Remembering the life of Annemarie Schwarzenbach :Swiss photographer, writer and anti-fascist (23 May 1908 – 15 November 1942)

 

On 23 May 1908 Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Bisexual Swiss photographer, writer,  and anti-fascist  was born,  in Zurich, in German-speaking Switzerland ,When she was four, the family moved to the Bocken Estate in Horgen, near Lake Zurich, where she grew up. Her father, Alfred Schwarzenbach, was a textile magnate/.

Her mother Renee Schwarzenbach-Wille, the daughter of the Swiss general Ulricj Wille and descended from German aristocracy, was a prominent hostess, Olympic equestrian sportswoman and amateur photographer. is said to have almost bled to death at the birth of her daughter and to have clung to her fiercely all her life. Terrible feelings of loneliness were later to torment this daughter, who remained tied to her mother in a kind of love-hate relationship. Her imposing shadow hangs over the childhood of young Annemarie, as she grew up in the luxurious property of Bocken. Her mother had an imposing and devouring personality and while she  was growing up, her mother conducted a long-term affair with opera singer Emmy Krüger, which her father  and may have catalyzed Annemarie's awareness of her own attractions to women. In childhood, Annemarie was not only allowed to wear traditionally masculine clothes, but it was encouraged by her mother.

Her family might have been one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland, but Annemarie spent most of her adult life trying to get away from them. Tensions evolved .into major political disagreements with her mother, who had a domineering personality.But from an early age, it was in writing that Annemarie  found freedom and a way to emancipate herself from her mother’s suffocating presence.

At her private school in Zurich she studied mainly German, history and music, neglecting the other subjects. She liked dancing and was a keen piano player, but her heart was set on becoming a writer. She studied in Zürich and Paris and in 1931, at the age of 23,  she received her doctorate in history at the University of Zurich and wrote her first book freunde um bernhard (bernhard's circle).  

Annemarie left Switzerland for the bohemian underground of Berlin. There, she met fellow writers and her life became a flurry of words, lovers, projects, international expeditions and disappointments.

Though her beauty caught the eye of men and women alike, her androgynous style also baffled people and gave way to cruelty. Throughout history a male-dominated world has enforced a very rigid idea of what women should  look like and how a woman should behave Annemarie Schwarzenbach.was a trailblazer and a seductress, who dared to challenge the norm.

Both women and  men  found her painfully attractive. after all there’s nothing more tempting than a beautiful woman who breaks the rules. She was introspective, sensitive and passionate. Stylish and daring while at the same time she also developed intense anti-Fascist political views..

Annemarie loved the Bohemian lifestyle Berlin offered and was described by her friend Ruth Landshoff stating, “ She lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn.” It was during this time period she befriended the children of author Thomas Mann, Klaus and Erika Mann, and like their father, they hated Nazi’s.

In 1933 bohemian Berlin disappeared with the Nazi take-over Annemarie found her carefree lifestyle coming to. an end. Her mother was a Nazi sympathizer and demanded Annemarie cut ties with her Berlin friends, especially the Mann family. Annemarie who was devoutly anti-fascist refused, and remained friends with them anyway, rejecting her pro neo-nazi family she soon starting a relationship with Erika. This relationship would not last, though, as while Annemarie was head over heels for Erika, Erika soon moved on to a new woman, an actress named Therese Giehse.  Something she never fully got over.

She spent much of her time with Klaus in Berlin. Klaus however was the one to first introduce her to morphine the drug that would haunt her.. Annemarie would spend the rest of her life battling her on again/off again addiction.

She helped Klaus Mann finance an anti-fascist literary review called “Die Sammlung.” This review helped writers in exile from Germany by publishing their articles and short stories. But the complications and strain of being pulled between what she knew was right and her family took its toll on her mental health and Annemarie attempted suicide which caused a scandal among her family and their conservative circle in Switzerland. .

Annemarie is portrayed by Klaus Mann in two of his novels: as Johanna in Flucht in den Norden (1934) and as the Angel of the Dispossessed in Der Vulkan (The Volcano, 1939).

Thomas Mann called her a “ravaged angel”; another writer, Roger Martin du Gard, said she had “the face of an inconsolable angel”; while German photographer Marianne Breslauer, who took numerous photos of Schwarzenbach, likened her to “the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven”.the portraits that remain still retain their  androgonous  alllure

Over the next several years Annemarie travels to France, Italy and Scandinavia with Klauss. To Spain, with fellow photographer Marianne Bresleaur. She visited Moscow with Klaus for the Soviet Writers Union Congress. There she met André Malraux and Louis Aragon. Annemarie did not hide her enthusiasm for the Bolshevik model, stressing in a letter to her friend Claude Bourdet the place of literature in the USSR: “Here, a man like Gorky is, with Stalin, at the center of the interest of the greatest number, he is a true national hero – and here everyone is concerned with literature”.

In 1935 Annemarie returns to Persia. Here she meets French diplomat Claude Clarac. After just a few weeks they decide to marry. Their marriage was one of convenience as they were both gay but allowed her to obtain a French diplomatic passport and to travel without restrictions.. She stays with Claude for a while but has an affair with the daughter of a Turkish diplomat that does not end well.

 n 1937 and 1938, her photographs documented the rise of fascism in Europe, visiting Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Ultimately, she leaves Claude, although still married, and travels to America. This is the first of two trips to the US for Annemarie. She spends her time there as a freelance photographer and reporter working alongside  her friend American photographer, Barbara Hamilton-Wright. . She is completely taken with capturing the social dynamics and everyday life for those in the mining and steel industries during the Great Depression. 

She returned again the following year and traveled to the deep South—Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Anniemarie published several articles depicting the suffering and violence happening there. The pair encountered lumberjacks in Tennessee, who were starting to organize unions—And her support for the formation of labor unions, caused a deeper rift with her family who owned many textile mills in the US.

On her second trip to America she has an affair with fellow writer Carson McCullers. Carson fell madly in love with Annemarie saying “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.” But the relationship became rather one-sided. Annemarie’s depression rears its head again and she makes her second attempt at suicide. This time she’s admitted to a psychiatric hospital. When she’s finally released it is with the agreement that she leaves the US. Carson never quite gets over Annemarie. She dedicates several books to Annemarie.

She then embarks on a daunting 4,000 mile road trip from Geneva to Kabul, Afghanistan with her friend the ethnologist Ella Maillart. To finance the adventurous journey  the two women signed contracts with a Swiss press and photo agency, a book publisher and several newspapers, which paid them advances. In their luggage they had typewriters, cameras and a movie camera. Schwarzenbach also planned to participate in excavations of the "Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan". The trip was   taken in part in an effort to help cure Annemarie of her addiction to morphine, but failed as she  eventually found her way back to the drug. Ella eventually becomes so frustrated with Annemarie for wasting all her talent on drugs that she abandons her in Kabul. Maillart chronicled the difficult experience in the book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey It is considered a classic of travel literature, but the name of her troubled and transcendent companion was changed to Christina, presumably at the intervention of Annemarie’s family. 

Schwarzenbach would make her way back to Europe and then on to the U.S. where she met her old friends, the Manns, and worked with them on a committee for helping refugees from Europe.

Annemarie’s last years lead her on writing expeditions to Portugal, the Belgian Congo  as an accredited journalist in order to join the resistance and in particular the Free French Forces., but was prevented from taking up her position. .

In June 1942 in Tétouan, she met up again with her husband, Claude Clarac,before returning to Switzerland. While back home, she started making new plans. She applied for a position as a correspondent for a Swiss newspaper in Lisbon. In August, her friend the actress Therese Giehse stayed with her at Sils. Then on September 7, 1942 tragically she suffered a devastating fall on her bicycle and fell into a coma for three days. she awoke to amnesia ,and died soon after on the 15th of November aged just 34.During her final illness, her mother permitted neither Claude Clarac, who had rushed to Sils from Marseille, nor her friends, to visit her in her sick bed.

After her death, her possessive   mother also destroyed all her letters and diaries.Hundreds of letters from Klaus and Erika Mann,  and Carson McCullers which would have provided an important insight into her fascinating life went up in smoke. Thankfully, one of Schwarzenbach’s friends held on to a collection of photographs and writings, and in the process saved Annemarie Schwarzenbach from the mists of obscurityl

Although Annemarie’s life span was short, wrecked by morphine, as well as a domineering mother  and other disasters before the bicycle crash that ended it.her output in those few years  was prodigious, and eventful She was immensely gifted as a photographer, author, photojournalist, and documentarian in a time dominated by men when few women were represented in these fields.

