Stuff the Jubilee - Republic demo on June 3rd

Firstly, thanks to Republic http://www.republic.org.uk/
They have been the rallying point for many republican sympathisers up and down the country. You might not have heard them mentioned much in the mainstream  printed media, or on the television, due to excessive  the excessive propogandering going on at the moment. All we have is spin,spin, and more spin.
Personally in a time of extreme poverty and austerity, I think it is pretty obscene to be forking out £32 million for the farce that is the Queens anniversary celebrations. Apparently 69% support the upcoming celebrations,  this is because they never get to see the other side of the coin, fed daily images of good news of this archaic family. like the Olympics people are force fed to exhaustion point,  but this weekend up and down the country their will be many who will not be celebrating, and will be hosting their own celebrations.
A key focus point will be down in old London town, details of which I'm posting here.

Jubilee Protest - 3 June 2012

The Thames Pageant is the key event in the Queen's jubilee celebrations. The pageant  involves 1000 boats travelling in procession down the Thames from Putney to Tower Bridge, with the Queen and other parasitic members of her family on the lead boat.

We will be staging a major protest at the Tower Bridge end of the route, where banners and placards will be displayed and speeches will be made. This is a unique opportunity to make a bold statement about our opposition to the monarchy and to promote the republican cause.

Here are the details

Date:

3rd June 2012

Time:

12 noon till 5pm, with speeches from 1:30 pm. We'll be there from mid morning, so come and join us if you want to make a full day of it or want to help out.

Venue:

On the South Bank of the Thames, near Tower Bridge and City Hall.

As I've said their will be many other protests in cities across the Country, it is not all bunting and jubilation, despite what the B.B.C and the rest of those hand in hand with the monarchy are saying. So I hope they correct the balance against the pomp and privelege and inherited wealth of the biggest benefit cheats in Britain. Visitors to my blog might get the idea that I'm against everything, this is not the case. I do think humanity still is rather strange when we still have to bow down to our so called masters, but I do believe in fairness, justice and equality and it is these themes that I try to promote .
S'sssh........ don't wake her. She's pretty vacant anyway.

Anyway here's a quote from Aneurin Bevan

"Royalty, in the propoganda apparatus that it is, has four functions; to foster the illusion of national unity; to prescribe the hierearchy of honours and titles by which representatives of the workers are subjected to the most insidious forms of corruption, to supply a fertile source of diversion, and above all, to intervene at times of acute political crisis and exert its influence in favour of the existing social order."

and here's a tune

When the sheep go marching in - The Queen Elizabeth anti Diamond Jubilee song 2012

Hath a Palestinian not eyes.

Shakespeareans for Poetic Justice present:

                   A SONNET FOR HABIMA

If all the world's a stage - why then, the stage

       Must play its part if we would change the world.

Whence this commotion? Why such howls of rage

        The moment that our banners are unfurled?


In Shakespeare's time, an audience was moved

       By speeches about justice and compassion.

The Bard, methinks, could only have approved

        Of protests carried out in such a fashion.

We'll take no lessons from those fools who claim

       That politics can't mix with the theatre.

If actors break the lawe, they are to blame.

       Perform in settlements? They should know better!

Now "Globe to globe" meets global Intifada.

- Sue Blackwell

" Let the Globe's audiences and Habima performers
squirm in discomfort and wonder what will happen,
let them feel for a few hours what most Palestinians
experience on a daily basis."

Habima is performing at the Globe Theatre as part of the Globe to Globe festival despite protests from over 30 actors, directors and playwrights, including the founding artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Mark Rylance, and actors Emma Thompson and David Calder, who signed an open letter in March condemning the Globe for its invitation.

Habima has a history of performing for illegal settlements in the West Bank, and Palestinians living in the West Bank are prevented from attending due to Israel's policies of ethnic and religious segregation.

Sarah Colbrne, Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said " We are asking people to boycott Habima in protest against their support of illegal settlements.

Being an artist does not remove your responsibility as a uman being to stand up against oppression. And Habima have been complicit in supporting that oppression by performing in theatres built on land illegally occupied by Israel, and performances which exclude Palestinians from attending.

