International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

 

Every year on 23 August, the world observes the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. The day is marked to “inscribe the tragedy of the slave trade in the memory of all peoples,” according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade still lives on. It began in the 15th century and only ended in the 19th. Even today, the descendants of slaves deal with horrific racism. This led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. Nothing in human history compares with the slave trade’s magnitude, cruelty or sustained brutality.

Slavery was not a new institution in the 15th century. It was invented even before the Middle Ages. In ancient times, the losing side in war was often enslaved and made to pay for its misfortune with servitude. Slavery was common in the Roman world. In the 10th century, the Vikings captured men and women in their raids and then sold them off in the slave markets along the Volga River and the Caspian Sea.  

The colonial empires of Western Europe were the main benefiters from the transatlantic slave trade. The trade transported people, mainly from Africa, in inhuman conditions to work as slaves in the colonial settlements in Haiti, Caribbean, and other parts of the world.

As the slave trade developed, Europeans created a racist ideology which could be used to justify the trade. Africans were thought to be sub-human, uncivilised, and inferior to Europeans in every way. And as they were ˜not one of us, they could be bought and sold. The development of racism is linked to the slave trade. The slave trade could not have continued without this ideology to justify it. Racism cannot be ignored in any study of the slave trade.

The English had equated blackness with death and evil centuries before they met any black people. Thus the first reaction to people with black skin was to assume that they were some form of devil or monster. From this, and from travellers tales, arose the stereotype of the African, as barbarous, prone to excessive sexual desire, lazy, untrustworthy and even cannibalistic. There were few who challenged this prejudiced view. Richard Ligon, in his book A true & exact history of the Island of Barbados, published in 1657, wrote against the popular view. He believed ‘that there are as honest, faithfull, and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe

From about 1600, with the development of science in Europe, racism could be˜proved  scientifically. Scientists and philosophers like David Hume could state that Africans were˜naturally inferior to the whites It was widely believed that Africans and Europeans had developed separately. Many, like Sir Thomas Herbert, writing in 1634, believed that Africans must be descended from apes and were part of a separate and inferior race. This was long before Charles Darwin theory of evolution, which showed that all humans are part of the same species.

In the era of joint-stock companies, the transatlantic slave trade exploded. The United Kingdom’s National Archives tell us that “Britain transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to the British colonies in the Caribbean, North and South America and to other countries” between 1640 and 1807. An estimated 7 million slaves were transported from Africa to America in the 18th century. This figure for the period between the 16th to the 19th century is estimated at 10 to 12 million. 

Human beings were forcibly removed from their African families and communities and loaded onto ships owned and fitted out by Liverpool, Bristol and West Country merchants, to endure the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the New World. Only 466,000 reached their destination, and 99,000 died on route, and their bodies most likely flung overboard to be eaten by sharks.

For those who managed to survive, they were then sold at auction into the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Caribbean and the southern states of America.

The majority, some 414,000, ended up as field slaves on Jamaica, the Leeward and Windward islands. Here their daily task was working the cane fields, harvesting the stalks and processing them in the crushing and boiling houses and

 Mortality rates were extremely high and the slaves were accommodated in primitive conditions with only the most basic food. For much of the period they could be tortured, murdered and raped with impunity. Those that did survive could only expect to live another 2 to 4 years, so bad were the working conditions in the plantations. Many slaves tried to escape or rebel, and even suicides were a daily occurrence.

Meanwhile the  merchants become exceptionally rich on this human misery.The fabulous wealth generated by slavery and the trading system which thrived around it provided the capital for the development of industry and commerce, which laid the foundations for the birth of modern capitalism. The fact was that the wealth of the Western countries was built on the backs of Black slave labor is a point many historians seem to conveniently forget or ignore.

In the 18th and 19th century, many white people were horrified by the brutality  of  the slave trade and wanted for freedom for the slaves. But this led the people who supported it to develop theories to justify what they were doing. They claimed that some slaves had caught a rapidly spreading disease, the symptoms of which made the slaves run away! Blacks were naturally lazy, people were told, which is why they hated working on the plantation. Defenders of the slave trade also said that blacks were less intelligent than whites; they were “sub-human” and had tails. These ideas were backed by church leaders, writers and academics and soon a large number of myths about black people were spread about Europe. “The African slave in America was happier than in his own civilisation”— slavery supporter quoted in CLR James “The Black Jacobins”

Also the belief in the superiority of the British and European races fed the expansion of the empire. The British empire grew from the idea ˜that the British were the best race to rule the world  a view expressed by Cecil Rhodes, the colonial administrator who founded the British colony of Rhodesia, in
Central Africa (now Zimbabwe).

 During the lengthy reign of King George III, from 1760 to 1820, Atlantic slave uprisings and a multiracial coalition of abolitionists transformed the British public’s view of the slave trade at the same time the Crown supported its continuation. 

The night of 22-23 August 1791 saw the beginning of an uprising in Santo Domingo, in modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic. The uprising in the French colony inspired the Haitian Revolution. It also played a major role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.The uprising conveyed a universal demand for freedom that transcends all limits of time and space. It speaks to humanity as a whole, without distinction of origin or religion, and continues to resonate now with undiminished force.

Therefore, the United Nations (UN) decided to commemorate this day as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.

 Although the Slave Trade Act of 1807 had made it illegal for British subjects to buy or sell African captives, demand for slaves remained high in the Caribbean, Brazil, the Spanish colonies, and the United States. After 1808, as the illegal slave trade flourished, European enslavers transported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas, many in ships built, financed, or outfitted in Britain.

 In the decades after the abolition of the British slave trade, enslaved and free people of African descent petitioned the Crown repeatedly, seeking royal intervention on their behalf in their quest for liberty and civil rights. These petitions largely fell on deaf ears. Even after Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape Colony (South Africa), enslaved people did not immediately receive their freedom. The negotiated settlement required enslaved men and women to continue to labor for their former masters as unpaid “apprentices” and also granted 20million pounds in compensation to Britons with financial interests in slavery. Formerly enslaved people and their descendants received nothing, other than recognition of their status as free subjects of the British sovereign.

However the pro-slavery views of the king and his sons bolstered the efforts of the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants to delay the abolition of the British slave trade for nearly two decades. George’s third son, Prince William (the future King William IV), served in the Royal Navy as a teenager and was the first member of the royal family to visit Britain’s North American and Caribbean colonies. While stationed in Jamaica, William witnessed colonial slavery firsthand and approved of what he saw. In 1799, William, now the Duke of Clarence, delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords against the abolition of the slave trade. Printed by the pro-slavery lobby and widely circulated, his speech was viewed by many Britons as representative of the attitudes of the royal family.

