Hurrah for the Blackshirts : Remembering The Daily Mail's Support For Fascism

On January 15 1934, The Daily Mail newspaper ran with the notorious headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” which was written by Viscount Rothemere, whose family incidentally still own the Mail, an article that  celebrated Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF).

Mosley was highly influenced by Benito Mussolini, so much so that members of the BUF were given the nickname of ‘Blackshirts’ as their uniform was modelled on that worn by those belonging to the National Fascist Party in Italy.Mosley’s Blackshirts dressed up like Mussolini’s thugs and saluted like Hitler’s, but theirs was a distinctly English program. The first of Mosley’s “10 Points of Fascism” announced that the BUF was “loyal to King and Country” and its “watch-word… is ‘Britain First.’”

 Mosley himself was commissioned in the 16th Lancers but joined the Royal Flying Corps at the outbreak of the First World War. Injured in a crash in 1915, he rejoined the Lancers and fought in the trenches between October 1915 and October 1916. He joined the Conservatives after military service to become an MP at 22. From the first, he challenged the old guard even within his own party, and was re-elected as an Independent before crossing the House to join Labour where he campaigned on unemployment. With his matinee idol looks and dramatic oratory, Mosley cut a darkly glamorous, radical figure.After the 1931 general election, Mosley toured Europe and it was that particular expedition which drew his attention to fascism. Following his travels, at 34 he founded the New Party, which – influenced by Mussolini – morphed into the quasi-military British Union of Fascists 19 months later in October 1932, with Mosley himself as the leader.

 Lord Rothermere, had launched the Daily Mail in 1896 with his elder brother, Alfred Harmsworth, who was later named Lord Northcliffe. By 1930, they owned 14 daily and Sunday newspapers, and a substantial share in three more.Shortly after Mussolini came to power, Rothermere laid his cards on the table. In an article in the Mail entitled “What Europe Owes to Mussolini,” he expressed his “profound admiration” for Italy’s new leader.

“In saving Italy he stopped the inroads of Bolshevism which would have left Europe in ruins… in my judgment he saved the whole Western world,” Rothermere declared.

His frequent visits to Italy seemed only to further stoke Rothermere’s enthusiasm for the Duce.

“He is the greatest figure of the age,” Rothermere proclaimed in 1928. “Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the 20th century as Napoleon dominated that of the early 19th.” He praised Mosley and the Blackshirts seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs”.

 Rothermere initially believed that Britain was “not suited” to fascism, but a general strike in 1926 and a fear that Baldwin was displaying “the feebleness which tries to placate opposition by being more socialist than the Socialists,” led him to reappraise this view as a new decade dawned.

 The Mail’s enthusiasm for the Nazis would grow as their support in Germany surged.By the 1930 election, when the Nazis’ seats in the Reichstag jumped from 12 to 107, Rothermere was a convert.

“[The Nazis] represent the rebirth of Germany as a nation,” Rothermere wrote in the Mail. The election, he correctly prophesied, would come to be seen as “a landmark of this time.”

It wasn’t hard to see why the Mail’s fawning coverage of the Nazis so delighted the Fuhrer — the paper uncritically reported the butchery of the Night of the Long Knives.

“Herr Adolf Hitler, the German Chancellor, has saved his country,” began its story on the frenzy of extrajudicial killings, and cheered the Nazis on as they trampled the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

When German troops marched into the Rhineland in March 1936, the Mail suggested Hitler had “cleared the air” and warned against “Bolshevik troublemakers.” It offered a glowing report of the Anschluss two years later — penned by Price, who had hitched a ride in Hitler’s convoy as it sped towards Vienna.

 Grateful for this unusual support from the foreign press,gained the Mail exclusive access to publish interviews with Hitler, it also earned Lord Rothermere and his son a place at the dinner table as honoured guests of Hitler himself.Following his meetings, Rothermere believed Hitler — a “simple and unaffected man” and a “perfect gentleman” — to be “obviously sincere” in his desire for peace. “There is no man living whose promise given in regard to something of real moment I would sooner take,” he later argued. A vicious reactionary anti-semite, Rothermere saw the Nazi dictator as an ally against the spread of (Jewish) communism and backed Hitler's actions to remove Jews from public life in Germany. During the Munich crisis of 1938 his papers urged capitulation to Hitler's demands for the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia (though they did advocate rearmament, just in case). The Mail objected time and again to the admission to Britain of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. 

                                                      Lord Rothermore and Hitler

Under the headline Hurrah for the Blackshirts Rothermore praised Mosley and the Blackshirts seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs”;auding Mosley’s aim of bringing Britain “up to date” by following in the footsteps of Europe’s “best governed” nations, Italy and Nazi Germany. The article urged a similar “revival of national strength and spirit.” Following their proprietor’s cue, staff at the paper began showing up for work wearing black shirts.

Rothermere’s other newspapers also threw their support behind the effort. The Mirror urged its readers to “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand,” and printed the addresses of Mosley’s local recruiting offices. A visit to Germany or Italy, Rothermere assured readers, showed that “the mood of the vast majority of the inhabitants was not cowed submission, but confident enthusiasm.”

The Sunday Dispatch offered free tickets to Mosley’s rallies, prizes for readers who submitted letters on why they liked the Blackshirts, and regular features on attractive female fascists, under headlines such as “Beauty joins the Blackshirts.”

 By 1936 anti-semitic assaults by fascists were growing and windows of Jewish-owned businesses were routinely smashed. Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’  The Daily Mail headline is just one chilling indication of the very real threat Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists posed in the mid 1930s which concluded with a direct call for young men to join Oswald’s party.and  certainly helped boost  the BUF membership considerably, perhaps to as many as 50,000 active members..

 When, on 7 June 1934, Oswald Mosley addressed a tumultuous rally at London's Olympia, his British Union of Fascists seemed on the verge of political acceptability. Yet with its chaos, violence and subsequent condemnation in the press, Olympia marked the beginning of the end for the Blackshirts.

Mosley’s blackshirts had been harassing the sizeable Jewish population in the East End all through the 1930s and a primary focus of its anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiment was Stepney, an East End neighborhood then home to 60,000 Jews descended from families who fled pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as Irish and other immigrant workers. and on 4th October 1936, Mosley planned the BUF’s biggest and boldest initiative yet. His uniformed Blackshirts would march through London’s East End, home to one of the country’s largest Jewish communities. The intention was quite clear: to cause fear and stir up hate. On the day, more than a hundred thousand east enders, of any faith or none, turned out to protect their community. The fascists were forced to retreat in what became known  as the Battle of Cable Street https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/10/remember-battle-of-cable-street-no.html. in which tens of thousands of anti-fascists  battled 6,000 police and 3,000 BUF Blackshirts to refuse the fascists passage through Stepney. Taking their example from Spanish Communists during the siege of Madrid months earlier, they used as their slogan “¡No pasarán” and erected three sets of barricades on Cable Street. Irish dockworkers tore up paving stones and filled the street with broken glass and marbles to defeat mounted police. They did, not pass.

Mosley lost thousands of supporters as people began to make links between what was happening at home and events in Nazi Germany.s the Second World War loomed,.and during the Second World War, the British authorities viewed Mosley as an enemy sympathiser – if the Nazis successfully invaded the UK, it was believed he would head up the regime on home soil – and had him interned, along with his wife. The pair lived together in the grounds of Holloway prison for the majority of the war, before being released in 1943.After the war, Mosley formed the Union Movement in 1948, but his influence had waned.and The Union Movement was eventually dissolved in 1973 after failing to gain significant ground.

The Daily Mail began to change its editorial line and moved away from explicitly supporting fascists and their regimes. But, the racism and xenophobia remained a key part of their  so called ‘journalism’ and has continued through to this day. Rothermere died in 1940 a broken man, desperately disappointed that the great dictator in Berlin had not forged an alliance with London to vanquish Stalin. He was an utterly disgusting human being..

