BERNADETTE DEVLIN ADDRESS VIDEO BLOODY SUNDAY

Bernadette (Devlin) McAliskey addressed this year's Bloody Sunday March For Justice. Despite a very wet day up to 5,000 people attended the march in solidarity with the victims of Bloody Sunday. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Thanks very much. I wasn't really quite sure where to start here today. It's good to see so many people here. I thought actually that Kate was going to read out some of the thanks to people before I started but she's going to do that afterwards.

So I'd just like to take a minute to thank Kate Nash, to thank The Nash Sisters, to thank the families who have asserted their right to keep this issue to the fore until the truth is followed by accountability for the action.

It has been a lonely enough path at times for families. There are times when people who are in the thick of what is actually happening – the people who have actually have suffered the brunt of the pain and the loss - who have to travel very lonely paths sometimes - although we try our best to stand with everybody.

The ebb comes and goes. And it takes very brave people to keep standing their ground when there are plenty of people with them and when there are no people simply because they know that justice remains to be done needs nd not simply be seen to be have done.

So here on the forty-first anniversary of Bloody Sunday I'm actually surprised myself that on this cold day that somewhere in the back of my head is a slightly-too-close for me at the minute a very uncomfortable memory of standing here forty-one years ago.

Sometimes you forget as well why we came on that day. It's very important to remember first of all that we continue to fight - to challenge the cover-up, to challenge the pattern, to challenge the belief that the state can do whatever the states likes.

And even though some people from time to time get tired or begin to collaborate with the state in believing that it's all best swept away somewhere and new starts made on corrupt beginnings.

We still have to keep in front of people's minds that it didn't just happen to us. Bloody Sunday is not exclusive to the people of Doire - not exclusive to the people of Northern Ireland. Had many of you had the opportunity, which you didn't, to be at some of the events yesterday, and hear Jenny Hicks speak of the loss of her two daughters at the cover-up in Hillsborough, to hear Dave Douglas speak about the cover-up of the attack on the miners, to hear Susan McKay speak on the cover-up of sexual abuse of innocent children who were supposed to be safe in the care of institutions and were violated there.

And I think what stood in common to all of us yesterday as we were speaking was that the deed was bad enough. The shooting of people in the street in Doire was bad enough. The failure to protect people in a football stadium was bad enough. But the worst thing that happened to people was that having done it was the lie!

To immediately, in the aftermath of doing it, to lie about it. And to consistently maintain that lie to protect the state, to protect the interest, to protect the guilty. And in order to keep that lie alive, to demonise, to vilify the innocent.

And let us remember that even today when the vast majority of the innocent have been declared innocent - which we always knew - that innocence is still denied to young Gerald Donaghey. Innocence is still denied to that young person on whose corpse soldiers planted nail bombs in his pockets so that they could say they saw them there or whatever it was they did. There has still not been a declaration of innocence for young Gerald Donaghy.

Let us also remember, and we talked about that yesterday as well, that that pattern, that pattern of the state action doing what they want, lying about the fact they did it, being able to draw in the great and the good - the media, the police, the Church, the social speakers, the powerful - to maintain the lie.

That demonising of the victims, that long, long process of barricading the truth away from the people. People talk about how long The Saville Inquiry took - how expensive The Saville Inquiry was. It took a long time and it cost alot of money because for every single inch of that journey, for every single day of that journey, the British government, who set the Inquiry up, prevented the truth from being brought before it.

That's why it cost alot of money. That's why it took alot of time.

And as one of the people and I still say - I never asked for that Inquiry...I never wanted it...that's my personal stand...I never wanted to go to it because the man who was sitting there, decent human being though he was, was an employee of the government I saw murder people in front of my eyes!

How was he going to find his employer guilty? So he laid the blame at a half a dozen soldiers. And they still have not been held to account.

But the true culprits will never be held to account unless we keep on this path until they are.

But let us not forget what took us onto the streets that day.

We did not stand here forty-one years ago for the purpose of being shot. That's not why we came here. We didn't stand here all that time ago to create a situation that we would have to remember year after year.

We came on the streets that day to end the policy of internment without trial. That's what took us here.

And here today forty-one years later we have a new administration. We have a new dispensation. We have a new power structure. We have new civic collaborators in the administration of government.

But we still have internment without trial!

We still have people in prison on the whim and the dictate of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State - the Overlord of this place.

And whatever minions of small people who think they have power here... the fact that they cannot have Martin Corey released means they have no power! Power still lies in the fist of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State. But they have paper power.

Marian Price remains in prison on the whim of the Secretary of State.

Dolours Price cannot be harmed by this state anymore because they have finally destroyed that good woman and she is now gone.

But the Minister of so-called Justice, David so-called “Liberal” Ford, under Article 7 of the 2000 Act, at the stroke of a pen could release her sister whom they are also trying to break in body and soul and spirit and mind. And for what?

It took all day yesterday in the High Court for a very brave lawyer to keep battling against David Ford and we're not supposed to say this because David Ford asked the judge to insure there was no reporting.