It was only after 1838, with both slavery and the apprenticeship system at an end in Britain’s Atlantic empire, the British monarchy publicly supported the anti-slavery cause for the first time.

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its AbolitionThe day is marked to remember and honour the victims of the slave trade and the systemic racism they endured. It also hopes to foster critical analyses of such practices that might transform into modern forms of exploitation and slavery.

 The UN hoped that the day would be an opportunity for collective reconsideration of the historical causes, consequences, and methods of the tragedy.

 UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that while the transatlantic slave trade was abolished more than two centuries ago, the world continues “to live in its shadows of racial injustice”. He called upon the need to combat racism, dismantle racist structures, and reform institutions.

 Officially acknowledging that the royal family both fostered and profited from the enslavement of millions, and affirming a commitment to reparatory justice as the Caribbean Community has urged the governments of Britain and Europe to do, is the very least the present-day British monarchy owes to the descendants of enslaved people.

The Crown’s act of willful forgetting demonstrates how easy it was to overlook,then and now,the pivotal role played by the royal family in accelerating England’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the development of an Atlantic empire built on the backs and blood of African and Indigenous people.

On 23 August this year, we honour the memory of the men and women who, in Saint- Domingue in 1791, revolted and paved the way for the end of slavery and dehumanization. We honour their memory and that of all the other victims of the slave trade and slavery, for whom they stand..

We pay tribute to all those who campaigned, black and white, to abolish the trafficking of enslaved labour, particularly the enslaved African men and women themselves.  Once and for all, it is time to abolish human exploitation and to recognize the equal and unconditional dignity of each and every individual on Earth. Today, let us remember the victims and freedom fighters of the past so that they may inspire future generations to build just societies while continuing to oppose all forms of modern slavery, and remembering that ending Slavery's legacy of racism is  a global imperative for justice.

As we pause to remember the horrors of the past, we are driven by the acts of defiance and the relentless efforts that abolished slavery. Yet, amidst our progress, we're confronted with the unsettling truth that millions of people globally are still exploited in modern slavery, including over 100,000 in the UK alone.

Remembering Black Revolutionary George Jackson : Soledad Brother

 

Black Revolutionary George Jackson was shot to death in prison on Aug. 21, 1971, nearly one month before his 30th birthday. There is still controversy surrounding the circumstances of his death. Authorities reported that Jackson was killed  by a tower guard, who claimed George was trying to escape.. The uprising left three guards and two prisoners dead, including Jackson. James Baldwin declared at a rally in Westminster, “No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.” 

George L. Jackson was born in Chicago, Ill on September 23rd, 1941,and moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of 14.  As a teen, he had a number of juvenile problems, which landed him in trouble with the police and resulted in him spending time in the Youth Authority Corrections facility in Paso Robles, CA. In 1960,  aged only eighteen, George Jackson was accused of stealing $70 from a gas station in Los Angeles. Though there was evidence of his innocence, his court-appointed lawyer maintained that because Jackson had a record (two previous instances of petty crime), he should plead guilty in exchange for a light sentence in the county jail. He did, and received an indeterminate sentence of one year to life. Jackson spent the next ten years in Soledad Prison, seven and a half of them in solitary confinement. Instead of succumbing to the dehumanization of prison existence, he transformed himself into the leading theoretician of the prison movement and a brilliant writer.

 While incarcerated at Soledad Prison in Salinas, CA. he became politicized and began studying the theories of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Fidel Castro. Jackson was also inspired by the powerful events of the Cuban revolution and the struggle of the people of Vietnam, as well as the anti-colonial rebellions going on all over the so-called Third World. He developed strong ideas viewing capitalism as the source of the oppression of people of color and became the leader in the politicization of Black and Chicano prisoners in Soledad.  

 When he started teaching other prisoners about the conditions that had got them into prison, and when he started organising the other prisoners to defend themselves, he was put in solitary confinement, where he did seven and a half years. While in prison, he joined the Black Panther Party, and became one of its leading intellectuals and public figures.

On January 16, 1970, in response to the death of three Black Muslims, a white guard (John Mills) was killed; In his twenty-eighth year, Jackson and two other black inmates , Fleeta Drumgo and John Cluchette, were falsely accused of murdering the guard.

The accused men were brought in chains and shackles to two secret hearings in Salinas County. A third hearing was about to take place when John Cluchette managed to smuggle a note to his mother: "Help, I'm in trouble." With the aid of a state senator, his mother contacted a lawyer, and so commenced one of the most extensive legal defenses in U.S. history. According to their attorneys, Jackson, Drumgo, and Clutchette were charged with murder not because there was any substantial evidence of their guilt, but because they had been previously identified as black militants by the prison authorities. If convicted, they would face a mandatory death penalty under the California penal code. Within weeks, the case of the Soledad Brothers emerged as a political cause célèbre for all sorts of people demanding change at a time when every American institution was shaken by Black rebellions in more than one hundred cities and the mass movement against the Vietnam War.

For many supporters, the issue was the belief that the Soledad Brothers were victims of a prison conspiracy.  In August 1970, Jackson’s teenage brother Jonathan was killed in the Marin County Courthouse in an attempt to rescue his brother.  Angela Davis, then a professor of philosophy at UCLA and the key organizer of the Soledad Brothers campaign, was also a member of the Communist Party USA and a “fellow traveler” of the Black Panther Party.was named as an accomplice to the crime because the guns used in the takeover were registered in her name. but was later acquitted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. A possible explanation for the gun connection is that Jonathan Jackson was her bodyguard.  Thomas Magee, the sole survivor among the attackers, eventually pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975. 

 Jackson was able to smuggle out his book, Blood in My Eye, only a few days before his murder. It was published the autumn after his death. His book is a political manifesto, relating Black struggle to a larger struggle against imperialism, colonialism and the working class.  Itt remains essential reading, even today. 

The publication of Jackson’s  brilliant book "Soledad Brother"  which contains the letters that he wrote from 1964 to 1970, which  is dedicated to Jonathan Jackson, was released to critical acclaim in France and the United States, with an introduction by the renowned French dramatist Jean Genet, in the fall of 1970. Soledad Brother went on to become a classic of Black literature and political philosophy, selling more than 400,000 copies and acts as his testament and added to his visibility. These uplifting writings, are the words of a prisoner who would not compromise with the authorities because he knew it would do no good. In a letter to his mother he expressed his outrage toward the society he was born into, “I was born knowing nothing and am a product of my total surroundings. I blame the capitalistic dog, the imperialistic, cave-dwelling brute that kidnapped us, pulled the rug from under us, made us a caste within his society with no vertical economic mobility. As soon as all this became clear to me and I developed the nerve to admit it to myself, that we were defeated in war and are now captives, slaves or actually that we inherited a neoslave existence, I immediately became relaxed, always expecting the worst, and started working on the remedy.”

