Remembering the White Rose Movement and their brave non-violent resistance to Nazi Germany

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 Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, White Rose Society 1943

The morality of every person dictates the innate wrongness of genocide, and yet the world stood by as the Nazis sent millions to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Historians and social scientists often attribute this moral failure to the blissfully feigned ignorance of the German people, enveloped in a blanket of fear propagated by the Nazi regime, and the indifference and prejudice of other nations. Yet a few brave college students in Munich proved to the world that conscientiousness still existed in the Fatherland. It is for their willingness to die to end the silence that The White Rose Movement has since become legendary.
The White Rose Movement was an informal group made up of students who attended Munich University and their professor who sought to oppose the war, Hitler and the fascist Nazi regime with non-violent resistance. It was founded in early 1942 by Hans Scholl, Willia Graf and Christoph Probst after the mass deportation of jews had begun, who were fully aware of the atrocities that were being committed against certain non-Aryan minorities. They had seen clearly the loss of liberty, the shredding of human rights, and the disturbing reality that the war was probably already lost. By the summer of 1942, knowing  that resisting Hitler in any form was a capital crime, and who were fully aware of the existence of Nazi concentration camps and that hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered in them, to keep secrecy under these extremely dangerous circumstances  kept membership of their group very small.They took their name, The White Rose, from the book La Rosa Blanca, about struggling campesinos rising up against capitalist landowners in Mexico.
Between June 1942 and February 1943, they prepared, wrote and distributed six different leaflets, in which they called for the active opposition of the German people to Nazi oppression and tyranny and clandestinely distributed them across Munich.
The leaflets of the White Rose contained messages, such as :- ”Nothing is so unworthy of a nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by a clique that has yielded to base instinct…Western civilization must defend itself against fascism and offer passive resistance, before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield.”
However, this was Nazi Germany which kept a high degree of surveillance on any resistance activity and there were informants everywhere. After leaflets were found in the University of Munich, the local Gestapo stepped up its efforts to catch the resistors. Hans, Willi and Alex also began a grafitti campaign painting anti-Nazi slogans like "Freedom" and "Down with Hitler," and drew crossed-out swastikas on buildings in Munich.
On February 18, 1943, members of the group including Hans sister, Sophie Scholl were arrested distributing anti-fascist leaflets at Munich University. Sophie and Hans were interrogated by Nazi officials and despite trying to protect each other, on February 22, 1943 were bought before the Peoples Court which had been set up try people accused of political offences against the Nazi state. The trial was presided over by Roland Freisler, chief justice of the People’s Court of the Greater German Reich. Freisler was an ardent Nazi and with great vigour and a manic intensity, frequently roared denunciations at the accused.
Despite the hostility, and appearing in court with a broken leg after her interrogation. Sophie replied to the court,“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”
She also said:“You know the war is lost. Why don’t you have the courage to face it?”
No defence witnesses were called and, after what amounted to a short show trial, the judge passed a guilty verdict, with a sentence of death. The sentence was to be carried out early the next morning by guillotine.
Walter Roemer, the chief of the Munich district court, supervised the execution, he later described Sophie’s courage in facing her execution. He reports that Sophie’s last words were:-
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

 

Gestapo photographs of Sophie Scholl (18th February, 1943)

The guards were impressed with the courage of the resistors, and relaxed the rules to allow Hans, Christoph and Sophie to meet before their execution. After the execution of Sophie, Hans and Christoph, the Gestapo continued their relentless investigation.

 

Gestapo photographs of Christope Probst  (20th February, 1943)

Later that same year other members of the White Rose, Alexander Scmorell, Willi Graf and Kurt Huber were also tried and executed. Most of the other students convicted for their part in the group's activities received prison sentences.
Before their deaths members had believed that their executions would stir other university students and other anti-war citizens into a rallying call against Hitler and the war, but accounts clearly suggest sadly that most university students continued their studies as usual, the public said nothing, many actually seeing the movement as treacherous and as anti-national such was the grip of madness in Nazi Germany at the time.
Yet reports of mass killings of Jews, were widely shared by members of the White Rose. This features in the second White Rose pamphlet :- "Since the conquest of Poland 300,000 Jews have been murdered, a crime against human dignity…Germans encourage fascist criminals if no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds. An end in terror is preferable to terror without end.”
The members of the White Rose remain heroes who sacrificed their lives for the basic principles of freedom and the preservation of human dignity, and a potent symbol of how people can take a courageous action to resist,speak out ,even against the most brutal totalitarian regimes. Today again those with conscious must defend itself against the dark forces of fascism and offer resistance.
This is an archive of their leaflets: 

https://libcom.org/library/white-rose-documents

Celebrated Palestinian Poet Mourid Barghoutti dies at the age of 76

The celebrated Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, died on Sunday at the age of 76.There has been no immediate announcement on the cause of his death. On his official Facebook page, his son, the well known poet Tamim Al Barghouti, mourned his father. 

Barghouti, was born on the 8th of July in 1944 in the mountainous village of Deir Ghassanah, west of the River Jordan in Palestine. The cluster of villages was dominated by the Barghouti clan (the name he delights in means flea) of politicians, poets and landowners. His father worked the land, then joined the Jordanian army. Aged four when the state of Israel was declared, Barghouti learned of the Palestinian nakbah, or catastrophe,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/05/marking-72th-anniversary-of-nabka-day.html as non-Barghoutis with different dialects appeared in his village. "I was told they were refugees. The story unfolded of the destruction of villages, and the policy of ethnic cleansing that drove them away." Hearing of a massacre at Deir Yassin https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/04/remembering-deir-yassin.html in April 1948 was "the nakbah for me as a child - stories of those killed in cold blood that were disseminated all over Palestine. They were meant to be, to encourage people to flee". The second of four brothers, he moved with his family to Ramallah, aged seven. At school he admired the Iraqi modernist poet of the late 40s, Badr Shakir Al Sayyab, who broke the classical Arabic poem that had survived for 15 centuries unchanged, during the surge of Arab liberation movements against British and French occupation.

He moved to Cairo in 1963 to study English literature at Cairo University and graduated in 1967, after which he didn’t go back to Ramallah for 30 years. It  was in Cairo that he met the love of his life, the Egyptian novelist Rawda Ashour who he married in 1970, staying together until her death in December 2014.In 1977 he was deported from Egypt after his opposition to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. The poet headed for Beirut, then left in 1981 for Budapest, where he lived for 13 years. He returned to Egypt in 1994 to be reunited with his wife and son.

He visited his birthplace in Palestine only after the peace agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1993.The event inspired his autobiographical novel Ra’aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah), published by Bloomsbury in 2004 in a translation by Ahdaf Soueif, that first won him an international audience.It was translated to English by his late wife..The book won him the Naguib Prize in Literature in 2017. The late Edward Said saw it as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement” 

Reflecting on crossing the bridge from Jordan to his West Bank birthplace in 1996 after 30 years' exile - a visit under Israeli control that he refused to call a return - he described a condition of permanent uprootedness and the harrowing experience of a Palestinian who is denied the most elemental human rights in his occupied country, and in exile alike. It provided a view of Palestine that has been dispossessed and changed beyond recognition by usurpers. All writing, for him, was a displacement, a striving to escape from the "dominant used language" and the "chains of the tribe - its approval and taboos".

