This is a video of my local Welsh language pop legends Ail Symudiad (Second Movement) performing their track Twristiaid yn y dre (Tourists in the town). I think their fantastic, they have such a unique fresh sound, and have released so many great records over the years. The first record I actually got by them was a single called Geiriau (words) which came out in 1981, and I've been fortunate to catch them play a number of times over the years, where they always manage to draw a loyal faithful crowd.
They were formed in Cardigan, West Wales in 1978. They were initially inspired by the punk movement that was sweeping the UK at the time. The band cites the Jam, The Undertones, the Buzzcocks, Y Trwynhau Coch and the Clash as primary influences.
The founding members of Ail Symudiad were brothers Richard Jones, guitar, vocals; Wyn Jones bass, backing vocals and Gareth Lewis, drums. Though the personnel of the band has changed many times since its inception Richard and Wyn have remained the constant steady members since 1978, and the band is still going strong. Over forty years that's quite an achievement for any band.
They are also a good reason to learn the Welsh language and have helped support an array of other Welsh language bands over the years through their own record label Fflach records, such is their valuable contribution to Welsh culture.
Here are links to their facebook page. and record label check them out.
Peter Green the influential and legendary lead guitarist, singer and original founder of Fleetwood Mac has passed away today (25 July). He was 73.
His family’s solicitors Swan Turton announced the news in a statement:
“It is with great sadness that the family of Peter Green announce his
death this weekend, peacefully in his sleep. A further statement will be
provided in the coming days.”
The news on Saturday comes just two days day after Fleetwood Mac announced a forthcoming massive box set reissue
of their first seven studio albums, some of which featured Green on
guitar prior to the arrival of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in
1975.
Born Peter Greenbaum, in Bethnal Green, East London in 1946, to a Jewish working class family, , he was a sensitive
child in whom music had always inspired powerful emotions. He would
burst into tears when he heard the theme from Disney's Bambi because he
couldn't bear to remember the suffering of the baby deer. He was
sensitive in other ways too. As a Jewish kid in London's tough East End,
he was constantly teased and taunted, and the scars remained into
adulthood. From an early age, he became enthusiastic about US blues musicians like BB King and Muddy Waters. At the age of eleven he first learned the guitar after acquiring a cheap Spanish guitar from his brother. At
the age of 15, the teenager started playing guitar professionally and
five years later got the chance to be the lead guitarist for the
instrumental band Peter B's Looners,where he met drummer Mick Fleetwood.
By the time he was 20, Green had already made a name for himself in
the British blues scene. His big break came when he was given the chance
to stand in for Eric Clapton in John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. .Green went on to record The Hard Road with The Bluesbreakers,
adding two of his own compositions to the album. He left soon after to
form what would become Fleetwood Mac. Already regarded as one of the
best Blues guitarists on the scene, Green’s skills as a songwriter
were also fast developing,having penned hits such as Albatross, The Green Manalishi and Black Magic Woman now quite rightly regarded as classics.
Sadly, being a sensitive soul it was
partly this, combined with a rapid rise to fame and the lifestyle that came with it that
led to Green’s deterioration. Much has been written about this, and in particular about Green’s decline in mental health and his erratic behaviour.
To ignore the details of this would be wrong. Green’s struggle with
mental health has come to define his life as well as much of the music
he and Fleetwood Mac created.
With newfound stardom came excess. Green began experimenting a lot
with psychedelic drugs. On a tour in California, Green became acquainted with Augustus Owsley III. notorious supplier of LSD to the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey and it was not long after that his mental health also began to deteriorate. In some of his last appearances with the band, he wore a monk’s robe and
a crucifix.
He became increasingly uncomfortable with his material wealth and vowed
to give all of his money away, urging his bandmates to do the same. He
was starting to exhibit some of the erratic behaviour that would
manifest itself in a much more extreme way in the following years.
If Green was already mentally unstable, then it was the events of
Fleetwood Mac’s European tour in 1970 that really tipped him over the edge. On touching down in Munich, Green was targeted by members of what
road manager Dennis Keane described as a ‘cult’. An extremely glamorous
couple appeared at the airport and greeted Green like an old friend.
They followed him around for the rest of the day, and went to watch
Fleetwood Mac play that night.
After the gig, the mysterious couple took Green and fellow guitarist
Danny Kirwan to a huge mansion in the woods, which they had turned into a
hippy commune. Green and Kirwan took LSD and began jamming with members
of the commune in the basement of the house.
When Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Jeremy Spencer later arrived,
they were met by a worried looking Keane, who warned them that Green was
tripping out badly and the place had a ‘horrible vibe’. The band called
their hotel and swiftly left.
Although Green had already started to show signs of mental illness,
this particular incident was one from which he never fully recovered. Green left Fleetwood Mac after a final performance in 1970. Shortly after leaving the band, Peter Green released his first solo album, The End of the Game, it marked a significant
departure from anything he produced before or since."That was my LSD album," admitted Green "I was trying to reach things
that I couldn't before but I had experienced through LSD and
mescaline." It was also to be
his last creation for some years, as his mental health continued to
decline from his LSD use.
Just a couple of years later, following an outburst in which
Green smashed an entire cabinet of crockery at his brother’s house, he
was interned at a psychiatric hospital, and was eventually diagnosed as
schizophrenic .and spent time in
hospitals undergoing electro-convulsive therapy during the mid-70s at St Thomas's Hospital in South London. This drastic treatment
frightened him, but it stabilised his behaviour by reducing him to a
level of docility in which he appeared to be almost in a trance
Sadly, he would go on to suffer through years of psychotic outbursts. At
one point he grew his nails and hair long and wild and roamed around
Richmond Park in London, howling and barking like a dog. The
most serious incident saw him smuggle a shotgun into the UK from Canada,
threatening to shoot his accountant. Acording
to legend, Green wanted him to stop sending him his royalty cheques for
Fleetwood Mac's early work, worth around £30,000 a year.
Thankfully, as treatment for schizophrenia advanced and Green’s
own lifestyle settled down, so did his erratic behaviour. In the
1990s he went on to form the Peter Green Splinter Group. They recorded
10 albums during their time together, including Hot Food Powder and The Robert Johnson Songbook. The albums feature cover versions of every song Robert Johnson is known to have recorded.
It is quite amazing that after more than a decade of serious mental
health problems, Green was able to produce two albums, both of which are
eminently listenable.Green
married Jane Samuels in January 1978; the couple divorced in 1979. They
have a daughter, Rosebud Samuels-Greenbaum (born 1978).
While his career may have been cut short, his impact and legacy
has been lasting.‘Without Peter Green there would be no Fleetwood Mac. Beyond that and in his own right, Peter Green produced music that
continues to inspire and delight listeners. It is for this that we
should remember him. He is without question one of the best and most
underrated blues guitarists of all time.He released seven solo albums altogether, the final of which was A Case for the Blues (with Katmandu) in 1984.
Green was among eight members of Fleetwood Mac,- along with Fleetwood, Stevie
Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, John McVie, Christine McVie, Danny Kirwan and
Jeremy Spencer - who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame in 1998.