He felt that a great injustice had been committed against him by his excessive and indeterminate sentence. He came to believe that he would never be allowed to walk out of prison alive. He became increasingly defiant in his attitude toward the justice system in general, particularly with regard to the racial disparities in rates of incarceration and lengths of sentencing.

The Attica prison rebellion https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/09/attica-prison-uprising1971-and-its.html in September is often speculated as a direct outcome of his death, the most public revolutionary prison  rights activist murdered and silenced by the state apparatus.  

Bob Dylan  famously wrote a song about his legacy after his murder, 

 

Bob Dylan - George Jackson

  

 I woke up this mornin’
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

He wouldn’t take shit from no one
He wouldn’t bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love
Lord, Lord
So they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground.

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground 

 George Jackson stands alongside Malcolm X https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/02/malcolm-x-no-sell-out-19525-21265.html and countless others who became politically and socially aware of racism and capitalism’s underdevelopment of black America while locked down behind the walls of prison. He represents an important ideological thread within the international movement against colonialism, imperialism and racism. He was sickened by the traditional ‘left’, and felt that their lack of courage, their refusal to keep up with new developments and their comfortable middle class backgrounds prevented them from organising real change in society. He took to the Black Panther Party quickly, because he saw that it was an organisation that spoke to the street, to the dispossessed, the downtrodden; an organisation that *organised*, not just talked. In ‘Blood in My Eye’, he puts it very simply:

“We are faced with two choices: to continue as we have done for forty years fanning our pamphlets against the hurricane, or to build a new revolutionary culture that we will be able to turn on the old culture”

 Jackson’s legacy is one of solidarity and strength. His doctrine was not one of aggression, or Black separatism, but of Black love and unity. He recognized the immense power of solidarity within all marginalized communities. His doctrine was one that allowed for the Black community to display strength through education, unity, and self-defense.  

One of the most dangerous components of his doctrine was his use of racial unity. Although focused on Black struggle and strengthening his community, he reached out to all cultural groups, seeing the revolutionary potential in all oppressed people. He was a part of organizing or an inspiration to many Latino prison struggles as well. Additionally, his anti-imperialist framework guided him towards supporting all countries under the United State’s imperialist grip, in favor openly of the revolutions in Venezuela and Cuba. His ability to unite all those around him, oppressed by the predominantly white system that held him in chains, made him a dangerous man to the status quo.  

The historian Walter Rodney summed up George Jackson’s contribution brilliantly: 

 “George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective frightened the US power structure into physically liquidating him… The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.” http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/477.html 

The United States imprisons 2.3 million women and men. This is the highest incarceration rate in the advanced capitalist world. Every day this system continues its deadly assault on working people, the poor, youth, and people of color. Another George Jackson is being born every day. As long as there are inequalities among class and race in the criminal justice system and the prison population continues to grow, the story of George Jackson will remain relevant. He was convinced that he (and many others) would never be treated fairly by the system. As a result he took matters into his own hands. As he once wrote, “Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”

Frederico Garcia Lorca ( 5/6/1896 -19/8/36 ) - Death of a Poet

Frederico Garcia Lorca, Andalucian  poet, dramatist, artist, hero of mine, and ardent socialist was  most  likely murdered by fascist militiamen  on this day  the nineteenth of August 1936. Born on 5 June 1898 in the village of Fuente Vaqeurtos in the province of Granada, a man ahead of his time, avant gardist, homosexual and restless traveller, the most  gypsy of poets , a term he rejected, friend of surrealists, developing his own ingenious style, full of lyrical freshness and spontaneity. His father, Federico García Rodriguez, was a prosperous farmer. Vicenta Lorca Romero. His mother was a schoolteacher before becoming Federico's second wife.

Throughout his all too short but trailblazing life, death had been his central artistic theme, it seems he had foretold his own violent death, when he wrote  ' Then I realised I had been murdered. They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches - but they did not find me. They never found me. They never found me.'

Few artists, have represented and embodied their nations collective spirit more than Lorca - which makes  the tragic account of his death all the more heartbreaking.

 Lorca was deeply tied to his Andalusian roots, and they were a source of his lifelong fascination with cante jondo (“deep song”), the hypnotic, wailing music of the Gypsies. It is the unvarnished, primeval cousin of flamenco, which was festooned with more rhythmic drive and cosmopolitan appeal—“cante jondo for tourists,” in Lorca’s words. Cante jondo embraces many cultures: Jewish, Byzantine, Moorish, Indian. Some of the songs are bitter reflections on hunger and poverty. But Lorca was more fascinated by the natural imagery of cante jondo—wind, sea, earth, and moon, the locus classicus of his poetry. The groundbreaking 1922 cante jondo festival Lorca organized under Manuel de Falla’s direction was only one of his many artistic ventures based around Gypsy culture—his 1928 Gypsy Ballads attained instant popularity and launched him into the spotlight. 

Federico García Lorca was part of what’s known as the Generation of ‘27, a group of avant-garde artists and writers which include the painter Salvador Dalí, with whom he had a close relationships who he had first met in 1923. A poet of the universal, Lorca used his voice to speak about love, death, passion, cruelty and injustice, and also the most international, saying - ' I sing to Spain, and I feel her to the core of my being, but above all Iam a man of the world and brother of everyone.' 

  Lorca received significant critical and popular attention, and in 1929 travelled to New York City, where he found a connection between Spanish deep songs and the African American spirituals he heard in Harlem. When he returned to Spain he co-founded La Barraca, a traveling theater company that performed both Spanish classics and Lorca’s original plays, including the well-known Blood Wedding (1933), in small-town squares. Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer.

 Shortly  after the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1938, Lorca made the misguided decision to leave the  safe enclave of Madrid, to be with his family, in the conservative hometown of  Granada expecting to be able to rely on the protection of friends if the city was taken by Nationalist forces. Sure enough, Lorca – a known supporter of the leftist Popular Front party – took cover with the Rosales family within weeks of returning to Granada. Though the Rosales were connected to the local Franco-backed Falaganists, their son Luis was good friends with the poet so they took him in.

Because of his association with the Republic  this made him a marked man. His plays also dealt with repression, and some anti-Catholic opinions in interviews made him a high profile target.

