrated trilithons. And how could Avebury’s vast 400-metre-diameter earthen embankment and the equally deep ditch that encircled these huge monoliths have for several centuries become invisible even to local historians? Ironically perhaps, the initial blame for this pagan temple’s centuries in cultural oblivion goes not to scheming Christians but to the 5th century arrival from Germany of another group of pagans – the invading Saxons – who, recognising Avebury’s possible use as a defended settlement, broke with the traditions of the previous Roman and Romano-British occupiers by setting up their homes and farmsteads directly within the mighty earth banks of the temple itself. Blasphemers! Thereafter, many centuries of harsh day-to-day living within the Avebury henge conspired to obscure then finally obliterate all physical traces of this vast Earthen Temple. Saxon ploughing within the henge tumbled soil into the deep ditches, which silted up considerably and became repositories of household refuse. Residents fearful of disturbing the ‘Devil’s work’ incorporated the Avebury megaliths into the hedges of their allotments, gardens, fields, and even saved energy by employing those monoliths most vertically aligned as supporting walls for their stone cottages. And when villagers lost their fears of the stones, deep pits were dug into whose depths several of the most intrusive monoliths were unceremoniously tumbled. Thereafter, the magnificent geometric shape of this robust 4,500 year-old landscape temple became lost in the chaos of domesticity; until that fateful day, that is, when John Aubrey and his friend Dr. Walter Charleton joined their hunting party and galloped westwards across Fyfield Down along the chalky London-Bath ‘rode’. Aubrey himself recounts in his posthumously published two-volume tome Monumenta Britannica:

“The chase led us at length through the village of Avebury, into the closes there: where I was wonderfully surprised at the sight of those vast stones: of which I had never heard before… I observed in the enclosures some segments of rude circles, made with these stones; whence I concluded, they had been in the old time complete.”

It’s been my experience that no story about Avebury ever concludes without some vicious act of destruction by some pious know-it-all or other; this On This Deity entry is no different. For, despite King Charles II’s fascination with the Avebury stone circle, it was his return to the English throne that prompted the temple’s most vivid and desperate period of destruction. For in their determination to stamp out the Non-Conformism of Cromwell’s time, Charles II’s paranoid Restoration Government in 1665 passed the Five Mile Act (or Non-Conformist Act 1665), which specifically forbade all itinerant Non-Conformist preachers from speaking within five miles of their old parishes. Avebury stone circle is nine miles south of Swindon, eight miles north-east of Devizes, five miles west of Marlborough and six miles east of Calne. Non-conformist preachers throughout northern Wiltshire looked to the ancient pagan temple and regarded the Five Mile Act as a divine sign: let us make our new home here, and every pagan stone we break we’ll make righteous by incorporating it into our Non-Conformist church. And so to Avebury they did come and such destruction so they did: the church remains at the circle’s centre even to this day, self-effacing and easily overlooked but engorged nevertheless with as many splendid sarsen stones of that former 4,500 year-old monument as those Non-Conformist preachers could muster. Our hero John Aubrey would, for his pains, die unpublished and in penury. Today, however, his legend burns with an unquenchable fame due to that pioneering archaeological tome Monumenta Britannica, that gossipy biography of his many contemporaries Brief Lives, and – most of all – for that splendid vision of Avebury. To John Aubrey – Culture Hero and how!

[Written by Julian Cope]

Posted in World Events | 6 Comments

2nd January 1920 The Palmer Raids


Industrial Workers of the World offices ransacked during the Palmer Raids

On this day in 1920, in an attempt to rid America of its “moral perverts”, federal agents under the direction of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer raided without warrants pool halls, restaurants and private homes in thirty-five American cities. They arrested more than six thousand alleged radicals. Known as the Palmer Raids, the anniversary of this onslaught against civil liberties marks the height of a government campaign begun in 1919 to fight a perceived “red menace” that the ruling class believed to be a threat to “Americanism”.

World War I was over. America had been on the winning side, and yet it was gripped in fear. Suspicion and paranoia of Bolsheviks, Anarchists, feminists, labour militants and anyone with a foreign accent was rampant. A jury in Indiana took just two minutes to acquit the killer of an immigrant who had yelled “To Hell with the United States”. A salesman in Connecticut was sentenced to jail for six months for remarking to a customer that Lenin was “one of the brainiest” world leaders. And the Ku Klux Klan re-emerged with a deadly vengeance. It was in this milieu that, in November 1919, Attorney General Palmer ordered federal agents to raid the homes and headquarters of suspected radicals. This first-wave of raids received huge support from a xenophobic public fed lies that there was a great conspiracy led by “foreign radicals” aimed at overthrowing their American way of life. High-profile anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were shipped back to the Soviet Union, along with some 500 other undesirables, while the Industrial Workers of the World – the scourge of the government and industry bosses – was brutally targeted. “The nation owes a debt of gratitude to A. Mitchell Palmer,” the New York Herald editorialised. “And now let there be no mawkish sentimentality about these rascals, no prattling of the sacred right of free speech from parlour socialists and others of that ilk.”

Emboldened by the public’s approval, and hoping to ride the wave of his success all the way to the White House in the 1920 presidential election, Palmer leaked information to the press that a revolution was “imminent”. With the justification in place for stepping up his raids and arrests, the scene was set for the largest-ever federal dragnet. Those arrested on 2nd January 1920 were incarcerated in jails and detention centres for weeks and even months without the right to legal counsel or bail while they were interrogated and often beaten. In Detroit, “eight hundred men were packed in a narrow windowless corridor on the top floor of a federal building,” recalled a witness in Labor’s Untold Story. “They remained there, many ill and without food, for six full days … Then they were moved to a deserted army encampment at Fort Wayne where new methods of torture were devised. The wives and children of those imprisoned there were beaten in the sight of the prisoners.” Meanwhile, Congress actually debated imposing the death penalty for insurrection.

But when Palmer’s Justice Department attempted to change the law to deprive suspected radicals of their right to vote – the most sacred fundament on which the nation was founded – the backlash against such Draconian tactics and violations of civil liberties at last began. Assistant Labor Secretary Louis Post discovered that only forty of the several thousands arrested had actually admitted a desire to overthrow the U.S. government, and subsequently ordered the release of detainees and cancellation of deportations. Palmer responded by questioning Post’s patriotism. The Palmer Raids and associated hysteria finally simmered down when the “imminent revolution” failed to materialise on 1st May as per Palmer’s prediction; the government’s war on immigrants and civil liberties fell apart soon after.