Rolling Stone ranked Green at number 58 in its list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time", and in 1996, Green was voted the third-best guitarist of all time in Mojo magazine.
In February before the coronavirus shut down large scale gatherings ,Mick Fleetwood organised a gig in celebration of Green, with artists including Fleetwood,
Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and guitarists Jonny
Lang and Andy Fairweather Low performing at the London Palladium. Mick Fleetwood said of the gig at the time: “Peter was my greatest
mentor and it gives me such joy to pay tribute to his incredible talent.
I am honoured to be sharing the stage with some of the many artists
Peter has inspired over the years and who share my great respect for
this remarkable musician.”
Because of his unigue talents he was loved by friends and admirers in equal measure and musicians have been quick to pay tribute upon news of his death.
Whitesnake
frontman David Coverdale called him "a breathtaking singer, guitarist
& composer". Guitarist Bernie Marsden wrote that he was probably
"one of millions" he [Green] touched.
Peter Frampton, a contemporary of Green's, tweeted: "Most sadly have lost one of the most tasteful guitar players ever."
Black
Sabbath's Geezer Butler described Green as "one of the greats", while
Mumford and Sons guitarist Winston Marshall thanked Green "for the
music", describing him as a "#GOAT" (greatest of all time).
Film
director Edgar Wright tweeted: "RIP Fleetwood Mac co founder and
original lead singer Peter Green", linking to a performance of one of
their hits, Oh Well.
Actor David Morrissey praised Peter Green's "fantastic soulful voice", saying he "loved his playing and his singing so much".
Goodbye Peter Green, tragic genius and one of the greatest guitarists the world has known. Rest easy. Long may his legacy endure. I extend my thoughts to the loved ones of Peter Green at this sad time. Below I present some of the best fom the inimitable Peter Green.
Man of the World - Fleetworld Mac
Green Manalishi - Fleetwood Mac
Black Magic Woman - Fleetwood Mac
Oh Well - Fleetwood Mac
Peter Green - Fool No More
Peter Green and the Splinter Group - The Supernatural
John Newton, slave trader turned abolitionist and author of the hymn Amazing Graze was born on 24th July 1725 in Wapping, England. His father was a master mariner. His mother. a pious Dissenter, taught him to read Scripture and memorize
Reformed catechisms and hymns. Together they attended an Independent
(Congregational) church in London, at a time when barely 1 percent of
that city's population went to churches associated with that
Puritan-derived group. At age 7, however, Newton's mother died of tuberculosis, and he fell under the less religious and more distant care of his sea-captain father.
His father remarried after his mother's death,
but John did not enjoy a good relationship with his stepmother. In 1733 Newton was sent to a boarding-school at Stratford, and at the age of eleven he went to sea with his father, after losing his first job, in a merchant's office, because of "unsettled
behavior and impatience of restraint"—a pattern that would persist for
years. He spent his later teen years at sea before he was press-ganged
aboard the H.M.S. Harwich in 1744. Newton rebelled against the
discipline of the Royal Navy and deserted. He was caught, put in irons,
and flogged. He eventually convinced his superiors to discharge him to a
slaver ship bound for West Africa. Espousing freethinking principles, he remained arrogant
and insubordinate, and he lived with moral abandon: "I sinned with a
high hand," he later wrote, "and I made it my study to tempt and seduce
others."
Eventually he reached the coast of Sierra Leone where he became the servant of an abusiveslave trader. In 1748, he was rescued by a sea captain and returned to England.
He became a slave ship master himself, working with slave traders to transport people, treating them as cargo. Newton later explained: "The slaves, in general, are bought, and
paid for. Sometimes, when goods are lent, or trusted on shore, the
trader voluntarily leaves a free person, perhaps his own son, as a
hostage, or pawn, for the payment; and, in case or default, the hostage
is carried off, and sold; which, however hard upon him, being in
consequence of a free stipulation, cannot be deemed unfair. There have
been instances of unprincipled captains, who, at the close of what they
supposed their last voyage, and when they had no intention of revisiting
the coast, have detained, and carried away, free people with them; and
left the next ship, that should come from the same port, to risk the
consequences. But these actions, I hope, and believe, are not common."
Newton argued that it was important to have as many slaves as possible on board the slave-ship:
"With our ships, the great object is, to be full. When the ship is
there, it is thought desirable, she should take as many as possible. The
cargo of a vessel of a hundred tons, or little more, is calculated to
purchase from two hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty slaves.
Their lodging-rooms below the deck, which are three (for the men, the
boys, and the women) besides a place for the sick, are sometimes more
than five feet high, and sometimes less; and this height is divided
towards the middle, for the slaves lie in two rows, one above the other,
on each side of the ship, close to each other, like books upon a shelf.
I have known them so close, that the shelf would not, easily, contain
one more. Let it be observed, that the poor creatures, thus cramped for
want of room, are likewise in irons, for the most part both hands and
feet, and two together, which makes it difficult for them to turn or
move, to attempt either to rise or to lie down, without hurting
themselves, or each other."
Newton admitted that conditions on board ship were appalling: "The
heat and the smell of these rooms, when the weather will not admit of
the slaves being brought upon deck, and of having their rooms cleaned
every day, would be, almost, insupportable, to a person not accustomed
to them. If the slaves and their rooms can be constantly aired, and they
are not detained too long on board, perhaps there are not many die; but
the contrary is often their lot. They are kept down, by the weather, to
breathe a hot and corrupted air, sometimes for a week: this, added to
the galling of their irons, and the despondency which seizes their
spirits, when thus confined, soon becomes fatal."
On one occasion Newton kept a record of how many slaves died on a journey from Africa to South Carolin:
"The ship, in which I was mate, left the coast with two hundred and
eighteen slaves on board; and though we were not much affected by
epidemical disorders, I find, by my journal of that voyage (now before
me) that we buried sixty-two on our passage to South Carolina, exclusive
of those which died before we left the coast, of which I have no
account. I believe, upon an average between the more healthy, and the
more sickly voyages, and including all contingencies, One fourth of the
whole purchase may be allotted to the article of mortality. That is, if
the English ships purchase sixty thousand slaves annually, upon the
whole extent of the coast, the annual loss of lives cannot be much less
than fifteen thousand."
Newton also took slaves to Antigua.
He later recalled a conversation with a man who purchased slaves from
Newton: "He said, that calculations had been made, with all possible
exactness, to determine which was the preferable, that is, the most
saving method of managing slaves". He went onto say that they needed to
decided: "Whether, to appoint them moderate work, plenty of provision,
and such treatment, as might enable them to protract their lives to old
age? Or, by rigorously straining their strength to the utmost, with
little relaxation, hard fare, and hard usage, to wear them out before
they became useless, and unable to do service; and then, to buy new
ones, to fill up their places?" Newton added: "He farther said, that
these skillful calculators had determined in favor of the latter mode,
as much the cheaper; and that he could mention several estates, in the
island of Antigua, on which, it was seldom known, that a slave had lived
above nine years."