Between 1933 and 1942 she produced approximately 170 articles and 50 photo-reports for Swiss and German newspapers and magazines.  Schwartzenbach’s subjects, her travels, were widespread and amazingly disparate—linked together chiefly by her liberal-to-radical political emotions.

With thankfully the rediscovery in the late 1980s of Schwarzenbach’s body of work  she gained new interest and e was recognised as a female pioneer and a gay icon.

In 2001, there was even a feature film, The Journey to Kafiristan, tracing her 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul in a Ford Deluxe with  Ella Maillart.

In life, Annemarie Schwarzenbach may have battled personal demons, but she also waged ideological war against the violent political regimes, social inequalities and gender norms of her time.She rebelled against her prestigious family’s conservative values and struggled with her mother’s possessiveness. Nonetheless, Annemarie lived openly as a lesbian and developed her journalistic voice and camera skills through adventurous travel and keen observation of social conditions. 

Annemarie remains a remarkable trailblazer who dared to challenge the norm. She refused to live within the confines of traditional femininity or masculinity, and instead occupied a space of radical liberation. Antifascist, courageous and lucid, she stood her ground and remained focused in the face of Hitler’s rise to power, while her family saluted.  She traveled the world, as a daring free spirited seeker and despite her traumas and  struggles  in her words. photographs, and fascinating life, her legacy endures. long may her life be celebrated.

Marking the ongoing injustice of the Palestinian Nakba

On May 15 Palestinians  and their allies around the world mark the Nakba ( Catastrophe in Arabic) the time when more than 750,000 Palestinians, about half of the Arab population  in Palestine at that time, were forced out of their homes and lands and saw Palestinian villages wiped off the map in places like Yassin, Lydda, Tantura  by the hands of Zionist para-military groups like Haganah, that later formed the core of the Israeli Defense Force, Ergun and the Stern Gang. to establish the state of Israel. 

The 1948 founding of Israel was preceded and accompanied by a massive ethnic cleansing operation to remove as many of the Muslim and Christian inhabitants as possible. During Israel's "war of independence," Palestinians were driven from their homes, never to be allowed to return. Hundreds of towns were razed; villagers were massacred. Their very existence on the land was nearly wiped from history as Israel built new towns over the ruins.  This devastating event is given almost no attention in  history books or by the mainstream news media but is essential in understanding the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine and the Middle East in general.  

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the establishment of the Palestine Mandate, the British colonial power began implementing its plan of creating a Jewish state on Palestinian land. At the same time, the Zionist movement was lobbying Western powers to support the mass migration of Jews to Palestine and recognize a Jewish claim to the land.  In 1917, the Balfour Declaration declared British support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, and that's how the Day of Nakba officially began. 

The  notorious declaration was made in a letter written by Britain's then-Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Zionist movement. The letter was endorsed by Britain's then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George..The letter stated the British would "use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object". For Zionists, this was a clear victory.

The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines  and those internally displaced, were barred by the newly declared state of Israel from their right to return to their homes or the reclaiming of their property, and in doing so Israel violated international law. It is the defining event that formed and solidified the Palestinian liberation struggle.

To understand the Nakba is to first confront its sheer scale and totality. Before the Nakba there was a large, deeply rooted, and essentially ancient Arab society in most of what, within a few months, became the Jewish state of Israel. In effect, one day it was there, as it had been for living memory, and the next day it was gone. An entire society, with the exception of relatively small groups in a few places, simply vanished.

After World War I, the League of Nations broke the Ottoman Empire up into territories assigned to different colonial powers. The lands that today constitute Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were placed under British rule, but with two explicit and incompatible purposes: Britain was already committed to supporting the recently established Zionist movement that sought to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. 

Then in Britain came the notorious 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Palestine mandate, in which the overwhelming Palestinian majority was simply referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” with “civil and religious rights,” but not political ones.

With the Balfour Declaration, the government of the time was seeking Jewish support for its war efforts, and the Zionist push for a homeland for Jews, which was becoming an emerging political force. In 1917, Jews constituted 10% of the population, the rest were  Arabs. Yet Britain recognised the national rights of a tiny minority and denied it to the majority This was a classic colonial document which totally disregarded the rights and aspirations of the indigenous population. In the words of Jewish writer Arthur Koestler: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”

It was a shock to the Arab world, which had not been consulted and had received promises of independence of its own in the post-war break up of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Palestinians have always condemned the declaration, which they refer to as the "Balfour promise" saying Britain was giving away land it did not own.

The Balfour Declaration constituted a  dangerous historical precedent and a blatant breach of all international laws and norms, and this  act of the British Empire to “give” the land of another people  for colonial settlement created the conditions for countless atrocities against the Palestinian people. Balfour, in a 1919 confidential memo, wrote: 

 “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”  

The discriminatory language used by Sir Arthur Balfour and seen in the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate reveal the prejudiced rational behind British foreign policy in Palestine. A month after the Balfour Declaration on 2 December 1917, the British army occupied Jerusalem. In 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine came into effect, and included the entire text of the Balfour Declaration. Through the Mandate, Britain would go on to rule Palestine for three decades.

As a result of all of this the Palestinian people were denied the right to independence and statehood, and were treated as refugees in their own land. The Nakba resulted in the destruction of much of Palestinian society and much of the Arab landscape was obliterated by the Zionist state. And in the post 1948 period the Palestinians became second class citizens, subject  to a system of military occupation by a government that confiscated the bulk of their lands.

Even the word 'Nakba' was banned by the Israeli Minister of Education in 2009, and was removed from school textbooks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayah said at the time that the word was tantamount to spreading propoganda against Israel. But the word Nakba is the term that about a fifth of Israel's population, the Palestinians use to describe this day.

The influx of Zionists to Palestine, supported by the British, was however was met with fierce Palestinian resistance and is very important to note that the Palestinian leadership in Al-Quds at the time insisted on continuing negotiations with the British to resolve the simmering tensions, Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam, a Syrian leader living in Haifa since 1922, began calling for resistance against the British and the Zionists.  In 1935, Al-Qassam was surrounded by British forces and killed along with some of his men. His resistance inspired many Palestinians.

By 1936, an Arab resistance erupted against British imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism and by  1939, the Palestinians found themselves fighting two enemies: British colonial forces and Zionist militia groups.

And although the British had backed mass Jewish immigration to Palestine, the colonial power began to limit the number of Jews arriving in the country in an attempt to quell Arab unrest.This new limit on immigration upset the Zionists and they launched a series of terrorist attacks on British authorities to drive them out, while at the same time the Zionists continued to further advance their dream of creating a Jewish state on Palestinian land. 

The Zionist strategy of expelling Palestinians from their land was a slow and deliberate process. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Zionist leaders and military commanders met regularly from March 1947 to March 1948, when they finalized plans to ethnically cleanse Palestine.  As Zionist attacks on the British and Arabs escalated, the British decided to hand over their responsibility for Palestine to the newly founded United Nations.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly proposed a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one. Jews in Palestine only constituted one-third of the population - most of whom had arrived from Europe a few years earlier - and only retained control of less than 5.5 percent of historic Palestine. Yet under the UN proposal, they were allocated 55 percent of the land. The Palestinians and their Arab allies rejected the proposal. The Zionist message was simple: Leave the land or be killed. The Zionist movement accepted all this on the grounds that it legitimized the idea of a Jewish state on Arab land. But they did not agree to the proposed borders and campaigned to conquer even more of historic Palestine. 

As the date (May 14, 1948) selected by the British for their Palestine Mandate to expire approached, Zionist forces hastened their efforts to seize Palestinian land. In April 1948, the Zionists captured Haifa, one of the biggest Palestinian cities, and subsequently set their eyes on Jaffa. On the same day, British forces formally withdrew, and David Ben-Gurion, then-head of the Zionist Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel.  Overnight, the Palestinians became stateless. The world’s two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, immediately recognized Israel. 

