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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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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.

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15th December 1890 The Death of Sitting Bull


“I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.” – Sitting Bull

Today we lament the death of Sitting Bull – arguably the most famous-ever Native American – murdered by Indian “police” during a bungled effort to arrest the legendary 59-year-old Sioux chief. Five years earlier, Sitting Bull had received a vision that he would die at the hands of his own exploited people, as had his fellow heroic resistor, Crazy Horse, with whom Sitting Bull had so famously united to defeat Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. But Crazy Horse was murdered just fifteen months after what was to be the last great Indian victory, and Sitting Bull would live for another fourteen protracted years – during which time he bore witness to the systematic destruction of the Sioux traditions and desecration of their sacred lands in the Black Hills of South Dakota. These last years of Sitting Bull’s life – following his surrender to the U.S. Army after cold and hunger forced him and his band to return from exile in Canada – saw this great shaman and inaugurated leader of all the Sioux tribes detained for nearly two years as a prisoner of war, confined to a small allotment within the Standing Rock reservation where he was denied the right to hunt, embroiled in a constant feud with U.S. Indian agent James McLaughlin, and even reduced to a “feature attraction” in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West exhibition tour. Yet despite such dishonours enforced upon him in this period of extreme transition as the Great Plains tribes were finally pacified, Sitting Bull remained to his death the white man’s boldest, strongest and most stubborn opponent. He battled the land agreements of 1888 and 1889, which demanded the return of half the Great Sioux Reservation for white settlement and divided the rest into six separate reservations; when the federal government exploited Sioux factionalism amongst the “government-appointed chiefs” in order to obtain the necessary signatures for this new so-called treaty, Sitting Bull alone refused to sign; and, somehow, he remained a beacon of hope amongst his increasingly hopeless people.

Against reservation policy, the Sioux continued to recognise and revere Sitting Bull as their leader. Indeed, so fearful was McLaughlin of the great chief’s support for the ill-fated Ghost Dance – the religious movement that swept through the Great Plains tribes throughout 1890, carrying the promise of an end to White expansionism and the return of the nearly-extinct buffalo – that he ordered Sitting Bull’s arrest under the pretext of a suspected uprising. And so, at 5.30am on 15th December 1890, McLaughlin dispatched thirty-nine tribal policemen who surrounded Sitting Bull’s cabin. A group of Ghost Dancers, determined to protect their leader, opened fire. Sitting Bull was killed in the melee, along with 15 others. Buried in a corner of the Fort Yates military cemetery, even in death the great chief was deemed a threat. His relatives were refused permission to hold a public burial. His body was desecrated by the white man with quicklime and acid to prevent the taking of relics.

It was a tragically senseless death for this holy man who – as a sash-wearer in the Brave Heart soldier society of the Hunkpapa – had sacrificed 100 pieces of flesh from his arm during his legendary sun-dance ceremony that preceded Little Bighorn and vowed to give his life in defense of his people. But was it, as has so often been said, an ignominious death? By his own judgment, Sitting Bull died for that which he loved: “Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?”

The murder of Sitting Bull would trigger the Wounded Knee Massacre just two weeks later, marking the end of the Indian Wars and the total subjugation of the Lakota tribes.

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20th October 1926 the Death of Eugene V. Debs


Eugene Debs

Today we pay tribute to Eugene Victor Debs – the most prominent proponent of socialism ever to emerge from the United States. A candidate for president five times under the banner of the Socialist Party of America, under Debs’s leadership socialism became, for a time, a viable national political movement. Renowned and admired for his compassion, generosity, sensitivity and strong convictions even amongst opponents of his radical ideas, as we recall this great man, there must also be a sense of lament for what he might have achieved as a world leader.

Propelled into a lifetime of socialism by the Depression of 1893, Debs organised the first industrial union – ­the American Railway Union – and went on to lead its members during the infamous Pullman strike, described in the New York Times as “a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital”. He then became a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, but his primary devotion was to his beloved Socialist Party and his dream of a benevolent, classless society. Debs became the Great Voice of the Underdogs through his considerable oratory gifts – thousands would turn out to hear him wherever he spoke – but his most famous-ever public moment was his notorious anti-World War I speech delivered at the Ohio State Convention of the Socialist Party on 16th June 1918, which led to his arrest for violating the Espionage Act and crimes of sedition. He defended himself at the subsequent trial, refusing to call any witnesses. Moments before he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, he spoke these famous words:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Debs served thirty-two months (during which time he still managed to run for president – his fifth candidacy – polling nearly a million votes) before President Warren Harding commuted his sentence and pardoned him on Christmas Day 1921. Howard Zinn tells the following story, which serves as a wonderful and accurate testament to Debs’ character and popularity: “On the day of his release, the warden ignored prison regulations and opened every cellblock to allow more than 2,000 inmates to gather in front of the main jail building to say goodbye to Eugene Debs. As he started down the walkway from the prison, a roar went up and he turned, tears streaming down his face, and stretched out his arms to the other prisoners.”

In a life of many great acts, this was to be Debs’ last – neither he nor the Socialist Party would recover from America’s first Red Scare in the years following the Great War. And as capitalism flexed its powerful muscle, the great socialist experiment was consigned to an embarrassing memory in American history. Debs died five years after his release from prison.

But as the bitter fallout from unchecked capitalism continues to unravel, now might be a prudent time to recall these prescient words written by Eugene Victor Debs:

“The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society – we are on the eve of universal change.”

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22nd August 1989 the Death of Huey P. Newton


On this day in 1989, revolutionary leader and co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton was shot and killed when a drug deal went wrong. He was forty-seven years old. After his glory years in the 1960s during which time Newton was the most powerful voice in the Panthers’ crusade to establish equality for black Americans through militant organisation and community programs, the subsequent slog, drudgery and cultural disintegration of the 70s and 80s saw Newton drifting into the very downward spiral against which he’d so long railed. Ironically, his murderer, a young dealer named Tyrone Robinson, had once been a recipient of the “Free Breakfast”, one of the many initiatives that Newton had set up in his hometown of Oakland, California to improve life for the poor blacks of his community. As the crack-addicted Newton stared into the barrel that would soon fire three bullets into his face, he said to his killer: “You can kill my body, but you can’t kill my soul. My soul will live forever.”

Ignominious though his death may have been, Huey P. Newton’s life was anything but. He was a man of destiny who had set out to change the course of his own people’s destiny, in his own words, ‘by any means necessary.’ Speaking at Newton’s funeral, his fellow Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale said: “He stood for all of us, and he did so in ways very few people could even attempt … The debt we owe to HPN is one that can never be paid and may never even be fully understood.”

It’s more convenient for traditionalists and liberals to consign the legacy of Huey P. Newton to “controversial” than to recall with truth the oppressive milieu in which he was forced to act. And so, on the occasion of this revolutionary’s death, I have linked to this post a film so that we may be reminded of the trail Huey P Newton and the Panthers blazed, and the critical social changes that occurred in their wake.

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11th August 1958 the Dockum Sit-In


Dockum Sit-In Memorial

On this day in 1958, the owner of Kansas’s state-wide Rexall drugstores walked into Dockum’s, his flagship store in downtown Wichita. Observing a group of young black students sitting peacefully at the lunch counter, after several minutes of consideration, he said to his store manager: “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.” Thus successfully ended the first-ever sit-in of the civil rights movement.

Despite a state law passed in 1874 prohibiting segregation, Kansas nevertheless largely subscribed to the Deep South’s repugnant view of blacks. Wichita, near the Oklahoma border, was an exceptionally segregated community. Although the city’s establishments adhered to the law and did not display signs proclaiming their policies, blacks were ‘politely’ told that their custom was not welcome. The lunch counter of the downtown branch of Dockum Drug Store was the most popular daytime eatery. Under the drugstore’s unofficial policy, blacks were not allowed to sit at the counter to be served; instead, they ordered from a special window and then took their food outside.

Two black college students, Ron Walters and Carol Parks – President and Vice President of the Youth Council of the Wichita chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) respectively – conceived of the idea of a ‘sit-in’ to put pressure on Dockum to integrate. The NAACP advised against the proposal, preferring legal means to direct action. Nonetheless, Walters and Parks determined to execute the plan and set about recruiting others to join them. Forty students agreed, and for several weeks, Walters – taking inspiration the victorious Montgomery Bus Boycott – trained the students to ignore taunts, no matter how provocative, and to at all times behave with dignity and purpose.

On 19th July 1958, several black students entered Dockum Drug Store, sat down at the lunch counter, and remained there – without being served – from lunch until after the dinner hour. This pattern would continue on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for the next three weeks. The students were never served. They endured constant verbal abuse. Gangs of white hoodlums threatened bodily harm. The local newspapers ignored the protest – too chicken to offend such a lucrative advertiser as Dockum. And all the while, the police turned a blind eye.

But still, the students persisted. For three weeks they held their nerve and took their places at the lunch counter. And finally, at 10 o’clock on the morning of 11th August, they triumphed. They celebrated by ordering, and being served, coca colas. The very same day, all the stores of the Rexall chain were desegregated. It had been a state-wide victory. The students had pioneered what would soon become a powerful tactic in the battle for civil rights – a public display of determination, dignity and tenacity. Nineteen months later in Greensboro, North Carolina, by which time the NAACP had bowed to pressure and endorsed sit-ins, blacks would employ this very tactic to catapult the civil rights movement to the top of America’s social agenda.

Overshadowed by events at Greensboro – which received massive national media coverage – it was not until 2006 that the NAACP formally recognised the Wichita protesters as the originators of the civil rights movement’s sit-ins. Ron Walters has gone on to enjoy an illustrious career as an educator in African American history and politics – but his Wikepedia entry mentions nothing of his contribution to altering American history.

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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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29 August 1867 The First Gay-Rights Activist Speaks Out


Karl Heinrich Ulrichs – pioneer of the modern gay rights movement.

It was in the 4th century immediately after the Roman Empire became a de facto Christian state that the first anti-homosexual laws appeared. Thereafter, for the next 1500 years, the criminalisation of homosexuality spread voraciously and plague-like across the whole of Europe. So severe were the punishments that it was actually considered “progress” when in 1860 Great Britain reduced its penalty for homosexual acts from death by hanging to life imprisonment. So entrenched had this monocratic crusade become that no one dared challenge it. But on 29 August 1867 – and do please take note that this was over a century before Stonewall – 42-year-old German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs did just that. With his heart pounding and cognisant that “the distant gaze of comrades of my nature” was upon him, Ulrichs mounted the speaker’s box of Munich’s Odeon Theatre and, in front of 500 of Germany’s most esteemed jurists, pleaded for the repeal of anti-homosexual laws. Or, to be more accurate, sodomy laws – for Ulrichs’ action so far preceded the emergence of any LGBT movement that the word “homosexual” had not yet even been coined. The courage Ulrichs possessed is almost unfathomable. For this was not only the first public challenge to these noxious laws, it was the most open acknowledgement of the taboo concept of homosexuality witnessed anywhere in Europe since the days of Ancient Rome – and made by a self-proclaimed homosexual, no less!

Five years prior, Ulrichs had already declared himself to friends and family and in print an Urning (his own term for a man who desired another man), making him the first known gay man in the modern age to out himself. Ulrichs would go on to publish twelve pioneering works about sexuality, under his own name, including the first theory about homosexuality – arguing, against the religious notions of “corruption” and “perversion”, that same-sex love was in fact an entirely natural and in-born condition. Furthermore, Ulrichs’ vision extended far beyond the decriminalisation of homosexuality to nothing less than equal rights with heterosexuals.

Ulrichs’ plea to the Congress of German Jurists that day in 1867 was loudly shouted down. But, amongst the overwhelming cries of “No!” there were a few encouraging shouts to “Continue!” A small but momentous crack in the bulwark had been made. Just three decades later, the ground-breaking ideas of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs would inspire and launch a German gay-rights movement so advanced that we would not see its likes again until the 21st century. Fin de siècle Berlin emerged as the gay capital of the world. Ulrichs would directly inspire and influence German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, who in 1897 founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee – the world’s first gay and transgender rights organisation. Under the liberal Weimar Republic, gays were free from prosecution, gay-rights organisations flourished, Hirschfeld was permitted to openly conduct sex and gender studies (he calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible combinations of sexual characteristics). There were even early experiments in gender-reassignment surgery; in 1930, Hirschfeld himself supervised the first procedure of transgender pioneer Lile Elbe.

The arrival of the Nazis in German politics, however, brutally destroyed all such cultural advances, quashing those ideas that Ulrichs begat, then erasing his name from memory. Between 1933 and 1945, Hitler’s Nazi regime targeted more than one million homosexual Germans as part of their “purification” purge. An estimated 50,000 gay men were imprisoned – some of whom were sent to concentration camps, where SS lackeys used them for target practice, aiming at the pink triangles they were forced to wear. The Nazi persecution of homosexuals would not be fully acknowledged until 2002.

As for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, after repeated arrests, he gave up his one-man battle and in 1879 fled to Italy. He died on 14 July 1895, not knowing that his works would become the foundation for gay-rights and non-binary activists. Despite enduring constant harassment, persecution and imprisonment, he had no regrets:

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

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9 January 1905 The Divine Life of Louise Michel


The saint-like Louise Michel

Born on this day in 1830, at the dawn of an extraordinary revolutionary age, Louise Michel was the Transcendent Revolutionary – an extraordinary French woman whose ideals and displays of generosity to the Parisian poor existed at such a hands-on level that she was known even in her own lifetime as ‘’The Sister of Charity’. For her selfless devotion to France’s revolutionary cause, and for the religious manner in which she lived, Mme. Michel earned another portentous nickname ‘The Red Virgin of Montmartre’ – Christlike in her compassion for the downtrodden, a teacher to the ignorant and the destitute, an ardent helper of minority races, this illegitimate daughter of a servant and a dissolute nobleman – her high ideals aloof from the possibilities of failure – caused such constant and chronic problems for the French authorities that they eventually exiled her to a distant island. This is Louis Michel: so high falutin different from the herd that she was even raised in a castle. Her outpourings of poetry, her many musical compositions, her fascination for horticulture, her need to learn obscure languages: all these things point directly to a busy bee obsessed always with the cross pollinations of Culture – not just her own culture, but all those with which she made contact. To Louise Michel, every culture belonged to and was a part of its people. To wrestle control of that culture from the stultifying interpretations of the Top Knobs was her goal.

So what made a saint of this lifelong contrarian? What makes a saint? In each case, it’s their determination to do what is necessary, by any means necessary. Canonisation comes much later – everyday pains-in-the-arse get ahead, but Visionary Moaners will not go unheard! Such was Louise Michel.

Mme. Michel was 41 when she first exploded on to the political scene as the famed heroine of the Paris Commune – that momentous turning point when the working classes briefly seized power for the first time and, for 72 elevating days, proceeded to form their own pioneering socialist government. This trailblazing experiment set about reinventing society, introducing free meals and housing for the poor, increasing workers’ wages, and proclaiming freedom of the press. Unlike most women in revolutionary history, Michel did not play a supporting role. Indeed, simply describing Louise Michel’s daily actions explain how capably she shattered all gender assumptions. Chairing political and vigilance committees, appropriating churches for use as schools, co-steering the iconoclastic feminist movement, fighting in military uniform alongside her male Communards, even dragging the wounded to safety as an ambulance nurse – hands-on, sleeves rolled up, in the thick of it always. Other Communards often displayed centuries-old prejudices – not Louise Michel. Against even the wishes of her comrades, she demanded that prostitutes be welcomed into the Commune’s nursing corps: “Who has more right than these women, the most pitiful of the old order’s victims, to give their lives for the new?”

The French government eventually sent in the army who, during the infamous ‘Bloody Week’, massacred an estimated 20,000 Communards. Forced afterwards to stand trial, in a stunningly defiant speech, Louise Michel demanded her equal right to the same death sentence as her male comrades: “Since it seems that any heart which beats for freedom has the right only to a small lump of lead, I demand my share. If you are not cowards, kill me!”

But the government was unwilling to make a martyr of France’s legendary “Red Virgin”. Instead, this French heroine was exiled to New Caledonia, a distant Pacific island. Even here, however, her beatific nature could not be suppressed as she made botanical experiments while crystallising her political ideas – she would become an Anarchist. And while fellow Communard prisoners displayed hostility and racism towards the indigenous Kanaks, Mme. Michel instead befriended them, learned their language and customs, then helped to organise their independence movement – to eliminate central power everywhere remained always her mantra.

When after seven years the exiled Communards were granted an amnesty in 1880, Louise Michel received a hero’s welcome upon her return to Paris. For the rest of her days she would continue to agitate and educate, her fiery speeches and eloquent writings giving voice to the plight of the have-nots. For this, she still suffered constant harassment, even further imprisonment, but never did she abandon her dedication to improving the lives of others. And while we can be certain no church will ever canonise her, she is nevertheless the Saint of Anarchism. Bless her!

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18th May 1980 the Death of Ian Curtis


ic_manchester79_tjda_rehearsal1 “If somebody kills themselves, they have the last word.” – Deborah Curtis

Thirty-eight years ago today, Ian Curtis killed himself.

Tragic rock’n’roll deaths, and suicides especially, are such obvious breeding grounds for romanticised cults. We’ve mythologized Cobain and Curtis to such an extent that it is impossible to consider their music separately from the heavy reality of what happened next. We’ve morbidly, voyeuristically, pored over the hideous clues in Ian Curtis’s lyrics; our endless fascination at times resembling a highbrow version of Peaches Geldof’s death and the ensuing media & public hysteria (lest we forget the whole “Ian Curtis died for you” malarkey that a Google search now attributes to Paul Morley in the NME, but my own memory says it was Dave McCulloch in Sounds). Yet in our wallowing, we risk overlooking what is at the heart of these myths: they would not endure and we would not be so moved if the art was not worthy.

Ian Curtis was a great poet. His melancholic (as opposed to melodramatic) lyrics are fine and true enough to withstand isolated, black-and-white scrutiny. But, in the grand tradition of lyric poetry – which has always been an oral art – his words demanded vocalisation. And it was with an Artaud-like completeness that the sound and vision conceived by Joy Division provided the apocalyptically bleak foundation for the haunted poetry. The result was both mesmeric and metaphysical. It was a brand new sound and, although Martin Hannett’s distinctive production will forever betray its true age on the corporeal plane, those of us who bought Unknown Pleasures in 1979 knew without the benefit of tragedy-informed hindsight that we were experiencing something Eternal.

2008’s Joy Division documentary and the previous year’s biopic Control – based on Deborah Curtis’s book Touching From A Distance (which, I’m embarrassed to admit, I initially and rashly mocked but did a volte-face after I actually read it; it is most excellent) – did much to both debunk and propagate The Ian Curtis Myth. We learned that he was once a happy Bowie fan; an easy-going guy who liked to go to the pub, hang out with his mates and actually had a sense of humour. And, with a youthfully foolish lack of foresight, it had been his idea to get married (Control however falsely portrays a spontaneous suggestion from Ian to start a family even though Deborah admits in her book that this had been her wish). But while great effort is made to provide evidence that he was ‘normal’ (ie.  he did not emerge from the womb tortured), we also discovered the downright eerie story behind “She’s Lost Control” and Ian’s own subsequent and beyond coincidental epilepsy; the countless notebooks he kept from a very early age, spilling over with poetry and lyrics; the evolution of that dance; and, most intriguingly, the truth about his relationship with Annik Honore. Both films also help us better understand the cocktail of struggles that proved to be lethal: he might have been able to conquer his relationship traumas if his epilepsy had been properly medicated and had he lived in a time when mental health was better understood. As it was, the landscape of the early 1980s working-class north was in no way equipped to help a sombre poet whose relentless inner soundtrack was Throbbing Gristle’s “Weeping”.

On the evening of May 18th 1980, my friend Tim phoned to tell me that we would not in fact be going to see Joy Division in two days’ time at NYC’s Hurrah as we had been so eagerly anticipating. Four months later, along with my fellow RnR obsessive Patty, I would witness New Order’s first-ever US show (Maxwell’s, Hoboken, New Jersey; pre-Gillian, with the three JD survivors timidly, uncertainly, taking turns on lead vocals). We hung out with the guys for a while after the show. All perfectly nice and chatty, they were so unlike what I was expecting. But what on earth was I ‘expecting’? I was already completely in thrall to the Joy Division myth.

Tempting as it is to dismiss the cult of the Rock’n’Roll Suicide as nothing but an emo-like celebration of the macabre, the quixotic attraction is verily but an adjunct to that most time-honoured and archetypal artistic theme: death (the Romantics themselves would overly romanticise 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton). Ian Curtis ensured he would have the “last word” on his artistic legacy, for there really can be no separation from his final statement and the art (“Cold as the grave, has the infinity of a Gustave Doré hell” was Jon Savage’s appraisal of Joy Division’s music in his forward to Deborah Curtis’s book). Yet if we accept the idea of a ‘myth’ not as a falsehood but as a sacred narrative that can provide a broader insight into life, then the Ian Curtis/JD myth is justifiably compelling as evidence of humanity’s profound relationship to art and our artists, and our ability and/or need to be deeply touched, if only from a distance.

RIP Ian Curtis. Ian Curtis Forever.

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24th March 1976 Argentina’s Dirty War


VIctims of the Dirty War – “Los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared.

Victims of the Dirty War – “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared”.

On this day in 1976, power was seized in a coup d’etat by a military junta that would rule Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Throughout those seven grueling years, Argentines endured a repressive regime of indiscriminate violence, persecution, torture, kidnappings, theft of babies born in captivity, and – infamously – the disappearance and assumed deaths of an estimated 30,000 people. This unchecked state terrorism came to be known as the “Dirty War”.

The roots of the Dirty War go back to 1955 and the overthrow of the legendary populist President Juan Perón, heralding an unstable political period alternating between dictatorships and restricted democracies. The next 18 years saw Argentina plagued by antagonistic political sides – some linked to transformation by democratic means, others backing the military and those with economic power. In the first half of the ’70s the predictable became inevitable: a huge conflict and irreconcilable division between the two. This inauspiciously coincided with the 1973 American-backed coup in Chile against socialist president Salvador Allende. That same year, Perón returned to Argentina from exile and was rapturously received. He won his third term as president but had become so out of touch that he was unable to lead a country that had moved on in his absence. He died in 1974, leaving power to his third wife and widow Isabel – whose weakness opened the door for the seizure of power.

And so occurred the military coup on March 24th 1976 led by right-wing militant General Jorge Videla and his resultant “Process of National Reorganization”: a conservative, militarized, Catholic vision of what the country should be. But the truth of his vision included a campaign of extermination against the so-called “subversion” – a term that included intellectuals and militants of the left, freethinkers, atheists, homosexuals, disobedients, and other arbitrary ‘outcasts’. This Dirty War was part of the greater Operation Cóndor – an unholy alliance of intelligence and coordination between the military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia with connections to Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela – aided and abetted by the United States through the CIA. The technical services of the CIA provided torture equipment and advised on how to deal “effectively” with resistance. US involvement along with the cover-up of crimes was a conscious policy proposed by Henry Kissinger who, according to Christopher Hitchens, was the ideologist behind Operation Cóndor. America’s involvement was only disclosed when secret documents were declassified during the administration of President Bill Clinton.

But while Operation Cóndor extended throughout South America, the Dirty War was Argentina’s own – the most macabre face of which was “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared.” Many people, both opponents of the government as well as innocent people, “disappeared” in the middle of the night – taken to secret government detention centers where they were tortured and eventually killed. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo deserve distinguished mention for their courage during these dark years. Demanding the whereabouts of their sons and daughters, they never stopped marching every Thursday around the pyramid of Plaza de Mayo opposite the House of Government wearing a white scarf on their heads made with cloth diapers to represent their lost children. Their struggle turned into a fundamental part of this bleak chapter in Argentina’s history: while the world turned a blind eye, they made the invisible visible. Some time ago one mother said ‘… not only was it a question of transmitting the truth, but also of finding it.’

The legacies of the Dirty War are many and Argentina has had to deal with them in different ways. In economic terms the consequences left the burden of an increased national debt as well as social inequality that continues to this day. As for the countless atrocities committed, these have been the subject of much discussion… but finally the issue of state terrorism and violation of human rights has begun to be addressed and redressed. There have been trials and convictions for many and that has served as balm for the survivors, but lest we forget that dictatorship is a past that remains present within the political agenda and some who are in power today once swam dangerously close to those sinister waters.

24 March is now a public holiday in Argentina – The Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice – commemorating the victims of the Dirty War. And today in Argentina the story is quite another; better, although still uncertain. The precarious democracies of Latin America – mostly autocracies – are adept to the cult of personality: whoever yells the loudest tends to prevail. But the truth is that they don’t care about the people. Moreover, the temptation of rulers to succumb to corruption remains and looks like a perennial calamity in the form of tragic destiny.

[Written by Daniel Renne]

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31st October 1517 Martin Luther Posts the Ninety-Five Theses


Nailing the Ninety-Five

Martin Luther Nails It

Despite the best efforts of fundamentalists of all kinds to have it otherwise, most of us are products of a generally secular society. This makes it almost impossible for us to conceive of a time when every expression of thought, philosophic, political or cultural, was expressed within the terms of reference of religion. But making that mental leap is precisely what we have to do in order to appreciate quite how revolutionary it was when an unknown German clergyman posted up on a church door his list of grievances against the Catholic Church in 1517. In so doing Martin Luther started a chain of events that would bring the Middle Ages to an end. In truth his was neither the first, nor the most radical, challenge to church authority, but it came at a time of political and social upheaval that gave Luther immense historical significance.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the multifunctional organisation at the heart of every aspect of society. Quite apart from being one of the most powerful landowners in Europe, it held the virtual monopoly on knowledge, education and culture, and acted as the arbiter of morality and legitimacy. Luther’s challenge to priestly authority broke this monopoly at a time when Medieval society was starting to fracture politically, socially and economically. For Christians this marks the birth of the Protestant Reformation, and for historians it marks the beginning of Modern Europe.

From a 21st century perspective this upheaval starts with a seemingly technical and narrow argument over the corrupt sale of ‘indulgences’. Indulgences were remissions from God’s punishment issued by the Church in return for charitable works. In reality, in a church riddled with corruption and greed this meant that salvation could be bought by those who had the money to do so. In 1517 Luther, a German friar and scholar published his grievances against these abuses. It set him on a trajectory that would call into question the basis of church authority and of salvation itself. As a result within three years he would be excommunicated by the pope, and a proclaimed an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor. Luther might have disappeared from history, like many other previous religious dissidents, had he not had the protection of the Elector of Saxony who had his own grievances with the Holy Roman Empire.

It was whilst under this protection that Luther developed an ideology that would become recognisable as Protestantism. He developed a rationale that every individual was responsible for their own salvation based on a personal relationship with God – what Christians would call ‘faith’ – and not on adherence to a set of practises and observances ordered by a church hierarchy. For Protestants, the source of religious authority did not lie with a church hierarchy but with scripture – which it was both the right and duty of each individual to study in their own language. It was an ideology that was deeply attracted to any group that found itself in conflict with the Medieval establishment and the status quo. And in this respect there was not one but several Reformations.

Within the ruling classes there were those – like the Elector of Saxony – who in their jockeying for power adopted Protestantism as an act of realpolitik to justify wars against their neighbours. For the middle class, the craftsmen and merchants, previously on the margins of medieval society but becoming increasingly powerful, Protestantism promised a very attractive elevation of the free individual. Amongst the peasant masses, Protestantism provided a liberating focus of protest against centuries of Church repression and corruption. For two centuries these peasant masses had found an ideological expression of their grievances in radical religious movements as diverse as the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Central Europe.

In the 1520s a series of peasant revolts again expressed the ideas of Protestantism. The logic of Protestantism suggested a radically different form of church – a free assembly of like-minded individuals. However the implication of removing a church hierarchy was that of also removing a social hierarchy. In 1524 the German peasants expressed this in the Memmingen Charter – an anti-feudal manifesto that called for an end to serfdom and common ownership of land. Munster where the city was under the leadership of radical Protestants a kind of proto-socialist municipality was established, and ruthlessly suppressed by church and spiritual authorities, as were peasant revolts throughout Europe.

However, this kind of radicalism was not at all Luther’s vision of Reformation. Distancing himself from radical groups such as the Anabaptists, Luther made it very clear on which side he stood, declaring ‘better the death of all peasants than of princes and magistrates’. Until his death, Luther lived under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, developing his theology and re-organising the church in Saxony. This new church represented Luther’s compromise between his theology and his distrust of the masses and their radicalism. The result was what came to be known as ‘Lutheranism’ – a protestant theology welded to a reformed church hierarchy. This was very much ‘Reformation from above’.

In many parts of Northern Europe, particularly where the emerging middle classes were strongest, an alliance developed between them and some disaffected elements of the old nobility. They embraced this new form of religion, and derived their power and prosperity not from land ownership but from trade and commerce. This signalled a break with the Middle Ages and heralded the start of a new era, now recognisable as the first stages of modern Capitalism. Sociologist Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism saw an inextricable link between the two.

Luther is not necessarily a character that it is easy to like. Added to his distrust of the masses, he has also been credited as developing a particular German strand of anti-Semitism. However if for nothing else, he deserves to be remembered for his courage in standing up for the primacy of the individual conscience in defiance of seemingly unassailable authority: “I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.”

[Written by journeyman]

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12th November 1924 the Death of E.D. Morel


E.D. Morel

A man who helped to bring about the end of a brutal empire, whose tireless campaigning laid the groundwork for groups like Amnesty International, and who defeated Winston Churchill in an election – but who nobody has heard of – surely deserves the accolade “Unsung Hero”. This is why today we celebrate Edmund Dene Morel, who died on this day in 1924.