The forces of Fascism are on the rise again, in Europe and around the world.we must continue to resist wherever they are promote and try to come together. Those who daub synagogues with anti-semitic graffiti or defile mosques with anti-Islamic hate or any other communities that suffer abuse or racism, we  must  forever be on the side of those communities, and they will never be given any welcome, and be outnumbered and humiliated by antifascists. Whilst they continue to intimidate and stoke up division with their racist ideology and their  hatred against difference and people marked as socially undesirable. they  will always be met with resistance, their routes blocked by those that seek to defend their communities from fascist violence.

Sill a high-circulation right-wing tabloid much beloved by “Middle England” The Daily Mail still weathers the occasional barbs about its disreputable past whilst creating hate-filled media stories that create a violent culture of hostility towards migrants and refugees. Remember Rothermere was pro-Nazi. The Daily Mail was pro-Nazi. The Daily Mail is the traitors' paper. Never forget, never forgive. Lower than vermin, as Aneurin Bevan once said. 

 

 Daily Mail Poem

I pour scorn on its petty margins
Its distortion of realities silhouette,
The daily shame, should be its new name
Cross out all its lies, we'd be left with empty pages,
Drinking toasts to underbellies of nastiness
It sharpens its pen on bile,
With agenda of spreading hatred
Is enough to scramble your brain,.
A bully that's scared of everything
Its dark heart  distorts reality,
With script of venom and division
In truth, worth nothing at all,
Its pinning sense of intolerance
Is a message I don't want to hear,
A tabloid  rag not fit for the gutter
Full of twisted opinion and bad news
Designed to leave us disheartened,
Don't know how anyone can call it a friend.

Boris Johnson is rotten to the core, so are the rest of the Torys. As for the Political System, We need a fresh start.

Boris Johnson is currently under fire, and rightfully so after it has been revealed that during the lockdown, while the public was forced to stay indoors isolating from loved ones, the government-held several illegal parties.

A staggering 13 gatherings have now been exposed that were held during periods in 2020 when lockdown restrictions were in place. This includes, in recent days, revelations that Downing Street hosted a “bring your own booze” event on 20 May, during the first wave of infections.

268 people died of COVID-19 on 20 May 2020, when more than 100 Downing Street staff were invited to “socially distanced drinks” in the Number 10 garden. At the time, people across the country were banned from meeting more than one person outside who they didn’t live with.

Just five days after that gathering, our hypocritical Prime Minister used a daily Coronavirus briefing to say that the police should intervene to stop outdoor gatherings.

He was asked by a member of the public: “There are large groups gathering in local parks, ignoring social distancing rules. When many of us are being so vigilant and staying alert, what can be done to discourage this disregard for the rules?”

Johnson replied: “Feel free to speak to people yourself if you feel that they are not obeying the rules… But the police will step in if necessary and encourage people to obey the law.”

This wasn’t the only gathering held in the Downing Street garden in May 2020.

On  15 May, held a ‘wine and cheese’ rendezvous with small groups gathered on the lawn. 314 people died from COVID on 15 May 2020. Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie were pictured at this event, which Downing Street has called a “work meeting”.

Johnson has also admitted that he attended the event on 20 May – reportedly “wandering round gladhanding people”, though the Prime Minister claims dumbfoundedly that he did not realise that it was a ‘party’.

These revelations follow a slew of stories, exposing numerous gatherings held in November and December 2020 , when tiered restrictions were being re-imposed in reaction to rapidly rising case rates.

These gatherings included a Christmas party attended by around 40 members of Johnson’s team on 18 December, just two days after new restrictions were introduced in London, banning indoor mixing between households. Some 514 people died of COVID-19 on 18 December 2020, while daily cases had reached 35,800, more than double the figure recorded at the start of the month.

The Prime Minister’s former spokesperson Allegra Stratton resigned after footage emerged showing her joking on 22 December about “a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night” in a mock press conference. Johnson said that he was “furious” about the footage and apologised “unreservedly” to the British people, for the fact that Stratton had seemingly mocked the rules, not because a gathering had taken place.

Several parties were also held by other Government departments during the festive period – including the Treasury, the Department for Education, and the Department for Transport.

In sum, 5,664 people died from COVID-19 on the days that these parties were held. Moreover, 662 people were issued with fines by the Metropolitan Police for breaching COVID-19 restrictions in London during the weeks when these gatherings took place in the capital, not including the parties in May, for which data is unavailable.The Met has so far refused to investigate any of the parties, despite an overwhelming amount of people saying that a police investigation should take place.

After Johnson admitted to having attended a lockdown party, held at his own residence,he knowingly misled Parliament and after a nin apology in Parliament has refused to offer his resignation, but he has since faced severe backlash, with many calling for his resignation. Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, is one of many who said Prime Minister Boris Johnson should resign.

Ross said, "Regrettably, I have to say his position is no longer tenable," Ross said. "I spoke to the prime minister this afternoon and I set out my reasons and I explained to him my position." 

Johnson was also reportedly unable to give his assurances that yet more negative media stories about his  antics during lockdown might be published. Understandably the anger up and down the country is immense, people are rightfully furious.

Boris Johnson for a long time has proven to be a liar of the first order, so I am more than happy that Johnson is having such a shit time, he apologised because people were hurt, not because he breaks the law? We as a nation are being gaslighted. He is an apology for a PM, and a lame excuse of a man, who is simply rotten as are the rest of the Torys who alongside him continue to treat us all with disdain.

There isn't a single Tory MP who wants Johnson to go because of the horrific mismanagement of the pandemic or the blatant systematic enduring corruption which resulted in riches for their cronies and inadeguate supplies for health workers. Nope it's all about them and whether they'll lose their seats.

At the same time the UK Government is pushing through some truly terrifying new bills. These new laws trget the right to protest, remove citizenship rights and attack the most basic human rights,

This is part of the never ending shift to the right in Westminster, A reaction to the increased number of people standing up to them from a diverse number of groups such as BLM, XR,Palestine Action and the series of Kill the Bill protests.The right to protest is not a gift of the government in power, it’s a fundamental democratic right, This Government is trying to remove that right, stifle dissent and entrench its own powers, and together with Johnson their simply taking the piss.

On Sept 2020 Priti Patel said she’d call police to report neighbours holding parties. Today she’s defending Boris Johnson after he admitted doing just that. As Home Sec she’s responsible for upholding the rule of law for all. Not one rule for your mates  and another for everyone else.From the party of law and order, I give you:  Unlawful VIP lanes, Illegal lockdown parties, Unlawful Parliament suspension, Unlawful withholding of contract details , Breaking international law. And that’s just law breaking Let alone the ministerial code. Out of control. Alongside endless lies, corruption and incompetence, this Government is no longer legal.

Anyway if you despaired at the direction this country took over the last 5 years and were horrified by the election of the self serving Johnson you can at least afford yourself some slight optimism at the moment, because he might be toast. it's not if he goes but when he goes.One day, when the rest of this rotten Tory house of cards finally comes tumbling down, at least I'll be able to say I opened my mouth and decried.

As for the opposition, Starmer whipped to abstain on reducing  the welfare cap, meaning  he thinks it's ok to needlesly punish people who are in poverty. Starmer has no principles or integrity either, he's just another Tory.  

At the moment Johnson is still trying to cling on instead of doing the decent thing and offering his resignation.I guess this is the way you run an arcane democracy whose system is no longer fit for purpose in the modern world. A system which has become very vulnerable to the influence of vested interests  moneyed elites, and unaccountable individuals. The political system is fundamentally rotten to the core, that does more harm than good.