As the Zionists continued their ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians, war broke out between neighboring Arab countries and the new Zionist state. The UN appointed Swedish diplomat, Folke Bernadotte, as its mediator in Palestine. He recognized the plight of the Palestinians and attempted to address their suffering. His efforts to bring about a peaceful solution and halt to the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign ended when he was assassinated by the Zionists in September 1948. 

Nevertheless the  UN continued to push for an armistice deal between Israel and those Arab countries.  Bernadotte was replaced by his American deputy, Ralph Bunche. Negotiations led by Bunche between Israel and the Arab states resulted in the latter conceding even more Palestinian land to the newly founded Zionist state. In May 1949, Israel was admitted to the UN, and its grip over 78 percent of historic Palestine was consolidated. The remaining 22 percent became known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This is the Palestinian peoples history and it is essential we should be allowed to talked about. It is it not wrong to question, when other regimes oppress, we question them too, we have a duty to criticise and condemn, when fundamental freedoms and rights are violated. Any state that acts aggressively is open to criticism. All human beings are entitled to human rights.

75 years later over 7 million Palestinians live as refugees or exiles, and are stull denied the right to return to the land from which they, or their family, were forcibly expelled. A right which is enshrined in international law. Palestinians who remained in the State of Israel, and those in the occupied territory, many of whom are refugees, face a sertheless the  UN continued to push for an armistice deal between Israel and those Arab countries.  Bernadotte was replaced by his American deputy, Ralph Bunche. Negotiations led by Bunche between Israel and the Arab states resulted in the latter conceding even more Palestinian land to the newly founded Zionist state. In May 1949, Israel was admitted to the UN, and its grip over 78 percent of historic Palestine was consolidated. The remaining 22 percent became known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This is the Palestinian  peoples history, and it is essential we should be allowed to talked about. It is it not wrong to question, when other regimes oppress, we question them too, we have a duty to criticise and condemn, when fundamental freedoms and rights are violated. Any state that acts aggressively is open to criticism. All human beings are entitled to human rights.

This period of time is what we remember today, and also now marks the anniversary of those killed during the Great Return March in Gaza in 2019. Thousands of Palestinians, stuck in the blockaded Gaza strip, initiated protests that started in Gaza as a way to draw attention to the living conditions in Gaza, where currently more than 1.3 million Palestinian refugees live, but more importantly as a march for the right of return.

This Great March characterized the use of peaceful activism by Palestinian citizens since the early 2000s. These mobilizations aim to defend land rights, rights to resources, mobility through non-violence and sometimes innovative actions to attract international attention demanding their right to return to their homes from which they were expelled in 1948. They were also condemning the continued occupation and siege. Hundreds of people were killed during these marches, including children, disabled protesters, journalists and paramedics.

There is no peace in stolen lands, especially when people still cry for liberation and the right to return to their lands.The fact is the Nakba never ended. It continues every day as Palestinians are evicted from their homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank to be replaced by illegal Jewish-only settlements. It continues as Israel’s occupation obstructs and severely restricts Palestinians’ attainment of rights and fundamental freedoms, including: the right to life, the right to liberty and security of person, and their right to an adequate standard of living.

Notably, Israel  continues to violate Palestinians’ right to freedom of movement within and from the Occupied Palestinian Territories through its closure policy made up of the Annexation Wall and its associated permit-regime in the West Bank, and its prolonged closure of the Gaza Strip, which has made Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians.

In the Gaza Strip, in particular, Palestinians continue to be severely deprived of their liberty as a result of Israel’s unlawful closure, amounting to collective punishment. In Gaza, Palestinians are trapped in a humanitarian crisis without adequate water or electricity as they are prevented from returning to their lands inside what is now Israel.It continues with sniper attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, encroachment of illegal settlements across the West Bank and extreme limitations placed on Palestinians' movements within and between towns, courtesy of IDF-staffed checkpoints and all in violation of international human rights law and in denial of the fundamental aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sought “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy … freedom from fear and want”.

Palestinians still have no state and no equality, Refugee camps still exist all over the world and a majority of Palestinians live in the diaspora and Palestine is occupied  in the most brutal way possible.

For the nearly six million Palestinians who live between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Nakba remains an ongoing process, as Israel uses a range of tools to restrict their livelihoods.

They remain vulnerable to expulsion, watching an ever-increasing share of their land become off-limits. About half of the occupied West Bank is already inaccessible to Palestinians, designated as military zones or nature reserves, or set aside for future Israeli settlements.The Israeli military control large parts of the West Bank and Gaza is completely sealed and “monitored” by Israeli ships, fighter planes and tanks.

Against their will, the Nakba has divided the Palestinian people between Gaza and the West Bank. Still searching for justice and dignity who despite the international attention that the Nakba has received over the years, the state of Israel to this day has not yet recognized the Nakba, nor their responsibility for what happened in 1948.

The right of return for Palestine refugees is a right guaranteed by international law and enshrined in UN General Assembly resolution 194. Knowing that the displacement of Palestinians is still being practiced by Israel today in the West Bank and Gaza, the question of the ongoing Nakba needs to be addressed to achieve justice and peace in the region. The right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land must be the precondition for a dialogue for peaceful coexistence between Israel and Palestine.

The development of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine is deemed a breach of international law, and thus by doing business in these settlements, many international companies are contributing to the economic viability of settlements and are normalising Israeli annexation of Palestinian land,and aiding in promoting discrimination, oppression and injustice.

As a result the Nakba still reverberates today because  Al Nakba is constant and continuing, felt through all aspects of Palestinian life, whether in Israel. the Occupied Territories, the refugees camps, or even in settled Palestinian communities abroad.

The Nabka is not a static event, but rather an ongoing reality for Palestinians.The Nakba is felt each time a Palestinian family is forcibly removed from their home. The Nakba is felt each year that the crushing siege on Gaza continues, and with each Israeli air strike. And the Nakba is felt each time Israeli forces violently raid some of Islam's holiest sites, as was the case with the numerous attacks on the Al Aqsa compound during Ramadan recently.

Only Last Tuesday, Israeli military forces intentionally and indiscriminately bombed families in Gaza and over the the past week, apartheid Israel’s airstrikes on the over 2 million Palestinians under siege in Gaza have killed, so far, 31 Palestinians, including 7 children and shockingly, in just five months, Israel's occupation forces and illegal settlers have murdered at least 144 Palestinians.This daily violence cannot be allowed  to continue.

Today, as we observe the sad sombre event of the Nakba  lets be more determined  than ever to stand up to Israeli policies of apartheid. It is more important than ever that the  international community keep defending Palestinian human rights, support Palestinian protests against forced housing demolitions and land theft and put real pressure on Israel to end its occupation and comply with international law. To take all measures within international law to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing strategy resulting in ongoing human rights violations and international crimes committed against the Palestinian People, including forcible transfer, colonization and apartheid.

Let. continue too use this occasion to reaffirm the inherent dignity and rights of Palestinians and to assert the right of the Palestinian people, as a whole, to self-determination, which includes the right to permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources and the right of return of Palestinian refugees, in order to achieve justice and durable peace for the Palestinian People.

The ongoing occupation of Palestinian land also makes the Boycott Divestment  Sanctions (BDS) campaigns all the more urgent and necessary.Lets remember that  Palestinians will never to give up and be content to mourn the ghost of Palestine. They still belong to their land, and though time drifts, for the Palestinians their memory is never erased, still  proudly belonging to the land of their ancestors, where their  hearts and minds can never leave.  It is time for the leaders of the world to understand that there is no homeland for the Palestinians except Palestine.

As we recount  today the unique personal stories of those who lived through the Nakba  and recognise the Palestinians who daily live under occupation in the West Bank  imprisoned by an Israeli wall, and the over 2 million currently living under military siege in Gaza, denied a series of fundamental rights, that include the freedom to move, access to clean water, food, medicine and electricity 

Let's  today remember that the Palestinians  will remains  unbroken, so lets continue to stand with them today in  solidarity and  keep demanding  that they are allowed to move freely again in their own land and are given keep  back the dignity and respect and basic rights  that they all deserve as human beings.