Morel’s story begins with the invention of the pneumatic tyre, and the ensuing popularity of bicycles – which led to an enormous demand for rubber. That rubber was produced in the Congo, and shipped to Europe. The Congo was at that time known as Congo Free State, and was effectively King Leopold’s of Belgium’s personal property, which he ruled with his own private army.

Morel was a shipping clerk in Liverpool. Having emigrated to England from France in his childhood, his fluency in French meant he was employed extensively in the Congo. Morel noticed that the ships were travelling from the Congo to Europe laden with rubber, but making the return voyage filled with soldiers and firearms – instruments that enforced a brutally unequal exchange.

Morel was outraged. He realised that the discrepancy meant forced labour and the theft of natural resources. Workers that failed to make quota faced having their hands amputated; rape, mutilation and murder were commonplace. Indeed, Leopold and his forces are today estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of up to 15 million Congolese.

The authorities tried to bribe Morel, then to coerce him, but he instead resigned from his job and started campaigning tirelessly to “expose and destroy what I knew then to be a legalised infamy… accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life.”

Morel armed himself with a camera, and brought back graphic images of mutilated children and piles of bodies that countered the official propaganda of the time. He wrote a book, “Red Rubber”, and also founded a newspaper, The West African Mail, which served as vehicles to expose and publicise what was happening. Most significantly, he set up the Congo Reform Association – the first mass human rights campaign. Other high profile people supported the CRA, notably Irish revolutionary and diplomat, Roger Casement, and authors Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain. The tide of public opinion eventually forced other Western governments to bring pressure on Belgium, and in 1908 Leopold sold his stake to the Belgian state at great personal profit. Reform was promised, but the atrocities continued. Morel and his Congo Reform Association continued to agitate for change for another four years.

As the Congo campaign ended, clouds were gathering over Europe. Morel returned to England and was selected as a Liberal Party candidate for the Birkenhead constituency. Concerned about how behind-the-scenes diplomacy was only making matters worse, he formed the Union of Democratic Control. This organisation became the biggest and most effective anti-war movement of the first world war.

Morel was hated by the jingoistic press who did everything they could to smear him. And smear him they did. UDC meetings were frequently disrupted, Morel was physically attacked several times, he was deselected as a parliamentary candidate by his own party, and, finally, arrested on order of the Home Secretary – despite the police being unable to find any evidence of criminality. Morel spent 6 months in Pentonville prison under such harsh conditions that he would never fully recovered from his ordeal.

After the war, Morel was an outspoken critic of the Treaty of Versailles, prophetically warning that its humiliating and restricting terms would lead to another war. He left the Liberal Party and joined the newly formed Independent Labour Party. Selected as a candidate for Dundee, he defeated Winston Churchill to win a seat in the first ever Labour Government. Beating Churchill gave him great pride:

 “I look upon Churchill as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart.”

It was widely expected that Morel would be given the post of foreign secretary, but Ramsay MacDonald took the unusual step of appointing himself to the role. In an attempt to keep him quiet, senior Labour figures nominated him for the 1924 Nobel Peace Prize. Once again, Morel proved to be intractable, speaking out against his party’s policies when he saw them as immoral. His influence led to the British Government recognising the new Communist government of Russia – something that the right wing press seized upon – and Labour in due course lost the next election. Morel retained his seat, but died of a heart attack a couple of weeks later.

In 1946, George Orwell recalled “this heroic but rather forgotten man” – but even the mighty pen of Orwell could not save Morel’s legacy from obscurity. And so, to this forgotten man on the anniversary of his passing, we remember and express our gratitude for his indefatigable efforts to expose gross and rampant abuses that would prove to be such a valuable blueprint for today’s human rights movements.

[Written by Paul Sharp]

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11th July 1960  Harper Lee Publishes To Kill A Mockingbird


“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

“…Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. “Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing … but sing their hearts out for us.

Nelle Harper E. Lee was born in Alabama in 1926 and wrote only one book in her lifetime, published on this day in 1960; the brilliant To Kill A Mockingbird. It won the Pulitzer-Prize and is one of the 20th century’s greatest literary works.

Now 53 years old, the book has been translated into 40 languages, sold 35 million copies, and was made into a film starring Gregory Peck for which he rightly won an Oscar in 1962.

The story of To Kill A Mockingbird confronts huge subjects head-on: racism, class, courage, forgiveness, loss, justice, crime, punishment, death, violence, being a woman, class. Despite being as complex as Dickens and as tragically beautiful as Shakespeare, it is written plainly, simply, beautifully. The story unfolds through the observations of a six-year-old girl, Scout Finch, and it is through her eyes, through laughter, irony and satire we learn what it is to be a decent human being.

Always shy of publicity, Lee considers To Kill A Mockingbird to be entirely self-explanatory and has always shied away from publicity or explanation. “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct…” she says.

When in 2011 she was asked why she never wrote anything else, she said: “Two reasons: one, I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill A Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.” Now aged 86, Harper Lee is partly deaf and blind, wheelchair-bound and suffering memory loss.

People of faith open their ancient, so-called ‘holy’ books to guide them in life. But for those of us living free of the dogma of invisible sky-gods, we turn to Dickens, Shakespeare and To Kill A Mockingbird for relevant, rational, universal moral guidance. Indeed, To Kill A Mockingbird topped a 2006 survey of librarians, ahead of the Bible and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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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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16th May 1918 The Sedition Act


The Sedition Act: “Freedom’s” just another word

“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,” states the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Except when it suits Congress. And ninety-nine years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson pushed through the Sedition Act of 1918 – a blatant breach of the most sacred of constitutional rights and what historian Geoffrey R. Stone calls “the most extreme anti-speech legislation” in American history.

In the repressive hysteria that followed America’s entry into World War One, the Sedition Act was an even more egregious amendment of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalised interference with the war effort or military recruitment. With utter dictatorial disregard for freedom of speech, Congress outlawed any utterance or expression of opinion that cast the government, the flag, the Constitution, military or war effort in a negative light. Dissent of any kind whatsoever was effectively gagged. Pacifists and other outspoken opponents of the war – of which there were many – were branded unpatriotic and disloyal criminals. Over 1000 dissidents were sentenced from 10 to 20 years in prison – often for merely passing out leaflets, engaging in discussion on street corners, or attending a meeting. Eugene Debs, who’d received more than a million votes as the socialist candidate for president five years earlier, attacked Wilson’s efforts to silence dissent: “It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make Democracy safe in the world.” For this he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

And just like Dubya’s post 9/11 Patriot Act (extended by Obama), Wilson’s bill was used as an opportunistic smokescreen to erode individual liberties of ‘undesirables’ in the name of national security. By criminalising the mere suggestion of any anti-American sentiment, the Sedition Act provided a convenient excuse to target, prosecute and, when possible, deport immigrants, labour activists and radicals – especially anarchists, Wobblies and socialists – whose movements had gained considerable momentum.

As evidenced by Nazi Germany’s heroic resistance movement the White Rose, wartime dissent can be the very essence of responsible and courageous citizenship. And the great irony of the Sedition Act is that history has shown the anti-WWI voices of dissent were in truth the most patriotic of all. As Howard Zinn asserted, in that utterly pointless war where over 30 million died in battle, of hunger or disease “…no one since that day has been able to show that [World War I] brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that it was an “imperialist war,” now seems moderate and hardly arguable.”

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9th May 1960  The Pill is Approved


Our bodies, our choice.

“No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother” – Margaret Sanger

The most revolutionary and liberating act for women is surely the availability of The Contraceptive Pill. Before The Pill contraception was a messy, hit-and-miss, often outlawed business. Women in the Ancient World fashioned vaginal tampons from a cocktail of leaves, honey, oils or animal dung. Condoms were made from animal intestines, leather or fine linen. And Casanova favoured the use of half a lemon placed on the cervix before coitus.

It wasn’t until 1839, when Charles Goodyear first vulcanised rubber and manufactured condoms and a proto-diaphragm, that contraception became much more effective than crossing your fingers. Condoms were rightly incredibly popular. But they relied entirely on a man’s willingness to use one. Women were still fucked.

What the girls were crying out for was a simple, private, effective, 100% female-controlled method. One where you didn’t have to fiddle around with unsexy rubber or poke about with pessaries, creams and little foil packets.

By the 1930s scientists had already worked out which hormones were responsible for ovulation and how they could be inhibited. But a way of synthesising progesterone proved tricky and expensive. Pharmaceutical companies seemed reluctant to get involved with the research. It wasn’t until 1951 that hormonal contraceptive research finally began. The first clinical trials took place five years later and on this day in 1960, the US Federal Drugs Administration finally approved the first oral contraceptive. Today, an estimated one hundred 100 million women worldwide now use The Pill. In the UK a third of women of reproductive age do so.

Now, no more fannying about: let’s get real.

“Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life” – Bertrand Russell

Check out this website and study the net population growth this year number very closely. Whatever you may think of the Chinese government’s controversial one-child-policy there is no doubt that they have at least done something about the global over-population crisis that no one (least of all politicians) dares talk about. Women, armed with information and the contraceptive pill, can avert the crisis. People need education about sex, sexual health, and the benefits of small, planned families right now if Bertrand Russell’s assertion is not to come true in our lifetimes. In some places it already is: Haiti, Rwanda, Bangladesh…

“Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion” – Spike Milligan

Unbelievably there are still governments and organisations around the world who misguidedly advocate abstinence and just-say-no campaigns, while simultaneously judging and condemning girls who have babies ‘out of wedlock’ or very young. This is 1. claptrap and 2. hypocrisy. It is right and natural for young people to explore their sexuality. Irrespective of what the Bishop of Rome says, people want to shag, even if His Holiness chooses to keep his cock in his boxers. Young people especially need to be armed with: accurate information, realistic expectations, the confidence to say yes or no, and the freedom from the risk of pregnancy and disease. For girls this means using The Pill as early as she and her doctor feel able, and for lads it means understanding it’s their responsibility to say: “even if you’re on The Pill, I need to use this condom.”

For those that think that telling kids about sex early leads to early first sex, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. Kids in The Netherlands who learn about sex young, delay their first sexual encounter until the age of 17.

It needs to become as easy to get hold of a condom in a poor country as Coca-Cola” – Clare Short

Our Sisters in developing countries need special attention and support. Millions of women, many denied an education and married off shockingly young, suffer poor health, grinding poverty and early death as a result of pregnancy after pregnancy, child after child. It was once like this in the UK. The Pill – and now hormone injections too, which act in the same way – can ease this needless suffering. Combined with the use of condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS, The Pill has the power to transform entire communities.

Now, after a hard day at work or caring for their much-wanted offspring, women in developed countries can kick off their shoes, lie back and make love to their partners free from the fear of pregnancy. But remember girls, The Pill is only 99.7% effective. My daughter’s middle name is 0.3%.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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19th April 1943 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising


Memorial to the heroic Jewish resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Of the many tales of sacrifice and struggle commemorated here at On This Deity, few can be more poignant or inspirational than today’s – the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

On this day in 1943, Nazi security forces began the work of ‘liquidating’ the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw that – since January of the same year – had offered armed resistance to the forced deportations. The fighters of the ghetto were from the start isolated, ill-equipped and with no real hope of any sustainable success. But they served as a beacon of hope, and inspired others to fight back.

Warsaw’s Jewish community was one of the largest in Europe. And in spite of a long history of Polish and Russian anti-Semitism, it had developed a longstanding and thriving Jewish quarter dating back to the thirteenth century. With the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, it was natural that Jews throughout Poland would seek refuge and support from the community in Warsaw. Within days of the Polish army’s collapse the Nazi authorities began to impose anti-Jewish laws and to segregate the city.

In November the Jewish quarter was effectively sealed off from the outside world with a 20-metre-high wall that stretched for 11 miles. The ghetto was officially established.

With the exception of a small number of skilled workers who left the ghetto during the day for work, contact with or from the outside was prohibited and enforced by death. Non-Jews were forced from the ghetto while 138,000 Jews from outside were forced in. Starvation and disease, particularly typhoid, took a grip of the over-crowded area; by the summer of 1941, 5,000 people were dying each month.

A by-product of this enforced over-crowding manifested in the creation of a community with its own self-organised hospitals, libraries, orchestras, theatres and schools. Underground newspapers and publications flourished as the ghetto was increasingly radicalised.

And in this pressure-cooker environment, the full spectrum of Jewish political organisations flourished. Two main blocs emerged. On the one hand, there was a sometime uneasy alliance of the Left between the Communist PRR, Left-Zionist organisations such as Hashomer Hatzair, and the largest and longest established group – the Anti-Zionist Socialist Bund. Together they would form the armed resistance group known as the ZOB (Jewish Battle Organization), while another smaller group of Rightist Zionists came together in the ZZW (Jewish Military Union).

Outside of the resistance groups stood conservative ‘community leaders’– some of whom formed the Jewish Council ordered by the Nazis to administer and self-police the ghetto. Amongst their ranks there were undoubtedly those who were opportunistic collaborators. But there were also others who believed they could save lives by compromising with the Nazis. The tragedy of this position is personified by Council leader Adam Czerniaków, who committed suicide in July 1942 on realizing the full reality of the unfolding Nazi Holocaust.

The summer of 1942 saw the Final Solution enter a new phase. The Nazis ordered the Jewish Council to provide 6,000 people a day for ‘deportation’. This was initially carried out by Jewish police units – supposedly on the basis that deportees were destined for labour camps. In fact the deportations were to the newly built extermination camp of Treblinka, only forty miles away. News of the camp led to a fateful decision to resist any further deportations. And so, in autumn the first small Jewish combat units were formed.

These groups were horrifically ill-equipped and dependent upon stolen German small arms and a tiny quantity of weapons smuggled in from the resistance outside the ghetto – the Polish Home Army. But the overriding attitude of the Home Army and the exiled Polish Government towards the Jewish groups was ambiguous at best. Hostile to the Left and deeply tainted with traditional Polish anti-Semitism, the Polish government in London did not provide support. As the fighting unfolded, however, the Home Army and the smaller but more supportive Communist resistance forces (the People’s Guard) did provide some support, and at one point entered the ghetto to fight alongside the Jewish resistance.

In January of 1943, Nazi forces surrounded the ghetto and began a mass round-up for deportation. Most of the community refused the order and Jewish fighters took to the streets. As the fighting raged from the cellars and narrow streets, the deportations were prevented. For twelve weeks the fighters of the ZOB and ZZW had control of the ghetto and the German forces were held at bay. These Jewish fighter had no long-term plan or even a hope of survival; they knew only that they were saving their community from certain death in the camps. The Home Army – increasingly galvanized by the bold resistance – smuggled further weapons into the ghetto.

Even so, most fighters were armed only with a pistol and petrol-bombs, and could offer no real match to the tanks and artillery of the Germans. And so, on the morning of 19th April 1943, the SS amassed their weapons at the perimeter wall and at 6am entered the ghetto with the intention of ‘liquidation’.

Against all the odds, the ighting continued. But by mid-May the Nazis had achieved their objective. 13,000 Jews had been killed and most of the remaining 50,000 were deported to the death camps. Only a tiny handful of the fighters escaped, who went on to link up with other groups – particularly the People’s Guard.

Some of these fighters survived to participate in the uprising of the wider city of Warsaw in August 1944. This – another story of extraordinary courage, sacrifice and betrayal by the outside world – resulted in the destruction of 85% of the city and the death of 220,000 Poles. Advancing Soviet forces were only 15 kilometers away when the Home Army took control of the city, but Stalin cynically and deliberately left the resistance to its fate. Debate still continues as to whether the Red Army was in a position to support the uprising, but there ca be little doubt that an independent Poland – which may well have emerged from a successful uprising – would have been a great inconvenience not just to Stalin but to the future carve-up of Eastern Europe that had been agreed amongst the Allies.

The enduring historical significance of the Ghetto uprising remains in Israel where groups on both the Left and Right can trace their antecedents to the Jewish fighters. But most of all, the uprising provided inspiration both to the wider Polish Resistance and to the Jewish People who – contrary to the historical misrepresentation as passive victims of the Holocaust – provided the nucleus of resistance groups throughout war-torn Europe and led prisoner uprisings within the Nazi camps.

In the words of one of the last surviving Ghetto fighters, Marek Edelman: “No one believed they would be saved. We knew the struggle was doomed, but it showed the world there was resistance against the Nazis, that you could fight the Nazis.”

[Written by journeyman]

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5th April 1722 Europeans Discover Easter Island


The restored moai at Tongariki, Easter Island. Photo: Moth Clark

The rise and fall of Easter Island is a parable for our times; a warning from history of what happens when our selfish species doesn’t pay close attention to every detail of Planet Three’s precious natural resources.

On Easter Sunday 1722 Dutch sailor Jacob Roggeveen landed on a speck of volcanic land 12 miles long and 6 miles wide in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the remotest inhabited piece of land on the planet. Its nearest neighbour, Pitcairn Island, is 1,289 miles away and continental Chile is 2,100 miles away. It’s that remote.

Roggeveen was the first European to clap eyes on its then treeless shores dotted with mighty stone platforms (ahu) supporting gigantic stone statues (moai). Until that day the islanders thought their island was the whole world and they were the only people.

Archaeological, linguistic and cultural evidence suggests that the first settlers probably came from the Marquesas Islands 1,600 miles away, but nobody knows when. A vague folk-memory passed down in creation myths existed, but the true story of how they reached what they called Rapa Nui is lost in time.

What is certain is that the Polynesian settlers arrived with their stone tools, chickens, taro, sugar cane, bananas and stowaway rats to find an island paradise. When they arrived the island was thickly forested with five endemic species of land birds as well as migratory seabird colonies, the sea was heaving with fish and marine mammals and the soil was rich for verdant cultivation. Despite the lack of springs or rivers, the volcanic craters acted as reservoirs and it rained frequently enough for them never to have to worry. They’d do well here!

And so they did, for perhaps a thousand years. The islanders’ unique clan-based culture thrived and to honour their ancestors they built ahus and erected moai. These were manu – sacred – invested with deep spiritual power and ritual significance. With natural resources so freely available, they could relax and indulge their passion for carving in wood and stone. Indeed, they invested their energies in creating stone statues on an industrial scale.

The population grew to perhaps as many as 15,000 in the century before the Dutchman’s arrival. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. Fish stocks dwindled. Seabird colonies were plundered until few came to nest any more. Marine mammals were hunted until none remained. Forests were cleared for cultivation, the trees used for building boats, houses and paraphernalia required to carve, move and erect statues.

When Roggeveen arrived he estimated the population of the almost treeless island at about 2,500. Something had happened in the previous hundred years. Most likely overpopulation and environmental degradation had reached a tipping point, leading to starvation and clan warfare over limited resources. Scholars are still trying to discover the precise details. What is certain is that Roggeveen’s arrival would lead to still greater catastrophe for the islanders.

Roggeveen noted the “remarkable stone figures, a good 30 feet in height”. He stayed a week; time enough to transmit one or two European diseases and kill a dozen locals. The next Europeans came in 1770, when a Spanish ship moored up. It reported seeing the statues still standing. Yet by the time Captain Cook dropped anchor just four years later, he noted that many of the moai had been toppled and the islanders were hungry and ‘wretched’. He noted the “…ratts which I believe they eat as I saw a man with some in his hand which he seem’d unwilling to part with…. Sea Birds but a few…. The Sea seems as barren of fish.”

What was happening? Perhaps the environmental degradation, combined with the arrival of Europeans had somehow signalled that the ancestors were no longer powerful enough to provide for and protect the islanders. Statue building was abruptly abandoned and all the erect moai were knocked down. By 1825 every single moai was down – all 288 of them that had been erected on ahus. Hundreds more were abandoned in the quarries. With few natural resources and their faith shattered, the people struggled for survival between themselves. Could it get any worse? Oh yes.

In the 1860s Peruvian slave-traders abducted more than half the population. Those that were left squabbled over the vacated, treeless, almost barren land. There were devastating outbreaks of smallpox, tuberculosis and Catholicism. By 1877, only 111 islanders were left. Much of the cultural heritage and folklore was lost. In 1888 Chile annexed the island, confined the few islanders to one small village and turned the bleak land into a sheep farm.

There can be no doubt that what the islanders themselves started through overpopulation and depletion of natural resources, was finished by the arrival of Europeans polluting their sacred spaces, transmitting diseases, enslaving and imprisoning the few that remained.

We homo sapiens like to think we’re smart. But as we gang rape Mother Earth for oil and minerals, poison the once-bountiful seas with effluent, pollute the air with noxious gases, cut down forests, greedily guzzle finite fresh water supplies, mercilessly extinguish other species and breed like fucking locusts, we appear not to be smart enough to learn Easter Island’s lessons and prevent our own downfall.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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29th March 1912 the Death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott


Captain Robert Falcon Scott rare picture at South Pole

Captain Robert Falcon Scott

In the 1960s space was the final frontier. But just half a century earlier, the final frontier was the South Pole. And 104 years ago today – his two companions lying frozen to death next to him – 43-year-old Captain Robert Falcon Scott died in a tent in Antarctica, sheltering from a blizzard which had raged for nine days.

In recent years it has been fashionable to debunk the efforts of Scott and his men as a heroic failure. But I will have none of it. Scott and his men did reach the pole. And their expedition conducted ground-breaking scientific research which still resonates today.

Scott’s early Royal Navy career was uneventful. In the 1890s financial ruin and deaths in Scott’s family meant that at aged 30, he was now the breadwinner for his mother and two sisters. He had to find of a way of getting promoted. A chance meeting with Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographic Society, would change his fortunes. He was accepted onto the trail-blazing British National Antarctic ‘Discovery’ Expedition. That journey from 1901 to 1903 mapped huge parts of Antarctica for the first time and made original observations in biology, geology, meteorology and physics. And they went further south than any person had been before: 82°17′S. The expedition was haled as a great success and Scott and his men returned as heroes. What wasn’t mentioned was that they failed to master the techniques of polar travel using skis, sleds and dogs. The Norwegians were already way ahead in this.

In 1908 Scott married artist Kathleen Bruce and their son Peter Markham Scott was born in 1909. Peter would later become a pioneer of wildlife conservation. However, the joy of his new family and the adulation of the British people were not enough to keep Scott from returning to Antarctica. He would take command of the Terra Nova expedition.

The expedition of 65 men would carry out a massive programme of scientific discovery, as well as attempt to reach the South Pole. Japan and Australia were also planning Antarctic journeys. The Norwegians seemed not to pose a threat as, publicly at least, they appeared to be concentrating their efforts in the North. The Brits had best get on with it or someone else would grab the glory. But on their way south, while Scott was in Melbourne, he received a telegram from Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen telling him that he was heading south. The race was on.

Amundsen’s only mission was to reach the Pole. With skis and dog sleds, his men dressed in skins and furs like the Inuit, he would use the highly efficient ‘dog-eat-dog’ technique as he went along to provide fresh meat. Scott’s polar plans were more complex and included establishing a research base, testing motorised sledges, and using ponies, dog sleds and man-hauling to carry provisions, scientific instruments, log books and specimens.

Scott and his men spent 1911 establishing a base at Cape Evans and laying depots of provisions. Parties were sent out on missions to make geological surveys and collect specimens. They experimented with equipment and rations. Their findings would influence polar explorers and mountaineers for decades. A zoological expedition set out in the winter to conduct research on emperor penguins to try to discover an embryological link between the birds and dinosaurs. Apsley Cherry-Garrard who took part in this expedition later wrote an account of it in his astonishing book The Worst Journey in the World.

In September, 16 men set out towards the Pole. Most of the men were there as support and would be sent back in stages leaving only a small group to go all the way to the Pole. At 87° 32′ S on 3 January 1912, Scott decided on the group: himself, Edward Wilson, Lawrence Oates, Henry Bowers and Edgar Evans. Five men, not four as originally planned. This meant recalculating rations and would have dire consequences.

They arrived at the Pole on 17 January, but Amundsen had planted his flag there a month before. The disappointment was overwhelming. “Great God! This is an awful place” Scott wrote “and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

The return journey started out well. But the rations were insufficient and his men soon lost condition. Evans’ frostbite worsened. He died at the the Beardmore Glacier on 17 February. Oates’ feet were horribly frostbitten and hampered the progress of the entire party. On 16 March, he struggled to put his boots on for the last time and stepped out into a blizzard saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott acknowledged his sacrifice. “We knew that Oates was walking to his death… it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman.

Scott, Wilson and Bowers continued towards One Ton depot which they knew could save them, but an unseasonal blizzard halted them just 11 miles short of their target. Malnourished, frostbitten, weak and trapped inside the tent by the weather, they knew what was coming.

I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.”

Scott was probably the last of the three to die on 29th March 1912.

A search party found the tent in November that year. They salvaged rolls of photographs, meteorological observations,  diaries and 16 kgs of fossils gathered on the way back from the Pole. They left the bodies in the tent and buried them under a mound of snow.

That five men failed to be first to the Pole and died is only half the story. The expedition recorded more than 2,000 animals, 400 new to science. They gathered rock samples and fossils which revealed the geological story of the Antarctic continent. They made detailed observations in glaciology, meteorology, geology and studied diet, clothing and rations in extreme conditions. Cherry-Garrard wrote: “We had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made.”

And apart from the science, there was the art! Herbert Ponting’s photographs recorded the grandeur and the hardships. And Edward Wilson’s illustrations of Antarctic birds and wildlife are unsurpassed.

One hundred years after Scott we now face climate change, melting icecaps, rising sea levels, weird weather phenomena and a crisis of extinctions. Polar science is now more important to us than ever in helping us work out what is going on and what – if anything – we can do about it. And Captain Scott was, surely, one of the founding fathers of polar science.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…”

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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14th February 1779 The Death of Captain James Cook


Captain Cook

Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.”

Whatever you may think about British colonial expansion, its impact and subsequent noxious effects, you have to admire the bravery, spirit and ambition of farm labourer’s son Captain James Cook. When he sailed away from Blighty in the 18th century it was as risky and as pioneering a thing to do as Gagarin’s first space flight in the 20th.

Born on 7 November 1728 in Yorkshire, aged 17 James became an apprentice on the small ships that sailed up and down the north east coast of England trading coal. He applied himself diligently to both the back-breaking, git-hard physical duties as well as the complex mathematical, cartographic and astronomical skills he would need to one day take charge of a ship.

In 1755 he enlisted in the Royal Navy, which was gearing up for the Seven Years War. He realised it would be the fastest way to progress in his career, and he rose quickly through the ranks. He displayed a dazzling talent for surveying, and charted the coast of Canada in maps which were still being used in the 20th century. At a time when accurate, reliable charts were few, this skill was as valuable as gold. It didn’t go unnoticed.

In 1768 he was asked by the Royal Society to sail the HMS Endeavour to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus across the sun. The data Cook recorded would assist with calculating longitude as well as expanding scientific knowledge. Cook also had a secret mission, contained in sealed orders to be opened only after the Tahiti mission was accomplished. He was to search for the mysterious Great Southern Land, Terra Australis. Sailors knew there was something down under but what was it? Where was it? Who lived there?

When Cook sailed away from England on what would be his first round-the-world trip, the Pacific Ocean was largely uncharted and he’d have to make it up as he went along, as well as try to keep alive all 90 of the ship’s company,  which included botanist Joseph Banks. After eight months they reached Tahiti and established friendly relations with the local people. Then he sailed south west with a Tahitian guide, Tupaia, and in October 1769 reached New Zealand, only the second group of Europeans to do so. But friendly relations with the warlike Maori proved difficult, despite Tupaia’s ability to communicate with them. Cook set about mapping the islands’ coastline, correctly observing the passage between the islands, now known as the Cook Strait. In less than six months he mapped 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coast. The discovery was a great achievement, but it wasn’t the fabled Great Southern Continent he’d hoped for. He would have to sail on.

In April 1770, Cook’s party landed on the east coast of Australia, the first Europeans to do so. The currents and winds forced him to sail north and in doing so he was able to map most of the east coast of the continent naming places as he went: Botany Bay, Sydney Cove, Cape Tribulation and giving the whole lot the name New South Wales and claiming it for England. He returned to England in July 1771. The first voyage of discovery had taken three years.

There would be two more voyages of discovery. The second, in HMS Resolution, would take him south into the Antarctic circle for the first time and to claim South Georgia, and then into the Pacific once more to chart the Friendlies, Easter and Norfolk Islands. The third, in HMS Discovery, would take him on a quest to reveal the Northwest Passage and lead him up the west coast of America to the Bering Straits and finally, finally Hawaii.

For the most part Cook was firm but fair. He treated his crew justly and they always shared rations, his officers enjoyed no special privileges. He knew about ship-borne diseases and did what he could to feed his crew on fresh provisions caught or bartered for locally. He traded nails, cloth and other useful trinkets with local people for chickens, fruit and coconuts. Eating fresh local food, he observed, kept the scourge of scurvy at bay. Of course he didn’t know why; vitamin C was not isolated and explained until 1931. He was a stickler for hygiene and insisted that his men wash both themselves and the ship frequently. His actions would keep most of his crew in good health.

James Cook is a difficult man to get to know. His extensive journals reveal a man walking on a knife edge, trying to navigate a delicate balance between doing his job efficiently, self-preservation, the discipline and wellbeing of his crew, extreme patience, painstaking exactitude but also shortness of temper.

Among his tasks on his voyages was to “to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives” and to “endeavour, by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with the Natives.” In a world where white European attitudes of cultural and racial superiority ruled the waves, Cook stands out as enlightened. I think he remembered he was son of a farm labourer and saw that the natives he met were no different to the natives back home working the land. For example, in 1697 William Dampier noted of the aboriginal people he met: “The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world… setting aside their Human Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.” But Cook describes the cultural practices of the people he encountered with respect and thoughtfulness:  “they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans…. In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them…this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.” To Cook, these are not ignorant savages, they are immensely practical and sensible. Today’s ugly consumer society still has this priceless lesson to learn.

