Gaza's main power plant stopped working on November 1st due to severe fuel shortages. Power cuts effect Gaza for 12-18 hours a day. The power cuts are having a serious impact on the abilities of hospitals to cope and primary healthcare clinics to provide essential services, plus sewage treatment and water filitration. This is effecting about 5,000 people. Immediate action is necessary, but this is something happens quite frequently in Gaza. it's people daily under siege.
This is the eighth day that the people of Gaza have had no street lights, sewage pumps, no hospital operating theatres, no fridges, incubators, no heaters, no lights, no power, no fuel for the power station,sanitation, health all disrupted.Their lives one of miserable toil, simply because Israel won't allow any diesel in, and the fact of life when under occupation. These people are trapped, powerless in everysense of the word. Suffering unimaginably as the leaders of our so called civilised world do nothing to help them. Why is Israel allowed to get away with this. This siege must end. Free Gaza, Free Palestine.Lots more information from here:-
Police State Britan seems possible as UK Government is about to pass legislation which will make behaviour percieved to 'cause nuisance or annoyance' a criminal offence. Thus anyone being 'anti-tory' could be arrested.
Personally who is causing the most nuisance or annoyance in Great Britain at this moment in time. That's right the bloody Tory's.
Last night, David Cameron gave a speech at a banquet calling for permanent austerity, we should all simply get used to it, this bungling hypocrite declared, whilst dressed up in all his finery, eating and quaffing the finest food and drink imaginable. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/11/david-cameron-policy-shift-leaner-efficient-state
Speaking at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in the City of London, he said the best way to keep the cost of living down was to take " difficult decisions on public spending" to leave a " state we can afford".
He said all this while his life of comfort doe not change one a bit, while the rest of us are forced between heating our homes and eating. There he stood standing behind a gold speech stand, surrounded by all the vestiges of wealth and the disproportion that it brings.
I can almost hear him sniggering 'yay to austerity,' but I also believe he is simply beyond the pale, completely out of touch, and after stuffing his face, his shirt it seems could no longer take the pressure and his shirt buttons popped open.
His words are hollow and empty, we have to kick him and his consorts out as soon as possible bfore he creates even more damage. We have to shout NO to austerity, kick out the Tories Now. Enough is enough.
Today November 11 1887, the Haymarket martyrs were hanged, wrongfully convicted for the deaths of eight police during a Chicago labor rally.
The Haymarket affair refers to the aftermath of a bombing that took at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight hour day, but the police then attempted to break up the public gathering. An unknown person threw a bomb at police as they acted to disperse the meeting. The bomb blast and ensuring gunfire resulted in the death of seven police officers and at least four civilians.
This was a time of mass strikes and demonstrations and violent repression by the police. The demonstrators were calling for greater power and economic security and the overthrow of capitalism, and were gaining much popular support, a reason why their were some who wanted to destroy the movement.
Four unarmed strikers had been shot and killed the day previously, and there were believed to be many spies and infiltrators among the strikers, and to this day many believe the Haymarket martyrs were used as scapegoats to stoke up division and resentment.
The next day martial law was declared, not just in Chicago but throughout the nation. Anti labor governments across the world used the Chicago incident to crush local union movements. Labor leaders were rounded up, houses were entered without search warrants and union newspapers were closed down
Inevitably anarchists were rounded up, and treated to what today would be termed rough justice, with August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer and George Engel being executed. A fifth, 23 year old Louis Lingg killed himself in his cell the night before.
Engel, Fischer, Parsons and Spies were taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods. They sang the Marsellaise, then the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. According to witnesses , in the moments before the men were hanged .Spies shouted, " The time will come when our silence, will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!" Witnesses reported that the condemned men did not die immediately when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the speakers visibly shaken.
250,000 people lined Chicago's streets during Parsons funeral procession, with the executions eliciting an international outcry. The Haymarket affair is now generally considered significant as the origin of the International May Day observances for workers, when in July 1889, a delegate from the American Federation of Labor recommended at a Labor conference in Paris that May 1 be set aside as International Labour Day n memory of the Haymarket martyrs and the injustice metered out to them, and has become a powerful reminder of the international struggle for workers rights, that I for one try not to forget.