Despite going into hiding the Fallangists hunted him down. He was arrested and imprisoned, without trial and charge, and mercilessly tortured. On August 19th at around 3.00 a.m he was handcuffed to another prisoner ( a teacher). shortly before  dawn he was taken out along with the teacher and two bullfighters ( members of the Anarchist Trade Union CNT), three guards struck Lorca's body with the butts of their rifles, then he was shot, his body riddle with bullets It is often relayed that Antonio Benavides, a relation of Lorca’s father’s first wife and one of the poet’s executioners, later bragged that he “gave that fat-head a shot in the head”. Some say he was  murdered because of his sexuality,  as well as his politics.  

He lived in Spain under Franco's dictatorship, and both his sexuality and his left-wing political views made him a target for the authoritarian government and their sympathisers. He was branded a socialist and a participant in " homosexual and abnormal practices" which , as you can guess, did not play in favour of his life expectancy under a fascist government. It is worth noting that homophobia existed on both sides in the Civil War and afterwards, it was a national problem. Now Spain permits same-sex marriage, That taboo must continue to be broken. 

The body of Frederico Garcia, one of the greatest poets and playwrights  of the twentieth century and  one of Spain's most prodigious sons was unceremoniously dumped in a hastily dug hole, soon to be a mass grave. Despite years of efforts his body I believe has never been found.

Ever since that grim August morning ago, people have been looking for Lorca’s remains in the rugged countryside outside Granada. In 2009, a site near the village of Alfacar was excavated by a team of archaeologists from Granada University. The patch of land had been marked some three decades earlier by a local who said he was one of the men who dug the ditch for Lorca and the anarchists in 1936. Not a single bone was found and the team concluded that no graves had ever been excavated in the area.

 The most plausible case for Lorca being buried near Alfacar was made two years after 2009’s fruitless dig, when a local historian named Miguel Caballero Pérez released a book entitled “The Last Thirteen Hours of Garcia Lorca”. As a result of his research, Pérez claimed he’d found the spot where the writer was interred; less than half a mile from the site of the 2009 excavation, it is believed to be the site where a trench was dug in search of a possible underwater stream. Might this be the watery grave into which Granada’s most famous son was thrown in 1936?

The fascist forces  after his death  tried to erase his memory, burning and banning  his books. Lorca’s writing, considered deeply homoerotic, was banned until 1954 and censored until 1975.One thing is for certain his life would not be forgotten. Lorca's voice would still  belong to humanity. An emblem who gave his  life for Spain, a martyr of it's people. He once said ' I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed  to enjoy the nothing they have in peace. 

 In death  Lorca became  an anti-fascist martyr, and became a symbol of political resistance for writers throughout the Americas and beyond. His poems and plays took on heightened significance, a trend that continues to this very day, after all  he was killed in this political assassination, essentially a state-sanctioned execution, and this made him a symbol of anti-fascist struggle. Though Lorca died tragically, he lived a life filled with passion and zest. He was a theatrical visionary and a poet of seemingly endless invention. Charismatic and exuberant. As Spain moved to democracy, Lorca rose to the fore again, his writings finding a new generation of readers. Many years  after his death his voice still rings out, where bullets were unable to silence him, his ecumenical and immortal poetry now known all over the world , making him Spain's most influential and recognized poets.

Frederico Garcia Lorca -  Before the Dawn

But like love
the archers
are blind

Upon the green night,
the piercing saetas
leave traces of warm
lily

The Keel of the moon
breaks through purple clouds
and their quivers
still with dew

Aye, but like love
the archers
are blind!

Frederico Garcia Lorca - Farewell

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The little boy is eating orange
(from my balcony I can see him.)

The reaper is harvesting the wheat
(from my balcony I can hear him,)

If I die
leave the balcony open!

Here's a post from a couple of years ago https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-continuing-legacy-of-poet-frederico.html?m=0

"I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace."  - Frederico Garcia Lorca 

The Peterloo Massacre and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mask of Anarchy

 

The 16th of August, marks  the anniversry of the infamous Peterloo Massacre, one of the most significant atrocities carried out by the British authorities against their own people and one of the  bloodiest episodes and most dismal in British history. The massacre by official accounts is believed to have involved 18 deaths and injuries to as many as 700 protesters, who paid the price for exercising their democratic rights and freedom of assembly.Though the actual death toll was likely much higher.

Peterloo involved the assembly of a large crowd of citizens at St Peter’s Field in  post- Napoleonic Manchester (since renamed St Peters Square.) Where over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy (none of them were armed) and anti poverty protestors  had gathered, many in their Sunday best, proud and defiant  amid growing poverty and unemployment, mainly from the Corn Laws that artificially inflated bread prices, at a time when only 2% could vote. 

The first few decades of the 19th century, enshrined in public imagination as the elegant age of the Regency, were a time of severe political repression in England. The Tory government, led by Lord Liverpool, feared that the kind of revolutionary activity recently witnessed in France would break out in England – probably in Manchester, where social conditions were so desperate – and chose decided to stamp out all dissent and free speech.

The government was at war with France, which saw Wellington triumph over Napoleon’s forces at Waterloo in 1815.But as Paul Foot once wrote, the British government was also waging war against its own people.

The key speaker at St Peter’s Field was a famed orator by the name of Henry Hunt, the platform consisted of a simple cart, and the space was filled with banners emblazoned with messages calling for - Reform, universal suffrage,and equal representation. Many of the banners poles were topped with the red cap of liberty- a powerful symbol at the time.However, local magistrates peering out a window from a building near the field panicked at the size of the crowd, and proceeded without any notice to read the Riot Act, ordering the assembled listeners to disperse. It would almost certainly have been the case that only a very few would have heard the magistrates. The official 'guardians of the peace' then promptly directed the local Yeomanry to arrest the speakers. The Yeomanry could be described as a kind of paramilitary force with no training in crowd control and little in the way of proper discipline similar to the riot police that ran amok at the Battle of Orgreave during the miners strike of the 1980's. On horseback they charged into the crowd, and pierced the air with cutlasses and clubs. Many in the crowd believed the troops had drunk heavily in the lead up to the assault. In the melee, 600 Hussars who had initially been held in reserve, were ordered to attack unarmed civilians, with brutal consequences.They sliced indiscriminately at men, women and children as they tried to get to the speakers platform. Within minutes, people were sabred, trampled and crushed. Screams reverberated across the square. The Manchester Guardian described how " the women seemed to be the special objects of the rage of these bastard soldiers," 

The massacre was named ‘Peterloo’ in ironic comparison to the battle of Waterloo, that took place four years earlier.The victims included a two year old boy, William Fides, who was ridden oer by the cavalry after he was knocked from his mothers arms, and an an old Waterloo veteran , John Less, who was slashed to death by the cavalry's sabres.

