Lessons from Hiroshima and Nagasaki

74 years ago  on 6th August 1945 am.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.
.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 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. Lets not forget that in our our current dangerous  times, many world leaders remain recklessly committed to their nuclear  arsenals. There are an estimated 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world at the present time with over 90% held by USA and Russia, but also by the UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and lately North Korea. This is more than enough to wipe out most of the human race and most other life and in scrapping the landmark intermediate-Range nuclear arms control pact, like the  US president Donald Trump has done on August 2d, the threat of nuclear war has been dangerously heightened.
As the safety and security of people across the globe hangs by a thread, and today 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. Across the world today for Hiroshima Day and on August 9 Nagasaki Day there will be many Lanterns for Peace Ceremonies to commemorate these two events, where many will echo the call of the Hibakusha, that such a tragic thing must never happen again.

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

Roma  Holocaust Memorial Day is held every year on August 2, to remember the murder of hundreds of thousands of Romani by the Nazis during Word War II. Roma communities also mark May 16, 1944, when, as survivors remember, the inmates successfully resisted the SS’s first attempt to clear the camp .
No official figures exactly exist, but it is estimated that between 220,000 and 500,000 Romani and Sinti,from Central Europe were killed during the war, the Nazis and their allies killed about 25 percent of Europe's entire Roma (a.k.a. Gypsy) population, accounting for half their total population at  the time. This genocide, known in the Romani language, as Porajimas which can translate as “destruction.” It's remembered as the worst event in their peoples' history. Other Romani people in the Balkans prefer to use the term 'samudaripen,' translating as “mass killing,” but there's still no general consensus in the community regarding how to call this tragedy, sometimes even borrowing the word 'holokausto.'
Roma persecution by the Nazi regime began in 1933 and during the 1936 Olympic Games, the Roma and Sinti were forcibly relocated to a camp on the outskirts and were not allowed to leave unless they had a job. Their property was confiscated and sold; they were never compensated. Between 1933 and 1945, more than 400,000 people were forcibly sterilised by the Nazis, including thousands of Roma and Sinti, In the late 1930s, the first deportations of Roma to concentration camps began. While the yellow star worn by the Jewish victims of the Holocaust is best known, the Roma had their own symbols, brown or black triangles, symbolising their ethnicity and their inherent ‘anti-social’ status.
In May 1944, the Nazis started to plan the “Final Solution” for the “Gypsy Family Camp” in Auschwitz. The initial date for the liquidation of the “Gypsy camp” was planned for the 16^th of May. The prisoners of the camp were ordered to stay in the barracks and surrounded by 60 SS men. When the SS men tried to force the prisoners out of the barracks they faced a rebellion of Roma men, women and children, armed with nothing more but sticks, tools and stones, and eventually the SS had to withdraw. The resistance of Roma prisoners gave them only a few additional months of life.
The Nazi also feared that an insurrection could spread to other parts of the camp and they planned the “Final Solution” on August 2nd. On orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler, a ban on leaving the barracks was imposed on the evening of August 2 in the “Gypsy Camp”. Despite resistance by the Roma, 2,897 men, women, and children were loaded on trucks, taken to gas chamber V, and exterminated. Their bodies were burned in pits next to the crematorium. After the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 only 4 Roma remained alive.
Auschwitz remains a powerful symbolic point of reference for European Roma , as it does, of course for global memory of the Holocaust. But even before this horrific moment in history the Roma were vilified, and maligned across Europe, an ethnic group originating in the northern Indian subcontinent before making their way to Europe most likely in the 14th century, the Roma had always been a migratory people who often faced local persecution wherever they ended up. And in the subsequent years since the Holocaust, their pain and suffering has been forgotten and diluted, wiped from the pages of history books while the same myths that were used to put them in camps in the first place persist into the 21st century. Widely accepted “facts” about Roma criminality and anti-social behaviour are today central to any conversation about the Roma community, despite a broad lack of understanding for the realities involved. The genocide of the Roma and the Sinti by the Nazis remains for many the "Forgotten Holocaust "
Surely  it is  time we should reject the notion that only the group with the highest number of victims deserves acknowledgement for their suffering.What matters most, in any case, is not the anomalies or the differences in the numbers, but the fact that both Jews and Gypsies were deemed “parasitic alien races” and targeted for racial extermination.It is certainly time for full recognition of the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis. Just as Jews have Yom HaShoah, the Roma and Sinti have now their own commemoration  to fully recognize Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. Today organizations representing  the Roma and Sinti community will gather today at Auschwitz and other sites for education and remembrance.
We should not forget either,  that those who passed through the gates of Auschwitz were only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Romani victims of the genocidal policies of the Nazis and their allies. In occupied Poland, Serbia and the Soviet Union, they were hunted down by the same Wehrmacht units and death squads that massacred Jews. In Romania, some 25,000 were deported to “colonies” east of the Dniester river (Transnistria); nearly half of them did not survive the brutal conditions there.
After World War II, German society even denied for decades they had been persecuted and it took until 1979 for the German government to commence reparations and until 2011 for the killings to receive an official day of remembrance.However to this day the families of the victims of the Roma Holocaust still struggle for compensation and equal rights, while at same time institutional and rhetorical anti-Gypsyism is sadly becoming politically respectable in parts of Europe again. They face extreme unemployment and poverty. They have poor education outcomes, language and literacy barriers. They are segregated and discriminated against at every turn, but people are willing to turn a blind eye to all of that because it’s not happening to them.The need for continued memorialization of the fate of the Roma and Sinti population of Europe has never been more important.
Not just today we should pay tribute to the memory of the Roma victims of the Holocaust, making sure this tragedy is never repeated . It is  also a stark reminder of our shared responsibility and duty as fellow humans to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to counter antigypsyism, antisemitism, racism,discrimination and stand guard  against hatred and indifference and other forms of intolerance. Also in remembering the genocide is an important step towards securing respect and civil rights for Europe’s Sinti and Roma. a path to stop the racism against the Roma that has never stopped  for them and the pain that is still inflicted on their community that affects them so deeply.