In  attempt to understand the catastrophe, here is a small reading list of key books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, from Ghada Karmi, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji al-Ali, Ilan Pappe, Edward Said, Shlomo Sand, and more. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3210-nakba-day-reading-list?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=US+UTM+Nakba+Day+reading+list

 

Growing Free

The hands of the clock move faster

The spirit of youth fading away

Friends going to sleep

In  the mornings gone forever

Moments of time

Increasingly darker

Dreams defaced

By forces of fascism

Worry lines etched deeper

Instead of those of laughter

Remembering all in same boat

Keep searching for the light

So close the door on malice

Stop menace from  entering

To distract inner fear

Try to keep on dancing

Celebrate life's rich diversity

Music still releasing joy

Sources of synergy

Allowing awakening

Releasing gratitude of now

In precious moments

As the end approaches

Enabling us to be

More conscious neighbours

Not restricted by fields of negation

That define and shut down

Without inhibition

Refuse to let passions expire

Forces of life on the loose

Unchained, unbound.

Jack Cade’s Rebellion

 

 Jack Cade’s Rebellion began on this day  1450 when Kentishmen, led by Jack Cade, marched to London to protest against laws introduced by King Henry VI. It was one of the most important popular uprisings to take place in England since the Peasant's Revolt of 1381https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/06/wat-tyler-and-peasants-revolt-of-1381.html  It began as an orchestrated demonstration of political protest by the inhabitants of south-eastern England against the corruption, mismanagement, and oppression of Henry VI's government. especially with high taxes, the incompetence of Henry VI's advisers and especially the war with France that had lately seen the loss of Normandy at the end of 1449. .

Cade’s method of tackling this, was to draft and distribute a manifesto entitled The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent which was issued in spring 1650..This document set out the grievances of the people he was representing, and listed fifteen complaints and five demands that he wished the king to tackle.

The rising, the most extensive popular movement between 1381 and the sixteenth century, was relatively limited in its aims and was certainly not directed at the overthrow of the social order.although they did call for some social change, notably to the Statute of Labourers, which made peasants subject to compulsory labour, social change was not the rebel's root concern.

Instead, most of these minor gentry wanted an end to poor government. They did not call for sweeping social change, but for the removal of certain councillors, the return of royal estates that had been granted out, and improved methods of taxation.

And although Cade's Rebellion has sometimes been characterised as a peasant uprising. similar to the Peasant's Revolt. such is not really the case. Cade's Rebellion certainly attracted numbers of peasants, but the evidence suggests that Cade's support was fairly widely based, and that the strength of his leadership lay in his ability to act as a spokesmen for all the social groups that supported him and who objected to the political climate of the times. Even churchmen joined the rebels, including the rector of Mayfield and the Prior of St Pancras in Lewes.

With the nobles of England glowering threateningly at each other, and the government, bankrupted by the years of war in France, beginning to collapse, England in the middle of the 15th century was desperately in need of a strong leader.

The man who came forward as claimant for this position Jack Cade self-proclaimed "Captain of Kent." is something of a mystery man; even his name is uncertain. Some of his followers called him John Mortimer, and claimed that he was related to Richard, Duke of York, and also that he had fought for France against England in the Hundred Years War. He appeared to history out of nowhere in the spring of 1450, and by sheer dint of personality became the recognized leader of the Kentish protests.  Cade became  a hero to the ordinary small landowners of Sussex and Kent, who called him ‘John Mend-All’ for restoring order and justice

Cade gathered about 5,000 supporters from the south east of England and met the King at Blackheath in early June 1450. Cade refused to back down forcing the King to flee. Later that month Cade's army defeated a section of Henry's army at Sevenoaks and the rebels marched on London. 

At first they were welcomed by the Londoners, who were in sympathy with many of Cade's aims. The rebels stormed the Tower of London but just failed to take the fortress. They killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry's treasurer, Sir James Fiennes, as well as the Sheriff of Kent, who had their heads cut off and placed on poles kissing each other.

As fear spread through the ruling class the king, in an attempt to appease the rebels and quieten the unrest in his own camp, sent two high profile names on Cades hit list to the Tower. However, Lord Saye, the former treasurer, and the equally unpopular William of Crowner, the Under-Sheriff of Kent were not sufficient scapegoats. Cades army was advancing, and many royal soldiers were wavering in their loyalty, so much so that they were disbanded by their demoralised commanders. Henry VI left London, seeking refuge at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire.

Moving forward from Southwark on 3rd July, Cade crossed London Bridge, struck his sword on the London Stone, and proclaimed himself Lord Mayor. The rebels were buoyed with success and confidence as they were joined by many from the City. 

The idea of the Tower being attacked forced Lord Scales and the Aldermen to hand over Lord Saye and William Crowmer to the rebels. The pair were taken to the Guildhall and quickly given token trials, which ended in their execution, and their heads stuck on high poles and carried triumphantly through the streets by the exultant mob. 

At first Cade was able to maintain a level of discipline among his men, although, it was perhaps inevitable that order would give way to chaos. Looting and brawling soon heightened the tension; goodwill from many Londoners began to turn into resentment. Cade had done  his best to stop the killing, raping and looting, but without success. This turned the Londoners decisively against him and may have alienated his own respectable followers as well.

Within days, the insurgents had outstayed their welcome. Lord Scales, making what, to him, must have felt like a one-man stand, managed to instil some resolve into the Tower garrison, while the people of the city were rallied to fall into line by their own councillors. In the dead of a July night, a mix of soldiers and citizens cleared the streets and forced Cade’s men back onto London Bridge for a ferocious showdown. Fighting raged all night. When dawn broke, the northern half of the bridge was back in royal hands. While, the rebels huddled together at the southern end. However, before Scales could mount a further assault to regain the rest of the bridge, Archbishop John Kemp, Lord Chancellor, intervened. It was time for political negotiation. 

The Lord Chancellor sent William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, to talk to the rebels.Probably sensing that his followers were ready to drop Cade presented his set of demands to the Bishop and obtained a promise that they would be met in full The Bishop produced official pardons, ready to be offered to anyone willing to lay down their arms and give up the rebel cause.

The general pardon of the king was gladly accepted by most of the rebels and citizens, but many were hanged as traitors and to frighten off others.And neither the king nor Parliament had agreed to any of the rebel's demands, and neither seemed prepared to do so anytime soon,

The rebels quickly dispersed. Cade himself was at Dartford on the 8th and Rochester on the 9th, where he discovered that the government was offering a thousand marks for him alive or dead. He left two days later in disguise.The new Sheriff of Kent, Alexander Iden, pursued Cade and caught him on July 12, 1450, at a little hamlet near Heathfield in Sussex. The hamlet is now known as Cade Street. There Cade was mortally injured, and he died on his way back to London

Unsurprisingly, Henry took the opportunity to make an example of him and he had a mock trial enacted out with Cade then being posthumously hung, drawn, and quartered. His limbs were sent back to various parts of Kent, and his head was displayed on a pole on London Bridge. Cade’s Articles of Complaint went the way as his body. and the heads of other leaders of his cause were put alongside to keep him company. The wheel had come full circle, but its barbed axle had gored into a weak and unstable government and tore open a wound that would never heal.  The rebellion had exposed the king as weak and vulnerable

And although The Jack Cade Rebellion  had been unsuccessfuL and quieted and dismissed shortly after Cade's death, the feeling of rebellion in England did not die down so easily. For example, it inspired ideas of revolt in many other counties in England besides Kent. Many of Cade;s followers from the county of Sussex, such as the yeomen brothers John and William Merfold, organized their own rebellion against King Henry VI. Unlike Jack Cade's revolt, however, the men in Sussex took Cade's ideas a step further in that they made declarations to reform that were much more radical and aggressive  This animosity could have been due to the fact that the King had gone back on his proclamation of pardon for Jack Cade, which made many of the rebels distrust the King's government.

The suspicion that the King wanted all followers of Cade dead inspired the rebels to take a more drastic view of the reformation of English rule. They stated that the men of Sussex planned on killing the King and all his Lords, replacing them with twelve of the rioters own men. These revolts organized by the young Sussex men rallied smaller numbers of followers than that of the Cade rebellion, but still had an effect on the societies in England. For example, all the riots and looting taking place in English counties gave people an excuse to go on rampages of destruction for their own personal gain while being absolved of blame by claiming that their behavior was a rebellion against the King.and  all theses centuries later we're still working the kind of change  that many of Cade's supporters dreamed off.