After the massacre, it was the victims, and not the aggressors who were treated as criminals, and feared discrimination by their employers. And no doubt many of those injured died as a result of their injuries some weeks or even months later. In those days of primitive medical care and lack of welfare provision, a serious injury was often a death sentence, and for a wage earner to be incapacitated  equalled the threat of starvation for a family. At this time many handloom weavers and spinners were already living in a state of semi starvation.

The government of Lord Liverpool, backed up the public officials and the actions of the troops and was adamantly unwilling to apologize for the appalling violence. Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford and other radical leaders were arrested for treason. This capital offence  was later commuted to a lesser one, and they served prison sentences of several years.

The event would  also usher in a series of draconian laws that further restricted the liberties of the population.It would lead to the suppression of public expression of opinion, debate , gathering and dissent.The populace did not decline into apathy, however. A large public outcry ensued, and an effort was made by various reformers to document the truth of what had occurred in the center of Manchester on that fateful day. Peterloo led directly to the formation of one of Britain’s leading progressive newspapers, the Manchester Guardian (now the more watered down Guardian). The aftermath of the event would in itself unleash a wave of public anger and protests, which eventually was to lead to the Great Reform Act of 1832, which led to limited suffrage and to today's parliamentary democracy. Many historians now acknowledge Peterloo  as hugely influential in ordinary people winning the vote and credit it with giving rise to the Chartist movement, and  strength to other workers rights movements. We should never forget on whose shoulders we today stand, a reminder that what rights that we have today were hard one.

In Italy, in the aftermath of Peterloo, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley having heard of the horror, his outraged response was  to compose his powerful political  91-verse poem, The Mask of Anarchy. The word anarchy then meant something quite different to how we view it today, Shelley used it to describe the chaos of tyranny, in which no one but the very few who own and control society can plan their lives for themselves.

The poem was written in the ballad tradition. Ballads in the early 19th century were verse narratives, often set to popular tunes and typically sold on the streets as a cheap disposable form of literature. They often focussed on tragedies, love affairs or scandals. By adopting this style,Shelley could be seen  to be speaking with the voice of the common man. 

The Mask of Anarchy recounts a nightmare in which the three Lords of the Tory Cabinet parade in an awful possession, murdering and deceiving while Britain dissolves into anarchy. He rouses the people to free themselves from their oppressors, by supplying them, among other things, with a powerful definition of freedom.

He begins his poem with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time: God,  the King and Law, and he then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action. The poem mentions several members of Lord Liverpool's's government by name: the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh who appears as a mask worn by Murder, the Home Secretary,Lord Sidmouth., whose guise is taken by Hypocrricy, and the Lord Chancellor,Lord Eldon whose ermine gown is worn by Fraud.The crowd at this gathering is met by armed soldiers, but the protestors do not raise an arm against their assailants:

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many - they are few."

That closing verse is perhaps one of the best known pieces of poetry in any movement of the oppressed all over the world such is it's resonance.Encouraging people to rise up and challenge the tyranny that they are facing every day of their lives, against the undeniable injustices.faced by the many at the hands of the few. The rallying language of the poem  has led to elements of it being recited by students at Tiananmen Square  and by protestors in Tahir Square during the revolution in Egypt in 2011.It would inspire the campaign slogan "We are many, they are few" used by anti Poll Tax demonstrators  in 1989-90, and also inspired the title of the 2014 documentary film We are Many, which focussed  on the worldwide anti-war protests of 2003, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also memorably used the final stanza.
Shelley’s friend and publisher, Leigh Hunt did not publish the poem until after Shelley’s death fearing that the opinions in it were too controversial and inflammatory. The Masque of Anarchy  has been described as “the greatest political poem ever written in English” by people such as Richard Holmes. It inspired Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience which in turn influenced the anarchist writings of Leo Tolstoy.Percy Bysshe Shelley believed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”He would remain a serious advocate for serious reform for the rest of his life, and would come to serve as a prophetic voice and inspiration to those, like the Chartists who created significant movements for peaceful reform, alongside generations of activists to this present day. Many years later his powerful poem is as relevant in austerity gripped Britain as when it was first written and  reminds us that Poetry can serve to inspire and motivate people and change and influence ideas. It is one of the most powerful tools we have.

Full text of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy can be found here:-

http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/anarchy.html 

An earlier post on Shelley can be found here :-

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html

The terrible events  that happened on August 16th, 1819  have recently been dramatised by director Mike Leigh in his  historical drama Peterloo. In this gripping account he presents a devastating portrait of class and political corruption which develops our understanding of how the working poor in Britain have coped with oppression . It  is a necessary film for our times, .which should be shown up and down the country in schools so that our children  can learn more about this shameful piece of British history.

This sobering but enthralling blast from the past, superbly shot by the director's regular cameraman Dick Pope, sees Leigh seamlessly move between the lives of disparate characters in the years after Waterloo: a family of weavers headed by Maxine Peake's matriarch: the Westminster government and gluttonous Prince Regent (an unrecognisable Tim McInnerny), fearful of losing his head to the forces of revolution; venomous Manchester magistrates determined to quash any radicalism; and moderate reformists and supporters from the local press, who invite tub-thumping speaker "Orator" Hunt (a terrific Rory Kinnear) to address the masses on that fateful day. Though the film is of considerable length, it's never plodding - Leigh leavens the mood with pointed humour and subtle mockery, whether it's in the pomposity and idiosyncrasies of the ruling classes, Vincent Franklin's apoplectic reverend magistrate or Hunt's smug, southern snobbishness. The climactic massacre is unheralded and low key, yet once the mayhem unfolds, it's easy to be reminded of recent crowd crises like Orgreave, the Poll Tax riots and Hillsborough. No doubt, Ken Loach would have been more strident with the material. To his credit, Leigh manages to take quirky slice-of-life drama to impressively epic heights and express a quieter indignation. But it's indignation, nonetheless. 

Peterloo  has  since become a rallying cry for the working class and radicals, a symbol of the vile nature of the ruling class. The lessons that they draw from it remain as valid today as ever, that we do not forget  that our rights have been won by others and must be constantly defended. A time to pause and to consider this significant moment in history when our working class ancestors were  slaughtered whilst peacefully protesting for basic civil rights that we today, take for granted.We must continue too display our defiance. More than that, in today's society with the Conservatives  current  draconian  Policing Bill, it’s a reminder that Peterloo was about demanding basic democratic rights and that all these years later a Tory Government is still trying to restrict them and take them away and they are continuing to attack peoples rights to free assembly and their assaults on the weak and vulnerable among us, in an age of increasing government surveillance and the erosion of our civil liberties, it is a timely reminder of how governments are still not averse to attacking its own people and we should put Shelley's words into practice and rise like lions, because we are many and they are few.

