WHO'S YER DADDY, Harry ?

If you didn't know who they were, which of the two would you say was Harrys'daddy?..bearing in mind Diana was "messing' about with the Major around the time Harry was conceived. You wonder where Harrys' ginger hair came from !!

But then this is complicated and it may be that the milk man is Harry's grand father. I am not sure Lizzie will be happy to hear that.

Prince's Harry: A Gun-horny Adolescent 
By Joe Glenton

January 24, 2013 "The Independent" - - Winter has come and it seems that over the last few days leading figures in the War on Terror, unwilling to wait for Season Three of Game of Thrones to hit screens, have been re-watching past episodes to the point that it’s coloured their rhetoric.

Between Cameron’s assurances of a war against sundry evil-doers that will last ‘decades’ and French Defence Minister Le Driand’s frank (and frankly crackpot) calls for a ‘total reconquest’ of Mali, the only question is: how long until we replace drones with halberds?

Martial cant

The latest bit of martial cant has come from one dashing Captain Harry Wales; fighter, lover, occasional exhibitionist and warrior-prince of the House of Saxe-Gotha-Coburg. Having had his first tour of Afghanistan cut short, he has just finished his latest stint, where he has been fighting astride - or rather, in – Apache helicopters: the British Army’s multi-million pound engines of destruction.

The poor lad’s been having a hard time, even Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - a man whose admirable turn of phrase just can’t make up for his human rights records - called him a ‘shameless, drunken jackal’ recently. In all honesty, and I include a younger version of myself in this, that’s not a completely inaccurate description for young soldiers out on the town: hit the bars and clubs of Colchester on a Saturday night if you doubt me.

That said, we didn’t generally take our disco-dancing shoes on operational tour and Harry doesn’t kill Afghans while intoxicated as Hekmatyar suggested – on this evidence he does it while stone-cold sober. Apaches are too precious and expensive to be flown by drunkards, regardless of their pedigree. In fact, given that we aren’t doing at all well in Afghanistan, even with our potent technology, Apache may be even more of a burden on taxpayers then Harry himself. 

While a number of Household Cavalry veterans have informed me that young Mr Wales was okay ‘as officers go’, which is a pretty glowing assessment in soldier-speak, his latest public comments do make him sound for the all the world like a gun-horny adolescent playing a pricey version of Call of Duty.

Don’t get me wrong, squaddie culture and humour is close to the bone because the tasks soldiers are given are the grimmest imaginable and are often carried out, as in Afghanistan, without a mandate and with little public support. Brutal humour is often the only kind of armour a soldier can get hold of easily, I recall an expression brought back from Bosnia by older members of my own unit that seems to capture it: If you don’t laugh you’ll only cry.

Captain Wales does come across as fairly casual when he talks about taking lives to save lives, stopping people doing ‘bad stuff’ and ‘taking people out of the game’. In his defence though, and given his much publicised record as the royal social hand grenade, he may be politically naïve, or it could be that he’s a young man who’s been strapped into an attack helicopter for 20 weeks. One of the best arguments against war is the effects it has on the people fighting – though clearly Harry is, unlike many of the infantrymen he’s supporting, a soldier by way of choice not economics, I would not wish sleepless nights on anyone, even as a republican.

Just a job

This trivialisation of violence is not new thing; it is part of the process of dehumanisation which is central to modern warfare. It seems to have taken on new forms in the post 9/11 campaigns. During his short-lived first tour as a tactical air controller – calling in air strikes – Wales and his colleagues watched the bombs hit from their bunker on a live-feed monitor nicknamed ‘Kill TV’. This notion of a kind of professional distance from the killing you are involved in is also expressed in the US military term for an Afghan, Pakistani or whoever killed by a drone strike; a kill is referred to humorously – and officially - as a ‘bugsplat’ after a children’s computer game.

In all honesty, Harry’s comments are hardly revelatory and are tame compared to those I’ve heard from soldiers away from the media. To operate against and kill other humans, it helps to view this process as simply a job, however intellectually dishonest that is. Military training is sophisticated social engineering and wartime experience has the effect of ingraining a certain type of callousness. While war is a toxic institution, for some of those who conduct it, particularly privileged young princes who find themselves in the vanguard of US power, it can appear to be a latter-day boy’s own adventure.

The author refused to serve a second tour in Afghanistan on legal and moral grounds, later spending five months in military prison. His book, 'Soldier Box', is published by Verso in May.

Dolours Price Rests in Peace

Dolours Price has been found dead at her home in Dublin.