Cook knew the impact the arrival of his ship would have on the small communities he encountered. He was acutely aware of the impact of European diseases – especially sexually transmitted infections – and would flog any of his crew who shagged local women. Many communities had already had other explorers visit and been raided and violated by them. No wonder they were wary. Although Cook took pains to forge polite, friendly relationships where others had not, he was nevertheless an intruder and meetings on those sun-kissed, palm-fringed beaches were often tense or ended in violence or death.

And so it was when he dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii for a second time on 14 February 1779. Cook’s previous visit had gone well and he forged friendly relations with the Polynesians. But there was a skirmish on the beach. Cook’s head was smashed and he was stabbed to death as he lay in the surf.

Undoubtedly Captain James Cook quite literally redrew the map of our fabulous world. But his achievements go further than mere cartography. Observations made on his voyages would lay the foundations of quite new ways of understanding the world and everything in it: oceanography, astronomy, anthropology, ethnography, botany, zoology. He may have been the first European to set foot in many new lands, but he was long dead by the time British policy was to exploit, dispossess and disrespect the extraordinary people and places he discovered.

Captain Cook: brave scientist; fearless explorer; gifted cartographer; and health obsessive or flag-waving, ruthless expansionist; bullying coloniser; spreader of disease and the scourge of alcohol to native peoples. You decide.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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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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10th February 1778 the death of Carl Linnaeus


Carl Linnaeus

The Bible, Genesis 2:20, states: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”. But actually it wasn’t Adam. It was a Swedish botanist: Carl Linnaeus.

My dad was also a botanist, so since I was knee high to an orthoptera, I was aware that everything had a difficult-to-pronounce Latin name as well as its common or local name. I knew all about the splendid bulk of Sequoiadendron giganteum and the dangers of Toxicodendron radicans. But what I really wanted to do was to go to the ocean and watch the Zalophus californianus basking on the rocks.

At school, young Carl Linnaeus learned Latin, Greek, theology and maths, but he wasn’t interested in that stuffy nonsense (although it would come in very useful later in his life). All he wanted to do was go outside and look for plants. Fortunately his teachers recognised his gift for science and his studies re-focused on medicine and botany at the universities of Lund and Uppsala. In 1729, aged just 22, he published a thesis on plant sexuality and began lecturing to other students. It was going to be a brilliant career.

In 1732 he made a six-month-long expedition to Lappland to study the biodiversity of the region. It would be there when stuggling to name the 100 new species of plants, mosses and lichens he identified, that the idea first came to him of simplifying the existing cumbersome system of classifying and naming living things. In Flora Lapponica, he applied his taxonomic system for the first time and realised it was so flexible and yet so specific, it could be extended to other living organisms.

There are two parts to his system, classification and naming.

Consider the zebra. We say zebra, but to Swahili-speakers all stripey horses are punda milia. But do we mean the mountain zebra, the plains zebra or Grevy’s?  The Linnaean system makes classification very clear.

  • Kingdom: Animalia – an animal
  • Phylum: Chordata– an animal with a backbone
  • Class: Mammalia – an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk
  • Order: Perissodactyla  – an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk that has a hoof with an odd number of toes; this branch in the tree of life includes horses, rhinos, and tapirs
  • Family: Equidae – the horse family
  • Genus: Equus quagga – this is the plains zebra

Its name, Equus quagga, is specific to that species alone. As with all science, things are fluid; a species’ classification is debated and revised as new data is revealed.

Which brings me to names. Consider the springtime roadside herb with crowns of white lacy flowers I know as keck. But you might call it cow parsley, Queen Anne’s Lace or wild chervil. And if you’re French you might know it as anthrisque sauvage or cerfeuil des bois. Confusing, isn’t it? As he travelled, studied and met other botanists, Linnaeus realised each species needed a universal name. He adopted a system of nomenclature only partially developed by 16th century Swiss botanist, Caspar Bauhin, which he refined and popularised into a name consisting of two Latin words. Keck became Anthriscus sylvestris.

A glorious by-product of Latin names is that they often have an innate poetic beauty and history of their own. The humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae translates as ‘New England big wing’. While the giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis comes from the Arabic ziraafa combined with a description: tall like a camel and spotty like a leopard.

Linnaeus’ first published his system, Systema Naturae, in 11 pages in 1735. Such was its popularity that by 1768 it was in its twelfth edition and ran to 2,400 pages. The system was soon adopted by the new breed of naturalists including Captain James Cook’s expedition naturalist Joseph Banks.

So why was a system of putting species into groups and giving them universal names so important?

Species can look very different from each other and live far apart and yet still be related (the kiwi and the ostrich). Or they may have evolved similar features because of the way they feed (the thylacine and the wolf). A classification system gives scientists a logical framework based on anatomy and physiology on which they can work to reveal the truth. And without universal names how could scientists all over the world study species unambiguously and meaningfully?

Linnaeus’ classification system enabled him to think about food-chains and the interdependence of life. It wasn’t until Darwin that the complex and beautiful tree of life would begin to be explored in more detail. It would even help shed light on our own origins.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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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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1st January 1804 The Black Jacobins and the Haitian Revolution


Toussaint L’Ouverture: Leader of the Haitian Revolution

On New Year’s Day in 1804, Haiti proclaimed its independence: After ten years of struggle, an army of former slaves led by their charismatic leader Toussaint L’Ouverture had fought the French and British to a standstill. After the British colonies in North America, it was the first colony of a European power to win its freedom and establish a radical regime – the likes of which would not be seen again until the collapse of empires after the Second World War. Most significantly, slavery there was ended not by benevolent abolitionists but by the self-emancipation of slaves themselves. And despite the poverty and tragedy that has plagued Haiti in the past century, the ‘Black Jacobins’ remain an inspiration to all liberation movements.

Haiti was previously the French colony of Saint-Domingue – created in the 1690s when they seized the western half of the Spanish island colony of Hispaniola. In the eighteenth century it became the most profitable plantation economy in the world.

As in many other colonies there were frequent slave revolts – but also an emerging local elite based on a racial hierarchy with the white colonial merchants on top and an intermediate layer of  ‘mulattoes’ of mixed-race. In an echo of the initial demands of white colonists in America, this group sought recognition and representation from France. The revolution of 1789 and the creation of a National Assembly raised these aspirations. The French colonial administration responded equivocally with a policy that gave some concessions – and included the mulattoes in an attempt to divide and rule. However this strategy did not work and thousands of slaves joined an uprising to press these demands. And it was at this time that Toussaint L’Ouverture – a former slave who had won his freedom to become a small-scale landowner – emerged as a leader. Although initially defeated, after taking advantage of the growing turmoil at home in France, by 1793 the slave army and their allies had seized control of the colony.

Understandably Toussaint L’Ouverture looked to the new radical Jacobin regime for support in abolishing slavery. In Britain, prime minister Pitt had previously been edging towards abolitionism, but fear of a domino wave of slave revolts and the prospect of incorporating the highly profitable French colony proved too tempting. The British sent an expeditionary force and restored slavery in the areas they controlled whilst the slave forces fought a guerrilla campaign, with some hesitant French support. But the end of Jacobin rule in 1795 and the installation of the reactionary Directory marked the end of any hope of support from France.  In those areas controlled by L’Ouverture’s forces a radical regime was established that abolished slavery, reformed the justice system, introduced schools, and regulated working hours and conditions.

In a glimpse of the kind of post-colonial regimes that would emerge in the 1950s and 60s, L’Ouverture ruled as an enlightened autocrat dependent on military rule – although in contrast to later regimes he made no personal gains from the state he had built. However, with the formerly profitable colony now isolated and besieged by the western powers, poverty gripped the island. Discontent rose as L’Ouverture even resorted to forced-labour in an attempt to keep the economy going and in 1802 there was a rising against his rule. Although the rising was defeated, Napoleon at the head of a new stabilised and strengthened French regime co-operated with his enemies in Spain and Britain to crush the liberated areas and restore colonial rule. In the course of the campaign some 100,000 Haitians and 50,000 French were killed.

The prospect of fighting an on-going guerrilla war in conditions where sickness claimed as many casualties as battle would prove too much for the western powers. Like later imperialists, eventually France had to acknowledge that the war was unwinnable – but not before L’Ouverture had been tricked into giving himself up for negotiations and taken back to France where he would die in prison. It was left to his successor as commander of the slave army, Jean Jacques Dessalines, to formerly declare the independence of the world’s first ‘Black republic’.

The story of Haiti following independence has not been a happy one. In a sense the western powers never forgave its challenge to their power. France under the restored monarchy of Charles X sent an invasion force in 1825 in an unsuccessful attempt to restore colonial rule. Haiti later became the first country to have economic sanctions imposed by the United States, who in 1915 sent a military force that remained in occupation until 1937. Constantly blighted by poverty – which was consistently the worst in the whole of the Americas – Haiti was subject to a succession of autocratic and despotic regimes. Some of these, in the spirit of L’Ouverture, were benevolent and enjoyed varying degrees of popular support. Others were appalling in their repression, in particular the post-war regimes of the Duvalier dynasty. In an all too familiar pattern, these have at different times been supported, tolerated and occasionally brought into line by the western powers depending on the economic stability they provide, and the extent to which they provide a bulwark against revolution in the region.

As a footnote to this story, the definitive history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Black Jacobins is that of CLR James published in 1938.  Few people can claim fame in both cricketing and revolutionary circles – but CLR James, the grandson of a former slave, came to England from Trinidad to become sports correspondent of The Guardian. Living amongst the mill workers of Lancashire he was drawn through their struggles towards Communism, rejected Stalinism and became part of a small group of early British Trotskyists.

[Written by journeyman]

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9th December 1996 the Death of Mary Leakey


No matter who we are and what we think, the beautiful truth is that we are all children of Africa. It was in no small part the painstaking work of Mary Leakey that revealed this. For more than 50 years under hot African skies, archaeologist Mary grubbed around in the earth searching doggedly for clues that would reveal the truth about human physical and cultural evolution. And, man, did she find them.

Born in London on 6 February 1913, Mary was rubbish at school; she couldn’t even pass exams in French, in which she was fluent having spent much of her childhood in France. Aged 12 her passion for prehistory was ignited when in the Dordogne, she was wowed by cave paintings. Unqualified in anything and unable to get into university, she had only a talent for drawing and an insatiable curiosity in prehistory. Unregistered, she attended university archaeology lectures and joined various archaeological digs.

“I dug things up. I was curious, and I liked to draw what I found,” she later said.

Her illustrations would lead to her meeting and falling for archaeologist Louis Leakey. In 1936, after Louis’ messy divorce, they finally married and had three sons, Jonathan, Richard and Philip, all of who would make their mark in the field of archaeology. But it was not to be the easiest of marriages. Louis was a womaniser and basked in self-publicity.

It was Mary and Louis’ discoveries in East Africa which made the Leakey name synonymous with hominoid archaeology. She fell in love with Africa, loved living in tents, and at various excavations in Kenya and Tanzania, she simultaneously raised her sons, kept a pack of dogs, smoked cigars, quaffed single malt and dug and dug and dug and dug.

At Olorgesailie, near Nairobi, she unearthed numerous handaxes and fossils and realised that she had found a place where early hominids had actually once lived and thrived 100,000 to two million years ago. She was on to something. Each new find, publicised by Louis with lectures, broadcasts and after-dinner speeches, seemed to be proving that East Africa was indeed the cradle of humanity. Mary’s methodical evidence-gathering, her scientific cataloguing, report-writing and sheer bloody hard work backed-up all Louis’ flashy raconteuse.

Her spectacular finds include: the skull of Proconsul africanus, a fossil ape; a 1.8 million-year-old skull of Australopithecus boisei, the so-called nutcracker man because of his huge teeth and jaws; and the bones of Homo habilis surrounded by stone tools. Reconstructing the bones, she revealed that Homo habilis was dextrous and had a brain big enough to make and use tools. It was a sensation and blew out of the water any theories that the origins of modern humans were to be found in Asia.

From 1968 until Louis’ death in 1972, Mary and Louis lived separate lives. He loved celebrity lecture tours and fundraising, while she loved only digging at Olduvai in Tanzania, which had by this time become her home, as it was to so many of our human ancestors. Mary had worked most of her life in Louis’s shadow but her most remarkable discovery came in 1978 when her team spotted, quite by chance, what she thought might be footprints of a human ancestor.

And so on 2 August 1978, on hands and knees, Mary spent hours with a paintbrush and toothpick to carefully reveal the well-preserved imprints of heel, toes and arch. Exposed by erosion, she deduced that the tracks had been made by an early bipedal hominid. She stood up, lit a fine Havana and declared: ”Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece!”

The trail of footprints went for 75 feet. Two or three people had walked here 3.7 million years ago; a large one, perhaps male, a smaller one, maybe female and a tiny one, possibly their child. Like a bushman tracker, she read the prints and noted that at some point the female had stopped and turned before continuing. Perhaps she sensed a lurking predator or heard a thunderclap? The footprints remain the earliest known traces of human behaviour and they established that hominids were walking upright far earlier than previously supposed.

”This motion, so intensely human, transcends time,” Mrs. Leakey wrote, ”a remote ancestor – just as you or I – experienced a moment of doubt.”

The story of how we Homo sapiens evolved is still being drafted by scientists. It’s a long story, but there is no doubt that Mary wrote the first chapter. We dig you, Mary.

[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

23rd October 2006 The Death of Dr Jane Elizabeth Hodgson


Jane Elizabeth Hodgson

There are many reasons why a pregnancy may be unwanted. A woman may have no access to contraception or already have too many mouths to feed. It may endanger her health, even her life. She may have been raped. The foetus may not be viable. No matter what the circumstances, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one of the most difficult that a woman will ever make. So imagine how much tougher it would be if abortion was illegal. Millions of women across the world are still denied the right to a legal, clinical abortion for political, cultural and religious reasons.

And so today, the women of North America can thank their lucky stars for the work of obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Jane Elizabeth Hodgson who died in 2006 aged 91, after a 50-year career.

Brought up in the early 20th century to consider abortion as immoral, the more Dr Hodgson saw the more she began to understand that the lack of abortion was immoral. She was troubled by the numbers of women attending her clinic begging quietly and desperately for abortions. Especially heart-breaking were the numbers of women she treated for complications from botched back-street jobs: you can imagine the kind of terrible injuries and infections she came face to face with. And all of it preventable. The majority of her work took place at home in Minnesota, but she worked in Africa and Central and South America. Everywhere she went she observed women’s lives, health and ambitions blighted by a lack of reproductive choice. She noted that: “a woman’s place in society was directly related to the availability of abortion services, contraception and family planning services. In countries where it was all illegal, women were much worse off as far as their overall rights, health care and poverty levels.” Look around – it is still the case.

In a 1970 a young pregnant mother of three arrived at Dr Hodgson’s clinic. She had contracted rubella, a devastating disease which causes defects in the unborn child. She wanted an abortion, sadly illegal in Minnesota except to save a woman’s life. Hodgson realised this could be the test case she needed to promote her cause. Hodgson was convicted of the ‘crime’ and sentenced to 30 days in jail, becoming the first US physician to be convicted for carrying out an abortion in hospital. Other legal challenges would follow. She established sexual health clinics, campaigned to ensure that women receive full reproductive health care and changed laws.

Throughout her life Dr Hodgson was harassed as a baby killer, sent hate mail and intimidated by small-minded people more interested in maintaining their vile dogmas than the health of vulnerable, frightened women. “If at any time I’ve ever had any doubt about what I’m doing, all I have to do is see a patient, and talk to her, and I realise it’s the right thing” she said.

Well into her 70s she was still practicing. When other physicians would not carry out an abortion having been scared off by the abusive, placard-wielding morons, they would call on Dr Hodgson knowing that she would go to a woman’s aid calmly, swiftly and without judgement.

It’s incredible to think that there are still people out there who wish to deny women basic reproductive choices and will resort to violence to achieve it. And so to the sacred-foetus-brigade, I say this: if you don’t want an abortion don’t have one. But if my daughter needs one, she’ll have one thanks, and it’s none of your damn business. It is not for anyone except the individual woman to make reproductive decisions for her.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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22nd October 1941 The Execution of Guy Môquet


Guy Môquet

It happened in a quarry behind a prison camp on the outskirts of Châteaubriand. In three groups of nine, twenty-seven men were lined up. Behind them a pit to fall into. Before them a row of German guns. It was the 22nd of October 1941 and terrible scenes such as this were happening throughout Europe. For one reason or another, some of those events have echoed louder in the pages of history than others. And the brutal slayings that took place in that quarry near Nantes have echoed as loudly as any. For it was there that Guy Môquet’s short life was ended. He stood defiantly with his 26 comrades and faced the guns, refusing a blindfold so he could look his killers in the eye. He cried out Vive la France! as the fascists opened fire.Guy Môquet was a young member of the French Resistance. The son of a union leader, he was exposed to radical left wing politics at a tender age and joined the Communist Youth movement in his early teens. In October 1939 his father was arrested during a crackdown on left-wing activists and sentenced to five years in prison, much of which would be spent in a labour camp in Algeria. As Europe went up in flames and anticipating the tumultuous days to come, Guy helped move his mother and younger brother out of Paris to a small village on the coast.

But soon after his sixteenth birthday he returned to the capital to join up with a group of communist friends who had organised a resistance cell in the city. Even as the grey tide marched triumphantly into Paris on 14 June 1940, Guy Môquet was on the streets distributing anti-fascist pamphlets. He was an active member of the Resistance. He was idealistic, good looking, charismatic. And on October 13th 1940 during a Paris-wide crackdown on Communist activists, he was arrested and charged with exactly the same offence as his father… infraction of the decree of 26 September 1939 disbanding Communist organisations.

Guy was questioned by both the French and German authorities, and when they couldn’t get him to name names he was sent for trial. By the end of January 1941, with no confession and no hard evidence against him, the authorities were forced to acquit him of the charges. But this was Occupied France and instead of being released, Guy spent the next four months being transferred from one prison to another. Finally, just a month after his 17th birthday, he ended up as an inmate of “Barrack 10” at the Choisel prison camp in Châteaubriant, Loire-Atlantique. It was where he would die.

But between May and October of 1941 it was also where he fell in love with Odette Leclan, a young communist incarcerated in the camp. And although the segregation of the male and female prisoners meant their love was never consummated, it was to Odette that he wrote his last letter. Though of course, it’s the letter he wrote before that one for which Guy Môquet is best remembered.

On the morning of October 20th 1941 a high-ranking German Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Hotz, was gunned down outside the Cathedral in Nantes. Môquet’s fate, along with that of 47 others, was sealed. The men who killed Hotz were communists and members of the Resistance. The Nazi response was to demand the death of “50 hostages”. It fell to Pierre Pucheu, a minister in the Vichy government, to select those to be executed and he sent a list of 48 names to the Germans.

Pucheu was executed as a collaborator three years later. I can’t help but wonder whether he soothed his conscience by reminding himself of the time they asked for 50 and I only sent them 48… I saved two lives, I did all I could possibly do!

Perhaps not. Pucheu was a more than willing collaborator whose conscience probably didn’t weigh too heavily on him. He was an industrialist and committed fascist who saw the Nazi occupation as a necessary evil; a first step towards an independent fascist France. Which is why there were so many known communists on the list he sent to the Germans. Among them, Guy Môquet.

Today there’s a Metro Station in Paris called Guy Môquet. There are streets and schools named after the resistance fighter. When Nicolas Sarkozy was elected President of France one of the first things he did was to decree that the anniversary of Môquet’s death be marked by a reading – in every school in the country – of that famous letter.

Upon hearing the news that he was to be shot, Môquet penned the letter that keeps his name alive all these years later. It wasn’t a strident call to arms, or an eloquent political analysis. It was a letter to his family. A letter to a mother from a son about to be murdered. It’s sad and it’s sweet… an attempt by a scared and confused teenager to sound brave and composed.

When Sarkozy announced that Môquet’s anniversary should be commemorated by schools, it sparked no little controversy. For some it was a point of principle that politicians shouldn’t be arbitrarily deciding what gets taught in schools. Others felt that the reading of the letter – stripped of context – runs the risk of over-simplifying the events of the past and even wallowing in sentimentality. While still others criticised Centre-Right Sarkozy for attempting to co-opt a resistance fighter who quite explicitly equated capitalism with fascism.

All the same, rightly or wrongly, the letter gets read in many schools. The name Guy Môquet lives on. And so long as it does, we should salute the memory of that scared boy trying to comfort his mother before being led out and senselessly murdered. At the same time we should guard against over-romanticising the individual, and remember that Môquet was but one of millions to die a violent death during that terrible time. Ensure that if his name lives on, it does so not just as the author of a letter, but as a constant reminder of the dangers of unfettered power.

Written by Jim Bliss

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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.

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 10 Comments

8th September 1969 The Death of Alexandra David-Neel


Young Alexandra

Today we celebrate the long life of a remarkable, and remarkably unsung, woman: Alexandra David-Néel.

Alexandra was a Belgian-French explorer, who travelled the world from Europe to China –usually alone, in a time where this was nearly unthinkable for a young woman. From her teens, she was fascinated by the religious experience – practicing fasting and other ascetic methods gleaned from her reading of histories of the saints, and joining many of the esoteric secret societies of her time, including the Theosphical Society. She was also a natural feminist and anarchist, and it was perhaps this combination which led her not to merely take the word of her books and teachers on the subject of mysticism, but to seek answers for herself. This search would take her to Nepal and Tibet, where she studied for many years (including under the Dalai Lama), eventually becoming one of the few women, and certainly the only white woman, to reach the rank of Lama.

She wrote extensively about her experiences, especially in the book Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929ce). It was in this book that she told a story which would influence Western occultism and modern mythology to this very day: a story of her creation of a Tulpa – a projected ’thought-form’ which takes on a life of its own.

Here is how she tells the tale:

I shut myself in tsams (meditative seclusion) and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom Monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and lifelike looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents. The monk included himself in the party.

Though I lived in the open, riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw the fat tulpa; now and then it was not necessary for me to think of him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the kind that are natural to travellers and that I had not commanded. For instance, he walked, stopped, looked around him. The illusion was mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me, and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.

The features which I had imagined, when building my phantom, gradually underwent a change. The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control. Once, a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a living lama.

I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it turned into a “day-nightmare”…. so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious of life.

There is nothing strange in the fact that I may have created my own hallucination. The interesting point is that in these cases of materialisation, others see the thought-forms that have been created.

Although later scholars and practitioners would note that Tibetan Buddhist praxis does not actually use the concept of the Tulpa in this way, her version became part of the bedrock of Western occultism, especially in chaos magic. It also was absorbed into pop culture mythology, featuring in such wide ranging areas as the TV show ‘Supernatural’ and as part of the origin of that most modern of monsters, the internet-created entity called Slenderman.

Alexandra died in 1969 at the incredible age of 101, at the height of the movement which brought so much of the wisdom she loved to the West, at the end of a life truly fulfilled. Her spirit should be a beacon for us all.

By Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent

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5th August 1895 the Death of Friedrich Engels


Friedrich Engels: “Marx’s General”

Today we recall the social theorist and world-changer, Friedrich Engels – co-author of The Communist Manifesto and profound contributor to Das Kapital – but chiefly remembered as the lifelong friend, literary executor and “junior partner” of Karl Marx.  At 24, Engels looked set to assume the role of Hegel’s heir apparent with his brilliant and groundbreaking publication The Condition of the Working Class in England. But recognising that his new friend Marx “… stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us,” he sacrificed his aspirations to the greater man. Indeed, the most notable aspect of their partnership might be how much Marx depended on Engels’ personal sacrifices and generosity. For twenty years Engels undertook detested work at his father’s Manchester cotton mill in order to facilitate and financially support Marx’s research and writing. He looked after Marx’s children – even claiming the paternity of an illegitimate son. And, for forty years, he contributed ideas, practical examples and editorial direction to the development of the philosophical aspects of Marxism.

While it’s unsurprising that Engels’ legacy should be forever linked to the man he so devotedly served and considered the world’s “greatest living thinker”, having survived Marx by twelve years created more than a bit of posthumous thorniness. During a crucial stage in the growth of the socialist movement, Engels was elevated to primary spokesman for Marxism. He devoted himself to pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of Das Kapital and, inevitably, there were several significant loose ends which Engels was left to tie up. Sometimes, it is argued, the results were more revolutionary than Marx may have intended – opening up the theory to much more radical interpretations by 20th-century hijacker tyrants Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Thus, Engels has either been written out, written off or treated like the “whipping boy” – the Saint Paul of Marxism – blamed for the defiled misinterpretations of the prophet. As the political writer Richard N Hunt notes: “It has lately become fashionable in some quarters to treat Engels as the dustbin of Classical Marxism, a convenient receptacle into which can be swept any unsightly oddments of the system, and who can thus also bear the blame for whatever subsequently went awry.”

As Capitalism continues to expose its innate inequality, Marx has been spectacularly resurrected from the post-1989 communist graveyard. Engels, meanwhile, plunges ever deeper into obscurity. As his biographer Tristram Hunt observed, throughout the former Soviet Union, “he is so innocuous his statue isn’t even pulled down.” But as humanity has not in fact reached its final form of government as capitalists prematurely claimed, and we urgently seek alternatives, is not Friedrich Engels – whose 19th-century grasp of global capital resounds today with a terrifyingly accurate prescience – also deserving of a full reappraisal?

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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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29th July 1890 the Suicide of Vincent van Gogh


Vincent

On 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh, an unkempt, unknown 37-year-old Dutchman, walked out of his lodgings in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris, where he had been living and working since May. That day instead of his usual easel and paints, he carried a handgun he had perhaps borrowed from a farmer ‘to scare away the crows’. He intended to kill himself.

An habitual self-harmer, only two years before Vincent had mutilated his ear.

Wracked by mental torment, frustrated by his illness (probably a deadly cocktail of bipolar disorder and porphyria combined with alcoholism, poor diet, overwork and insomnia) he now feared he was a burden to his beloved brother Theo. Theo had supported him – believed in him – in every possible way for the past 10 years but Theo now had a wife and baby son to support too. Desperately lonely, his once overwhelming christian faith long evaporated, Vincent only had his painting left to believe in. But no one was buying.

No one knows exactly where he was when he pulled the trigger. Legend has it he was in the rolling wheatfields at the back of the village. More likely he scurried quietly into a barn. He shot himself in the stomach. Bleeding heavily he somehow managed to stagger back to his lodgings. He went to bed, lit his pipe and waited for the inevitable.

Vincent’s quack homeopathic doctor, Paul Gachet, who Vincent believed to be as mentally unstable as he was, was called for. The bullet was too deep. There was nothing to be done to save him. Infection quickly set in. Theo arrived on the next train from Paris. Theo stayed with him until 1.30am on 29 July 1890; where he died in Theo’s arms in that pokey, gloomy attic room.

An unposted letter to Theo was found on Vincent’s body. In it, Vincent described a painting he had recently finished: Wheatfield with crows. He said it depicted “vast fields of wheat beneath troubled skies,” adding “I did not have to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness.”

Dr Gachet made a sketch of Vincent lying dead.

The church at Auvers, which Vincent had only recently painted, refused to host Vincent’s funeral because he had killed himself. So much for god’s mercy. The service took place across the river at Mery-sur-Oise the next day.

Vincent’s friend, the young painter Emile Bernard, was there:

“The coffin was already closed. I arrived too late to see the man again who had left me four years ago so full of expectations of all kinds. On the walls of the room where his body was laid out all his last canvases were hung making a sort of halo for him and the brilliance of the genius that radiated from them made this death even more painful for us artists who were there.

“The coffin was covered with a simple white cloth and surrounded with masses of flowers, the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was his favourite colour, the symbol of the light that he dreamed of being in people’s hearts as well as in works of art. Many people arrived, mainly artists, among who I recognised Lucien Pissarro … also some local people who had known him a little, seen him once or twice and who liked him because he was so good-hearted, so human…

“At three o’clock his body was moved, friends of his carrying it to the hearse, a number of people in the company were in tears. …his brother, who had always supported him in his struggle to support himself from his art was sobbing pitifully the whole time…

“The sun was terribly hot outside. We climbed the hill outside Auvers [towards the cemetery] talking about him, about the daring impulse he had given to art, of the great projects he was always thinking about, and about the good he had done to all of us. We reached the cemetery on the little hill above the fields that were ripe for harvest under the wide blue sky that he loved. Then he was lowered into the grave.

“Doctor Gachet (who is a great art lover and possesses on of the best collections of impressionist painting at the present day) wanted to say a few words about Vincent and his life, but he too was weeping so much that he could only stammer a very confused farewell. He was, Gachet said, an honest man and a great artist, he had only two aims, humanity and art. It was art that he prized above everything and which will make his name live.”

Vincent has been my teacher and inspiration since the muscular yellows of ‘The Sunflowers’ hit me squarely in my 16-year-old face like a lightening bolt at the National Gallery, London. If you think you know this painting from the zillions of reproductions, I can assure you, you don’t. Make the trek to London and see it for real. And take sunglasses.

Every year on 29 July I think of Vincent lying in Theo’s arms as death finally healed him. Heartbroken, 33-year-old Theo followed Vincent to the grave just six months later. Theo’s widow, Johanna, inherited all but a handful of Vincent’s 900 canvases and more than 1,000 drawings. She would spend the rest of her life promoting her brother-in-law’s ground-breakingly colourful, life-affirming paintings.

The legend had begun.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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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”.