 

                                 Print of the Peterloo Massacre published by Richard Carlisle
     

                       

Beyond the Sadness

Across the world, times of darkness

Unsettling denting and bruising inside, 

Taking away our thoughts and dreams

Hearts breaking, affected by tragedy,

Unbridled tears running like water, in Plymouth

The landscape of my childhood memories,

Where the spirits of pilgrims set sail from

Ancestors went to sea,with hearts full of love,

In times of departure, weathered many a storm 

From a distance in Wales, was inspired,  

By colourful epitaphs and  gentle smiles

A time when hatred was not  fostered,

Upon  salty winds the sails of unison

Not shattered by cold cruel empty wicked eyes,

In this proud city, am currently feeling its hurt 

Yearning for hope to return, heal the hatred,

Beyond the blackness, the evil of terror

With outstretched arms, I weep to remember,

As sorrow rains down, let healing thoughts blossom 

Take the reins, harvest a new direction,

Affections feeling, releasing unfolding empathy

Destroying misogyny, keeping reason alive,

Filling the world with care and compassion

With thoughts and prayers, uproot the pain.

This is a story that everyone in the country should hear

 A video projected on the Houses of Parliament has been making the rounds on social media today and has been dubbed the 'story everyone should hear..The Good Law Project https://goodlawproject.org/  have  joined up with Led By Donkeys https://www.ledbydonkeys.org/ to expose the truth about the Government's secret back-channel which allowed friends of the Conservative Party and other politically connected suppliers to secure billions of pounds of PPE contracts. This was while overworked NHS staff were struggling to stay safe on the frontline. 

Amid court action by the Good Law Project to reveal more about the contracts, the short film raises questions about why the Government is so reluctant to name more of the companies involved in the lucrative PPE schemes.

It raises legal concerns about Downing Street's so called "VIP lane" for select companies and runs through the vast sums awarded to firms owned or linked to associates of top level government officials and helps show  the utter contempt  they have, for the public for all to see.

It has been released as health minister Lord Bethell comes under scrutiny over his use of private communications channels for official government business.

The Good Law Project has highlighted dishonesty, obfuscation, illegality, and cronyism in the awarding of key pandemic contracts and roles, as well as delivery of protective equipment and testing

As our government is becoming increasingly authoritarian and our media is run by a handful of billionaires. most of whom reside overseas and all of them with strong political allegiances and financial motivations. It is vital that we keep holding this corrupt government to account.

Transparency is essential  for any credible government. It shouldn’t take inquiries, whistleblowers, legal actions, investigative journalists, and public campaigns to get at truths that should already be in the public domain,

David Cameron ‘made more than £7m’ from Greensill Capital before firm collapsed

 

David Cameron so stinkingly Tory earned about $10 million from finance firm Greensill Capital before the company’s collapse, according to documents leaked to the BBC.

The former British prime minister was due to be paid $4.5 million after tax for a tranche of Greensill shares, according to a letter from the firm to Cameron obtained by the BBC Panorama program.

Cameron also received a salary of $1 million a year as a part-time adviser and was paid a bonus of $700,000 in 2019, the broadcaster reported. In total, the program alleges the documents suggest he made around $10 million before tax for two-and-a-half years’ part-time work.

 The number, reported, is news, not least because Cameron himself had refused to disclose it. Speaking to a Commons committee investigating his failed lobbying for the failed company, the failed former PM would say only that he had been paid a 'generous' sum by Greensill.That one word, 'generous', speaks volumes about Cameron and the Greensill episode. Cameron lets not forget is nothing but a slave owning descendent who has not worked a single day of his life, who with a reported obscene £30 million in inherited wealth, whilst PM imposed austerity on the rest of us.

The former Conservative leader has been at the center of Britain’s biggest lobbying scandal in a generation after it emerged he pressed senior ministers and officials to include Greensill Capital in a coronavirus lending scheme.

Greensill which provided loans to steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta's company - cratered in March after a furious lobbying effort for Covid cash by Mr Cameron fell flat. 

The former premier bombarded ministers including Rishi Sunak and senior officials with 56 texts begging for Government bailout loans.

During a Commons grilling in May Mr Cameron bragged he made "far more" cash at Greensill than he did in No10 but refused to cough an exact figure.

Following Greensill’s collapse in March, which left 3,000 jobs at a steel manufacturer at risk, investigations have been opened into the company’s activities in the U.K., Germany and elsewhere. The former prime minister was cleared of breaking lobbying rules but a cross-party group of MPs found he had demonstrated a “significant lack of judgment.” 

He also faced questions for bringing Australian financier Lex Greensill into the heart of Government as an adviser with a desk in Downing Street.

Senior civil servant Sir Bill Crothers was also found to have parachuted into a plum Greensill job after leaving Whitehall.

In a statement released after the new allegations emerged on Monday evening, Mr Cameron's spokesperson said the former Conservative party leader committed "no wrongdoing".

"David Cameron deeply regrets that Greensill went into administration and is desperately sorry for those who have lost their jobs," the spokesperson said.

"As he was neither a director of the company, nor involved in any lending decisions, he has no special insight into what ultimately happened. 

"He acted in good faith at all times, and there was no wrongdoing in any of the actions he took. He made the representations he did to the UK government not just because he thought it would benefit the company, but because he sincerely believed there would be a material benefit for UK businesses at a challenging time. 

"He had no idea until December 2020 that the company was in danger of failure. 

"We are not commenting on David Cameron's remuneration; this is a private matter. But it is preposterous to suggest that he would work for any company if he was aware that it was behaving improperly, or was in any way seeking to mislead investors. 

"Indeed, Panorama's questions and assertions are attempting to define a role for David Cameron at Greensill that is totally at odds with the facts. He was a part-time adviser to the company - one of several - and had no executive or board responsibilities whatsoever." 

The statement adds that Mr Cameron "had no knowledge" of GFG's financial situation and repeats that "both the Treasury Select Committee and the Boardman Report have since confirmed that he broke no rules".

 Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner said it was "ludicrous" that the former Conservative prime minister allegedly earned over £7m from his work with Greensill and accused Mr Cameron of "using his Tory contacts for huge personal gain"."The fact that David Cameron was cleared of any wrongdoing, proves that the rules that are supposed to regulate lobbying are completely unfit for purpose. It's created a wild west where the Conservatives think it's one rule for them and another for everyone else,""The system causes more harm than good by giving a veil of legitimacy to the rampant cronyism, sleaze and dodgy lobbying that is polluting our democracy under Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. This is money most of us cannot even imagine, but for David Cameron it was just a part-time gig using his Tory contacts for huge personal gain." Ms Rayner said.