We have a massively over large and unelected House of Lords, the lack of a Written Constitution, the disproportionately elected House of Commons and a country not organised in a properly devolved, federal system. The nonsense of the Honours System and a  monarchy that simply has no business in becoming involved in a 21st Century democracy. All these have added to the farcical way in which our ‘name only’ democracy is organised. which leaves us with a a worn out and broken system! Sadly there is no alternative in the political mainstream which offers the possibility of changing this system.  Simply because it cannot be changed through "parliamentary democracy", which was developed precisely to uphold it. I no longer have any faith in it, do you?

As Jeremy Corbyn once said "..Think about the world you want to live in. Do you want the dog to eat the dog, or do you want us all to care for each other, support each other, and eliminate poverty and injustice? A different world is possible." We all need a brand new system, a fresh start, radical and fundamental change, dismantling the corridors of corruption, and if that means getting rid of capitalism that enables it all, so be it.

Remembering Amiri Bakara ( LeRoi Jones) - A Revolutionary Conscience

 

 

Amiri Baraka, incendiary and emotive poet was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his BA in English.

 He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957,but was given a dishonourable discharge after accusations of communism. He then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers.

He married  the- poet Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/03/jack-kerouac-march-12-1922-october-21.html and others.

His early work was associated with Beat and Black Mountain poetics, and  used his writing to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena, .and the struggle of American blacks for justice. 

He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/10/diane-di-prima-pioneering-feminist-beat.html of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962.

 His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film.

After the  murder of Malcolm X https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/02/malcolm-x-no-sell-out-19525-21265.htmlin 1965, Bakara left the predominantly white literary world of Greenwich Village for Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repetory Theatre and began an intense involvement in Black Nationalism.The company, which produced plays that were intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself.

 He took the Bantu-Muslim name Imanu Amiri Baraka, which means 'spiritual leader,' 'prince' and 'blessed one,' he also became the main theorist of the Black Aesthetic movement, which sought to replace white models of consciousness with African/American language and values.Later he embraced the philosophy of Marxism and became a supporter of third world liberation movement.He also supported the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system , for both black and white.

Scorning art for art’s sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Baraka was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.

“We want ‘poems that kill,'” Baraka wrote in his landmark “Black Art,” a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts Movement. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”

 He was as eclectic as he was prolific: His influences ranged from Ray Bradbury and Mao Zedong to Ginsberg and John Coltrane. Baraka wrote poems, short stories, novels, essays, plays, musical and cultural criticism and jazz operas. His 1963 book, “Blues People,” has been called the first major history of black music to be written by an African-American. A line from his poem “Black People!”  “Up against the wall mother f—–” became a counter-culture slogan for everyone from student protesters to rock bands.             

He  became respected for his pointed social criticism and fiery writing style, his voice incendiary, emotive, confrontational, He  believed poetry should rattle readers, rather than serve as decoration.

In 2002, as poet laureate of New Jersey, Baraka drew accusations of anti-Semitism over his poem Somebody Blew Up America, which referenced the 11 September 2001 attacks.

Baraka refused then-New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's request for him to resign and, in response, a state law was passed eliminating the position of poet laureate.

"Poetry is underrated," Baraka told the New York Times in 2012, "so when they got rid of the poet laureate thing, I wrote a letter saying 'This is progress. In the old days, they could lock me up. Now they just take away my title.'"

 

 Somebody Blew up America

 

  This controversy threatened to cloud the poems larger message.As journalist Jeremy Pearce explains " the poem announces the plight of the downtrodden through history, repeatedly asking 'who' is responsible for political oppression across the globe. I thank Amiri Bakara for rekindling the fire of politics in poetry.
The divisive politics of race and power continued to engage him. To Bakara, the vital connection between art and politics couldn't be more clear, " There's a great flock of lies that have to be refuted, and only poetry can do that."

Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. For two decades, Baraka was a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He was co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space,

On January 7, 2014, Amiri Baraka passed away, aged 79. His  death marked the passing of one of the greatest and most important American thinkers of the last century.In a statement following his death, Newark Mayor Luis Quntana hailed Baraka as a man who "used the power of the pen to advance the cause of civil rights".

Amiri Baraka's poetry and prose transcended ethnic and racial barriers, inspiring and energising audiences of many generations," Mr Quintana said, His voice has since been used to speak out against oppression and injustice. Amiri's  revolution was  fought with words,that I hope continue to be shared and not silenced, and shine a light, reflecting the worlds mirrors, both in it's  beauty and ugliness. Here are some of is poems

Political Poem

( for Basil)

Luxury,then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

( I have not seen the earth for years
and think now possibly " dirt" is
negative, positive, but clearly
social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot
recognize the root with clearer dent
than indifference. Though I eat
and shit as a natural man. (Getting up
from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich
and answer the phone: the poem undone
undone by my station, by my station,
and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up
to the breech, we seek to fill for this
crumbling century. The darkness of love,
in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen
who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious games of reason, saying, " No, No,
you cannot feel, " like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies fast

1964

The New World

The sun is folding, cars stall and rise
beyond the window. The workmen leave
the street to the bums and painters' wives
pushing their babies home. Those who realize
how fitful and indecent consciousness is
stare solemnly out on the emptying street.
The mourners and soft singers. The liars,
and seekers after ridiculous righteousness. All
my doubles, and friends, whose mistakes cannot
be duplicated by machines, and this is all of our
arrogance. Being broke or broken, dribbling
at the eyes. Wasted lyricists, and men
who have seen their dreams come true, only seconds
after they knew those dreams to be horrible conceits
and plastic fantasies of gesture and extension,
shoulders, hair and tonques distributing misinformation
about the nature of understanding. No one is that simple
or priggish, to be alone out of spite and grown strong
in its practice, mystics in two-pants suits. Our style,
and discipline, controlling the method of knowledge,
Beatniks, like Bohemians, go calmly out of style. And boys
are dying in Mexico, who did not get the word.
The lateness of their fabrication: mark their holes
with filthy needles. The lust of the world. This will not
be news. The simple damning lust.
                                                    float flat magic in low changing
                                                    evenings. Shiver your hands
                                                    in dance. Empty all of me for
                                                    knowing, and will the danger
                                                    of identification,

Let me sit and go blind in my dreaming
and be that dream in purpose and device.

A fantasy of defeat, a strong strong man
older, but no wiser than the defect of love

1969

Ka' Ba

A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk in the air

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
brothers. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new

correspondence with ourselves
and our black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be
the sacred words? 

 

 

Short Speech to My Friends

 

 A political art, let it be
tenderness, low strings the fingers
touch, or the width of autumn
climbing wider avenues, among the virtue
and dignity of knowing what city
you're in, who to talk to, what clothes
—even what buttons—to wear. I address
/ the society
the image, of
common utopia.

/ The perversity
of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly
ignorant.
Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

2.
Is power, the enemy? (Destroyer
of dawns, cool flesh of valentines, among
the radios, pauses, drunks
of the 19th century. I see it,
as any man's single history. All the possible heroes
dead from heat exhaustion
at the beach
or hiding for years from cameras
only to die cheaply in the pages
of our daily lie.
One hero
has pretensions toward literature
one toward the cultivation of errors, arrogance,
and constantly changing disguises, as trucker, boxer,
valet, barkeep, in the aging taverns of memory. Making love
to those speedy heroines of masturbation or kicking literal evil
continually down filmy public stairs.

A compromise
would be silence. To shut up, even such risk
as the proper placement
of verbs and nouns. To freeze the spit
in mid-air, as it aims itself
at some valiant intellectual's face.

There would be someone
who would understand, for whatever
fancy reason. Dead, lying, Roi, as your children
cane up, would also rise. As George Armstrong Custer
these 100 years, has never made
a mistake.