 I Saw Ramallah, was followed by another book I Was Born There, I Was Born Here after Barghouti returned to the Occupied Territories. Barghouti weaved into his account of exile poignant evocations of Palestinian history and life - the pleasure of coffee, arriving at just the right moment and as an exile, the importance of being able to say, 'I was born here', rather than 'I was born there'.

In all Barghouti published 12 poetry books in Arabic since the early 1970s, as well as a 700-page Collected Works (1997). Midnight and Other Poems was his first major collection in English translation.

He reflected on the cruelty of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, in particular the siege of Jenin in 2002 and wrote, “We have been subjected to massacres at intervals throughout our lives. Thus we find ourselves competing in a race between quickly realized mass death and the ordinary life that we dream of every day. One day, I will write a poem called “It´s Also Fine.”

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.
It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests
empty and pale
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.
It’s fine to have an undusty death,
no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.
It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheeks,
our hands resting in those of our loved ones,
surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,
with nothing left but a graceful farewell,
paying no attention to history,
leaving this world as it is,
hoping that, someday, someone else
will change it.

His poems were translated into several languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Russian. He read his poetry and exhibited his books around he world, and lectured on Palestinian and Arab poetry at universiiies in Oxford, Manchester, Oslo, and Madrid, among others.

Although he was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Barghouti did not identify with any political party. He spent years as the body's cultural attache in Budapest.Few poets managed to evoke the existential complexities of living in exile and being stranded from a homeland as eloquently as Barghouti did. Barghouti reflected on his life under many regimes, seeing and witnessing in them all the corruption of power and at the same time the indomitable courage and resilience of the Palestinian people, their daily acts of resistance to occupation who in  just trying to live a normal life is an act of resistance. .

“The homeland does not leave the body until the last moment, the moment of death.The fish, Even in the fisherman's net, Still carries The smell of the sea."” Mourid Barghouti wrote in his award-winning autobiographical novel I Saw Ramallah. the quote is now one of many by Barghouti being shared online as people pay tribute to the Midnight poet.

The Palestinian Minister of Culture, Atef Abu Seif, mourned the late poet, saying that Palestinian and Arab culture had lost with his death “a symbol of creativity and the Palestinian national cultural struggle.”

Abu Seif pointed out that Mourid Barghouti was “one of the creative people who devoted their writings and creativity in defense of the Palestinian cause, the story and struggle of our people, and Jerusalem, the capital of the Palestinian existence.”

 He may have envisioned his homeland leaving his body upon death, but his contributions to Palestine and Arab literature will survive long after he is gone. However, his death marks a great loss not just to Arab poetry but to world literature as a whole. Mourid Barghotti Rest in Power.

 

 “People like poetry only in times of injustice—times of communal silence—times when they are unable to speak or act. Poetry that whispers and suggests—can only be felt by free men.”

"Silence said:/truth needs no eloquence./After the death of the horseman,/ the homeward-bound horse/says everything/ without saying anything." -  Mourid Barghotti

There is always Beauty

There is always beauty to comfort

More precious than silver or gold,

Harmonious thoughts passing through

Beyond the troubled world that contains us ,

Songs of hope to advocate and release

The power of love, affection, peace,

Cloudbursts of honesty and integrity

Gifts of protection, care, sincerity, 

The  flickering constellations of stars

Planets, moons, and rain that showers,

Laughter that keeps escaping our lungs

Dreams of better times, soothing tonques,

Voices of truth and reason in every season

Doggedly working, shielding us with light,

In trees, the breeze, rippling leaves

Passion bringing corrupt governments to knees,

Blooming flowers on a clear spring day

To relieve the tensions impaling our way

Good samaritans with hearts of kindness

Delivering  phone calls to console the lonely,

Air full of fragrances of love and passion 

The warmth of companionship and solidarity.

Tom Paine's Bones

Thomas Paine was an English/American political activist, author and political theorist, whose words helped shape modern Britain and France, Born to a Quaker family of Thetford, England, on January 29th , 1737 ( or February 9th, 1737 according the Gregorian calender) ,the son of an artisan, he was well educated at Thetford Grammar School but soon chafed at the constraints of his home town. His chequered career eventually led him to the American colonies where he emigrated in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin. There he found his calling, as a revolutionary writer.

Thomas Paine played a crucial part in the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, after his popular pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis swept through the Western worlds, both new and old, placing before the public eye in simple, yet dramatic terms, the virtues of self-government and individual liberty.

On  January 10 1776, his pamphlet Common Sense  was published for the first time ( though anonymously,because of its treasonous content.). Here he delivered his uncompromising message to the common people, which set the seeds for the American  Revolution.In this important document, he passionately urged the American to create a new form of government - a modern republic, based entirely on popular consent. He believed all men were born equal, so saw no need for Kings and Queens, he also distinguished  between governments and society, at the root of all governments is evil but the root of society lay good. The pamphlet called for the end of British tyranny in the American colonies and a break with a country ruled by kings. Common Sense made its appearance at a crucial moment as the debate for American independence reached a tipping point.

Common Sense ignited a wildfire.The numbers were astonishing—150,000 copies were in print within a few months (roughly equivalent to 15 million copies today). But its real impact can best be measured in the way that colonists from Massachusetts to South Carolina moved in the direction that Paine prescribed. “Without the pen of Paine,” as one contemporary wrote, “the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” 

He became a champion of equality and liberty and went on to support struggles in Britain and France, he  despised tyranny and oppression, the divine right of kings, organised religion, the death penalty and slavery.  He loved reason, freedom, the emancipation of mankind and was the first person to coin the term “the United States of America” and to use the term “democracy” as something other than a pejorative.

 Paine thought the revolution in America did not go far enough since it did not abolish black slavery and he thought the revolution in France went too far since it became entrenched in medieval violence and bloodshed. He took bold private stands in both revolutions against his own friends, colleagues and comrades, never willing to compromise his conscience, but always ready to go it alone if that’s where the courage of his convictions took him – and it nearly always did.

Returning to Europe in 1787, and in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, he published his most famous work, The Rights of Man, 1791-2,  dedicated to Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, Rights of Man extensively lays out Paine’s Republican utopianism and envisions a society where man’s natural rights are respected, all forms of hereditary government such as monarchy and aristocracy are abolished, and the welfare of the poor are taken care of. Paine’s work resulted in him receiving honorary French citizenship as a reward, as well as a seat on the French Constitutional Committee.

Paine fled to France and was briefly elected to the French National Convention. Imprisoned in the Bastille for opposing the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Sentenced to death by Robespierre, he escaped his fate only by a miraculous accident (the executioners marked his cell door on the wrong side). Free again, Paine lashed out at President Washington, whom he blamed for not coming to his rescue.This alone would have been enough to secure his lasting ignominy in America, but Paine had more in mind. 

