Joe Hill ( 7/19/1879 -19/11/15) Joe Hill's Last Will

Joe  Hill the workers martyr was executed by firing squad, today on November 19th , 1915, framed for a murder that many believe he did not commit.An innocent man condemned to death for his passion. Many historians have come to recognise it as one of the worst travesties of Justice in American history. After a trial that was riddled with biased rulings and suppression of important defence evidence and other violations of judicial procedure, which was characteristic of many cases involving labour radicals. A guard reported that at about 10.pm, Joe Hill handed him a poem, through the bars of his cell. It was his last will, which has since become a prized piece of poetry in the heritage of the American Labour Movement.
Born Joel  Emmanuel Hagglund in  Sweden, he emigrated to the United States in 1902, where he changed his name to Joseph Hillstrom. After several years as an itinerant worker - a 'hobo' he joined the IWW (The International Workers of the World) .  A wobbly organiser, balladeer, he was also a man of pride, the flag that he proudly followed was was one of international solidarity.
On the same day that he was executed he sent a telegram to fellow International Worker of the World (IWW), Bill Hayword, telling him "Don't waste time mourning , Organise!" An estimated 30,000 people attended his funeral in an impressive 'singing demonstration' under the banner ' In Memorium - Joe Hill - Murdered by the Capitalist Class.  A rebel to the core, his voice still rings out loud and clear, venerated and celebrated.

Joe Hill's Last Will

My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don't need to fuss and moan
Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.

My body - Oh - If I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again
This is my last and Final Will
Good luck to all of you,

- Joe Hill

Joe Hill's Last Will - Utah Phillips

Paul Robeson - Joe Hill

( one of the most stirring, emotional versions of this song I know.)

Doris Lessing (22/10/19 - 17/11/13) - Uncompromising Spirit R.I.P

Nobel Prize winning novelist, short-story writer,poet, playwright, biographer has sadly passed away at the grand old age of 94. She was the author of over 55 published works of fiction, and non-fiction, a figure as iconic and inspiring as she was polarising in some quarters.
Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War , was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia, her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promiose of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like many other women from southern Africa she did not graduate from high school, but she was to make herself into a self-educated intellectual.
After moving to Britain in the 1930's, she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, and she joined the Communist Party. However, during the postwar years, she became increasingly diillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, she had moved and settled in London with her young son. Her first published novel, The Grass is Singing was published in the same year, the start of a a very prolific output.
Many of her brilliant literary works take in themes in defence of freedom, third world causes and the developing world, and  often from a biographical slant, her prose  marked by its vividness and effectiveness. Her range was vast, not afraid to experiment with form, even turning her hand at science fiction,  engaging between idealism and reality. Alternative ways of seeing and living were also  themes that ran through her work, (she herlself explore sufi mysticism in the 1960's), and the exploration of human nature  being central to her words, investigating its curses in an attempt to find cures..
Her life was marked with a reputation for being a maverik and outspoken, with a refusal to compromise. Her subversive spirit meant that she pusued truth whilst maintaining her individual tongue.
In recognition of her achievement she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, at the age of 88, becomming the oldest woman to do so, and only the 11th woman ever to recieve the prize.
This great writer was also a reluctant feminist, who was first and foremost a storyteller, loyal to the power of the written word, and her belief in it never wavered.
She "saw the Soviet Empire, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, the British Empire, the White Supremacy of South Afica and the Southern Rhodesia." her words capturing the spirit of her time, and now as they shimmer, the spirit of ours.
Doris Lessing R.I.P

' But for a while the dance went on-
That is how it seems to me now
Slow forms moving calm through
Pools of light like  gold net on the floor.
It might have gone on, dream-like, forever.

Doris Lessing
- from Fable, 1959

' Very  few people care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few.
Very few people have guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies, or cannot be born'
-Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook


' Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.'

Doris Lessing - The reluctant heroine

 

Gaza without Electricity.

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:-

http://www.map-uk.org/

Sleepwalking into Police State Britain as Tories apparently dislike opposition

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.

http://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/sleepwalking-further-into-police-state-britain-as-law-offers-new-powers-of-repression/

David Cameron calls for permanent Austerity whilst attending banquet of richness

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.

Haymarket Martyr's Anniversary

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.

Remembering the Haymarket Affair

Remember Me -Curtis D Bennett

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.

Albert Camus (7/11/13 - 4/1/60) - His Enduring Appeal

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 :-

Albert Camus - The Smoking Philosopher

http://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/albert-camus-71113-4160-smoking.html


Pictures and Quotes from Albert Camus

 

Albert Camus - The Man who made thinking cool;
music by the Velvet Underground

Camus and the Stranger ( Rare BBC documentary)

 

 

Autumn Rhythm

          
                         Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm; 1950 

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.

Bonfire of Austerity

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.

.