Frank Stanford (1/8/48- 3/6/78 ) :- Neglected Poet of raw emotion

Prolific American poet Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi on August 1 in 1948, he was taken out of a Mississippi orphanage and was adopted by Dorthy Gildart, who was single. In 1950 his mother adopted a daughter Bettina Ruth, and in 1952, his mother married Albert Frankin, a much older civil engineer contractor in Memphis., Tennessee, where the family relocated, and Albert adopted Frank and his younger sister. Until his death eight years later, Stanford raised the young boy as his own. When he was 21, Frank discovered that his mother had adopted him he had always believed, or been led to believe, that she was his birth mother. His birth parents are unknown. The orphanage from which a single mother adopted him burst into flames, destroying his record.
 Standford spent summers in labor camps run by his father, and worked side by side with African Americans building levees on the Mississippi River, absorbing his co-workers’ vivid storytelling, their music and their fatalistic point of view. Asked once what he had learned from his co-workers, he said simply: “how shitty white people were to them.”
In 1964, Stanford entered Subiaco Abbey and Academy near Paris, Arkansas, a boys' prep-school run by Benedictine monks who provided a rigorous liberal arts and physical fitness curriculum. After graduating, he entered the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in the fall of 1966, pursuing a civil engineering degree as his stepfather had done at the same institution some fifty years earlier. In January 1969, the spring semester of his sophomore year, Stanford changed his field of study to English and was allowed to enroll in the graduate poetry-writing workshop, an uncommon occurrence.
Stanford‘s personal life  though was rather tumultuous, after leaving University without a degree in 1971,he married  Linda Mercin , but the marriage ended within a year. In 1973 he married a second time to painter Ginny Crouch. They had no children.His preoccupation with his loss of identity and his perpetual quest for identifying origins, manifested across his poetry. His subject was mostly childhood, and particularly the childhood spent growing up in a Southern community at a time when the South was on the brink of tumultuous change. He writes of childhood memories viewed through an adult lens, memories recalled with a grasp that is fond and loving but also understanding and at times shocking. Much of his poetry is about growing up in the 1950s South. His language soaked in a Southern vernacular and deeply American.Long poems set with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape drawn from his childhood in the Ozark mountains and full of wild embellishment.
Stanford was a writer unlike any other American poet of his time. He was heavily influenced by French and Latin American Surrealism, and he was dubbed "a swamprat Rimbaud" by the poet Lorenzo Thomas and "one of the great voices of death" by Franz Wright.Stanford consistently took two of the most ancient poetical themes, love and death, and infused them  with a freshness with his language and imagery. His poems remain haunting,primal, otherworldly and powerful to read, full of raw emotion and passion, and despite the preoccupation with death are strangely beautiful.
 On June 3, 1978, Stanford  walked into his home in Fayetteville, Ark., to be confronted by his wife, painter Ginny Stanford, and his mistress, poet C.D. Wright about his sexual liaisons. There were at least half a dozen other women at the time.After confesing his infidelity to his wife, he had suffered from depression and threatened suicide on previous occasions, he stepped into the bedroom and shot himself with a .22 pistol. He is buried at Saint Benedict's Cemetry near Subiaco Abbey.
 Stanford wrote ten books of poetry, eight volumes in the last seen years of his life, which is pretty impressive for anyone, his books include The Singing Knives, Ladies from Hell, Arkansas Bench Stone  and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I love you, a mostly unpunctuated poem that is more than 16,000 lines long.
He published prolifically and was acknowledged as one of  the most talented and uniquely  inventive poets of his generation, however after his death, with his literary estate split, a rift between his widow and his mistress left the majority of his work inaccessible to all  but determined seekers. But in the years following his death  there have been a number of posthumous collections, and though a underappreciated and neglected  artist, who has been almost entirely absent from poetry anthologies he has certainly developed a cult following,  and now with his books being republished, it has meant that  his legacy, in recent years, has at least continued to  grow and for him to be at last  recognised  as an undeniable force in contemporary American poetry. He cared about the lost and forgotten , the poor and afraid. And he bought them into his poems. where their despair and hoplessness could shine clearly. His poems should be a wake up call for all of us, and long shall they not be forgotten either.His grand imagination has flared in the imagination of a new generation of readers and writers and he has since been written about in at least two folk songs - the Indigo Girls' "Three Hits" and Lucinda Williams' beautiful song "Pineola" who was a close family friend of Stanford who was a staple in the Williams household in the 1970s.

The Light  the Dead See - Frank Standford

There are many people who come back
After the doctor has smoothed the sheet
Around their body
And left the room to make his call.

They die but they live.

They are called the dead who lived through their deaths,
And among my people
They are considered wise and honest.

They float out of their bodies
And light on the ceiling like a moth,
Watching the efforts of everyone around them.

The voices and the images of the living
Fade away.

A roar sucks them under
The wheels of a darkness without pain.
Off in the distance
There is someone
Like a signalman swinging a lantern.

The light grows, a white flower.
It becomes very intense, like music.

They see the faces of those they loved,
The truly dead who speak kindly.
They see their father sitting in a field.
The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended.
There is a towel around his neck,
The odor of bay rum.
Then they see their mother
Standing behind him with a pair of shears.
The wind is blowing.
She is cutting his hair.

The dead have told these stories
To the living.

 Time Forks Perpetually toward Innumerable Futures in Your Enemy - Frank Stanford

I am going to die.

Friends who made good,
Friends who did not,
I am going
Down into the Egypt of your sex,
The lands of your mystery and death.

Do you still want me
To find you
Somebody to love?

I cruise through the delta of your love,
Paradise on Sunday,
Cold as ice on Monday.
A hundred pounds of it on the tongs,
A butterfly at the center.

Going home I cross the bridge
And throw a bottle out the window,
Hit all my friends in the head.

The crickets under the straw
Like old folks spitting in a paper sack.

Now my life the Sphinx
Laid by slaves,
My death the promised land.

A light rain falling, a split tongue
And sad eyes, no lie,
I’ve got you by the tongue.

I park my Cadillac outside your temple of madness.
You are worshipped there.

Look at your face, swollen from sleep.
Are you waiting for me
To unwind you from your last clothes,
Do you want me
To bury my long ship in your heart?

Your lineage like gravesites for the stars,
Way stations for great dreamers.

There is a six foot rattlesnake
Asleep in the birdhouse.
Are you taking crumbs to the warblers tonight?

Death is an isthmus, you can get there on foot.
But love had made its island.

What of the young?
I hunt them down,
Good winds in the desert,
Blue eggs in the junipers.

You - Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

Frank Stanford, What About This:Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Port Townsend; Copper Canyon Press, 2015

Pineola - Lucinda Williams

Britains richest man: Frack off !