In 1795, he released the final, and most daring, chapter of his classic trilogy. The Age of Reason, an attack on traditional religion and the Christian church, made him one of history’s great apostates. He returned to America in 1802, his promotion of the concept of human rights greatly influenced the American Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.

However scurrilous attacks followed him in his waning years. It was symbolically appropriate that, as he tottered around New York City, he could find no place to be buried. (Even the arch liberal Quakers spurned his request.) His last years in America often depressed, drunk and in poverty. When he died on the 8th of Jine 1809, tragically only six people attended his funeral in New Rochelle, New York, and his tombstone was desecrated soon afterward.

His isolated grave was all but forgotten until a onetime foe, then later admirer, radical newspaper editor William Cobbett, dug up his skeleton, without permission ten years after his death. Cobbett was horrified when he visited Paine’s neglected grave in 1819 and deeply felt that the man had not been given his posthumous due. He decided that since America had turned its back on its revolutionary hero, he would rebury him in England,with grand plans for a memorial that would inspire England’s democracy movement.

After disinterring Paine’s grave, he shipped the bones in a common merchandise crate and predicted their momentous effect. “…those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.” Unfortunately for Cobbett, the bones failed to stir England and Cobbett became a laughingstock, the subject of vicious caricatures and grim jokes.

Despite Cobbett’s noble motive, the public responded in horror to the desecration of the grave, especially because of the surreptitious way he went about it. Lord Byron even wrote about the incident, which was quoted at the time:

“In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will Cobbett has done well;
You visit him on earth again;
He’ll visit you in hell”

 The memorial never materialized and when Cobbett died a bankrupt in 1835, Paine’s bones remained above ground, in debtor’s limbo. Surviving the auctioneer’s hammer as a matter of taste, different fragments or parts of Paine’s bones were then over time dispersed and scattered over four corners of the earth.Parts of Paine might still be in England, possibly in the form of buttons made from his bones. There might be a rib in France. A man in Australia who claims to be a descendant says he has Paine’s skull. No one really knows where the skull that held the mind which one day long ago opined, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” For  such a 'Citizen of the World', his mortal remains have no final resting place.

Paine remains ,an icon of defiant, unorthodox idealism. and his promotion of the concept of human rights influenced the American Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.After his death, Napoleon is said to have suggested that every ‘free-thinking city’ should have a gold-plated statue of Paine. Instead, he is commemorated with a gilded bronze statue outside Thetford town hall commissioned by American philanthropist Joseph Lewis, who believed Paine was the true author of the American Declaration of Independence.  Paine’s work continues to be a great inspiration to politicians and activists he was a truth-teller, contentious and bold, who was adamant about holding accountable the brokers of authorised versions of history,calling out their hypocrisy, omissions and mistruths. I wonder what he would say in this age of tyranny, the rage spreading across the land of liberty, the urgent global crisis that we collectively face.would he still be speaking truth to power?,  His own basic philosophy, “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion,” has never  been more timely. Hail to thee Tom Paine.

Here is  Dick Gaughan singing about the revolutionary 18th century thinker and propagandist The song  was written by Graham Moore.

Dick Gaughan - Tom Paine's Bones

 
As I dreamed out one evening
By a river of discontent
I bumped straight into old Tom Paine
As running down the road he went
He said, "I can't stop right now, child, King George is after me
He'd have a rope around my throat
And hang me on the Liberty Tree" But I will dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance in the oldest boots I own
To the rhythm of Tom Paine's bones
I will dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance in the oldest boots I own
To the rhythm of Tom Paine's bones "I only talked about freedom
And justice for everyone
But since the very first word I spoke
I've been looking down the barrel of a gun
They say I preached revolution
Let me say in my defence
That all I did wherever I went
Was to talk a lot of common sense"
Old Tom Paine he ran so fast
He left me standing still
And there I was, a piece of paper in my hand
Standing at the top of the hill
It said, "This is the Age Of Reason
These are The Rights Of Man
Kick off religion and monarchy"
It was written there in Tom Paine's plan
Old Tom Paine, there he lies
Nobody laughs and nobody cries
Where he's gone or how he fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares But I will dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance in the oldest boots I own
To the rhythm of Tom Paine's bones
I will dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance to Tom Paine's bones
Dance in the oldest boots I own
To the rhythm of Tom Paine's bones 

The writer/artist Paul Fitzgerald from Hulme in Manchester also known as Polyp,has been busily working to take Tom Paine out of stuffy lectures on politics and philosophy and onto the illustrated novel page.  Important update: copies of Paine are now on sale here!  The result of his labours is now out in the world, and is itself a cause for celebration. Paine: Being a Fantastical Visual Biography of the Vilified Enlightenment Hero, by his Ardent Admirer ‘Polyp’ quite lives up to its title. The book was funded through a Kickstarter appeal,

The Fuse of Cognition

The world is full of constant sorrow

Darkest hours.and the longing,

Politicians creating climates of fear

Releasing pain across the land.

The world is full of inquisitors

Poking daily against reason,

Hearts of darkness, chords of division

Emissaries of death, hovering over misery.

The world is full of conspirators

Malignant forces  that do not discriminate 

Killing hope, releasing unfriendly fire

Condemning and intimidating all in reach.

The world is full of vultures

Devouring and masticating,

Preying on us, with deadly intent

Feasting persistently without regret,

The world is full of waves washing over

Dragging us down, lower than we've ever fallen,

Into dungeons of time that does not cease

Deeper and further into the abyss,.

The world is full of walls of indifference

Mirrors of illusion, enabling complicit voices,

Tyranny and oppression, that brutalize and dehumanise

Crushing and delivering weights of burden.

The world despite all this is full of love

Those that are tired never give up their struggle,

To a war that never ends, will never ever surrender 

Continue resisting creating a new world.

The world is still full of seeds of reason

Ever flowering, augmenting our deepest wounds,

Fruitful pastures, stemming the flood of tears

Beyond hurtful paradigm, healing balms to share.

World Cancer Day 2021: I Am And I Will

 

Today (4 February) marks World Cancer Day 2021, a global event  designed to prevent cancer, promote research, improve patient services, raise awareness, and “mobilise the global community to make progress against cancer”.

The day was set up by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) – the largest and oldest international cancer organisation – and was first marked in 2000.

The theme for 2021’s World Cancer Day is: “I Am And I Will”.

The UICC says this year's event marks the final year of a three year campaign, which offers “a chance to create long-lasting impact by increasing public-facing exposure and engagement, more opportunities to build global awareness and impact-driven action.”

They describe 2021 as “the ultimate year of the ‘I Am and I Will’ campaign”, and say “more than ever, our actions are also being felt across borders and oceans.

"This year is a reminder of the enduring power of cooperation and collective action. When we choose to come together, we can achieve what we all wish for: a healthier, brighter world without cancer.”

World Cancer Day 2021 comes as people are being urged to seek help for potential symptoms of cancer after it emerged that fewer are coming forward during the pandemic.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said that the latest NHS data for England shows fewer people are being referred for helpfor lung cancer and urological cancers because they are not coming forward for help.