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24th July


Nought to write about on this day. I’ll leave you instead with something to ponder from proto-feminist and beloved ancestor, John Stuart Mill:

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

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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.

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 4 Comments

22nd July 2005 the Murder of Jean Charles de Menezes


Jean Charles de Menezes

Today we remember one of the great miscarriages of British justice of the present time, in which the British police – indeed the Metropolitan police, those paragons of English authority whose collective beats are more international and mutli-cultural than probably any other city in the world – were revealed as foul racists, shoot-first-ask-questions-later trigger-happy chancers who fudged the facts, lied, created hysteria and showed that they were – in a crisis – entirely incapable of their task. That they claimed to have mistaken a Portuguese-speaking olive-skinned South American man pleading for his life for a Muslim terrorist was offered as an excuse for pumping seven bullets into his head. English justice? I think not. And on the World Stage, too.

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 3 Comments

18th July 1988  the Death of Nico


Nico

“I’m flying to Ibiza. It’s my favourite place, and I think I’ll die there.” And 28 years ago today, Nico fulfilled her own prophecy after a fatal bicycle fall on the Spanish island she loved so much. She was 49. It was an inglorious if wryly self-scripted end for this legendary enigma whose lifetime of extraordinary successes and equally extraordinary failures had always been determined by a singular wilfulness. Born Christa Päffgen in Nazi Germany, at 14 she decided she was going to be a top model. So she loitered outside Berlin’s most upmarket department store, undismayed by those who told her that was not the way to be discovered. Within days, the 5’10” beauty was spotted by German couturier Ostergaard. With similar self-purpose, she conquered Paris, launched her film career in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”, and caught the attention of Andrew Loog Oldham – who was set to make her his Next Big Thing until Andy Warhol intercepted and catapulted her to Superstardom. As the Velvet Underground’s Aryan chanteuse, Nico was shrouded in an aura of mystery and cool. She inspired songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne and Lou Reed. She had affairs with all of them, as well as Brian Jones, Tim Buckley, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison – who told her she should get serious, stop relying on other musicians, and become a poet and songwriter herself. So she did. In yet another extraordinary act of self-determination, she bought a portable harmonium, taught herself to play, and lay for hours in a darkened bath surrounded by candles until those Grimm lyrics came forth. The result was The Marble Index, a work of enduring otherworldy genius with its sepulchral death drones from the depths of who the fuck knows where.

But then, with that same monolithic resolve, Nico elected to self-destruct. She refused to be beautiful. Commenting on “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, which Lou Reed had written for her, she said: ‘I can’t identify with it – to notice only the beautiful and not the ugliness.’ She demanded to be a heroin addict with a frighteningly pragmatic rationale: ‘I have too many thoughts’ and ‘it is better to be addicted to opium than it is to be addicted to money.’ While her audience and former colleagues observed the resultant train wreck with decreasing interest and pity, Nico herself – as ever – was doing precisely what she wanted.

Towards the end of her life, she said her only regret was she hadn’t been born a man. As it was, she was one of the greatest outsider women of the twentieth century.

Posted in Heroines | 7 Comments

16th July 1945 the Manhattan Project


The explosion of "The Gadget"

At half past five on the morning of July 16th 1945, The Gadget exploded and the whole world shook. Three square miles of desert sand was melted into glass. A mushroom cloud rose almost 8 miles into the sky and cast a shadow that darkens our world even now. For it was on this day, in the final year of the second world war, that humanity entered the atomic age. A day of infamy. A day to lament. A day on which we should – as a species – collectively reflect on just how far our ingenuity has exceeded our wisdom.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

The Manhattan Project officially began in 1942, though its roots lay in a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, written by a group of concerned scientists including Albert Einstein. Aware that the Nazis were attempting to develop nuclear weapons and terrified by the prospect, the authors of the letter urged Roosevelt to begin research into the technology. Einstein – whose involvement in the project ended with that letter in October 1939 – would later describe adding his signature as the “one mistake in my life” and insisted that he never would have done so had he known that fascist Germany would be unsuccessful in developing the bomb.

But the die had been cast. And a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Major General Leslie Groves – the son of a Presbyterian pastor – was selected to run a top secret project, codenamed “Manhattan”. Groves was given almost free rein with regards to funding and the selection of staff; spending almost $2 billion (and that’s 1945 dollars) and employing some of the finest scientists and engineers of the era. Perhaps the most famous of whom was Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the design team.

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (quoting the Bhagavad Gita)

The Manhattan Project took place at over 30 locations, mostly in the United States but work was also carried out in Britain and Canada. The three central facilities were in Hanford, Washington (where plutonium was manufactured), Oak Ridge Tennessee (where uranium was enriched) and, of course, Los Alamos, New Mexico where the design team worked and The Gadget – as the test bomb was codenamed – was assembled. The Los Alamos facility is generally considered the home of the Atom Bomb and has become a place of fascination and horror within popular consciousness… the birthplace of a monster.

Between 1942 and the end of 1944, suffering setbacks and experiencing triumphs, the Manhattan Project slowly produced the nuclear fuel required for four bombs. The first – The Gadget – was the test device. The second – Little Boy – was dropped on Hiroshima. The third – Fat Man destroyed the city of Nagasaki. The fourth, as it turns out, was not used… two bombs being enough to force an unconditional Japanese surrender. The potential targets for that last product of Los Alamos included Tokyo and Kyoto. By early 1945, Oppenheimer was confident that the design was complete and production of the final devices could begin.

The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

On May 7th 1945 a preliminary explosion was carried out in the New Mexico desert when 108 tons of TNT mixed with plutonium was detonated. This first “dirty bomb” was intended to test the instruments that would record The Gadget, as well as provide an increasingly impatient military high-command with some fireworks. Over a billion and a half dollars had been sunk into the project by this point and results were being demanded. It has been suggested that the Japanese were ready to negotiate in May, and some believe the war was deliberately extended in order that the atomic might of the United States could be revealed to the world (particularly the Soviet Union). It’s difficult to know how much truth is in this theory, but there can be little doubt that – in every nation, in every era – there will always be people in power who wish above all things to demonstrate that power.

Which is why, at ten past five on the morning of July 16th 1945, a select group of soldiers, scientists and politicians sheltered in bunkers between 10 and 20 miles from The Gadget and watched the clock as the 20 minute countdown ticked away, second by second. Of all the people in the world, only they knew that the end of an era was upon us. That a time when human beings could extinguish all life on our planet with the push of a button was dawning. And that they were ushering it in. Midwives to the monster. As half past five drew closer, darkened glasses were donned and eyes shifted from the clock to the horizon. Somewhere out there in the Jornada del Muerto desert, at a place codenamed Trinity, a one hundred foot tower rose up out of the sand. Atop the tower was The Gadget.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
Martin Luther King Jr.

There was a flash of light. Had they not been wearing darkened goggles, the observers would have been blinded by it. Then a moment, an eerie moment in which nothing happened, as though the whole world had taken a sharp intake of breath. Humanity, as one, reduced to a cartoon character… we had run off the cliff and just remained there, suspended above the chasm, waiting for gravity – for the laws of physics – to visit upon us the consequences of our recklessness. And then Trinity exhaled. A poisonous wind rushed outwards in all directions, scorching all in its path, melting the very earth. For hundreds of miles in all directions, the ground shook and a terrible sound rang out. The gates of hell had been opened, and we have yet to find a way of closing them.

The fourteenth of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets opens with the line, Batter my heart, three person’d God. It was this that Oppenheimer was referring to when the named the test site “Trinity”. Part of him knew that his work would unleash a nightmare. Not just on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though they suffered first and as yet, worst. But on the entire human race. That the hearts of generations to come would be battered by the fear and paranoia that characterises our atomic age.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein

Is our technology the product of our insanity? Or is it the other way round? Either way, the Manhattan Project is the ultimate manifestation of that insanity. When that bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert it created two separate futures for our species. In one, that explosion is a wake-up call. In the other, it is a death knell. As yet, we know not which future we have chosen to inhabit. But, let’s face it, the signs aren’t good.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 4 Comments

15th July 1907 the Martyrdom of Qiu Jin


秋瑾 or Qiu Jin (Autumn Gem) – China’s First Feminist

Today we pay tribute to the extraordinary Chinese poetess, radical women’s rights leader and revolutionary, Qiu Jin – executed at the age of 31 on this day in 1907. At the turn of the twentieth century, while Qiu’s sisters in the West were crusading for the right to vote, Chinese women in accordance with the I Ching were believed to occupy a lower position than men in the hierarchical order of the universe. Theirs was a lot of bound feet, arranged marriages and subservient positions across every stratum of society. But then along came China’s first feminist. Qiu was the first to attempt to educate, mobilise and emancipate Chinese women as a group, and single-handedly brought the notion of women’s rights to national attention. And without any movement behind her, Qiu Jin said NO to the degradation of bound feet, left her loveless marriage to study in Japan, started her own radical journal calling for Chinese women’s rights and trained a female army of revolutionaries to rise up against the corrupt Qing Dynasty.

Qiu Jin was first exposed to radicalism after her move to Beijing in 1903, where she witnessed the disastrous political and social backlashes from the Boxer Rebellion of 1900-1905. Swept away by the new ideas of a modern republican form of government, Qiu Jin made the bold decision to abandon her husband and two children to become a revolutionary. She pawned her jewellery and made her way to Tokyo, where many radical writers of the time found themselves. She started wearing pants like men, openly advocated for women’s rights and founded a newspaper to denounce foot binding and other practices that subjugated women.

We women, who have had our feet bound from early childhood, have suffered untold pain and misery, for which our parents showed no pity. Under this treatment our faces grew pinched and thin, and our muscles and bones were cramped and distorted. The consequence is that our bodies are weak and incapable of vigorous activity, and in everything we do we are obliged to lean on others … Sisters, let us today investigate the causes which have led to this want of spirit and energy among women. May it not be because we insist on binding up our girls’ feet at an early age, speaking of their “three-inch golden lilies” and their “captivating little steps”?

When Qiu returned to China in 1906, she started a feminist newspaper called Chinese Women, encouraging women to train for work and become financially independent: “The young intellectuals are all chanting, ‘Revolution, Revolution,’ but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.”

Qiu understood the problem of “woman” and “nation” to be inter-connected. Even if the women of China could free themselves from patriarchal rule, it would be of no use as long as China remained subjugated by imperialistic powers. Qiu and her cousin, Hsu His-lin, began working together to unify the various secret revolutionary groups in order to overthrow the Manchu government. She ostensibly opened a school, ostensibly for physical education, but it in truth it was a secret training ground for women revolutionaries.

Plans for a nationwide Chinese uprising were foiled by the premature action of a lone revolutionary cell, prompting swift government retaliation. Deciding to act before government troops could seize him, Qiu’s cousin Hsu assassinated the much-hated governor of Anhui. He was summarily exectuted. Qiu was arrested soon afterwards. Remaining silent even under torture, she was convicted solely on the evidence of two of her revolutionary poems and sentenced to death by public beheading.

Two years later, China’s revolution ignited. Qiu Jin became the first female martyr of the 1911 Revolution and is celebrated today as a national heroine and symbol of women’s independence. In the past half-century, the cause of women’s rights in China has achieved some remarkable results that Qiu would no doubt be proud of. In 1995, the government stated that the realisation of the equality of men and women is a basic national policy to promote social development in China, and Chinese women legally enjoy more equal rights than many women in the West. But the Confucian tradition of man’s superiority over women has largely survived decades of Communist rule, and nowhere is this more evident than in the twisted one-child policy with its consequential forced abortions, female infanticide and gender imbalance. What’s going to happen when 30 million Chinese men can’t find wives? According to a United Nations official: “The shortage of women will have enormous implications on China’s social, economic, and development future … The skewed ratio of men to women will have an impact on the sex industry and human trafficking,” as well as family, societal and regional stability. Verily, Qiu Jin’s legacy and words have never been more pertinent or powerful:

With all my heart I beseech and beg
my two hundred million female compatriots
to assume their responsibility as citizens.
Arise! Arise! Chinese women, arise!

Posted in Heroines | 4 Comments

14th July 1789 the Storming of the Bastille


The Storming of the Bastille, by Jean-Pierre Houël

Today we celebrate, though not without a small note of reservation, the Storming of the Bastille in Paris on this day in 1789. Commemorated with a public holiday in France, Bastille Day has come to mark the beginning of The French Revolution. Of course, France has had a number of significant revolutions – notably the July Revolution of 1830 and the revolution in 1848 that gave rise to the Second Republic – but it is the one that began in 1789 and lasted a full decade that has earned the definite article. It is The French Revolution.

The Bastille (or Bastion de Saint-Antoine) was originally a fortress built in the 1370s – during the Hundred Years’ War – to protect eastern Paris. By the 17th century the expansion of the city meant the Bastille was no longer on the outskirts where it could serve as an effective fortification against attackers, and Louis XIII re-purposed it as a prison. For the next hundred and fifty years the Bastille provided French royalty with a secure facility into which political prisoners and social agitators could be thrown with little or no regard for legal due process. As such, in the eyes of many it soon came to represent the oppression of the monarchy and although it only contained seven prisoners on July 14th 1789, the Storming of the Bastille was a hugely symbolic act, demonstrating the rejection of arbitrary royal privilege by the people of Paris.

Although history has chosen to locate the start of The French Revolution on this day, the decision to storm the gates of the Bastille was not a spontaneous one taken in isolation. It was merely the first explosive outburst of a society in which anger and disillusionment had been brewing for some time. Indeed, the monarchy was well aware of this gathering storm and earlier that year, on May 5th, King Louis XVI convened the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years. This was an assembly of representatives of the three ‘Estates’ (the monarchy – the First Estate; the church – the Second Estate; the common people – the Third Estate) and it aimed to stave off public unrest by finding solutions to the severe economic and social problems facing France at the time.

However, the Estates-General soon collapsed with the Third Estate quickly realising they had little real power to affect change via this forum. It was essentially a talking shop aimed at providing the illusion of participation in the political process and so, on June 17th they broke from the discussions and formed the National Assembly. Although less dramatic that the Storming of the Bastille a month later, it could be argued that this was the first truly revolutionary act by Les Communes and set the course for the days, months and years to come.

During the following four weeks, the relationship between the First and Third Estates grew increasingly strained, with the Church – having carefully gauged which way the wind was blowing – reluctantly taking the side of the people. On June 20th the king placed guards around the building used by the fledgling National Assembly. Members of the Assembly, sensing the onset of confrontation, made their way to a nearby tennis court owned by Louis and convened a meeting there instead. While the formation of the National Assembly had been a contentious act, the oath sworn by the members on June 20th – which later became known as the Tennis Court Oath – was the first direct challenge to the authority of the monarch. The Oath consisted of several commitments and assertions; firstly that the Assembly would continue to meet despite royal prohibition; secondly that political power ultimately derived from the Third Estate; and thirdly that they would continue to oppose the monarchy until a national constitution had been drawn up which enshrined that basic principle.

It was the Tennis Court Oath that led to the direct confrontation between the First and Third Estates which boiled over on July 14th. For although Louis initially offered concessions and sought to defuse an increasingly tense situation, the defiant nature of the Oath inspired both revolutionaries and conservatives to action. On the one hand, the fact that the monarchy was openly rejected in such a manner made it easier for others to do so; on the other hand, conservative forces within the king’s court saw the Oath as evidence that their authority was being undermined and anarchy was lurking just around the corner.

A number of historians have suggested that Louis XVI was actually more liberal than many in his own court, and was prepared to meet many of the demands of the National Assembly. However, his son had died just two weeks prior to the Tennis Court Oath distracting him from matters of state and allowing more conservative elements within the First Estate to gain power. Which is why troops flying the Royal Standard began to arrive in Paris within days of the Oath. Many of these soldiers were foreign mercenaries as the loyalty of French troops to the monarchy had begun to waver, with orders to detain political opponents of Louis being ignored. Sporadic rioting began as a reaction to the presence of Swiss and German troops on the streets and despite royal assurances that no direct action would be taken against the National Assembly, the tension was mounting.

On July 11th, Louis XVI’s privy council dismissed the Minister of Finance, Jacques Necker, who was the staunchest ally of the Third Estate within government and who had been attempting to restructure the French economy in a manner favourable to them. This was the final straw for many, as it represented the complete disenfranchisement of the Third Estate, and by the morning of July 14th the stage had well and truly been set for The French Revolution.

So it was that a crowd of about 1,000 revolutionaries gathered at the gates of the Bastille demanding entry. Although there were only seven prisoners to be liberated (none of whom had any political significance), there was a far greater prize lurking within the walls of the old fortress. For as well as the symbolism of occupying that hated prison, the building was also being used as an armoury and contained almost 15,000kg of gunpowder… exactly the kind of cache that could kick-start a widespread revolution.

Although there were only a handful of defenders, they were better armed than the angry mob and what started as an attempt by the terrified guards to peacefully relinquish control of the prison turned into a battle. Almost 100 revolutionaries died that day with the loss of just one soldier, though a further eight were later executed for their part in the killing.

And so the Bastille fell, sparking a revolution that would last for the next ten years. A revolution that soared to the heights of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, yet plumbed the depths of the savage Reign of Terror. A revolution that essentially heralded the end of feudalism in Europe, but which simultaneously ushered in the Napoleonic Wars and a new era of modern imperialism.

Which is why at this point, I must sound that small note of reservation mentioned in the first line. Although the Third Estate referred to themselves as ‘the commons’, in reality they represented the emerging capitalist class and not the common man… the peasantry. So although the masses would indeed join the fight, there is a sense in which – for much of the time at least – they were being manipulated and exploited by one social elite in their bid to replace another. Yes, The French Revolution saw a fundamental shift in European society with the downfall of feudalism. However, despite the high ideals outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, it was as much about securing the rights of Private Capital as it was about the Rights of Man.

And now, almost two and a quarter centuries later, the entrenched power of International Finance Capitalism and the tyranny of the “Free Market” are as much a legacy of those ten chaotic years at the end of the 18th century as are the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the spread of representative democracy. The French Revolution did not replace the rule of The King with the rule of The People. It merely replaced bloodlines with accumulated wealth. Which, if it’s a step in the right direction, can only be seen as a very small one. It’s a journey as yet incomplete. A job we need to finish. Without the wars and the reign of terror, if possible, but so long as an unaccountable elite controls the affairs of man, the ideals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité remain but a fleeting illusion.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Revolution, World Events | 9 Comments

13th July 1954 the Death of Frida Kahlo


Frida Kahlo self-portrait

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

…and Frida’s reality was a lifetime of extreme physical pain and tortuous suffering, punctuated with a tempestuous emotional turbulence.

Artist Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish father and indigenous Mexican mother. She grew up in Mexico City at a time when Mexicans were beginning to take great pride in their native culture and traditions. Frida was proud of her pre-Columbian heritage and wore local costume, including long embroidered skirts in bright colours, big silver earrings, flowers, and jewellery from the folk tradition. Her distinctive look gave her a brand, yet averted attention from her tiny, weak, disabled body.

Aged 6 she contracted polio which left her with a stunted leg and foot. Despite this she studied hard at school to fulfil her ambition of becoming a doctor. On 17 September 1925 the bus she was travelling home from school on collided with a tram. Frida’s wounds were severe but somehow, despite the loss of blood, the broken spine, the shattered pelvis and the spike which impaled her through her vagina, she survived. She was only 18.

Her recovery to some form of functioning health was slow. Her father, who was a photographer and painted for pleasure, rigged up an easel, mirror and a palette for her in bed and she took up painting to “combat the boredom and pain”. This was the beginning of Frida’s exceptional artistic journey.

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

She started as she was to continue; with self-portraits. But she shows us so much more than just what she looked like and what she was wearing. Frida shows us her inner world, which is visceral, intense and often doesn’t make easy viewing. Other people perhaps write books or poetry or see a counsellor to express their inner turmoil. Frida painted it. There are paintings of pain, torture, betrayal, lust, love, loss, disappointment and death. She is honest about herself in a way that perhaps no other artist had ever been. Frida’s life and work are indivisible.

Quite apart from the more than 30 operations she had to endure to manage her poor physical health, she was often emotionally stressed. Aged 22 she married 42-year-old Diego Rivera who was already an established artist, a painter of political murals, an atheist and a revolutionary communist. He recognised Frida’s talent and used his influence and contacts to promote his wife’s work. But their firey personalities meant their relationship was fraught with difficulty. Frida and Diego were both active communists, so when Leon Trotsky came to Mexico to escape Stalin in 1937 they offered him refuge in their home. Diego, himself a serial womaniser, felt the pain of betrayal he’d so often inflicted on Frida, when she had an affair with Trotsky. Frida and Diego divorced in 1939, but remarried the following year. A classic case of can’t live with, can’t live without.

“I have been cheated-on more times than I can count.”

Frida smoked cigars, swore like a navvy, drank tequila to excess and took drugs – both prescribed and recreational – sometimes all at the same time. It was her way of coping with the shit that life threw at her. The physical pain was agonising, as were Diego’s affairs, but perhaps what hurt her most were the three miscarriages. She painted those too.

Culturally steeped in the visual traditions of the Catholic church, a powerful force in Mexican society, it’s not surprising that Frida’s self-portraits are strewn with references and symbols, including Frida’s own depiction of herself as the Virgin Mary. But Frida is no sweet-faced mother-of-god. Frida is a powerful Everywoman. The universal themes that women understand are all there; the sacrifice, the selflessless, the blood, the sometimes futile attempts to take control of our lives. It’s no wonder that women all over the world respond so passionately to Frida’s work.

Frida’s health worsened; there were yet more operations, bone grafts, infections, amputations.

“Feet…what do I need them for if I have wings to fly.”

By now she was addicted to painkillers and bed-ridden much of the time. But her burning desire to paint was undiminished; she completed another 15 in her last two years. She attended the opening of her final exhibition pushed along in her bed.

On Tuesday 13 July 1954, Frida died of what may have been a deliberate overdose in the Blue House where she had been born 47 years earlier. Diego couldn’t accept she had gone; a doctor had to open one of her veins to show him that she did not bleed. “I don’t want to be buried. I have spent too much time lying down…just burn it!”

At her funeral mourners sang political songs. As Diego and Frida’s family lifted her body from the coffin, a blast of heat from the furnace caught it; mourners saw her body jerk bolt upright and her hair blaze like a halo as the incinerator doors closed.

Frida’s total output was small: only 143 paintings, but 55 of them are self-portraits. She never set out to be a pioneering feminist, but in recording and exposing the passions and truths of her life, that is her legacy. That a diminutive, crippled, Latino woman was able to make her mark as a great artist is a measure of the value she placed on herself. Women today, whether they are artists (like Britain’s best known woman artist* Tracey Emin who learned much from Frida) or not, would do well to learn from Frida’s priceless example.

Her face now appears on the Mexican 500 peso note. Even for a communist like Frida, that’s worth something.

* apologies for using this loathsome and patronising expression

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

Posted in Heroines | 3 Comments

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?

Posted in World Events | 1 Comment

9th July 1977  the Death of Alice Paul


The remarkable Alice Paul

At the onset of the second decade of the twentieth century, the American women’s suffrage movement was floundering. Despite non-stop crusading since 1848 and the monumental efforts of pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by 1910 only four states had enfranchised women. The movement was in desperate need of new impetus. Today we recall the extraordinary woman who led the final charge for the vote with a militance hitherto unseen in America – Alice Paul.

Like many of the younger first-wave feminists, Alice Paul had grown impatient with the longstanding state-by-state strategy. At 29, Alice instigated a campaign dedicated to the passage of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage and went head-to-head with the federal government and President Woodrow Wilson. She played a pivotal role in bringing about the passage of the 19th amendment in 1919, but what this decisive moment in America’s development owes to Alice Paul’s militancy is often criminally overlooked because history has adopted a less controversial narrative of the women’s suffrage movement.

Born into a strict Quaker family, Alice Paul was raised to believe in the righteousness of social equality. In 1907, while studying in the UK, her peaceable worldview came to an abrupt end after witnessing a riot when a female attempted a public speech about women’s suffrage. That woman was Christabel Pankhurst – eldest daughter of the legendary militant suffragist Emmeline. The newly radicalised Alice abandoned her studies to join the Pankhursts in their struggle, and was sent to English prisons on three occasions where she endured hunger strikes and painful force-feeding.

Three years later, Alice returned home and became an overnight star in the American suffrage movement. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) appointed her chair of its new Congressional Committee, whereupon she wasted no time in introducing her bold tactics in accordance with the Pankhurst credo of “deeds not words”.

Alice understood that for a federal campaign to succeed, it needed to have the support of the president. She got his full attention when she staged a suffrage procession of some 8000 strong in Washington D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration. Though Alice had done her part to organise a peaceful march, an unruly crowd assaulted the suffragists while police stood by and did nothing. The next day, Alice Paul stole Wilson’s inaugural thunder when news of the near-riot made headlines. Over the next four years, she would become one of the prickliest thorns in the president’s side.

By 1914, the increasingly militant Alice Paul was expelled from NAWSA for being “too British”. Along with her great ally Lucy Burns, Alice formed a newly independent Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later renamed the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Without the resistance from the more measured NAWSA, Alice was free to be unapologetically aggressive. In January 1917, on the eve of America’s involvement in the First World War, the NWP stationed members in front of the White House. No American – male or female – had ever before conceived of this now time-honoured protest tactic. Alice Paul was the first.

The NWP’s so-called “Silent Sentinels” picketed the president’s residence for 18 months, 6 days a week, 8 hours a day. But when Alice unveiled her banner indicting “Kaiser Wilson” for hypocrisy in fighting an overseas war for democracy while 20,000,000 American women remained disenfranchised, the president finally lost his patience.

An indignant public lost its patience too. A group of patriotic soldiers tore the “treacherous” banners to shreds and violently attacked the female picketers. Instead of arresting the attackers, the police arrested the women for “obstructing traffic”. 168 suffragists were sent to jail – most of them to a former men’s prison with male guards and open toilets, rotten food and dirty sheets. In an attempt to discredit Alice Paul, she was declared insane and placed in a psychiatric prison. Demanding to be recognised as political prisoners, Alice and many others went on hunger strike and were subsequently subjected to brutal forced-feedings. Then, on 15th November 1917, some forty guards with clubs went on a rampage, terrorising thirty-three jailed suffragists. They beat, grabbed, dragged, choked, slammed, pinched, twisted, and kicked the defenceless women.

News of the so-called “Night of Terror” leaked out to newspapers, causing public outrage. The militants’ stubborn protests, however reviled they may have been, created a situation in which something had to be done. In January 1918, Woodrow Wilson publicly announced his support of woman suffrage. Two years later, the 19th amendment was finally ratified. Alice Paul’s militancy had worked.

For Alice Paul, however, the struggle did not end with the right to vote, which did not fully correct the fact that women were discriminated against: “The ballot is the symbol of a new status in human society, it is the greatest possible single step forward in the progress of women, but it does not in itself complete their freedom.” In 1923, Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment – the final step in women’s struggle for full legal equality.

When Alice Paul died on 9th July 1977 aged 92 at her home New Jersey, she was convinced that organisers would be successful in securing the remaining three states needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment that she’d introduced to Congress fifty-four long years earlier. The amendment, however, was yet again defeated.

A reinvigorated movement to once and for all secure constitutional equal rights for American women still awaits. It will require a new generation of courageous feminists who have not been hoodwinked by patriarchal concessions. The wrongs throughout society cannot even begin to be righted without equality. And so, on this anniversary of her passing, we bow our heads in gratitude to Alice Paul and beseech women of today and tomorrow to follow in her noble footsteps.

Posted in Heroines | 6 Comments

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

29th June 1975 the Mysterious Tragedy of Tim Buckley


Tim Buckley

Today we lament the tragic and untimely passing of rock’n’roll’s most revolutionary vocal stylist  – the beautiful Tim Buckley – wrenched away from this planetary existence on this day in 1975, aged just 28. Had he survived his tragic fate, who knows what ecstatic new highs and churningly deep lows this mischievous yodelling leprechaun could have brung us? Signing to Elektra Records in 1966 after a brief spell as Nico’s teenage guitarist, and accompanied – Donovan/Gypsy Dave-stylee – by his own poet/familiar Larry Beckett, Buckley’s first two LPs TIM BUCKLEY and the soaring and sumptuously produced GOODBYE & HELLO placed the nineteen-year-old on the edge of hippy superstardom by early ‘67. But when Tim’s exquisite performance of the timeless ‘Song to the Siren’ on the Monkees’ TV show enraptured millions of spellbound teenage girls, this immaculately hip troubadour immediately turned his back on the kind of  ‘Face of ‘67’-style magazine stardom that beckoned; ditching his cool young hippie musicians in favour of a bunch of middle-aged jazz uglies… ug-leez. Entirely absent from this new music were those baroque pop structures previously demanded by Larry Beckett’s keenly observed lyrics, Buckley’s new vocal path being instead a yelping dance through fire, a kundalini guru’s walk on gilded splinters, a relentlessly speculative and even unrewarding experiment. But at its peak, what a ride this music could be: a sonic Cresta Run no less. The blissful songs of this new LP HAPPY SAD stretched way out instrumentally into proto-meditative states, ambient ballads of impressionistic heat haze that evaporated on touching, as did the jarring, near inchoate stumbling genius of the bizarre LORCA, whose six blissful burnt offerings often collapsed in on themselves so strung out was the vibe. Ah yes, but so far from Elektra’s initial commercial expectations had Buckley by now swerved that this final extraordinary disc was passed over as a major release by Elektra and allowed merely to seep out via the company’s mid-price label. Buckley’s next home on Frank Zappa’s Straight label immediately yielded another artistic triumph in the glorious BLUE AFTERNOON, sumptuously packaged and brimming over with shimmering organic experiments. But the rage and range of its follow-up 1970’s STARSAILOR often veered too close to the jazz leanings of Tim’s Frank Zappa sidemen, and those all important strung out grooves which had previously acted as vehicles for Tim’s vocaleptics were, on STARSAILOR, too often faded out before he’d really kicked off.

