Craig Murray on Julian Assange

 

Former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray, does that here, speaking out for gaoled truth-teller, Julian Assange.

Paris Commune - a revolution of more than its own time

 

 

"a revolution of more than its own time"

 

A revolutionary tradition has always been strong in France. “From childhood,” wrote Eugene Varlin, a member of the 1st International, “people are brought up having revolution glorified … boys who cannot work out their own pay, who do not read newspapers, rush out as soon as there is any disturbance in the street.” This applies to Parisians most of all who are still proud that they destroyed the Bastille in 1789.

 

When war broke out between France and Germany in 1870, The International Workingmen’s Association called for a General Strike against the war in all countries of Europe. It was just a hope as workers were gripped by patriotic fervour while Emperor Napoleon III was half-hearted in his attempt to check a German advance. On 9 August 1870, a large crowd gathered in the Place de la Concorde to demand the Emperor’s abdication and the arming of the people. 

The defence of Paris now lay with the National Guard, the armed militia which had sprung up after the fall of the Bastille. Their allegiance was to the people rather than the State and the government was more frightened of  the people than they were of the German army. One minister said that there is a fear that “the agitators would use their arms more for social upheaval than for national defence”. With Paris under siege from the Prussian army, by the end of the year, 300,000 Parisians were under arms.

 

The government proceeded to to make peace as soon as possible and on 3 September 1870 the French army surrendered to the Germans at Sedan. The Republic was declared, supported by the old bourgeois parties who acted to prevent a social revolution.  The people of Paris, however, were demanding defence of their city, universal elections and municipal freedoms. A “Commune” was declared by delegates from the arrondissements in January 1871 and the Revolution was about to begin.

 

The Paris Commune was the first revolutionary upheaval in France in which the working class played the leading role. “Its true secret was this,” wrote Karl Marx. “It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of Labour.”

 

The government moved to Bourdeaux, headed by August Thiers who had suppressed workers revolts in Lyons and Paris in 1834 and 1848, referring to them as “that vile multitude”. Paris was defended by the Commune, with cannons placed on the Montmartre hillside. The army attempted to move these guns on the night of 20 March, but the officers in charge forgot to bring horses to draw the guns away and the populace was alerted. They fraternised with the soldiers and drew them away from their commanders. The army retreated to Versailles, but the Commune made its first and most fatal mistake. They failed to pursue them.

 

The Commune had two months to make its mark on history. “Time,” Marx said, “was not allowed to the Commune.” The political spectrum of the Commune was wide: Jacobins, socialists, members of the International and anarchists. The provinces supported Paris so long as municipal liberties remained a Commune demand. The more revolutionary Commune characteristics found strong support in the larger French towns, such as Lyons and Marseilles (where there was a short-lived Commune). The countryside remained antagonistic, a conflict that stretched back to 1848 when the peasants had supported Napoleon III against Republican Paris, helping to assault the city’s barricades. 

 

For many Communards the Commune was not revolutionary enough. Some wanted to seize the National Bank. “The appropriation of the Bank of France would have been enough to put an end with terror to the Versaillais”, declared Marx. But the Commune supported the setting up of workers cooperatives which resulted in ten large factories taken over by their workers. The socialist paper Affranchi called this, “The glory of the Paris Commune, rallying and bringing over definitely all workers to its side.” But the attempts by some of the Commune’s delegates to take over the monopolist factories for the workers were not taken up.

 

Decrees on educational reform were ambitious although little was accomplished. The poet FB Clement faced the issue in the pages of Le Cri du Peuple. “What will remain if the people are defeated?” he asked, “if not the principles enshrined in its decrees. They can kill us if they wish, they can rip down our posters and remove all traces from the walls, but the principles that have been affirmed will still exist, and whatever is done, whatever is said, they are monuments that the Versaillais cannot destroy either by strokes of the pen or shots of the cannon.”

 

In Lenin’s words the Paris Commune was “a festival of the oppressed”  which lasted long enough to show mankind a possible new future. Direct democracy of delegates replaced the parliamentary representatives. The Commune declared that “those elected by the people have the duty of keeping in constant touch with their electors in order to give account of the mandate they have received and to submit themselves to questions.”

 

The fighting for a total involvement of the people in their own democracy gripped Paris. The newspaper Rappel declared, “Today Paris has become truly pictureaque with the cries of its paper-sellers from dawn to dusk. It is a permanent concert, a sort of perpetual fair.”

 

Debates took place, at the Hotel de Ville, and in cafes and clubs. At the Club St Lieu they discussed  ‘Whether the rich should be shot or simply made to give back what they had stolen from the people.” The vote taken declared that they should first surrender their ill-gotten gains and then be shot. A woman at the Club des Proletaires suggested that as a last line of defence women should march to the basrricades with their children. “We shall see if the solders fire on them. Perish our children if necessary, but the Commune must live.” The League of Prostitutes met and declared that, “We are 25,000 and we will rip open the guts of the Versaillais.” Some took up arms, others became nurses. Many died on the barricades.