As a result, the Health Secretary and NHS clinical director for cancer are calling on the public to speak to their GP if they are worried about symptoms.

They stressed that cancer diagnosed at an earlier stage is more likely to be successfully treated, and the NHS has robust measures in place to protect cancer patients, and those being screened for cancer, from Covid-19.

“This World Cancer Day we should come together to commit that diagnosing and treating cancer is a top priority,” said Health Secretary Matt Hancock. “If you notice any unusual symptoms which last more than a few weeks, however mild you think they might be, please come forward and discuss it with your GP.

“The sooner you speak to your GP, the sooner a diagnosis can be made, the sooner treatment can start, and the more lives we can save.” 

For more information on World Cancer Day 2021, head to the UICC’s website 

To support World Cancer Day this year, you can make a donation to a number of registered cancer charities, including Cancer Research UK.

Cancer Research say their vital work has been "slowed down"by Covid-19 and are urgingg supporters to “donate now to get us back on track”.

You can donate to the charity by heading to their website, and can even choose which area of cancer research your donation goes to. They’re also offering some fun fundraising ideas for this year, including virtual quiz or games nights, home exercise challenges or head shaves.

You can also display your Cancer Research UK Unity band with pride this World Cancer Day.

The Unity Band is the charity’s symbol for support for World Cancer Day 2021, representing unity and showing support for those affected by cancer. You can get your Unity Band online today.

World Cancer Day 2021 comes as a study carried out by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found the UK is at the bottom of a list of countries ranked by survival rates of some of the deadliest cancers.

The UK came 25th, 26th and 27th out of 29 countries for its five-year survival rates of pancreatic, stomach and lung cancer respectively, research – first published in 2018 but shared to mark World Cancer Day – shows.

For cancers diagnosed between 2010 and 2014, the UK had an average five-year survival rate of just 15.97 per cent compared to South Korea, which had a rate of 32.78 per cent.

It ranked 14th for oesophagus cancer, 21st for liver cancer, and 22nd for brain cancer. Less survivable cancers make up around half of all common cancer deaths in the UK.

These numbers are likely to be impacted further by the pandemic, which has seen people having a much harder time dealing with their ailment, and people are being urged to seek help for potential symptoms of cancer after it emerged that fewer are coming forward

Cancer is a disease that causes  great physical and mental suffering, and yes death, and its management always requires great dedication in terms of time, investment, means and good organisation. Throughout the disease , may  unforseen  and delicate situations arise that require great individual adaption to overcome them.

Because of the pandemic added challenges have been added. We could not imagine that the pandemic caused  by covid-19 would affect cancer patients so much, fundamental tests and treatments are being put on hold such as radiology, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery. All these changes are causing a significant delay both in diagnosis and treatment. An extremely stressful and anxious time for all concerned. 

Cancer is a  disease that will kill more than  eight million people worldwide this year . The world needs to unite against this disease that knows no borders and represents one of humanity's most pressing concerns.

Moreover , understanding and responding to the full impact of cancer on emotional , mental and physical wellbeing  will maximise the quality of life for patients, their families and care-givers. Every citizen should have access to  free treatment options and care.

 Like other wars, real and imagined, the war on cancer is a gift to opportunists of all stripes. Among the vultures are travel insurers who charge people with cancer ten times the rate charged to others, the publishers of self-help books and the promoters of miracle cures, vitamin supplements and various ‘alternative therapies’ of no efficacy whatsoever.

But most of all, there’s the pharmaceutical industry, which manipulates research, prices and availability of drugs in pursuit of profit. And with considerable success. The industry is the UK’s third most profitable sector, after finance and tourism, with a steady return on sales of some 17 per cent, three times the median return for other industries. Its determination to maintain that profitability has seen drug prices rise consistently above the rate of inflation. The cost of cancer drugs, in particular, has soared.

The industry claims high prices reflect long-term investments in research and development (R&D). But drug companies spend on average more than twice as much on marketing and lobbying as on R&D. Prices do not reflect the actual costs of developing or making the drug but are pushed up to whatever the market can bear. Since that market is comprised of many desperate and suffering individuals, it can be made to bear a great deal. The research that this supposedly funds is itself warped by the industry. When it comes to clinical trials of their products, they engage in selective publication and suppression of negative findings and are reluctant in the extreme to undertake comparative studies with other products

Taking political action is also key to us preventing, treating and diagnosing cancer earlier in order for us to achieve survival of 3 in 4 by 2034. For those living with cancer, now and in the future (and that’s one in three of the UK population), the biggest threat is the coming public spending squeeze, cuts in NHS budgets and privatisation of services will mean more people dying earlier from cancer and more people suffering unnecessarily from it. Even better survival rates will become a curse, as responsibility for long-term care is thrown back on families. A real effort to reduce suffering from cancer requires a political struggle against a system that sanctifies profit – not a ‘war’ guided by those who exploit the disease. 

The target for treating cancer patients within 62 days of  urgent GP referral has not been met for over 5 years, despite the pandemic, and surveys evidence suggests that people are experiencing lengthening delays in getting GP appointments. Longer waits are a symptom of more people needing treatment than the  NHS has the capacity to deliver. As we remember Captain Tom  this week, he deserves are utter most respect  we should not forget the heartless uncaring hypocrites in government who are underfunding the NHS, that are continuing to put those that suffer from cancer further at risk, what better tribute than for out Government to increase funding for the NHS,, after all it was Captain Tom's sense of gratitude for the care he received for skin cancer that inspired him to take up his noble fundraising walk. We must not forget to hold out Government to accountable further down the road . We must not cower from politicising the deficiencies in the NHS that the crisis has revealed. 

Please also try and spare a thought  for all specialist cancer staff across the NHS who do so much for so many. They did everything they could to try and keep vital services running in 2020, and will no dock in 2021.

On World Cancer  Day any other day in fact, awareness  is so important, for the survivors and those who are not so fortunate, we should not be afraid to talk about it. For many affected by the disease it is a solemn one of reflection, personally a love of mine did not make it, but for others it's a time to become aware of this disease's impact and what is being done to help effect change for millions it impacts. A diagnosis of cancer does not mean that you have to live a painful and miserable life. Their is hope and positivity to. But it is so important to keep up the conversations. Best wishes.

Simone Weil (3/2/1909 - 24/8/43) - Into the Mystic

 

The French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil was born in Paris to wealthy agnostic parents of Jewish ancestry on the 3rd of February 1909. She was gifted from the beginning with a thirst for knowledge of other cultures and her own. Fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 12, she taught herself Sanskrit, and took an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. She excelled at the Lycée Henri IV and the École normale supérieure, where she studied philosophy. Plato was a lasting influence, and her interest in political philosophy led her to Karl Marx, whose thought she esteemed but did not blindly assimilate.

Very early, she demonstrated a strident, uncompromising compassion when she gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers in the First World War. While still a schoolgirl, she declared her solidarity with the communist left,and was active in workers demonstrations for trade unions, earning the nickname The Red Virgin. 