Well...I don't work for the media...so I'm not reporting... I'm just telling you!

But in the High Court, on a judicial review, the judge said that David Ford's behaviour and his judgment on not allowing Marian Price out - and not even considering it – for a few hours to sit by the coffin of her sister was unlawful, unreasonable and irrational. That's what the judge said about the Minister of Justice of this small, misbegotten, corrupt, little, pretending state.

He said the Minister of Lilliput is irrational. He said the Minister of Lilliput doesn't understand the law.

And he said that that young woman should be released for at least four hours to sit by the coffin of a sister with whom she had shared a cell for many years. With whom she had suffered the human torture, degrading and inhuman treatment of having a tube put down her throat, into her stomach, held down until a jug of liquid was poured into that funnel, into that tube and into that stomach every single day for over [two] hundred days.

When we talk about people on hunger strike many young people here forget that when Marian Price and Dolours Price were on hunger strike it wasn't that they were fasting - they were force fed in that manner for every day for [two] hundred days - and it destroyed those young women. It destroyed their physical health and still the state not satisfied.

Bullies one of them all of her life and imprisons the other one.

We came here forty-one years ago to demand (the end of) internment without trial. We came here forty-one years ago to make it perfectly clear that if Her Majesty's government – Her Majesty owns the government – if her Majesty's government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could not insure that this part of her jurisdiction was governed openly, transparently, democratically and within the dictates of fundamental human rights and freedoms - which should be extended to people in prison - which should be extended to people who should not have their liberty removed from them except by due, open process of law - then this place should not be governed by Her Majesty's United Kingdom government.

And I would like to say from this platform that I for one have not changed that position. And I don't care who is currently standing between us, between us and Her Majesty's government and attempting to administer democracy on their behalf.

Make the damn state work!

Make it work openly, democratically in support of the civil rights we have demanded since 1968!

We stand today looking at a new dispensation, people still in prison, the people in these houses – people who live here - no housing executive after a few years! No welfare state! No health! No benefit! No civil rights! No nothing!

And you look on that wall and ask for what died the sons, the daughters, the children of these streets.

We have got to get our act together. We have got to do a bit more than just march. We have got to organise. We've got to educate ourselves. We have got to get moving or there will soon be nothing here for anybody.

Let's look at the bravery of the people who stood here. 

Let's look at the endurance of the families who have held this fight. Let's look at the endurance of Marian Price and Martin Corey and the others and let's say to ourselves: we have got to get a political programme together here and get the struggle for civil rights, political rights, social rights and economic rights together or we are in, comrades and colleagues, for one hell of a hiding. Thank you very much.

HOLOCAUST, WHOSE HOLOCAUST ?

Ireland should not become a subsidiary of the international Zionist
holocaust franchise chain

It seems the Jewish holocaust is indeed much more important to
revisionists than the so-called Irish Famine or original European
holocaust, which in 1847 the Cork Examiner (now Irish Examiner)-
referring to the on-going crime in Ireland, called a "Holocaust" as
did many writers including Michael Davitt in his 1904 "The Fall of
Feudalism in Ireland". Being as it is that Jews were not victims in
the well documented food removal genocide perpetrated by the British
regime against the Irish people in the mid 19th century, could it be
that in today's politically corrected Ireland Jewish suffering and
crimes perpetrated by the NAZI regime in Germany trump the long
ignored and now much denied suffering caused by a deliberate policy of
state orchestrated genocide perpetrated against the Irish themselves a
century before by the racist, colonial power Britain?
Holocaust, whose holocaust?

By T Dillon Jan 2013

To whom it may be of concern,
It seems the Jewish holocaust is indeed much more important to
revisionists than the so-called Irish Famine or original European
holocaust, which in 1847 the Cork Examiner (now Irish Examiner)-
referring to the on-going crime in Ireland, called a "Holocaust" as
did many writers including Michael Davitt in his 1904 "The Fall of
Feudalism in Ireland". Being as it is that Jews were not victims in
the well documented food removal genocide perpetrated by the British
regime against the Irish people in the mid 19th century, could it be
that in today's politically corrected Ireland Jewish suffering and
crimes perpetrated by the NAZI regime in Germany trump the long
ignored and now much denied suffering caused by a deliberate policy of
state orchestrated genocide perpetrated against the Irish themselves a
century before by the racist, colonial power Britain? Must the Irish
in their still divided land not only desist in seeking justice and
recognition of the evil unleashed upon them by a brutal, usurping
neighbor but that they now too must participate in the franchised
international Jewish cult of holocaust that has become the religion of
global Zionism? Why do so many in Ireland insist on relinquishing
their own rights through the falsification of proven historical fact
while at the same time allowing themselves to be conned into donning
the "Emperor of Zion's" threadbare mantle of collective guilt being
foisted upon them as well as on to so many other nations?