The  behavior of these later rebels can be seen as having been directly inspired by Jack Cade.Also, the larger battles over the crown of England, known as the Wars of the Roses, were clearly inspired by views of Cade's rebels.

The story of Jack Cade’s Rebellion was later dramatized by Shakespeare in his play, Henry VI and in other tales he can be see portrayed as a Robin Hood character, .

Not My King : A Poem for Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor

 

On wasteful day of decadence

A pantomime of pure delusion

No time for celebration or jubilation

As millions of us suffer in poverty

With all this opulence and gold

It's too sickening to behold

Despite docile culture of servility

The daily media dosage of propaganda

I am not the Crowns obedient servant

I am a citizen! A proud Welsh republican 

Owe neither deference nor allegiance to a king

An archaic representative of privilege and power

Imposed on the people without consent

Who despite inheriting £650m tax free

Can't pay for his own coronation

Amidst the pomp and pageantry

Dazzling displays of obscenity

No stuffing of quiche for the many

Who need a fairer.equal society

God save the people from a monarchy

That stops us from having true democracy

This land no longer needs feudal overlords 

Palaces and thrones of gross immorality

We need an end to this gilded superiority

Time to elect our own  head of state 

And when current folly is no more

A new dawn, a red republic formed 

We will dance around in revelry.

On the Death of Khader Adnan: Please Write to the Foreign Office and Demand they Press Israel to end its use of Administrative Detention and release Palestinian political prisoners.

After an 86-day hunger strike in administrative detention, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan died in Israel’s Ramle prison cell yesterday  morning. Israeli officials refused to grant Adnan his freedom despite being informed by a Physicians for Human Rights Israel medic that he was facing “imminent death.”

The death of  Khader is a reminder of the deadly cost that Palestinians pay for challenging Israel’s apartheid and a military justice system rigged against them, 

Khader  died in  protest at the Israeli authorities’ systematic arbitrary detention of Palestinians and cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Palestinian detainees frequently use hunger strikes to challenge such policies, risking their health and lives in order to demand the rights that Israel denies them.

Khader 45 a modest baker by trade ftom Arrabeh, Jenin, had nine children with his wife Randa, 41 who tirelessly campaigned for his release. Since 2004 he had been arrested 13 times by Israeli authorities, due to his affiliation with the political wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement. While PIJ’s armed wing has carried out attacks on Israeli civilians, Khader Adnan himself was never charged with any involvement in acts of violence. In total, he spent eight years in detention, including nearly six years in administrative detention without charge or trial. 

Khader, helped introduce the practice of protracted hunger strikes by individual prisoners as a form of protest. Palestinian detainees have mostly used hunger strikes to challenge administrative detention, a controversial tactic in which more than 1,000 Palestinians and a handful of Israelis are currently being held without charge or trial.

Khader first grabbed international headlines and inspired solidarity protests over a decade ago, when he staged a 66-day hunger strike against his administrative detention. That galvanized hundreds of other prisoners to join the strike, which ended with a deal for his release. He was later arrested again.  Through all levels of Palestinian society. from squalid refugee camps in Gaza to wealthy businesses in the West Bank. Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention are celebrated as national heroes. Israel considers Palestinian prisoners to be terrorists. 

Before his last arrest, which led to his death Khader was arrested a dozen times and spent nearly a fifth of his life in Israeli prison, and became a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s open-ended occupation, now in its 56th year. His use of hunger strikes as a bargaining chip against Israeli authorities. during two other strikes in 2015 and 2018 that lasted 56 and 58 days, respectively motivated many other desperate Palestinians in administrative detention to refuse food. 

Israel’s prison service said Khader had been charged with “involvement in terrorist activities” following his February arrest. Last week, an Israeli military court denied him bail. A hearing on his appeal was repeatedly postponed.

Khader's  nearly eight years in Israeli prisons,were mostly spent in administrative detention, a standard practice that allows  Israel to indefinitely imprison someone without ever charging them with an offence. Political prisoners like Khader are then detained based on secret evidence not available to them or their lawyer, and kept imprisoned without ever facing trial. 

With some of them staying in jail for up to 11 years according to human rights groups. Israeli jail authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions lacking proper hygienic standards. The inmates have also been subjected to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express their outrage at the practice.

Ever since Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have resorted to hunger strikes as a form of protest to win collective or individual rights.Since then, there have been many more mass and group hunger strikes. Prisoners have demanded improved conditions, to be allowed family visits, or an end to solitary confinement.

Hunger strikes are a form of resistance that has long been understood as a weapon of last resort by the powerless and disenfranchised. designed to provoke feelings of guilt in others, especially those in positions of authority. Most hunger strikers involve either a time-limited symbolic refusal of food, or – in more extreme cases – a prolonged fast, limiting themselves to a liquid diet.

Over the first three days without food, the body uses up its store of glucose for energy. Then, the liver starts processing body fat, and the body enters “ketosis”, producing ketones to use as fuel.

Once the fat store is exhausted, the body enters “starvation mode” and starts harvesting muscles and vital organs for energy. At this stage, the loss of bone marrow becomes life-threatening. Hunger strikers can last anything from 46 to 73 days before dying.Indeed, death has been the outcome of many hunger strikes as in the case of the 1981 Irish Republican prisoners’ strike which saw. Robert  Gerard "Bobby " Sands (Roibeard Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh )  die  at 1.17am on 5th of March 1981 after being on  hunger strike for 66 days in the Long Kesh  Maze Prison in Northern Ireland  to protest against British treatment of political  prisoners.  

Over the next few months, 9 other republican prisoners followed him, the culmination of a 5 year struggle in the prisons of Northern Ireland demanding jail reforms and the return of special category status allowing them to be treated as prisoners of war , allowing them the privileges of POW's as specified in the Geneva Convention.

Humans can generally live for up to seven days without food or water, depending on their health. If only liquids are taken, a human can survive for up to 30 to 45 days. To last longer than that, hunger strikers must keep their physical activity down to a minimum.

 As with other forms of resistance within and outside prison walls hunger strikes are acts of resistance through which Palestinians assert their political existence and demand their rights. It is vital to sustain and nurture this resistance. In addition to giving strength to and supporting the prisoners in their struggle for rights, this form of resistance continuously and powerfully inspires hope among Palestinians at large and the solidarity movement. It is our responsibility to both support Palestinian prisoners – and to work for a time when Palestinians no longer need to resort to such acts of resistance through which their only recourse is to put their lives on the line.   

At first glance, such acts of self-destruction might seem oddly irrational or self-defeating. Many forms of resistance , such as a classic workers’ strike – aim to place economic and other costs on opponents. Yet with the hunger strike, the most severe costs are suffered by protesters, who risk pain, bodily damage and as id the case pf  Khader Adnan: death.

Nonetheless, detainees know that the refusal of food can shame the authorities who bear ultimate responsibility for the lives of those in their custody.By striking, hunger strikers also exert some measure of control against a system that micromanages their lives and strips them of agency. They demonstrate that they are sovereign over their own bodies and that the most serious decision of all – over life and death – is still in their hands.

As Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene put it, "They could lock me up for no reason and with no chance to argue my innocence. They could torture me, deprive me of sleep, put me in an isolation cell, control every single aspect of my life. But they couldn’t make me swallow their food."

Also for detained migrants and refugees, the choice of such an extreme technique is powerful evidence of the cruelty they are subject to in detention, and their moral determination to resist. Caged and herded like animals, they exhibit the characteristically human capacity of mastering their natural appetites in pursuit of a higher ideal.

While authorities across the world frequently attempt to dismiss hunger strikers as pathological and mentally ill, the strike is in reality a careful and deliberate form of political action. As such, hunger striking should be respected as an expression of the fundamental human right to protest, as set out in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This means that authorities  must refrain from force-feeding, and all other forms of intimidation and listen to the just claims of detainees regarding their treatment.