Thereafter, the 1970s would prove difficult, even arduous for Tim Buckley. His management bailed on him, his jazz musicians prevaricated and his audiences evaporated even further. So with his free music experiments put temporarily on hold, this loveable but un-hireable jazz elf held his tongue temporarily whilst LA producers drew out of him performances of songs written by others, even such standards as ‘Sally Go Round the Roses’. Ho-hum. Thereafter, heroin use, a bad haircut and his itinerant lifestyle soon took its toll on the famous Buckley looks, whilst the hack artwork of his final three LPs – GREETINGS FROM L.A., SEFRONIA and LOOK AT THE FOOL – show us evidence enough of our hero’s tragic can’t-be-arsed decline and evaporating muse. Ironic it was, then, that Buckley – only after a comparatively successful series of Texas shows – succumbed on June 29th, 1975 to an accidental heroin overdose, dying at 9.42pm from ‘acute heroin/morphine and ethanol intoxication’. Many friends and family members believe that Buckley overdosed due to his body’s over-reacting to his drastic clean up of the preceding months, whilst one close friend declared to me back in 1981 that Tim Buckley’s death should really be regarded as an unproven homicide, arguing that Tim had so successfully and so visibly reduced his heroin use that any friend offering him the drug should have known how hazardous it could have been to him.

With all of this in mind, we should now reflect on what a tragic loss the death of Tim Buckley was to ‘70s rock’n’roll, for his main sequence of LPs offer extraordinary and sustained evidence of a compelling Ur-spirit at work. Had Punk and the New Wave re-ignited that spirit, he may – like near contemporaries Peter Hammill, John Cale and Robert Wyatt – have enjoyed even greater notoriety than the first time around. But it was not to be. So let’s now salute this elusive elemental whose looks drove women crazy and whose ways charmed all around him, and let all true rock’n’rollers now bow their heads in symbolic acknowledgement of Tim’s dazzling series of roaring and righteous works. To Tim and his adventuresome spirit, let none forget.

[Written by Julian Cope]

Posted in Heroes | 12 Comments

28th June 1936  the Death of Alexander Berkman


Alexander Berkman

On this day in 1936, Alexander Berkman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. Suffering from poor health and broken dreams, it was a sad and discomfiting end to the noble life of this seemingly inexorable revolutionary who, together with one-time lover and lifelong companion Emma Goldman, had been the leading figure of the American anarchist movement at its early-twentieth-century peak.

A gifted writer, Berkman served as editor of Goldman’s hugely influential periodical Mother Earth, published his own journal, The Blast, and authored several seminal political works – his ABC of Anarchism remains one of the most concise and lucid explanations of anarchist philosophy. His writings endure as testimonials of one of the most pivotal political and social eras as well as blueprints for today and tomorrow.

But it is for one extraordinary act that the then 22-year-old Russian-born anarchist earned his place in historical infamy. Like John Brown before him, Berkman was ready to go to the furthest extreme on behalf of his cause. At the height of America’s labour struggles, he attempted to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick in revenge for orchestrating the violent suppression of the Homestead Strike resulting in the death of seven steelworkers.

Berkman imagined that to assassinate a tyrant such as Frick would awaken the consciousness of the working class, identify for them the enemy, and startle the masses out of their lethargy. The fateful deed, Berkman prophesised, would ignite the revolution – and he was fully prepared to sacrifice himself in order to light the flame. But the plan backfired spectacularly. Not only did Berkman bungle the assassination, but the very people for whom he had intended to martyr himself were utterly disgusted by his act. They didn’t want revolution. They didn’t want freedom from tyranny. All they wanted was a few more crumbs. The Homestead strikers were all too quick to disassociate themselves from the “crazed Russian immigrant”, and even sent condolence messages to Frick, praying for his speedy recovery.

Berkman, meanwhile, was sentenced to twenty-two years behind bars in the severe Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania. There, he wrote one of the great works of prison literature, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, wherein he offers not only an explanation for his act – but also a stirring justification for the controversial theory of propaganda of the deed:

Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life… True, the Cause often calls upon the revolutionist to commit an unpleasant act; but it is the test of the true revolutionist—nay, more, his pride—to sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People’s cause.

Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause? Why, the very life of a true revolutionist has no other purpose, no significance whatever, save to sacrifice it on the altar of the beloved People. And what could be higher in life than to be a true revolutionist? A being who has neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause; one who has emancipated himself from being merely human, and has risen above that, even to the height of conviction which excludes all doubt, all regret; in short, one who in the very inmost of his soul feels himself revolutionist first, human afterwards.

After serving fourteen years behind bars, Berkman was released and reunited with Goldman, threw his efforts into Mother Earth, helped found the Ferrer Centre in New York City and led the charge against conscription at the outbreak of World War One. For that he was once again imprisoned and eventually deported to Russia, where he witnessed the early days of State Bolshevism. He confronted Lenin and Trotsky, unsuccessfully tried to mediate in the Kronstadt uprising, and finally left the country deeply disillusioned. His subsequent account, The Bolshevik Myth, was one of the first to expose Soviet totalitarianism.

He spent his final years in poverty as an exile in France, dispirited by humanity’s failure to emancipate itself when it might at long last have had the chance to do so in the social revolutions of the early twentieth century.

As a man and revolutionary, Alexander Berkman was much, much more than he who shot Frick. He was one of anarchism’s greatest proponents, possessed of uncompromising integrity, altruistic idealism and without the power-hungry duplicity which tainted so many of his peers. He suffered imprisonment, torture, harassment, deportation and statelessness in the name of his convictions. But, to the end, he maintained that anarchism was “the very finest thing that humanity has ever thought of” – and never once expressed regret for his attempt on Henry Clay Frick. Throughout his long revolutionary career until his suicide at the age of 65, he at all times walked it like he talked it.

As the playwright Eugene O’Neill said to Berkman in 1927:

“As for my fame (God help us!) and your infame, I would be willing to exchange a good deal of mine for a bit of yours. It is not hard to write what one feels as truth. It is damned hard to live it.”

Posted in Anarchists, Heroes | 1 Comment

27th June 1905 the Founding of the Industrial Workers of the World


“An injury to one is an injury to all”

On June 27th 1905, a couple of hundred anarchists, socialists and vagabond activists gathered in a hall in Chicago for what would later become known as the First Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Like activists in China, Peru, North Africa and elsewhere today they would find themselves targeted by the authorities, imprisoned and even murdered for the crime of disagreeing with those in power. They spoke out. They organised their dissent. Sometimes they withheld their labour. Often they demanded radical change. They united beneath a simple slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all”… a worldview simply incompatible with free-market capitalism; a philosophy which happily externalises all manner of injury in the pursuit of personal gain; a philosophy that dismisses collective responsibility unless there’s a profit to be made commodifying it.

And the IWW – who became known as the Wobblies, a great name though one with a disputed etymology – understood this. They did not merely demand better wages and conditions (though many did demand these things as a first step), they ultimately sought an end to all wages. In the eyes of the IWW, employment by a “boss” was wage-slavery. Many of the Wobblies certainly agitated for higher pay, but always with an understanding that longer chains and bigger cages were not enough. Even today the IWW – and those organisations that trace their lineage back to the various splits in the organisation – are active in setting up workers co-ops and boycotting corporations that trample on the rights of workers. The ultimate goal is an end to bosses and an end to the alienation of wage-slavery… the dignity of a system that allows the worker to own their own labour and to invest it in an enterprise of which they own an equal share with every other participant.

Although the collectivist revolution they sought never materialised, the IWW’s rich history is littered with success stories. At the height of the organisation it had about a hundred thousand members and it’s said it could reliably call upon the support of a quarter million more. But it was not only the sheer weight of numbers that slowly won many of the rights enjoyed by workers in our liberal democracies today, though that certainly played a big part. It was also the organisational structure which permitted workers to discuss aims, to strategise and to distribute information via union newspapers. In the first decade of its existence the IWW organised literally hundreds of strikes and carried out a wide variety of other direct actions (blockading rail-lines, “free speech fights”, holding sit-ins in local government buildings and even sabotage). That this was all happening under the umbrella of a large international organisation meant successful tactics could quickly be passed on to others while unsuccessful ones dropped.

In 1915 the IWW won major improvements in the working conditions of migratory farm labourers. The 1917 IWW Lumber Strike was directly responsible for the 8-hour work day (ignore corporate revisionism that claims credit for this by suggesting it was a coalition of company bosses who magnanimously “gifted” the 8-hour work day to their employees… essentially the opposite of the truth). And all the while, at the heart of the IWW’s philosophy was the notion of equal rights with regards to race and sex. The Wobblies demanded – though the battle continues to this day – uniform pay and conditions for men and women irregardless of their race. It was a radical position in a deeply segregated United States and one which arguably limited their appeal and influence in some areas.

Throughout this period the IWW and its members came under violent attack from several directions. The US government – from the federal right down to the county level – framed several prominent members of the IWW for crimes they clearly did not commit. At the same time the authorities conspicuously ignored the actions of the private militias set up by company bosses to break strikes, even when such tactics resulted in grievous injury and death. The state sanctioned the murder of workers by wealthy capitalists in an attempt to suppress the unions. And it also turned a blind eye to the vigilante groups that attacked striking workers (particularly migratory workers and non-whites). IWW members were beaten, shot, falsely imprisoned and lynched, all with the tacit approval of the United States government. No one sane would suggest that the government of the time was “the same as” the Syrian or Chinese governments today. But their willingness to adopt many of the same brutal tactics is certainly revealing.

The IWW’s popularity was dealt a blow by the outbreak of World War I. An overtly pacifist organisation, it saw the war – quite correctly – as a squabble between imperial powers in which millions of young men were being sent to die futile deaths and inflict futile deaths on others. In the years immediately preceding their entry into the war, the Wobblies had been actively campaigning against US involvement. When some members bravely insisted on continuing this campaign even after the US declaration of war, it became easy for the government to paint the IWW as unpatriotic. A prominent leader of the organisation was lynched in August 1917 and it sparked a wave of such attacks. Hundreds of members were rounded up and thrown into prison. In just one particularly brutal example, an IWW member was removed from his jail cell by his guards and thrown to a mob that had gathered at the prison gate. He was beaten to a pulp, castrated and lynched before his body was shot dozens of times. The County Coroner listed the cause of death as “suicide”.

The name of that IWW member was Wesley Everest. And although the list of prominent Wobblies is long and impressive, his is the only name I will mention. I will deliberately refrain from naming others lest the cult of the individual obscure what was always a mass movement… a purposefully communal endeavour. For those who are interested, it is easy enough to track down the names of the more famous members, many of whom will be known to you and who have earned their own pages here at On This Deity. But for now let’s not get bogged down with the life-story of any one person and instead concentrate on the collective action of the people.

Although the IWW recovered somewhat during the 1920s and 30s, continuing to organise workers and successfully (occasionally) winning greater rights and better conditions for those in low paid jobs, the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s decimated the IWW leadership. By that point, however, the Wobblies could quite legitimately claim to have done more for the benefit of the American worker than any other single group. And the success spread beyond the United States thanks to an international membership that influenced labour movements throughout Europe and Australia. At the same time, there’s little doubt that the original founders are unlikely to have viewed the organisation as an unqualified success. Yes, the IWW won some important battles, they secured some important rights and improved the lot of millions of workers. But they did not win the war… not the war they were fighting.

And perhaps it was a war they were always destined to lose. Though it must be said that the constant splitting and in-fighting didn’t improve their chances. The first major split in the IWW came barely a year after it was formed. And the second major split just two years after that. At the time the internal dialogue within the Wobblies was between the anarcho-synidcalists and the Marxists. The latter saw the struggle for better pay and conditions as an essential first step towards worker control over the means of production. First, they believed, it was necessary to raise the workers out of abject poverty – to free them from the day to day struggle for basic survival. Only then would they be capable of coherent political action against the system.

The anarchists, however, saw this approach as self-defeating. The very thing that would drive the workers to overthrow the capitalist system was their oppression, their poverty and the fact that they were downtrodden. Give them longer chains and bigger cages and many of them might just forget the chains and cages were there at all. While others might be quite happy with wage-slavery so long as the wages were good enough.

Although my own natural sympathies lie with the anarchist position, I see both sides of that argument. Who could be so lacking in compassion as to dismiss the tangible gains made by the IWW during the first decades it was active? Who would reject the 8-hour day and insist that manual labourers should be forced to work 14 hours for a pittance or lose their jobs? How can we criticise the sweatshop conditions that compel criticism and opposition from Chinese labour activists at a real risk to their lives, without being thankful that we have – largely – eliminated such conditions from our own society?

But at the same time, might we not concede that the anarchists had a point? That the anti-capitalist revolution never arrived in large part because the capitalist elite permitted just enough wealth to trickle down, providing the masses with a modicum of comfort and the illusion of security? That the fragmentation of western capitalism occurring now is precisely because we’ve been happy with our bigger cages, even if their construction has been carried out at the expense of the planet we live on?

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Anarchists, World Events | 3 Comments

25th June 1876 the Battle of the Little Bighorn


Today we meditate long and hard upon the legendary and heroic but ultimately Pyrrhic victory of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull’s Indian Alliance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Could General George Custer have avoided defeat had this hothead not charged into battle without the unwieldy Gatlin machine guns on offer to him – weapons that elsewhere around the world were wiping out native forces sometimes at a rate of 500 to 1? But then again, let us not underestimate the enormous spiritual damage created by Sitting Bull’s unfortunate victory vision – achieved only after 48 hours of dancing and only then after having sacrificed 100 pieces of flesh from his arms. That his tribe would honour whatsoever visions passed through so great a shaman chief as Sitting Bull reads heroically and quite rightly so to we Moderns, but what was the truth of Sitting Bull’s victory vision? Like Igjugarjuk – the Inuit shaman whose loutish misrule of his village ultimately caused his people to have him incarcerated by the white authorities – could it not be argued that Sitting Bull’s long and protracted vision quest was not equally Custeristic towards his people? If he had to dance for 48 hours to find the truth, then what kind of truth was that? Sitting Bull’s vision deluded the tribes into their alliance. Without the vision, no battle would have taken place at the Little Bighorn. What is certain, however, is that General Custer’s defeat removed the scales from the eyes of the complacent white authorities. For the Battle of the Little Bighorn screamed out its Native American message to President Andrew Johnson: these Black Hills of Dakota, which you bequeathed us in perpetuity just six years ago, will remain in Native hands – or we shall die defending them. Unfortunately for Sitting Bull’s victory vision, that’s precisely what the tribes were forced to do. The shocking news of Custer’s defeat arrived in the east two days after the nation’s centennial, and prompted a thirst for revenge. The American government intensified hugely its military efforts, and Custer’s “Last Stand” also marked the Plains Indians’ last stand.  The Indian Alliance was shattered, Crazy Horse was forced to surrender while Sitting Bull and his people fled to Canada. Within the year, the federal government had stolen back those gold-steeped Black Hills and nearly all the Plains Indians had been confined to special reservations.

[Written by Saoirse Ó Gradaigh]

Posted in World Events | 2 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

19th June 1953  the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg


Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

Today marks the anniversary of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs – who maintained their innocence to the bitter end – were the only US citizens to be executed under the Espionage Act, in what has been described as the most controversial death sentence in US history. The spectacular trial and unprecedented severe sentencing during the height of Cold War hysteria shook America to its core and generated worldwide condemnation – Jean-Paul Sartre denounced the executions as “a legal lynching that has covered a whole nation with blood.” Over half a century later, disturbing truths about the Rosenberg case and the American government’s complicity in a frame-up remain unresolved.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were a devoted couple with two young sons. Growing up in a poor Jewish neighbourhood in New York’s Lower East Side, they’d both witnessed the horrors of pre-war American social injustice: impoverished tenements, evictions of families onto the streets, soup-kitchen queues extending for blocks, malnourished children forced to eat out of garbage cans. “You had to be dead from the neck up to not feel radical,” said a friend of the couple, speaking about the era. And for highly politicised radicals like the Rosenbergs, communism presented a viable alternative. But just how far did their admiration for the Soviet Union extend?

In July 1950, the Rosenbergs were arrested on suspicion of passing information to the Soviets. Eight months later, the couple and co-conspirator Morton Sobell went on trial in New York City for conspiracy to commit espionage during WW2 – when the Soviets were still America’s wartime allies. The principal prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs was Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, who confessed to spying and agreed to testify in exchange for promises that his wife would not be charged and he would be spared the death penalty in his own trial. Greenglass had worked on the atomic bomb Manhattan Project as a low-level engineer without any access to or knowledge of the weapon’s intricacies. He was allegedly the source of information on the bomb’s “secret”, having provided an amateur and inaccurate drawing of the bomb to Julius on the back of a Jell-O packet. He would later admit he’d lied on the witness stand. According to the federal prosecutor, another witness, Harry Gold, the confessed American accomplice of British spy Klaus Fuchs, was “the necessary link in the chain that points indisputably to the guilt of the Rosenbergs.” Gold would also later confess: “I lied so often it’s a wonder steam didn’t come out of my ears.” The Rosenbergs were found guilty and sentenced to death by Judge Irving R. Kaufman who declared their crime to be “worse than murder” and blamed them personally for 50,000 casualties of  the Korean War.

The appointment of a biased judge, the grooming of witnesses by the FBI, the secret and illegal meetings between the chief prosecutor and Judge Kaufman, perjured testimonies, fabricated evidence and the pervading demagogic McCarthyism all point to a monumentally corrupt trial. But it was the severity of the death sentence that shocked the world. Convicted British spies Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs received ten and fourteen years respectively. The Rosenbergs’ co-conspirators also received comparatively light sentences. Reviewing the case in 1966, law professor Alexander M. Bickel wrote, “The Rosenberg case is … a ghastly and shameful episode. There is first of all the death sentence, and secondly the death sentence, and thirdly the death sentence, and then again the death sentence.”

The imposition of the death sentence, however, was itself the tragic result of a failed prosecution strategy. At least a month before the trial began, the Justice Department discussed the usefulness of the death penalty as a device to force the Rosenbergs to confess and hopefully implicate others. The Rosenbergs called their bluff. Even though a confession from one could have saved the other, they both refused to admit guilt or blow the whistle on anyone else.

So, were the Rosenbergs treasonous spies? Recent declassified documents of the Soviets’ Venona Project certainly point a guilty finger at Julius. But the same de-coded information proves that Ethel played no role at all. Was Julius responsible for passing the “atomic secret” to the Soviet Union, thus perpetrating the Korean War no less? According to the Soviets, the information received through Julius was of virtually no use. Their own scientists were brilliant enough, thank you, to need not rely on an amateur and inaccurate drawing on the back of a Jell-O packet.

After all these years, what remains certain is this: the Rosenbergs were not guilty as charged. Their conviction was based on perjured testimony and fabricated evidence. Government agents and agencies orchestrated a frame-up which resulted in their execution. The sham trial and severe sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in a country baying for commie blood has been likened to a witch hunt. Remembering the Rosenbergs’ on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of their execution, the New York Times wrote: “[The case] still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria”.

Indeed, to all those who wonder how the German people could have collectively fallen under the spell of Adolf Hitler, we need only look back at America in the grip of McCarthyism for similar evidence of national mass psychosis.

Posted in World Events | 9 Comments

17th June 1972 the Watergate Arrests


The infamous Watergate complex

On a balmy Saturday evening in Washington DC, Frank Wills was doing his rounds. It was June 17th 1972 and he was working as a security guard in the Watergate complex. During the course of his routine patrol he noticed that several of the doors had tape applied to them in order to prevent them locking. Suspecting that a burglary might be in progress, Wills called the police, little knowing his phone call would become one of the most influential of all time. While that night it would merely result in the arrest of five burglars, it would later set off a chain of events that was to shake the United States to the core, forcing the collapse of a government and the only US presidential resignation in history.

Nixon, of course, like almost every historical figure, has long since succumbed to caricature. He’s the “bad president”. We now know that – despite his claims to the contrary – Nixon was a crook. More than that, he’s been cast in the role of The Crook. And while I won’t add my voice to those revisionists who seek to rehabilitate Richard Nixon, I find his demonisation to be a tad curious. Because what truly differentiates him from the rest is the fact that he got caught. And yet we’re expected to believe that he really was the one bad apple, without whom the list of US Commanders in Chief would smell sweet as an orchard at the end of summer.

It has been said that “history is political”. It’s a statement I agree with only up to a point, though I will concede that political history is generally political. Which is why we should be very careful about taking received wisdom at face value. There’s a tendency – and it’s a natural one – to simplify historical narratives; to make them more like fiction and less like life; to avoid complexity and ambiguity and spin history out into a fable with good guys and bad guys and easy lessons to be learnt. We view the past through a lens rooted in the present and force it to fit a cultural agenda of which we are only dimly aware, if at all.

In the United States of America, that cultural agenda is still tainted by the long-discredited doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It’s buried deep and is largely unconscious, but the sense that the USA is a beacon of righteousness still lingers in the collective psyche of the nation. As such, on that level of collective unconsciousness, the Office of President is viewed as the domain of Great Men. Sure, there have been good presidents and bad presidents, but they were all Great Men elevated to the highest office by that Greatness. All except Nixon… he became the exception that proved the rule; the one craven crook to slip into the oval office. A cautionary tale.

Except it’s not true. As any half-rational examination of the facts will quickly illustrate. Not that he wasn’t a craven crook. Of that we can be certain. Simply that he was far from the only one.

Nixon came to national prominence as Eisenhower’s Vice President and was considered the clear favourite to succeed Ike. But in the end he was pipped to the post by a youthful and charismatic JFK in an election campaign that was, for the first time, mostly conducted on television. Kennedy – the darling of liberal America – has since been cast as the antithesis of all that Nixon represents. The Hero to Nixon’s Villain. Yet the closer one examines the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the more one realises just how far from reality the myth has strayed (even to the point where that term of office is dubbed “Camelot”). When you strip away the film-star looks, the cocktail parties, Marilyn’s rendition of Happy Birthday and the wonderfully idealistic speeches, you find they conceal a murky underbelly. You find an administration willing to risk global nuclear war rather than lose face; an administration whose policy on Cuba was founded on murder and treachery; an administration that fell far far short of the high standards it publicly set for itself.

One of the interesting things about the Watergate debacle, however, is how close it came to revealing this general truth to the American people. It shook the faith of a nation, not only the faith in a single president, but also in The Presidency itself. A nation already reeling from the trauma of Vietnam suddenly found itself being kicked while it was down. Kicked by the very guy who was supposed to keep it safe.

Remarkably, despite being one of the most well-documented events in recent history, the actual Watergate burglary which we commemorate here is still considered something of a mystery and the exact motive behind it remains cloudy. What we do know is that five members of a covert unit established by Nixon were arrested breaking into the offices of the Democratic Party (possibly to plant listening devices, possibly to steal files). The unit had been set up a year and a half earlier as a response to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of The Pentagon Papers and was tasked with the mission of discrediting Ellsberg and preventing any further leaks. For this reason, the unit was known informally as The Plumbers and was made up of ex-CIA agents, gun-runners and other shady characters; many of whom had been involved with Kennedy’s Cuban misadventures and other questionable missions for the US government during the 1960s.

When The Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times (detailing a variety of nefarious and clearly illegal operations carried out by the United States in South-East Asia throughout the Vietnam war) The Plumbers began a campaign to paint Ellsberg as a deranged nutcase feeding false information to the press in order to destabilise the country. They broke into his psychiatrist’s office in the hope of getting information with which to blackmail or discredit him and there’s even a suggestion that they may have conspired to kill Ellsberg. As Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff said of the Pentagon Papers:

To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing… It shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the president can be wrong.

In the end, The Plumbers neither silenced nor discredited Ellsberg. Indeed, the more one reads about Nixon’s Plumbers the more like The Keystone Cops they appear. Thuggish, violent and with colourful pasts, certainly, but also essentially incompetent. And it was this incompetence that most characterised Nixon’s amazing fall from grace. From the president’s fondness for tape-recording his own criminality to the Watergate break-in that would later reveal that criminality… a break-in which offered no obvious gain to a politician who was clearly going to be re-elected by a landslide later that year. Nixon’s only serious opponent in his race for re-election was George Wallace, a conservative Democrat who looked like he might steal some of the Republican vote. But Wallace had been paralysed by a would-be assassin a month before the Watergate break-in and was no longer a viable candidate for the ’72 election.

There are suspicions – not least held by Wallace himself right up until his death in 1998 – that The Plumbers may have been involved with his attempted assassination, though no hard evidence ever came to light. The Plumbers also carried out “dirty tricks” campaigns against a number of Nixon’s critics and opponents, notably Senator Edmund Muskie (another Democratic candidate in 1972) and the journalist Drew Pearson. It’s also alleged that Nixon ordered The Plumbers to “silence” a prominent newspaper columnist, Jack Anderson, who was one of his most vocal critics. As G. Gordon Liddy (the most famous of The Plumbers) later claimed,

They charged us with the task: “Come up with ways of stopping Anderson…” We examined all of the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion that the only way you’re going to be able to stop him is to kill him… And that was the recommendation.

Reading the seminal Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers, it becomes clear that President Nixon had become convinced not only that he was above the law, but that it was somehow acceptable for a president to protect his position by any means. He had always possessed that belief in his own infallibility which afflicts the over-ambitious, but once he’d attained power Nixon was quickly overwhelmed by it. As Mikhail Bakunin put it:

Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command. The best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits.

Never was that axiom demonstrated more clearly than by Richard M. Nixon. In the months that followed the arrest of the Watergate burglars, evidence began to emerge that many of them had clear financial ties to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). Tens of thousands of dollars worth of political donations to Nixon’s campaign had somehow found itself in the hands of these criminals and the further the authorities (and famously, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post) probed, the closer that trail of cash and conspiracy got to the White House. It was a scandal that gripped the nation for two full years as the evidence of corruption and abuse of power slowly came to light and was drip-fed to the world by the media.

Eventually the seven members of The Plumbers (the five burglars plus Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) were charged and imprisoned. By March 1974, seven members of Nixon’s staff were indicted by a grand jury… including John Mitchell, the US Attorney General, Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff and right-hand man, John Ehlrichman, Nixon’s assistant in charge of domestic affairs and Charles Colson, aide in charge of political affairs. Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehlrichman and Colson all served prison terms though the other three who were indicted were acquitted or had the charges dropped. The grand jury also named President Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator” but was unable to bring charges against a sitting president.

Soon after Haldeman and the others were convicted, it became clear that Nixon would face impeachment. Not only had he caught himself on tape ordering a cover-up of the Watergate burglary, but he was also involved in the financial irregularities that saw political donations end up in the pockets of an unofficial covert unit carrying out a variety of illegal acts in the president’s name. Incontrovertible proof that he had deliberately obstructed justice was in the public domain and for all his obfuscation and denial, it was only a matter of time before he was impeached, indicted and imprisoned.

Though of course, Nixon was never impeached. He wasn’t indicted. And he certainly never went to prison. History may have cast him in the role of The Crook, but it never expected him to atone for his crimes. Instead, the man they called Tricky Dicky pulled off his final dirty trick. Cutting a deal with his Vice-President Gerald Ford, Nixon resigned the presidency before he could be impeached and in return Ford issued a full presidential pardon. It was far from a just end to Nixon’s presidency, but who could argue that it wasn’t a characteristic one?

In truth it’s more than a little strange that an incompetent burglary on this day in 1972 brought down a president. The Oval Office Tapes contain presidential orders to carpet bomb foreign countries, to illegally expand a disastrous war into neighbouring states, to kill and maim on a massive scale. Yet it was Nixon’s order to cover up a pointless break-in that brought him down. And that is probably the lasting legacy of Watergate (aside from the annoying tendency of tabloids to suffix every new scandal with a “-gate”, as though Nixon’s downfall had something to do with “water”)… the clear and unambiguous message to the world that the United States does not see itself as accountable for the horrors unleashed by its own foreign policy.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in World Events | 4 Comments

14th June 1928 the Death of Emmeline Pankhurst


The inimitable Emmeline Pankhurst

Today, we remember one of the most important British women of the 20th century who died 86 years ago today, aged 69.

Sisters! If you have ever voted in an election, thank Emmeline Pankhurst. And if you have ever decided not to vote in an election, you can thank Emmeline for having that choice.

And Brothers! You can thank Emmeline too: for freeing your mothers, sisters, aunts, wives and daughters from lifetimes of voiceless, subservient frustration, and enabling our talents, opinions, creativity and humanity to enrich our society.

Emmeline was born in Manchester in 1858, at the height of the industrial revolution. Both her parents were political activists, so as a child she learned, almost by osmosis, about social justice and the need to speak out. She read avidly; Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a History of the French Revolution made particularly deep impressions, and her mother’s subscription to the Women’s Suffrage Journal would profoundly shape her thoughts.

She understood that campaigning on a single issue ‘votes for women’ would enable women to change everything that mattered to them: sexual health and reproductive rights, employment law, inheritance law, fair pay.

“We want to help women…We want to gain for them all the rights and protection that laws can give them. And, above all, we want the good influence of women to tell to its greatest extent in the social and moral questions of the time. But we cannot do this unless we have the vote and are recognised as citizens and voices to be listened to.”

