Julian Cope

24th February 1942 the Death of the Joint Fuehrer

Today we consider the curious case of Anton Drexler, the artist-mentor of Adolf Hitler and temporary Joint Führer, who died on this day in 1942. Joint Führer? Surely not! Why, even the possibility of a world solipsist such as Hitler … Continue reading

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20th July 1923 the Murder of Pancho Villa

Today we make note of the splendidly awful murder of that outrageous Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa on this day in 1923, whose bulging-eyed corpse – exploded by nine fatal bullets – was left upside down hanging out of his trashed … Continue reading

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17th July 1946 the Execution of Draza Mihailovic

Today, we make brief note of the execution 70 years ago of the notorious Serbian Chetnik leader – General Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović – for war crimes and collaboration with the Nazis and Italians during the Second World War.  Rejected at the end by … Continue reading

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3rd July 1971  the Death of Jim Morrison

Today we honour that great poet and masterful singer, Jim Morrison, whose life was taken from him forty-six years ago today as he lay sleeping in his bath. He packed the life of an adventurous seventy-year-old into his twenty-seven short … Continue reading

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29th June 1975 the Mysterious Tragedy of 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 … Continue reading

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6th June 1961 the Death of 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 … Continue reading

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5th June 2002 the Death of Dee Dee Ramone

Today we pay tribute to the great rock’n’roll hero Dee Dee Ramone, who died on this day in 2002 aged fifty. What can we do but kneel at the grave of this hoodlum culture hero and give thanks to him … Continue reading

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21st May 1927 Charles Lindbergh’s Solo Atlantic Flight

Today we celebrate, rejoicing with arms outstretched at the audacious and heroic actions of America’s Charles Lindbergh, whose 30-hour flight from America’s east coast to Paris eighty-seven years ago in a single-engine monoplane even shorter than a Spitfire turned him … Continue reading

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15th May 1940 the First McDonald’s

Today we recall with epic sadness that dreadful disastrous day 78 years ago when the first McDonald’s hamburger restaurant opened for service in San Bernadino, California. The extraordinary trajectory of McDonald’s flight to world infamy these past seven decades embodies … Continue reading

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 6 Comments

30th April 1945 the Suicide of Adolf Hitler

Today we celebrate with arms outstretched in utterly ecstatic glee the bizarre Berlin suicide 73 years ago of that Cosmic Herostratus, World Garbage Mouth and Nihilistic Ruiner of All Things Adolf Hitler, who took his own life with poison even … Continue reading

Posted in Tyrants | 6 Comments

24th April 1915 the Armenian Genocide

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Atrocities | 3 Comments

10th April 1919 the Death of Emiliano Zapata

Today we lament the death of the great Mexican revolutionary, natural anarchist and prophet ­– Emiliano Zapata – tragically betrayed and ambushed on this day in 1919 by federal forces after an heroic 9-year struggle to bring self-reliance and autonomy … Continue reading

Posted in Anarchists, Heroes | 4 Comments

8th April 2010 the Death of Malcolm McLaren

Today we pay tribute to that uproarious lord of mischief, Malcolm McLaren, who popped his clogs 8 years ago today. What more can be said of this tiresome entrepreneurial maverick haberdasher who practiced his trade in the dying embers of … Continue reading

Posted in Anarchists, Heroes | 5 Comments

31st March 1970  The Yodo-Go Hijack

On this day in 1970 occurred the all-time single-most revolutionary political act in rock’n’roll, when Moriaki Wakabayashi – bass player of Tokyo’s notorious underground legends Les Rallizes Denudés – accompanied several other members of the Japanese Red Army Faction in the armed … Continue reading

Posted in Revolution, World Events | 3 Comments

29th March 1772 the Death of Emanuel Swedenborg

Today we celebrate the extraordinary scholar, philosopher, mystic and prophet, Emanuel Swedenborg, who left this world – just as he had predicted – two hundred and forty-four years ago today. Prophecy it was that brought greatest fame to Swedenborg, probably his … Continue reading

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27th March 1968 the Death of Yuri Gagarin

Today we acknowledge the anniversary of the death of Russia’s Yuri Gagarin, the first hero in space, the first human in space. How ironic then it was that such a hero could be dispatched not on a space flight but … Continue reading

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21st March 1991 the Death of Leo Fender