Is this simply to be a case of an Irish based monument commemorating
the destruction of innocent Jewish victims (only) at the hands of
NAZIS, or is there to be a reciprocal memorial to the equally innocent
victims of the British engineered holocaust in Ireland perhaps set
somewhere among the ruins of Palestine's bulldozed villages and lands?
Or dare I ask will there be a world-wide network of well financed
monuments to the ongoing terror in Palestine (still being perpetrated
as I write) by the children of the victims of Auschwitz against the
real Semitic people of that cursed land? Where will the history chain
of guilt stop and what is so special in fact about Jewish
victimization that Irish minister Mr Alan Shatter feels the need to
insult the heroes of Irish independence while completely denying the
obvious genocide perpetrated against "his" people, the Irish who he
supposedly represents in the Irish government?

Needless to say this "debate" initiated by well known Zionist Fine
Gael politician Alan Shatter, who insults those who fought and died
for Ireland's independence -with his repugnant and extremist views
much promoted in British tabloids and the global network of Jewish
press- seeks to soften the "hasbara" of Israeli propaganda campaigns
as the ethnic cleansing and genocide against the people of Palestine
continue unabated. All this supposed Irish guile resurrected from
Ireland's bleak post independence past, (at least in Shatter's fertile
and alien imagination) is somehow responsible for the murder of
innocent Jews and is now being raised like some Hebrew Golem as bands
of extremist, supremacist colonizers from Eastern Europe and Russia
wielding their so-called "right of return" have made the Middle East a
raging inferno even as the despicable Netnyahoo government threatens
nuclear war against the sovereign and peaceful nation of Iran while
daily fomenting terror and anarchy against the people of Syria.

Perhaps Agent Shatter would also like to comment on the "morally
bankrupt regime" of fellow Jew and proto-Zionist Benjamin Disraeli,
who in the service of Britain's colonial interests during his tenure
as Britain's Prime minister for two complete terms in 1871 and 1877,
(all the while denying the rights and interests of those of John
Bull's less worthy citizens in his "colony" of Ireland), infamously
insulted that other great Irish statesman and freedom fighting hero
when the Zionist bellowed at Daniel O'Connell in the British House of
Commons with the supremacist taunt "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the
ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an
unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

Obviously Disraeli the "man of political and sexual intrigue" was
ignorant of the fact that he was addressing a member of a race that
was acknowledged centuries before by the English themselves as having
the oldest written language of northern Europe, much older in fact
than the first scribblings attributed to the English and of course
much much earlier than the migration of Khasarian Jews (Disraeli's and
possibly Shatter's ancestors among them) as these migrants spread
across Western Europe from lands that had nothing to do with Palestine
according to Tel Aviv university faculty of history Professor Shlomo
Sand in his best-selling seminal work on Jewish mythology, the must
read expose titled "The Invention of the Jewish People" (2009).

Not only is the propaganda stunt of imposing a Zionist Jewish
territorial marking monument in Ireland an outrageous insult to the
victims of German pogroms of the mid-twentieth century on mainland
Europe (a despicable horror in itself of which a broken and suffering
Ireland had no part whatsoever to play, Mr Shatter), it is an even
greater insult to the ignored and then rabidly denied genocide of
Irish people by a foreign government that has a history more brutal
than any other fascist entity on this planet. Shame on you for your
despicable insinuations that a land impoverished by almost a
millennium of savage, colonial rule by merciless Britain (whose own
jealous ambitions vis-à-vis the rising power of Germany and which
contradictorily played no small part itself in the financing and rise
of NAZI Germany along with well documented US Zionist and fascist
banking interests).... to somehow try to spin that historic fact into
a case of Irish "moral political bankruptcy" is indeed a new low in
the ceaseless attacks of Zionist hasbara spreaders and their network
of ill-informed, useful idiots which mankind today is constantly
subjected to by media in the hands of liars and bigots while trumpeted
by those propagandists they help to get s-elected.

However, I suspect that the real agenda of Zionism in Ireland and that
of its well connected Trojan horse riding cowboys is to teach the
unruly Irish once and for all that the cult of holocaust and the
cherished tales of "suffering Jews", despite all the evidence to the
contrary, will be forced upon the plain people of Ireland in order
that they too finally learn that their steadfast support for their
brothers in occupied, apartheid Palestine will no longer be tolerated
under the diktats of "New World Order" anymore than their attempt to
seek justice and retribution from the usurious tactics of so-called
"Irish" banks now bleeding the working-class people of Ireland dry in
the interests of thieving money changers and fraudsters in lands
distant and unfortunately not distant enough. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose, indeed!