Residents in the south Yorkshire village of Woodsett are currently raising money to oppose shale gas exploration proposals by US petrochemical giant Ineos, largely owned by the UK’s richest man, and Brexiteer the billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe  has described shale gas as a “saviour“ of the UK economy. He is known for his aggressive pursuit of industrial assets in the UK, including the Grangemouth petrochemical plant and refinery, Forties pipeline, and fracking licenses. [2], [3], [4], [5] Ratcliffe confessed to moving his operations to the tax-haven of Geneva, Switzerland, with some parts of INEOS’ business now returned to the UK.He forced the closure of the Grangemouth refinery in 2013 after a dispute with trade unions over working conditions and pension payments.
 Ratcliffe wrote a comment piece for the Daily Telegraph reflecting on the Grangemouth industrial dispute, in which he says of trade unions:“It is misplaced for unions in Britain to think that we are the enemy. We are not. It is not necessary, nor appropriate, to sow dissent and misrepresent employees or constantly to threaten industrial action. "
Ineos does not restrict themselves to getting up the noses of their workers They have also taken out a national injunction against protestors, making it a highly risky business even to stand outside an Ineos plant brandishing a cardboard Frack Off sign.
Ineos currently has a UK petroleum exploration and development licence (PEDL) for a field outside Woodsetts, which allows it to pursue a range of oil and gas exploration activities, subject to necessary drilling and development consents and planning permission.
Matthew Wilkinson, from Woodsetts Against Fracking, said houses in Berne Square backed on to Ineos’s site: “It would be clearly visible from their homes. You could throw a ball and probably get very close to the well pad.”
A few weeks ago Ineos submitted an application to erect a 270-metre-long fence as an “acoustic sound barrier” to shield the estate, which has already been dubbed the “Great Wall of Ineos”.
Wilkinson said the fence would make residents feel trapped. “If somebody sticks a huge wall up outside your house, which it pretty much is, you’re going to feel enclosed.
“The ‘Great Wall of Ineos’ will act like nothing more than a prison wall to the most vulnerable people in our village, obscuring their views, reducing their light and causing stress.”
The Conservative government is in favour of fracking and has made it difficult for local councils to deny planning permission to energy firms hoping to frack for shale gas. To turn down a fracking application, councillors must cite concerns over traffic, noise or environmental impact, rather than an ideological objection to the process of fracking. Councillors in Rotherham have so far though twice refused planning permission for the well, citing concerns mentioned above .Denying Ineos for the second time in September .councillors voiced concern about the proximity to Berne Square, which provides housing for people who are elderly or ill.
Fracking is the process of extracting gas or oil from rocks trapped thousands of metres underground, by drilling into the rocks and breaking them up with water and chemicals at high pressure.Those in favour of fracking say that we are addicted to fossil fuel and should  not make a fuss about the consequences, that fracking will increase jobs, reduce energy bills and reduce reliance on imported oil and gas. Those against say, this is not about consumer demand, it’s about profits  and our reliance on fossil fuels is short sighted, the practice is terrible for the environment and the number of jobs generated has been grossly over exaggerated and the Government should focus on renewable energy.
Sir Jim, has dismissed many of the concerns about fracking, calling many protest groups ' ignorant' and criticising the Government for listening to a "noisy miniscule  minority and insisting his company has made significant breakthroughs  on expanding the recycling of plastic.
However support for shale gas has sunk to a new low, as cracks appear in the industry.In a government survey on energy, published last Thursday, 6 February, public support for fracking has sunk to a record low. The survey, carried out quarterly for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, found that 13% supported fracking while 35% opposed fracking. The government survey also revealed 77% of people want renewable energy; the most common reason being the loss or destruction of the natural environment, followed by the risk of earthquakes and tremors. Fracking also presents  immediate risks to human health and contamination of drinking water by toxic chemicals released during the fracking process. This combined with respiratory problems that flare up in the vicinity around fracking sites, from wheezing and coughing and breathlessness, to potentially life-threatening issues like asthma. Further, there are serious issues with noise, stress, and sleep deprivation, leading to rises in incidence of heart disease, depression, and even linked to learning difficulties in children. As a result many are calling for fracking to be banned once and for all.
Ineos has repeatedly come under fire for its carbon footprint, which it has historically refused to disclose, while some have suggested the group may be one of Britain's largest polluters.“It seems reasonable to assume that Ineos' emissions amount to millions, if not tens of millions of CO2 every year,” a Christian Aid spokesman said.“Yet despite the company's vast scale, it manages to keep an extremely low profile, releasing only snippets of information about its emissions of greenhouse gases.
Documents released under a freedom of information act request revealed Ineos was also leading a push to use Brexit as an opportunity to exempt the chemical sector entirely from climate change policy costs, The Guardian reported.
Protestors recently targeted  the chemical giant at the cycling Tour de Yorkshire after Ineos became the sponsor of a British cycling team, that had previously been called Team Sky, and follows a £110m investment with Olympian sailor Ben Ainsle in the American Cup Yacht race, which  many believe simply amounts to a form of greenwashing, in an attempt to deflect criticism of the company's  damaging environmental record and polluting activities by backing high profile eco friendly causes. Environmental  groups have been quick to link Ratcliffe's spending to wider controversies about his business interests, from concerns about the real impact of fracking to the over extension of the plastics  market. Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, has described the acceptance of Ineos sponsorship as "wholly inappropriate"..
The villagers of Woodsett are fighting back in what campaigners are describing as a case of “David v Goliath”.and have crowdfunded £10,000 to pay a lawyer to help them oppose the application by Ineos to carry out test core drilling on a field just outside their village. They have recently recieved fresh hope as Ineos' planning appeal for drilling has been delayed until 2020. I would urge people to  support them in their fight against climate criminals Ineos , as they destroy our environment and fuel climate change in their thirst for profit.

 Crowdjustice website for Woodsetts Against Fracking

Martin Luther King, Jr. - We've learned to fly the air like birds...

On August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  took the stand and began his famous “I have a dream speech” with the following words:

 “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

By the time King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, he had left us all with his universal message of peace, freedom , justice and the dignity of being human. His words many years later continue to touch, move and inspire and are so relevant to the times we  currently live in. Dr. King’s vision went far beyond garnering equal rights for his own racial group. His experience of oppression and suffering led him to identify with all who suffer from systems and structures that exclude them. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. King used the metaphor of a “World House” to remind us that we all inhabit the same fragile planet and that the way we live together will either make the house more habitable or destroy it altogether. He went on to say

 "Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: ‘Improved means to an unimproved end.’ This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual ‘lag’ must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul."

Our survival depends on solving these problems", King said, adding that "The solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony."