 

Amiri Bakara: Evolution of a Revolutionary Poet

 

 

 

As Hunger Striker Abu Hawwash Wins His Battle for Freedom: From Kurdistan to Palestine to Great Britain, Hunger Strikes Still Matter

 

Palestinian prisoner Hisham Abu Hawwash, who has been on an open-ended hunger strike for 141 consecutive days, has suspended his strike after an agreement was reached on his release from Israeli captivity, according to official Palestinian sources.
The Palestinian Authority (PA)'s Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs said in a statement that Abu Hawwash, who had been on his 141st day of hunger strike in protest against his detention without charge, ended the strike on Tuesday following an agreement under which he would be freed on February 26.
"The agreement stipulates the release of Abu Hawwash on February 26 without any extension, as well as the termination of his treatment in Israeli hospitals until his release," the statement underlined.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS)'s attorney, Jawad Boulos, also confirmed that an agreement had been reached and the 40-year-old Palestinian inmate had terminated his open-ended hunger strike after 141 days in a row.
Palestinians have protested across the occupied West Bank and Gaza in support of Abu Hawwash and the Islamic Jihad resistance movement had threatened to target Tel Aviv if he died in Israeli jails.
Most recently, the 40 year-old political prisoner has recently suffered with a decreased level of consciousness, severe weakness, and a potentially fatal potassium deficiency.
Abdul-Latif Qanu, the spokesman for the Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas, praised the prospective release of the hunger-striking inmate and said, "A new victory is recorded by the prisoner Hisham Abu Hawwash, to confirm once again the ability of our Palestinian people and their valiant captives to win every battle they are waging with the occupation."
He added, "Abu Hawwash's victory over the Zionist regime is an extension of the steadfastness of our Palestinian people in the face of the Zionist occupation."
The rights advocacy group Palestinian Prisoners Club hailed Abu Hawwash’s resistance as a "victory" and said celebrations were held in the southern West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and his birth place after the announcement.
"The battle of Abu Hawwash brought the issue of the captive movement, specifically the issue of administrative detentions, to the fore, despite all the challenges that he and his comrades who preceded him on strike recently faced," Prisoners Club said in a statement, referring to an Israeli policy of detention without charge.
"Abu Hawwash's victory comes as a complement to previous victories achieved by others in the face of the arbitrary policy of administrative detention."
The Palestinian Commission of Detainees' and Ex-Detainees' Affairs warned earlier in the day that 50 Palestinian prisoners were set to begin an open hunger strike on Tuesday night in solidarity with Abu Hawwash. The commission added that the prisoners of the Islamic Jihad resistance movement in Israeli jails would be leading the strike.
Palestinian resistance groups had over the past weeks warned against the deteriorating condition of Abu Hawwash's health and pressured the Tel Aviv regime to release the Palestinian hunger-striking inmate.
Abu Hawwash, a father of five children, who had been held since October 2020 but, under the draconian administrative detention order, had not been charged and had not gone on trial.

Under Israel’s administrative detention orders, which are mainly used against Palestinians, prisoners can be held indefinitely without knowing what they are accused of, with evidence even withheld from their lawyers.and held in an Israeli jail without charge.
More than 7,000 Palestinians are reportedly held in Israeli jails. Over 540 of these inmates have apparently been held without charge, with some of them staying in jail for up to 11 years according to human rights groups. .
Israeli jail authorities keep Palestinian prisoners under deplorable conditions lacking proper hygienic standards. The inmates have also been subjected to systematic torture, harassment, and repression.
Palestinian detainees have continuously resorted to open-ended hunger strikes in an attempt to express their outrage at the practice.

Ever since Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have resorted to hunger strikes as a form of protest to win collective or individual rights.Since then, there have been many more mass and group hunger strikes. Prisoners have demanded improved conditions, to be allowed family visits, or an end to solitary confinement.

Hunger strikes are a form of resistance that has long been understood as a weapon of last resort by the powerless and disenfranchised. designed to provoke feelings of guilt in others, especially those in positions of authority. Most hunger strikers involve either a time-limited symbolic refusal of food, or – in more extreme cases – a prolonged fast, limiting themselves to a liquid diet.

Over the first three days without food, the body uses up its store of glucose for energy. Then, the liver starts processing body fat, and the body enters “ketosis”, producing ketones to use as fuel.

Once the fat store is exhausted, the body enters “starvation mode” and starts harvesting muscles and vital organs for energy. At this stage, the loss of bone marrow becomes life-threatening. Hunger strikers can last anything from 46 to 73 days before dying.Indeed, death has been the outcome of many hunger strikes as in the case of the 1981 Irish Republican prisoners’ strike.

Humans can generally live for up to seven days without food or water, depending on their health. If only liquids are taken, a human can survive for up to 30 to 45 days. To last longer than that, hunger strikers must keep their physical activity down to a minimum,

Hunger Strikes in British society is always a subject of much controversy many people see the act as a fanatical approach to resolving political objectives, while many people hold the importance of life to such an extent that they see the act hunger strike as nothing more than a suicidal approach to resistance. Many also see hunger strikes as a strange phenomenon that shares no link to our own society or history of our people. But this could not be further from the truth.

To understand this we need to look back at our own history. Since the days of the British Empire to the political turbulence of the Thatcher years, Hunger strikes have played a major role in our history. Hunger strikes have helped shift the political discourse of our society. This is impossible to deny. Looking back at our history, many major movements from women’s suffrage to the liberation of India and Ireland from British Colonialism. In each of these struggles there were hunger strikes.

In medieval Ireland, people would fast on the doorstep of those they believed had wronged them; if they died, the accused inherited their debts. Ancient India had a similar practice.

The first famous hunger striker in modern times was British suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop, who began refusing food in prison in 1909 to fight for women’s right to vote.On 5th July, 1909 she petitioned the governor of Holloway Prison: “I claim the right recognized by all civilized nations that a person imprisoned for a political offence should have first-division treatment; and as a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me, I am now refusing all food until this matter is settled to my satisfaction.” 

Wallace-Dunlop refused to eat for several days. When the doctor asked her what she was going to eat, she replied: "My determination". He answered: "Indigestible stuff, but tough no doubt."Herbert Gladstone , the Home Secretary, was consulted and he told the governor of the prison that "she should be allowed to die." 

However, on reflection, they thought that if this happened, Dunlop might become a martyr and after ninety-one hours she was suddenly set free. According to Joseph Lennon: "She came to her prison cell as a militant suffragette, but also as a talented artist intent on challenging contemporary images of women. After she had fasted for ninety-one hours in London’s Holloway Prison, the Home Office ordered her unconditional release on July 8, 1909, as her health, already weak, began to fail". . Gandhi, a lawyer in London at the time, was among the crowd that heard the speech she delivered after being released.

On 22nd September 1909,Chotte Marsh, Laura Ainsworth and Mary Leigh were arrested while disrupting a public meeting being held by Herbert Asquith  Marsh, Ainsworth and Leigh were all sentenced to two weeks' imprisonment. They immediately decided to go on hunger strike a strategy developed by Marion Wallace-Dunlop a few weeks earlier. but the governor of Winson Green Prison, was willing to feed the three women by force. 

Keir Hardie, the Labour MP, protested against the idea of force-feeding in the House of Commons. However, his comments were greeted with a chorus of laughter and jeers. One newspaper reported: "Most of us desire something or other which we have not got... but we do not therefore take hatchets and wreck people's houses, or even shriek hysterically because the whole course of government and society is not altered to give us what we seek. These notoriety-hunters have effectually discredited the movement they think to promote."

Hardie wrote to The Daily News to complain about the way these women were being treated: "Mr. Masterman, speaking on behalf of the Home Secretary, admitted that some of the nine prisoners now in Winston Green Gaol, Birmingham, had been subjected to 'hospital treatment', and admitted that this euphemism meant administering food by force. The process employed was the insertion of a tube down the throat into the stomach and pumping the food down. To do this, I am advised, a gag has to be used to keep the mouth open. That there is difference of opinion concerning the horrible brutality of this proceeding? Women worn and weak by hunger, are seized upon, held down by brute force, gagged, a tube inserted down the throat, and food poured or pumped into the stomach. Let British men think over the spectacle".