It was during a storm on 21st March 1748, when Newton thought his ship full of
slaves may sink, that he prayed to God for deliverance. While this was
the beginning of his desire to embrace Christianity, it was later, on
another slave ship that he became deeply ill and prayed again for God’s
intervention. This experience is what he touted as the moment when he
began to realize the horror of his trade. But despite this he
continued to work on ships taking slaves from the Guinea coast and the West Indies (1748–9) and he became master
of slave-trading ships, The Duke of Argyle (1750–51) and The African
(1752–54). His biographer Bruce Hidsmarth argued "Newton has sometimes been accused of hypocrisy for holding
strong religious convictions at the same time as being active in the
slave trade, praying above deck while his human cargo was in abject
misery below deck."
Newton married Mary Catlett on 12th February 1750 and in 1754 suffered a convulsive fit and was forced to leave the
maritime trade. Later that year he attended religious meetings
addressed by George Whitefield and John Wesley. In August 1755 Newton took up a civil service post as tide surveyor at Liverpool. He also became a leading evangelical laymen in the region. This included hosting large religious meetings in his own home.
Newton was considered a Methodist and was unsuccessful in several applications for orders in the Church of England. He sent the first draft of his autobiography to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. With his support Newton received deacon's orders, on 29th April 1764, from the Bishop of Lincoln. Newton became curate-in-charge of Olney in Buckinghamshire.
Newton had become friends with the poet, William Cowper and in 1771 they began to collaborate formally on a project to publish a volume of their collected hymns. Olney Hymns was published in 1779. Newton's most famous contribution Amazing Grace is included."
The irony of Newton’s lyrics is that part of history is that the song
was adopted as a spiritual sung by black African slaves to engender
strength, hope and encouragement. It was performed by Liwana Porter during George
Floyd's memorial service in Minneapolis and is probably one of the best
known hymns across a variety of Protestant denominations. The song was originally known as "Faith's Review and Expectation."
In 2015, President Barack Obama, a man with no
previous history of public singing, sang the hymn at a memorial service
for the nine African Americans killed by a white supremacist shooter
inside one of the nation's oldest black churches, Mother Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The moment
seemed to resonate with a wide variety of Americans.
In Newton’s age, slavery was an economic reality, as it has been at many
times in human history, including today. There is always a profit to be
made from human servitude. Newton knew both sides of the economic
divide. Having endured slavery, he apparently for some years had no
qualms about profiting from it. He knew what it was to be a wretch in
two senses: first, to lose physical agency, and then to fail to assume
moral agency. But he changed.
In January 1780 Newton accepted the offer from John Thornton of the benefice of St Mary Wolchurch in Lombard Street, where he wholeheartedly supported the work of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787. He became close friends with William Wilberforce and became involved in his campaign against the slave trade.
Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, was the nephew of one of
Newton's London friends. Inspired by the former slave trader, and
paralleling Newton's own conversion, Wilberforce began to question his
role in life. Although Newton, then a lowly Olney curate, was convinced
that Wilberforce was just another wealthy politician, he persuaded him
to crusade for change and use his station in life and his powerful
friends (including Prime Minister Pitt) to seek reform. One of the chief
topics for such advocacy was abolition. In fact, Wilberforce wrote in
his journal on October 28, 1787, that one of the two goals that had been
set before him was "the suppression of the Slave Trade."
Newton joined in the fight for the abolition of slavery by publishing
the essay "Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade." in 1787. He admitted that this was "a confession, which... comes too
late....It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me,
that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now
shudders." Newton explained why he had become involved in the campaign against
the slave trade: "The nature and effects of that unhappy and disgraceful
branch of commerce, which has long been maintained on the Coast of
Africa, with the sole, and professed design of purchasing our
fellow-creatures, in order to supply our West-India islands and the
American colonies, when they were ours, with slaves; is now generally
understood. So much light has been thrown upon the subject, by many able
pens; and so many respectable persons have already engaged to use their
utmost influence, for the suppression of a traffic, which contradicts
the feelings of humanity; that it is hoped, this stain of our National
character will soon be wiped out."
Because Christians
still felt that slavery was justified in the Bible, Newton and
Wilberforce wisely avoided building their protests on a religious
platform. Instead, they condemned the practice as an inhumane treatment
of their fellow men and women. Newton, speaking strongly from his own
experiences, also proposed that the captors were in turn brutalized by
their callous treatment of others and cited offences including torture,
rape, and murder. Newton's friend, William Cowper, joined their
fight by writing pro-abolition poems and ballads.
In 1789 Wilberforce introduced a "Bill for the Abolition of Slavery"
in Parliament. The bill faced opposition in both Houses, but the forces
against enactment became weaker each time it came up for a vote. The
bill finally was passed by the House of Commons in 1804 and by the House
of Lords in 1807 after which King George III declared it law.
John Newton died on 21st December 1807 aged 82 a few months after the Act abolishing the slave trade throughout the British Empire had been passed. It did not bring slavery itself to an end, as this was
only outlawed completely in British territory with the Slavery Abolition
Act of 1833. However, the 1807 Act was an incredibly important step in
that direction, that encouraged abolitionists around the world. Newton was buried by the side of his wife in St Mary Woolchurch on 31st December; both bodies were reinterred at Olney in 1893.
As far as I am aware, there isn’t a statue to Newton in any significant
place. If there were then, although I applaud the sentiment behind the
pulling down of Edward Colston’s statue, I would be much more startled
to see the same thing happen to Newton’s statue if it existed. The Black Lives Matter campaign has been focussing on educating people about
systemic racism and on changing hearts and minds.
After the senseless death of George Floyd and others has awakened an anger and a widespread undeniable feeling of injustice, a
feeling that people from black and minority ethnic groups do face
discrimination and we cannot ignore. As a result it is possible to wholeheartedly support the Black Lives Matter movement
and campaign to stamp out racism but also to acknowledge that we can’t just wipe things out without learning and we also need historical
examples of people that can and do change. In Newton’s age, slavery was an economic reality, as it has been at many
times in human history, including today. There is always a profit to be
made from human servitude. But Newton, a man who had enslaved others, at least changed into a man fighting against the very thing he had been been so much part of. This is why I believe it is important to remember him.
The world swiftly rearranges
Moving faster than a runaway train,
As the draw bridges shut down
And children grow older faster,
We all stand at the crossroads
Watching each pivotal step,
Kindling hope, igniting rainbows
The pipes of pan serenading,
Beyond the whips and chains that bind
Eternity in mothering bridges,
Delivering confirmation, validation
Following contracts of good and evil,
Gravity of mercy shared
Dynamics of existence,
Between hours of prepared purpose
Shrouds of twisted navigation continue,
As cherry blossom powder the earth
Greed of old, keeps infecting,
We must keep searching for answers
Make magic out of days,
From blue armchairs in sad suburbs
Without inhibition, keep on believing,
Keep on easing minds, bending the rules
Releasing knots, making wishes come true,
Like the old black and white movies
Old wild world keeps on spinning,
Specks of rain softly soothing
Interrupting dragons fangs,
Take to the river at full moon
In the force of currents, believe in change,
Upon the stair cases of ink
Paint flowers, get drunk on imagination.