Today we pay tribute to the sustained visionary genius of Leo Fender, whose extraordinary deployment of Edisonian technology catapulted the previously minstrels-only 6-string guitar to the forefront of the post-war rock ‘n’ roll revolution. Yes, it must be understood that … Continue reading

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11th March 1941 The Commencement of Lend-Lease

Today marks the anniversary of the commencement of Lend-Lease, the controversial programme through which America gave aid to Great Britain’s war effort as she struggled alone against Hitler’s Nazi Germany in those dark days after the fall of France. Cajoled, … Continue reading

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5th March 1953 the Death of Joseph Stalin

On this day in 1953, the people of the Soviet Union were finally shown cosmic mercy for their long sufferance, freedom at last from their quarter-century endurance test at the hands of a peripheral mad man. Peripheral? J. Stalin hailed … Continue reading

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21st February 1965 Assassination of Malcolm X

Today we pay tribute to America’s extraordinary 1960s ‘Black Muslim’ leader and future World Prophet Malcolm X – assassinated 53 years ago  – whose audacious and inflammatory words, infamous autobiography and extraordinary TV appearances as the Nation of Islam’s spokesman … Continue reading

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13th February 1970 The Release of “BLACK SABBATH”

Today we celebrate the release, nay, escape of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut LP, forty-nine years ago, with which the initial re-paganising of late-50s Whitey – with its fuse lit by African-American rock’n’rollers – was crystallised forever by four psychedelicized Anglo-Saxon … Continue reading

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27th January 1967 the Apollo 1 Sacrifice

Today we pay tribute to the three American astronauts of Apollo 1, who died on this day in 1967 when their command module cabin caught fire during a pre-launch test at Cape Kennedy. The flight had already caused controversy when, … Continue reading

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25th January 1971 Charles Manson Convicted

It was on this day 1971 that Charles Manson and three of his female accomplices were finally convicted of those horrendously violent murders which have come to many to represent the symbolic termination of the Sixties. Undoubtedly, the grotesque and … Continue reading

Posted in World Events | 5 Comments

24th January 1965 the Death of Winston Churchill

Today we are duty bound to remember that dreadful old scoundrel, Winston Churchill, who died on this day in 1965. Racist, royalist, aristocrat, misogynist, opposer of women’s rights, deployer of army weapons against striking miners even; who knows the scores of … Continue reading

Posted in World Events | 14 Comments

16th January 1968 the Release of Blue Cheer’s VINCEBUS ERUPTUM

Let us today pay tribute to Blue Cheer’s astounding debut LP VINCEBUS ERUPTUM, their teenage master class in colossally loud avant-garde guitar dynamics released exactly 50 years ago and arguably the first rock album genuinely deserving of the description ‘Heavy … Continue reading

Posted in Heroes, Revolution, World Events | 7 Comments

7th January 1649 The Re-Discovery of Avebury

Today, we must celebrate John Aubrey’s dramatic rediscovery of Avebury – the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle – whilst out hunting with fellow royalists during the English Civil War, exactly 373 years ago. For Aubrey’s heroic retrieval of this vast … Continue reading

Posted in World Events | 6 Comments

25th December 2006 the Death of James Brown

Today we pay tribute to James Brown – the legendary Godfather of Soul and self-proclaimed  ‘Hardest Working man in Show Business’ – whose death on Christmas Day 2006 robbed us of a true World Artist and Culture Hero of the highest … Continue reading

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13th December 1937 The Rape of Nanking

Today we lament the tragic Rape of Nanking, in which the recently Westernized & ‘modernized’ Japanese army – themselves less than a century out of their fiercely backward-looking Samurai past, and each soldier reeling from the still cruelly harsh authoritarian … Continue reading

Posted in Atrocities | 7 Comments

8th December 1980 the Murder of John Lennon

Today we pay tribute to Beatle John Lennon, who was on this day in 1980 shot to death outside his New York City apartment building. It is not the role of this On This Deity entry to heap upon Lennon’s … Continue reading

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5th December 1931 The Suicide of Vachel Lindsay

Today we lament the tragic suicide eighty-five years ago of Vachel Lindsay, the Visionary Illinois poet whose intriguingly itinerant ‘Johnny Appleseed’ lifestyle, visionary essays and paintings, slew of gritty epic, para-religious poems, and the extravagant and declamatory public manner in which … Continue reading