Though uncompromising in her persona at school, she was also brilliant and had the best education France could offer in languages, classics and philosophy.  While at the École Normale Supérieure, her tutor set her focus on the problem of man as an active being.  To address this she took Plato as her master and Descartes as her antagonist.  These influences remained touchstones in her intellectual life.  Despite the spiritual writings for which she is best known, her training and approach was that of a philosopher.

 After Weil became a teacher of philosophy in secondary schools, she continued her activism both in writing and in the streets.she demonstrated with striking workers, participated in labor union debates, taught adult education classes, and like a latter-day Francis of Assisi, Simone gave away her salary as a teacher to help the unemployed in Le Puy. Like George Orwell and Albert Camus, while Weil was very much on the political left, she distrusted revolutionaries no less than she did reactionaries. Certain that a Marxist regime, even more so than a monarchist regime, would lead to totalitarian rule, Weil threw her support to anarchist and syndicalist organizations.

For Weil, reality was rooted in the world of manual labor. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

At one point she took a year off from teaching to work in factories incognito to help understand the experiences of the working class. Weil’s “year of factory work” (which amounted, in actuality, to around 24 weeks of laboring) was not only important in the development of her political philosophy but can also be seen as a turning point in her slow religious evolution.

In Paris’s factories, Weil began to see and to comprehend firsthand the normalization of brutality in modern industry. There, she wrote in her “Factory Journal”, “Time was an intolerable burden” as modern factory work comprised two elements principally: orders from superiors and, relatedly, increased speeds of production. While the factory managers continued to demand more, both fatigue and thinking (itself less likely under such conditions) slowed work. As a result, Weil felt dehumanized.  Weil was surprised that this humiliation produced not rebellion but rather fatigue, docility. She described her experience in factories as a kind of “slavery”. 

Initially, her interests lay in the labour movement as well as pacifism.  Her judgment of the political weakness of the labour movement and more generally of social causes led to the qualification of her views on pacificism.  Violence, she then thought, could be a defense for human dignity against the Fascism that diminished it. 

 However, her exposure to the Spanish Civil War led her to contradict herself.  Force, she thought, could never be righteous.  Allowing that someone was the legitimate object of force inexorably nurtured tribalism, making murder seem natural.  Force controls those who would use it, an insight she saw in The Iliad which treated Greeks and Trojans alike as victims of force itself.

Her views on force were a singular example of how her developed perspective was at odds with received pieties in Western Culture, both those of the establishment and those who opposed it.  She denied the importance of political rights; of justice by due process; of state or private ownership; private choice in life; and legitimation by collective, public will. Instead she elevated as primary response to affliction; the inestimable significance of a human being; the needs of the soul as the basis for government; meaningful labour; and good and evil. Weil was unafraid of intellectual isolation, nor did she seek fellows,though she did publish her essays in intellectual journals.

On a trip to Portugal in August 1935, upon watching a procession to honor the patron saint of fishing villagers, she had her first major contact with Christianity and wrote that:

"the conviction was suddenly borne in upon [her] that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and [she] among others. (1942 “Spiritual Autobiography” 

In comparison with her pre-factory “Testament”, we see that in her “Factory Journal” Weil maintains the language of liberty, but she moves terminologically from “oppression” to “humiliation” and “affliction”. Thus her conception and description of suffering thickened and became more personal at this time.

Weil participated in the 1936 Paris factory occupations and, moreover, planned on returning to factory work. Her trajectory shifted, however, with the advent of the Spanish Civil War. Critical of both civil and international war, on the level of geopolitics, she approved of France’s decision not to intervene on the Republican side. On the level of individual commitment, however, she obtained journalist’s credentials and joined an international anarchist brigade fighting alongside the Durutti column.On 20 August, 1936, Weil, who was known for her clumsiness and near sightedmess, stepped in a pot of boiling oil, severely burning her lower left leg and instep. Only her parents could persuade her not to return to combat and Weil went to Assisi to recover.

By late 1936 Weil wrote against French colonization of Indochina, and by early 1937 she argued against French claims to Morocco and Tunisia. Often, a morbid romanticism seems to drive her desire to experience this world. As she told one baffled fisherman who took her on as a deckhand even though she was mostly useless, her “misfortune” was that she had never been poor. Weil made the same confession to a farmer and his wife for whom she wished to work: “What I want is to live the life of the poor, to share their work, live their troubles, eat at their table.” The couple, stunned by this request from a well-to-do Parisian bourgeoise, reluctantly invited her into their lives. Less reluctantly, they disinvited her a month later. Chief among their reasons was that Weil never stopped peppering them with questions and did not eat when they sat down to a meal, explaining that the “children in Indochina are going hungry.”

In April 1937 she travelled to Italy. Within the basilica Santa Maria degli Angeli, inside the small twelfth-century Romanesque chapel  she prayed for the first time in her life amid an ecstatic experience in the same church where Saint Francis had prayed. As she would later describe in a letter, “Something stronger than I compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees” .She embraced Roman Catholicism, but stopped short of baptism, for she felt the Catholic Church was in too much need of reformation. Finding God’s will for her life became her new passion, not replacing her earlier social passions, but becoming the larger context for them.

 Weil received spiritual direction from a Dominican friar and learned much from the Catholic author Gustave Thibon She was especially rooted in Neoplatonic thinking in her spiritual writings. Yet her spiritual curiosity took her far. She learned Sanskrist to read the Bhagahvad Gita. She studied Mahayana Buddhism and the ancient Greek and Egyptian mystery religions. She believed that each religion, when we are within it, is true. But she was opposed to religious syncretism. She saw a blending of religions as diminishing the particularity of each tradition and the truth of that path to God. Though she learned from other faiths, she plunged deeper into her own Catholicism. For Weil truth was deeply personal and could only be approached through deep introspection. She wrote intensely about spirituality, mysticism, beauty and social struggle.  Her writings sought to develop the intellectual consequences of the religious experiences she was having.

From 1937–1938 Weil revisited her Marxian commitments, arguing that there is a central contradiction in Marx’s thought: although she adhered to his method of analysis and demonstration that the modern state is inherently oppressive,being that it is composed of the army, police, and bureaucracy,she continued to reject any positing of revolution as immanent or determined. Indeed, in Weil’s middle period, Marx’s confidence in history seemed to her a worse ground for judgment than Machiavelli’s emphasis on contingency.

 One of the most intriguing and conflicting aspects of Weil’s thought is her notion of justice, which figures prominently in the book. She certainly wouldn’t be characterized as a “social justice warrior” who promotes sanctimonious moralism. For Weil, justice converges into one aspect of life, encounters with God and other human beings, such as those on the French front. But unlike other mystics, for whom union with Christ was an interior experience of a relation between lover and beloved, Weil is a relational mystic for whom justice is one of the most important aspects of religious and spiritual experience. Her asceticism, so clearly visible at the end of her life, is inextricably connected to the suffering of the other.

According to Weil, everything in life is relational, and human relations are intention. We ought to choose self-denial, but only to help us love our neighbor. Imagining nameless people, stranded in a ditch, forgotten and overlooked by others, Weil writes that these very strangers are our neighbors, and “to treat our neighbor who is in affliction with love is something like baptizing him.”