C,P,Scott wrote to Asquith and Gladstone complaining of the "substantial injustice of punishing a girl like Miss Marsh with two months hard labour plus forcible feeding." As the editor of the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper that supported the Liberal Party, he suggested that the women should be released "to prevent the damage which is being done to our party". As a result of this letter, Gladstone agreed to monitor the health of the prisoners with a view to recommending an early release. 

Mary Leigh, described what it was like to be force-fed: "On Saturday afternoon the wardress forced me onto the bed and two doctors came in. While I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long, with a funnel at the end; there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up the right and left nostril on alternative days. The sensation is most painful - the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and there is a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I am on the bed pinned down by wardresses, one doctor holds the funnel end, and the other doctor forces the other end up the nostrils. The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down - about a pint of milk... egg and milk is sometimes used." Leigh's graphic account of the horrors of forcible feeding was published while she was still in prison. Afraid that she might die and become a martyr, it was decided to release her. 

Charlotte Marsh also experienced force-feeding. According to Elizabeth Crawford the author of The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (2000): "The Prison Visiting Committee reported that at first she (Charlotte Marsh) had to be fed by placing food in the mouth and holding the nostrils, but that she later took food from a feeding cup."Votes for Women  on her release, reported that Marsh had been fed by a feeding tube 139 times.  The authorities believed that force-feeding would act as a deterrent as well as a punishment. This was a serious miscalculation and in many ways it had the opposite effect. Militant members of the WSPU now had beliefs as strong as any religion and now they could argue that women were actually being tortured for their faith. "Suffragettes submitted to force-feeding as a way to express solidarity with their friends as well as to further the cause."

The suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst wrote of the “sickening sensation” of force-feeding, though she noted that the “sense of degradation” was even worse than the pain.

 

 

 A drawing from the WSPU newspaper, The Suffragette in 1909

 

The use of hunger strike as a form of resistance in 20th century Ireland began with James Connolly and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. They were imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail during the Great Lock-out of 1913 and were released within days of commencing their fast. The tactic was then borrowed by Irish republican prisoners,ten thousand of whom went on hunger strike in British prisons between 1916 and 1923. The brilliant and harrowing film, Hunger, by Steve McQueen, portrays the most famous republican hunger strike in the Maze prison, Belfast, when Bobby Sands starved to death in 1981 with nine other prisoners. 

 

 

With the ongoing war between the Provisional IRA and the British State over the struggle for Irish Reunification, Many Irish republican militants were arrested and interred at the Maze prison by the authorities. Whilst in prison the Irish republican prisoners began a series of protests over a five-year period. The protests began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. This led to two separate hunger strikes organized by prisoners of whom were members of the Provisional IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). The first hunger strike took place In 1980, when seven prisoners participated in the action, however the strike ended when the British government decided to make an offer in order for the prisoners to concede their demands. This however was not to last when the Government then did a u-turn on the details of the agreement. The decision of the government led to a second hunger strike, which began in 1981 and was led by Bobby Sands. 

This hunger strike led to increased support for the Irish Republican cause in Ireland, North and South and around the world  One month before his death Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament in a rebuke to the British Government from the people of Northern Ireland having won 30,492 votes, ten thousand more than Thatcher in her London Constituency of Finchley and with a majority twice as large. I remember  Thatcher's ( British PM at the time)  callous refusal to reach any compromise - " crime is crime, it is not political." she said,  which only served to reinvigorate the republican cause at the time. It is estimated that over 100,000 people attended Bobby's funeral.and  an international outpouring of grief and anti British demonstrations were to take place. Protests were held in Paris, Milan, Ghent , Australia and Greece. In a ripple effect that was felt across the world.
In the end the strike was called off after ten of the prisoners had died as a result of the hunger strike. And although Thatcher claimed victory , her government conceded the hunger strikers demands soon after the protest ended and even she, the main adversary of Sands and his comrades was moved to say years later " It was possible to admire the courage of Sands and the other hunger strikers who died. Even today the legacy of Bobby Sands is respected not only in Ireland but all over the world.

Following Bobby Sand;s death Nelson Mandela led a hunger strike by prisoners on Robben Island to improve their own conditions.The hunger strikers who died alongside Sands still continue to provide inspiration to political prisoners everywhere.

Many years later it is perhaps difficult to fully appreciate the sacrifices made by Sands and his comrades, which even if you disagree with the aims for which they gave their lives remains a monumental testament to the power of the human spirit.
It should be noted that their fight won huge support in Ireland, North and South and around the world 
And although Thatcher claimed victory , her government conceded the hunger strikers demands soon after the protest ended and even she, the main adversary of Sands and his comrades was moved to say years later " It was possible to admire the courage of Sands and the other hunger strikers who died."

Mahatma Gandhi used political fasting to great effect against the British in India and to pressure Hindus and Muslims to halt sectarian violence. He came to regard the hunger strike as one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of non-violent resistance.

 Another  example was Bhagat Singh. Singh was an Indian national who was an active participant in the Indian independence movement. He was an enthusiastic and determined revolutionary. Unlike Gandhi who leaned towards pacifism, Singh was more committed to the ideas of socialism and believed that only through revolutionary war could India be freed from British colonial rule.

When he was arrested on the charges of murdering British police inspector Saunders and Chanan Singh, Bhagat Singh was arrested and taken to prison in Punjab. Whilst there, along with other prisoners he began a hunger strike. His hunger strike was taken in order to raise a voice against the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions of the jail. The clothes, rooms, and all basic necessities provided by the authorities were dirty and unfit for purpose. Besides of this they were also coerced to do excessive manual labor which was intolerable and torturous not only for Singh but also for many other prisoners.

Bhagat started his hunger strike in June 1929 and he was successful enough to gain public sympathy and support. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later become the first prime minister of India visited Singh in prison and was deeply affected when he saw how much pain he was in. Like with the suffragettes before, The British government planned to use counter insurgent tactics to the strike. One example was to place a well in front of Singh and the other hunger strikers in order to break their spirit, but their tactic served to no use and none of them ate food. Even after a court case where he was forced to attend in spite of his poor health and a transfer to another prison, Singh still carried on with his hunger strike. By this time he had lost 14 pounds. This further fueled popularity that crossed beyond the boundaries of Punjab. Only after the insistence of his own father did Singh decide to call an end to his struggle and in October 1929 after 116 days his hunger strike ended.

South African anti-apartheid activists, Turkish Marxists, Palestinian militants and Tibetan monks have likewise used hunger strikes with varying degrees of success, along with thousands of ordinary prisoners protesting solitary confinement and other abuses.  Cesar Chavez during the struggle for farm workers rights in the United States, and the prisoners incarcerated by the US in Guantanamo Bay.   

The demands by hunger strikers vary but are, in all cases, a reflection of broader issues and social, political and economic injustices. For example, the 1981 Irish Republican prisoners’ hunger strike demand for the return of Special Category Status reflected the broader context of “the troubles” in Northern Ireland. 

Hunger strikes have become one of the prominent actions of opponents of the regime in Turkey, along with other resistance actions that have been carried out in the prisons of Diyarbakır (Amed) and elsewhere, following the 1980 military coup.

Kemal Pir, Hayri Durmuş, Akif Yılmaz and Ali Çiçek lost their lives in the “great hunger strike” of 1982, triggering great resistance in the prisons. The ‘Diyarbakır Dungeons Resistance’ is accepted as one of the turning points in the struggle of the Kurdish people for their rights in Turkey.

Six prisoners lost their lives as a result of hunger strike actions in Diyarbakır and Sağmalcılar Prisons in 1984, demanding the abolition of the prison uniform, an end to torture, the provision of humane and social living conditions and the recognition of rights for political prisoners.

