Just Imagine New York as Gaza!

The Israeli-Palestinian war in 1948 took one area that had been a single, territorial, cultural, ecomomic unit and divided it into seperate areas. After the Israeli occupation  in 1967, there was freedom of movement among the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, which as the occupation continued and people began to resist the occupation - became restricted.
Beginning in the 1990's, Israel  began to seal the borders in ways that were really hard for Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Imagine that overnight the mayor of New York declares  that people from Brooklyn can no longer enter Manhattan.People cut off, seperated from friends and loved ones. Imagine F16's roaring over your head, while you try to sleep. Imagine a daily life  under seige, under blockade, restriction of movement, no equal rights, access to clean water and saintation etc etc. This the daily ordeal of the People Of Gaza. Having endured one of the longest blockades in human history, resulting in suffering for the 1.7 million Palestinians living under siege in just 365 sq/km of land. Half of the population are under 18, and two/thirds are refugees.Subject  to attacks  by land, air and sea.
We must  continue to confont Israelis abuses  of the Palestinian's human and political rights, and challenge Israel's illegal seige, keeping pressure on our own Governments to take action on this issue, and  by supporting the many initiatives out there to help the dispirited people of Gaza.

' No man can put a chain about the ankles of his fellow man, without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that sociry is an organised conspracy to oppress. rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Whatever the future may have  in store for us, one thing is certain - this new revolution in human thought will never go backward. When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world."

- Frederick Douglass ( 2/1818 -20/2/95, social reformer, escaped African-American Slave)

I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier - the first anti-war hit record

Released in 1915, I Didn't Raise My Son to be a Soldier, sung here by the Peerless Quartet, was the first commercially successful anti-ar record and featured prominenlty yn the American ant-war record and featured prominently in the American anti-war movement opposing US entry in the first world war. The warmongering ex-president Theodore Roosevelt objected to the song's message of peace and its early feminism: " Foolish people who applaud a song entitled "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A soldier" are just the people who would also in their hearts aplaud a song entitled "I Didn't Raise my Girl To Be A mother."

Follow stop the War Coalition

http://www.stopwar.org.uk

Goodbye Sue Townsend (2/4/46 - 10/4/14)

Sue Townsend, passionate socialist,republican, humourist, and author died on Thursaday after a short illness. illness. She was best  known as the author of the succesful Adrian Mole series, which I thoroughly remember, enjoying at the time, when I too was a spotty teenager growing up in the early years of Thatcher's Britains.

She was a big fan of Aneurin Bevan, and used to be a staunch supporter of the Labour Party, but felt left down by them, especially under Tony Bliar during the Iraq war, a war that she opposed. She knew back then that the New Labour bubble was about to burst.
Her work and her life  was informed by her sense of where she came from. The daughter of a post man from Leicester, she left school at 15 working at a series of jobs including factory worker, shop assistant and youth worker, a secret voracious reader, it was with sadness that she was later to lose her sight, and be unable to read her beloved books.
She married a sheet-metal worker aged 18 and leaves behind four children. She had suffered a stroke at Christmas, which had affected her memory and made it " difficult to get the tongue around words." Back in 2009 she said, she would not  be goin on to 'make old bones.'
The world hs lost another fine writer, often  both poignant and funny, theres always a special sadness for writers, who have helped shape our youth. Sue Townsend R.I.P

" I am a passionate socialist, but, God, I can't stand them now. I support the memory and the history of the party and I consider that these lot are interlopers. . . I could  still cry to think about shock and awe, to watch it on television and think 'there are bombers and they're bombing children. That Blair could sit and watch that, with his kids, possibly. How  would he have explained it to his children?"

Killing Joke - Requiem (A Floating Leaf Always Reaches The Sea Dub Mix:- For David Cameron)

What is God's name?

Does she/he listen to music like this?

If David Cameron thinks he's doing God's work you have to wonder what he worships? That's if he worships any religious figure at all, I think he would get along with Mammon, though, the very personification of greed. Personally think David Cameron has been deluded for a long time now. I do know another thing, that in the wake of Maria Miller's resignation, there's a whole load of people out there, hoping and praying that David Cameron does the same. 'The Bible tells us to bear one another's burdens" he said yesterday, but  his weight on the world is surely to much for us to take, this country of ours shares many faiths and traditions, one thing that is definitely not making this country stronger is David Cameron's Tory Government. He certainly has not listened to the passages from a certain book about giving to the poor, god's apparent deep concern for the poor and social justice. 
So to put it quite simply.

Paul Robeson (9/4/29- 23/1/76) - The People of Wales still proudly remember you.