She began looking for an organisation she could join that reflected her passionate political views. An obvious choice was the National Society for Women’s Suffrage but she became frustrated with its party political affliations. The Parliament Street Society advocated votes only for single women; married women’s husbands could vote on their wives’ behalfs. Not good enough! Emmeline and her husband Richard founded the Women’s Franchise League. It was radical – it supported equal rights across the board – but too radical, and dissolved after only a year. She joined Keir Hardy’s newly created Independent Labour Party. After a visit to a workhouse to distribute food aid, in which she saw the appalling, insanitary and undignified conditions that many women and their children had to tolerate, she wrote:

“The condition of our sex is so deplorable that it is our duty to break the law in order to call attention to the reasons why we do.”

By 1903, now a widow with five children to support and a mountain of debt, Emmeline’s patience was wearing thin. Moderation and oratory weren’t getting her anywhere. Political parties weren’t putting votes for women at the top of their agendas. She’d have to do something herself.

Emmeline, her daughter Christabel and several others founded the Women’s Social and Political Union whose motto ‘Deeds not Words’ was a hint of the direct action and radical stance it would need to take to get the job done. The time for being lady-like was history. Hurrah!

Things turned militant. For voiceless, disenfranchised people there is no other way. Take note, Muamar Gaddafi, Bashir Al Assad and other monstrous control-freaks of your kind.

Initially the suffragists marched, rallied and petitioned. Then they set fire to property, sent letter bombs, spat at the police, smashed government buildings, threw axes, and chained themselves to railings in a sustained campaign of disobedience. They were arrested, imprisoned, heckled, humiliated and went on hunger strike. Emily Davison’s protest at the Epsom Derby lead to her death under the hoofs of the King’s horse. Others endured solitary confinement and force-feeding to break their hunger strikes.

“We are here, not because we are lawbreakers; we are here in our efforts to become lawmakers.”

The Daily Mail, as pathetic and odious then as it is now, coined the derogatory, diminutive term suffragette, derived from suffragist.

Emmeline’s three-word campaigning slogans ‘Votes for women’ and ‘Deeds not words’ still chime down the years: ‘Make poverty history’, ‘Feed the world’, ‘Save the whale’, ‘Yes we can’, even ‘Arbeit macht frei’.

After the Great War, The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to all men over 21 and some women over 30. Bah! Hardly the dream of universal suffrage that so many had fought for. The Women’s Party emerged and Emmeline embarked on lecture tours, and tirelessly continued campaigning.

By the 1920s, well into her 60s now, the long struggle, frequent imprisonment and hunger-striking, a punishing schedule and emotionally-draining strife with her daughters was taking its toll. She died in a nursing home in London aged 69.

Three weeks after her death The Representation of the People Act 1928 was passed. At last women achieved electoral equality with men: aged over 21, regardless of property ownership. Now the struggle for equality could truly begin. Still it continues.

What would Emmeline make of today’s world? I think that she’d be horrified that 41 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970, the gender pay gap is as wide as ever. I think she’d be shocked that despite the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, women still get second class treatment. I think she would be appalled by the lack of aspiration of so many girls today (which incidentally is not their fault. If we don’t tell girls what’s possible, no wonder they aspire to be WAGs or mums at 16.) She would be bemused – and yet she would understand. Today’s Sisters would do well to revisit and emulate the proud tradition of women’s protest that Emmeline began.

And so each election time, when my polling card falls through the door, I thank my lucky stars that Emmeline, and the thousands of other women who struggled with her, made it possible for me to mark my X in that box.

Women: remember that your right to vote was hard won. When I see that thousands of people today, especially young people, can’t be arsed to vote, I could weep. Even if you think all the candidates are self-serving numpties you can still vote: simply spoil your ballot paper. Spoilt papers are counted and together they send a clear message. They say: ‘there’s no one worthy of my vote’. Just do it for Emmeline.

And today, as the Arab world erupts and millions of people struggle to have their human rights respected and opinions heard, I hope that they too will find courageous warriors to lead them, as we had our Sister Emmeline.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

Posted in Heroines | 6 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

8th June 1809 the Death of Thomas Paine


Erased from official history, the man who named "The United States of America"

Today we celebrate and give thanks to Thomas Paine who, in his lifetime, contributed profoundly and fundamentally to the American and French Revolutions. His words crystallised and brought to the forefront the struggles of Britain’s Industrial Revolution working class. His ideas permeated the Declaration of Independence. He coined “The United States of America”. One of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age, his achievements led the second US president, John Adams, to declare in 1805: “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.” But by the time of Citizen Paine’s death on this day in 1809, so far had his star fallen that only six people attended the funeral of this one-time people’s hero.

So what happened? And why has one of the most important Founding Fathers of the United States been consigned to the margins of “official” history?

Born and raised in England, Paine emigrated to the Colonies in 1774 when he was thirty-seven. He immediately seized upon the New World’s revolutionary fervour, yet discovered a reluctance to fully withdraw from what was an intrinsic allegiance. So while even George Washington was still toasting his king, the little-educated Paine wrote and published Common Sense – a call to arms that ignited Americans and gave them the courage to be disloyal, to become revolutionaries, to be citizens rather than subjects.

Paine challenged the King’s authority and mocked the very concept of monarchy (“even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families”). He blamed British rule for virtually all of the Colonies’ problems, and graphically outlined the imperialistic crimes. And it was Thomas Paine who declared that only through unification of the colonies could there be triumph over tyranny.

Common Sense was the first American national bestseller. Paine pioneered a new literary style of accessibility that appealed to everyone from plantation owner to farmer, and its widespread success would mark the turning point that finally ignited the long-smouldering Revolution.

After the war and a brief, unsuccessful stint in Congress, Paine returned to England where he wrote The Rights of Man – an Everyman’s guide to Enlightenment thinking in which universal and natural rights (for men) were no longer decided by privilege and the past. It would prove to be the Common Sense equivalent to the French Revolution. Paine was welcomed in France as a citizen and champion of the people, but his unlikely opposition to the execution of Louis XVI led to his arrest and death sentence.

Whilst incarcerated and not expecting to survive, Paine wrote the The Age of Reason – a scathing attack on Christianity and organised religion. After Robespierre’s downfall, Paine miraculously escaped death – but he would never in his lifetime escape the monumental consequences of his anti-religion treatise. He returned to the United States in 1802 to face ostracism from his pious and powerful former allies. Shunned, his last years of life were plagued by poverty and alcoholism. His obituary read: “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” His role in the making of the United States was henceforth effectively erased.

Thomas Paine led with his pen, through his ability to bring forth ideas in a language people could understand. His meteoric rise to fame was followed by almost as dramatic a fall in popularity, but his impact is unquestionable. For his pivotal role in the American Revolution and “democratising democracy”, he deserves an assured and esteemed place in history.

Is it not therefore highly suspect that the man who wrote “these are the times that try men’s souls”, coined the phrase “United States of America” and drafted the Declaration of Independence has for the most part been relegated to ‘world’s forgotten boy’?

Posted in Heroes | 3 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.

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31st May 1996 the Death of Timothy Leary


The one and only Dr. Timothy Leary

At 12:44am on the 31st of May 1996, Dr. Timothy Leary sat bolt upright in bed startling the small group of friends and family who had gathered to keep him company during his final days. He had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer the previous year and it had finally run its course. “Why not?” he asked those keeping vigil. Again, louder, “Why not?” He repeated the question a third time. “Why not?” Then, lying back down, Dr. Leary whispered his final word… “beautiful”… and slipped into death. He was 75 years old.

It’s hard to think of many public figures who split opinion to the degree that Leary did, and still does. Hailed by some as one of the most important philosophers of his generation, by others as a visionary scientist centuries ahead of his time, and by some as a prophet, a mystic, a guru, even a saint. While still others denounce him as a fool, an ego-maniacal charlatan and even – in the words of President Richard Nixon – “the most dangerous man in America”. As is so often the case, the truth is far more complex than the simple narratives produced by those who worshipped or abhorred him. In fact Leary’s life and work encapsulate perfectly the chaos and ambiguity; the heady highs and crashing lows; of the psychedelic counter-culture he – more than any other single individual – helped to create.

As a psychology professor at Harvard University in the early 1960s, Dr. Leary would exhort his students to “Always question authority. Even the authority of your psychology professor”. And this anti-authoritarian attitude can be seen all the way back to his childhood. Born into a wealthy, conservative Irish-American family, the young Tim Leary rebelled from an early age. Exasperated by his attitude, his parents sent him to a strict Jesuit College and later forced him to enrol in West Point (the US military academy responsible for officer training). He lasted just over a year before being dragged up in front of a court-martial. Although he was acquitted, Leary was discharged from West Point and although technically still a member of the Army Medical Corps for a couple of years, he finally rejected the demands of his family and signed up for a psychology degree.

In 1943 he received his BA in psychology, and by 1950 had earned his Master’s and completed his PhD. His academic career blossomed and he spent the next 13 years teaching at two of the most prestigious universities in the United States as well as being appointed Director of Psychiatric Research at the renowned Kaiser Family Foundation. A combination of personal charisma and obvious talent allowed Leary’s career to maintain an upward trajectory despite his often abrasive attitude towards the academic establishment. However, it was an event in 1960 that would radically alter Leary’s life and career. It would lead directly to his dismissal from Harvard in 1963 and his permanent exile from the mainstream. Because it was in 1960 that Dr. Timothy Leary, professor of psychology, would have his first psychedelic experience. And despite being the experience of a single individual, it would end up having a profound and revolutionary impact on global culture.

It was Leary’s friend and Harvard colleague, Anthony Russo, who first introduced him to psychedelics. He’d invited Leary to spend some time at a villa he’d rented in Southern Mexico. On August 9th, 1960 as they lounged by the pool with a small group of friends, smoking and drinking tequila, Russo told the others about his recent encounter with the mushroom, Psilocybe mexicana. He’d been studying the religious rituals of the local Mazatec people who consumed the mushroom to induce visions. Fascinated by what he was hearing, Leary asked Russo whether he could get his hands on any more. One brief trip to the local market later, and the group were in possession of a large bag of the powerful hallucinogen. They washed down the dried mushrooms with local beer and the whole world shifted a little on its axis.

Later, Dr. Leary would declare

it was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man. You are never the same after you’ve had that one glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn. I learned more about psychology during the 5 hours of that trip than I had in 15 years of studying the subject as an academic.

A few days later Leary would return to the local market and purchase a very large quantity of Psilocybe mexicana. He brought the mushrooms home with him to Harvard University and the focus of the psychology department shifted in a radically new direction. Leary’s initial research and experiments were lauded by the faculty and the wider academic community. He gave the mushrooms to hundreds of academics, writers, philosophers and religious leaders. The poet Allen Ginsberg asked to be part of the experiments and within a year Leary had accounts from poets, professors and priests all attesting to the positive life-changing qualities of psilocybin. Under controlled conditions he administered psilocybin to prison inmates and reported that his test group had a 20% rate of re-offending; a massive decrease on the an average rate of 60%. He administered a course of the drug to alcoholics and reported astonishingly positive results. Later as a concerted effort was made to discredit Dr. Leary’s work, the experiments were repeated and while the huge improvements in re-offender rates were not achieved, “statistically significant” reductions were nevertheless reported.

Within three years however, news of the Harvard experiments (which by then had expanded to include LSD) had spread far and wide, and interest was growing in these “new” drugs. With the official experiments massively over-subscribed, a black-market in LSD and psilocybin flourished around Harvard and although these substances were still perfectly legal, the university administration were less than happy with the psychedelic explosion within the undergraduate population. Claiming that he was neglecting his teaching duties in order to conduct his research – a charge that he vigorously denied – Harvard University fired Dr. Leary signalling the decline and eventual end of serious clinical research into these incredibly promising chemicals (though recent years have seen a tentative and hushed revival).

Leary, however, saw his dismissal as both a challenge and a vindication. In the three years since he’d first taken mushrooms in Mexico he had become convinced that the psychedelic experience would reshape western culture in a powerfully positive manner. This conviction led him to become openly evangelical about LSD and other psychedelics. Released from the confines of academia, his experimentation continued at a large estate called Millbrook in New York. It was to be his home for the next five years and is often seen as the epicentre of the psychedelic counter-culture that sprang up in the mid 60s. His evangelising took the form of interviews and articles in mainstream magazines, lectures to packed halls and eventually a series of books.

His first two books, High Priest and The Politics of Ecstasy were massive cultural events. They would influence the direction of the 1960s counter-culture as much as any musician, writer or activist. As someone born just as the 1960s had drawn to a close, I didn’t encounter the two books until I hit my teens in the 1980s, but just as with a generation of teenagers in the sixties, they had a huge impact on me and profoundly influenced my intellectual development. Make of that what you will.

However, Leary’s LSD proselytising in the mid 60s was making him as many enemies as it was friends. And not merely within the mainstream establishment he was overtly attempting to destabilise. Some of his colleagues became concerned – as it turns out justifiably so – that his personal mission to “turn on” the world would end in a backlash that would see psychedelics driven so far underground that they could no longer be openly studied. They saw Leary’s charismatic public performances as little more than self-publicity and his writing as irresponsible and dangerous. In reality, there’s plenty of truth in that assessment. But it’s far from being the full story.

Reading, for example, The Politics of Ecstasy you’ll be hard-pressed to name a single essay or interview which extols psychedelics without also urging caution. That the media chose to highlight his extolling of LSD while the cautionary words were ignored is perhaps not surprising. But nor is it Leary’s fault. He can certainly be accused of a singular naiveté in that respect but I challenge the notion that he was knowingly irresponsible. Yes, Leary urged us to “Tune in, turn on and drop out”. But he also wrote very clearly that “Of course you can not be turned on all the time. In fact, you cannot even be turned on most of the time”. He insisted that LSD – when used responsibly – was a tool that could help people fulfil their potential and change their lives for the better, but he also made it clear that when used irresponsibly it could have dreadful consequences.

Indeed, Leary went so far as to suggest that the use of psychedelics should be permitted only by “licensed individuals”. In The Politics of Ecstasy he writes

The licensing for use of powerful psychedelic drugs like LSD should be along the lines of the airplane pilot’s license: intensive study and preparation, plus very stringent testing for fitness and competence…

He insists that “anyone who wants to have a psychedelic experience… should be allowed to have a crack at it” but that first they should be “willing to prepare for it and to examine [their] own hang-ups and neurotic tendencies”. It’s easy to grab chunks of Leary’s work in which he vigorously promotes the use of psychedelics, but we are being dishonest and do him a great disservice if we fail to acknowledge the cautionary context into which he placed that “promotion”. To claim that he argued for some sort of psychedelic free-for-all is simply wrong. When Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters showed up at Millbrook, Leary refused to give them any LSD precisely because he felt their philosophy of dolling it out to all-comers was potentially dangerous.

But of course, cautionary statements or not, Leary’s anti-establishment rhetoric was starting to worry the establishment. His “tune in, turn on, drop out” message and his exhortations to “tear down the American TV studio reality” didn’t play well in the power structures he argued should be replaced by a new psychedelic consciousness. And so, by the late 60s the worst fears of those who saw him as a demagogue had come to pass. Psychedelics had been outlawed and draconian punishments were being visited upon those caught producing or possessing them. Violent criminals were given more lenient sentences than those caught with LSD and even cannabis – long prohibited – was seen as an integral part of this revolutionary subculture and a nationwide crackdown was ordered.

So it was that Leary found himself arrested and charged for the possession of a single joint. His sentence? Thirty years in prison. He appealed the sentence and spent the next few years in and out of the courts. In the meantime he continued his transformation from respected academic into counter-cultural icon. Not only does he get a name-check in John and Yoko’s Give Peace A Chance but he was part of the famous bedroom recording session in Montreal and can – legend has it – be heard providing percussion by banging on a wardrobe door. He opposed Ronald Reagan in the race to be Governor of California and Lennon wrote his campaign song, Come Together. But the noose was tightening around Leary’s neck and while he successfully appealed the thirty-year sentence, he found himself back before the courts on charges of marijuana possession once more and in January 1970 finally lost his legal battles and found himself behind bars for 25 years.

Or he would have done had his life not turned into something out of a spy novel at this point. Although originally sentenced to a maximum security institution, Leary – like most prisoners at the time – was asked to sit a psychological profile test to establish the most appropriate prison regime for him. The name of the test was “The Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test”. He’d designed it himself a decade previously and knew exactly the right answers to give to ensure he ended up on gardening duty at a minimum security facility. Meanwhile his wife enlisted the help of the revolutionary organisation, The Weather Underground, and together they broke him out of prison and smuggled him to Algeria.

Dr. Leary spent the next three years on the run from the US authorities. Nixon took a personal interest in his case and provided practically unlimited resources to those hunting him. From North Africa to Europe the chase continued. Through Europe to Beirut and finally to Afghanistan where he was intercepted and dragged back to the United States to face punishment. Leary was told that not only would he never see the outside of a prison again but vague threats were made against his family including a promise to resurrect an old marijuana possession charge against his daughter.

However, Leary didn’t waste his time in prison and was prolific in his writing. His psychedelic experiments had led him to propose a radical new model of human consciousness (the “8-circuit model”) which he detailed in his book Exo-Psychology (later revised as Info-Psychology). This was hugely influential, albeit not within the mainstream, and was the catalyst for much of Robert Anton Wilson’s work, including the seminal Prometheus Rising. In prison Leary also wrote Intelligence Agents and Neuropolitics among other books. And he used the time to develop many of the themes that would dominate his later work… a complex and occasionally confusing fusion of mysticism, technology, psychedelia and about a dozen different schools of philosophy.

Nixon’s spectacular fall from grace meant that Leary ceased being public enemy number one and the new administration offered him the chance to “buy his freedom” by informing on others in the underground. This controversial period in his life is often raised by his critics. What’s interesting, however, is that the criticism never came from those he allegedly “informed” on. In fact, as An Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy Leary makes it clear, Leary managed to clear all of the information he passed on to the FBI with those on the outside before he passed it on…

– Nobody was seriously injured by Leary’s interaction with the FBI, with the exception of a former attorney, who received three months in prison after being set up on a cocaine bust by a girlfriend of Leary working on the outside, not from Tim’s testimony. The lawyer has never come forward to express any anger toward Leary. Two other former lawyers of Leary were placed at risk, as were his estranged wife and his archivist, but nothing came of it because of the absence of corroborating testimony from people who Tim well knew had been underground for years.

– The Weather Underground, the radical left organisation responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was “we understand.”

In 1975, two years after providing this information to the FBI, Leary was released. While he continued to write, to lecture and to make public appearances, his experiences in prison left him understandably cautious and less willing to poke the establishment with a stick. His ideas were no less radical, he was just more careful about how he presented them.

An advocate of space exploration and an early internet enthusiast, Leary’s final decade was spent producing illuminated manuscripts such as Chaos and Cyberculture and The Game of Life. He collaborated with artists, scientists and philosophers as diverse as William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, David Byrne, Johnny Depp, Bruce Campbell, Gerard O’Neill of NASA, Brenda Laurel (the Virtual Reality pioneer) and countless others. He argued in favour of a kind of technological paganism, or techno-shamanism; aware that although the religious experience had been swallowed up by the tyranny of monotheism, it was nonetheless an essential part of being human and we faced disaster unless we found a way of reintegrating it with our modern, technological culture. “The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery” he wrote. On the surface, a rather conservative statement. But, typical of Leary, it appears in an essay entitled “Start Your Own Religion”.

Ultimately, no short article can even begin to capture the life and work of Dr. Timothy Leary. For better or worse (I’d argue “better” but I guess that’s a judgement call), partly by design and partly by accident he brought psychedelic drugs to the masses. He was one of life’s genuine pioneers. A radical thinker who was larger than life. And yes, that magnified his flaws just as much as his virtues, but in the 75 years he spent on this small planet, he arguably changed western culture as much as any single individual during the same period. Re-reading his writing can be a little sad in these dark times. The joyous optimism; the belief in a brighter, better future; the conviction that the psychedelic explosion would usher in an unprecedented global creative revolution that would sweep away the power structures, hierarchies and oppression of the past… liberating us all and allowing the dawn of a new age of exploration. “The future is not a place we travel to”, Leary famously said, “it’s a place we build”. And for all Leary’s faults he wanted nothing more than to build a better future for himself and us all. And for that, Dr. Leary, I’d personally like to thank you.

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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30th May 1431  the Burning of Joan of Arc


Hermann Stilke's 1843 painting of the death of Joan of Arc

Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.” – Mark Twain

On this day in 1431, the English tied a 19-year-old French peasant girl to a pillar in the square in Rouen and burned her alive. Her executioners were so afraid of relic-hunters they reduced her body to ashes which were then thrown in the river Seine.

At the time of Joan of Arc’s death The Hundred Years’ War had already been raging for 94 years. The War, a series of conflicts which actually lasted 116 years, was a power struggle between various French noble houses and the English, who claimed dominion over vast tracts of France. The prize was well worth fighting for: the French throne itself. It was in this web of Anglo-Gallic argy-bargy that Joan became entangled and would emerge as a saint.

Joan grew up in Domrémy, a tiny village which had been periodically trashed and burned during the Wars. At the age of just 12 she had visions of Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret who told her to drive out the English. Joan was a good Catholic girl and good girls don’t argue with the Word of God. Joan was on a mission.

Demonstrating remarkable powers of persuasion and political acumen for one so young, aged 16 she got an audience with the uncrowned King Charles VII and told him of her holy quest to have him restored to the throne. Experienced military commanders, Counts and Dukes all pooh-poohed her, but she was not to be deterred. At their second meeting the King saw her unwavering righteousness and took a chance. He needed to, because things were looking desperate. By 1429 the English had Orléans under siege. Strategically the city was vital for French forces to recapture. Only a leader with his back against the wall would put his faith in a farm girl dressed in men’s clothes who took orders from angels.

Joan took 5,000 men and rode to Orléans. She had the king, the saints and the Good Lord on her side! She dressed as a bloke and cut her hair; it was more practical and it would protect her from unwelcome male advances. Joan is reported to have been a skilled military tactician and strategist, a charismatic leader. She mounted carefully planned raid after raid, and with blind faith worn like a suit of armour, she inspired the soldiers. Incredibly, they broke the siege in just a few days.

More success followed. But during military action in Burgundy she was unhorsed and captured. This set in motion a woeful chain of events which would lead to her being sold by her Burgundian captors to the English who tried her as a heretic in a dodgy kangaroo court.

Just 24 years after her death she was retried and declared an innocent martyr. Too late for poor Joan who, having fulfilled her Holy Mission, had just wanted to go home to mum and dad in Domrémy.

The Maid of Orléans was undoubtedly a righteous and brave warrior, defeating les rosbifs and fighting for the freedom of France. No wonder she is a national heroine on the other side of The Channel. Books and plays have been written about her. Films made. The Catholic Church sainted her. Visionary, martyr, call her what you like; but it’s worth remembering that Joan was essentially just a girl with a big idea determined to get out there and change things.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

 

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28th May 1871  Defeat of the Paris Commune


Paris ablaze during The Bloody Week, the final days of the Paris Commune, 21–28 May 1871

Today we lament the unfathomably brutal suppression of the first proletarian revolution in history, the Paris Commune. Just three months earlier, on 18th March 1871, the workers of Paris rose up, seized power from the new provisional French government, declared themselves autonomous and set about trying to reinvent society. The National Guard, recruited from all able-bodied men, replaced the police and the regular army. The separation of church and state was decreed. All church property was made public.  Improved workers’ rights and education reforms were implemented. Interests on debts were abolished. And women were to be granted equal rights. In the absence of envy and oppression, a new kind of egalitarian social order emerged. “Paris is a true paradise!” the painter Courbet enthused. “No nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it could stay like this forever. In short, it is a beautiful dream!”

But the beautiful dream was about to implode, for the Communards had made a fatal error. In their idealism and magnanimity, the revolutionaries had failed to comprehensively overthrow Adolphe Thiers’ provisional government while its army was weak and demoralised following the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Instead, Thiers and his bourgeois government regrouped in Versailles and plotted with their former bitter enemy, the Prussians, to destroy the Commune.

On 21st May at 2pm, in the prosperous western area of Paris, a Versailles officer noticed a white handkerchief being waved by a middle-class traitor near the Point-du-Jour gate. The government’s army was able to enter the fortified city through an opened gate; by nightfall, over 60,000 troops were inside Paris. There was no second line of defence and, despite an attempt to quickly erect barricades, the recent addition of boulevards made the inner city impossible to defend. The Commune was doomed.

And so the slaughter began. The massacres were indiscriminate; no one was spared, as to merely be Parisian was considered an act of treason. The barricades fell quickly and, each time they did, the defenders were put up against a wall and summarily executed. 300 were cornered and gunned down after they fled into the Madeleine church. When the Versailles troops captured the seminary at Saint-Sulpice, which had been turned into a hospital by the Commune, they executed all the medical staff and patients. The dead were left everywhere – the world-famous fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens overflowed with corpses. Word had reached Versailles of the strong feminist movement within the Commune, and a cynical rumour spread amongst Thiers’ troops of the pétroleuses, or “women incendiaries”, who were allegedly setting fires to buildings. Thus there was no mercy for women, who were savagely bayoneted in the streets. For eight days, the killing continued. Every Parisian pavement was a battlefield, every house a fort. On 28th May, the Communards were driven to a last stand at Père Lachaise cemetery. Thousands were herded together and shot. A part of “The Wall of the Communards” still stands; the sculptured faces at once a challenge to capitalist rule and a monument to the martyrs of the Commune.

Over 30,000 were killed in the week known as La Semaine Sanglante (“The Bloody Week”) – more than in the French Revolution. Up to 50,000 were arrested and imprisoned; some 4,000 deported for life to New Caledonia. It would take France decades to recover from the humiliation of the massacre. For Europe’s socialist movement, however, the Paris Commune was the ideal testing ground for revolutionary theory. Karl Marx hailed it as “the glorious harbinger of a new society”  – evidence that a proletarian uprising could topple the bourgeois bureaucratic machine. He did, however, criticise the Commune for failing to launch an immediate attack on Versailles and for its failure to seize the gold reserves of the Bank of France. Marx accordingly revised his theory of the State, concluding that the working class had to smash the state – rather than take it over or leave it intact – and that to do so required a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

But no one would better learn from the mistakes of the Commune martyrs than Vladimir Lenin: if the ruling class would show no mercy, neither could the working class.

Posted in Anarchists, Revolution, World Events | 10 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

23rd May 2008 the Death of Utah Phillips


Utah Phillips

Let’s today raise a fist in tribute to folk singer, anarchist, activist, historian and storyteller extraordinaire, Utah Phillips, who died 10 years ago on this day aged seventy-three. A Mark Twain-meets-Howard Zinn with a guitar, Phillips dedicated himself to unearthing and preserving in song and tale America’s hidden history that might otherwise have passed into obscurity. An itinerant for much of his adult life – a proud member of America’s Travelling Nation community of hobos and railroad bums – Phillips’ songs of working-class struggle were recorded by Emmylou Harris, Tom Waits, Joan Baez and Waylon Jennings. A collaboration with feminist-folk/punk icon Ani DiFranco earned him a Grammy nomination. But Phillips was leery of the music industry, always more comfortable amongst the people he was singing about; he habitually arrived for engagements at least a day early in order to meet locals, learn their lore and tailor his performance to the history and industry of the area. A lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World, no one in recent years did more to keep the Wobbly spirit alive than Phillips. His countless performances were in effect rallies for the cause of labour, unions, anarchism, pacifism and the Wobblies. A keeper of tales and prolonger of oral traditions, Utah Phillips was among the last of a dying breed of troubadours. “Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country,” he declared. “It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we’re going, but where we want to go.”

Born Bruce Phillips to labour organiser parents, he ran away from home as a teenager and took to the roads and rails. At a financial low point in 1956, Phillips enlisted in the Army and was sent to Korea for three years – an experience he would later describe as the turning point in his life. “What I really learned in the army,” he said, “was how to be a pacifist.” His radicalism grew alongside that of other Americans in the 1960s, and he was introduced to anarchism by left-wing Catholic anarchist Ammon Hennacy at Salt Lake City’s Joe Hill House – a shelter for tramps and itinerant workers. Henceforth, Phillips vowed to lay down “the weapons of privilege” and to take personal responsibility each day for making the world a better place. In the folk music community of Saratoga Springs, New York, he discovered “a dignified, ancient, elegant trade, one where I could own what I do and never have to have a boss again,” and adopted “Utah” as his stage name. With his unique mix of story-telling, rich baritone and self-penned songs like “I Will Not Obey”, “The Telling Takes Me Home”, “The Miner’s Lullaby” and “Hobo’s Last Ride” as well as interpretations of IWW “Little Red Songbook” classics, he hit the coffeeshop circuit and built up a loyal grassroots following.

In 1968, Utah Phillips ran for the U.S. Senate as a candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. In 1976, he ran for president as an anarchist in the Do-Nothing Party. He lost on both occasions. Thee only time he himself ever voted was in protest against George W. Bush in 2004. As his son Duncan Phillips recalled:

[Utah] said he cast a vote every day he went out in the world and did something. If you want to make change, go out and actually do it yourself. He didn’t need to hand over any responsibility to politicians.

Right the fuck on.

He gave us forty years of songs, stories and activism. By anyone’s reckoning, that’s a damned noble life. And so, on this anniversary of his passing, let’s keep the flame alive of this keeper-of-the-flame. To Utah Phillips: we salute you!