The 62-year-old mother-of-two was found at her home in Malahide last night, sources said.

Her death is not being treated as suspicious. A postmortem is due to take place on her body at the Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown later today.

Ms Price and her 58-year-old sister Marian, who has been politcally interned in British Occupied Ireland since 2011 were on hunger strike for over 200 days,being force-fed by the British for 167 of them

Irish Republican News

" Veteran republican Dolours Price, sister of Irish political prisoner
 Marian Price, has died.

 Dolours remained a significant force in Irish republicanism until her
 untimely death in Dublin last night.

 Following the introduction of internment in 1971, when hundreds of
 nationalists were arrested and imprisoned without trial, she approached
 Sean MacStiofain, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA and said
 she wanted to be a "fighting soldier".  She campaigned to join the IRA,
 not part of Cumann na mBan, the women's wing of the republican movement.
 An IRA Army Council was convened and Price was sworn into the
 organisation, followed by her sister.  Both played a significant role in
 the IRA's armed struggle.

 In 1973, she and her sister were sentenced to life imprisonment in
 England, and immediately embarked on a 200-day hunger strike seeking
 their repatriation to a prison in Ireland.

 During the hunger strike, which was called off in 1974, the sisters were
 force fed.

 Following her release on compassionate grounds in 1980, Dolours returned
 to Dublin and she married Belfast actor Stephen Rea in the early 1980s.
 The couple, who divorced in 2000, have two sons.

 Her sister Marian Price was interned in 2011 by an order of the then
 British Direct Ruler Owen Paterson.  Marian continues to suffer serious
 ill health as a result of her hunger strike and remains the subject of a
 worldwide campaign for her release.

 Their brutal treatment in English prisons continued to affect both
 sisters' mental health, and Dolours has received treatment for post
 traumatic stress disorder.

 In recent years, she was highly critical of the Sinn Fein leadership of
 Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and of the peace process.  She has
 made a number of statements denouncing Mr Adams for allegedly denying
 his IRA past, and her involvement in a historical archive project for
 Boston College became the subject of a PSNI subpoena and multiple legal
 actions.

 It is understood she died peacefully at her home last night in Malahide,
 County Dublin.  Ar dheis De go raibh a hanam."


In an interview with Suzanne Breen, they  described being force-fed:

Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you can't struggle. 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.

Dolours Price and her sister, Marian Price, were the children of Albert Price, a prominent Irish Republican and former IRA member, from Belfast.

In 1980 Dolours and Marian Price received the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and was freed on humanitarian grounds afterwards her health became permanently damaged as a result of being force fed by the British.

In February 2010, it was reported by The Irish News that Dolours Price had offered help to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains in locating graves of three men, Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, who were allegedly killed by the IRA and whose bodies have not been found.

Oral historians at Boston College interviewed both Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes between 2001 and 2006. The two former IRA members spoke on condition that the tapes not be released in their lifetimes. In May, 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland subpoenaed the material, possibly as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a number of people in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.

 In June 2011, the college filed a motion to quash the subpoena. A spokesman for the college stated that "our position is that the premature release of the tapes could threaten the safety of the participants, the enterprise of oral history, and the ongoing peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland." 

In July 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors asked a judge to require the college to release the tapes in order to comply with treaty obligations with the United Kingdom. On July 6, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with the government's position that the subpoena should not be quashed.On October 17, 2012, the United States Supreme Court temporarily blocked Boston College from turning over the interview tapes.The matter caused considerable duress to both Dolours and Marion.

 
Time Magazine Article:

The World: Ulster's Price Sisters: Breaking the Long Fast

Monday, June 17, 1974

• 
  
  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,... Rest of the story censored

If anyone can resurrect this article please 

forward or publish.

On Thursday 24 January 2013 it is reported that "Dolours Price has been found dead at her home in north Dublin. The Garda Síochána are investigating the circumstances surrounding the sudden death of the former Irish republican icon in her apartment in Malahide, although she had been in general ill health

IRA DRONES ?

Drones are relatively inexpensive and plenty of new models are evolving. You are allowed to operate a drone with impunity in Ireland and the only concern most people have, is their careless operations over built-up areas. But there's a bigger issue. What if the IRA develop drone technology? Aside from IRA drone surveillance in east Belfast, what if they use versions of the switchblade over the City of London to launch missiles. 