Today marks the anniversary of
the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, a moment in time that has come
to represent the defining struggle
of the age: a clash between not just between the opposing political
ideologies of socialism and fascism, but between civilization and
barbarism, good and evil.
The fascists launched a coup against the democratically elected Popular
Front Government in Madrid on the night of 17th July 1936 inspired mostly
by General Franco. A central goal of the rebels was the destruction of
left-wing organisations. Franco’s fellow officer, General Queipo de
Llano, instructed his subordinates on how to treat the ‘Bolshevik’
activist with this chilling sentence: ‘I authorise you to kill him like a
dog and you will be free of all responsibility." The Nationalist rebels' initial efforts to instigate military revolts
throughout Spain only partially succeeded. In rural areas with a strong
right-wing political presence, Franco's confederates generally won out.
They quickly seized political power and instituted martial law. In other
areas, particularly cities with strong leftist political traditions,
the revolts met with stiff opposition and were often quelled. Some
Spanish officers remained loyal to the Republic and refused to join the
uprising.
Within days of the uprising, both the Republic and the Nationalists
called for foreign military aid. Initially, France pledged to support
the Spanish Republic, but soon reneged on its offer to pursue an
official policy of non-intervention in the civil war. Great Britain
immediately rejected the Republic's call for support.
Faced with potential defeat, Franco called upon Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy for aid. Thanks to their military assistance, he was able
to airlift troops from Spanish Morocco across to the mainland to
continue his assault on Madrid. Throughout the three years of the
conflict, Hitler and Mussolini provided the Spanish Nationalist Army
with crucial military support.
Some 5,000 German air force personnel served in the Condor Legion,
which provided air support for coordinated ground attacks against
Republican positions and carried out aerial bombings on Republican
cities. The most notorious of these attacks came on April 26, 1937, when
German and Italian aircraft leveled the Basque town of Gernike
(Guernica in Spanish) in a three-hour campaign that killed 200 civilians
or more. Fascist Italy supplied some 75,000 troops in addition to its
pilots and planes. Spain became a military laboratory to test the latest
weaponry under battlefield conditions.
The Spanish conflict quickly generated worldwide fears that it could
explode into a full-fledged European war. In August 1936, more than two
dozen nations, including France, Great Britain, Italy, Nazi Germany, and
the Soviet Union, signed a Non-Intervention Agreement on Spain. The
latter three signatories openly violated the policy. Italy and Germany
continued to supply Franco's forces, while the Soviet Union provided
military advisors, tanks, aircraft, and other war materiel to the
Republic
But the people rose, millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly
advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; and more than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help
defend the Spanish Republic, forces of red and
black fought back united against fascism. In the countryside, peasants took control
of the land, redistributing
large estates and, in many places, collectivizing the land and setting
up communes and a civil war was was waged, the workers immediately set up barricades and within hours the rising
had been defeated. Arms were seized and given to workers who were
dispatched to other areas to prevent risings. Madrid was also saved
because of the heroism and initiative of the workers. Hearing of what
had happened in Barcelona they had stormed the main army base in the
city. Workers' militias
were established. Workplaces were taken over and for ten months after July 1936, the people held power. Taking over
the factories and the running of the whole of society. They organised
workers’ committees in enterprises and streets. They believed that they
had power and fought to defend and extend it.
But in a series of tragic events were sadly defeated aided by the
British government who
had agreed to a policy of 'non-intervention' along with the help of
fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The town of Guernica situated 30 kilometers east of Bilbao, in the Basque province of
Vizcaya. Guernica was considered to be the spiritual capital of the
Basque people and had a population of about 7,000 people. On 26th April
1937, Guernica was bombed by the Germab Condor Legion..
As it was a market day the town was crowded. The town was first struck
by explosive bombs and then by incendiaries. As people fled from their
homes they were machine-gunned by fighter planes. The three hour raid
completely destroyed the town. It is estimated that 1,685 people were
killed and 900 injured in the attack.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937)
General Franco denied that he had nothing to do with the raid and claimed that the town had been dynamited and then burnt by Anarchist Brigades.
Franco issued a statement after the bombing: "We wish to tell the
world, loudly and clearly, a little about the burning of Guernica. It
was destroyed by fire and gasoline. The red hordes in the criminal
service of Aguirre burnt it to ruins. The fire took place yesterday and
Aguirre, since he is a common criminal, has uttered the infamous lie of
attributing this atrocity to our noble and heroic air force."
The Spanish church backed this story and its professor of theology
in Rome went so far as to declare that "the truth is there is not a
single German in Spain. Franco only needs Spanish soldiers which are
second to none in the world." After the war a telegram sent from
Franco's headquarters was discovered and revealed that he had asked the German Condor legion to carry out the attack on Guernica. It is believed that the attack was
an attempt to demoralize the Basque people. Germany had agreed as they
wanted to carry out "a major experiment in the effects of aerial
terrorism."An earlier post on this tragic event can be found here https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/04/79-years-ago-bombing-of-guernica.html
By April 1939, all of Spain was under
fascist control and
Franco declared a victory .Solidifying his power with a brutal
dictatorship by oppressing and systematically killing any political
opposition.Over half a million people were killed in
the war, and in the next few years many tens of thousands more were
executed, not forgetting all those who died from
malnutrition, starvation, and war-engendered disease. General Franco's
military regime remained in power
until his death in 1975 depriving Spain of
freedom for several decades afterwards, and former Republicans were subjected to various forms of discrimination and punishment. Victory
for the Francoist side brought economic and political isolation for
Spain until the 1950s and the denial of basic rights until the late
1970s. Only in recent years have relatives of the executed started to
learn where their loved ones are buried.
The fighting and persecution resulted in several million Spaniards being
displaced. Many fled areas of violence for safe refuge elsewhere. Only a
few countries, such as Mexico and the Dominican Republic, opened their
doors to Spanish refugees. Nearly 4,000 Basque children arrived in the UK in 1937, fleeing from the terrors
of the Spanish Civil War. Over 200 were
accommodated at colonies in Caerleon, Swansea, Brechfa and Old Colwyn,
and they were warmly welcomed by Welsh people who considered that
Welsh miners and the Basques were fighting the same enemy - fascism.
When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939,
with Franco's victory, some 500,000 Spanish Republicans escaped to
France, where many were placed in internment camps in the south, such as Gurs,
St. Cyprien, and Les Milles. Following the German defeat of France in
spring 1940, Nazi authorities conscripted Spanish Republicans for forced
labor and deported more than 30,000 to Germany, where about half of
them ended up in concentration camps/ Some 7,000 of these became prisoners in Mathausen; more than half of them died in the camp.
About 300 people volunteered from Wales against the tyranny of fascism,
with 35 of whom not returning home .When the Welsh volunteers returned home they were greeted in their
communities as heroes, but many felt betrayed by the British government
and were at first unwilling to share their experiences.However, as time went on, plaques were erected, memoirs and biographies
were written and historians began to carefully curate the individual stories of idealism and bravery
The important historical truth is
the international flavour of those who volunteered to fight in this
brutal war.A total of 59,380 volunteers from fifty-five countries served during the Spanish Civil War joining.the International Brigade, to fight selflessly side by side for the ideas of liberty and social justice, solidarity and mutual aid .Rallying to the republican cause.The International Brigade, were so called because their members (initially) came from so many different countries. The International Brigaders were recruited, organized, and
directed by the Cominterm (Communist International), with headquarters in Paris.