The Palmer Raids marked the first time in America’s history when thousands were ethnically profiled and arrested as part of a criminal investigation without being charged of a crime. But it would not be the last. While Palmer’s federal flunkies were rounding up innocent immigrants, one particularly zealous agent was a 24-year-old anti-Communist by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. The lessons learned by Hoover in illegal domestic surveillance and detention, denying suspects their rights, infiltrating covert organisations and torturing progressive leaders, would serve him well for the next Red Scare.

Posted in Atrocities | 3 Comments

30th December 1896 the Execution of Jose Rizal


José Rizal

On this day in 1896, José Rizal – the “George Washington of the Philippines” – was executed by the Spanish Army following a false conviction for rebellion, sedition and conspiracy. Rizal had devoted all of his brief adult life to liberating his countrymen from the 300-year yoke of Spanish colonial tyranny. So his imperial overlords were happy for any excuse to get rid of such a firebrand, even though Rizal had not participated in the nascent armed uprising; believing in non-violent resistance, he had even criticised the rebels. For Rizal was a man of words – but his were so incendiary that he gave birth to the Philippine Revolution with even more force than a gun or a sword.

The most celebrated and radical  Ilustrado (the “enlightened” Filipino class), Rizal was a genius and recognised Renaissance man: doctor, poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, architect, historian, teacher and proficiency in twenty-two languages were some but by no means all of this polymath’s talents and skills. His political ideas were forged by his extensive European education in Madrid, Paris and Heidelberg. It was during this time that Rizal published several essays and editorials opposing Spanish colonial tyranny and clergy despotism. But it was his two daring novels – Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo – which gave rise to a national Filipino consciousness. “I have endeavoured to answer the calumnies which for centuries had been heaped on us and our country,” explained Rizal of his literary intentions. “I have described the social condition, the life, our beliefs, our hopes, our desires, our grievances, our griefs; I have unmasked hypocrisy which, under the guise of religion, came to impoverish and to brutalize us.”

Banned by the Spanish, copies of these two novels – published in 1886 and 1891 – were smuggled into the Philippines and read stealthily by the Ilustrados. The impact was, well, revolutionary. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – which Abraham Lincoln cited as one of the triggers of the American Civil War – Rizal’s novels would spark the flames of the Philippine Revolution. Furious Spanish officials deported Rizal to the easternmost island of the Philippines for four years,  but when an uprising broke out in Manila, they nevertheless accused Rizal of initiating it. Whilst en route to Cuba, he was returned to Manila and arrested for revolutionary agitation and convicted of treason. The Spanish were so fearful of a public mutiny that they executed Rizal an hour earlier than scheduled – but 30th December 1896 was to be a pivotal turning point that activated a full-scale revolution, and the anniversary of Rizal’s death is today commemorated in the Philippines as a national holiday.

Before the late 19th century, “Philippines” was only a geographical term for a vast archipelago of some 7,000 islands. The Philippine Revolution was borne of a consciousness by the inhabitants of these islands that they could be one nation bound by a common culture, history and destiny. Rizal’s execution served to broaden this consciousness. The Philippines was the first country in Asia to stage a national revolution and declare its independence on 12th June 1898. By virtue of his daring vision and the forcefulness of his language and imagination, Rizal not only pioneered the Philippine national consciousness – but his martyrdom would also send a trenchant message to the colonial powers throughout the vast region of Asia.

Posted in Heroes | 7 Comments

28th December 1937 The Birth of the Irish Republic


Éamon de Valera at the inauguration of the new Irish constitution

At one minute before midnight on December 28th 1937 the Irish constitution passed into law and the Republic of Ireland (or Éire) was born. Although it has been described as a revolutionary act itself, the passing of the constitution was a strangely muted – almost administrative – conclusion to several hundred years of oppression and bloody rebellions.

It was the middle of the 12th century when the first Cambro-Norman troops arrived on Irish soil from Britain, but it wasn’t until after the English Reformation in the 16th century that the British government asserted ownership of the island of Ireland and attempted to impose absolute control. Prior to that time the foreign presence was resented, occasionally opposed, but ultimately tolerated by the native people who owed little or no allegiance to the invaders but equally whose lives were not significantly influenced by them. It was only when the British Crown renounced Catholicism and instigated the twin policies of Plantation and the Penal Laws in Ireland that the life of the average Irish person was dramatically impacted by the British presence. Consequently, it was only then that rebellion against the Crown became widespread.

The policy of Plantation essentially robbed the Irish peasantry of their land, handing over all but the least fertile tracts to English and Scottish colonists and turning small-hold farmers into tenants of often oppressive landlords. At the same time the Penal Laws aimed to obliterate all traces of traditional Gaelic culture from the island by denying basic rights to Catholics – to the point of outlawing the celebration of the Catholic Mass – and suppressing, even violently, the speaking of the Irish language along with traditional art, music and sports. And so began more than 350 years of conflict that was to culminate in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence it sparked.

One of the leaders of the 1916 Rising was Éamon de Valera, in many ways – for better and for worse – the dominant figure of 20th-century Ireland. Despite being the subject both of hagiography and demonization, de Valera ultimately resists such simplistic black-or-white characterisation. Though eventually becoming a divisive figure, de Valera’s vision and determination helped unite the Irish in their struggle against British rule after the Easter Rising. With the end of the War of Independence in 1922 and the establishment of The Irish Free State (a semi-independent Dominion of the British Empire), he led the defeated faction in the subsequent civil war — refusing to accept the partitioning of the island, de Valera sought to continue the War of Independence until Ireland was united under a single government.

Despite leading the losing side of the civil war, de Valera’s determination (and many would say, his deviousness) saw him rise to the position of Prime Minister of the Free State in less than a decade. He acknowledged the grim irony of being leader of a Dominion State that he himself viewed as illegitimate and almost immediately upon taking office in 1932 instigated the process of severing all ties with London. He had a vision of an Irish Republic that was at once radical and conservative, blending revolutionary socialism and reactionary Catholicism in a unique and perhaps paradoxical fashion. Some have gone so far as to argue that de Valera’s zealous participation in the Easter Rising (his was the last of the brigades to surrender), his imprisonment, being sentenced to death (commuted just hours before he was due to be shot) and his involvement in the bloody wars that followed had left him shell-shocked and that his subsequent political philosophy was tinged with genuine madness.