The quiet airborne IRA drones are a volunteer multiplier and  would certainly have a much less obvious noise footprint over east Belfast or London, than some of those loyalist Lambeg drums, who regularly awaken people from their beauty sleep. If I was making a long bet, in terms of what the IRA will be doing overhead Belfast or London in the near future, I'd put money on expecting a visit from a fleet of IRA drones, deployed in Irish republicans best interests.






" Rise of the Machines -

Most people see drones as a controversial weapon prowling over foreign battlegrounds.

"This is a powerful technology. No amount of hand-wringing is going to stop it", says drone expert, Peter Singer. Whether it's a floating TV station streaming live to the web, the prying lens of the paparazzi, the police chasing a criminal or a government agency spying, small domestic drones are experiencing an exponential growth. At the world's largest drone convention in Las Vegas a salesman tells the crowd, "this can be used in law enforcement, disaster relief and industrial applications. It's also very good at dusting floors. Every home owner should have one". And as the technology advances at a frightening speed, anyone with a few hundred dollars can buy one over the counter. These hobby drones can fly for miles and provide sharp video feedback to the pilot. "I wouldn't cheat on your wife!", laughs columnist Charles Krauthammer. But jokes aside, there are real fears over the "political, legal and ethical issues that play out with this", argues Singer. In 3 years time an order from the US congress will see tens of thousands of drones legally occupy an already crowded sky, raising numerous questions about basic safety, terrorism and civil liberty. As companies rush to cash in on this new billion dollar industry, experts warn, "we're not ready for this". "

Criminalising Republicanism Drugs Debate

Criminalising Republicanism Debate Link

They are poisoning our communities and destroying Republicanism. They are anti- working class. They are anti-Republicans. The choice is yours.

Many years have passed since Bobby Sands wrote that 'they will never criminalise us'. However, ask the average punter these days what they think of Republicanism and they will tell you without question they associate it with criminality. And why wouldn't he? It is beyond high time that those who care about future of Republicanism take a heard look around them and admit that there are those using the cloak of Republicanism to line their own pockets. How did it get to this point and what will we do about it? Something must be done or Republicanism will be forever tarnished, destroyed by those who the mainstream media is more then happy to publicise. Republicanism is being criminalised, not by the brits or free state, but by criminals who are being permitted to operate under the banner of Republicanism.

Extortion, drugs and gang warfare is what it is becoming associated with. The working class of Dublin, Derry, Limerick, Dundalk and elsewhere are only too aware of what is going on, even as too many Republicans stick their heads in the sand. This is not easy to write, but it has got to end and the first step in any recovery is admitting that the issue exists. Next is identifying the cause and the culprits and finally; ostracising those who have brought it into disrepute and the precarious position it finds itself in.

In Dublin, a faction of RIRA have all but destroyed the publics opinion of Republicanism. Fully permitted and encouraged under a six county 'leadership' who were more concerned with money in the short term, then in the inevitable repercussions to both working class communities and Republicanism. The same group is up to the same shit everywhere it has a presence. This is the 'success' of the takeover by 'independent Republicans'/ 'former PIRA yes men from Lurgan and the east Tyrone area. It gets even more bizarre, not content with those that were until very recently muscle used by the Gerry's 'kitchen cabinet' against principled Republicans and 'dissidents', they also joined forces with suspected MI5 outfit RAAD. This group operates loosely under numerous monikers; RIRA, NIRA, Friends & Family, 1916 Societies, etc. It is rumoured that there are those with the 32csm (aligned to RIRA) who are seeking to straighten this mess out; and break with their new 'leadership', let us hope so. To repair this they must oust those that supported the take over.

They are far from alone in this, though. Three years ago a number of members of the group called the CIRA were expelled for criminality. This CIRA faction then conjoined with two small groups called Saor Uladh and Saor Eire ( neither of these are the older, now defunct groups who previously used these names). Outright criminals who don't even bother trying to mask as Republicanism were brought into this grouping , as well. This group based in Limerick is spread out thinly throughout the 32 counties. Like the RIRA, the activity is the same: extortion and drugs. Republicanism merely a cover for it all. This group uses the monikers, RCIRA, Saor Uladh, Solas, etc. As those who have managed to take over the RIRA are suspected of being led by MI5, this group is suspected of being a free state run operation. What price is it to the state, if crime occurs if Republicanism dragged through the mud at the same time? RSF continue to speak out at the misuse of their name by this group. Like those within the 32csm who speak out, RSF must be supported.