Curtis D Bennet of Lawrence, Kansas was a military pilot and served in the marines during the vietnam war in 1968. He is also an outsstanding modern war poet. His poems are powerful , incisive, sometimes shocking, deeply thoughtful and deeply felt. Here I reprint this poem to reflect a different mode, on today Rememberance Sunday. Today I remember the hundreds of million slaughtered by swords, bombs and guns, vaporised into shadows on broken walls, the innocent lost, the propoganda, that dishonours peoples lives, the plunder and the carnage, histories full of lies and deceit. Heddwch/peace,
Remember Me
I was once the pride of this country,
The healthy, the young, the strong and brave,
Then I quickly became the acceptable casualty
In my country's undeclared war
In the name of national interest,
A country where I was too young to vote!
I went because I was still too young
to know any better, though others
Cleverly refused or ran away to hide.
I never once dreamed my own government
Would ever lie to its own people,
But I was mistaken and they did for years.
I fought their war in a hell for one year
Then came home and found another hell
Awaiting from thevery people and country
who determined I go in the first place
Then their war, suddenly became mine,
And I was the converted scapegoat!
Today, I am the broken bodies and minds
Shunted off out of sight, behind heavy doors
Of VA hospitals and mental wards to die
I am in wheel chairs and braces, in hospital beds;
I walk the streets, I wander the railroad tracks,
I sleep beneath the stars.
A 100 years after his birth, and more than half a century after his untimely death, Albert Camus still resonates with the modern world. On 4 January, 1960, this writer, intellectiual, and absurdist philosopher skidded of the road whilst a passenger in a car, and was killed instantly.
On all accounts he was of a sensitive nature, a seeker of maximum unity. An admirer of revolutionary syndicalism, anarchists, conscientious objectors, and all manner of rebels. Standing against totalitarianism in the form of Stalinism and fascism, and was never afraid to speak his truth.
Born in extreme poverty, in French ruled Algeria, to an illiterate mother who was partially deaf, who lost his father in the horror that was World War 1, despite tremendous disadvantages by the age of 44 he was collecting the Nobel Prize for literature.
At the time his philosophical writings, which continued the themes explored in his novels - the absurdity of the human condition and the necessity of rebelling against it, were not popular with critics, but his words and their power live on. Does the realization of the absurd reguire suicide? " No" Camus answered it requires revolt. " The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart."
Long have I been an admirer of this man who was not afraid to preach justice, to reconsider his stance, to take candour and reflect, to be as honest as he thought best .After all there is no authority but yourself.
With this year being his centenary year, I am sure there will be a renaissance of interest in this great man, this visionary of the absurdity of life, who expressed so articulately that human life is rendered ultimately meaningless by the fact of death, his themes of the alienated stranger, or outsider, the rebel in revolt, tempered by his own experience, showing us the readers, the individuals paths where we can truly be free.
He has undoubtedly become one of the most profoundly original thinkers of the modern age. For him the urge to revolt was one of the ' essential dimensions' of the human race, seen in man's continuous struggle against the conditions of his existence, through solidarity and our shared humanity.
It was his persistent efforts 'to illuminate the problem of the human conscience in our time' that were one of the main reasons he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and I for one am very grateful to have discovered his enduring words, that continue to flow with inspiration.
" Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion" - from, Albert Camus's famous celebrated essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
An earlier post with more biographical detail can be read here :-
Crossing the Bridge of sighs,
I return home to write,
to fill in blank pages,
with vapours of love and rage,
shadows pass, intervening with time,
holding on and letting go,
in moments of silent whisper.
Winter wraps around my breath,
drifting over autumns flight,
dreams drift, vast and unbound,
releasing immaculate flames of hope.
The daily surge of passion,
undertakes its sustaining journey,
as meanings wake from cavernous sleep,
relinquishing visions of intent and faith,
into the lifeblood of growing destination,
and the kiss of tomorrow's promise.