A large number of the mostly young recruits were Communists before they
became involved in the conflict; more joined the party during the
course of the war. This included the following: French (10,000), German (5,000), Polish
(5,000), Italian (3,350), American (2,800), British (2,000), Yugoslavian
(1,500), Czech (1,500), Canadian (1,000), Hungarian (1,000) and
Scandinavian (1,000). Battalions established included the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, British Battalion, Connolly Column and the George Washington Battalion among others.
A great idealistic cause of the first half of the twentieth
century, that has been of great interest to me over the years. Two local
people from my neck of the woods went to serve Arthur Morris and a
Percy Jones. More information here http://irelandscw.com/docs-WelshMorris
, I have yet though to see a monument erected to them.
For many it was not just a war to defeat the fascists it was the
beginning of a new society. A revolution in fact,
unfortunately revolutions do not succeed when the people are divided.
There are many lessons to be learnt from this struggle, a struggle that
continues to do this day.
Lets not forget all those who were killed serving with the International
Brigades who nobly fought bravely in a spirit of solidarity, and
political and moral awareness to try and save us from fascism's threat
that still sadly lingers and haunts us today.The dark shadow cast by
the Spanish Civil war, still matters, and the wound inflicted on Spain
still within living memory for many has yet to close. We
must continue to resist oppressive forces, with our shout of no
pasaran.
The poet and political activist John Corford was just 21 years old when
he died in Spain in August 1936, I will leave you with these two poems
by him written in the teeth of death. Poem
Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.
The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.
On the last mile to Huesca,
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side.
And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don’t forget my love.
A letter from Aragon
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,
But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.
The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards
And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.
Death was not dignified.
We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth
And fired a ragged volley over the grave.
You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
There is no poison gas and no H. E.
But when they shelled the other end of the village
And the streets were choked with dust
Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,
Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.
I thought: how ugly fear is.
This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.
In the clean hospital bed, my eyes were so heavy
Sleep easily blotted out one ugly picture,
A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,
Now out of danger, but still crying for water,
Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.
This on a quiet front.
But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker
Said: 'Tell the workers of England
This was a war not of our own making
We did not seek it.
But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona
It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.'
Before nuclear weapons were used on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at 5.30 a.m, on July 16, 1945, Los Alamas scientists detonated a plutonium bomb at a test site located on the U.S. Air Force base at Alamogordo, New Mexico. J. Robert Oppenheimer chose the name "Trinity" for the test site , inspired by the poetry of John Donne.
When the bomb was finally detonated atop a steel tower, an intense light flash and sudden wave of heat was followed by a great burst of sound echoing in the valley. A ball of fire tore up into the sky and then surrounded by a giant mushroom cloud stretching some 40,00 feet across. With a power equivalent to around 21,000 tons, the bomb completely obliterated the steel tower on which it rested, destroying everything in its vicinity and melting huge swathes of sand into sea-green glass. The Nuclear Age had begun,,
Less than a month later, the United States would drop a nearly identical weapon on the city of Nagasaki in Japan. The bomb, named Fat Man, fell three days after Americans dropped a uranium bomb called Little Boy, on Hiroshima. Both weapons immediately killed tens of thousands of Japanese people and forced Japan's surrender on August 14, bring an abrupt end to the war.
Many of the scientists who witnessed the Trinity blast quickly realised the "foul and awesome" power they had set free, according to historians. Mr Oppenheimer said a Hindu scripture ran through his mind at the sight of the explosion: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Kenneth T. Bainbridge, the test director, was less poetic. "Now we are all sons of bitches," he said.
The Trinity test exposed the communities in the areas downwind from the blast to dangerous levels of radiation and fallout. In the following decades, the "Downwinders" from the Tularosa Basin who were not even informed about the test have faced long-term health consequences including cancers, even across generations. Like the Hibakusha,a term widely used in Japan, that translates as ' explosion effected/Surrvivor of the Light' and global victims of nuclear tests, the Downwinders have raised their voices to fight for a better future.
The thousands living downwind from the Trinity Blast were knowingly exposed to extremely high levels of radioactive fallout . Many New Mexicans living in the vicinity of the Trinity test were ranchers, Native Americans, Hispanic settlers who lived a rural and substinence lifestyle. Unbeknownst to them their land, their water and their food was severely contaminated to radioactive fallout. The effects of this exposure are still evident 75 years later in the physical, economic and mental hardships of survivors and their families. Downwinders developed certain types of cancers at rates that far exceed the general population. In many case, entire families have developed cancer at rates that far exceeded the general population. Many downwinders were also forced into debt and poverty from costly health treatments, none of which were compensated by the federal government.
Since the Trinity Test 75 years ago, at least eight countries have have detonated over 2,000 nuclear weapons at more than 60 locations around the globe,according to data released by https://www.armscontrol.org/ More than half of these tests have been conducted by the United States, most have have taken place on colonized land and the lands of indigenous and minority people, never close to those who made the decisions to conduct them.People living in the vicinity of these tests exposed to radioactive fallout are part of the under acknowledged ;collateral damage' of our nuclear industry. The history of nuclear testing also exposes the oppressive and racist nature of relying on nuclear weapons for “security”.
Radiation from nuclear tests harms children more than it does adults. Infants and young girls run the highest risk of cancer across their lifetime after exposure and teenage girls will suffer almost double rates of cancer compared to boys.
In 2017, the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is the only international treaty to require for all victims of nuclear weapons use and testing to receive adequate victim assistance. 39 countries have already ratified this Treaty. Has yours? It compels states to address the needs of victims and impacted environments and acknowledges the disproportionate impact of nuclear weapon activities on indigenous peoples. Justice for survivors is an essential part of the quest for a word free of nuclear weapons.
While the number of atomic warheads in the world has fallen considerably since the darker days of the cold war, the club of nuclear armed countries has expanded. With countries including the U.S, updating their nuclear arsenals and arms control treaties in danger of collapsing, many experts believe the risk of nuclear conflict is rising. 75 years after the first nuclear weapon was tested, we must stand with the affected communities, press our leaders to take the actions necessary to ensure these immoral, illegal weapons are never used again and to negotiate in good faith the global elimination of these most devastating weapons of mass destruction.
Trinity Downwiders will be hosting a virtual event recognising the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test. I encourage people to attend Here is a link to the video which will go live when it takes place :- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfmqI1cWiYfYKGIInjGjYRw/?guided_help_flow=5
Walter Benjamin who was born on July 15, 1892 in Berlin was a German Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, philosopher and renaissance man of letters, who wrote on topics ranging from art history
and aesthetics to linguistics, politics, and psychedelic drugs, who is now considered to have been the most important German literary critic in the first half of the 20th century.He was influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, by Marxism, by German idealism and by Jewish mysticism.In his brief life, Benjamin developed many of the themes that now serve as an indispensable foundation for literary and cultural criticism. "Criticism" he observed, "is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where prospectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society." This could have been written yesterday, it was published in 1928.