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30th November 1718 the Death of Charles XII of Sweden

We today commemorate – with wonder, awe and several mega-caveats – the brief bizarre life and equally bizarre death, of Sweden’s controversial King Charles XII, who met death on this day in 1718, during his second invasion of Norway.  That Charles’ … Continue reading

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26th November 1976 ‘Anarchy In the UK’ Released

Today we celebrate the release of the Sex Pistols’ debut 7” single ‘Anarchy in the UK’ which caused a public outcry when it first appeared 41 years ago, and heralded the entire regeneration of ‘70s rock’n’roll. A riotous wake-up call … Continue reading

Posted in Revolution, World Events | 2 Comments

11th November 1918  Armistice Day

Exactly 100 years ago today, the signing of the Armistice in a railway carriage in France’s Compiegne Forest, by the Allied Commander-in-Chief Marshall Foch and Germany’s representative Matthias Erzberger, signaled the end of World War One and the complete defeat … Continue reading

Posted in World Events | 5 Comments

8th November 1923 Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch

Ninety-four years ago today, Adolf Hitler – a full decade before actually seizing power – led his young Munich-based Nazi Party in an audacious yet disastrous attempt to force armed revolution upon chaotic post-WW1 Germany, when 600 Nazi stormtroopers gate-crashed … Continue reading

Posted in Atrocities, World Events | 5 Comments

29th October 1949 the Death of George Gurdjieff

Today we commemorate the death of the prophet and gnostic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who died on this day in 1949 in Neuilly, near Paris, surrounded by a large group of sobbing followers. Somewhat like William Blake’s notion of having been … Continue reading

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21st October 1966 The Aberfan Disaster

On this day in 1966, 116 children from the South Wales village of Aberfan were suffocated in their classrooms, buried alive – just yards from their parents’ homes – by a forty-feet-high avalanche of liquefied coal waste that swept down … Continue reading

Posted in Atrocities | 1 Comment

18th October 1977 the Revolutionary Suicides of Baader and Ensslin

Today we consider the twin revolutionary suicides of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin – co-leaders of Germany’s nihilistic Baader-Meinhof Gang – whose bloody and murderous exploits throughout the 1970s – made as part of Europe and Asia’s larger unhomogenised terrorist … Continue reading

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17th October 1961 The ’61 Paris Pogrom

On the 17th of October 1961, just seventeen years after he had expelled nearly 1,600 French Jews to concentration camps to the East, the former Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon – obscenely and most bizarrely placed as Prefect of the Paris … Continue reading

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11th October 1649 the Sack of Wexford

Today we pay tribute to the 1,500 Irish civilians murdered by rampaging English Parliamentarian forces, during Oliver Cromwell’s controversial siege of the Irish port of Wexford. Many drowned whilst attempting to escape across the river in preference to being cut … Continue reading

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9th October 1967 The Martyrdom of Che Guevara

On this day in 1967, the CIA had Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara murdered in the jungles of Bolivia – the heroic exploits of this Latin American Warrior Poet and future World Prophet having, again & again, rendered the US Government’s many … Continue reading

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30th September 1971 the Death of T.C. Lethbridge

Today we honour the great British adventurer, author and hero, T.C. Lethbridge, the Cambridge University academic whose Timothy Leary-style volte-face midway through his illustrious archaeology career saw him newly transformed into a visionary of Blakean proportions. Out went the excellent … Continue reading

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21st September 1942 Maiden Flight of the B-29

Seventy-five years ago today saw the maiden flight of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, that huge American warplane whose atomic load would, with the bombing of Hiroshima, bring World War 2 to a sudden and dreadful conclusion. Faster, vaster, and with … Continue reading

Posted in World Events | 3 Comments

10th September 1676 the Death of Gerrard Winstanley

On this day in 1676, the most Visionary and Prophetic reformer of the entire English Civil War period died at the age of sixty-seven. Thrust into the revolutionary times surrounding Oliver Cromwell’s execution of King Charles I, Gerrard Winstanley was … Continue reading

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25th August 1900 the Death of Friedrich Nietzsche

Who dares to celebrate the death in an insane asylum of this radical thinker, whose works – admittedly violated, even in places re-written, by his self-serving sister – contributed so much of demerit to the vile Nazi war machine of … Continue reading

Posted in Curiosities, Heroes | 6 Comments