 Let our quest for peace and justice long continue,

.https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1964/king/lecture/

Defusing the timebomb ( for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson)

Some say he's all but won
for others a fly in the ointment
causing ripples of despair
as choruses of desperation
search for some way out of here
in the face of incredulous days
no room for jubilation
as idiocracy given keys of power.

There's a difference between
austerity and robbery
the undemocratic process
that is not shown on the news
where they carpet bomb us with bullshit,
regurgitated soundbites that do not calm
do not expose the truth for all to see
that exist in the shadows of our being.

As divisions cracks are fostered
a snake charmer releases bag of tricks
time to shape new spectacles
end illusion, ignite passionate fire
create a new parliament for the people
built on circuits of love
where veracity in the end
will be what is left standing.

The hungry and those hardest hit
the broken and abandoned
with nothing left to lose.
will take on the mantle of power
no longer needing to run or beg
cancelling out abominations
the mists of their tomorrows
glimmering with hope.

https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/defusing-the-timebomb-by-dave-rendle/         
                                   

Boris Johnson as British Prime minister !!

This week following a month long contest will see a group  of 160,000 largely old white male lunatics,who are likely to have voted for the Brexit party in the EU elections electing  one Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson to be the oafish new British Prime Minister on behalf of vested interests and his quest to destroy democratic values. It is such a cheery thought to wake up to and is certainly an odd way for a country to choose its next prime minister and seems like a sick joke, and certainly gives us all room for concern..
Although Johnson's image is carefully constructed, to give him the appearance of a harmless, amiable, loveable  buffoon, his life of privilege is real, as a product of Britain's most famous private school, Eton College which marks  him, by most peoples definition, a member of the gilded elite. An individual with a chaotic private life, gross incompetance and ineptitude, as seen in the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe,who also has a habit of bending facts,who has lied through life, has lied his way though politics, with an egomania beyond control, such a nasty piece of work who will stop at nothing, from racist crass offensive rabble rousing to promising the moon on a stick, in order to get what he wants. A man who should not be trusted to open the Downing Street door, let alone given the keys, he is simply not fit for office, the mind truly boggles at the thought of this prospect.
Yet there are still those that fall for the idea that this self-serving chancer  is a  liberal despite his embrace of nationalism and targeting of Islamic women, with his toxic rhetoric,while appeasing Americas very own racist President,  who in terms of policy in the depressing leadership campaign has seen him pushing for tax cuts to the rich, he pledged to increase the threshold for paying the 40% rate from £50,000 to £80,000, coercing a large swathe of the Tory membership who will be voting for him, at a cost of 9 billion a year. He said in declaring his canditature, "We should be cutting corporation tax and other business taxes."
Even the Financial Times  felt obliged to editoralise that such policies were  "irresponsible" at a time of growing social discontent."Surveys show that after a near decade of austerity most Britons would rather the government raised taxes and spent the proceeds on better services than cut them further."Johnson also talked of desiring unity having done so much to widen division by leading this country blindly into its current morass. Johnson is also seeking to ensure closer ties with the US, with the promise of of a new free trade deal with Washington  post Brexit, under conditions in which the major EU powers are at odds with US imperialism over policies of trade war and confrontation with China, Russia and Iran, that can only intensify divisions between the UK and Brussels. Under his tenure it would also see the scrapping of environmental regulations, the ever deeper erosion of workers rights and a political climate in which racism, homophobia and every reactionary prejudice can be freely expressed. At end of the day its just a political game of power to Johnson, one that could blow up in his face, and that could seriously backfire on him and the rest of his acolytes.
Because Johnson is such a polarizing figure in UK politics that for many voters, they  don't just dislike Johnson but absolutely loathe him. For all his charm, it wears decidedly thin, with his long history of causing offence whenever he happens to opens his mouth.
Chosen by a tiny, unrepresentative minority, he will certainly have no mandate from the people for his racist, hard right policies.,Yet we could see that Boris becomes the shortest serving Conservative prime minister, because he might not even have a majority by the time he is announced as the next PM, and if there is a general election later this  year with the UK still not having left the UK and Brexit remains unsolved, polls are predicting a Tory bloodbath, as people come to their senses with the nation  booting Johnson and the rest of the Torys out of power, and confining them to the dustbins of electoral history, where they truly deserve to reside. I can only live in hope.

Earlier thoughts

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/06/boris-johnson-not-clown-but-intolerant.html

Living utopia (Vivir la utopia) - Unique documentary on Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (1936)

On a day like this, 83 years ago, a sequence of events occurred , that would lead to the Spanish Revolution . A moment in time that has come to represent the defining struggle of the age: a clash between not just between the opposing political ideologies of socialism and fascism, but between civilization and barbarism, good and evil.
 In 1931 with the proclamation of a Republic a Socialist-Republican Government was formed in Spain, which had the support of many revolutionary forces active in Spain.It had a commitment to the seperation of the church and the state, and a commitment to international peace, modern systems of education, land reform, and more equal roles for both men and women. By 1936 the Spanish Republic had recently been revived by the election of a moderately liberal government after 5 years of tension and retrenchment. A new popular front alliance of all anti-fascist parties had swept the country the previous year.
However on the night of 18th July, 1936 the army mutinied with their generals  and launched a coup against the people. They bought in foreign legionairres and colonial troops and under General Franco proclaimed a military takeover. A bitter struggle had begun.
Executions without trial were common place, Franco had the support of the aristocracy,the army, the landlords, the bankers, and the Church hierararchy and a clique of corrupt politicians went over to the conspirators the rest backed the Republic.The left wing of the popular front was determined to resist the Generals and resolved to distribute arms and weapons to newly formed militias. By the morning of 19th July truckloads of rifles from  the Ministry of War were on their way to the headquarters of the Socialist and Anarchist trade unions for distribution to their members. A few weeks later  a government emerged more than capable of defending the Republic against the Generals. It was the first Republican Government to have full Socialist, Communist and Anarchist support. However Franco had both Italian and German fascist support, with both their finance and intervention. The fascists defended a common view of the past, while the republican coalition though, had widely different visions of the future.