Born into a Jewish middle class family his education took him to Berlin, Munich and Bern before he returned back to Berlin in his late twenties, student of philosophy, Benjamin had been intent on a career as an academic but his ambition was thwarted when the University of Frankfurt dismissed his doctoral thesis on the origins of German tragedy as outlandish.
Because of his anti-fascist advocacy, the Gestapo requested Benjamin’s
expatriation from Paris in February 1939. When France declared war on
Germany, all Germans living in France were interned in camps. Benjamin
was sent to the village of Nevers in Burgundy, but was released due to
interventions by his friends. He continued to work, but in June 1940 he
was forced to flee Paris.
He then attempted to travel through neutral Spain by crossing
the Pyrenees on foot. On the night of September 26, 1940, he was falsely
alarmed when he was stopped by General Franco’s border guards near Port-Bou. In his hotel room, unaware that he was not under
suspicion and could have escaped to freedom he took his own life with an overdose of morphine, which he carried for in such an eventuality. The local doctor, however declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name.
His tragically short life became the subject of Jay Parini's novel Benjamin's Crossing. Charles Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough wrote the opera Shadowtime based on his life.His dislocation and willful alienation, mark him as a kindred spirit to Kafka and Baudelaire.More than 70 years after his death his work continues to speak compellingly to the modern reader.
In the following excerpt from an unfinished essay, Capitalism as Religion by Walter Benjamin written in 1921 and published in the Volume VI of his Collected Writings (in German). Here, Benjamin characterises capitalism not as something that resembles a religion, but as an actual religious cult,without mercy or truth, leading humanity to the house of despair.
Directly based on Max Weber's Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but – in ways akin to Ernst Bloch or Erich Fromm – it transforms Weber's 'value-free' analysis into a ferocious anti capitalist argument, probably inspired by Gustav Landauer's romantic and libertarian socialism. The translation is by Chad Kautzer.
Beginning in the late middle ages and reaching its first plateau in the late eigthteenth century, the capitalist market began to assume an autonomous, god-like existence. Since then we have made fetishes out of commodities as we believe we can derive sensuous pleasure from their magical properties. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market., the God that some owe their deepest allegiance.
Capitalism is a totalitarian system that engulfs the entire social and cultural structure at considerable cost to this fragile earth of ours. Under it's influence people plunder,kill, steal , ravage nations and wage wars. Capitalism isn't about bringing you contentment, it's about making you feel discontentment and under the Tory Government they have already shown us that they
want pure privatisation through unfettered Capitalism. So those who
already have, will increase their wealth and those who do not will
struggle to live. The altar of greed is truly where they worship. Thanks Walter for reminding me.
Capitalism as religion - Walter Benjamin
“One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say,
capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and
disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. The proof of
capitalism’s religious structure – as not only a religiously conditioned
construction, as Weber thought, but as an essentially religious
phenomenon – still today misleads one to a boundless, universal polemic.
We cannot draw close the net in which we stand. A commanding view will,
however, later become possible.
Three characteristics of the religious structure of capitalism are,
however, recognizable at present. First, capitalism is a pure religious
cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it everything only
has a meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special
dogma, no theology. From this standpoint, utilitarianism gains its
religious coloring. The concretization of the cult connects with a
second characteristic of capitalism: the permanent duration of the cult.
Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans rêveet sans merci.¹
Here there is no “weekday”, no day that would not be a holiday in the
awful sense of exhibiting all sacred pomp – the extreme exertion of
worship. Third, this is a cult that engenders blame. Capitalism is
presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than repenting cult.
Herein stands this religious system in the fall of a tremendous
movement. An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent,
grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make
it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all
to include God himself in this guilt, in order to finally interest him
in repentance. This [repentance] is thus not to be expected in the cult
itself, nor in the reformation of this religion – which must hold on to
something certain within it – nor yet in the denial of it. In the
essence of this religious movement that is capitalism lies – bearing
until the end, until the finally complete infusion of blame into God –
the attainment of a world of despair still only hoped for. Therein lies
the historical enormity of capitalism: religion is no longer the reform
of being, but rather its obliteration. From this expansion of despair in
the religious state of the world, healing is expected. God’s
transcendence has fallen, but he is not dead. He is drawn into the fate
of man. This passage of “planetary man” [Planeten Mensch] through the house of despair is, in the absolute loneliness of his path, the ethos Nietzsche describes. This man is the Übermensch,
the first who knowingly begins to realize the capitalist religion. The
fourth characteristic [of the religious structure of capitalism] is that
its God must become concealed and may only be spoken of in the zenith
of his culpability. The cult becomes celebrated before an immature
deity, [while] every image, every idea of it injures the secret of its
maturity.
Freudean theory also belongs to the priestly rule of this cult. It is
thoroughly capitalistic in thought. The repressed, the sinful
imagination, is, at bottom, still an illuminating analogy to capital –
to which the hell of the unconscious pays interest.
This type of capitalist, religious thinking magnificently reconciles itself in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The thought of the Übermensch
loses the apocalyptic “leap” not by changing its ways, atonement,
purification, [or] penitence, but in the apparently continuous, but in
the end, rupturing, discontinuous intensification. That is why
intensification and evolution are incompatible in the sense of “non
facit saltum.” The Übermensch is the one who without changing, arrived, who streaked through the heavens – historical man.
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, without dogma. Capitalism
itself developed parasitically on Christianity in the West – not in
Calvinism alone, but also, as must be shown, in the remaining orthodox
Christian movements – in such a way that, in the end, its history is
essentially the history of its parasites, of capitalism. Compare the
holy iconography of various religions on the one hand with the banknotes
of various countries on the other: The spirit that speaks from the
ornamentation of banknotes.
Christianity in the time of the Reformation did not encourage the
emergence of capitalism, but rather changed itself into capitalism.”
¹ The translator suggests this should actually read “sans trêve et sans merci”
Today marks the birthday of legendary left-winger, songwriter, poet of the people and musician Woody Guthrie. A man who celebrated the little guy, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised, whose songs openly took the side of the working class, poor and oppressed people.
Tragedy first struck when Woody was still a young child. His father was a land trader, and soon made enough money in oil-mad Okemah to build a nice six-room home for the family; yet shortly after the Guthries moved in, the house burned down. By then, the depression was already beginning to bite, and his father couldn't afford another one. For the next few years, the Guthries moved from house to house as their fortunes got worse; and as if the falling family fortunes weren't enough, human tragedy struck too. Woody's favourite sister, Clara, died after being horribly burned by the explosion of an oil stove.
Not long after, this Woody's mother suffering from Huntingtons disease was sent to a mental asylum where she later died. A saddened and a broken man, Woody's dad did his best to keep happiness alive in the broken family: he would sing to his children, but, remembered Woody, "I could tell by the sounds of his voice that he was not singing to make his own self feel good, but to try and make us kids feel better." Then the family home burned down for the second time.