In order to empathize with others, we have to understand that we tend to 

  “live in the world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position at the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

She was not celebrated in her lifetime, and almost all of her writings have been published posthumously and have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and she loved Christ but chose never to be baptized into the Christian church. 

As a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and confronted Trotsky over hazardous party developments, Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. She studied with Simone de Beauvoir and debated with Leon Trotsky, and Albert Camus called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.” though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived. 

When the Nazis occupied France, Simone Weil joined the French Resistance working in England. While working for the Free French in London on a manifesto for a transformed government in post-war France, her unyielding manner of living overcame her always-fragile health. Her final and most radical act was self-induced starvation in solidarity with French citizens during World War II, she refused to eat more than the French people were allowed under German occupation, despite being afflicted with tuberculosis. As a consequence, her body gave up, and she died at age thirty-four in a sanatorium  in Ashford, Kent at 34. The coroner’s verdict was suicide. 

 She was buried in Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford; a flat marker laid across her grave was engraved with her name and relevant dates:

Simone Weil

3 février 1909
24 août 1943

Weil’s grave, its location highlighted on the cemetery map, has since become one of Ashford’s most visited tourist sites. By way of acknowledging the constant stream of visitors, a second marble slab explains that Weil had “joined the Provisional French government in London” and that her “writings have established her as one of the foremost modern philosophers. 

Her celebrity came posthumously when her notes on Christian spirituality were published, influencing those within and without the Church.  Subsequently, her philosophical works have invited both praise and criticism among disparate groups of people. Weil rejected her class upbringing and Judaism, she embraced working-class people (although she rejected Marxism), and as a Christian convert who criticised the Catholic Church and as a communist sympathiser who denounced Stalinism and debated with Leon Trotsky. Weil’s independence of mind and resistance to ideological conformity are central to her philosophy. There is nothing moderate about Weil, she lived an extreme life bordering on madness while devoting her life to a rigorous regimen of study and political engagement. Though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived.

In her book Devotion (2017), the poet and rock star Patti Smith described Weil as ‘an admirable model for a multitude of mindsets. Brilliant and privileged, she coursed through the great halls of higher learning, forfeiting all to embark on a difficult path of revolution, revelation, public service, and sacrifice." The French politician Charles de Gaulle thought Weil was mad, while Albert Camus, called her, of all the thinkers reckoning with the monumental philosophical crises raised by the world wars, “the only great spirit of our times.”

In her brief life she became a bright light for spirituality and social activism. As a teacher and philosopher she never shied away from a fight, and teaches us the art of revolt and rebellion through her philosophical, political, and spiritual work. Living in accordance with her philosophy, she denounced the legacy of colonialism and lived in accordance with her heartfelt beliefs .

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) - Mother of Science Fiction

 

                               

                                                  

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797, in London , England. She was the daughter of the notable philosophical anarchist and novelist  William Godwin and leading feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/04/mary-wollstonecraft-2741759-1091797.html  Her father's most famous book was Political Justice (1793), which is a critical look at society and the ethical treatment of the masses. Godwin's other popular book Caleb Williams (1794) examines class distinctions and the misuse of power by the ruling aristocracy. Mary Wollestonecraft, her mother, espoused her views in her famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

 Mary's parents adhered to revolutionary principles both in politics and in their private lives, but in spite of despising the institution of marriage they took the step after all to facilitate Mary's entrance into society. Sadly however, Mary Wollstonecraft died ten days after the birth of her daughter from puerperal fever. Her father William Godwin was left to care for Mary and her older half-sister Fanny Imlay. Imlay was Wollstonecraft's daughter from an affair she had with a soldier. 

The family dynamics soon changed with Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane Clairmont on  21 December 1801. Clairmont brought her own two children into the union, Charles and Jane, who later called herself Claire. and she and Godwin later had a son together. Mary never got along with her stepmother, who  did not encourage Mary Godwin's intellectual curiosity and did not bring her up according to her mother's principles. Mary never went to school, but was taught to read and write at home. Her father encouraged her to use her imagination, so she started  being creative  at a very young age, finding a creative outlet in writing.  According to The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, she once explained that "As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'"

The family lived at Somers Town, where William Godwin and his wife opened a publishing firm (M. Godwin and Co.) and a shop retailing children's books. In 1810, the Godwin Juvenile Library published the first work by Mary Godwin: Mounseer Nongtongpaw, a verse poem which extended the five-stanza song of the same name that Charles Dibdin had published in 1808. It is a humorous account in an iambic pentameter ballad of John Bull's trip to Paris and the resulting linguistic misunderstandings.

Mary Shelley was very conscious of the political issues of her time. Visitors to her father's house, when Mary was young, included many leading radical thinkers and distinguished guests included the likes of  Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While she didn't have a formal education, she did make great use of her father's extensive library. Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave. She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging home life into her imagination.

By 1812 things between Mary and Mrs Godwin had come to such a head that William Godwin sent Mary to board with an acquaintance, William Baxter, and his family in Dundee for several months.  There she experienced a type of domestic tranquility she had never known. Shelley returned to the Baxters' home the following year.

In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html An admirer of Godwin, Percy Shelley visited the author's home and briefly met Mary when she was fourteen, but their attraction did not take hold until a meeting two years later. Shelley, twenty-two, was married, and his wife Harriet Westbrook. was expecting their second child, but he and Mary began to go on daily walks to the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft at St Pancras churchyard, and here they declared their love for each other on 26 June 1814. When Godwin found out on 8 July, he was outraged, immediately writing to Shelley to forbid Mary from seeing him again (In fact Godwin did not speak to Mary for  three years, which hurt her immensely.) 

Like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart were more important than legal ones, and .in July 1814, one month before her seventeenth birthday, Mary ran away with Percy, and they spent the next few years traveling in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Percy's father, Sir Timothy Shelley, cut off his son's large allowance after the couple ran away together. 

 In late 1814, Mary and Percy returned to England and lived in hiding to avoid his first wife and previous back debts. In February 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter, who was born prematurely and  who subsequently died in March of the same year. Stricken with grief, the Shelleys moved to Bishopsgate, but Mary soon became pregnant again. In 1816, she gave birth to a son, William, who she named after her father. 

Despite difficult circumstances, Mary and Percy enjoyed a large group of friends, which included the poet Lord Byron and the writer Leigh Hunt. They also maintained a schedule of very strict study,including classical and European literature, Greek, Latin, and Italian language, music and art and other writing.

1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer.” The eruption of Mount Tambora caused a global catastrophe. Heavy smoke and volcanic ash disrupted the stratosphere, blocking sunlight. The loss of sun caused cold temperatures, darkness, and a food shortage around the world.

During this gloomy season, the Shelleys traveled for a vacation  to Switzerland  by the shores of Lake Geneva There, they stayed with their friends, Lord Byron, Dr. John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont.  Mary was in an emotionally difficult situation. She had craved a mother's love all through her life and bitterly regretted being alienated from her father. The relationship that developed between Shelley and Claire undermined her self-esteem. 