 

Posted in Heroes | 4 Comments

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

12th May 1916 the Execution of James Connolly


James Connolly

It was a bright morning in Dublin on May 12th 1916, and a great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham Jail. As spring was turning to summer, a city still coming to terms with the death and destruction of the Easter Rising was being forced to accept yet more blood-letting. People near the jail on recent days had heard the terrible sound of a volley of gunfire as the firing squads ended life after life, and then watched as the black flag was raised above the building. Executions without trial, these state-sanctioned murders represented the British government’s response to the most recent attempt by Irish socialists and nationalists to break free from the shackles of Empire. With between one and three shootings per day, Dublin’s mornings were scheduled to be punctuated by gunfire for the next two months. As blunt a demonstration of the iron fist of oppression as could be imagined.

But the size of the crowd on May 12th, and the anger and outrage it displayed, was to force a rethink of British policy. Because it was on that morning that James Connolly was gunned down, tied to a chair, in the courtyard of the prison.

Connolly was born in Scotland in 1868. The son of Irish immigrants, he spent his childhood in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh; then an Irish slum. He attended the local Catholic school until just before his 11th birthday, whereupon he joined the ranks of the army of child labour that formed the lowest tier in the support system of the Great Industrial Empire. By the time he was fourteen, Connolly sought escape from the poverty of the slum and – lying about his age – joined the British army. How different would history have been had Connolly’s regiment not been posted to Ireland?

For the next seven years James Connolly was a British soldier in a country on the brink of revolution. A country he’d been raised to call his own, despite his thick Scottish accent. They were formative years for the young Connolly. Years in which he first encountered Irish nationalism, Karl Marx and Lillie Reynolds. He was to devote the rest of his life to all three… deserting the army, marrying Lillie and becoming a revolutionary firebrand. Critics of Connolly have often argued that he gave his political activism a higher priority than his family. But the unwavering and vocal support he received from Lillie, and later from his son Roddy and daughter Nora, who became a revolutionary socialist herself, tell a different story. Those closest to James Connolly shared his passion for social change and saw in him a man who might just be capable of bringing it about.

And bring it about he certainly did. No, he didn’t usher in the international socialist revolution he wrote about, but by aiming so high and urging so many others to do the same, Connolly brought radical social change to Ireland and was cited as an inspirational figure far and wide. Including by none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Apart from his primary school in Edinburgh, Connolly was a self-educated man. He had a reputation as a prodigious reader and consumed books on political theory from all points on the spectrum. But it was the work of Karl Marx than chimed deepest with him. Connolly fervently believed that no human being should be forced to endure a lifetime of poverty and while he never truly escaped it himself, his activism paved the way for the Irish working class to begin the long climb out. He spent a few years back in Scotland after deserting the army and became involved in left-wing politics, founding The Socialist newspaper. But it was when he was offered a position as secretary to the Dublin Socialist Club in 1895 that his political activism really took off.

Within months of returning “home” to Ireland, James Connolly had transformed the Dublin Socialist Club into the ISRP (Irish Socialist Republican Party), a small but hugely influential group that was to become the template for future Irish socialist parties. Publishing the nation’s first regular left-wing newspaper, Workers’ Republic, the ISRP embodied the ideals of socialism and republicanism that were to inspire Irish revolutionary socialism for generations to come. Connolly believed in Marx’s vision of international socialism. At the same time he remained an Irish nationalist, convinced that Ireland could never be part of an international revolution until it had thrown off the shackles of imperialism and taken its place among the community of independent nations.

In 1903 he was invited to give a series of lectures in New York by the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World). His pamphlets had made their way around the world and had met with acclaim from Marxists, labour unions and socialists. His stay in America ultimately lasted seven years. Active within numerous socialist groups and founding one or two himself, Connolly learnt much from his involvement with the American labour union movement and upon his return to Ireland in 1910, was in a militant mood.

With his friend and fellow-traveller “Big Jim” Larkin, Connolly helped set up the Irish Trade Union Congress. Larkin was a revolutionary syndicalist and had formed the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union – by far the most militant Irish labour union and a pivotal organisation in the Dublin Lockout. Together the two men set about planning a workers’ revolution in Ireland and formed the Irish Labour Party to help bring it about (oh, how that once mighty organisation has fallen!) In 1913 Larkin called a General Strike and the Dublin Lockout began. Initially picketing and agitating for better pay and conditions, the Lockout turned nasty when the Dublin Metropolitan Police were ordered to break the strike by any means necessary. Violent clashes erupted and Connolly responded by forming the Irish Citizen Army.

Initially created to protect workers from the increasingly brutal police attacks, the ICA soon evolved into an armed force dedicated to “an independent Irish socialist republic”. After Larkin fled to America when the Dublin Lockout eventually ended in 1914, Connolly began organising for national rebellion and sought allies within the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Padraig Pearse’s Irish Volunteers. And on Easter Monday of 1916, they began that doomed rebellion.

During his life, James Connolly published a number of books and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pamphlets and essays. Along with Jim Larkin he arguably created the modern Irish labour movement and unionised the workforce. While he was alive, Connolly was an inspiration to many thousands, and in death he has been an inspiration to millions. Indeed, it has been said that it was Connolly’s death, above all things, that shook the Irish people from their stupor and brought about the War of Independence that would ultimately lead to the formation Irish Republic.

On the morning of May 12th 1916, with shrapnel in his chest and his ankle shattered by a bullet, Connolly was transported from a secure hospital in Dublin to Kilmainham Jail. He was carried on a stretcher from the ambulance to the courtyard, pausing briefly to allow him to meet with a priest. He is said to have confessed his sins to the priest and received communion; his first religious acts since his wedding in 1890. Famously, when the priest asked whether he could forgive the men who were about to shoot him, Connolly replied “I will pray for all men who do their duty according to their lights [conscience]”. He then smiled wickedly and whispered “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do”.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Heroes | 11 Comments

9th May 1976 the Revolutionary Suicide of Ulrike Meinhof


“If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offense; if one sets hundreds of cars on fire, that is political action.” – U. Meinhof

“How can stupidity invade intelligence?” asked Ulrike Meinhof of post-war West Germany’s increasingly capitalistic policies of betrayal. Since her death in 1976 on this day at the age of forty-one, we’ve been asking that very question of her own dilemmatic life and exodus from her leftist (but nevertheless bourgeois) existence to become West Germany’s Most Wanted female terrorist, her name condemned to everlasting infamy as one-half of the media-dubbed “Baader-Meinhof Gang”.  While gun-toting lady guerrillas are a rare enough breed to warrant curiosity and scrutiny, we don’t question or judge the motives of Meinhof’s Red Army Faction sister, Gudrun Ennslin – or Leila Khaled – with anything like the same damnation. What singularises Meinhof is her social background and her choices. This formidably intelligent woman deserted her comfortable life, successful career, compatibly-thinking husband and young twin daughters in favour of guerrilla warfare training in Jordan, bank robberies, bomb attacks, kidnappings and targeted murders. Meinhof was captured on June 14th 1972 and, in 1974, sentenced to eight years in prison. In 1975 she was additionally charged, alongside Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, with four murders and fifty-four attempts to murder. It was during the long trial that she became withdrawn, divided and evermore alienated from her co-defendants and, on the morning of 9th May 1976, she was found hanged in her cell. The official verdict was suicide, though her comrades and conspiracy theorists insisted she was executed.

Ulrike Meinhof was already radically politicised before her line-crossing moment of destiny on 14th May 1968 when the audacious plan to break out the incarcerated Baader went wrong. In a nanosecond, Meinhof was no longer a mere conspirator but an accomplice to attempted murder, and there was no going back. From 1960-68, she had been a hugely influential journalist of minor celebrity for the left-wing publication konkret. But as the decade came to a close and it became ever clearer to the genuinely committed that the times were not a-changing, her writings became increasingly desperate and intolerant. She was no doubt spellbound by the rock’n’roll Andreas and Gudrun, and Baader’s quasi-religious rhetoric guilted and goaded her into a ‘are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution’ response.

With a hindsight that can only be informed by how horribly wrong it went for Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, it is all too easy to dismiss them as deranged and deluded for ever believing they could create a stir that would inspire the masses to join in and overthrow West Germany’s capitalist system. But do we lump them in with Charles Manson, or Che Guevara? Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, it can be an ambiguously fine line between activist/freedom fighter/revolutionary vs. terrorist/murderer/maniac. But in casting our judgment, we must also consider the motives of Meinhof and her fellow guerrillas – though from the comparative apathy of the early 21st century, it would be nearly impossible to imagine how desperate the 1960s radicals must have felt as they helplessly watched their dream slipping away; and harder still to imagine the burden of guilt, need for atonement and fear of inaction that Germany’s Children of Hitler would have carried.

Ulrike Meinhof remains an enigma – a “historical riddle”, as Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek describes her in the introduction to a compendium of Meinhof’s konkret writings, Everybody Talks About the Weather…We Don’t – the powerful title being one of Meinhof’s own quotes. Red Army Faction historian Stefan Aust believes she “suffered under the injustice of this world,” and perhaps that hints at the only satisfactory answer to this ‘historical riddle’. For Ulrike Meinhof, there was no other choice. As JFK said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Posted in Revolution | 1 Comment

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]

Posted in Heroes | 5 Comments

7th May 1763 Pontiac’s Rebellion


Chief Pontiac

On this day in 1763, one of the most significant Indian rebellions in the history of Colonial America began when a confederacy of tribes under the leadership of Chief Pontiac attacked British forces at Fort Detroit. Pontiac’s war would rage for nearly two years before an uneasy truce was reached – but the consequences would prove to be even more dramatic than the rebellion itself. For the Native Americans, it marked the first united multi-tribal resistance to the European interlopers. And as the first of the Indian wars that did not end in complete defeat for the Native Americans, Pontiac’s vision was a clear demonstration of pan-tribal co-operation and would subsequently alter the tactics and strategies of Indian leaders. For the British and American colonists, the conflict resulted in the introduction of new policies that would lead directly to the American Revolutionary War. Pontiac’s Rebellion also bears the dubious distinction of being the first documented and deliberate attempt at biological warfare in North American history. So let us take a brief look at this often overlooked but pivotal episode and its fateful implications.

By the mid-1700s, the Indian Nations of the Eastern Interior were entirely surrounded by invading European powers. When the British fought the French for control of North America as part of the Seven Years’ War, the Native Americans sided with the French whose designs on the Indian lands were limited to the lucrative fur trade rather than colonisation. In 1760, after six years of war, the French abruptly withdrew from the Ohio Valley and Western Great Lakes allowing the British to move in unopposed. Chief Pontiac, however, refused to surrender to the land-hungry invaders who had no interest in cementing friendship with the customs of gift-giving.

By early 1763, Pontiac had succeeded – for the first time in the Indian Wars – in forging a broad coalition of the often inter-warring Indian nations. On 7th May, he launched his initial attack against Fort Detroit. The assault had been anticipated, and the 120-man garrison successfully resisted several attempts by Pontiac. But just two days later, Pontiac’s confederacy attacked isolated settlers outside Fort Detroit and laid siege to the garrison. Within a few weeks other Indian war parties had taken every fort west of Niagara except Detroit and Pitt. Following these stunning victories, by early September, the Indians remarkably stood on the verge of total victory.

But unbeknownst to Pontiac, the French had already signed a treaty of surrender ending all hostilities between the two colonial powers. Freed from campaigns against the French, the British were at last able to give Pontiac’s Rebellion their full attention. And they did so with alarming genocidal-like brutality. General Jeffrey Amherst – the commanding officer of North American British forces – ordered the distribution of amongst the Indians of blankets infested with the deadly smallpox virus. Thousands and thousands of Native Americans were subsequently wiped out by the epidemic.

When confirmation of the French surrender eventually reached Chief Pontiac, it was a decisive blow to the momentum of the rebellion. The British seized the opportunity to end the expensive conflict and make peace. In a delayed attempt at diplomacy, they agreed to establish a line at the Appalachians – beyond which settlements would not encroach on Indian territory. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 stated: “We do strictly forbid, on pain of our displeasure, all our loving subjects from making any purchases or settlements whatever in that region.”

King George III would soon renege on his promise but, of far greater significance, colonists were incensed by the king’s command to establish an Indian-controlled frontier, believing that unlimited westward expansion was their right and destiny. Resentment escalated further when taxes were introduced exclusively to the colonists to finance the defense against the Indians, and the seeds of a plot for a new rebellion began to germinate. When the Revolutionary War broke out, most Indians would fight on the side of their recent British enemy.

As for Chief Pontiac, after the failure to capture Fort Detroit he withdrew but continued to encourage militant resistance to British occupation. Although the British had successfully pacified the uprising, they decided to negotiate with the Ottawa leader in a show of respect. Pontiac met with the British superintendent of Indian affairs in July 1766 and formally ended hostilities. Three years later, on April 20th 1769, he was murdered. It was rumoured that the British hired his assassin.

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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.

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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]

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24th April 1915 the Armenian Genocide


Death March of Armenians

Today we lament the beginning of the infamous Armenian Genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Turkey’s Ottoman regime. Force-marched to their deaths across stifling tundra, countless thousands driven en masse into subterranean caves at the mouths of which the Turkish authorities lit lethal fires with which to suffocate their despairing prey, Armenia’s Christian population – sandwiched unfortunately between Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia – was virtually abandoned by the Christian West during their hour of need as the Turks annexed much of western Armenia and brought that country’s legendary Mount Ararat within its own east-west sprawling mass. Even today, many Turks vehemently deny the Armenian Genocide, so much so that Cardiff’s Armenian Genocide memorial was defaced by outraged Turks just days after its dedication. And still the furore continues. Before he took office, Barack Obama made a pledge to recognise the genocide, a gesture swiftly forgotten when he assumed power.  And still the US, British and German governments – their politicians reliant on the good will of Turkey – vacillate between embracing this century-old atrocity and utterly sweeping its 1.5 million victims under the carpet. The Armenians, meanwhile, mindful of their dubious “squeezed” geographical location, continue steadfastly to protest their need for national closure on the world’s stage, even at times displaying a remarkable and singularly Armenian sense of humour. When, in 2003, the Azerbaijanis claimed for themselves a small part of southern Armenia, invoking a century-old forgotten deal with the then Bolshevik government, the local Armenians simply avoided that particular highway and trucks, taxis, vans, cars and motorcycles improvised by re-routing themselves up a dry riverbed instead. And when one particularly pig-headed and thick-skinned Turkish politician undiplomatically requested that the Armenians remove Mount Ararat from their national flag – its now being technically a part of Turkey – the Armenian government riposted: “Then shouldn’t you remove the moon from your flag, for neither is that on your territory.”

[Written by Julian Cope]

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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.

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19th April 1824 the Death of Lord Byron


Lord Byron on his death-bed

Yes, he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – flamboyant, dynamic and notorious for his scandalous love affairs and aristocratic excesses. A proto-rock star, he was the most famous literary figure of his day – capturing the imagination of Europe like no one else in the whole of the nineteenth century. And of course he was one of the great major Romantics; a brilliant poet of brooding passion and, in the words of Goethe, “boundless genius”. But lest we forget that on this day in 1824, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron – more commonly known as Lord Byron – died a revolutionary in the Greek town of Messolonghi.

When Byron set out from Italy the previous summer, it was with the hope that his name, money and idealism could somehow assist the Greeks in their struggle for independence from Ottoman Turkey. His first six months as a freedom fighter were rainy and miserable, but the poet remained true to his altruistic mission. He took part of the rebel army under his own command, and planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. On 9th April 1824, however, having been soaked by a heavy rain whilst out riding, Byron suffered fever and rheumatic pains and within days was fighting for his life. Repeated bleedings, which he initially resisted, further debilitated him. Among his last recorded words were, “I have given [Greece] my time, my means, my health – and now I give her my life! – what could I do more?” He was thirty-six years old.

The Greek nation was overwhelmed by grief. At memorial services throughout the country, Byron was proclaimed a national hero. His death served to unite Greece against the enemy and elicited support from all all over the world. In October 1827 British, French and Russian forces destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino, assuring Greek independence, which was acknowledged by the sultan in 1829.

How easy it would have been for Lord Byron to rest on the laurels of his nobility, celebrity, talent and wealth. Even when forced to flee from Britain in 1816 following the scandalous affair with his half-sister, his exile in Switzerland and northern Italy could have been one of extravagance, leisure, literary output, tumultuous affairs with anyone he so chose (most likely brilliant married women or handsome younger men), and great intellectual friendships with the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley – as indeed it was for the first seven years.

But Byron was a genuine and untiring champion of the underdog, a committed libertine and – as he wrote in Don Juan, Canto VIII – a firm believer that “Revolution/Alone can save the earth from hell’s pollution”.

The very embodiment himself of the famed Byronic Hero, he defended that principle with his life.

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18th April 1955 the Death of Albert Einstein


Albert Einstein

On the 18th of April 1955 Albert Einstein died in Princeton Hospital, New Jersey. He was 76 years old. One of the chief architects of the modern era, there are few other individuals whose impact on human culture has been so significant. Fifty years earlier, in 1905, during what would later be referred to as his “miracle year”, Einstein published a series of papers that sparked a revolution in physics, laying the groundwork for twenty years of remarkable work. Papers that not only revolutionised the field in which he specialised, they revolutionised the world around him. In an era when established orthodoxies were under fire from all sides… from Marx and Darwin… from Nietzsche, Freud and Joyce… from technological advance and an emerging mass media, Einstein overturned the most fundamental orthodoxy of them all – Newtonian Physics.

Our well-ordered clockwork universe dissolved into a seething ocean of quantum uncertainty, and nothing was ever quite the same again.

Einstein became almost as well known for the depth and breadth of his intellect as for any specific idea that emerged from it. For the first time in history there was a mass consciousness that spanned the globe. It had started with news via wire telegraph, then came cinema, radio and by the time of Einstein’s death, network television… mass media had been born and with it mass consciousness. And although at the time few individuals understood the intricacies of Einstein’s work, there was a collective appreciation that it contained something truly significant. As he himself wondered aloud during an interview with the New York Times in 1944, “Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?”

Relativity became more than a physical theory, it became a buzzword… a concept to be drawn on by artists and fed into fields such as sociology and anthropology. Despite Einstein’s protestations at this migration and his insistence that notions of cultural or moral relativity were not somehow “proven” by his work in theoretical physics, in the minds of many his apparent undermining of such things as absolute time pulled the rug from beneath a lot of erstwhile concrete ideas. In Einstein’s universe, many felt old certainties could no longer be relied upon and everything was suddenly up for grabs.

Born into a lower middle-class family in Germany in 1879, Einstein’s youth provided precious few hints that one of the world’s most revolutionary minds was soon to emerge. The tales of his poor results at school have been exaggerated (he tended to do exceptionally well in those subjects that interested him and rather badly in those that did not) but even so, by his early 20s his prospects of a career as an academic or scientist did not appear good. Unable to find a teaching position upon graduating university, he took a job as an office clerk to pay the bills while he completed his PhD. Almost completely isolated from mainstream academia, he laboured away for several years on his thesis (A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions) which he completed and submitted in early 1905. Even as the University of Zurich examination board contemplated their decision, Einstein published four other papers he’d been working on alongside his thesis.

It was almost four years before the University of Bern offered him a position and Einstein could afford to quit his job at the Patent Office. But during that time, those four papers from 1905 had begun to shake the field of physics. His paper on the photoelectric effect – for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize some years later – demonstrated that light possessed many of the properties of a particle (rather than merely a wave). The paper paved the way not only for modern electronics, but for his 1909 paper in which he first proposed the idea of the wave-particle duality of light… quantum theory. These ideas would not be fully accepted until the 1920s. His paper on Brownian motion single-handedly invented statistical physics and proved beyond doubt the existence of molecules. Next there was the small matter of his Special Theory of Relativity which redefined all past theories of motion and provided the foundation for the General Theory of Relativity ten years later which would redefine damn near everything else.

And, in the final weeks of 1905, he would publish the fourth of the papers that would constitute his miracle year. Almost an addendum to the Special Theory of Relativity it is best known for introducing the most famous equation in all of science… E=mc2. By establishing an equivalence between matter and energy, Einstein had explained to the world exactly how the sun worked, but also opened up the possibility of creating mini-suns here on earth.

For the next twenty years, Albert Einstein was at the forefront of theoretical physics. His achievements in the field go to make a very long list indeed, and the influence those achievements have had on those who followed him is profound. Although he struggled with some of the implications of his own work, there’s no doubt that such mind-bending ideas as inhabit the further reaches of quantum and string theory can be traced backwards to the work carried out by Albert Einstein in the decades that followed 1905.

But as well as having an impact on the scientific community, Einstein found himself catapulted to wider fame soon after the First World War. In 1919 the first experimental results were recorded that confirmed his General Theory of Relativity. Around the world, newspaper headlines declared the end of the Newtonian Age and the beginning of the Einstein Era. In fact, with the possible exception of Charlie Chaplin, Einstein was the most famous person on the planet for a while. He was supremely uncomfortable with “celebrity” but resolved to use his fame to further two goals. Firstly, the promotion of theoretical physics. Secondly, the promotion of peace and justice.

Because if there was anything closer to Einstein’s heart than science, it was the cause of peace. With the rise of Hitler, he reluctantly abandoned the strict pacifism which he had expounded since his youth (“We must dedicate our lives to drying up the source of war; ammunition factories”), though nonetheless maintained it should be the ultimate longterm goal of humanity (“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”). He possessed a naked contempt for nationalism and militarism, describing nationalism as like measles – “an infantile sickness” and suggesting that “killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder”. Even as the Nazis gathered strength in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s, he remained a vocal figure in the peace movement, taking part in – and campaigning publicly for – the League against Imperialism which opposed the remilitarisation of Europe post-WWI and demanded that overseas colonies be granted independence.

He espoused vegetarianism and denounced racism (describing “bias against the Negro” as the worst disease from which US society suffered). He attacked capitalism, materialism and the use of the mass media to manipulate the public…

“… under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.” – Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

So it’s hardly any wonder, that a little more than a decade after being forced to flee Nazi Germany for his ideas (and his race), he found himself investigated by the FBI and coming to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy (who Einstein described as “a great danger to intellectual freedom”). In an open letter, he announced that although he had never been a member of a Communist party, if he had been… “I would not be ashamed of it.”

Einstein described himself as a Zionist, though his support for a Jewish state was equivocal at best. On the one hand he expressed concern that Judaism and the Jewish people would be damaged by becoming enslaved to narrow nationalism. On the other hand, he was a prominent Jew in Germany during the 1920s and early 30s… which is the kind of environment that shapes your political position for you. He was lecturing in the US when news reached him that Hitler had taken power. By the time he was due to return home, the book burnings were underway, with himself and Freud given pride of place on the pyres. The German government had banned Jews from holding positions at universities and one prominent magazine had published his name on their “Not Yet Hanged” list. With a bounty on his head and Goebbels mentioning him by name in hateful speeches, Einstein sought asylum in the USA and spent the rest of his life there.

He played no part in the Manhattan Project, though there can be little doubt that his work decades earlier had laid the theoretical foundations for the atomic age. However, his fear that Hitler might develop nuclear weapons before the allies did prompt him to write to US President Roosevelt and suggest that research in this area should be carried out with all haste. A few months prior to his death, he told a friend that his only regret in life was his decision to write that letter.

By the end of his life Einstein was still working in theoretical physics, though by then his best work was behind him. Troubled by the apparent randomness that lies at the heart of quantum theory – a field he had helped shape – he laboured at a Grand Unification Theory that would unite the laws of physics at the subatomic level with those that ruled over the mechanical universe. He described himself as “a deeply religious non-believer” and this religious sensibility was focussed on the beauty of the universe itself. That the laws of physics which held sway at the macro level didn’t seem to work on the micro level – and vice versa – offended him on some level. It interfered with what he saw as the great elegance of reality. And he sought to remedy that, working on his Grand Unification Theory right up until the day before he died. It was a project he was forced to leave incomplete, though work continues (not least in the field of string theory) to achieve this most elusive of goals.

With the death of Einstein the world lost one of the greatest minds it has ever possessed. During his lifetime, international trade and mass media finally succeeded in uniting humanity in what he described as “a planetary community of production and consumption”. For the first time ever we were a single tribe. And Albert Einstein was our first Tribal Elder. That we have conspicuously failed to heed his wisdom is indeed a tragedy.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Heroes | 7 Comments

14th April 1964 the Death of Rachel Carson


Rachel Carson

Today we commemorate one of the twentieth century’s greatest revolutionary heroines – the mother of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson. Passionate naturalist, brilliant biologist, fearless crusader and gifted writer, this outwardly demure and unassuming woman took on the federal government, the powerful agricultural industry and the male-dominated science community to blow the whistle on the lethal damage pesticides were inflicting on our environment. “As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club,” she wrote, “the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.” The second woman to be employed by the US government’s Fish and Wildlife Service, Rachel Carson first came to the public’s attention with a trilogy of lyrical and informative bestsellers about the ocean. But it was with her 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring, that a worldwide environmental revolution was kick-started. In America’s post-WW2 technological boom years, use of synthetic chemical pesticides on crops and in pest control programmes was rampant. The most popular pesticide DDT had been hailed as the “saviour of mankind” after being used successfully against typhus epidemics and proven effective in killing insects. So gung-ho was America for this newfound control over nature that pesticide trucks regularly patrolled suburban neighbourhoods throughout the summer months – as ubiquitous as the ice-cream man – blasting DDT on trees and front lawns even while children played outside. In 1958, after receiving a letter from a friend describing the large-scale death of birds following a DDT aerial spray, Rachel Carson – already highly suspicious of pesticides – began what would become a four-year crusade. Working relentlessly and independently, without the safety net of any scientific or academic institution, she painstakingly gathered her evidence, triple-checking every detail. Halfway through the monumental project, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and endured a radical mastectomy followed by intensive radiation therapy. But, somehow, she soldiered on. In her own words: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find resources of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

Upon its publication, Silent Spring caused a sensation. An alarmed public terrified of food contamination catapulted it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. But Carson’s scathing critique of ecological disaster, corporate irresponsibility, misguided science and government complicity caused a backlash from the all-powerful chemical industry, who launched a sexist attack against the author’s scientific credentials and findings. “Hysterical,” “communist” and a “spinster” who couldn’t possibly understand the needs of “future generations” were just some of the insults the boys’ brigade hurled at her. But Carson’s calm demeanour, impeccable research and articulate arguments persuaded the world that human-made chemicals could indeed threaten the delicate balance of nature and drive birds and other animals to extinction. President John F. Kennedy was inspired to call for safety testing of pesticides, and the scientific community and public policymakers soon agreed that Carson’s warnings were real.

Rachel Carson died from breast cancer at the age of 56 just two years after the publication of Silent Spring. She did not live to see the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, or the first Earth Day that same year, or the banning of DDT in 1972 – all sparked by the awareness that she generated. If not for Rachel Carson, the environmental movement might have been long delayed, and we know now that there was and is not a minute to lose. And so with gratitude and in tribute to this World Heroine, let us recall and heed her prescient words from p. 227 of Silent Spring:

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less travelled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

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7th April 1969 “The Birth of the Internet”


Today we wish a very happy 50th birthday to the internet. In truth, pinning down an exact date for the birth of the internet isn’t really possible, but Wired magazine suggests today’s as good a day as any to celebrate; for it was on the 7th of April, way back in 1969, that the first RFC – Request For Comment – documents were published. RFC documents describe the theoretical foundations of the internet and interconnected computers. They outline the methodologies involved, the research being undertaken and any new concepts developed in the field of computer networking.

The first RFC documents were published as part of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). This was an academic programme drawing on ideas first proposed by the US Defence Department almost two decades earlier. The aim of ARPANET can be summed up by this quote from the visionary psychologist and computer scientist, Joseph Linklider,

[to create] a network of [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines providing the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions.

Back in 1960 Linklider had published a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis”. In it he called into question the rather fashionable theorising about Artificial Intelligence that was prevalent at the time. Instead of spending time building a mechanical brain, Linklider suggested a far more useful goal would be to use computer networks to link together human brains. Computer networks, he believed, had the potential to bring many millions of human minds together inside the largest library ever conceived. Linklider’s contemporary, W.R. Ashby suggested that this would result in what he called “intelligence amplification”. What wonders would such technology enable us to achieve!?

Well, if we fast-forward 50 years, we might be forgiven a small sigh of disappointment. Linklider’s vision of a golden age of human discourse, knowledge and understanding appears to have sunk beneath an ocean of pornography, gambling and home-shopping. The internet may well be the largest library ever conceived, but it’s a library where almost 15 percent of the books are filled with images of people having sex. A library with the ambience of a grubby shopping mall and the attitude of a casino. A library where intellectual discussion is often drowned out by vitriolic shrieking. Every depravity, every cruelty, every human frailty can be found writ large on the walls of our global library. It houses enough hatred and intolerance to shock even the most cynical.

And yet, though that may all be true, it’s far from being the whole truth. The pace of technological progress over the past hundred years has been dizzying. My grandmother was in her teens before she encountered an electric light. Yet by the time of her death she’d watched a man walk on the moon and seen her grandson playing games on his own personal computer. James Gleick’s seminal book, Faster: the acceleration of just about everything, suggests that while technology itself can be alienating, the pace of technological change massively compounds that alienation. Albert Einstein described technological progress as “like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal”, while anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson goes further and insists that modern technology is itself pathological… the externalisation of a deeply flawed view of ourselves and of the world of which we are part.

But at the same time, with the arrival of the internet and our mass participation in its development, we have a revolutionary technology with the potential to trump all others. Despite the million YouTube videos of cats doing something amusing; despite the message boards filled with petty arguments and vicious insults; despite the porn and the rampant consumerism, the casinos and the privacy concerns. Despite all of this and worse, the internet is undoubtedly capable of the intelligence amplification envisioned by William Ashby. Because above all, what the internet provides us with is a space where millions can gather and share information freely. A space that is democratic in the purest sense. A space where ideas can be expressed, challenged and reshaped by a collective consciousness that spans continents. Even ideas about technology, progress and the internet itself. Curiously enough, the net may prove to be the piece of technology that allows us to assess the impact of technology on our world.