But the people rose, millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; and more than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic, forces of red and black fought back united against fascism. In the countryside, peasants took control of the land, redistributing large estates and, in many places, collectivizing the land and setting up communes and a civil war  was waged, the workers immediately set up barricades and within hours the rising had been defeated. Arms were seized and given to workers who were dispatched to other areas to prevent risings. Madrid was also saved because of the heroism and initiative of the workers. Hearing of what had happened in Barcelona they had stormed the main army base in the city. Workers' militias were established. Workplaces were taken over and for ten months after July 1936, the people held power. Taking over the factories and the running of the whole of society. They organised workers’ committees  in enterprises and streets. They believed that they had power and fought to defend and extend it.The revolution that Spain was experiencing did not go unnoticed by visitors. George Orwell, who arrived to fight as a volunteer in a column raised by the POUM, a dissident Marxist party allied to the anarchists, describes his impressions upon reaching Barcelona:

"This was the first time that I found myself in a city where the working class was in control... The anarchists were virtually in control of Catalonia and the revolution was striding ahead... Activities of a servile nature had disappeared. No one said 'Senor' or 'Don', nor even 'usted'. Everybody was called 'comrade' and 'tu'; and said 'Salud!' instead of 'buenos dias'.

Barcelona was the nerve centre of the revolution in urban Spain. With the CNT and the FAI at the head of the antifascist militias committee, Catalonia underwent one of the most radical transformations in its history, affecting every aspect of its political, social and economic life. 80% of firms had been collectivised and all services were being run by the workers themselves. These changes were to be legalised by the Generalidad in October 1936.

But in a series of tragic events  they were sadly defeated aided by the British government who had agreed to a policy of 'non-intervention'  along with the help of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It was a brutal conflict that polarised Spain, pitting the Left against the Right, the anti-clericals against the Church, the unions against the landed classes and the Republicans against the Monarchists. It was a bloody war which saw, in the space of just three years, the murder and execution of 350,000 people, not forgetting all those who died from malnutrition, starvation, and war-engendered disease. It was also a conflict that became internationalised, becoming a battleground for the forces of Fascism and Communism as Europe itself geared up for war.
By April 1939, all of Spain was under fascist control and Franco declared a victory .Solidifying his power with a brutal dictatorship by oppressing and systematically killing any political opposition. General Franco's military regime remained in power until his death in 1975 depriving  Spain of freedom for several decades afterwards, the wound inflicted still resonates.
Over 40,000 other selfless men and women fought side by side for the ideas of liberty and social justice, solidarity and mutual aid from 53 different nationalities. Rallying to the republican cause.
For many it was not just a war to defeat the fascists it was the beginning of a new society. A revolution in fact, unfortunately revolutions do not succeed when the people are divided. There are many lessons to be learnt from this struggle, a struggle that continues to do this day.
The film above "Vivir la Utopia" (Living Utopia) is a unique 1997 feature-length documentary by Juan Gamero (Spanish with English subtitles) which chronicles the origins and evolution of the Spanish anarchist movement and its important role during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939). The largest anarchist community of its kind in Europe at the time, millions of peasants and urban workers successfully established a society based on equality, mutual aid, participatory democracy and self-organization – all without a central state or government. This fascinating yet largely unknown non hierarchical sociopolitical experiment was eventually destroyed by forces from inside and outside the country. Featuring rare archival footage and interviews with surviving participants, Living Utopia is considered to be one of the most important documentaries on the subject and what it lacks in high-brow cinematic quality it makes up for with the passion of the people whose story it tells. By telling the stories of these social pioneers, the film emphasizes on the social changes and the political developments that have resulted in the rise of Franco and the Spanish Civil War. Extensive interviews with the old laborers and anarchist members are beautifully combined with black and white footage from the era of the revolution. Many years later people  are still looking for another world, a living utopia, Emma Goldman  once said  'To the daring belongs the future... when we run out of dreams, we die... .

Summer of Love

In conditions of splendour across the land
finding passion, following its hungry shout,
soaring through the trees and breeze
as we play hide and seek
under the fiery sun
sharing our love
for woman, spirit, man.

Climbing fissions of desire
beyond the cruelty of life
under the influence, defying gravity
seeking hands of human friendship
that resurrect lifes limbo
drawn to positive forces
painting pictures anew.

Under turpentine clouds
sizzling and shimmering
lifting us to a future
where we can keep seeking
the same water of  life
kissed by the sun
feeling the warmth of its embrace.

Swimming among tides of change
sunshine taking us to horizons of love
flowing with  devotion
allowing dreams to expand
unleashing awakening yearnings
as evening releases harmony
a blanket of stars to catch our breath.

Truth can set you free : this is my version.

Media 

( mee-dee- uh)

noun

An institution largely controlled by rich people, in order to convince poor people to blame other poor people for problems created by rich people.

Constantly manipulating, perpetuating myths, that allow the poor to be blamed for their poverty, that allows the rest of society to avoid taking any responsibility.Allows dangerous policies to be imposed on whole sections of society without the full consequences from being examined. Through a systematic misrepresentation of the poorest in society. Offering us a constant stream of propoganda, disinformation and lies. This is turn, influences the way people see the world, and as a result, the media is a key by which the general population comes to accept, and support things. It also enables people to adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised and fatalistic. Increasingly the focus lies on sensationalism and entertainment that leads to the overuse of soundbites, that tend to be repeated indefinitely.
Bias in the media is a global phenomenon and as the media grows in power, the political and economic interests of news outlets and the ones who control it have grown as well, which has its impact on the opinons of those that are easily influenced. Sections of  of Britain’s biggest papers, release racism, transphobia and homophobia also operate insidiously under the guise of “free speech”, “open platforms” and “rational debate”. We saw this when Newsnight asked whether alt-right figurehead Tommy Robinson was dangerous or just “a man raising concerns that others ignore”; and it reared its head  recently  when Question Time mused on whether it was “morally right” that “five-year-old children” learn about the existence of queer people. These debates are often set up in a way that is unrepresentative or makes an equal footing impossible – like a panel that is skewed towards racists or transphobic people, with only one black person or one trans woman to represent. Also according to research by YouGov, from a few years ago, the British media definitely has a skew to the right, the study covering 7 European countries  found that people’s perceptions of right-wing bias were most pronounced in the UK. The study, involved 8,358 people showed that UK citizens were the most likely to think that the press is too negative about immigration.

Overall 26 per cent of the survey respondents said that UK newspapers, radio and TV was “too right-wing” as opposed to 17 per cent who said it was “too left-wing.” The study focused on five topics: immigration, housing, health, economics and crime. It certainly was grim reading. And it certainly seems to hae got far worse since this report initially came out.
The great Noam Chomsky has helped develop a detailed and sophisticated analyse of how the wealthy and powerful use the media to propogandise in their own interests behind a mask of objective reporting. More of which you can read about in a book he wrote with Edward Herman called Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media. It is noted however that mainstream media journalism has fallen precipitously in the minds of the public in recent years. 

Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the media

In the last decade or so, with the growth of the internet, alternative news websites, social media sites like facebook and twitter, it has made it easier to encounter a range of voices that together can often give a fuller picture of a story and reveal gaps in knowledge and  can at least have the capacity to challenge certain agendas  and narrives of unrelenting bias. People have begun to finally realise that they they are being misled, manipulated and lied to and have started to resent it. Unlike the corporate mainstream media, this blog does not rely on well paid journalists, or the reliance and dependence on the concerns of advertisers, but tries to remain truly independent in spirit. Trying to release a point of view that is not distorted in favor of state corporate interests.
It is clear that the establishment though is still afraid of free voices, that try to  push for social change. Voices that hopefully can and will continue to hold the powers to be held to account. Beyond the daily inane machinations of the mainstream media,  that refuse to serve and maintain the status-quo. 
We should all  try and seek to report the truth , providing fair and comprehensive accounts of events and issues, counter narratives to what we are peddled daily. If we continue to fail to report the truth , and consider story's from every angle, we fail the public and one another. This at end of day,,is only my point of view and I am sure their are those out there who will find my words an irrelevence, a mere distraction, in the larger scheme of things. We all have our different versions of reality, different  opinions  that can at least help people see and interpret things differently.Even if you don’t think you have great leverage to change things, you need to talk about bias where you see it, and the media organisations you see that are failing us.
I hope to keep on releasing my free expression, the truth as I see it, a truth that sets me free, oh plus the usual mixture of my own poetical musings and thoughtful willful distraction.

Wildness - Henry David Thoreau.

"We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us"

Organic radical thinker Henry David Thoreau was born today on July 12 1817

He promoted a simple natural way of life and spoke out against modern civilization and the violence of the state.and his ideas thankfully  still permeate all our seasons, who reminded us that when unjust laws are made wee should bot hesitate to break them. His essay  from 1848, Civil disobedience stands as a classic statement of principled resistance, and is a beautiful manifesto of much needed intent, that appeals to  people of individual conscience to resist political authority .https://archive.org/details/CivilDisobedience-HenryDavidThoreau

I will end with this wonderful quote from him which was written in 1851, long may Thoreau's legacy grow

"We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where
the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe;
to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more
solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close
to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore
and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed
and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough
of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,
vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the
wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud,
and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life
pasturing freely where we never wander."

FROM - Walden, 1894.

https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/henry-david-thoreau/

Far right extremist Tommy Robinson sent to prison, for contempt of court

Far right extremist Tommy Robinson, the 36-year-old founder of the anti-immigration, anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL), whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who has 11 previous convictions for violence. assault, drug and public order offenses, mortgage fraud and using another person's passport to travel to the US  has been convicted and jailed for contempt of court over a video he broadcast on social media which featured defendants in a criminal trial.
Prejudicing a trial is a natural consequence when there is an offence of contempt of court committed. When an individual interferes with the court’s constitutional role in the course of justice, they may influence the jury’s verdict, rendering such a verdict unfair and compromising the trial as a whole.
Judge  Dame Victoria Sharp sentenced him to 19 weeks, less 138 days for time served for a previous offence. A sentence  simply not long enough for some. Passing sentence, she said: "We are in no doubt that the custody threshold is crossed in this case, in particular having regard to the common law contempt that the respondent committed."Nothing less than a custodial penalty would properly reflect the gravity of the conduct we have identified."
 Dame Victoria continued: "The respondent (Robinson) cannot be given credit for pleading guilty. He has lied about a number of matters and sought to portray himself as the victim of unfairness and oppression."This does not increase his sentence, but it does mean that there can be no reduction for an admission of guilt."In May 2017 Robinson was given a three-month suspended at Canterbury Crown Court.
Nick Lowles, chief executive of HOPE not hate, said: “Stephen Lennon put at risk the trial of men accused of horrendous crimes with his live streaming antics. He doesn’t care about the victims of grooming, he only cares about himself. He now faces yet another stint behind bars.
“So far this year, he’s been humiliated at the ballot box, kicked off social media platforms for hate speech, jailed for contempt, and it’s only July.”
Robinson had arrived arrogantly late  in court with his legal team  and arch provocatur  Katie Hopkins in tow, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words "convicted of journalism", on the front and “Britain = North Korea” on the back, which if it was the case, well he would not have been granted the honour of a trial, he would have simply dissapeared, Ever  the opportunist he also wore a badge reading "I support soldiers A-Z" , that has recently become a rallying call to the far right,.despite the grey areas and the continual injustices that permeate on all sides.
Outside  the court Robinsons supporters booed as news of his sentence filtered through, with violent protests erupting as his supporters threw cans at the police while chanting "We love you Tommy". A group the made their way to Parliment's Carriage Gates to continue their protest, blocking thee roads around Parliament Square.
Personally my heart does not bleed for Robinson one bit, a  fosterer of hatred and division, who only recently, in much  irony, despite his vitriol against refugees and asylum seekers, worried that jail might not be an experience he enjoys, he hypocritically  appealed directly to  Donald Trump to grant him political asylum, whilst continuing to deny safe haven for others. Robinson and his fellow far-right supporters are aware that a sense of victimhood is a powerful tool for attracting support and encouraging collective action. In his biography, Enemy of the State, he actually acknowledges the importance of being seen as the victim "going to gang up on me and that I would come off as the victim … it was exactly as I wanted it to go”
Robinson  and his supporters are adept at playing the victim, time and  time again, but as he and his followers continue  with  their antagonistic discourse, and obvious hatred to other people differing opinions, let this judgement at least be welcomed. I do not though for one moment think it will halter one bit their hateful discourse, who will at end of day, use  Robinsons punishment  as a torch for their rallying call of hatred and division, that we must continually challenge.

Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba

The Nakba or Day of Catastrophe,saw the displacement of more than 700,000 people following the Israeli War of Independence, and saw the massacre of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Against their will, the Nakba divided the Palestinian people between Palestine and diaspora, betwee Gaza and the West Bank, between those who hold a refugee identification card and who don't. Seventy years on, more than 5.5 million refugees are scattered all over the Middle East and the world, and are still waiting to exercise their internationally recognized right to return.
Following Comma Press’popular Iraq + 100, which asked Iraqi writers what the country will look like a century after the 2003 invasion, Palestine + 100 is  a new anthology from them posing a question to contemporary Palestinian writers: what might your home city look like in the year 2048, exactly 100 years after the Nakba. How might that war reach across a century of repair and rebirth, and affect the state of the country its politics, its religion, its language, its culture and how might Palestine have finally escaped it, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line? As well as being an exercise in escaping the politics of the present in a country which some have called the largest prison in the world , this  necessary anthology is an opportunity to showcase contemporary Arabic writers offering their own spin on science fiction and fantasy.The stories  cover a range of approaches from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, peace treaties that span parallel universes, and even a Palestinian superhero, in probably the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine ever. Featuring stories from a range of writers, including: Talal Abu Shawish, Liana Badr, Selma Dabbagh, Samir El-Youssef, Anwar Hamed, Mazen Maarouf, Ahmed Masoud, Nayrouz Qarmout, and Rawan Yaghi.The voices contained within  demnd to be heard.
Translated from the Arabic by Raph Cormack, Mohamed Ghalaieny, Andrew Leber, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Yasmine Seale and Jonathan Wright.
Winner of a PEN Translates Award:
.https://www.englishpen.org/translation/pen-translates-autumn-2018-awards-announced/
Comma Press is a not-for-profit publishing initiative dedicated to promoting new writing, with an emphasis on the short story. It is committed to a spirit of risk-taking and challenging publishing, free of the commercial pressures on mainstream houses. In April 2012, Comma became one of the Arts Council's new National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs). The collection will not be available until July the 25th. More details below.

https://commapress.co.uk/books/palestine-100/

Beds of roses

Finding no sanctuary in my sleep
Nightmares roaring in my head,
Scenes of desolation and devastation
Certainly no bed of roses.

In war ravaged countries
The rattling call of injustice,
A cauldron of death and despair
No respite or any beds of roses.

Amid the poverty and desperation
Where people grieve for their dead,
The ever flowing tide of human misery
For the children, no beds of roses..

Anguished eyes gaze, frail hands reach out
Barren lands flooding with tears overflowing,
Global silence decapacitating hope
as the night calls, no bed of roses.,

While humanity turns away and abandons
Another dawn exudes deaths mephitic odour,
How can we fail to speak out, not be silent
Reach out, cultivate fertile beds of roses,.

An injury to one is an injury to all
A collective thorn of pain and misery,
We can cover our eyes, be indifferent
Or help those in need, offer beds of roses.

From the heartache, filled with cries
We can send messages to the politicians,
The gift of solidarity to those that deserve
And when wars cease, beds of roses will grow.

https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2019/07/08/beds-of-roses-by-dave-rendle/

The Matchmakers Strike of 1888

                                 The Strike Committee of the Matchmakers Union

In the late 19th century Londons' East End was known for it's serious deprivation,,overpopulated by depressing living conditions, sweated industries, poverty and disease.
In 1850  the  Quakers William Bryant and Frances May established Bryant & May  to sell matches. At first they imported the matches from Lundstrom’s in Sweden, but as demand outstripped supply, they decided to produce their own, and set up a factory in Bow, in London, producing hundreds of millions of matches each day. It was also the largest employer of women in East London, with a staff of over 2,000 women and girls. Many of the poor, uneducated, and unskilled women they employed had come from Ireland following the potato famine. They lived in abject poverty, in filthy housing unfit for human habitation and were often subject to prolonged hours of backbreaking work making matches.

Despite their public reputation as philanthropists and Quakers, the factory owners subjected their wokers to awful conditions, their product was ironically called "safety matches" but they were far from safe for the women who made them. The matchmakers faced a life of hard toil for very little reward, earning a pittance while the company's shareholders recieved dividends of over 29%. Outraged by these exploitive conditions, crusading  socialist journalist Annie Besant. having heard a complaint against  Bryant & May at a Fabian Society meeting – resolved to investigate conditions in the factory for herself.When Besant went to speak to the factory girls in Bow, she was appalled by what she found. Low pay and long hours were quite ubiquitous, but the Bryant & May workers were treated without compassion and often endured physical abuse and extortionate fines as punishment for shoddy work. Matchstick manufacture came with particular health implications, and Bryant & May did nothing to alleviate the effects of ‘phossy jaw’, a form of bone cancer caused by the cheap white  phosphorous that they used, causing yellowing of the skin and hair loss. The whole side of the face turned  green and then black, discharging foul smelling pus and finally death. Additionally the condition caused jaw and tooth aches and swelling of the gums. The only treatment was the disfiguring cutting away of the affected areas. More expensive red phosphorous carried much lower risks to the women  but the company refused to use it.

By 1888, resentment had been building for some years,in 1882 Mr Bryant, wishing to curry favour with the then present Prime Minister Mr Gladstone, arranged to have a statue erected of him in front of St Mary's church. Nothing wrong with this you might think until you learn that to pay for it he deducted a certain amount each week from his workers wages. When it was unveiled the matchgirls demonstrated by throwing stones, but this had little effect on Bryant & May that was to come six years later when the women down tools and walked out.
It was Annie Besant’s exposure of the terrible conditions at the Bryant and May factory, after hearing a speech by Clemantine Black, at a Fabian society meeting on the subject of Female Labour, in which she described  the twelve-hour days and the inhumane, as well as dangerous working conditions at the Bryant & May factory that really brought matters to a head. It led to Besant’s article in her socialist publication  The Link on 23rd June 1888 entitled White Slavery in London which pulled no punches, depicting Bryant and May as a tyrannical employer and calling for ‘a special  circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery, and suck wealth out of the starvation of helpless girls’, and went on to describe how the match girls, some as young as thirteen worked from 6am to 6pm with just two short breaks. From their meagre wages her readers were told the women had to house, feed and clothe themselves, the wages were further decreased if they left a match on the bench and by the cost of paint, brushes and other equipment they needed to do their work. Then apart from the likelihood of developing 'phossy jaw' there were there dangers of losing a finger or even a hand in unguarded machinery. Besant called the factory "a prison-house" describing the match girls as "white wage slaves" and "oppressed"