He would not be the first revolutionary leader to suffer such a fate. And certainly not the last.

So it was that during the 1930s de Valera supervised the drafting of the Constitution of the Irish Republic. It is a document infused with socialism and Catholicism; a document that cautions against the creep of global capitalism and seeks to establish Ireland as a genuinely independent and self-sufficient nation… a society anchored with deep roots in the past that would consciously isolate itself from an outside world committed to a progress that de Valera viewed with suspicion and contempt.

In July 1937 de Valera called a referendum and the Constitution was adopted by the people of Ireland, though with a smaller majority than he had expected. The divisions of the civil war had not healed and while most Irish welcomed the establishment of a Republic, de Valera’s zeal was viewed with some disquiet. There was recklessness in his refusal to negotiate a separation with the British government, and his determination to simply announce the Republic unilaterally conjured fears of a military backlash from across the Irish Sea.

In the end however, with the storm clouds of fascism gathering across Europe, Britain could ill-afford to become embroiled in yet another guerrilla conflict to its west. So when the Constitution was written into Irish law 73 years ago today, it provoked nothing more than a stern letter from His Majesty’s Government in London.

And so the people of Ireland became Citizens of a Republic; no longer Subjects of a Crown… half-led, half-dragged by a willful visionary; a brilliant man driven to the edge of madness by power and violence.

By the 1960s Éamon de Valera’s vision of Ireland was considered antiquated. Backwards even. Certainly his determination that Ireland should be a beacon of Catholicism (the Constitution he produced was even sent to the Vatican for approval prior to the referendum) ultimately bestowed far too much power on the clergy which — as is ever the case — became corrupted and perverted by it. Similarly, de Valera’s insistence upon cultural isolation, nay cultural purity, was probably neither desirable nor realistic.

However, those who have condemned de Valera’s ideas as totally flawed are doing him a great disservice. There is much about his vision that, far from being antiquated, was well ahead of its time. His deep suspicion of global capitalism and of industrialisation (he considered it destructive and unsustainable) and his insistence that Ireland – that any nation – should be self-sufficient, capable of feeding, clothing, housing and educating their citizenry without external assistance will, I am convinced, soon be seen as genuinely forward-thinking… once the project of globalisation is exposed as the house of cards it truly is.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in World Events | 2 Comments

25th December 2006 the Death of James Brown


James Brown

Today we pay tribute to James Brown – the legendary Godfather of Soul and self-proclaimed  ‘Hardest Working man in Show Business’ – whose death on Christmas Day 2006 robbed us of a true World Artist and Culture Hero of the highest order, a unique and uniquely-focussed individual whose single-mindedness and persistence throughout the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s contributed vastly to adjusting the manner in which post-war African-Americans viewed themselves. Combining the worldview of the shaman with the dance of the showman, James Brown – for over five decades – delivered up a compelling brand of electrifying and frantic soul music over which he discussed every current major black issue, and then some. Sex and the sexual revolution were of course at the head of Brown’s early subject matter. But, in time, civil rights, racial equality, drug culture, poverty and hunger all took their places as regular J. Brown themes: themes that increasingly preached African-American self-reliance. Endeavouring to practise what he preached, Brown throughout the ‘70s always block-booked recording studios, ensuring maximum 24-hour usage by organising cheap ‘downtime’ sessions for other lesser-known James Brown-related artists – trombonist Fred Wesley, singer Lynn Collins or perhaps the JB’s themselves – Brown’s record company Polydor Records thus unwittingly facilitating all kinds of fine extraneous underground record releases. Was Brown a Commie, a Socialist? Nope, but being a cultural beacon and pillar of inspiration who drew to himself only the most inspired and extreme young musicians, James Brown – like fellow modern African-American shamen Miles Davis, Sly Stone and George Clinton – clearly felt compelled, even morally obliged to promote and mythologize his many cohorts.

It was in May 1967 that James Brown executed his bravest and most avant-garde move with the release of his single ‘Cold Sweat’, a monotonous and compelling on-the-one groove that was to change soul music forever. Arguably the first funk record, the futuristic ‘Cold Sweat’ and James’s subsequent ‘On-The-One’ canon would inspire scores of future acts from George Clinton’s Funkadelic to Cologne’s Can via New York’s No Wave scene to Miles Davis himself. And so, although James Brown commenced his career in the ‘50s as no more than a Little Richard copyist, he was by his career’s conclusion the most sampled dance artist in history: his beats, his grunts, his laughter, his delighted inchoate chatter, even his spoken instructions to the JB’s, everything now considered worthy of sampling. James Brown was the living embodiment of funk, a consummate showman so polished and so damned showbiz-professional that it’s easy to forget just how radical much of his music was. His Soul Review presentation, his extraordinary dance routines, his emphasis at all times on the Sat’day Night entertainment aspect of his act: all of these elements conspired ultimately to undermine our perception of his true role, a role which should be described, during his career’s height at the very least, as that of a top-class cultural commentator – a metaphysical narrator who dared to create then corral all of these monolithic soul grooves, reducing them to no more than vehicles for his musings and narrations on the current state of African-American affairs.

[Written by Julian Cope]

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17th December 1830 the Death of Simon Bolivar


Simon Bolívar

“I swear before you, I swear before the God of my fathers, I swear by my fathers, I swear by my honour, I swear by my country that I will not rest, body or soul, until I have broken the chains with which Spanish power oppresses us.” Thus declared Venezuelan-born Simon Bolívar at the age of 21. And, true to his word, the legendary Hispanic American revolutionary hero devoted his entire adult life to the liberation of millions of South Americans from tyrannical Spanish imperialism and oligarchy. Bolívar’s tireless efforts succeeded in emancipating all of the northern half of South America from colonial despotism and gave rise to the five independent nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia – one of very few countries to name itself after an individual.