.Personally I believe  dodgy Dave Cameron to be a smug, conceited, greedy hypocrite of the first order, who arrogantly negligent of the well-being of the country, runs away from his responsibility, protects party  over people, who devoid of any principle, simply grubbed around in the trough to the tune of £10m  ,who along with his friends was always on hand to castigate poor people on benefits, who seem to think they are entitled to far more, whilst lining their own grubby pockets. Cameron and his party clearly believe that society should be founded on inequality, that the poor deserve poverty, whilst the wealthy deserve incentives. Simply rotten to the core, whatever reputation he once had, simply now lies in tatters, and  as for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, well like his predecessor, is made from the same cloth. 

Hiroshima / Nagasaki : Never Again

 

On this day 6th August 1945 the United States dropped  an atomic bomb called ' Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan which is estimated to have killed 100,000 to 180,000 people out of a population of 350,000. Then three days later, a second  atomic bomb  called "Fat Man" was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing between 50,000 and 100,000 people in an act of unspeakable violence.
.Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely civilian towns, meaning there wasn't a strong military reason to drop the atomic bombs over those particular cities. No one was excluded from the horrors of the atomic bomb, a "destroyer of worlds" burnt hotter than the sun. Some people were vaporised upon impact, while others suffered burns and radiation poisoning that would kill them days, weeks or even months later. Others were crushed by debris, burned by unimaginable heat or suffocated by the lack of oxygen. Many survivors suffered from leukemia and other cancers like thyroid and lung cancer at higher rates than those not exposed to the bombs. Mothers were more likely to  lose their children during pregnancy or shortly after birth. Children exposed to radiation were more likely to have learning disabilities and impaired growth.
Those that did manage to survive  would be traumatised for the rest of their lives. Hibakusha is a term widely used in Japan, that refers to the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it translates as 'explosion effected  Survivor of Light. These survivors speak of the deep, unabating grief they felt in the days, months and decades since the attack  They have described the shame of being a survivor , many were unable to marry, find jobs, or live any sort of normal life. They have said that many Hibakusha never speak of the day, instead choosing to suffer in silence. They told what it was like to be suddenly alone in middle age, to lose their parents, spouses, children, and livelihoods in a single instant. In memory of them, we should make sure that the  misery and devastation caused by nuclear weapons is never forgotten.
Even if Japan was not fully innocent, the people of Japan did not deserve to pay the price for their nations wrongdoing, and there was absolutely no moral justification in obliterating these two cities and killing its inhabitants in what was clearly a crime against humanity and murder on an epic scale. Hiroshima and Nagasaki held no strategic importance. Japan were an enemy on the brink of failure an members of the country's top leadership were involved in peace negotiations. Many believe that these two atrocities were a result of  geopolitical posturing at its most barbaric, announcing  in a catastrophic  display of military capability, of inhumane intention showing America's willingness to use doomsday weapons on civilian populations.The bombings serving as warnings and the fist act of the Cold War against its imperialist rival Russia. A message to the Russians of the power of destruction and technological military capability that the US had managed to develop.Three days later U.S president Harry Truman exulted ; "This is the greatest thing in history! " and gloated that " we are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely."
Then the photos began to emerge, haunting images of burned children with their skin hanging off, of bodies charred and there was Sadaki Sasaki and the 1,000 origami peace cranes she folded before her death at 12 from leukemia ten years after the bomb was dropped on her hometown of Hiroshima.The atom bombs dropped by the US on those Japanese cities served no military purpose, as the Japanese were already suing for peace. President Truman, who ordered the bombs to be dropped, lied to the American people when he said that the atom bombs had saved lives and there were few civilian deaths, The  two atomic bombs killed and maimed hundreds and thousands of people.and the effects are still being felt today. The bombs dropped were  of a indiscriminate and cruel character beyond comparison  with weapons and projectiles of the past. Despite all  this Truman never regretted his decision. .

Today as the world commemorates the lives that were lost and the unacceptable devastation caused to people and planet, we still have so much to learn from this picture of indescribable human suffering. As  we mourn the hundreds and thousands of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki now is the time for us to redouble our efforts to ensure that such an atrocity does not happen again and on this poignant anniversary, we must reaffirm our determination to campaign for a world without nuclear weapons, whilst remembering the resilience of ordinary people in the years after the war and the movements of ordinary people against war, who try to make this world more peaceful and harmonious place for us all.Hiroshima and Nagasaki  reminds us of our mission to end preventable and premature deaths by such senseless atrocities. And this year is special. In January 2021, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force. Nuclear weapons are banned.  

But in the UK, the government refuses to do its moral duty, and now its duty under international law. Instead, it has committed £Billions towards expanding the UK’s stockpile. This comes at a time when over 150,000 people in the UK alone have died of COVID-19, and our NHS is straining from the virus and years of austerity. 

The second year of the pandemic has continued to expose long-running health inequities both in the UK and worldwide. Yet again, UK health workers have had to spread themselves so thin this year. We know we need huge investment in the NHS and wide-ranging measures to reduce health inequity. In this context, the government’s choice to spend billions more of public money on weapons of mass destruction is unbelievable. 

Today, 76 years since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it’s time to step back and consider what our society values most. Across the world today for Hiroshima Day and on August 9 Nagasaki Day many will echo the call of the Hibakusha, that such horrors must never happen again, and honour ther wish for the elimination of nuclear weapons..

Wendell E. Berry ( b 5/8/34) - Prophet of responsibility

 

Wendell Erdman Berry the American novelist, essayist, novelist, and poet,  environmentalist, cultural critic, and farmer celebrates his 87th birthday today.Born the first of four children of Virginia Erdman Berry and John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer.  near Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky (1934). His family, on both sides  have farmed tobacco in Henry County for at least five generations.

 A prolific author, he has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays. I love the meditative quality of his work. A key theme in his  writing is the importance of living in harmony with nature and protecting the earth. Environmental activist Bill McKibben has called Berry " a prophet of responsibility."  

With care and humility, passion and eloquence, he has  lived his life built on convictions and has a love for everything that's wild, everything that's natural, and at the same time for people, particularly simple people who are trying to build a relationship with the natural world. For most of his life, he has lived and worked with his wife, Tanya Berry, on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, trying, as he puts it, "to see from there as far as I can."