Management were furious at the workforce for the revelations, and reacted by attempting to force the workers to sign a statement that they were happy with their working conditions. When a group of women refused to sign, the organisers of this action were sacked and  three women whom they suspected of leaking information were fired.  Outraged, 1,400 employees rose up in protest, including girls as young as 12. on 5th July 1888, 1400 girls and women  walked out of the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, London and the next day some 200 of them marched from Mile End to Bouverie Street, Annie Besant’s office, to ask for her support. While Annie wasn’t an advocate of strike action, she did agree to help them organise a Strike Committee.The firm first tried to force the women to condemn Besant. They refused, smuggling out a warning note:  ‘Dear Lady, they have been trying to get the poor girls to say it is all lies that has been printed and to sign a paper…we will not sign…’
They stayed out for two weeks: as there was no union to provide strike pay, the Match Girls went door to door raising money in support of their cause, whilst Annie Besant and other members of the Fabian Society started an emergency fund to distribute to striking workers. A Strike Committee was formed and rallied support from the Press, and some MPs. William Stad, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Henry Hyde Champion of the Labour Elector and Catherine Booth  of the Salvation Army,  joined Besant in her campaign for better working conditions in the factory. However, other newspapers such as the Times, blamed Besant and other socialist agitators for the dispute, but in reality it was the brutal conditions that  bred militancy within rather than it being imported in from outside.
Bryant & May tried to break the strike by threatening to move the factory to Norway or to import blacklegs from Glasgow. The managing director, Frederick Bryant, was already using his influence on the press. His first statement was widely carried. 'His (sic) employees were liars. Relations with them were very friendly until they had been duped by socialist outsiders. He paid wages above the level of his competitors. He did not use fines. Working conditions were excellent...He would sue Mrs Besant for libel'.
'Mrs Besant' would not be intimidated. The next issue of The Link invited Bryant to sue. Much better, she asserted, to sue her than to sack defenceless poor women.She took a group of 50 workers to Parliament. The women catalogued their grievances before a group of MPs, and, afterwards, 'outside the House they linked arms and marched three abreast along the Embankment...' Besant's propagandist style was bold and effective and she had a fine eye for the importance of organisation. She addressed the problem of finance. An appeal was launched in The Link. Every contribution was listed from the pounds of middle class sympathisers to the pennies of the workers. Large marches and rallies were organised in Regents Park in the West End as well as Victoria Park and Mile End Waste in the east. 

The strike committee called for support from the London Trades Council, the most prominent labour organisations of the day,who responded positively, donating £20 to the strike fund and offering to act as mediators between the strikers and the employer. The London Trades Council, along with the Strike Committee of eight Match girls, met with the Bryant & May Directors to put their case. Such was the negative publicity, directed  by middle class activist Annie Besant, it overwhelmed the owners of the factory, By 17th July, their demands were met and terms agreed in principle, the company announced that it was willing to re-employ  the dismissed women and bring an end to the fines system, the Strike Committee put the proposals to the rest of the girls and they enthusiastically approved and returned to work in triumph. The Quaker reputation as good employers was tarnished by this strike: whatever the reasons, Bryant and May had not taken the care of their employees that people expected of Quakers. Disappointingly, though, it wasn’t until 1906 – almost 20 years later – that white phosphorous was made illegal.Partly because of Annie's journalism and mainly because of the remarkable courage of the factory women , the Bryant & May dispute was the first strike by unorganised worker to have garnered widespread publicity, with public sympathy and support being enormous. One of the Matchgirls' most enduring successes  was to secure Bryant & May's agreement for them to form a union. The inaugural meeting of the new Union of Women Match Makes took place at Stepney Meeting Hall on 27th July and 12 women were elected and it became the largest female union in the country. Clementina Black from the Women's Trade Union League gave advice on rules, subscriptions and elections. Annie Besant was elected the first secretary. With money left over from the strike fund, plus some money raised from a benefit at the Princess Theatre, enough money was raised to enable the union to acquire permanent premises.
By the end of the year, the union changed its rules and name. It became the Matchmakers Union, open to men and women, and the following year sent its first delegate to the Trade Union Congress.
The Matchmakers Union ceased to exist in 1903,  but this strike in 1888 was unprecedented and changed the character of organised labour, it was a landmark victory in working-class history. A  history lesson that should be taught in our schools As such, it was a vital moment for both female empowerment and the increasing momentum of the workers’ cause. The strike had a significance that is difficult to put into words. In its physical scale it was unremarkable for the period,  but its significance for the future of the British trade union movement was colossal, since the strike redefined the very nature of trade unionism, and because of its success helped to inspire the formation of unions all over the country, and  helped give birth to our modern-day general unions and laid down the foundations of the rights of women workers. A story  that has inspired activists ever since, a symbol of what can be achieved when people bond together in solidarity, that has seen plays and musicals  being written about the triumph of the Matchwomen, which saw Bryant & May dogged by the notorious association until it stopped trading in 1979.
The match girls’ success gave the working class a new awareness of their power, and unions sprang up in industries where unskilled workers had previously remained unorganized, as these new unions sprang up in the years that followed, new leaders of the working class emerged, people like Tom Mann, Will Thorne, John Burns and Ben Tillett and one year after the strike in 1889  it would see a sharp upturn in strikes, most notably the Great Dock Strike involving workers from across the Docklands area,confident that if the match girls could succeed, then so could they.
In 1892, philosopher and social scientist Friedrich Engels highlighted this new mass movement as the most important sign of the times:
“That immense haunt of human misery [the East End] is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, it has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the ‘new unionism’, that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of ‘unskilled’ workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the forms of the old unions of ‘skilled’ workers, but it is essentially different in character.
“The old unions preserve the tradition of the times when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once for all established, final fact, which they can at best modify in the interests of their members. The new unions were founded at a time when the faith of the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that [em]their minds were virgin soil[/em], entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old’ unionists.
“And thus we see these new unions taking the lead of the working-class movement generally and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud ‘old’ unions.” (F Engels, Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892)
The TUC (Trade Union Congress) commented that the match girls strike is not just of historic interest. " It is an absolutely critical example of how after decades of low struggle and disappointment a militant movement can revive. Its genesis could come from the most unpredictable and apparently unpromising source."
The TUC  went on to suggest that todays, call centre personnel, supermarket till staff and other poorly paid workers could use the matchmakers example as a springboard for improving their own working conditions. Women in their defiance, continue to challenge health inequality and those who seek to oppress and exploit them not only nationally, but also globally. Women in their droves are standing up for other women, and are no longer willing to accept poor health outcomes as an inevitability of their oppressed lives. Years after the matchmakers strike the flame against injustice is still kept very much alive,  burning bright.

Further reading
 
A match to fire the Thames by Ann Stafford. Hodder and Stoughton, 1961.


Matchgirls strike 1888: the struggle against sweated labour in London's East End by Reg Beer. National Museum of Labour History, 1979.

 “It Just Went Like Tinder; the Mass Movement and New Unionism in Britain 1889: a Socialist History.” John Charlton, Redwords, 1999.

Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History by Louise Raw (2011)Bloomsbury

British women trade unionists on strike at Bryant &May, 1888
https://microform.digital/boa/collections/53/british-women-trade-unionists-on-strike-at-bryant-may-1888/detailed-description