I would appeal to all voters in Ireland to rise above the inherited
Tweedledee and Tweedledum Civil War stupidity of Fine Gael and Fianna
Fail politics, where liars and traitors are continuously "elected" to
political office for flogging our ancient, dead horses, where said
politicians then proceed to betray the people of Ireland as they
unscrupulously represent the interests of foreign and dangerous
elements that are even more insidious than what our forefathers fought
against and were murdered by so that Irish men and women today can
still live and speak their minds in freedom.
Next time Zionist Agent Shatter and the rest of his ilk come pandering
for your vote, bearing despicable tales of imaginary misdeeds and
betrayal of the chosen race which he so obviously represents, remind
this impostor of his own political and moral bankruptcy (whatever
about financial) and ask him about those properties and legal disputes
down in Florida where many other well-heeled speculating Irish patriot
builder friends of his have equally sumptuous nests to escape to when
the climate in Ireland becomes too severe in the winter of collapse
ahead.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092138/Irish-m....html

http://irishholocaust.org/

http://www.federaljack.com/?p=174095

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/96853&user_frontpage=53

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shatter

http://www.politics.ie/forum/history/204938-why-does-du....html

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ireland/disire.htm

PRICE SISTERS INTERNMENT

Below are extracts from Dolours and Marian Price writings and statements, with an article from Time Magazine, about the internment of the Price sisters. Dolours was interned this week in Milltown cemetery. Marian  was politically interned without trial, almost two years ago by the British in Occupied Ireland.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa
14 July 2004
I am now deeply worried. I watched the news on July 12th and saw a former I.R.A comrade, Gerry Kelly, standing, arms spread wide across a retreating British Army jeep protecting the British soldiers inside!
I have not slept a wink since seeing that. Did some incompetent give me the wrong instructions when I joined the I.R.A? I will be very cross indeed if I find out that I was inducted into the Army by some eejet who got things arse about face!

I Once Knew a Boy... 
17 July 2004
Perhaps my own experiences with Gerry Kelly as a comrade on a difficult mission in England and our subsequent imprisonment together leaves me somewhat emotionally vulnerable to the person. We went through a lot together. It causes me a great deal of pain to ridicule the boy I once knew to be stubborn, anti-establishment, arrogant as only those who are convinced of the rightness of their cause can be. A man-boy who endured the same rigours of hunger-strike and force-feeding as myself, my sister, Hugh Feeney and others on our failed mission.
I got to know Gerry Kelly well, from the boy leaping over bollards at Trafalgar Square to the boy who stood proudly in the dock at Winchester Crown Court to receive his life sentence and twenty years; the boy who was dragged from the dock declaring his loyalty to the Republican Cause, “Damn your concessions England we want our country!” To now witness what he has become, a British lackey, a forelock tugging parody of an enslaved people, a puppet for the Brits and all that is bad in our country, that causes me deep pain, deep hurt, hurt because Gerry Kelly was a person that I once loved as one can only love a brother or a comrade.
[...]
When we starved together it was not 'to move the process forward', it was not for seats in a British Government, it was not to be treated as 'equals' in a Stormont Assembly. It was, I like to think, because we had a shared passion for justice and freedom for this island, the whole of this island of Ireland. I believe that we were dedicated to the old struggle to rid this land of any British interference, that our wish was to regain our dignity as Irishmen and women never again to bend the knee, never again to lie down except in death after a good fight. Death would never have been our defeat — living on our knees, now that is defeat!

Dolours Price

Monday, Jun. 17, 1974
The World: Ulster's Price Sisters: Breaking the Long Fast
Time Magazine
Each day passes and we fade a little more. But no matter how the body may fade, our determination never will. We have geared ourselves for this and there is no other answer. - Dolours Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Sometimes we can achieve more by death than we could ever hope to living. We 've dedicated our lives to a cause and it's supremely more important than any one individual's life. - Marion Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Fate and politics have a way sometimes of cheating would-be martyrs. Belfast's Price sisters -- Dolours, 23, and Marion, 20 -- were sentenced last Nov. 15 to life in prison for their part in the March 1973 London car bombings that injured 238 persons and led to the fatal heart attack of another. In an effort to gain attention for their Irish Republican cause and force British authorities to return them to Ulster for the rest of their prison term, the sisters pursued a grim path toward self-imposed death: for seven months they systematically starved themselves. 

At week's end the British government announced that the Prices had ended their long fast after what appeared to be an eleventh-hour decision by Westminster to avert the risk of violent reprisals by the sisters' Irish Republican Army supporters. As soon as their health permits, the pair may be transferred from London's maximum-security Brixton Prison to jail in Northern Ireland. 

Dolours and Marion are daughters of a former I.R. A. officer who once tunneled his way out of a Londonderry prison. The sisters were raised amid the revolutionary passions of Belfast's working-class Andersontown district, an I.R.A. stronghold. As teenagers, they shared a liking for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as for Irish folk dances. Both girls were and are devout Roman Catholics: a notebook that Dolours was carrying when she was arrested for the London bombings contained notes on the Virgin Mary along with details about her I.R.A. contacts. 

According to their older sister Clare, 26, the girls showed little active interest in politics until 1968, when they joined the civil rights movement, which was dedicated to securing equal voting rights for Northern Ireland's Catholic minority. The turning point in the Prices' conversion to hard-line militancy came when they participated in the 1969 civil rights march from Belfast to Londonderry; Protestant hooligans ambushed and stoned the young marchers. 