But while his military successes earned him the reverent title of El Libertador, Bolívar was also a visionary whose “Bolivarian dream” is widely recognised as an early precursor to the modern Pan-Americanism espoused over a century later by another great Latin American revolutionary, Che Guevara. At the peak of his post-liberation political powers, Bolívar attempted in 1826 to organise a league of Latin American states to promote solidarity and military cooperation among the developing nations, proposing the adoption of a constitution that would ease the nascent republics gradually toward democracy. The colonial legacy of three centuries would not, however, be eclipsed overnight – and the fragile South American union refused to ratify the constitution.

Bolívar’s greatest political mistake was his failure to recognise the raging forces of nationalism, which would erupt into civil wars and bitterly divide the union that he had so vociferously fought for. As a last desperate attempt to realise his grand plan, Bolívar betrayed his Rousseauian principles of political reform and proclaimed himself dictator. Dissent was immediate, and Bolívar’s popularity plummeted just as rapidly. There was even an assassination attempt on the once unassailable Libertador.

Bolívar resigned his presidency, and descended into a prolonged state of self-reproach. There was to be further humiliation when the new Congress of Venezuela refused to negotiate with Colombia as long as Bolívar remained on Colombian soil, followed swiftly by Ecuador’s declaration of independence from Colombia and finally armed revolt in Bogotá – all of which devastated Bolívar, who reluctantly made plans for exile in Europe. But shortly before his departure, he succumbed to suspected tuberculosis. Ten days before his death, he dictated his last will and testament to his people:

“You have witnessed my efforts to establish liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have laboured unselfishly, sacrificing my fortune and peace of mind. When I became convinced that you distrusted my motives, I resigned my command. My enemies have played upon credulity and destroyed what I hold most sacred … my reputation and my love of liberty. I have been the victim of my persecutors, who have brought me to the brink of the grave.”

And so it was that at the age of 47, Bolívar died hated by those whom he loved. But it was not long before his reputation was restored, and his fame across Latin America has continued to grow to mythical proportions ever since. Bolívar’s legacy is currently enjoying a renaissance in his beloved birth country of Venezuela, spearheaded by the recently deceased Hugo Chávez. In such hallowed esteem did President Chávez hold his ancestral soul-mate that he called his reforms a “Bolivarian Revolution”, renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and left a chair empty at all political meetings in honour of El Libertador.

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16th December 1773 The Boston Tea Party


Depiction of the Boston Tea Party

At nine o’clock on the night of 16th December 1773, a group of angry Bostonians disguised as Mohawk Indians and armed with tomahawks boarded three British ships anchored at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston harbour. Urged on by thousands of cheering townspeople, the 70-odd colonists – including some of Boston’s most distinguished citizens – proceeded to axe open 342 chests of tea valued at $18,000 and heaved the lot into the Boston harbour in protest of heavy taxes placed by the British on American exports. Outraged and determined not to let this act of rebellion go unpunished, British Parliament retaliated immediately by passing a series of Coercive Acts (known by the colonists as the “Intolerable Acts”) against Massachusetts: the port of Boston was closed, the powers of self-government drastically reduced, and the colony was placed under rigid British military control. The severity of the Coercive Acts led to even greater resentment and resistance throughout all thirteen colonies, which in turn convened the First Continental Congress in order to petition King George III to repeal the acts. The king refused. And so it was that the audacious rebellion against imperialism and Draconian taxation, which famously came to be known as the Boston Tea Party, set in motion the chain of events that would lead directly to the American Revolution.

As a historical and iconic act, the Boston Tea Party is to modern Americans synonymous with the spirit of independence – being the very embodiment of the New World’s rejection of Old World tyranny. It is also significant as one of the first examples of mass civil disobedience; resistance to taxation had never before resulted in the large-scale and deliberate destruction of property. But it is worth noting that, were the Boston Tea Party to take place today, then every one of those so-called great patriots who participated would – under the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s current guidelines – be classified as “terrorists”. Hence, when casting our judgement on current dissenters and freedom fighters, it is wise to remember that political acts of dissent are always measured solely by their success or failure – for, as Winston Churchill said, “history is written by the victors.”

Posted in Dissent, Revolution | 3 Comments

14th December 1825 The Decembrist Revolt


Monument at the execution site of the five leaders of the Decembrist Revolt

Today marks the anniversary of the Decembrist Rising – a short-lived revolt of officers in the Czarist army in 1825. In many respects doomed to failure, the revolt has a historic significance that outweighs the actual events and marks a watershed in the revolutionary movement in Russia.

Whilst throughout Europe ideas of democracy were fermenting and were to culminate in the revolutionary surge of the 1840s, Russia remained firmly part of the ancien-regime.  Largely politically untouched by the ideas of the French Revolution, and economically and socially little changed from the middle ages, Russia lacked the radicalised middle classes that were to be the drivers in 1848’s ‘Spring Of Revolutions’.

But small layers of the lower Russian nobility were influenced by the liberalism of the Enlightenment and the popular patriotism of the Napoleonic Wars. Organised in a number of Masonic–like secret societies, they were committed to modernising Russia. By the 1820s the Union of Salvation emerged to pull together these groups, although they remained without a coherent ideology or objective. The Northern Society supported some form of reformed constitutional monarchy, whilst the Southern Society under the ‘Russian Jacobin’ Pavel Pestel had a more radical commitment to republicanism and land reform.

The catalyst for revolt came with the death of Czar Alexander I and the subsequent succession crisis: the heir Constantine had renounced his claim for personal reasons leaving as next-in-line his reactionary brother Nicholas. In St Petersburg a group of officers around the Northern Society led 3,000 troops in refusing to swear allegiance to the new Czar, and began a standoff with loyal troops in the city’s main square.

The weakness of the revolt was clear from the start. The conspirator’s plan was to have Prince Trubetskpoy proclaimed as provisional dictator until a new constitution could be adopted – however the prince panicked and sought safety in the Austrian embassy. His second-in-command turned himself in to the government forces and then committed suicide in prison. Lacking leadership, there was equally little clear idea of the revolt’s objectives – certainly not from the ordinary troops drawn from the peasantry. Their officers had apparently told them that they were fighting to restore the ‘true’ Czar Constantine, for better pay and conditions, and for promises of land reform.

The rebels had massed in Senate Square expecting to ignite a general revolt of the imperial armies, but within hours Nicholas had gathered loyal troops and turned his artillery on the assembled crowds. Some 1,200 people were killed within an hour – many of them passers-by and sightseers – and the remaining conspirators were rounded up within a few days. As news from St Petersburg spread south, a revolt broke out led by the Southern Society, and a nationalist group, the United Slavs, with the objective of taking control of Kiev. There was some success when the rebels captured the city of Vasilkov, but by January the southern revolt had also been defeated.