Keep hearing a lot of bad news today, but I am rminded today that the inevitable Paul Robeson was born today. Not only was he an exeptional athlete, cultural scholar, and actor and singer,  he was also a man dedicated to the causes of freedom and social justice, as a political activist he was hounded and persecuted in the U.S for his opinions. His name and historical contribution are still silenced in most textbooks in the U.S.A , where he was was caught up in the midst of the  McCarthy witchhunts.
Yet all around the world, especially here in Wales, his voice still carries much resonance, gives us some hope.
His first contact  with Wales came in 1928, when he was performing in 'Showboat' in the West End. Whilst in his hotel he was attracted  by the sound of singing from outside. The singing was coming from unemployed  miners who had  marched to London to draw attention to the hardship and suffering endured by thousands of mining families in South Wales. He went outside to meet them, listened to their plight, recognised a shared suffering, and a mutual bond was born. He was to visit Wales many times, between 1928 and 1939, performing at Neath, Swansea and Cardiff. In 1940 he starred in the film Proud Valley, set in South Wales, that captured the harsh realities of Welsh coal miners' lives.
Most famously in 1938, he sang and addressed a massed audience in the Pavillion, Mountain Ash, at the International Brigade Memorial Service, organised to commemorate the 33 Welshmen who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War.
He addressed the audience thus :-

' I am here because I know these brave fellows fought not only for me but for the freedom of the people of the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here.'

Long may he remain an inspiration. His name remembered as one synonomous with equal rights, the search for justice, peace and solidarity,the unquavering thirst for freedom.

Paul Robeson - Land of My Fathers.

Paul Robeson sings for the workers at Sydney Opera House.

Paul Robeson - We are climbing Jacob's ladder. 

Plant Trees Not Bombs in Afghanistan

It was  the jolting vibrations
that shook our senses,
direction-less,
nonetheless directed by fellow humans.
Our eyes darted from mysterious fears
of losing one another.
"There's been an explosion. Don't come this way!",
torn by our outspoken wish to huddle together,
as if madness could be scattered
among the fragile shells of ourselves.
as if we could
dream the unknown away.

Read more and view photos  here:-

http://vcnv.org/voting-with-their-feet

Thatcher: Tramp The Dirt Down - Elvis Costello

For Margaret Thatcher: 

To this day she remains one of the most controversial and divisive figures to emerge from British politics.

I still remain a proud member of the Thatcher hating society, this so called Iron Lady was responsible for plunging the countinto a pit of unemplyment, riots and despair, selling off  anything of worth. Took us off to war, shortly after waging her own with the so called 'enemy within', a lifelong friend of fascist despot, General Pinochet, etc etc. Her policies made life a misery for millions.

She sought to suffocate all that was around her, rather than give life. An enemy of the people.

Ding Dong, one year on the witch is dead but  her dark legacy still lingers though, time that we buried that also....

Kwibuka - Remembered

Yesterday across Rwanda, thousands gathered in stadiums, shurches and Community centres to take part in  Kwibuka -  the flame of Rememberance.
20 years ago marked the start of 100 of the darkest days in human history. 1 million people were killed in the Rwandan Genocide. We should not forget.
Yet  there are thousands of  lives on the line right now b- lives that are being extinguished because of bigotry, prejudice, hatred and cruelty. lives  that are being  lost with the full awareness - and complicity - of government officials.
In this moment in  time  in Burma, thousands of Rohingya Muslims are being persecuted, languishing in camps where many thousands are being forced to live. Then there are the thousands of Palestinians, stranded in Yarmouk Refugee camp in Syria.
We should not  forget the damage done to our own morality by choosing to ignore genocide, wherever  it is taking place.
Here are some words from Bobby Kennedy, as addressed  to a group of young people from Soweta, South Africa.

" It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." 

Rainer Maria Rilke (4/12/1875 -29/12/26) - Not Poor

 

We are not poor. We are just without riches,
we who have no will, no world:
marked with  the marks of the latest anxiety,
disfigure, stripped of leaves.

Around us swirls the dust of the cities,
the garbage clings  to us.
We are shunned as if contaminated,
thrown away like broken pots, like bones,
the last year's calender.

And yet if our Earth needed to
she could weave us together like roses
and make of us a garland

For each being is cleaner than washed stones
and endlessy yours, and like  an animal
who knows  already in its first blind moments
its need for one thing only-

to let ourselves be poor like that - as we truly are

Photo: Child and her mother, FSA Rehabilitation Clients, 1939 by Dorothea Lange

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