We see glimpses of this revolutionary potential already. Protest movements and pressure groups have found the net to be a powerful organisational tool. Indeed, the recent and ongoing revolutions in North Africa were coordinated – in part at least – through social media websites. Wikileaks, for all its many faults, has shaken the political establishment around the world. Research in almost any field you care to mention has been aided by the collaborative space provided by the net. And just as hatred breeds freely in cyberspace, so there are wonderful stories of hope, love and solidarity emerging from the electronic ether facilitated by encounters between like-minded people who would otherwise never have met.

Ultimately, despite the conceptual framework entering middle-age, the internet as a collaborative space involving mass participation is still very much an adolescent. It’s future is still unwritten, but there’s plenty of reason for optimism. When people gather together it’s often to work or to play. And yes, sometimes when they gather they form a lynch-mob. But occasionally, when minds meet, something truly wonderful is produced. The internet offers us the facility to meet in our millions. In our tens of millions. And even though most of the time we meet in such numbers we’re watching a Rick Astley video, it only takes one “something truly wonderful” to change the world forever.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

Posted in Revolution, World Events | 7 Comments

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]

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 3 Comments

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.

Posted in Heroes, World Events | 3 Comments

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]

Posted in Heroes | 1 Comment

25th March 1969  John & Yoko’s Bed-In for Peace


The newspeople said, "Say, what you're doing in bed?" I said, "We're only trying to get us some peace"

On 25th March 1969 Yoko Ono and John Lennon staged their first ‘bed-in’ for peace. Married five days earlier in Gibraltar, the Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton – inviting the world’s press to come and interview them about war and peace – was their version of a honeymoon.

Yoko brought to John the realisation that there are many methods of artistic expression available and, beyond that, the artist has an obligation to be relevant as well as challenging, to act outside of the enclave of their medium.

John had been in the eye of one of the greatest celebrity storms ever seen. Television only became a part of ordinary people’s lives in the early 60s. He’d quickly learned that when the mass media take an idea they will amplify and simplify it. Subtlety and nuance get lost, ambiguity and the loss of context can change everything. His ‘bigger than Jesus’ comment was made one drunken evening at a club, and yet a year later it came back to bite him thousands of miles away with record burnings and death threats.

They knew a message needed to be something simple, yet novel and inventive that would catch the eye and at a glance speak of radically different values. Yoko’s sparky avant-garde approach informed the decision; a white visual aesthetic with placards around. For hour after hour, day after day, they fielded any question.

When The Beatles were asked to write a song for the world’s first satellite TV link-up two years earlier, John had written ‘All You Need Is Love’; it had been composed deliberately to translate easily and unambiguously. So two years on he and Yoko decided that their message must be the same point but more robust and even more straightforward: Peace.

The Vietnam War was raging. Several years earlier John had sent back his MBE in protest but that was reaction; Yoko and he knew there also needed to be pro-active action. The media, the politicians and all the other overamplified voices at best accepted and normalised the war, the same way they do today when troops being paid to fuck over the Iraqi or Afghan people are routinely referred to as ‘heroes’.

To have voices in the midst of that cry ‘peace’ shifted the debate. The parameters moved away from should or shouldn’t the UK send troops, or what level of bombing is acceptable, and instead became war versus peace. Not that Ono and Lennon’s voices were the first or only ones for peace by any means; but they pulled the mass media culture towards it, they took it further out of the news bulletins.

As John explained, “we thought, the other side has war on every day, not only on the news but on the old John Wayne movies and every damn movie you see: war, war, war, war, kill, kill, kill, kill. We said, let’s get some peace, peace, peace, peace on the headlines, just for a change. We thought it highly amusing that a lot of the world’s headlines on March 25th 1969 were ‘honeymoon couple in bed’. Whoopee! Isn’t that great news?…

“So we would sell our product, which we call ‘peace’. And to sell a product you need a gimmick, and the gimmick we thought was ‘bed’. And we thought ‘bed’ because bed was the easiest way of doing it, because we’re lazy. It took us a long train of thought of how to get the maximum publicity for what we sincerely believed in, which was peace.”

Of course, two people lying in bed in their pyjamas, even ones as observed as John and Yoko, were not going to stop the war. Its impracticality expresses that futile feeling we have as war rages on in our name. Moreover its method – of patience, clarity, calm – spoke vividly of the values we need to overcome war.

The couple also expressly said that the new tools of mass communication were abused in selling us war and consumer junk. If they work so well – as they undeniably did – then they could be used to promote peace.

Their campaign continued with billboards in major cities. It had to be plain and straight, both in the message and in the form. The posters were plain black-and-white in an unserifed font like a tabloid headline. WAR IS OVER (IF YOU WANT IT). As simple as any other advert but a message that, in that context, shocks the viewer.

And yet, though it’s simple, it’s not simplistic. That bracketed bit – (if you want it) – tells us it is in our hands. Our leaders try to tell us that we are powerless, that the power they hold is theirs by right, that we’re too stupid to exercise it, whereas John and Yoko’s billboards said that the only power our leaders have is power we cede to them. It stands as one of the great slogans of all time, tackling a titanic perennial blight with the sense of possibility and personal power necessary to create hope.

Two months later they staged a second bed-in in Montreal where they recorded ‘Give Peace A Chance’. In October it was taken up as the anthem of half a million protesters against the Vietnam War in Washington, rallying and affirming their stance. It has been heard on the streets around the world ever since.

[Written by Merrick]

Posted in Dissent, Heroes, Heroines, World Events | 1 Comment

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

23rd March 1931 the Martyrdom of Bhagat Singh


Bhagat Singh photographed in prison

We in the West tend to recall only the great Mahatma Gandhi when we think of India’s long and gruelling fight for freedom from the British Raj. But today we pay tribute to another extraordinary Indian Independence revolutionary – Bhagat Singh – of whom Gandhi himself wrote: “There has never been, within living memory, so much romance round any life as has surrounded that of him.” Indeed, it is in no way surprising to discover that the brief but stellar life of this Indian icon has been Bollywooded not just once but several times. Born into a family of radicals, revolution was fed to him with his mother’s milk while his father and uncles were jailed as participants in the pro-liberation Ghadar Movement during World War One. At the age of 12, Singh’s revolutionary destiny was sealed after he ran away from school to visit the site of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre – where British Indian Army officers without warning or provocation shot and killed nearly 400 unarmed men, women and children. By the age of 16 – fuelled by the ideas of Marx, Engels and Bakunin – Singh developed a socialist and secular vision for India which extended beyond mere freedom towards nation-building and the removal of the caste system. After several years at the forefront of the underground armed struggle for independence, Singh became a national hero when he threw a bomb in the Central Legislative Council in Delhi in 1929 in protest of the repressive Public Safety Bill. As intended, nobody was hurt; the goal was to “make the deaf hear.” Bhagat Singh could easily have escaped but allowed himself to be arrested in order to use his court appearances as a revolutionary platform. With courageous and powerful speeches in the court that bore little relevance to his own defense, he articulated his vision for a free India – enduring prison persecution, hunger strikes, forced-feeding and violent beatings in order to give voice to his self-proclaimed “people’s movement.” Sentenced to life imprisonment, Singh was subsequently tried – along with two fellow revolutionaries – for the killing of a police officer two years earlier. Conducted by a special tribunal fraught with violations of due process, the farcical trial ended in death sentences. Singh refused to move a mercy petition and he and his two young comrades were hanged in Lahore Jail on 23rd March 1931. He was 23 years old.

Eight decades after Bhagat Singh’s execution, there has been a resurgence of his popularity in India amidst the current political backlash. India’s Independence movement was never solely confined to wresting power; the struggle for emancipation advocated self-reliance rather than foreign dependence, community and equality rather than division and disparity. But as India careens evermore into the reptilian folds of capitalism, it is deeply unfortunate that – unlike Nelson Mandela – Bhagat Singh did not survive to usher in its new era of independence.

Posted in Heroes | 17 Comments

18th March 1871 the Paris Commune Begins


Paris Commune Barricade 1871

“Storming Heaven”: The barricades at Montmartre

Today marks the anniversary of the formation of the Paris Commune – the first successful seizure of power by the working class. Facing Prussian invasion forces on one side and French troops mobilised against its own citizens on the other, the descendents of the sans-culottes of 1792 rose up to take power of Paris and establish a new kind of autonomous government. Schooled in the ideologies of Proudhon and Blanqui, the Communards decreed separation of church and state, improved workers’ rights, organised and provided public services, established co-operatives, implemented educational reforms, and the strong feminist movement within the Commune even negotiated the right for women to vote. One of the epochal events in social history, the Paris Commune would inform the next fifty years as anarchists and Marxists obsessed and argued over its successes and failures. In his 1895 study “The Commune of Paris: How the Commune failed to realize its true aim and yet set that aim before the world,” Peter Kropotkin wrote:

Why is the idea represented by the Commune of Paris so attractive to the workers of every land, of every nationality? The answer is easy. The revolution of 1871 was above all a popular one. It was made by the people themselves, it sprang spontaneously from the midst of the mass, and it was among the great masses of the people that it found its defenders, its heroes, its martyrs. It is just because it was so thoroughly “low” that the middle class can never forgive it. And at the same time its moving spirit was the idea of a social revolution; vague certainly, perhaps unconscious, but still the effort to obtain at last, after the struggle of many centuries, true freedom, true equality for all men. It was the revolution of the lowest of the people marching forward to conquer their rights.

This extraordinary explosion of democracy, freedom and co-operation – “the glorious harbinger of a new society,” as Karl Marx hailed it  – would end in utter tragedy. But while the monumentally significant tale of the Paris Commune will unfold in the coming months here at On This Deity, let’s pause for a moment to recall and celebrate its beginning…

The events which led to the revolutionary formation of the Paris Commune began when France suffered a crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in September 1870. As the Empire fell, a Third Republic was proclaimed and a new provisional government – the (so-called) Government of National Defence – was established, ostensibly to continue the war against the Prussians. This rotten new bourgeois regime would soon prove to be even deadlier than the outgoing empirical tyrants and showed its lack of grit almost immediately by capitulating to Prussia’s unreasonable terms of peace. Paris, however, remained defiant and refused to surrender. The Parisian National Guard, aided by the poor and oppressed masses, mounted a defence of the city – and, by late September, Paris was under siege that lasted for five gruelling months. When the head of the provisional government, the deplorable Adolphe Thiers, negotiated an armistice with the Prussians in January 1871, Parisians once again defied surrender and the city’s National Guard continued to mobilise.

On 18th March 1871, Thiers sent his regular army to Paris to regain control of the arms of the National Guard – including some 400 cannon. When the government troops arrived in Montmartre, they were surrounded by angry local women and children who beseeched them not to fire upon their own people. As the National Guards marched past, sounding their drums to rouse the population to resistance, General Claude Martin Lecomte three times gave the order to fire. Thiers’ troops, however, refused – and instead turned their guns on their own generals. Other army units joined the rebellion which spread so quickly that Thiers ordered an immediate evacuation of Paris by as many of the regular forces as would obey.

By three o’clock in the afternoon, one of the world’s greatest cities was in the hands of armed workers.

Posted in Anarchists, Revolution, World Events | 3 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]

Posted in Heroes | 7 Comments

13th March 1906 the Death of Susan B. Anthony


"Failure is impossible."

Today we pay tribute to a woman whose very name is synonymous with women’s suffrage – the legendary Susan B. Anthony. Although there are several other luminaries whose pioneering efforts heralded that extraordinary first wave of female emancipation,  it is Susan B. Anthony who has gone down in history as the summum bonum of the American women’s rights movement. She is the only suffragist guaranteed to be mentioned by name in American schoolchildren’s textbooks; in 1979 hers was the first non-allegorical image of a woman to appear on U.S. currency; and even the 19th Amendment itself is commonly referred to as the “Anthony Amendment”. But her iconic status and “acceptable” place in history belies her wholly radical reality.

Born in an age when women were not allowed to own property, study, speak in public or vote, Susan attended her first women’s rights convention in 1852 and thereafter dedicated the remainder of her life to the cause. An organisational genius, her canvassing plan is still used today by grassroots organisations. A tireless campaigner, Susan travelled across the nation crusading for the vote – delivering between 75 and 100 speeches every year for fifty years. With her great friend and ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded and published the weekly newspaper The Revolution with its inspired masthead: “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” She appeared before every congress from 1869 to 1906 to lobby for passage of the suffrage amendment that she and Elizabeth drafted. Between 1881 and 1885 Susan, Elizabeth and Matilda Joslin Gage collaborated on and published the monumental History of Woman Suffrage. Anticipating the “Ban the Bra” movement by some 120 years, she cast off her constricting corset and was one of the original “Bloomer Girls”. She co-founded the most influential national suffrage organisation, serving as vice-president and then president until she stepped down at the age of 80. And throughout her fifty years of relentless activism, she was all the while subjected to ridicule, opposition and abuse – to which she responded:

“Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.”

But throughout the course of a lifetime of memorable achievements, the most unforgettable was without doubt her audacious challenge of the U.S. Constitution. On November 1st 1872, Susan and three of her sisters marched into a Rochester voting registration centre and read aloud the recently adopted 14th Amendment to the three male electoral registrars, pointing out that nowhere did it state that these privileges were restricted to men. And in accordance with the amendment’s citizenship provision, the women demanded their constitutional right to register. The dumbstruck registrars were no match for this female firebrand and acquiesced. Four days later, Susan B. Anthony stepped into a voting booth and marked her ballot in the 1872 presidential election. This inspired act of manipulation and defiance resulted in her arrest and the infamous case of the United States v. Susan B. Anthony. It would also be the only occasion in her life that she would vote. Thirty-eight gruelling years later, on her 86th birthday, the struggle for women’s suffrage had still not succeeded – but the indefatigable Susan said to her supporters: “Failure is impossible.” She died one month later.

Susan B. Anthony’s persistence, indomitable spirit and unwavering dedication effected a change that she did not live to see; American women would not be granted the right to vote for a further fourteen years after her death. But her legacy survives in the daily lives of millions of women who, today, have a voice. She was a cunning, tenacious and formidable warrior to whom we owe an incalculable debt.

Posted in Heroines | 3 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.

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4th March 1888 the Death of Amos Bronson Alcott


“Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strengths, not my weaknesses.”

When a man is one hundred years ahead of his time, only the esteemed company that he keeps give his general contemporaries any inkling that his curious methods and zany lifestyle might be anything more than a splendid eccentricity. Throughout the Utopian life of Amos Bronson Alcott, however, this great progressive educator, social reformer, mystic and original thinker ran with such high achievers that they accepted his Utopian gush, his proto-hippy culinary pronouncements, his inability to coerce a living wage out of his brilliant ideas. Indeed, Henry David Thoreau declared him: “A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress.” And as one of the founders of the American Transcendentalists, Alcott – along with Emerson, Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne – was part of that 19th-century “Concord Quartet” that “freed the American mind.”

So why then has the story of this bold and original thinker – arguably the most transcendental of the American Transcendentalists – fallen into the doldrums? Today, he is remembered chiefly as the father of Louisa May Alcott, whose semi-autobiographical Little Women captured the world’s imagination with its aspirational themes of self-sacrifice and self-reliance. Ah, but that very imagination that Louisa May so artfully harnessed was in fact a by-product of her brilliant, quixotic and wholly impractical father. And therein lies the root of Bronson Alcott’s problems. For although in his quest for human ascendency, Alcott was even more Emersonian than Ralph Waldo Emerson himself, this most brilliant man was utterly incapable of committing the luminosity of his conversation to paper. It seems instead that Bronson Alcott was just too busy being the group’s chief practitioner of Transcendentalism – living the dream at its most visionary, edgy and fanciful.

Unfortunately for his legacy, Alcott’s mystic philosophy permeated into his everyday with such idealistic zeal that the results were often calamitous. For example, his short-lived Fruitlands community was so Utopian, so high reaching that Alcott excluded carrots and potatoes from their self-grown vegetarian diet because their roots grew down into the earth instead of aspiring upwards towards heaven! Such half-conceived idealism brought his family and the rest of the community to the brink of starvation – Fruitlands was a spectacular failure from which Bronson Alcott learned little of practical value. His lifelong habit of taking innovative ideas past the point of sense into to ruinous extremes forced his family into a perpetually rootless poverty, moving home over twenty times and frequently relying on the good will and charity of Emerson.

Nevertheless, Alcott did enjoy notable success with his establishment in Boston of America’s first progressive school – The Temple School. Assisted by Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, Alcott developed an experimental and highly advanced educational programme that sought to teach not by the traditional method of rote, but instead to develop the child from within. Alcott introduced pioneering methods such as organised play, imagination, gymnastics, the honour system and minimal corporal punishment. All of the aforementioned have nowadays long been accepted, but each was at the time considered to have been so unorthodox as to be scandalous. For seven years, however, Alcott’s school survived the harsh and continued criticism from the New England press and public alike until, at last, Alcott’s principles gave them the excuse they needed to shut him down. Enrolling a black girl, Alcott found himself facing a mob, who demanded her withdrawal. When Alcott refused to compromise, the school was forced to close.

Although the long life of Bronson Alcott was clearly no undisputed victory, his failures were always mitigated due to their being a product of his daring, original and unwavering attempts to restore the ascendancy of man’s spiritual nature. Moreover, the ever forward-thinking Alcott worked into his everyday life practises, ideas and influences that his contemporaries only wrote about – advances of the kind that can be found at the root of many social and education reforms that would come only much, much later. We must never judge conventionally one who has soared so high above rational distinctions in the true mystic manner, especially when one such as Henry David Thoreau deemed him the “sanest man” he ever knew.

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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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28th February 1906 The Publication of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”


Inside a Meatpacking Death Factory, Chicago 1904

In 1904, 26-year-old socialist Upton Sinclair was a struggling and impoverished New Jersey writer when he was commissioned by the editor of The Appeal to Reason – America’s most widely circulated socialist-populist newspaper – to write a fictionalised series on the exploited immigrant workers of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Disguised as a worker, Sinclair gained access to the stockyards, slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants where he interviewed labourers and bore witness to the wretched conditions. Men, women and children worked in disgusting and unsanitary environments, with animal blood up to their knees. There were often no toilets; workers had to relieve themselves in the corners of the work floor. The hands of picklers and wool-pluckers were eaten away by acid. The thumbs of beef-trimmers were hacked down to lumps. Pay was pitiful, and corruption rife: workers were victims of blacklisting and kickbacks as bent foremen employed a small pool of better-paid and frequently alternated workers to “speed up the gang” by setting a furious pace for the rest of the plant. Seven weeks later, Sinclair returned to New Jersey to write his novel.

The Jungle is a propagandist tale of the fictitious Jurgis Rudkus and his family – Lithuanian immigrants inspired by real people Sinclair had met in Chicago – who are pulverised by dangerous, disgusting and low-paying work in a corrupt industry. As an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten and contaminated meat products were processed and mislabelled for sale to the public. In brutally graphic detail, he described how dead rats were shovelled into sausage-grinding machines; bribed inspectors would look the other way while diseased cows were slaughtered for beef; filth and guts were carefully swept up off the floor and packaged as “potted ham”; workers with tuberculosis coughed constantly – their bloody spit mingling with the blood of animals; meat for canning and making sausages was piled on the filthy floor before workers carried it off in rat-infested carts. And, unforgettably, the infamous “lard scene”:

“And as for the … men who worked in the tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their particular trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Beef Lard!”

Following its serialisation in The Appeal To Reason, Doubleday published The Jungle as a book on 28th February 1906 to immediate and sensational international success. Within months it had been translated into 17 languages and had amassed an impressive list of vocal admirers including George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Debs, Winston Churchill and Jack London, who commented: “[What] Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for black slaves, The Jungle has a large chance to do for the wage-slaves of today.”

A zealous socialist, Sinclair certainly intended to expose “the inferno of [the workers’] exploitation.” But the plight of the labourer prompted little controversy compared to that one explicit chapter exposing the horrors of contaminated meat. Americans were horrified to discover what they had been eating, and food safety became a national obsession – no book published in the United States had ever generated such a loud outcry. Outraged consumers bombarded their senators and representatives for change. Upton Sinclair was even summoned to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt to verify his story, after which the president ordered an investigation of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Inspired by The Jungle, demand for reform was so fervent that, before the year was out, Congress was forced to pass the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts – the first American laws to regulate the food industry.

For the highly politicised Sinclair, however, the outcome was one of bitter disappointment. The food safety reforms the government introduced so obsessed the U.S. public that his intended target of wage slavery became entirely forgotten. Sinclair would famously lament: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” But as the most enduring literary account of the Progressive Era, the grotesqueries contained within the pages of The Jungle continue to raise critical questions about a revolting industry that rears living creatures as commodities to be exploited for profit.

Over 100 years after the publication of Sinclair’s ‘muckraker’, the meat industry has degenerated into one of the most dangerous by-products of capitalism – responsible for untold global environmental destruction, resource depletion, institutionalised animal cruelty and human health risks.

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26th February 1994 the Death of Bill Hicks


"I left in love, in laughter, and in truth, and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit."

Do you remember where you were when you heard the news that Bill Hicks was dead? I was at the corner of Kentish Town Road and Hawley Road, on my way to a pub in Camden Town. My friend Justin came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I could clearly see something was wrong when I turned to look at him. He just said, flatly, “fuck man, Bill Hicks is dead”. He might as well have punched me in the stomach.

To those of us who got him, Hicks was far more than just a stand-up comedian. He was an inspirational figure; a voice of truth and sanity in an increasingly false and insane world. He spoke truth to power like almost nobody else of our generation. Militant yet deeply compassionate, when Bill Hicks took to the stage he transcended the safe and empty art form that comedy had descended to by the late 80s and early 90s. “Comedy is the new rock’n’roll”, we were being told by the media, but that was just bullshit… a marketing slogan. Yes, stand-up comedy was now happening in arenas and comedians had adopted the swagger of rock stars. And yes, some of them were even quite funny; credit where it’s due. But while it adopted the swagger of rock’n’roll, stand-up comedy hadn’t captured the danger… the threat of cultural revolution… the righteous assault on the pillars of the establishment. While much of rock’n’roll had been co-opted by the mainstream, the new wave of stand-up was never genuinely outside it.

Except for Bill.

Born into a conservative Christian family in Texas, Bill Hicks was both a product of his environment and an escapee from it. His style was heavily influenced by the Baptist preachers who harangued him from the pulpit, but the content was a world away. “Chomsky with dick jokes” was how he once described himself, but that doesn’t even begin to capture the essence of Bill Hicks. Every night he would climb on stage and assault his audience with a barrage of truth. He made it as funny as it could possibly have been, but the communication of ideas was far more important to Hicks than the generation of laughter, or the security of a regular pay-cheque. Which – needless to say – didn’t make him the most popular of comedians on the US circuit. Booed, heckled, and on more than one occasion physically threatened with violence by his audience, Hicks nonetheless remained steadfast in his fearless belief that it was more important to shake people up than merely entertain them.

Which is not to say that Bill Hicks wasn’t entertaining. It would not have been enough for him to be some kind of secular preacher. What made Hicks truly great, and gained him the following that he still retains almost two decades after his untimely death, is just how genuinely funny his material was. Whether he was skewering the hypocrisy of mainstream religion, or offering burning insight into American foreign policy. Whether discussing pornography, the war on some drugs or the pro-life/pro-choice debate, those on the same wavelength as Hicks were always laughing. And we can only hope that those not on that wavelength had an occasional seed of doubt sown in their existing world view.

Watching Bill Hicks on stage was like being part of a shamanic ceremony. He exorcised demons up there. Ours. And his own. He would often conjure up extremely violent images to shock an audience out of their comfort zone. Or he’d exploit our cultural hang-ups about sex to do the same. Not just pushing the boundaries but smashing them down completely. It can’t be stressed enough though, that these were not merely the tactics of the shock-jock, aimed at producing notoriety and a media buzz. With Hicks it was all about that sharp realignment of perspective that allows us to see through the illusions of our corrupt and mediated reality to an underlying truth.

The now-famous incident of his set being cut from The Late Show with David Letterman rightly angered Hicks. But it always amazes me that he was so surprised by it. Because it demonstrated perfectly many of the truths he tried to impart; that the mainstream media is not interested in anything that might genuinely challenge the status quo. That the twin functions of that media – to maintain a compliant populace and increase corporate revenues – will not tolerate opposition.

“You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!”

Hicks ultimately found a bigger audience in the UK, Ireland and Australia than he would ever do in his home country. His tirades against consumerism and marketing went down slightly better in places that didn’t automatically view attacks on capitalism as tantamount to treason. And while he certainly had a small but dedicated following in the United States, he always faced the stark choice of toning down his material or alienating a large proportion of his audience. And given those options, he just wasn’t the kind of guy to choose the former.

For many of my generation, Hicks was a powerful beacon of love, laughter and truth. Despite the darkness in his act – and there was plenty – it always resolved itself into something powerfully positive. An inspirational catharsis and a reminder that there’s no rule that forces us to walk the path of fear. It’s a choice. And we have it within us to make a different one.

Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. His voice is sorely missed.

[Written by Jim Bliss]

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25th February 1956 Khrushchev Outs Stalin


Khrushchev delivers his "Secret Speech"

On this day in 1956, before a closed session at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev delivered his sensational speech, On the Personality Cult and its Consequences – or the “Secret Speech” as it would go down in history. In a sustained discourse lasting some four hours, the new leader of the Soviet Union carried out the unthinkable when he unreservedly denounced his predecessor Joseph Stalin – dead for only three years – exposing his boundless crimes against his people, party and country. The gob-smacked delegates listened as Khrushchev voiced what no one had hitherto dared: the so-called ‘great leader of progressive mankind’ had been the murderous architect of the Great Purge – the unfathomably large-scale persecution and execution of Communist Party officials and Red Army leadership. Khrushchev furthermore accused Stalin of unleashing mass terror on millions of innocent Soviet citizens, of violent nationalism and anti-Semitism, and committing serious blunders in state leadership – notably his misguided alliance with Hitler at the start of World War II. And central to all of Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev proffered, was the self-creation of his own ‘personality cult’: “It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”

At last, the murderous tyrant had been outed! For the delegates of the 20th Congress, Khrushchev’s speech was so shocking that some suffered heart attacks there and then. Others would soon commit suicide. For the implications of Khrushchev’s mutiny were enormous. The open denunciation of Stalin would cast doubt on the very legitimacy of Soviet communism. It was after all under Stalin’s 30-year leadership that the Soviet system had taken shape in its essential form.

And indeed when abridged versions of the speech began to trickle out soon afterwards, all hellski broke loose. Riots broke out in Georgia – Stalin’s home state – as furious crowds called for independence from the Soviet Union. In China, Mao was repulsed by what he deemed a display of weakness and accused Khrushchev of being a ‘revisionist’. The West, meanwhile, was equally shocked by the speech’s openness and hints at liberalizing the USSR. But while America was content to watch and wait, the Eastern Bloc was quick to capitalise (sic) on Moscow’s disunity. By the autumn both Poland and Hungary would explode. The Hungarian Revolution ignited a round of ruthless power struggles in Moscow, which Khrushchev just about managed to survive – but only by abandoning his vision of reform and suppressing the uprisings with a brutal, Stalin-like heavy-hand.

Khrushchev held on to power for another seven years until he was finally ousted in 1964. But on that momentous evening in 1956, he unwittingly opened Pandora’s box. So incendiary was this speech that, at the time, Israel’s Moshe Dayan predicted the USSR would implode and disappear in three decades. He was only five years off.

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23rd February 1821 the Death of John Keats


“I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” – John Keats, One of the Greatest

Today we reflect on the brief but luminous life of John Keats – struck down by tuberculosis on this day in 1821 at the age of 25. Little known and lowly regarded in his lifetime, the dying poet – resigned to eternal obscurity – insisted his grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome be left anonymous and his epitaph read only: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Some three decades after his death, however, the world would begin to recognise that John Keats had in fact been one of the greatest English poets to have ever lived. In the three years of his poetic career, he published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But with his prodigiously rare gift and mystically sensual awareness of nature, love and life, he greatly advanced the poetic form – and, in his six legendary Odes – perfected it.

The tragic, heart-rending tale of John Keats’ short life is one that all but equals the poignancy of the poems themselves: the early loss of his parents; cruelly cheated out of his inheritance; the abandonment of medical studies to devote his life instead to poetry; the abject poverty that followed; a beloved younger brother’s prolonged death from tuberculosis; the cruel and savage attacks on his work; a fiery love affair with Fanny Brawne never to be consummated; his own battle with the dreaded “White Plague”… all of which led inexorably to his embittered, premature death in Rome.

“Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers,” wrote John Keats to his brother on January 23rd 1818. What riches might he have brought forth had his own already-formidable intellectual powers been allowed to ripen with maturity? We can only lament the loss of such promise. But whilst mourning what might have been is inevitable when contemplating John Keats, on this anniversary of his death, let us instead celebrate the extraordinary, elevated ouevre he bestowed upon us. The beautiful Endymion – the target of such vicious and erroneous criticism. The abandoned epic Hyperion. The visionary theory of Negative Capability. A canon of some of the most compelling and insightful letters – by any literary figure – on the nature of the creative process. And, most of all, the Odes… those six explosions of perfect genius composed in quick succession in his “annus mirabilis” of 1819.

Percy Bysshe Shelley declared in Adonais, his famous elegy to Keats, that the young poet would be part of  “the white radiance of Eternity.” Nearly two centuries after his death, the poetry of John Keats is indeed forever luminous.

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