Protest Habima at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
from 6 p.m 28/5/  - Tues May 29th

Why we say "no" to Habima at the Globe - Miriam Margolyse

Protestors holdinga banner and forcefully removed from Habima performance

Olympic Fever

So the Olympic flame trundles on through the country. Yesterday it passed through my home town, here in West Wales.It seems the country has gone mad. About 7,000 or so gathered to watch it pass, (from all accounts in a matter of minutes) quite a lot for a small town.For some people the recession does not seem to be happening, as this government slashes benefits, attacks the poor!
Sure there are tales of courage and fortitude, but overall I just don't get it. Crowds gather in excitement and delight wherever the torch appears, following the smell of spin and propoganda. It has an air of craziness about it, people whooping, people crying. Celebratng a torch that is on its way to London, where it will be used again as a symbol at the Olympics great spectacle of wealth.
I came home to my garden before the flame actually arrived ( heard the cries, of joy and hysteria) but what I saw  in the town was blatant publicising for the Olympics main sponsors - Coke a Cola, B.T, Samsung and Lloyds/T.S. B Plc, McDonalds, the epitomy of junk and greedy captitalistic endeavor, their only common dominator is their thirst for profit. Corporate advertising latched on to a cavalcade of vehicles.
And coke, not really a healthy drink that I would associate with sport. As for the participation of Dow Chemicals..... the mind simply boggles, have people simply  forgotten the Bhopal disaster that killed 15,000 people. And the people whoop and the people cheer.
The Olympics are going to  cost an estimated £11billion - more than the Tory governments latest cut to the welfare budget. So lets celebrate our austerity.... hip hip hooray.
The relay is supposed to 'promote peace and make the world a better place' according to the International Olympic Committe President Jacques Rogge - but at such enormous cost. A true spirit of international co-operation would have seen us bailing out the Greeks, the originators of the Olympics, letting them host the games permanently and giving them our £15 billion.
And who invented the modern torch relay - the bloody Nazis.... Torches and flames had a strong link to Nazi ideology, they were used as a key part in Leni Reifenstahl's Nazi propoganda documentary Olympia.
They used the 1936 Olympics and the torch relay as a way of spreading their racist message of hate.

Today I feel this event is being used as a mass distractive action, to mask over the current problems we have in our country. I do not belittle peoples happiness, but think that it's all a bit of a con. At least some people will make something out of the games, by selling their torches on, with some perhaps being given back to charity.
In my garden it felt like I was living on another planet, as I heard the crowds roar, down the road from me. We have been experiencing some exceptionally good weather. But as the mass delusion rolls on I remain, deeply cynical. Will the flag waving, clapping and shedding a few tears of national pride continue,  yes, many international groups are eagerly anticipating the event, but many people in London themselves are searching for ways to avoid the Olympics entirely, perhaps this hopeful distraction give us some kind of illusion that we can beat this austerity...... and its the Jubilee coming up soon too. No I'm not buying it, I simply don't believe the hype. But at least the Sun is shining.

Eurovision mired in deeper controversy by further clampdowns on dissent in Baku

Eurovision mired in deeper controversy by further clampdowns on dissent in Baku

Not that I'll be watching

John Cowper Powys (8/10/1872 - 17/6/63) - The Magic of Detachment

 ' But it is in relation to individual human beings that Detachment is most necessary of all. The wise man spends his life running away. But luckily he can run away without moving a step. We are all - men and women alike - teased by the blue-bottle flies who want to lay their eggs. These are the people who have never learnt and never could learn the art of detachment. They are blue-bottle flies - as my sister Phillipa says - and they want to lay their eggs; and they can only lay their eggs in carrion. Not one of us has carried in him, carrion in her; and the buzzing blue-bottles, among our fellows, smell this afar off, and fly towards it, and would fain settle upon it and lay their eggs.
   Here indeed, here most of all is it necessary to excercise the very magic of Detachment, that magic that makes it possible for you to be in one place - like the man seated on the naked stone by the flowing water - and yet to be in the heart of the flaming sun and at the circumference of the divine ether. For if you fail to exercise the magic of Detachment upon the blue-bottle fly who infest your road they will really lay their eggs - the eggs of the maggots of civilisation - in your soul. And then you will believe in the justifiability of vivisection; in the sacrosanct importance of private property; in the virtue of patriotic war; in slaughter-houses, in brothels, in slavery, and in the great, noble scientific, gregarious, loving, human, undetached art of - Advertisement.
  Rouseau was right. It is only by detaching yourself from human civilisation that you can live a life worthy of a living soul.'

 Quotation Reprinted from
John Cowper Powys
A Record of Achievement
- Derek Langbridge
The Library Association,
1966 

Omotola says: Shell must own up, pay up and clean up.

It's Shell's AGM today and despite huge profits they've still not stumped up the money to clean up two major spills in the Niger Delta. The pollution has ruined the lives of the millions who live there. Here Omotola, an actressfrom the Niger Delta explain why Shell must own up, pay up,  calling on Shell's chief executive , Peter Vosey to take resposibility for the pollution in the area.
Then sign Amnesty International's petition, http://amn.st/LiosFv

Royal Babylon by Heathcote Williams (rough cut)

Narration and montage
by Alan Cox

' Can we go on bowing and curtseying to people who are just like ourselves? We begin to wish that the Zoo should be abolished. That the royal animals should be given the run of some wider pasturage - a royal Whipsnade. Will the British Empire survive and will Buckingham Palace look as solid in 2034 as it does now?
Words are dangerous things remember. A republic might be bought into being by a poem.'