Through hunger strikes, prisoners no longer remain silent recipients of the prison authorities’ ongoing violence: Instead, they inflict violence upon their own bodies in order to impose their demands. In other words, hunger strikes are a space outside the reach of the  state’s power. The body of the striking prisoner unsettles one of the most fundamental relationships to violence behind prison walls, the one in which the  state and its prison authorities control every aspect of their lives behind bars and are the sole inflictors of violence. In effect, prisoners reverse the object and subject relationship to violence by fusing both into a single body - the body of the striking prisoner – and in so doing reclaim agency. They assert their status as political prisoners, refuse their reduction to the status of “security prisoner”, and claim their rights and existence.  

 “Khader Adnan is the first Palestinian detainee to die as a result of a hunger strike since 1992. When his life was at risk, Israeli authorities refused Khader Adnan access to the specialized care he needed in a civilian hospital and instead left him to die alone in his cell. The appalling treatment of such a high-profile detainee is the latest alarming sign that Israeli authorities are growing increasingly brazen in their contempt for Palestinians’ rights and lives, and increasingly reckless in their cruelty towards Palestinians,” said Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Undoubtedly, Khader Adnan was a notable symbol of the Palestinian prisoners’ struggle for freedom.  Israel’s regime of mass arrests and imprisonment of Palestinians is an evident systematic effort to embed its criminal occupation and apartheid over Palestinian life. According to Israeli human rights group https://hamoked.org/ Israel currently holds more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees in administrative detention, meaning they are being held  without charges or trial. This is the highest number being kept on record  in three decades and as of last month, 4,900 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons as political prisoners. Amongst these are 160  child prisoners, 30 female prisoners, and 554 serving life sentences for resisting occupation and ethnic cleansing.

Administrative detention orders issued by the Israeli military against Palestinians are based on secret evidence and are almost automatically approved by the military courts which operate in the occupied West Bank. Detainees cannot challenge the grounds of their detention – a denial of their right to due process.  

Israel’s systematic and discriminatory use of administrative detention against Palestinians forms part of its system of domination and oppression and constitutes the crime against humanity of apartheid. Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,  imprisonment  in violation of fundamental rules of international law also constitutes a crime against humanity, if committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.

On Tuesday afternoon, hours after his death, Israeli authorities moved forward to perform an autopsy on the hunger striker’s body, against Adnan’s final will that his body not be cut open and autopsied in the event of his death. 

According to statements made to the press by Adnan’s legal team, an appeal was submitted to the Israeli courts to ban the autopsy. And more than 24 hours after his death, Khader Adnan’s family have yet to receive his body back for burial despite a petition filed by his lawyer on Tuesday. Amnesty International is calling on Israeli authorities to expedite the release of Khader Adnan’s body to his family to enable a dignified burial, as required under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

The Israeli regime is so unhinged it goes as far as systematically abusing and brutalizing children in Israeli military detention.Khader's life of resistance and martyrdom will live on with us. His death should be a jolting wake-up call for those who have remained silent as Israel has continued its ploy to demolish Palestinian lives for decades via endless imprisonment and the grander prison of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid. 

While not prohibited under international humanitarian law, administrative detention is only lawful if employed for imperative security reasons. Israel’s routine and extensive use of administrative detention renders it arbitrary, therefore violating international human rights and humanitarian law. Also, in contravention of international law, it is used in a deeply discriminatory manner. Please write the Foreign Office to demand they press Israel to end its use of administrative detention and release Palestinian political prisoners

https://palestinecampaign.eaction.online/khaderadnan

Unparalleled Dimensions

Exhausted by the days

But constantly dreaming,

Looking waiting  searching

To reset the horizon.

Sprinkling magic 

On stunted rebel roots,

Crushing tory weeds 

Replaced by insurgent shoots. 

Wildness unstoppable

Beyond routes unsustainable,

The parasites of living 

Taking never giving.

I throw seed bombs 

Nurtured with love, 

Against the darkness 

To grow and resist.

Among nature’s tapestry 

Colours of red and green, 

Destroying the past

Creating the future.

Untangling old deviations

Forging divergent directions,

A sanctuary transcending pain  

Heart uplifted,. mind revived.

As new stems emerge

The garden matures, 

With prospering buds 

That embeds and endures.

Scents of change permeate the air

Providing sustenance to others,

Infused  with fragrance of compassion

As poisonous nexus no longer invade.

Thriving with possibility 

Continue seeking alternative ways,

Dissolving walls and barriers

Raking away the disarray.

Marking the Horrific Anniversary of the Bombing of Geurnica

 

                         Guernica- Pablo Ruiz Picasso 

During the Spanish Civil War on the afternoon and early evening of Monday, April 26th, 1937,  the German and Italian fascist air forces destroyed the  sacred city of Basque People, Guernica in a raid lasting three hours. The war crime was ordered by the Spanish nationalist military leadership and carried out by the Congor Legion of the German luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazone Legionairre. Designed to kill  or main as many civilians as possible, Operation Rugen was deliberately chosen for a Monday afternoon when the weekly town market would be at its most crowded. Guernica, in the Basque  country where revolutionary sentiment among workers was deep, was defenceless from the bombers, which could fly as low as 600 feet. 

The prototype of all future bombing raids, the Junker and Heinkel bombers of the Legion Condor visited a hell on earth in the form of bombs weighing up to 1000lbs across the town of 10, 000 people.  Heinkel fighters, according to press reports, machine gunned the fleeing crowds as they sought escape into the surrounding fields.

The airplanes made repeated raids, refuelling and returning to drop more bombs. Waves of explosive, fragmentary, and incendiary devices were dumped in the town. In total, 31 tons of munitions were dropped between 4.30 in the afternoon and 7.30 in the evening. In the aftermath of the raid, survivors spoke of the air filled with the screams of those in their death throes and the hundreds injured. Civilians fleeing the carnage in the fields surrounding the town were strafed by fighter planes. Human and animal  body parts littered the market place and town center, a horror soon immortalised by Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
Guernica was effectively wiped of the map. From a population of 5,000 some 1,700 residents were killed and a further 800 injured. Three quarters of the buildings were raised to the ground. Farms four miles away were flattened.

The savage and barbarous attack was a deliberate attempt to terrorise and intimidate the workers of Republican Spain. Spanish nationalist general Emilio Mola had spoken of destroying the industry of Barcelona and Bilbao in order to cleanse the country. In other words, the Nationalists would endeavour to destroy the industrial proletariat. As the historian Paul Preston wrote  in Spanish Holocaust, the Nationalist forces had launched a scorched earth policy during their rapid advance through Spain, most notably in Badajoz, where many hundreds of revolutionary workers were machine gunned to death in the city's bullring.
The fascist government of Berlin and Rome were only to glad to assist Franco in his 'cleansing' of the Spanish population, as both a geo-political necessity and as a test for their military command, new military technology and fighting forces. At his trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, the leading Nazi Hermann Goering would tell the tribunal that he had urged Hitler to send German forces to stem socialism in the Iberian theatre and to test out the Luftwaffe.We should never forget. 

 Franco, who ruled Spain as a fascist dictator for nearly forty years, from 1936 until his death in 1975, even claimed the attack on Guernica never took place. They tried to blame the Basques, claiming it was just Republican propaganda  but the truth is Germany deliberately bombed the town to destroy it and observe in a clinical way the effects of such a devastating attack, practicing a new form of warfare, where only civilians were the targets.In October 1937, a Nationalist officer told a Sunday Times correspondent: 'We bombed it, and bombed it, and bombed it and Beuno why not. ' 

Pablo Ruiz Picasso  one of the most important Spanish and universal artists of all time, in what is considered to be his most famous painting is his monumental anti-war painting Guernica. The picture still resonates with clarity, capturing the full terror and horror of this terrible moment in history.The work was an order of the government of the Second Spanish Republic during the period of the Civil War in 1937. The work commissioned to Picasso would be exhibited in the Pavilion dedicated to Spain at the International Exhibition in Paris of this same year. The aim of the artwork was to use the art to spread the horror that Spanish society was living during those years of war.

It seems that Picasso was going through a inspiration crisis, he had not advanced in the project for months, but he suddenly found a theme for his work when receiving the news of the bombings on the 26th of April of 1937 by the German Condor Legion on the Basque village of Guernica. Picasso ended his artwork in just 7 weeks.

The commander of this legion was Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the famous I World War aviator Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, who would also recognize the cruelty of the bombing.