There were mass hunger strikes in many prisons in 1995 and 1996, and 14 prisoners lost their lives, two in 1995 and 12 in 1996. Hundreds of prisoners joined the hunger strike and ‘to-the-death’ strike actions in 2000-2007, protesting against the F-type prisons. A total of 69 people lost their lives, 48 prisoners in the prisons, 13 prisoners after release, and seven on the outside who were supporters of the prisoners.

In the last 10 years, prison hunger strikes have re-emerged through a series of actions led by Kurdish political prisoners. The main demand that has featured in all the mass hunger strikes in Turkey’s prisons in this period has been the release of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan from solitary confinement, and the securing of his physical freedom.

In 2012, hunger strikes in the prisons demanding Abdullah Öcalan’s release from solitary confinement continued for 68 days. As a result of tens of thousands of prisoners joining the hunger strike action, the gates of İmralı prison were opened and Öcalan met with a peace delegation.

In 2016, as Öcalan was again being prevented from seeing his lawyer and his solitary confinement conditions were gradually worsening, Kurdish politicians and liberals started a hunger strike in Diyarbakır. This action ended after Abdullah Öcalan was allowed to meet with his brother Mehmet Öcalan.

In 2017, Kemal Gün began a hunger strike in Tunceli (Dersim), demanding that the state hand over his son’s bones to him. He ended the hunger strike on the 90th day when he was promised that his son’s bones would be given to him. Also that same year, educationalists Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça began a long hunger strike in Ankara demanding to be reinstated after they were dismissed by statutory decree.

In 2018, the frequent hunger strikes over previous years relating to serious human rights violations once again became a major agenda item under the leadership of Kurdish political prisoners demanding freedom for Abdullah Öcalan. In November that year, Leyla Güven, co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) led the greatest mass hunger strike in the history of Turkey and Kurdistan. The hunger strike spread quickly through many prisons across Turkey and the demands of the Kurdish prısoners were the same: end Abdullah Öcalan’s prison isolation conditions.

Tens of thousands of people joined the hunger strike action of 2018 both inside and outside the prisons. And during the last months of the strike, dozens of prisoners changed it to a ‘to-the-death’ strike. This action continued for 200 days, and while the Peace Mothers ran resistance actions outside the prisons in the streets, significant resistance actions continued inside the prisons.

Zülküf Gezen, Ayten Beçet, Zehra Sağlam, Medya Çınar, Yonca Akıcı, Siraç Yüksek, Mahsum Pamay, Ümit Acar and Uğur Şakar sacrificed themselves and lost their lives in their protests against Abdullah Öcalan’s solitary confinement.

Here in Wales an activist from Newport by the name of Imam Sis, 32, of Newport, had gone without food for 161 days in protest over the treatment of Abdullah Ocalan.

On 26 May 2019, lawyers from Asrın Law Office announced that they had had a meeting with Öcalan. With the breaking of his solitary confinement in this way, the mass hunger strike came to an end.

On 27 November 2020, with the renewed and ever increasing severity of Öcalan’s solitary confinement, political prisoners once again began a hunger strike action (which also included, among its demands, that rights abuses of prisoners should end). There were also ongoing hunger strike actions in support of Turkey’s prisoners in Maxmur Refugee Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lavrio Refugee Camp in Greece, where there were Kurds residing.

  

 

One of the earliest Palestinian hunger strikes was the seven-day hunger strike in Askalan (Ashkelon) prison in 1970. During this strike the prisoners’ demands were written on a cigarette pack as they were prevented from having notebooks, and included a refusal to address their jailers as “sir”. The prisoners won their demand and never had to use ”sir” again, but only after Abdul-Qader Abu Al-Fahem died after being force-fed, becoming the first martyr of the Palestinian prisoner's movement..

Hunger strikes at Askalan prison continued to be carried out through the 1970s.  In addition, two more prisoners, Rasim Halawe and Ali Al-Ja’fari, died after being force-fed during a hunger strike at Nafha prison in 1980. As a result of these and other hunger strikes, Palestinian prisoners were able to secure certain improvements to their prison conditions, including being allowed family pictures, stationery, books and newspapers.  

In recent years, ending the practice of administrative detention has been a persistent demand by Palestinian prisoners, given Israel;'s escalation of its use since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. For example, the mass  2012 hunger strike, which involved nearly 2,000 prisoners, demanded an end to the use of administrative detention, isolation and other punitive measures including the denial of family visits to Gaza prisoners. The strike ended after Israel agreed to limit the use of administrative detention.owever, Israel soon reneged on the agreement, leading to another mass hunger strike in 2014 by over administrative detainess pushing for an end to this practice. The hunger strike ended 63 days later without having achieved an end to administrative detention. 

In addition, there have been several individual hunger strikes sometimes coinciding with or leading to decisions to begin wider hunger strikes. Indeed both the 2012 and 2014 hunger strikes were sparked by individual hunger strikes demanding an end to the use of administrative detention. The individual hunger strikers included Hana Shalabi, Khader Adnan, Thaer Halahleh and Bilal Diab, all of whom secured an end to their administrative detention.  However, some of the individual hunger strikers were re-arrested after their release as in the case of Samer Issawi, Thaer Halahleh, and Tareq Qa’adan, as was Khader Adnan, who was released after a prolonged hunger strike protesting his re-arrest in 2015.

 As with other forms of resistance within and outside prison walls hunger strikes are acts of resistance through which Palestinians assert their political existence and demand their rights. It is vital to sustain and nurture this resistance. In addition to giving strength to and supporting the prisoners in their struggle for rights, this form of resistance continuously and powerfully inspires hope among Palestinians at large and the solidarity movement. It is our responsibility to both support Palestinian prisoners – and to work for a time when Palestinians no longer need to resort to such acts of resistance through which their only recourse is to put their lives on the line.   

At first glance, such acts of self-destruction might seem oddly irrational or self-defeating. Many forms of resistance , such as a classic workers’ strike – aim to place economic and other costs on opponents. Yet with the hunger strike, the most severe costs are suffered by protesters, who risk pain, bodily damage and even death.

Nonetheless, detainees know that the refusal of food can shame the authorities who bear ultimate responsibility for the lives of those in their custody.

By striking, hunger strikers also exert some measure of control against a system that micromanages their lives and strips them of agency. They demonstrate that they are sovereign over their own bodies and that the most serious decision of all – over life and death – is still in their hands.

As Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene put it, "They could lock me up for no reason and with no chance to argue my innocence. They could torture me, deprive me of sleep, put me in an isolation cell, control every single aspect of my life. But they couldn’t make me swallow their food."

Also for detained migrants and refugees, the choice of such an extreme technique is powerful evidence of the cruelty they are subject to in detention, and their moral determination to resist. Caged and herded like animals, they exhibit the characteristically human capacity of mastering their natural appetites in pursuit of a higher ideal.

While authorities across the world frequently attempt to dismiss hunger strikers as pathological and mentally ill, the strike is in reality a careful and deliberate form of political action. As such, hunger striking should be respected as an expression of the fundamental human right to protest, as set out in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This means that authorities  must refrain from force-feeding, and all other forms of intimidation and listen to the just claims of detainees regarding their treatment.

Through hunger strikes, prisoners no longer remain silent recipients of the prison authorities’ ongoing violence: Instead, they inflict violence upon their own bodies in order to impose their demands. In other words, hunger strikes are a space outside the reach of the  state’s power. The body of the striking prisoner unsettles one of the most fundamental relationships to violence behind prison walls, the one in which the  state and its prison authorities control every aspect of their lives behind bars and are the sole inflictors of violence. In effect, prisoners reverse the object and subject relationship to violence by fusing both into a single body - the body of the striking prisoner – and in so doing reclaim agency. They assert their status as political prisoners, refuse their reduction to the status of “security prisoner”, and claim their rights and existence. 