- Virginia Woolf, Time and Tide, 1/12/34

http://www.royalbabylon.com/

Edward Thomas (3/3/1878 -9/4/17) -Bright Clouds

Down in Plymouth at moment for grans 100th Birthday..... her name is May,  so a little poem. Am I the only one in this city at the moment,  who is not overjoyed with olympic torches and stuff..... a mass delusion seems to be taking place. Have been called a killjoy 3 times this morning already. Hey ho.

Bright Clouds

Bright clouds of may
Shade half the pond.
Beyond,
All  but one bay
Of emerald
Tall reeds
Like criss-cross bayonets
Where once a bird called,
Lies bright as the sun
No one heeds.
The light wind frets
And drifts the scum
Of may blosson.
Till the northern callsAgain
Naughts to be done
By birds or men.
Still the may falls.

Albert Camus (7/11/13 -4/1/60) - The Smoking Philosopher

Ah Mr Camus........see him up there, he did not smoke because it was a luxury or even  pleasurable he smoked because it was  just part of something he did. The writer is almost as famous for his love of Gauloises as he is for his novels. He even named his cat Cigarette, Absurdity as philosophy, this was his way. He describes his whole philosophy in an essay The Myth of Sisyphus

http://www.vahidnab.com/sisyphus.pdf
Despite several attacks of tuberculosis with which he was first diagnosed aged 17, and living in poverty he  kept on smoking. For him life itself and therefore humanity was irrational, he was labelled an existentailist but he rejected this..
Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on the 7th of November 1913, his father died one year later, and Camus was bought up alone, in acute poverty. He spent a lot of his days looking for  reason in a world of alienation.In 1934 he joined the Communist Party, but his relationship with the party was difficult and would remain ambivialent throughout his life. In 1934 he married Simone Hie, a morphine addict and in 1938 he became a journalist, writing for an anti-colonialist newspaper after dropping out of the University of Algiers.
He moved to Paris in 1940, looking for work with the leftist press,  married again, to a pianist and mathematician named Francine Faure,  and had two twins Catherine and Jean in September 1945,and found himself  a teaching post. In 1943 he joined Combat  a clandestine resistance cell, working underground, helping with smuggling activities and acts of sabotage.
He became the editor of Combat's magazine in 1943 where he deveoped his philosophies and strong moral convictions, and it was during this period that he published works that extended his ideas. He wrote ' This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.' He became associated with the French Anarchist movement, and wrote for several anarchist publications like  Le Libertaire, La Revolucian Proletarienne and Solidaidad Obrera. His real concerns  were for the plight of the ordinary man, not just in France or in Algeria, a search for solidarity, a humanity that does not divide.
His novels...... The Ousider (1942) and The  Plague (1947)  and The Fall (1947)  have  become pivotal texts for me to reach over the years. Here his themes developed further, a humanism grounded in nature  with people of the left accusing him off drifting away,  because he strongly critisized elements of communist doctrine. However he remained a man of the left. In 1949 he founded The Group for International Liasons with the Revolutionary Union Movement, through which he wanted to show the world the more positive aspects of surrealism and existentialism.. He labelled nihilism as the most disturbing problem of the twentieth century, in is essay The Rebel  he paints a terryfying picture of ' how metaphysical collapse often ends in total negation and the victory of nihilsm, characterised by a profound hatred, pathological destruction and incalculable death. Another theme that remained with him was his pacifism.
And whatever your opinion of the man he became obsessed with the human condition and its many forms.He accepted it's contradictions, and that's good enough for me, just because  life defies logic, and is irrational, does not mean it is less valuable or means that it does not need to be defended.
Towards the end of his life, human rights in particular were what essentially preoccupied him, and when the United Nations welcomed fascist Spain as a member under Franco he resigned from his work for UNESCO. He worked with imprisoned Algerians, and in 1957 was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature.
Albert Camus died on January 4, 1960 in an absurdist car accident... he was buried in the Loumarin, Vacluss, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, France.
So thanks Albert, whose ideas I have often found represented in the world around me, peppering them and illuminating them.  He was also a goalkeeper of rare promise from what I have heard, oh and I forgot to mention Mr Jean Paul and Simone de beauvoir....another time perhaps.
In the end he accepted lifes contradictions, he once remarked ' life is absurd and death renders it meaningless - for the individual. But mankind and its society are larger than one person'.
Right off to light myself a cigarette.