Maghaberry tells its own portion of the story. An Armagh man thought to be behind the RIRA merger managed to get a well respected Republican thrown into SSU. Other prisoners were attacked for not accepting this man as 'boss'. There was an attempt to allow four members of RCIRA onto Roe. One could easily wonder if the internment cases against both Marion Price and Martin Corey are linked to all this. Would Marion allow 32csm to cheer the criminal takeover who have taken over the RIRA? Would Martin be able to talk younger people away from the clutches of any of these groups?

This is where Republicanism stands at the moment. Principled Republican groups like eirigi and RSF are getting overshadowed by these criminals. And the state media is lapping it up. Enough is enough. Republicans who believe our cause is noble are duty bound to speak out. Let them call it what they like, remember it is principles that matter, not numbers. Remember what these people are and what they have done: In all cases, they are being utilised to confuse and demoralise and are useful to maintain an eye on younger, naive Republicans who are foolishly drawn to these groups with their promises of 'action'. They are poisoning our communities and destroying Republicanism. They are anti- working class. They are anti-Republicans. The choice is yours.

Price of an Irish Nigger in a British Gulag

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.

A Time for ‘Sublime Madness’
By Chris Hedges

January 21, 2013 "Truthdig" - - The planet we have assaulted will convulse with fury. The senseless greed of limitless capitalist expansion will implode the global economy. The decimation of civil liberties, carried out in the name of fighting terror, will shackle us to an interconnected security and surveillance state that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul to New York. To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination. It was the human imagination that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred.

It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence. Chants, work songs, spirituals, the blues, poetry, dance and art converged under slavery to nourish and sustain this imagination. These were the forces that, as Ralph Ellison wrote, “we had in place of freedom.” The oppressed would be the first—for they know their fate—to admit that on a rational level such a notion is absurd, but they also know that it is only through the imagination that they survive. Jewish inmates in Auschwitz reportedly put God on trial for the Holocaust and then condemned God to death. A rabbi stood after the verdict to lead the evening prayers. 

African-Americans and Native Americans, for centuries, had little control over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by whites. Suffering, for the oppressed, was tangible. Death was a constant companion. And it was only their imagination, as William Faulkner noted at the end of “The Sound and the Fury,” that permitted them—unlike the novel’s white Compson family—to “endure.”

The theologian James H. Cone captures this in his masterpiece “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” Cone says that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.” Cone continues:

That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

Reinhold Niebuhr, as Cone points out in his book, labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

Niebuhr’s “sublime madness” permits the rest of us to view the possibilities of a world otherwise seen only by the visionary, the artist and the madman. And it permits us to fight for these possibilities. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, asAbraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”

Primo Levi in his memoir “Survival in Auschwitz” tells of teaching Italian to another inmate, Jean Samuel, in exchange for lessons in French. Levi recites to Samuel from memory Canto XXVI of Dante’s “The Inferno.” It is the story of Ulysses’ final voyage.

“He has received the message,” Levi writes, “he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular.” Levi goes on. “It is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand … before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again.”

The poet Leon Staff wrote from the Warsaw ghetto: “Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.”

It is only those who can retreat into the imagination, and through their imagination can minister to the suffering of those around them, who uncover the physical and psychological strength to resist.

"… [T]he people noticed that Crazy Horse was queerer than ever,” Black Elk said in remembering the final days of the wars against the Indians. He went on to say of the great Sioux warrior: “He hardly ever stayed in the camp. People would find him out alone in the cold, and they would ask him to come home with them. He would not come, but sometimes he would tell the people what to do. People wondered if he ate anything at all. Once my father found him out alone like that, and he said to my father: ‘Uncle, you have noticed me the way I act. But do not worry; there are caves and holes for me to live in, and out here the spirits may help me. I am making plans for the good of my people.’ ”

Homer, Dante, Beethoven, Melville, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin, along with artists such as the sculptor David Smith, the photographer Diane Arbus and the blues musician Charley Patton, all had it. It is the sublime madness that lets one sing, as bluesmanIshman Bracey did in Hinds County, Miss., “I’ve been down so long, Lawd, down don’t worry me.” And yet in the mists of the imagination also lies the certainty of divine justice:

I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;
I feel my hell a-risin’, a-risin’ every day;
Someday it’ll burst this levee and wash the whole wide world away.

Shakespeare’s greatest heroes and heroines—Prospero, Anthony, Juliet, Viola, Rosalind, Hamlet, Cordelia and Lear—all have this sublime madness. As Theseus says in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it,” wrote James Baldwin. “Otherwise, they could never endure, much less embrace, the lives they are compelled to lead.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

© 2012 TruthDig.com