Palestinian detainee Abo Hawwash suffered a lot as he was on the brink of death after spending 141 days on a hunger strike. During his recent hunger strike, he lost the ability to speak, to move and went into a coma.but today at least he can claim victory is his, and has succeeded in gaining his freedom back.and proved once again the Palestinian’s ability to win against the occupation. And prove his possession of a great and indomitable will, His courageous fight also proves that from Kurdistan to Palestine to Great Britain,  hunger strikes still matter,

Remembering The Siege of Sidney Street of 1911

 

 

The famous Siege of Sidney Street took place on this day 3 January, 1911 when a small group of Latvian revolutionaries  took on Winston Churchill and the British Army, in a pitched gun battle which has since entered into East London folklore.

The Siege of Sidney Street, or the “Battle of Stepney” was preceded by the Houndsditch murders. On 16^th December 1910 a gang of Latvarian anarchists attempted to rob a jewellers shop at 119 Houndsditch. It was one of a series of “expropriations” to raise funds for propaganda and help their fellow activists in Russia and Latvia.

The revolutionaries had planned this carefully: renting rooms in the building which backed onto the rear of the shop. They even had bought a 60 foot length of India rubber gas hose so they could use gas from their own building to burn through the jeweller’s safe.

There was just one flaw in their plan, they had picked Friday night for the robbery, in a largely Jewish neighbourhood. The unexpected noise on the Jewish Sabbath disturbed residents who promptly called the police.

Two sergeants, Bentley and Bryant, tried the door of 11 Exchange Buildings, which was answered by a man who did not appear to understand English. He went inside, apparently to summon assistance. The officers waited, then followed him in, and exchanged a few words with a man standing at the top of the stairs inside. In the dark, with no electricity, they could only see his feet.

The officers decided to go further on into the house, but had hardly taken another step when a gunman burst out of the back room and opened fire. The man on the stairs also started shooting. Both sergeants were hit, but managed to stagger into the street, where a constable named Woodmans ran to help Bentley, and was shot in the thigh. He fainted.

There were two detectives in the line of fire, but the burglars were not frightened of men in plain clothes. They were only interesting in picking off the men in uniform. Two bullets hit Sergeant Charles Tucker, who was killed outright. PC Arthur Strongman, not knowing the sergeant was dead, carried him to safety, followed by one of the gunmen, who kept firing, but missed. In doing so, he stepped under a street light, which meant that the constable was the only one to see any of the killers’ faces. The others saw only shadows, and the flashes as guns went off.

The gang fired on the unarmed officers. Three were killed,Sgt Charles Tucker (47) – Sgt Robert Bentley (37) and Constable Walter Choat (34). and two injured and it remains the single worst incident for British police in peacetime.There was enormous public outcry at the death and injury of the policemen,most of the public would not have been greatly interested in their affiliations and what drove them to such desperate actions. Their war was not with the British authorities per se, but rather with Tsarist Russia. They (and there were a dozen or so associated with Houndsditch and Sidney Street) were refugees in Britain, from Latvia, where the 1905 revolution was put down with exceptional violence.

For the popular press they were all anarchists, but most had Social Revolutionary or Marxist affiliations, and had fought in terrible encounters with Tsarist forces, some of them undergoing savage beatings and torture. They believed they would receive similar brutality from the British police should they be caught, which helps explain some of their actions.

 Most were Jewish, and were part of the wave of refugees driven out of Russia by the pogroms of the late 1800s and the savage reprisals that followed the failed 1905 revolution. Britain had a reputation as a haven for such refugees, though most ended up in the sweatshops of the East End, desperately poor and roundly despised by the rest of society as ‘aliens’.

After an  intense search that  followed. the police had their first lead when a local GP reported being called to a house to treat a man who had been shot and had refused to go to hospital. They found him dead and a considerable amount of guns and ammunition, including the gun used to shoot the three policemen. The dead man was George Gardstein, an anarchist from Latvia. Three others had fled the scene. Rewards were offered,, up to £500 – a huge sum of money in 1910. The police were soon looking for an unidentified woman, Fritz Svaars and a Russian called Peter Piatkov, also known as Peter the Painter as that was his trade.Several of the gang members, associates, revolutionaries, and Latvarian anarchists were arrested in the following days.

As well as the official investigation, the murders sparked a severe social backlash against Eastern European people, particularly political refugees who lived in the East End, as they were lumped together with the anarchists as “foreign malefactors”.By 1914, over 100,000 immigrants had arrived from Eastern Europe. The majority were Russian Jews fleeing the programs but they also included other Eastern Europeans. Most settled into their new lives in London, in some cases populating entire streets in the East End. There was inevitably some negative public reaction. The immigrants were linked in the press to a rise in crime and to violent crime in particular. There were calls to amend the Aliens Act of 1905, which had introduced immigration controls for the first time in Britain and also required the registrations of new arrivals.Emotive statements were regularly published in the daily papers , often targeting immigrants with comments such as “some of the worst alien anarchists and criminals who seek our too hospitable shores” – and overviews such as “the constant mollycoddling attitude towards criminals by the government, and certain so-called humanitarian sections of the general public” (these are actual extracts from The Times newspaper at those times). The Daily Mail newspaper ran a headline that read “Who are these fiends in human shape?” This is very unsurprising given the Daily Mail’s historic support of government authority and reactionary politics. On 15^th January 1934 the paper even openly supported the fascist Oswald Mosley by publishing an article entitled “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”

 A fortnight after the shootings the police received information from a Mrs Gershon that two or three members of the gang, and possibly Peter the Painter, were hiding at 100 Sidney Street. The men inside, sensing they had been betrayed, seized the landlady and deprived her of her skirt and boots, assuming that no respectable Jewish woman would leave the house in her underclothes. But Mrs Gershon was made of sterner stuff, and slid out whilst the men were not watching.

Expecting heavy resistance, and not wanting anyone to escape, 200 armed police officers cordoned off the area after evacuating the other residents of the building, and on the morning of 3^rd January 1911, the battle began.As dawn broke, people started to gather around the police cordon, trying to find out what was happening. The police threw stones at the second-floor window where they believed the two men were hiding. Nothing happened. Then someone threw a brick and smashed a window pane. From the floor below shots fired out and a policeman was hit. A hail of bullets followed as they tried to move the wounded man.

The two holed up were heavily outnumbered, but possessed far superior firepower and had great stores of ammunition (during the 7 hours, over 400 rounds had come from the house). The German Mauser automatic pistols proved to be far superior to the weaponary than the Metropolitan police had available, and so a detachment of Scots Guards armed with rifles were sent to help. The Liberal government’s Home Secretary  of the day Winston Churchill got word of the siege, and sensing a chance for self-promotion, rushed along to take personal command. Finding the police equipped only with out-of-date firearms he authorised the deployment of 74 members of the Scots Guards stationed at the Tower of London – 35 members of the Royal Artillery plus 15 Royal Engineers – the first time the military had ever been called upon to support the constabulary..

Churchill headed down to observe it himself. Dressed in his fur coat and top hat, he proceeded to give shooting advice to the police officers. A stray bullet even passed through his top hat. To add to his preposterous appearance, Churchill had commissioned a field artillery canon to shell the building, but a fire had broken out before he had a chance to use it. This move is nowhere near excessive for a man who has put tanks on the streets of Britain before.

After 6 hours of continual shooting, a small cloud of smoke could be seen from one of the upstairs windows and very soon 100 Sidney Street was in flames.However, the soldiers showed no mercy and kept up their bombardment..

The media were in attendance; in fact it was apparently one of the first cases of live news coverage, filmed by Pathé News. and the first films were showing in West End cinemas that same evening. Eventually the police force swelled to at least 1,500, with a crowd of maybe twice that gathering to watch from the street and rooftops.