Dolours and Hugh Feeney, an I.R.A. comrade who is also in jail for the London bombings, formed the "People's Democracy," a militant offshoot of the civil rights movement, and took their cause to the streets. The sisters had been studying to become teachers. But they also began to investigate the revolutionary polemics of Che Guevara and Soledad Brother George Jackson. The girls learned the techniques of bombmaking and small-arms use in I.R.A. training courses across the border in the Republic. By the time they plotted the London bombings, both girls had become seasoned veterans of back-alley skirmishes with British troops and of slow marches behind the coffins of I.R.A. dead. 

Friends and relatives of the Price sisters have claimed that the pair were unjustly prosecuted and tried: that they received no legal advice until four days after their arrest, that authorities purposely shifted the trial from London to the more conservative town of Winchester. Their supporters have also charged that prison officials brutalized the sisters by force-feeding them during their long hunger strike. Force-feeding -- in which a person's mouth is clamped open while a greased tube is inserted through his nose and a "complan" solution of iron, orange and milk-soaked glucose is poured directly into the stomach -- usually causes acute vomiting. 

The procedure can provide a starving victim with 1,750 calories a day, but it is an exhausting and frightening experience. Shortly before the government announced that the Price girls had ended their fast, their sister Clare reported that they weighed less than 98 Ibs. each, that their skin had turned waxen, their hair was falling out and their mouths were covered with sores. The prison dentist confirmed that the sisters' teeth had been loosened under pressure from the mouth clamp. Last month, after doctors had said that the girls would probably die sooner from continued force-feeding than from fasting, officials halted the procedure. 

At week's end it was still uncertain how soon, if ever, the Prices would recover from their ordeal. Or whether, even if their flirtation with martyrdom has been happily aborted, they will be able to retain their heroine status once they are no longer a political cause celebre.

“Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can’t struggle,” says Price. “You clench your teeth to try to keep your mouth closed but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it open. They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then, they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can’t move. They throw whatever they like into the food mixer – orange juice, soup, or cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the tube. The force-feeding takes 15 minutes but it feels like forever. You’re in control of nothing. You’re terrified the food will go down the wrong way and you won’t be able to let them know because you can’t speak or move. You’re frightened you’ll choke to death.

- Marian Price

Marian Price is just one of several Irish people currently politically interned in British Occupied Ireland during which time lawyers have not been allowed to see any of Britain's ‘alleged’ evidence.

• She has been kept in solitary confinement in a ‘male’ high security prison
• She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date.
• She has not been given any timescale for any investigation.
• She has not been allowed to see the evidence that the state claims to have
• Her release has been ordered on two occasions by judges. However, on both occasions the British Vice royal has overruled those decisions.
• The Vice royal claims they ‘revoked Marian’s license, ’despite Marian never being released on license. She was given a Royal Pardon.
• Marian’s Royal Pardon has ‘gone missing’ from the home office (the only time in history). The British Vice royal has taken the view that unless a paper copy can be located – it must be assumed that she does not have one. It is generally agreed that MI5 shredded her majesty's pardon.
• Despite no ‘license’ existing for her release from prison in 1980, it is the non-existent licence that is being used to keep her in prison.
• She can only be released by Theresa Villiers the current Vice royal responsible for Marian's internment.

DEFRAGMENTATION

30 January 2013 LINK

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Travelling back in time through Bangkok’s Chinatown

InThailandCultural Activities

http://www.bbc.com/travel/feature/20130129-travelling-back-in-time-through-bangkoks-chinatown

 Perhaps you're one of those who think people are supposed to mellow in their old age? Think again. John Rotten may be past it but he will not be going quietly into that good night. And if they do finally get the bugger into a coffin they'd better nail the lid down good and tight.

 

And it looks like his half-sister may be managing a Tescos in Wales.

Remember when you were young,

You shone like the sun.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

Now there's a look in your eyes,

Like black holes in the sky.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

You were caught on the crossfire

Of childhood and stardom,

Blown on the steel breeze.

Come on you target for faraway laughter,

Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon,

You cried for the moon.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

Threatened by shadows at night,

And exposed in the light.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

Well you wore out your welcome

With random precision,

Rode on the steel breeze.

Come on you raver, you seer of visions,

Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
- Pink Floyd

For all that we struggle

For all we pretend

It don't come down to nothing

Except love in the end

And ours is a road

That is strewn with goodbyes

But as it unfolds

As it all unwinds

Remember your soul is the one thing

You can't compromise

Take my hand

We're gonna go where we can shine

- David Gray 

---

Letter of Ireland to Leon Trotsky 1938

Better an Honest Socialist than a Lying Republican

11 May 2004

I have no time for Stormont. I have no time for the Good Friday Agreement. I have no time for people who constantly change their position, cement hard gathered weapons into the ground, abduct people and put them down bogs, beat those who do not agree with their rules, have a finger in every financial pie going and seem to have done very nicely for themselves in their day to day lives. They are not Republicans, they are Stalinists. They have turned a once noble Army into an armed militia whose only role is to strong arm any opposition to their insatiable political greed and opportunism.   