In many respects the failed uprising had been an attempted ‘palace revolution’ that used the peasant-soldiers as pawns in a coup and had left most of Russian society untouched. Many of the rebel officers were known to the Czar, and were personally interrogated by him. In fact in all only 125 people were arrested in connection with the Decembrist uprising – of these five leaders were executed and the remainder were sent to exile in the East. However the revolt’s defeat had a more generalised and radicalising effect with a prolonged witch-hunt and repression of liberals and dissidents of all hues. Many fled the country, and for those who remained dark years followed with a repressive censorship and the rise of the notorious ‘Third Section’ network of informers and spies. It was said of Nicholas that he made it is his mission to become the country’s chief of police.

But most of all the revolt also marked the start of a new era; for nearly a hundred years Europe’s most repressive regime would be locked in conflict with successive generations of revolutionaries. This next wave looked not to an enlightened section of the nobility bound to the old order, nor to the middle class tied into the immense Czarist civil service, but to the peasant masses.  The new movement was known, significantly, as  ‘Land and Liberty’. Its leader was the personification of a new kind of professional revolutionary – and the son of a former Decembrist noble – Mikhail Bakunin.

[Written by journeyman]

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13th December 1937 The Rape of Nanking


Severed heads at Nanking. No genuinely representative photograph of the genuinely shocking Nanking atrocities were deemed suitable for this entry. It is not the policy of On This Deity to illustrate atrocities with any matter that could be deemed pornographic in its grotesqueness.

Today we lament the tragic Rape of Nanking, in which the recently Westernized & ‘modernized’ Japanese army – themselves less than a century out of their fiercely backward-looking Samurai past, and each soldier reeling from the still cruelly harsh authoritarian regime under which they served – inflicted upon the Chinese citizens of this ancient city such sustained and devastating cruelties over a two-week period that even the extensive photographic evidence available, being pornographic on such a colossal and citywide scale, somehow fails to ignite in the collective minds of we Moderns any sense of context in reality as we’ve known it. And whereas many of the foul SS guards who executed Jews by machine gun in the early days of Hitler’s Final Solution at least retained the human instinct to throw up whilst engaged in such nefarious activities, in Nanking, the 1937 version of the Japanese Army had long had such ‘weaknesses’ systematically knocked out of it, and instead held beheading contests upon hapless citizens that received much positive press back in Japan’s home islands. Many male Nanking citizens were forced to dig their own mass graves, into which they were then buried alive, whilst other Chinese men with guns held to their heads were forced to sodomize their neighbours. And it was during this sustained Japanese military orgy of violence and hatred that the rape of women became particularly vile and protracted. For, by the admission of a Japanese soldier at Nanking, he and his comrades ‘gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty’, and even the most conservative estimates claim well over 20,000 rapes took place. In order to facilitate a more military rape, women all over Nanking were hoisted upon specially made rape racks and systematically gang-raped, though most of this would have remained only hearsay, had not many of these ritualized rapes of Nanking’s prettiest young women been photographed and sent home as souvenirs by the soldiers themselves. So how had it come to this? Teenage US soldiers perpetrated all kinds of atrocities upon Vietnamese villagers, but none sent photographic evidence back to Mom and Dad upon a gleefully-worded postcard. And even Hitler’s Nazi regime was canny enough (and ultra cynical enough) to know that their Final Solution could work only if it could be kept secret from the German people, let alone consider broadcasting facts about it in the press. In stark contrast, the general attitude of the mid-1930s Japanese was clearly still so xenophobic and nationalistic that the mass beheading competitions in Nanking could be reported not with embarrassment and shame, but with all the pride of some great sports victory: “Contest To Kill First 100 Chinese with Sword Extended When Both Fighters Exceed Mark – Mukai Scores 106 and Noda 105’ ran the delighted headline in The Japan Advertiser.  So, once again we must ask, how had it come to this?

The tragic truth for the population of Nanking was that the motorised Japanese Army that invaded their city in 1937 had been Westernized in their weaponry alone. In everything else, however, Japanese military attitudes and its tough worldview remained barely changed from that of the previous centuries. Indeed, its harshness had even steadily increased. Living in blissful Isolationism for hundreds of years, the old world pre-technology Japanese of 1853 had been shocked into modernisation by the gunboat diplomacy of US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, who – with just four modern steam warships – had entered Tokyo harbour, trained his canon on the emperor’s place, then demanded and received from the Japanese government precisely the trade treaty that American politicians had long required. Humiliated by the shocking simplicity of these events and still ostensibly living in the musket & gunpowder mindset of the 1600s, Japan’s highly militaristic Imperial Culture shocked itself into life and spent the next years importing into their islands as much Western weapons technology as they could pay for, whilst paying no heed at all to the accompanying Western values. Indeed, between 1853 and the beginning of the Second World War, the Japanese military took advantage of this new Western technology purely in order to revive its Samurai-informed ultra-authoritarianism both at home and abroad. The army policy of Bentatsu (‘the act of love’) allowed Japanese officers to strike their men ‘until they streamed with blood’, expected them to wash their superiors’ underwear, and to endure beatings and floorings for any perceived indiscretion. A similarly harsh form of discipline known as Tekken Seisai (‘the iron fist’) was practised in the Imperial Navy, ensuring that all members of Japan’s military existed at all times in a highly agitated collective state of resentment and humiliation, not to mention physical pain. And it was in this collective state of High Anxiety that the soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army were unleashed upon those unfortunate Nanking civilians, free at last to lash out at all and everything in their path. According to the previously quoted soldier – now a retired doctor in Tokyo – “I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all… I was truly a devil’.

Ho-hum, but then what other lesson could a longtime militaristic epicentre such as Japan of the 1850s have learned from the US treaty so successfully secured by Matthew Perry’s bullying US gunboat diplomacy? Moreover, without the collective moral constraints of Christendom and the concept of Democracy breathing down their necks, just one glaringly-obvious answer met with Japan’s approval: Military Motorisation + Diplomatic Bullying = Success. And so, by cherry-picking only what its military agencies required from this recent interface with the West, Japan successfully embarked on a policy of belligerence and moral lawlessness that would rage so wantonly into-and-during the years of World War 2 that the United States – with itchy trigger fingers at all times – even justified that first massive deployment of atomic weapons to bring to an end Emperor Hirohito’s prolonged and Custeristic sacrificing of his subjects for his grotesquely solipsistic and ever more suicidal defence of Japan.