It is said that in the middle of the creative process in his studio in Paris, a group of Gestapo officials knocked on Picasso’s door and got stunned with the Guernica. Staring at the magnificent work and the horror that it spread, they asked him: Have you done THAT? To that question, Picasso answered, full of hate: “You did THAT, Nazis”.

Picasso never wanted to give his own explanation about the artwork and so, many theories have arisen trying to explain the symbolism of the painting and the intentions of the artist.

What can be assured is that the painting symbolizes the barbarism and terror produced by the war. It became the emblem of the harrowing conflicts of European society of the early twentieth century as well as the premonition of the suffering caused by the Second World War.

Guernica , massive in size, it is twenty-five and a half feet long and more than eleven and a half feet in height, composed in mixture of black and gray and white, is a picture of an air raid, and all it's horror..

Concerning the symbolism of this cubist work, we find several elements worthy of analysis. The work is divided into two groups: the one of the animals and the one of the human beings. At the center of the composition horse stands trampling on a warrior. This is a symbol of the European totalitarian regimes and the repression exerted by their dictators – Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. The horse is a clear allusion to death, as its nose and teeth forms a skull.

The warrior holds in his right hand a broken sword, a symbol of defeat. In it, a hidden flower can also be found. It represents the renewal of life, which would be a neccesary but tough and not so clear period for the victims.

The mythological figure of the Minotour, half bull half human, perfectly reflects the struggle between the human and the bestial side of the war. Regarding the people depicted in the painting, the protagonism of one women stands out.  In spite Picasso was married to one woman and expecting a child from another one,  When Picasso painted Guernica, he was maintaining a relationship with the French artist Dora Maar, whose face appears holding a candle in the painting, reflecting  with this the little light that illuminated the life of Picasso in that tragic moment. As an allusion to his sentimental situation, they also appear in the picture. Dora photographed the entire creation process leaving by doing it a very important document for the history of Art.

The photographs published by the press of the bombing over Guernica and its brutallity were the inspiration of Picasso and the reason for the lack of color in his work. It is a symbol of the darkness of that terrible period of the Spanish history. 

Guernica was exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition and in 1939 was sent to New York on a tour for the benefit of the Spanish Refugee Committee. When World War11 broke out later that year, Picasso requested that Guernica and a number of his other works be held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on extended loan. After the war, most of these works were returned to Europe, but Picasso asked that Guernica and its preliminary studies be kept by MoMA giving the museum clear instructions - the canvas belonged to the Spanish people and would only be given back "when they have recovered the freedoms that were taken away from them."

Its eventual return to Spain in 1981–eight years after Picasso’s death–was celebrated as a moral endorsement of Spain’s young democracy.

Francisco Franco  ruled over Spain as dictator for the rest of Picasso’s life, and the artist never returned to his native country. In 1967, Franco restored some liberties, and in 1968 his government made an effort to recover Guernica. Picasso refused, clarifying that the painting would not be returned until democracy was reestablished. In 1973, Picasso died in France at the age of 91. Two years later, Franco died and was succeeded as Spanish leader by King Juan Carlos I, who immediately began a transfer to democracy. Spain then called for the return of Guernica, but opposition by Picasso heirs who questioned Spain’s democratic credentials delayed its transfer until 1981. Finally, Picasso’s former lawyer gave his assent to the transfer.

On September 10, 1981, Guernica arrived in Madrid under heavy guard. The painting was to be housed in a new annex of the Prado Museum, only two blocks from the Spanish parliament, which had been the scene of an abortive military coup in February 1981. King Juan Carlos defused the revolt by convincing military commanders to remain loyal to Spain’s democratic constitution.

On October 25 1981—the 100th anniversary of Picasso’s birth—Guernica went on exhibit to the public behind a thick layer of bullet-proof glass. to protect it from possible harm in a country still struggling to deal with its very recent, dark past. Picasso’s preparatory sketches for the painting, likewise protected behind thick glass, were housed in adjacent rooms. The threat of terrorism against the highly politicized work required high security, and visitors passed through a metal detector to view the paintings. Because the painting had been damaged in its years of travel, curators at the Prado said it was unlikely that Guernica would ever go on tour again.

A number of groups in Spain, particularly Basque nationalists, objected strongly to Guernica‘s permanent exhibition in Madrid. Complaints escalated after the painting was relocated to the new Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1992 and it has become the star attraction. Since the 1997 opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museo, Basque nationalists have been calling for its transfer there.

The prophetic description of anonymous warfare, the blankets of darkness and death dropped over civilian populations still resonate. To the degree we realise the truth expressed in this work, Guernica stands as possibly the greatest painting of the 20th Century.

Like all great art, its power transcends time, and can symbolize something current and topical for individuals of any era. During the Vietnam War, the painting became the backdrop for anti-war vigils in the museum. These were quiet, poignant protests against the horrors of war. But in 1974 an Iranian political activist, who claimed to be protesting Richard Nixon’s pardon of William Calley after his role in Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, vandalized the painting, using red spray paint to write “KILL LIES ALL” across it. The paint was easily removed and the work undamaged. The vandal, who ironically later became an art adviser, waxe

The atrocity that was Guernica  horrified the world and helped shift public opinion towards the Spanish Republican Cause, but shamefully the British Government stuck steadfastardly to its non intervevention line. The fascists hated liberalism and humanity, their ideology was one of evil destruction, 'Long Live Death' they cried.  Guernica represented their creed, with one of the Fascist Generals declaring " Like a resolute surgeon, free from false sentimentality, it will cut the diseased flesh from the healthy body and fling it to the dogs. And since the healthy flesh is the soil, the diseased flesh, the people who dwell on it, fascism and the army will eradicate the people and restore the soil to the sacred national realm... Every socialist, Republican, every one of them, without exception, and needless to say, every Communist, will be eradicated, without exception.' An ideology of unfettered hate, and evil., an  ideology that is still trying to tear the world apart.

The attempts by the Francoist rebels for many years to make the world believe that this war crime, this crime against humanity, was the work of the democratic Basque authorities was fortunately rendered useless by foreign correspondents, such as George L Steer and Noel Monks, who told the world the truth about what happened.  Following this first attempt, more have followed, even to today, to downplay its historical importance and reduce the number of victims.

The destruction of Guernica was part of Franco's wider, brutal campaign against the existence of the Spanish Republic. This campaign led not just to widespread destruction of property, but thousands of civilian casualties too, as well as widespread displacement. Many sought refuge abroad, as many as 3,800 Basque children were evacuated to England and Wales for the duration of the war. The British Government at the time callously refused to be responsible for the children, but  throughout the summer children were dispersed to camps throughout Britain. Eight of these colonies were here in Wales. They were received with a mixture of hostility and kindness, but they had all managed to escape the grips of Franco's fascist Spain.
After Guernica , George Steers eyewitness account in The Times described what he saw as 'without mercy, with system', words that remain tragically pertinent to the bloody legacy of carpet bombing in conflicts ever since. Conflicts that continue across the world, that allow humanity to descend into darkness.Guernica represnted the first instance of a new kind of war. The Blitz followed it, then Dresden and the fireboming of Tokyo. Then Hiroshima, followed by the saturation bombing of Vietnam, on to the tragedies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Temen, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Ukraine etc.

So we must remember Guernica ,and  its legacy, we must make sure the fascists are stopped in their tracks, we must not let them pass., we must carry on singing no pasaron to whatever disguise they dress themselves up in, because today , throughout Spain and Europe, there is an ideological current that feeds into the same hatred and misery and ' principles' that guided the births of fascist, nazi, Francoist totalitarians.

To this day, the scenes of catastrophic suffering recorded in Guernica  are a black mark on Spanish history.Bit since the bombing, Guernica has become a symbol for peace. The town has a peace museum and a peace park. and survivors  of the air raid have over the year joined forces with others from Dresden and Hiroshima to campaign against war.

Sirens symbolically blare across Guernica today at the precise moment when fascist  warplanes  carpet-bombed it during the Spanish Civil War. We should never forget this grim reminder of humanity's continuing capacity for evil..It is important to remember for future generations, so that horrors like this never happen again.We much continue to be enraged by crimes against humanity, and together we should try to work together for  peace

Extract from poem written by Paul Eluard, a surrealist poet and friend of Picasso, in August, 1937.