I know that I'm not the only one effected by depression, but on this day November the 5th, 2013, at least I am safe in the warm environs of a West Walian library. But I really wish I could have mustered up some energy, and taken to the streets, to join other people who really have had enough, as this manufactured austerity rings and their darkness implodes, I commend people now full of indignation, burning bright with rage.
Today hundreds of anti-austerity campaigners will converge on Westminster Bridge, to express anger at the the failed government economic policies. To protest against the Tory's continued assault on the very fabric of the state, and on the most vulnerable members of society, in particularly the poor, the ill, the unemployed and the disabled.
Parallell protests will be taking place all across Britain as part of the 'Bonfire of Austerity' which was initially set up by the Peoples Assembly Against Austerity initiativehttp://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/. These actions are supported by more than 25 groups including trade unions and pressure groups , and will see giant energy bills set on fire to highlight the growing living costs and falling wages which are now the sharpest in Europe.
The mainstream media will probably avoid reporting it, but the spirit of dissent lives on. People raging with defiance against a government that simply does not give a ****.
Anonymous are also getting involved with their own 'Million Mask March' campaign http://millionmaskmarch.org/locations. Am sure it will be a blast.
Gil Scot Herons might have said 'The Revolution will not be televised', but enough is enough the people cry, remember, remember the 5th of November.
Recently discovered the work of Anna Kavan. Born Helen Woods, in Cannes, France. Kavan was the main character in her novel Let Me Alone.
A lifelong heroin addict she adopted the name after a spell in asylums in Switzerland and England.
As well as being a writer, she was also a talented painter and interior designer.
Her early writings were fairly conventional, but after changing her name, her works took on a more transformative air. Apparently she also used to daily take amphetimines whilst writing.
Her books seem to weave between a fevered imagination that finds their way into her often unclassifiable books, that are filled with hauntingly surreal magical landscapes. They contain an otherworldly strangeness that I like a lot.
She was to become an influence on writers as diverse as Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Anais Nin and Jean Rhys.
She was sadly found dead in her London home clutching a syringe. If you have not read her previously, I strongly recommend you checking her out.
Stark Vision - detail from self-portrait by Anna Kavan
The following is an extract from her 1947 book ( a classic in my humble opinion) Sleep Has His house. ' TRUTH, it's everything. The man who said, What is truth? certainly touched on a big subject. The truth of the matter is that there's far too much truth in the world. The world, from whichever you observe it, is altogether too full of truth. It isn't easy to recognise this truth in the first place, but it's impossible ever to ignore it once it's been grasped. Every single possibility or impossibility is true somewhere to someone at some time. It's true that the earth is as round as an orange and as flat as a pankcake. It's true that the wicked island goddess Ragda is a good goddess when she takes off her mask. Black magic on top, white magic underneath. That proves that black's whit, doesn't it? It's true that the idea odf America is a bright and shining thing in the mind. It's true that the idea of America is a crude and brutal land inhabited by adolescents and gangsters. Defeatism's true; war's true. So's idealism and the hope of a better society. You pay your money and you take your choice. Civilisation's gone down the drain. Utopia's just round the corner. It's true that civilization marches on: atomic energy plus universal war. The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah; H.M.V, recording. That's a truth, although universal war. There's the truth that you go to bed with and the truth that wakes you up at three o'clock in the morning when the tigers are jumping up and down on the roof and eternity is flapping at the earth like somebody shaking a rug. the truth of loving and hating, being an extrovert and an introvert, a success and a failure, travelling all over the world, living your whole life in one place, having security, accepting all risks. Then there's the truth that you find with the dirty glasses stacked in the sink. That's a different sort of truth. Books continue to be written in one truth and read in another. The radio announces various kinds of truth to suit every listener. Atomic warfare is true and so is the Sermon ofon the Mount. Truth is everywhere, in eveything, all the time. That's why it's true. It's true that all this is obvious and has been said often before. That truth's as true as any other truth too.'
( dedicated this new year morning to Ian Duncan Smith)
You who live safe
In your warm houses
you who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