A growing youth by then, Guthrie overcame his own personal hardship and tragedy and set of to seek his fortune far from the sad memories of his childhood. Hitch-hiking across America with a guitar on his back and paintbrushes in his pocket, he made for California, joining the crowds of Okies seeking a better life in the West. He mixed with the migrant farm workers, and learned their trade, singing about it in some of his finest "Dustbowl Ballads"; He became a spokesman for those Americans affected by the Great Depression and the dust storms. and sung out to sufferers of the Depression, the Dust Bowl era, and the second World War. He advocated the unions and scorned the corporations. But the formulas for writing the “people’s songs” didn’t rest in social justice alone; Guthrie’s wit, humor and home-spun vernacular attracted too and avoided pretension.
In the 1930s, Guthrie was among the many who climbed out of the western states’ disastrous Dustbowl; he brought with him original songs that catalogued the sights and emotions of the day: “So Long, ItsBeen Good to Know You”, “I’m Blowin’ Down This Old Dusty Road”, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues”, among many more. Once in California, Woody soon learned that it was no land of milk and honey. However, instead of toiling in fruit orchards, he became a radio performer, offering his old-timey and topical music to the southerners who’d migrated to the West Coast. While the station manager tried desperately to hold Woody to the country standards, somewhere in the mix was an original called “Mr.Tom Mooney is Free”. This 1939 composition told of the recently pardoned labor activist, a cause celebre in Left circles, who’d been wrongly imprisoned for 22 years. Very soon, he got a reputation as an outspoken defender of the poor and the exploited, and a well-armed enemy of those who exploited them. "I saw the hundreds of thousands of stranded, broke, hungry, idle, miserable people that lined the highways.... I heard these people sing in their jungle camps, and I sang songs I made up for them," he wrote.
Soon, Woody was renowned as a militant labor unionist, a champion of the public cause against private greed.In 1941, he was taken on by the Bonneville Power Administration, a state-run organisation, to help them win public approval for two vast dam projects on the Columbia River. The BPA project was hotly contested by the owners of private power companies, who did not want to lose their monopoly over the electricity supply in the region. Woody's collection of "Columbia River Songs" is a major contribution to the social history of the American West in the 1930s and early 40s, fixing in song and poetry the trials of a generation of rural Americans. In part thanks to Woody, the dams were built.
From his first song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya” which he wrote about a huge dust storm while living in Pampa, Texas, Woody Guthrie chronicled the changing world that he saw.
He could describe the deprivations of migrant workers but still insist that "pastures of plenty mustalways be free.” his songs touch on issues ranging from immigration (“Deportee”) see earlier post, about this song here, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-continung-relevance-of-woody.html
to corrupt financial institutions (“The Jolly Banker”)
to the plight of the working class (“Union Maid”) — age-old problems that continue to dominate the modern news. He re-wrote some of his songs, lambasting the racist developer/landlord, Fred Trump, father of president Donald J. Trump. A developer who made a fortune, not only through the construction of "public" housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them. Woody used his songs and other creative works as social commentary, promoting social justice issues such as treating all people fairly no matter what colour or economic status, political belief or place of origin.
The radicalism he brought into his songs was seldom forced; it was organically and seamlessly connected with a kind of humanistic appreciation of working people’s everyday struggles. He was, in his own words, “out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world.” songs that were made for you and me. Although he was unblinking in the face of suffering and injustice, he had a persistent streak of optimism. He seemed really to believe that music could change the world for the better, confidently writing on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” He was a radical, a revolutionary who believed if imperialists raised their ugly heads, it was time to battle them in bloody struggles. To the Fascists, he sent the ultimate warning:
“I’ll bomb their towns and bomb their cities
Sink their ships beneath the tides,
I’ll win this war, but till I do, babe,
I could not be satisfied.”
Guthrie’s ‘machine’ indeed ‘killed Fascists’. And he appealed to human reasoning through radical folk renditions that founded the landscape of protest music worldwide. And he never faltered from why he needed to sing what he did.
Woody Guthrie - Tear the fascists down.
Woody Guthrie - All you fascists Bound to lose.
All you fascists bound to lose - Woody Guthrie
I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose
Race hatred cannot stop us
This one thing we know
Your poll tax and Jim Crow
And greed has got to go
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose.
All of you fascists bound to lose:
I said, all of you fascists bound to lose:
Yes sir, all of you fascists bound to lose:
You’re bound to lose! You fascists:
Bound to lose!
People of every color
Marching side to side
Marching ‘cross these fields
Where a million fascists dies
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!
I’m going into this battle
And take my union gun
We’ll end this world of slavery
Before this battle’s won
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!
Woody Guthrie is also remembered for “This Land is Your Land”, his anthem reclaiming America for ordinary people. It was his own contemptuous response to the success of “God Bless America. It is often considered the nation's second national anthem
Many of the things he concerns himself with in song in the late 1930s are still with us today and though its disconcerting to know we haven’t solved those things, at the same time it’s reassuring that Guthrie’s music is still there to shed light on these issues. During hard times, people who are struggling to find a emotional accessible moral philosophy that can give hope can still find it in the words of this poet of the people Woody Guthrie. He taught us that an artist must not be confined to the world of imagination alone. The battlefield is an unequal world and the war against injustice is absolutely on. Until that war is won, the artist must not be satisfied!
In the 1950s, Woody was one of the many artists and writers to fall victim to the McCarthyist witch-hunts for supposed "Communists". Publishers gave up publishing his collections, and his most famous songs, such as "This Land is My Land", were presented as "anonymous".
By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. It was finally determined that he was suffering himself from Huntington's disease, this terrible genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Increasingly unable to control his muscles, an incurable victim of a slowly spreading paralysis he was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris County, New Jersey, from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital (now Kingsboro Psychiatric Center) in East Flat Bush until 1966, and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, New York, until his tragic death in 1967 aged only 55.
During the last years of his life, he lay in bed, a dying hero, forgotten by many but regularly visited by a small band of family and friends and acolytes, including a 19 year old Bob Dylan, many of whom were later to make sure that after his death, Woody would not be forgotten.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people was inspired by folk singers such as Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. By the time of his death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them through the likes of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Ramblin Jack Elliot,
Thank you Woody Guthrie, a folk revolutionary who continues to inspire and strike a chord or two. His songs and time remain eternal.
Revolutionary Mind - Woody Guthrie
Night is here again, baby,
I'm stretched out on my bed
Seeing all kinds of crazy notions
Running through my head
I need a progressive woman;
I need an awfully liberal woman.
There ain’t no reactionary baby
Can ease my revolutionary mind.
One hand is on my pillow,
One hand is on my head,
I see a million nightmares
Tearing around inside my head;
I need a progressive woman
I need an awful liberal woman
I need a social conscious woman
To ease my revolutionary mind.
If I could only make you see, babe,
I ache and pain and bleed,
I know you’d come a runnin;
If you blistered both your feet.
I need a progressive woman
I need an awful liberal woman
I need a social conscious woman
To ease my revolutionary mind.