Lovely world of cottages
Of the night and fields
Faces good in firelight good in frost
Reusing the night the wound and blows

Faces good for everything
Now the void fixes you
Your death will serve as a warning

Death the heart turned over

They made you pay your bread
Sky earth water sleep
And the misery of your life.

 
Guernica - A.S Knowland

Irun- Badajoz - Malaga - and then Guernica

So that the swastika and the eagle
might spring from the blood-red soil,
bombs were sown into the earth at Guernica,
whose only harvest was a calculated slaughter.
Lest freedom should wave between the grasses
and the corn its proud emblem, or love
be allowed to tread its native fields,
Fascism was sent to destroy the innocent,
and, goose-stepping to the exaggerated waving
of the two-faced flag, to save Spain.

But though the soil be saturated with blood
as a very efficient fertiliser, the furrow
of the ghastly Fasces shall remain barren.
The  planted swastika, the eagle grafted
on natural stock shall wither and remain sere;
for no uniformed force shall marshall the sap
thrilling to thrust buds into blossoms, or quicken
the dead ends of the blighted branches;
but the soil shall be set against an alien crop
and the seed be blasted in the planting.

But strength lies in the strength of the roots.
They shall not pass to ruin Spain!

Reprinted from

The Penguin Book of
Spanish Civil War Verse (1980)

Further Reading:-

The Spanish Civil War - Hugh Thomas
Penguin (1965)

They Shall Not Pass:
The Spanish People at War
-Richard Kissh (1974)

Guernica: The history and art of:-

 

 

Guernica - Paul Eluard - P Picasso  - Victory at Guernica
Music: Richard  Wagner and Herbert Von Karajan

Rana Plaza - ten years on

On 24 April 2013, over 1,100 people were killed and thousands more were injured in the collapse of a building on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh which housed several garment factories making clothes for Benetto, Primark, Matalan, Mango , Costa and other major brands.

The fate of the Rana Plaza building turned into a tragedy because workers were forced by their bosses to come to work in a place inspectors had previously ordered closed for safety reasons.It would be the worst factory tragedy in the history of the Garment industry. 

The predominately female workforce was pressured by management in to work that fateful day despite large structural cracks having been discovered in the building just the day before. The catastrophe that was entirely preventable was followed by a heightened struggle for justice for the Rana Plaza workers and safe factories for all. Campaigners and trade unions in Bangladesh heroically forced action – despite facing powerful, even violent, opposition.

The tragedy exposed the dire conditions in much of the world's fashion industry – and the corporate elite which profit from them.and  meant no longer could consumers, workers or governments simply turn a blind eye  to the dangers facing workers every day. And saw a growing cohort of consumers  behaving as citizens,  people who are no longer satisfied with opaque supply chains, the unethical treatment of people. and reignited a conversation about the social responsibility of clothing companies. There were rumblings of this movement in the 90s when Nike and GAP were exposed for using child labour in sweatshops. But the conversation had stalled somewhere in the mid-2000s as fast fashion brands increased in size and offering.  More than ever before people wanted to know the dirty little secrets behind the brands, and who they could  buy from with a clear conscience.

There is also now thankfully greater awareness about how our clothes are produced .given that well-known high street brands are understood to be among the companies who were sourcing clothes from the Rana Plaza building

Ten years since the deadliest garment factory disaster in history, industry leaders say working conditions have improved in the country, mainly thanks to an accord on fire and building safety that was signed by dozens of brands in the immediate aftermath of the collapse.

But the power imbalance between big brands and Bangladeshi suppliers persists, and victims are still campaigning for justice and compensation.

Marking the 10th anniversary, UK MPs and campaign groups have issued calls for solidarity with garment workers. 19 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion (EDM) in the House of Commons on the anniversary.

The EDM, sponsored by Labour MP Apsana Begum says that the House “is concerned at the ongoing poor labour conditions, low wages and unsafe work environments, with a high incidence of work-related accidents and deaths, faced by workers in the garment sector worldwide;

 “is alarmed at the ongoing suppression of trade union and collective bargaining rights in the garment industry and that since the covid-19 pandemic there is evidence of worsening health and safety standards, increased gender discrimination and reports of concerning levels of workplace gender-based violence and harassment;

“recognises that without the ability to organise, workers are inhibited from fully securing improved working conditions and/or challenging abuse; and believes that all workers deserve a workplace that provides them with a living wage, decent working conditions and trade union rights including the right to refuse unsafe work, to take strike action and collectively bargain.”

Former Labour frontbenchers Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell and Richard Burgon are among the signatories, along with Plaid Cymru MP Hywel Williams, SNP MP Carol Monaghan and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

On Sunday, campaigners from the Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective organised a ‘Cost of Fashion’ walking tour visiting high street stores on Oxford Street in London. The group, which includes NGOs and campaign groups including War on Want, No Sweat and Labour Behind the Label, commemorated those who died in the building collapse and called for brands to “put people before profits”.

The Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective is calling on all clothing companies to sign up to the International Accord, to ensure a disaster like Rana Plaza never happens again.The Accord – set up by the global union federations IndustriALL and Uni Global – was first signed in May 2013 in the aftermath of the international outrage at what happened. It is about creating an inspection and remediation program to mitigate fire, building, electrical and boiler safety risks for factory workers, along with providing complaints mechanisms for workers to file grievances about health and safety concerns and violations of their right to organise. However, many clothing brands  including Levi’s  have not joined the Accord. Despite over 50,000 people have signed a petition calling for them to do so.

The unfortunate truth is that, a decade on, poor labour conditions, low wages and unsafe work environments – with a high incidence of work-related accidents and deaths – still persist in the garment sector worldwide. By signing the Accord, brands would have to allow independent safety inspectors into those supplier factories as well as guaranteeing basic health and safety provisions for workers.

Tyrone Scott, from anti-poverty campaigning charity War on Want said: “The deadly Rana Plaza disaster was not an unavoidable accident – it was an entirely preventable disaster. Rana Plaza workers who made clothes for several UK high street fashion brands had previously raised safety concerns but were ignored. A decade on and garment workers are still facing unsafe working conditions and poverty wages. Clothing brands must urgently sign the International Accord on Fire and Building Safety and commit to guaranteeing safe workplaces, for genuine justice for the victims of Rana Plaza – and for all garment workers.”

In Pakistan, unions have taken the example of the Bangladesh Accord and are working to adapt it to their own national circumstances. Starting in 2018, labour organisations in Pakistan have been campaigning for a Pakistan Accord on Fire and Building Safety.

The Pakistan Accord is a legally binding agreement between global unions, IndustriALL and UNI Global Union, and garment brands and retailers for an initial term of three years starting in 2023. The factory listing of these brands would cover approximately 300-400 facilities in Pakistan. The program in Pakistan will include key features from the 2021 International Accord. 

35 global brands and retailers have now signed the Pakistan Accord. We should carry on calling on major brands and retailers to sign the Pakistan Accord and demand the industry protects progress so that a disaster like Rana Plaza never happens again.

As we remember the victims of Rana Plaza their families, husbands, wives, children, mothers and brothers, all left mourning a loved one.Let's not forget  that no individual has been yet held accountable for corporate manslaughter for the Rana Plaza disaster. While the factory owner, Sohel Rana, has been charged with murder, his trial has been delayed and he was recently presented bail.

Some survivors and families of victims claim they are yet to receive any compensation. Most of the survivors of the collapse are still living in poverty. According to a recent study conducted by ActionAid Bangladesh, some 55 per cent of survivors remain unemployed, mainly due to their physical injuries.

"Some survivors now beg for a living. Our primary demand is for all survivors to receive compensation for their lifetime of lost income, amounting to 48 lacs taka [approximately US$45,660] each,” says Mahmudul Hasan Hridoy, president of the Rana Plaza Survivors Association of Bangladesh. But so far, the provision of fair compensation has been elusive.

We must continue to demand compensation , medical treatment for life for all those effected and judgement for the culprits involved, while we carry on expressing  our anger at companies who disregard their workers safety in their supply chains in their thirst for profit.

Whether it’s in the UK or Bangladesh or beyond, all workers deserve a workplace that provides them with a living wage, decent working conditions and trade union rights including the right to refuse unsafe work.We should continue to tell  the fashion industry to make human rights and basic safety non-negotiable for all .