Give me an honest Socialist any day before a lying treacherous so-called Republican  -

Dolours Price


11 December 1938
New York City

Leon Trotsky
Coyoacan
Mexico DF

My Dear Leon Trotsky:

We were both very pleased to receive your note. Hortense, jokingly, says that it must all be a Stalinist plot. While she is not disinterested in politics, she is, in no sense, a political person. However, she is no bitter foe. And in her own profession, the theatre, she must pay a price for her attitudes and the stand that she has taken. Stalinist influence is permeating the American theatre, and Hortense is automatically excluded from even being considered for roles in plays by certain managements because of this fact.

Concerning “the mysteries of my style” [1], you may be amused to know that one Communist Party functionary described it, once in The Daily Worker, as “Trotskyite.” And one of the most current criticisms of my writing in Stalinist sources is that “the rationale of Trotskyism” has given a basis for his “despair,” and through that means he is degenerating.

This summer I was in Ireland, and I saw Jim Larkin. All men have weaknesses, but all men are not the victims of their weaknesses. Jim Larkin is a victim of his own weaknesses, and his own temperament. Now, he is embittered and envenomed. He feels that the Irish working class has sold him out. He was not returned in the last elections for the Dáil, and he ran in a working class district. He defended the trials, but thought that Bukharin could not be interested. But Larkin’s formal attitudes do not have much meaning. He is untheoretical and unstable intellectually. He is always a direct actionist, and his direct actionism takes whatever turn that his impulses lead him toward, In the midst, for instance, of a severe fight, he might be walking down the street and see a sparrow trapped in some electric wires where it might die. He will become incensed, and will telephone important members of the government and demand that they have men sent down to release the sparrow immediately, and then this will loom more important than the fight in which he is engaged. He is very garrulous, human and humane, witty, vindictive, vituperative, and he is Irish. At times, he is almost like an embittered version of the stage Irishman. In Ireland, there has never been much theory, and in consequence, never been many men with a rounded view of the reasons why Ireland was struggling. Before the war, the Irish labor movement was very militant and well toward the forefront of the European labor movement. It was defeated in the great Dublin transport strike of 1913, and out of this crushing defeat, the Irish Citizen Army was formed. Larkin left for America, and Larkin says that one of the last things that he said to Connolly was not to go into the National movement, not to join the Irish Volunteers, which was the armed force of the nationalist movement. Connolly did go into the Easter Rebellion, and there is the disputed question as to whether or not he made a mistake. Sean O’Casey, the Irish playwright, in a pamphlet he wrote on the Irish Citizen Army, declares baldly that James Connolly died not for Irish socialism but for Irish nationalism. Others maintain that Connolly could not have remained out of the rising. At all events, the Irish Citizen Army was decimated, and crushed by the Easter Rebellion. There were no leaders left to carry on the social side of Connolly’s doctrines. The entire movement was swept along in a frenzied rise of Irish patriotism and Irish nationalism. Sinn Féin was in complete control of the movement. The leaders of Sinn Féin had only the most vague notions of what they wanted – an Irish Ireland speaking Gaelic, developing its own Irish culture, free of the British crown, and some were not even fighting them for freedom from the crown. In 1921, when the treaty was negotiated in England, there was this same unclarity. Following the treaty, there was the split in the Irish ranks. The record of that split is most saddening to read. It was not a split on real issues. There were two or three documents with different wordings, and they all meant much the same thing. Instead of discussing social programs, they discussed Ireland, and they insulted one another. Out of this split the bitter civil war developed, and the comrades in arms of yesterday assassinated one another. The treatment which the Free State government meted out to its former comrades matches almost that which Stalin has meted out. The bravest fighters of the Irish Republican Army were taken out and placed up against a wall and butchered without any formality. And now, after all the trouble, the Irish people have changed masters, and a new Irish bourgeoisie is developing and coagulating, and the politicians of Sinn Féin are aligned with them and the Church, with reaction rampant, poverty to match even that of Mexico, progressive ideas almost completely shut out, a wall of silence keeping out the best Irish tradition – that of Fintan Lalor, Davitt, and Connolly, and poor Ireland is in a hell of a state. Larkin returned in the early twenties. After defeat, the Irish labor movement needed someone to lead it who could remould a defeated class. Larkin was a great and courageous agitator, but not a leader of a defeated army, and he could not work with any one. Gradually, he lost influence, and now he is old and embittered. Of course, Catholicism plays a strong role in Ireland, and Larkin is a Catholic and talks of the virtues of the Christian home. And suddenly out of his garrulous talk, a flash of his old fire comes through. Perhaps you are riding through the Dublin slums with him, and suddenly, seeing the poor in their filth, standing in front of the filthy buildings in which they are forced to live like animals, and a strong denunciation comes, and there is something of the Jim Larkin who defied the British Army, and at whose words the poor of Dublin came out into the streets in thousands, and flung themselves against the might of Britain and that of the Irish bourgeoisie. Human beings are social products, and Larkin is a product of the Irish movement. The principal instrument of the Irish revolutionaries was always terrorism and direct action, and when Larkin was unable to function with these methods on the wave of a rising and militant movement, he was lost, and the labor bureaucrats outmaneuvered and outsmarted him. When he returned to Ireland from an American jail, he got his following together, and marched on the quarters of the union he had formerly led. He took the building, but later lost it in the law courts, and he is no longer the leader of the transport workers. He has union following, and among his strongest support is that of the butchers and hospital workers.