 The following story is well known: The weather was consistently too rainy to go outdoors, in response to their isolation, Byron suggested an indoor activity, a sort of contest. They would each make up a ghost story and read them to each other on the chilly evenings. Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, his personal doctor, John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called “The Vampyre”, which has a history of its own, seventy years later it would be the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Mary had difficulty,coming up with anything until, in a nightmare, she saw a pale figure surrounded by machinery, and another shape lying on a table that suddenly stirred with horrible life. Mary's story, the best of the group, was so frightening to Byron that he ran "shrieking in horror" from the room. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was thus conceived.The story was first only a few pages, but with the encouragement of Percy, the tale took on a greater length.

But as Mary set off to continue working on the novel, she received the news that her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide. Then, just one month later, the Shelleys heard that the body of Harriet Shelley was found in London's Serpentine, into which she had jumped in order to commit suicide. Percy Shelley was denied custody of his and Harriet's two children in the following year. On 30 December, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married Percy Bysshe Shelley at St Mildred's, London. Born in 1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to adulthood. 

Mary had been having nightmares about the death of her daughter, and her anxiety brought on a "waking dream". She lay awake picturing what it would be like for a scientist to give life to something that was dead and how he would react when the creation started to move. She scared herself so badly that she had to snap out of her reverie. But it sparked her imagination. 

Mary’s monster was created not by magic or alchemy, but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue. Mary was a pretty sharp teenager and was unusually well-educated in the sciences; and had read about the Galvani experiments on dead frogs and she wondered, not unreasonably, if electricity might be used to reanimate dead tissue.

Prior to this time, inanimate objects, such as the Golem, had been brought to life in fantasy tales by magical means. The premise has become familiar to us from two hundred years of retellings, especially film adaptations. Dr Victor. Frankenstein, Shelleys peotaganist an ambitious scientist, discovers a means of giving life to an artificial body, which he calls the Creature through the use of that newly discovered force, electricity. (The idea that this body is a corpse, or made of parts of corpses, comes in later versions.) However, he is horrified by the Creature’s ugliness and abandons it.

The creature can’t bear his isolation so he begs Frankenstein to conjure him a female mate. Frankenstein complies but immediately regrets his action, so winds up destroying the female in front of his original creature.Without guidance from its creator, without human contact, without love, only rejection the creature does turn to violence, but it is more sinned against than sinning. Frankenstein never 'loses control' over his creature,.because he never exerted control - or guidance over the creature to begin with. In its friendless, heartbroken state, it begins to pursue Frankenstein and murder those whom he loves.

 Everything bad that happens occurs because the creature is lonely: “Misery made me a fiend,” it declares. This theme comes from the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the idea that man is born free, but is corrupted by societies and civilisations.

 Mary picked a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost for the title page of her book, setting her story up as a mythic recapitulation, in secular terms, of what happened in the Garden of Eden: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?”. Adam says this in Milton’s poem when he realises he is going to be expelled from the Garden of Eden.

 Mary Shelley very possibly, invented modern science fiction at the age of 18. At least that’s the claim of the British writer Brian W. Aldiss, who, in his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, cited Frankenstein as the first work of actual science fiction and Mary Shelley as the mother of the entire genre.

Frankenstein shows several qualities that have become standard elements of sci-fi. In terms of technique, book uses a pseudo-realistic narrative form, achieved in this case by multiple narrators. This pseudo-realism has become a staple of horror (notably in Dracula) as well as much sci-fi, heightening the emotional impact of the story by making it as credible as possible. 

But the theme of Frankenstein is almost unique to science fiction: the philosophical implications of technology. In particular, the novel explores the question of whether replicas of human beings are human themselves, and how an “artificial intelligence” would respond to the world. The trope that any such creation would turn on its maker, arguably, comes originally from Shelley. Books and films from Erewhon to Blade Runner to 2001: A Space Odyssey have ruminated on these matters ever since.

 Mary felt ambivalent towards her creation and called it her "hideous progeny." The novel was published on New Year's Day 1818, debuting  as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction.  Despite several negative reviews, one calling it a “horrible and disgusting absurdity” it became a big popular success. Mary saw the first theatrical production in 1823.Despite the book’s popularity, Shelley still had to fight for recognition of her work. She still  endured publishers who believed that her husband actually wrote the story. 

Frankenstein  became an iconic masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging  the idea of modernity and questioning the state of “being human” while continually searching for a way to validate the emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the pain on invalidation for most of her life. She received a  severe rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today, Frankenstein stands at the heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true still.

 In May 1822, the Shelleys moved to La Spezia, where Mary miscarried on 16 June during her fifth pregnancy, On July 8, 1822, Mary's life was forever altered when her husband was drowned at sea in a storm off the coast of Livorno (sometimes called Leghorn), Italy while sailing to meet Leigh Hunt and his wife. 

By now, Mary's life was seemingly connected to tragedy, with the deaths of three children, her mother, and her husband, and the suicides of Percy's former wife and Mary's half-sister. Mary suffered from intense feelings of guilt towards her dead husband, particularly so as at times she had wished her husband were dead. Shelley's friends blamed her, as she did herself, for having made Shelley's last year unhappy. After his death, Mary tried to continue to write, but cycles of depression and sorrow kept her from it, as her letters and journals attest. Bereavement drove her to express her grief in verse, a medium she normally avoided. "I can never write verses," she wrote to Maria Gisborne on 11 June 1835, "except under the influence of a strong sentiment & seldom even then." 

Mary and Percy Florence returned to London in August 1823. They found themselves impoverished. Mary immediately turned to writing articles, novels, encyclopaedia entries, stories and reviews. She turned away from Gothic and futurist novels to historical and sentimental ones, set in fourteenth-century Italy (Valperga), the Yorkist uprising in fifteenth-century England (Perkin Warbeck) or the fashionable world of early nineteenth-century society (Mathilda, Lodore, and Falkner),

William Godwin welcomed Mary on her return to London in 1823. They lived close to each other and met almost daily. But his financial troubles prevented him from giving her the emotional and financial security she needed. She refused all offers of marriage, namely from John Howard Payne, an American actor-manager (1825), and the writer Prosper Mérimée. Edward John Trelawny suggested in 1831 that fate might have thrown him and Mary together, but she refused him, too, although she had retained his friendship since her husband's death.She had an epistolary relationship with Washington Irving, another American writer. Mary also may have had a romantic relationship with  a Jane Williams, and moved to be near her in 1824 before they had a falling-out. 

 After returning to London in 1823 Mary had found that Frankenstein had become a stage production, complete with a frightening monster which sprang from a concealed laboratory at the top of a staircase! In her novel the scientist who re-animates the corpse is called Frankenstein; yet ironically by 1830 his creation was being referred to by this name. Mary’s original creature is not evil; he is an innocent victim, who develops and yearns to be integrated into society. He becomes malign after being rejected by his creator and by society, declaring: ‘I am malicious because I am miserable.’ Nevertheless the word ‘Frankenstein’ gradually became associated with things that were monstrous and threatening.