 Berry considers himself a Christian and criticizes the Christians who fail to take climate change and the environment seriously. He’s an activist for (and against) many other issues, too, including the death penalty, nuclear power plants, the coal industry, the war in Vietnam, sustainable agriculture, and dependence on fossil fuels. In 1973 he began corresponding with poet Gary Snyder.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/happy-birthday-gary-snyder-poet.html In many ways they were opposites: Snyder lived in California, Berry in Kentucky; Snyder was a practicing Buddhist, Berry a Christian. They didn’t always agree. Berry worried about fighting evil: “You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil […] And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I thought I would.” Snyder didn’t believe in the concept of evil the way that Berry envisioned it and told Berry he was fighting “ignorance, stupidity, narrow views [and] simple-minded egotism.” But over more than 40 years they have exchanged almost 250 letters, on subjects ranging from writing to religion, from farming to philosophy. Their letters are collected in Distant Neighbors (2014).

Wendell Berry dares to investigate the systemic malaise of the West. None is more fascinated with the interesting nature of the world than he, but he knows something’s gone wrong and he wants to look deeper. A radical voice who  cannot be pigeonholed politically or religiously, A pacifist and anti-capitalist moralist who has written against all forms of violence and destruction, of land, community and human beings.

 Many of Berry's  basic principles are actually consistent with socialist thought, in particular his strong concern  for the welfare of others and thee way he critcises corporate  power and market-driven behaviour. This combined with his belief in social equality, a thoughtful measured  mind that encompasses  a broad range of issues ranging from the ecological, aesthetic, spiritual, political and cultural. To those of us interested in the evolution of ideas, that is some achievement.

For Wendell Berry, the defense of the Earth is a mission that admits no compromise. This quiet and modest man who lives and works far from the center of power on a farm in Kentucky where his family has lived for 200 years has become an outspoken, even angry advocate for a revolution in our treatment of the land..

For years, Berry,, has advocated personal activism on behalf of the environment. He has written that there should not be a "split between what we think and what we do. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live." 

What Berry believes is reflected in how he conducts his life. As a political activist he has taken taken part in protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear power and a range of other environmental issues, and has written critiques inter alia of George Bush’s post-9/11 policies,  which he wrote about  about in  his 2003 essay titled "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States",which was  published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. In it he asserted that "The new National Security Strategy published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation."  

 The ideas that permeate his essays, novels and poetry focus on the failings of the global economic system that result in environmental destruction, greed, violence and injustice, and the need for sustainable agriculture and appropriate technologies that allow for greater connection to place, respect the nature, and recognise the interconnectedness of life.

 At the 1968 University of Kentucky conference on the War and the Draft, in "A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" Berry said: "I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war." And in  his essay, the "Failure of War" ( 1999) he wrote, "How many deaths of other people's children are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent and (supposedly) at peace? To that question I answer: None . . . Don't kill any children for my benefit." 

In 1979 he participated in non-violent civil disobedience against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Marble Hill, Indiana. And in  2009, Berry, along with Wes Jackson, president of The Land Institute and Fred Kirschenmann of The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture gathered in Washington D.C. to promote the idea of a 50-Year Farm Bill claiming that "We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities." 

Also in 2009, along with 38 other Kentucky writers, Berry wrote in opposition to the death penalty asking the Governor and Attorney General to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in that state. In that same year, he spoke out against the National Animal Identification System, which required that independent farmers pay the cost of registration devices for each animal while large, corporate factory farms pay by the herd. Said Berry, "If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I'll have to do it." 

Opposing the use of coal as an energy source, in 2009 Berry joined over 2,000 others in non-violently blocking the gates to a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., and later that year combined with several non-profit organizations and rural electric co-op members to petition against and protest the construction of a coal-burning power plant in Clark County, Kentucky. As a result, in 2011 the Kentucky Public Service Commission cancelled the construction of this power plant. On September 28, 2010 Berry participated in a rally in Louisville during an EPA hearing on how to manage coal ash. Berry said, "The EPA knows that coal ash is poison. We ask it only to believe in its own findings on this issue, and do its duty."  Berry, with 14 other protesters, spent the weekend of February 12, 2011 locked in the Kentucky governor's office demanding an end to mountaintop removal coal mining.

Through whatever he is writing, Berry's message is constant: humans must learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. In his opinion, we must acknowledge the impact of agriculture to our society. Berry believes that small-scale farming is essential to healthy local economies, and that strong local economies are essential to the survival of the species and the well-being of the planet,

 Wendell Berry lives up to his own standards, both privately and publicly. He uses horses to work his land and employs organic methods of fertilization and pest control. In 2010 he withdrew personal papers he had donated to the University of Kentucky because he objected to a decision to name a basketball-players' dormitory the Wildcat Coal Lodge. "The University's president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary 'gift,'" he wrote. "That...puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University." He intends to transfer his papers to the Kentucky Historical Society.

The author of more than 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the novel Hannah Coulter (2004), the essay collections Citizenship Papers (2005) and The Way of Ignorance (2006), and Given: Poems (2005) Wendell Berry has also  been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, which include  a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry (1962), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1965), a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing (1971), the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award (1987), a Lannan Foundation Award for Non-Fiction (1989), Membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers (1991), the Ingersoll Foundation’s T. S. Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997), the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), and the Aitken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review (1998). In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, and in 2016  he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Happy birthday Wendell Berry,  we are all living in a time here we could all be well served to imitate this prophet of responsibility's walk, and try  to reflect on our own responsibiliies as custodians of the places we belong to, listen to his words, his clarity and wisdom, find gentleness beyond the unsettleness of day.

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

I go among Trees - Wendell Berry

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

 

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front- Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

What we need is here 

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes,

  Abandon

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need 

is here.

 And we pray,  not

for new earth or heaven, butt to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear,

 what we need is here.

Crossing the Boardwalk

Every day people fighting over ideology

Some things so easily said, already undone,

Life is no charade, no borders necessary

Death forever entwines, surrealist pillows shine,

Between unsettling walls, causes that reek havoc

Sad fountains, a system so broken,

Rebel hearts keep planning where to go

Beyond the brimming swell of unreason,

Breaking the barriers, in soul searching dream

With prophetic endeavour, saving mind and soul,

Find sheltered breaches of sanity

Places of romance instead of trauma,

Where every thought is jewelled with love

The universe releasing inner riots pulsating,

Burning darkness and bitterness lingering

Sprouting forth madly while music roars ,

Bathing in unravelling glossamers of warmth

Spirits timeless hum, whispering beyond the chaos,

The syncopated rhythms of shimmering emotion

Life always ends, amidst the confusion,

Reach out find some satisfaction

Abandon all temples, follow rippling clouds,

Minds no longer occupied with diversion

Carried forever on an ocean of sound, sing.