[Written by Julian Cope]

Posted in Atrocities | 7 Comments

11th December 1981 El Mozote Massacre


The memorial to the hundreds of innocent civilians massacred in and around El Mozote

Today we recall the 1981 El Mozote Massacre – the largest killing of civilians during El Salvador’s brutal twelve-year civil war – in which nearly the entire 800-plus population of the small village of El Mozote and its surrounding hamlets was executed by a U.S. trained and equippped counter-insurgency force. This bloodbath, spearheaded by the elite Atlacatl Battalion, was undertaken as part of the Salvadoran Army’s “Operation Rescue”, which sought to force the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) guerrillas from the area and eliminate its supporters among the civilian population. But there was no good reason to attack the deeply Christian and non-political village of El Mozote. When the Atlacatl Battalion arrived on the night of 10th December 1987, they ordered the terrified residents to stay locked in their houses and warned that anyone who didn’t would be shot. The next morning, the soldiers separated the men from the women and children and imprisoned them in isolated groups. The men were the first to be interrogated, tortured, and executed – most by machine guns, others beheaded. The next victims were the women and older girls, most of whom were raped – some of these girls were as young as 10 – before they too were machine-gunned to death. Finally, the youngest children who’d been locked in the church and its convent were shot through the windows before all the buildings in the village were burned down. Only one village woman survived the massacre. Over the next few days, the soldiers repeated the same procedure in five other nearby hamlets.

This tragedy became known to the world on January 27th, 1982, after three American journalists were tipped-off by the FMLN. The journalists interviewed the few survivors and took photographs of the gruesome evidence. The Reagan administration – determined to preserve U.S. support for El Salvador’s war against the leftist revolutionary insurgents – downplayed reports of the massacre, deflecting the evidence that hundreds of unarmed women, children and men were shot, hung or beheaded. The incident sparked heated conflict in the U.S. Congress, where the renewal of military aid to El Salvador was already the subject of controversy. Both the Salvadoran government and the U.S. State Department acknowledged that a military operation had occurred in the area, but insisted what transpired in El Mozote had been a battle between the Salvadoran Army and the FMLN with no evidence of a “massacre”. Reports to the contrary were discounted as FMLN propaganda. And as Reagan continued to defend the notion that the Salvadoran government was guaranteeing the human rights of its people, Congress voted to renew military aid.

For eleven years, the U.S. government denied the truth while the three reporters defied intimidation and steadfastly stuck to what they’d witnessed. The journalists – and the victims – were finally vindicated in 1992 when a United Nations-sanctioned Commission on the Truth for El Salvador stated in its final report that there was full proof that the entire population of El Mozote and its surrounding hamlets had been deliberately and systematically massacred. Despite this, no one has ever been tried or convicted for these horrendous acts of human rights abuse that comprised one of the worst massacres in Latin American history.

As for the U.S. government’s unscrupulous and self-serving role in this tragic event, author Mark Hertsgaard perfectly summarised the paradoxical politics of Cold War America when he wrote:

“What made the [El Mozote] massacre stories so threatening was that they repudiated the fundamental moral claim that undergirded US policy. They suggested that what the United States was supporting in Central America was not democracy but repression. They therefore threatened to shift the political debate from means to ends, from how best to combat the supposed Communist threat — send US troops or merely US aid? — to why the United States was backing state terrorism in the first place.”

Posted in Atrocities | 2 Comments

9th December 1987 The First Intifada


Demonstration in front of the Dome of the Rock at the onset of the First Intifada

Today we mark the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987. Various end dates are cited, usually falling between the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991 and the Mehola Junction bombing of 1993, but arguably the conditions and enmities created during those first years have characterised Israeli-Palestinian relationships ever since, however one chooses to draw the timeline.

The word “intifada” has a dual meaning, neither of which tally with the widespread misconception that it translates as “uprising” or “rebellion”. In fact it means either to “awaken suddenly”, or to “shake off a fever”. As such, it is noteworthy that the vast majority of the Palestinian activities in the first intifada were non-violent. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that the various Palestinian groups – usually described as terrorists in the media – who organised resistance during those first years of intifada went to great lengths to employ a strategy of non-violence. Large numbers of Palestinians took part in protest marches, general strikes and various acts of peaceful civil disobedience. Nonetheless – as is so often the case – the media became fixated on the riots and violent attacks. And for years, images of Palestinian youths throwing rocks at Israeli armoured vehicles became a regular sight on television screens across the globe.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a difficult subject to tackle because it has so radically polarised opinion. Two rather simplistic narratives have emerged from this complex situation and a lot of people have flocked to one or the other, rather than deal with the ambiguities of reality. What’s most startling is the aggressive manner in which many people without a personal stake in the situation will defend one of these polarised positions. The pro-Israeli position sees Israel as a sovereign state under violent attack from Palestinian militants, and either implicitly or explicitly equates the Palestinian cause with terrorism. The pro-Palestinian position sees the state of Israel as acting tyrannically towards the Palestinians and the actions of the militant groups as regrettable, though ultimately justified.

Neither view captures the tragic reality of two groups of people trapped in a mutually destructive embrace.

The State of Israel came into being soon after the second world war. It’s an over-simplification to suggest that the creation of Israel was a direct result of the Nazi persecution of Jews, but the holocaust was clearly both a catalyst and one of several causes. Horrified by the concentration camps, the world quite rightly sought to offer some form of reparation to the Jewish people. The Zionists had been agitating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine for decades and the world powers felt that granting this wish would be an appropriate response to the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich. Had the area been uninhabited, they would have been right.

Unfortunately though, it wasn’t. The rights of Palestinians to self-determination were completely ignored in the decision to create Israel. And while only extremists suggest that this decision should be reversed and Israel dissolved completely (an act that would provoke too much bloodshed to be considered a rational solution), it should always be remembered that a grave injustice was done to the Palestinian people when Israel was founded, and that injustice has never been adequately addressed by either Israel or the international community.