He showed me something in Ireland that few people in Dublin know about. In the Parnell days, a terrorist organization, composed almost exclusively of Dublin workingmen was formed and named the Invincibles. The Invincibles committed the famous Phoenix Park murders in front of the vice-regal lodge, and were denounced by the Church, by Parnell, and by almost the entire Irish nation. There are no monuments in Ireland to the Invincibles. They died in isolation, some of them defiant to the end in their utter isolation. At the spot across from the vice-regal lodge in Phoenix Park, where the murders were committed, there is a patch of earth alongside of the park walk. No matter how often grass is planted over this spot the grass is torn up by the roots, and this spot of earth is left, and always, there is a cross marked into the dirt in commemoration of the Invincibles. Every week, someone – principally, I believe, one of Larkin’s boys – goes there and marks that cross. This has been going on for a long time.

In Larkin, there is something of that characteristic of defiant defeat that runs through so much of Irish history, and with it, never any real investigation of causes. But even up to today, he remains the only figure of commanding proportions in the Irish labor movement. The rest is pretty nearly all bureaucracy, tied to the tail of nationalism, enfolded in the cassock robes of the priestcraft, seeing the problems of Irish labor as an Irish question. Ireland is having something of an industrial boom. Certain sections of the Irish working class, the most advanced trade unions – which have been in existence some time – these are better paid than corresponding trade unions in England. But the country is partitioned between an industrial north and an agricultural south. In the south, de Valera is engaged in a program of industrialization. The Irish market is small, and that means that monopolies must be parcelled out to various groups or persons. When these monopolies get going, there will be resultant crises, because they will be able to supply the Irish market with a few months work and production. Also, the new factories are being spread over the country – a program of decentralization – and in many instances, factories are being set up in agricultural areas where there is no trade union strength. It is necessary to further industrialization in Ireland to have, as a consequence, sweat shop conditions. There is a small labor aristocracy and even this lives badly. And below it, poverty that reduces thousands upon thousands to live like animals in the most dire, miserable, and inhuman poverty. I saw some of this poverty. One family of eleven living in one room. The family has lived in this same room for twenty-four years. The building is crumbling, walls falling, ceiling caving in, roof decaying. The oldest in the family is nineteen, the youngest is an undernourished infant of eight months. Six sleep in one bed, three in another, two on the floor. The infant was born last Christmas eve in the bed where six sleep. The role of the Church is important. The Church tells the Irish that they are going to live for ever and be happier in heaven, and this engenders patience. There is a mystic fascination with death in Ireland. In all the homes of the poor, the walls are lined with holy pictures, those of the Sacred Heart predominating. The poor live in utter patience. They have lived in this patience ever since the heyday of Jim Larkin. In those days, at his word, they thronged the streets and threatened the power of England, and of the Irish and Anglo-Irish bourgeoisie. But no more. However, with the industrialization program, there is likely to be some enlargement of the Irish working class, and the economic factors of proletarianization, plus the resulting effects of factory work and familiarity with machines is likely to cause some changes in the consciousness of Irishmen. Familiarity with machines is likely to rub off some of the superstition, and the economic conditions will pose their problems to the Irish workers. There is possibly going to be a change in Ireland because of these factors, and some of the eternal sleep and mud-crusted ignorance is likely to go. But being an agricultural country, a poor country, a country ridden by superstition, it now sleeps, and there is a lot of talk about Ireland, and little is done about Ireland, and a characteristic attitude is sure and what is the bother. Ireland is no longer merely a victim of England, but of world economy now. Irish nationalism correspondingly has altered from being a progressive movement to a reactionary movement. Fascism could easily triumph in Ireland were fascism vitally necessary to the new rulers of Holy Ireland.

The Irish Republican Army is split into factions, some demanding emphasis on a social program, others on a national program. Stalinists are in the former group, but Stalinism is very weak in Ireland, practically inconsequential. It amounts to a few pensionaries. Ireland does not need Stalinism. It has Rome. Rome handles these problems with the necessary efficiency. Rome confuses the struggles, poses the false questions, sidetracks protests as Stalinism now does in advanced countries.