Nakba Remembered

Nabka Oral History: Sarah Odeh of Lifta (Arabic)

Today marks the anniversary of the Nabka ( Cataclysm). In human terms, on this day in 1948, saw the mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities and their villages,  it saw the massacre of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages.
Zionist forces used a terror campaign to expel 800, 000 Palestinians from their land. Today Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip, as well as pro-Palestinian supporters across the globe, will mark the 'catastrophe' and the inception of the State of Israel.Toaday is the Palestinians annual day of commemoration of this displacement. The vast majority of Palestinian refugees, both those outside the 1949 armistice lines at the wars' conclusion 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.
The Palestinian Authority has declared a general strike and mass rallies and marches are planned across the Palestinian Authority and in Arab cities in Israel. But today is also a day of celebation too in Gaza, because a deal has been reached where the hunger strike of thousands of Palestinian prisoners has ended, with Israeli authorities agreeing to concessions.With inmates currently being held under administrative detention being allowed for ther sentences to be renewable on the basis of new evidence. Also prisoners being held in solitary confienement will be allowed back to normal cells. So I guess a victory of sorts.
Unfortuantely there is no peace in stolen lands.... especially when people still cry for liberation and the right to return to their lands.
The above video is a story about a house and a woman - Sarah's mother died in 1998. Sara's father died soon after the Nabka, in 1952, leaving her mother to bring up eight young children. Aged 10 in 1948, Sara was the oldest daughter, so much of the upbrimnging of her brothers fell on her. Between 1967 and 1969, two of the brothers were arrested ad imprisoned. Sara's mother used to go daily to the main interrrogation center, the Moscobiyya, to ask about them. It was during one of these visits that sge got news that the Israeli army had surrounded the home. They were given 15 minutes to remove their belonging before the house was blown up. Then comes the most remarkable part- Sara's mother pitched a makeshift 'tent' on her land , and insisted on staying with her young children. Then stone by stone, she rebuilt her home. Of course the neighbours helped, also the children after school. But essentially it was her work, so onerous that her health was permanently affected. Other tragedies befall her but she remains firm in her faith in God and in the 'watan' (homeland), an inforgettable model to her children.

Sarah Oden speaks

"I am Sarah Ahmad Odeh. In 1948 I was about ten years old, and I remember how we left Lifta. In Lifta - the Jewish gangs began to attack the villages near Jerusalem, among them Lifta. They attacked us once, then a second time, but we didn't want to leave. Our home faced the Jaffa road, and all the firing was on it. So we left our house for a lower house, a little far from the Jews, and still the shooting followed us. My motheer was frightened for my brothers. She said to my father, 'Lets take them to a village near us so we shall be a little far from, the Jews'. He said, 'No, its impossible that I should leave my village. This is my village and my land. How can we leave?' She said, 'We wont take anything with us. Just the children. We'll take them away for a week until the shooting stops' - because all my brothers, all of us were young, and we were screaming. My father used to come and go through all the shooting, and he got wounded in his legs. He crawled on his hands and feet until he reached the house. He took us to another house. And still the shooting continued, night and day. Then they started to send shells, because our village, the old one, was on the road to Jaffa, and they took the Jaffa road and one side of Deir Yassin. They began to hit us with shells. And anyone who went outside of his house, they aimed at him and shot him. At that time they hit a Lifta coffee house and many people were killed. People wer maddened by the noise... so my mother convinced my father that we should leave for a week... ny father did not allow her even to take bread..."

This story and audio copyright Al Mahrig (the Levent) to contact Al Mashrig visit their website at
http://almashriq.hiof.no/ Reproduced audio March 2011 by Lifta Society, http://www.liftasociety.org.all/ pictures blong to their rightful owners. Contact if you have any questions, or concerns.

Al-Nabka Remembered. 

Last years post

on Nabka day

http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/63-years-of-nakba-day-of-catastrophe.html

Remember 64 years after the Nabka, 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. Against their will, the Nabka has divided the Palestinian people between Palestine and diaspora, between  Gaza and the West Bank, between those who hold a refugee identification card and who don't.
Still searching for dignity.  Rememberance acts as resistance to a country that  still tries to bury  and hide history.

Dier Yassin.... ghosts of massacre

Al Nabka - A poem
- Mary Pneuman

Dier Yassin
Almond and Cactus

Clinging roots of memory-
ghosts of massacre

Ein Karen
Almonds in green velvet
swelling pomegranete buds
grow more bitter now

Havara
Dreams of motherhood
lie still born at the checkpoint,
hope of Palestine