At the same time, it should also be borne in mind that the holocaust had left an indelible mark on the Jewish psyche. How could it not? James Joyce once said, “Nations have their ego, just like individuals”, and just like individuals they can suffer trauma and psychological damage. A psychoanalysis of the behaviour of the state of Israel points to a people suffering from the effects of Post Traumatic Stress.

While the simplistic pro-Israel position will justify their current behaviour as a purely rational response to being “surrounded by enemies”, it is nevertheless the case that PTS is liable to generate severe paranoia. Israel’s massive military, their obsession with security – to the point that it dominates Israeli politics almost to the exclusion of all else – even going so far as to build a wall around the entire nation… if we accept that nations can suffer collective psychological trauma, then these are precisely the kinds of behaviour we would expect to see from a people who had experienced the holocaust.

One does not blame a person suffering from Post Traumatic Stress for their paranoid behaviour. But nor should it be encouraged or sanctioned, and by doing just that the international community have helped create an intractable situation. The policies adopted by the modern state of Israel towards the Palestinians are neither just nor rational. The United Nations has declared the occupation of the West Bank to be illegal and while the pro-Israeli position can’t accept this fact, the Israelis are clearly acting in a tyrannical manner. They have completed the journey from oppressed to oppressor. And yet there is a real sense in which they cannot be blamed for this. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge”. The policies of Israel may be oppressive, irrational and ultimately self-destructive but they are also entirely to be expected given recent history.

From the Palestinian perspective, however, this is hardly a justification for the deep injustices they face as a people and a displaced nation. They can quite legitimately claim that Israel is illegally occupying their land and acting in the manner of a brutal dictatorship. That this behaviour is the result of historical trauma and the intervention of powerful states with their own agendas, does not – and should not – prevent the Palestinian people from seeking justice and autonomy.

Which brings us back to the first intifada. On December 6th 1987 an Israeli citizen was murdered by a Palestinian in the Gaza strip. Two days later an Israeli truck driver killed four Palestinians in what was seen as a deliberate reprisal. Such apparently minor incidents, when placed in the hothouse of paranoia and polarisation, can prove explosive. And so it was that on December 9th widespread protests and riots began. Over the course of the next few years more than 150 Israelis were killed by Palestinians. In the same period more than a thousand Palestinians died at Israeli hands, while almost as many were killed as collaborators by other Palestinians (mostly without credible evidence).

It’s a cycle of violence that still continues today, with little or no real progress having been made. The actions of both sides have roots that stretch back generations. The Israeli soldier manning a checkpoint in the Occupied Territories has been raised to believe that only through demonstrations of strength and power can the genocide of the jewish people be avoided. This does not legitimise their actions, but it does explain them. And it also explains why it is unreasonable to expect a solution to come from within mainstream Israeli culture.

The Palestinian militant, on the other hand, sees the occupation of their land and the oppression of their people. They see their family struggling to secure basic necessities such as food and water, and quite understandably views Israel as an enemy to be resisted and overthrown. While those of us who instinctively support the underdog may view their militancy as understandable – even legitimate – it is nonetheless irrational and self-destructive and those engaged in it are just as trapped by history as their Israeli counterparts.

For in a situation where one side enjoys overwhelming military supremacy but is suffering extreme paranoia, while the other is in a cage of poverty and oppression, all violence will simply feed the conflict. Indeed, even the threat of violence against a traumatised nation will trigger reprisals and a retreat deeper into paranoia.

The first intifada was the genesis both of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It involved thousands of attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, along with the peaceful protests and acts of civil disobedience. Yet nobody can deny that, however justifiable it may have been from a moral standpoint, it succeeded only in worsening relations between the two peoples and provoking massive retaliation. The aims of the Palestinian intifada are to be lauded and supported – the “shaking off” of oppression and the formation of an autonomous nation. The actions of Israel on the other hand – while not to be justified – must always be viewed through the prism of their history.

Ultimately the solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis will not come from either wall-building or intifada, for such strategies merely entrench the adversarial positions both sides have found themselves in. The solution requires patience, creativity and empathy, more than it requires guns, roadblocks and bomb vests. It requires an international community prepared to treat both sides as equals. To accept that neither side is in full control of their actions and thus must be guided, firmly but with compassion, towards a just solution.

Perhaps the most famous Zionist in history, Albert Einstein, wrote that “the attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people”. Arguably Israel has so far failed that test. But on this anniversary, let us all look towards the day when that change … when both peoples escape the prisons of their history and find themselves inspired by the hopes of a peaceful future rather than the fear of a violent past.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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7th December 1985 The Death of Robert Graves


Robert Graves

Today we pay tribute to the extraordinary English poet, novelist, translator and scholar, Robert Graves  – a literary giant, who died thirty-two years ago on this day. Seemingly effortlessly, Robert Graves’ career straddled vast tracts of time, his biography featuring such diverse accounts as poet Siegfried Sassoon’s World War One trench madness to playing host to the Soft Machine at his Majorcan home in the late 1960s. Like William Burroughs, Graves is ubiquitous in Western culture. He made his name as a war poet, then authored arguably the finest autobiography of the Great War in Good-Bye to All That. To most, Graves’ legend was already assured but he had barely begun. In his bestselling book I, Claudius, Graves gave us the most widely known and influential historical novel of his time. He dared to redo the Greek myths, and nowadays his are the orthodox editions. Collaborating with Jewish scholar Joshua Podro, Graves published the 982-page The Nazarene Gospel Restored, which systematically and painstakingly compared all of the orthodox gospels with those sacred texts omitted from the New Testament, proving that much of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not in opposition to his Jewish forebears as Saint Paul’s version likes to make out. Robert Graves had always viewed the debasement of women and the overwhelming and overweening patriarchal values of Western society as the two basic flaws from which he felt we should free ourselves. But it was not until the 1948 publication of The White Goddess, that Graves set down in a somewhat hysterical black-and-white, his controversial belief that civilisation had romped forwards in progress only when it had overwhelmed the previously all-powerful matriarchal societies. And despite the scholarly backup and scientific evidence of The White Goddess having been rigorously contested down the scores of years since its publication, it has been this curious little book – subtitled “A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth” – which has, with all its attendant insights and brain-capers, continued to illuminate the ways of poets and artists of subsequent generations. It is to be hoped that Graves himself would have been most delighted by this poetic turn of events, for he considered himself first and foremost a poet, and novels such as I, Claudius as mere wage-earners: “Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.”