We get torn and broken
In days of confusion,
As tears keep falling
In every passing season
Will you take my hand
Come take a slow dance,
To console, comfort and heal
Allow love to reveal,
Blended with emotion
Our eyes locked together,
Lips nearly touching
Breaking social distancing,
Feeling alive, beyond bitterness
While sun sets, and we kiss,
Remember time is short
Nothing lasts forever,
Lets gently move to music
Before the days are over,
Embracing tenderness
Instead of constant sorrow,
Holding hands, feeling warmth
Clinging on, to this source of passion.
25 years ago Serb forces captured the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, and carried out Europe's worst worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.. Around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed there over several days. They had been forcibly separated from the women and children. The Bosnian Muslims had found shelter in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War because it was supposed to be under UN protection. On 16 April 1993, one year into a civil war that began when Bosnia sought independence from Yugoslavia, the Security Council had passed Resolution 819 requiring all parties to treat Srebenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act. However in July 1995, General Ratko Mladić and his Serbian paramilitary
units overran and captured the town, Dutch UN peacekeeping forces were
at the time accused of failing to do enough to prevent the
massacre.The Muslim men and boys were told by the Dutch peacekeepers
they would be safe and handed over to the Bosnian Serb army. They never
returned. The Netherlands has since been found partly liable for the
deaths of 300 Muslims killed in the Srebrenica massacre, The Hague appeals court upheld a decision
from 2014 that ordered the Dutch state to pay compensation to the
victims families. In August 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that a crime of genocide was committed in
Srebrenica. Ever since, the survivors and the victims’ families have
been fighting to obtain justice and recognition. Srebrenica happened during a war with seemingly few rules of
engagement, bitter fighting, indiscriminate shelling of cities and
towns, ethnic cleansing and systematic mass rape. Essentially a
territorial conflict, one in which people of difference looked back on
times of peaceful coexistence, however fragile, and forward to ethnic
separation, exclusion and to living apart. When the attackers overran Srebrenica on July 11 and took peacekeepers
hostage, about 25,000 Bosniaks fled to the UN base at Potocari on the
city's outskirts. They sought refuge despite the scorching heat and
catastrophic hygienic conditions. A day later, the attackers began to
assault, rape and kill them. On July 12 and 13, girls, women and elderly
refugees were loaded onto buses and driven to regions under Bosniak
control. After murdering thousands of Srebrenica’s Muslims, Serbs dumped their
bodies in numerous mass graves scattered throughout eastern Bosnia, in
an attempt to hide the crime. Body parts are still being found in mass graves and are being put
together and identified through DNA analysis. Almost 7,000 of those
killed have been found and identified. Newly identified victims are buried each year on 11 July, the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995.
Nine newly identified victims were buried at a flower-shaped cemetery
near the town, where tall white tombstones mark the graves of 6,643
other victims. "After 25 years we succeeded in finding his mortal remains, so they
can be laid to their final rest," said Fikret Pezic, who buried his
father Hasan.
The remains of some 1,000 victims of the massacre in the eastern town during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war are still missing.
Thousands
of visitors usually attend the commemoration service and funerals but
this year only a small number of survivors would be allowed at the
cemetery due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Dozens of world leaders, who were prevented by the coronavirus pandemic
from attending the commemoration service in person, sent video messages
Saturday in which they urged tolerance and reconciliation in Bosnia, a
nation that remains deeply ethnically divided. They included Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez,
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris
Johnson and Prince Charles.
The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the foreign secretary,
Dominic Raab, paid tribute to the victims on Saturday. Johnson said in a
video posted on Twitter: “I want to join with you once more in mourning
the victims of those terrible events, and to stand with the families in
their fight for justice.
“As in so many cases from this conflict which brought violence and
destruction across the western Balkans, many families still do not know
what happened to their loved ones. Many perpetrators have still not been
held to account.
“And there are those who would prefer to forget or deny the enormity
of what took place. We must not allow that to happen. We owe it to the
victims and to future generations to remember Srebrenica and to ensure
it never happens again.”
Raab said in a statement: “On the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica
genocide, we remember the victims and the anguish of their families. During my time in The Hague between 2003 and 2006, pursuing those
responsible for this dark chapter in European history, I was reminded
daily of the heinous cruelty perpetrated against the innocent. The UK is determined to end impunity and help rebuild those
countries affected – as our commitment to the ICC and UK investment and
support for Bosnia demonstrates.”
Johnson, however, is facing calls from 30 MPs to apologise for
comments he made in the Spectator in 1997 regarding the genocide. In a
letter to the PM, the cross-party group led by Labour’s Tony Lloyd
wrote: “In 1997, when you were a political columnist for the Spectator,
you wrote an article challenging Bianca Jagger’s support for more direct
intervention against the Serbian Army in the Bosnian war.“You
wrote: ‘Alright, I say, the fate of Srebrenica was appalling. But they
weren’t exactly angels, these Muslims.’ As we commemorate the 25th
anniversary of the atrocity, it is unthinkable that you would publicly
attend national memorial events, without having apologised for such
comments.”
Some international speakers also addressed the continued refusal by
Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighboring Serbia to acknowledge the extent
of the Srebrenica slaughter and the ongoing suffering of its survivors.
Judge
Carmel Agius, president of the U.N. court that is completing war crimes
trials stemming from the breakup of Yugoslavia, warned in his video
message that the victims of the Srebrenica massacre “continue to be
tormented by those who attempt to deny their lived experiences, and,
thereby, their very existence.
Bosnian
Serb wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic and his military
commander Ratko Mladic were both convicted of and sentenced for genocide
in Srebrenica by a special U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. In
all, the tribunal and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50
Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the
Srebrenica killings.
Bosnian Serbs, however, still celebrate
Karadzic and Mladic as heroes. Some were even staging celebrations of
“the 1995 liberation of Srebrenica” on the anniversary of the crime.
The Serbian Orthodox Church supported Mladic. Serbs celebrated the
notorious paramilitary commander Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as
"Arkan," as a hero. Now, a quarter of a century after the slaughter of
Srebrenica, most Serbian leaders and many citizens still refuse to
recognize it as a genocide; streets, schools and student dorms in Serbia
are named after the convicted war criminals Mladic and Karadzic; and
many of the men who were directly or indirectly involved in the 1995
massacre hold key positions in the country's political and economic
sphere.
In
fact, Bosnian Serb political leaders have consistently prevented the
country from adopting a law that would ban genocide denial, with the
Serb member of Bosnia’s presidency, Milorad Dodik, even publicly
describing the Srebrenica slaughter as a “fabricated myth.” Humanity has lived through the darkest of times, but few events have
stained our collective history more than the Srebrenica genocide.Today
we remember the victims, survivors and those still fighting for justice.The lesson from Srebrenica is that no society is invulnerable to
prejudice and intolerance. We must all remain vigilant against these
forces, and take positive action to build stronger, more resilient
communities. We must continue to
learn lessons from this tragic event, never forget and recognise the
dangers of what can manifest when racism, prejudice, religious-hatred
and discrimination go unchallenged and ethnic divisions are exploited by
political leaders. We must reaffirm our commitment against all forms of hatred and prejudice
which targets people because of their religion, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality or beliefs
Here is a link to the official site of rememberance.:-