As a kind of compensation, Ireland a defeated nation has developed a fine modern literature, just as Germany, defeated and still un-unified at an earlier period, developed German philosophy. But the moral terrorism in the name of the Church and the Nation, and the parochial character of the life and of intellect in Ireland might choke the literature now. So backward is Ireland that even the American motion pictures have a progressive influence in the sense that they make the youth restless, that they produce freer and less strained relationships between the sexes, and that they give a sense of a social life of more advanced countries that is not permitted because of the state of economy in Ireland. Ireland impresses me as being somewhat parallel to Mexico, except that in Mexico there are progressive strains in the country, and in Ireland these are weak and morally terrorized. In part, this is undoubtedly because of Ireland’s lack of mineral resources and wealth, the backwardness and sleep of its labor movement, and the role of the Church. In Ireland, the Church was not the feudal landholder. Behind the scenes, the Church always fought against the Irish people, and spoke for law and order. But at one time, the Church itself was oppressed. The Church and the people became entangled in the consciousness of the Irish, and the religion question befogged the social and economic one. In Mexico, Spain, France, and Russia, the Church was more openly a part of a feudal or pseudo-feudal system. The peasants became anti-clerical because they wanted land. This did not happen in Ireland. In consequence, anti-clericalism did not take the same form. Anti-clericalism amounts to jokes at the priesthood, dislike of the archbishops, and so forth. In earlier days, it was stronger, particularly among the Fenians. But it never took the real form it took in France, Spain, etc. And so the Church has great power in Ireland today. In the most real, vivid, and immediate sense it gives opium to the people.

Poor Ireland! She is one of the costs demanded by history in the growth of what we familiarly call our civilization. There is an old poem with the lines – They went forth to battle And they always fell. And today, after having fallen so many times, Ireland is a poor island on the outpost of European civilization, with all its heroic struggles leaving it, after partial victory, poverty-stricken, backward, wallowing in superstition and ignorance.

My favorite Irish anecdote is the following. The last castle in Ireland to fall to Cromwell’s army was Castleross on the lakes of Killarney. At that time, the castle was held by the O’Donoghue. For several months, the British could not take the castle. The Irish infantry was more lightly clad than the British, and would always lead the better armored and more heavily clad British down into the bogs where their armed superiority became a handicap, and then the Irish would cut them to pieces. There was an old Gaelic prophecy that Castleross would never fall to a foreign foe until it was attacked by water. There was a proviso in this prophecy. For the lakes of Killarney empty into Dingle Bay, where the water is so shallow that foreign men of war from the sea cannot enter it. The British general heard of this prophecy. He went to Dingle Bay and built flat-bottomed boats and floated them up the lakes of Killarney. He fired one cannon shot at Castleross. And the O’Donoghue, thinking that the prophecy had been fulfilled, surrendered without firing a shot in return.

I took the liberty of writing in such detail about Ireland because I thought you might be interested in modern Ireland. They call it the “new Ireland” these days.

Hortense joins me in sending our warmest greetings to you and Natalia.

Yours,
Farrell "

Mullaghmore on a Hardy Day

How Iceland Overthrew The Banks Video

How Iceland Overthrew The Banks

Video

"Why do we consider banks to be like holy churches?" is the rhetorical question that Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimson asks (and answers) in this truly epic three minutes of truthiness from the farce that is the World Economic Forum in Davos. Amid a week of back-slapping and self-congratulatory party-outdoing, as John Aziz notes, the Icelandic President explains why his nation is growing strongly, why unemployment is negligible, and how they moved from the world's poster-child for banking crisis 5 years ago to a thriving nation once again. Simply put, he says, "we didn't follow the prevailing orthodoxies of the last 30 years in the Western world." There are lessons here for everyone - as Grimson explains the process of creative destruction that remains much needed in Western economies - though we suspect his holographic pass for next year's Swiss fun will be reneged...

January 29, 2013 - Zerohedge

Court: Iceland Doesn’t Need to Repay UK and Dutch Depositors

By Agence France-Presse

January 29, 2013  -- Iceland was entitled to refuse to pay immediate deposit guarantees to savers with failed online bank Icesave in Britain and the Netherlands, a European court said Monday.

The ruling is the latest twist in a bitter dispute which has clouded negotiations on Iceland’s ambitions to become a member of the European Union.

The Court of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which covers economic and trading relations between non-EU countries that are a part of the European Economic Area (EEA) single market and their European Union partners, was ruling on Reykjavik’s response to the collapse of the Icelandic banking sector in 2008-9.

The British and Dutch governments spent 3.9 billion euros ($5.5 billion) compensating 340,000 of their citizens who lost their savings in the collapse.

Iceland did not, and the EFTA Court upheld its approach, the court saying it had “dismissed the application” supported by London, The Hague and the European Commission.

The decision was based on three reasons — including the fact that Icelandic banking law at the time did not specify how to handle a major banking crisis of such global scale.

The ruling did not, however, call for monies already reimbursed to be clawed back.

Deals to use tax-payer money to refund the Icesave debt have been twice rejected in referendums so the assets of failed parent Landsbanki are the only way Iceland can settle the row.

In December, the group tasked with winding up Landsbanki reimbursed the first third of monies due to savers who lost money in the collapse of its Icesave — to the tune of 432 billion Icelandic kronor (2.71 billion euros, $3.64 billion).