[Written by Saoirse Ó Gradaigh]

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4th December 1969 The Murder of Fred Hampton


Murderous Chicago police officers cannot contain their glee as they carry off the body of Fred Hampton

Today we pay tribute to and recall the shocking circumstances surrounding the murder of Fred Hampton – 21-year-old deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and considered by many to be the most inspiring young African-American leader to emerge in the wake of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.. On this day in 1969, Hampton was brutally assassinated by the Chicago Police in collusion with, and on the direct orders of, the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and commanded the notorious COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program) to neutralize leading black political activists and destroy their organisations.

Noam Chomsky describes this shocking incident as “the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration” – and for those with an anti-authority interest, I would urge you to watch the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton. But let us now briefly recall the facts of this shameful chapter in American history, and lament the loss of a true luminary – whose murder heralded the end of the Sixties, and with it that decade’s revolutionary dream.

At 4.00am on December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided the apartment that was home to several of the city’s most prominent Black Panthers. Mark Clark, the BPP defense captain, was on security duty. He had time for one reflexive shot at the ceiling before the Chicago police opened fire on him. Over 200 gunshots would be fired in the next five minutes, but Clark’s was the only one from a Panther rifle. The police then turned their machine guns towards the wall of the bedroom where Fred Hampton lay sleeping with his fiancé, Deborah Johnson, eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their son. Johnson tried desperately to rouse Hampton, but he never woke. Earlier in the evening, Hampton had been drugged by his trusted bodyguard, William O’Neal – who was in fact an FBI informant and had back-stabbingly provided the Chicago police with a floor plan of the apartment. As fellow Panthers screamed that they were shooting at a heavily pregnant woman, police stormed the bedroom and removed Johnson. Two officers approached the still-sleeping Fred Hampton who’d been shot and wounded in the shoulder. After a chilling silence came the sound of two shots, fired at point-blank range into Hampton’s head. “He’s good and dead now,” one officer was heard to have said.

Four other Panthers sustained gunshot wounds. All were arrested and charged with attempted murder as the Chicago police lied through their teeth about what went down. At a press conference the next day, Chicago’s finest insisted they’d been “violently attacked” by the Panthers and were simply themselves. As evidence, they issued a photograph of a door with “bullet holes” later discovered to be nail heads. The grieving Chicago Panthers responded by inviting the public to view the crime scene. Thousands visited and were appalled by the bloody and indisputable slaughter of these young civil rights leaders.

No law enforcement officials were ever convicted of the crimes. Bu when activists burgled a Pennsylvania FBI office in 1971, they discovered and exposed documents conclusively proving that the raid had been a successful assassination attempt sanctioned by the FBI. Informant William O’Neal had been paid handsomely for his dirty deed, it was discovered,  but he would never again know peace. Years later he committed suicide after admitting his involvement in Hampton’s assassination.

Although the sickening story of Fred Hampton’s death is sadly indivisible from his life, on this anniversary of his assassination, let us not neglect to pay tribute to this quite remarkable young man – targeted specifically by the FBI for what they identified as his “messianic” qualities. To members of Chicago’s African American community in the late 1960s, no leader was more inspiring, articulate, effective or dedicated to the liberation of black people than Fred Hampton. A relentless grass roots organiser, he established food pantries, educational programs, recreational outlets and free breakfasts for impoverished black children. Perhaps his most extraordinary accomplishment – and sobering evidence of what more he might have achieved – was his brokering of a non-aggression pact between Chicago’s notoriously violent multi-racial street gangs. In May of 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce a truce had been declared among this “rainbow coalition,” a phrase coined by Hampton and made popular over the years by Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Fred Hampton’s murder was a great tragedy to all who knew him and a monumental setback to the civil rights movement. But the young Panther understood the threat he posed to the Establishment. One of the most celebrated orators of his generation, Hampton concluded a rallying speech shortly before his death with the chillingly prescient declaration: “But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary!”

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2nd December 1859 the Martyrdom of John Brown


John Brown on his way to the gallows and martyrdom

Today we honour a controversial World Martyr. A man so fervently opposed to racism that he was willing to die for it… but also to kill for it. A white man who killed white men – and sacrificed his own life – in order to free four million black people. For it was on this day in 1859 that John Brown – the legendary meteor who sparked the American Civil War – was hanged in the state of Virginia for the crimes of his one-man “Holy War”.

Six weeks earlier, immediately following his audacious raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown was imprisoned in Charles Town, Virginia, charged with murder, treason and inciting a slave insurrection – all three crimes punishable by death. Even more so than the raid itself, the trial of “one bold man … defending his rights in good earnest” caused a national sensation, arousing and intensifying the bitter divide between North and South. Intellectuals, poets and journalists – led by the Transcendentalists in the North, and Victor Hugo in France – began to write about John Brown as a Christian hero, a martyr, a man who would do that which even Frederick Douglass wouldn’t dare in order to eradicate slavery. The South, meanwhile, withdrew even further into defending its ‘traditions’ and deepened its hatred and suspicion of the North.

The trial of John Brown lasted three and a half days. The jury deliberated for just forty-five minutes before returning a guilty verdict on all three counts; the judge, without hesitation, sentenced death by hanging. With evangelical zeal, Brown accepted his fate. On the morning of his execution, he prophetically wrote: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” Escorted by a full 3,000 soldiers to ensure there was no chance to escape, Brown was led to a small field where the gallows and martyrdom awaited.

In the aftermath of the execution, Henry David Thoreau asserted that “[Brown] is more alive than he ever was. He has earned immortality … He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.” And indeed it would prove that the words and deeds of this one man, above all else, hastened the advance towards secession, war and – eventually – emancipation.

John Brown was a deeply religious man who believed it was his divine mission to abolish slavery. It is both disturbing and inspiring what this avenging angel was willing to do to achieve justice; even before Harpers Ferry, Brown’s ruthless actions in Bleeding Kansas earned him the reputation of a homicidal madman. The paradox that America needed to be morally rescued by a murderous freedom fighter has, inevitably, created for John Brown a thorny legacy. But, however fanatical his methods, history has proved that Brown was not mad. He was right.

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