 

 

 

Once the fire brigade arrived, Churchill prevented them from putting out the fire until the firing had stopped, or in other words until the anarchists had been burnt alive. Sure enough no one emerged from the building, and the remains of 2 bodies.Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow (both were also known by numerous aliases), were later discovered inside the building. A firefighter was also killed by falling debris from the destroyed building. Churchill’s role in this affair proved to be highly controversial. The man was known for his love of spectacle, and desire to be at the frontline of events. He even informed his secretary that the siege was “such fun!”

Nobody was ever convicted of killing the officers. One of the assailants arrested before the siege was Svaars’ cousin, Jacob Peters. No one knows who fired the fatal shots, but Donald Rumbelow, an ex-police officer, argued it was Peters. However unlike the others, Peters willingly allowed himself to be arrested, and put his faith in the British legal system. Peters was a member of the Bolshevik Party, not an anarchist, and the distinction is very significant. Given his membership of the disciplined Marxist organisation, it is incredibly unlikely for Peters to have been involved in such anarchist escapades. The initial counts of murder were less than dubious, and after 128 days Peters was acquitted by the court and returned to Russia, where after the 1917 revolution, he became a leading figure in Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, but was eventually purged by Stalin in the 1930s.

Peter the Painter was never found, and there is little of evidence of him even being present at the siege. In recent years, a British Anarchist historian, Phil Ruff, has concluded that the most likely candidate for ‘Peter the Painter’ is Janis Zhaklis, a leading member of Latvia’s revolutionary Social Democratic movement who reportedly took part in armed attacks on the Tsarist regime’s prison and secret police department in Riga in 1905-6 before being forced into exile. Zhaklis’ commitment to armed struggle over political struggle apparently led him to split from the Social Democrats and move in a more anarchistic direction. In exile his political group, like others, raised funds for their struggle against autocratic oppressors through ‘expropriations’ – aka robbing the rich. The young Stalin was a noted bank robber for the Bolsheviks, arguably his most useful contribution to the revolutionary struggle. (Zhaklis is also said to have given Lenin some of the funds from an ‘expropriated’ Helsinki bank.) Before the abortive raid on the Houndsditch jewellers, Peter the Painter’s group of Latvians had staged another failed robbery in north London in January 1909, this time of a factory’s wages. The ‘Tottenham Outrage’ as it became known culminated in a six-mile armed police chase across the Lea Valley that left two dead and two dozen injured. Peter the Painter eventually became somewhat of a folk anti-hero in the East End and beyond. The Mauser C96 pistols he and the anarchists used were reportedly referred to as “Peter the Painters” in the Irish war of independence against the British Empire.Tower Hamlets Borough Council, in 2006 named two of the their community housing tower blocks Peter House and Painter House, much to the annoyance of the Metropolitan Police.

The two deceased in the siege were known to have at one time frequented the Jubilee Street Anarchist Club, just around the corner from Sidney Street. At that time there were at least 3 anarchist clubs in London. The one at 165 Jubilee Street was opened under the guise of a Jewish Friendly Society and catered mainly for Jewish émigrés fleeing persecution from Tsarist Russia. It served more as a refuge and it was described as peaceful and friendly with a library and reading room, a kids’ Sunday school, lectures, dances, recitals and no alcohol. The police would often point homeless East European refugees in the direction of the Anarchist Club knowing they would get looked after. You can read more about London’s Anarchist Clubs here.

Over a hundred years on the blazing gun battle that was fought at 100 Sidney Street paints a picture of a bygone age of revolution and social and political radicalism, but also of the willingness of the British state to crush any form of revolutionary upsurge, even in a distorted anarchist form. The siege proved to be the impetus for the modernisation and militarisation of the British police force. There were also calls for tough new policies on immigration, and a general backlash against, and attempt to discredit, any kind of socialist politics. Not the Liberals though, who were in government. Josiah Wedgwood MP wrote to Churchill, just two days after the siege, urging him to oppose draconian measures: “It is fatally easy to justify them but they lower the whole character of the nation.“You know as well as I do that human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions.”

Churchill did not change the laws. 

However In today’s age of increasing police violence and increase in right-wing and reactionary politics, we can look to incidents like the Siege of Sidney Street to remind us what the true nature of the state apparatus is, an armed body of men in protection of private property and capitalism, willing to use whatever force it deems necessary to do so.

The building at 100 Sidney Street no longer exists but there is a red plaque on a block of flats that remembers Charles Pearson, a fireman who died at Sidney Street when part of the building collapsed on him, and there is also a memorial to the three police officers who were murdered at Houndsditch.

 For further information on the Sidney Street siege, there is one essential source. Donald Rumbelow’s The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street (1973, revised 1988) is the classic account, outstanding in the dramatic detail and in its understanding of both police procedure and the revolutionaries’ motivations.

The siege was the inspiration for the final scene in Alfred Hitchcock;s original 1934 version pf The Man Who knew Too Much, and the story was heavily fictionalised in the rather awful l960 film The Siege of Sidney Street, starring Donald Sinden .

The siege was also the inspiration for two novels, The Siege of Sidney Street (1960) by F Oughton and A Death Out of Season (1973) by Emanuel Livinoff.

 The causes that drove the revolutionaries of 1911 have faded into history, even if terrorism on British shores inspired by overseas conflict and a different set of beliefs has not. But the films remain, and the press reports, and the photographs, and the many picture postcards that were produced, as tragedy was turned into commerce. The films not only show extraordinarily exciting things happening on the streets of London, but they show us an area of London never before visited by the motion picture camera..

Three of the five newsreels made of the Sidney Street siege exist at the BFI National Archive, with further copies of these at British Pathé and ITN Source. Each runs for two to three minutes in length. Versions of all three can be found online.

 The Siege of Sidney Street 

News of the World

Be still, attentive.Stay sill enough to notice,

Try to take a moment to read my letter to the world,

The cry of my screaming heart, where truth shakes free,

I'm awake, I'm alive,  but I'm far from happy,

The Queen started the new year,

By giving a knighthood to Tony Blair,

Who lied about about WMDS in Iraq. Afghanistan and beyond,

Who together with George Bush committed Britain to a criminal war,

The NHS is in crisis. Now seeing true cost of Conservatism,

Toxic Prince Andrew's Pizza Express alibi, 

Collapsing like Dominos before our eyes,

Could someone please pass me some Anchovies,

While I continue releasing my plaintive cries,

We have a Prime Minister that hid away to eat his Christmas Pud,

While ignoring deaths on an industrial scale,

Palestinian detainee Hisham Abu Hawwash,

Has not woken since 03:00 am, dying by Israeli design;

After 139 days of hunger strike, now slipped into a coma

From now on, every coming year will be his for eternity,

Mainstream media builds walls of silence to keep the sadness out,

There not a right wing franchise, there a Neoliberal entity,

The protectors of the wealthy elite and the  ruling class,

Something  doesn't have to change. Everything  has to change.

Iridescent

( A poetical response to a dear loves thought )

One day the world will end

As the cradle of life, let's us go,

Each moment, every breath erased

No kindness or tenderness to hold on to,

Fear and hatred forever evaporated

Never to be seen again, Amen,

Through the flames we will soar

Burning brightly as stars,

Though our blood will run no more

In magic of infinity, hurled dreams stored,

Beyond storm clouds of reality's confusion

In autonomous transcendence, forever illuminating,

Beyond frictionless feeling, the vortex of now

That we will be unable to touch or feel,

The noise,chaos and confusion fading

Divergent efflorescence permeating,

Distilling tears that no longer keep flowing

Stripping bare, the pulse of thought releasing,

Iridescent, in spite of our grain being smudged out

Maybe the echo of humanity will continue to shine.