 In 1824, Shelley;s Posthumous Poems was published, which was edited by Mary. She had begun negotiations with her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, who did not want his  renegade  son's works published or his family's name published in the press again during his lifetime. 

The Last Man (1826) is her best-known work after Frankenstein. This novel, in which she describes the destruction of the human race in the twenty-first century, is noted as an inventive description of the future and an early form of science fiction.  The work is the first English example of a novel about a dystopian universe where a pandemic sweeps across the earth, spreading through globalization and panic. It shakes the foundation of countries, stoking revolution and fear around the world. 

 Mary tested her ideas of the egalitarian family against human egotism, temporal mutability and the brute forces of nature which annihilate individual achievement through chance, accident and death, thus contradicting the more optimistic stances of both her father and her husband and their utopian idealism. Instead of following the idea of Godwin and Burke, that history leads ultimately to perfection, Mary depicts a history that can abruptly stop. She also introduces the theme of shared marital love being lost love; trust is destroyed. She portrays the self-destructive side of motherhood, a mother who lives for her children only cannot acquire a life of her own. In this deeply pessimistic novel, women cannot find fulfilment within nor without the family. She saw herself as a follower, not as an active agent, and felt unable to take a stand on behalf of women's rights.

 In 1831, Mary revised Frankenstein for Colburn and Bentley's Standard Novel Series. By then, her philosophical convictions had radically changed; her personal tragedies, together with her financial straits and her despair over her feelings of guilt, had convinced her that material forces beyond any human, not free will or personal choice, control the course of events. Her organic conception of nature was now replaced by a conception of nature propelled by brutal, machine-like force. Human beings are reduced to puppets manipulated by external forces. Victor Frankenstein is presented in a more sympathetic way, he is held less responsible for his actions. He is the victim of circumstances, not the perpetrator of evil. The earlier ideology of the loving family has now turned into maternal love as a self-destructive force. Experience had taught Mary Shelley that her earlier Utopianism and her belief in a world without monsters were untenable.

 I believe that we should treat Shelley’s novel as a cautionary tale. It should prompt us to ask ourselves if our science and technology today is or is on track to cross lines to the point of human anguish and demise.Shelley’s most pressing and obvious message is that science and technology can go to far. The ending is plain and simple, every person that Victor Frankenstein had cared about met a tragic end, including himself. This shows that we as beings in society should believe in the sanctity of human life.

We also learn important life lessons through her book. She illustrates that actions have their consequences and stemming from that, we should not “play God.” The novel’s subtitle, or alternate title is The Modern Prometheus. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man and suffered punishment eternally as a result. Shelley parallels this through her story, where Victor Frankenstein pursued a place of forbidden knowledge in arrogance. Frankenstein is an example of the Romantic over-reacher, breaching boundaries between human and divine principles.

An additional message Shelley conveys is that “monsters” are not born as monsters. The Creature arguably became the way he was through his treatment, or mistreatment rather. Shelley gives the Creature a voice, and the reader understands that there is a disparity between his appearance and his thoughts which ultimately tests the reader. I thought it was interesting that Shelley’s character heavily contrasts the Frankenstein portrayal that we see in popular culture. She may have been making a statement on how humans should not mistreat one another for judgement of their appearance, and their race even.

The education of Mary's son Percy Florence at Harrow proved too costly when she boarded him there, so she left London and moved to Harrow herself to cut down on cost. Sir Timothy did little to help her and his heir. On 7 April 1836, William Godwin died of catarrhal fever and was buried beside Mary Wollstonecraft in St. Pancras Churchyard.

 In 1837, Mary published the novel Falkner, another book on the theme of the (foster) father- daughter relationship. Again Mary demonstrates that a woman's fulfilment lies within the family. Also in 1837, Volume III of the Lives was published, with Mary contributing essays on Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. In the same year, Percy Florence took up his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. July 1838 saw the publication of Volume I of the Lives of the most Eminent Men of France with essays by Mary on the lives of Montaigne, Rabelais, Corneille, Rochefoucauld, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Mme. de Sévigné, Racine, Boileau, and Fénelon. 

In 1839, Mary contributed essays on Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Mme Roland and Mme. de Staël for Volume II. In the same year, she also published Volumes I through IV of her husband's Poetical Works, complete with notes, at monthly intervals. In November, she published her edition of his Essays, Letters.

 The situation for the  Shelleys'  improved when Sir Timothy increased Percy Florence's allowance with his coming of age in 1840, which allowed mother and son to travel in Italy and Germany; their journeys are recounted in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843  published in 1844.After graduating from Cambridge in 1841  Percy married Jane Gibson who Mary adored, and equally Jane thought the world of her and on all accounts Percy was a loyal and affectionte son. so Mary was at least surrounded by loved ones as she aged. In July 1843, Mary returned to England, stopping on the way to visit Claire in Paris.

In 1844, Sir Timothy died, leaving the baronetcy and his heavily indebted estate to Percy Florence. In 1849 Mary was able to move into Field Place, the Shelley country home at Bournemouth, with Percy Florence and his wife Jane. Sadly due to a life plagued by trauma and misfortune, Mary  suffered from various kinds of psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks. Finally, she died from a mysterious paralysis on 1 February 1851 aged fifty-three.

After she died, her family cleared the contents of her writing desk. In it, they found locks of her dead children’s hair, as well as a parcel of Percy’s cremated heart, wrapped in one of his last poems, Adonais. She was buried between her mother and her father, whose remains had been transferred from St. Pancras, at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.

 Mary's legacy was sanitised after her death. Her son, Percy, and his wife, Jane, became fierce guardians of her papers. Jane despite worshipping  Mary destroyed many journal entries and letters she deemed too bohemian for proper society, and refashioned Mary her  into the Victorian ideal of a selfless daughter, wife, and mother, presented as an entirely innocent woman, which she wasn't: she had run off with another woman's husband. Jane also commissioned a monument, modelled after Michelangelo’s Pièta, and created a ‘shrine’ for Mary, Shelley and their circle at Boscombe Lodge, near Bournemouth.

It wasn’t until the middle 20^th century that Mary Shelley’s unconventional life became more widely known, and scholars began reexamining her life and work, looking at her journals, letters and fiction together, they reveal a remarkable woman, who overcame tragic circumstances time and time again with such reslience.. Mary herself was a revolutionary figure who lived an exciting life of hedonism and sin, tooled around with England's poetic elite, and broke rules as her mother and her father often encouraged. She was a modern woman in every sense, too often sidelined  by her husband and his Byronic buddies.

 Frankenstein, became an iconic masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging  the idea of modernity and questioning the state of “being human” while continually searching for a way to validate the emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the pain on invalidation for most of her life.

She received a  severe rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today, her trailblazing literary masterpiece Frankenstein stands at the heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true still. Shelley’s Frankenstein, whether it was the intended purpose or not, serve as a warning in regards to the direction of science, technology, social responsility and human circumstances now, and most likely will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.Like her most famous creation,she contiiues to be revived and reappraised, haunting the popular imagination, For this alone Mary Shelley leaves us a tangible legacy that will never fade.

                                     Mary Shelley's Gravestone , Bouremouth