 

In the words of the historian Stewart Edwards, “The Commune was a truly revolutionary event, the breakthrough into a new order where what seemed to be barely possible, however fleetingly, became actual.”

 

Neverthelees, a gap existed between the demands and hopes of the people and the actions of the Communards. Eduard Vaillant, editor of Affliche Rouge, expressed this difference when he wrote, “Instead of a revolutionary Commune, Paris had an elected Commune. It did its duty and it did its best. But because of its electoral origins, it could not have the unity of action and the energy of a committee arising spontaneously, from a people in revolt.” A Communard, August Malin, was later to admit, “The men of the Commune were not up to their task. One is never up to a people in revolt.”

 

The army broke into Paris in the last week of May 1871. A massacre took place. Le Figaro spoke of the need, “to purge Paris. Never has such an opportunity presented itself for curing Paris of the moral gangrene that has been consuming it for the past twenty years. What is a republican? A savage beast … we must track down those who are hiding, like wild animals. Without pity, without anger. Simply with the steadfastness of an honest man doing his duty.” Le Monsieur Universal said that the Communards should be treated as “the most appalling monsters ever seen in the history of humanity.” Le Bien Public spoke of the need for a “Commune Hunt”.

 

Paris was put to the sack by 130,000 troops. Upto 30,000 people were slaughtered with corpses thrown into the River Seine. Blood ran down the streets. Bourgeois women  poked at bodies with their sunshades while their husbands boasted to theit wives and children of the numbers they had killed.

 

The dead took their revenge. The large numbers of corpses in the streets threatened pestilence. There were over a thousand piled outside the Trocadero. Outside the Ecole Polytechnique the bodies were three deep in a line one hundred metres long. Limbs were sticking out of the ground in Place St Jaques. Flies were everywhere. Even the London Times condemned, “the inhuman laws of revenge under which the troops had been shooting, bayonetting, ripping up prisoners, both women and children, during the last six days.”

 

As well as the 30,000 killed in this way, a further 25,000 were exiled to island prisons where many died. The ruling class exacted their revenge in the only way they considered appropriate, with a bloodpath.

 

Once the city was subdued, the national government celebrated its victory by constructing a monument in ‘expiation’ for the crimes of the Commune - The Sacré-Cœur a white basilica dominating Montmartre, which had been the centre of Red Paris.

 

If you visit Paris and the Sacré-Cœur think of why it is there and think of the people defending that hill at the end of their short-lived Commune. In the Jardin de Luxembourg visualise the corpses heaped there by the troops after the carnage on the barricades of Rue St Michel. Then take Metro Line 2 to Philippe-Auguste station and visit Père Lachaise cemetery, Of course pay homage to Oscar Wilde and Frédéric Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Molière, Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison. But don’t leave without a visit to the momument to the Mur des Fédérés. On 28 May 1871, 147 Communards were put against this wall, shot and thrown into a trench below.

 

Tweny years ago, I was standing at this spot when an old man approached me and said that his father had first taken him here on his shoulders. “Tourists come to Paris, and they know about the 1789 Revolution, but how many know about the revolution of 1871? How many of us French even  know?” He was silent for a long time, then raised a clenched fist to his temple. “The truth about what happened here has been hidden for too long. It was a revolution of more than its own time. And it is our duty to keep their struggle and sacrifice alive.”

 

Walking back to the Metro station, I remembered a Mexican proverb, "They tried to bury us, but they didn't know we were seeds".

 

 

 

This is written on the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune

Add an L to Dido

 

"Baroness Harding of Winscombe has vowed to end England’s reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she becomes the next head of the NHS." (The Times) . I have had two major operations in recent years and three hospital stays. The first to drain blood from my brain. The second to install a new heart valve. Then after a stroke, many weeks in hospital. The first surgeon was Nigerian, the second surgeon was Egyptian and the nursing staff were from the UK, many EU countries and beyond. I have become a lifelong friend of a wonderful nurse from the Philippines. Thanks to all of them I'm still alive and well enough to shout out my anger. Baroness Dido Hardly Human can go f..k herself with her own name with added "L"

Keeping track of galloping corruption

 

 

 

“The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python” EX-PM John Major

What is the connection between these two photos? The first one was taken yesterday at Ascot where 12,000 unmasked guests, looking like a scene from “My Fair Lady”, met for the five day races. Meanwhile funerals are restricted to thirty attendees.

The second photo is of former jockey, and Jockey Club board member, Baroness Dido Harding, who is responsible for several major horse-racing events including the well-attended Cheltenham Festival in March and Ascot today.

She has just applied for the job of Chief Executive of NHS England. She was appointed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to head Test and Trace Health, ostensibly established to track and help prevent the spread of Covid-19. In August 2020 Harding was appointed interim chief executive of the National Institute for Health Protection, later renamed the UK Health Security Agency.

The Baroness is a Tory Peer and married to Tory MP, John Penrose who has, wait for it, government responsibilities for anti-corruption.

Back on the race track, what are the odds on her husband instituting an enquiry into the £27 billion test and trace / PPE monies not properaly accounted for? And anyone want to lay odds on how much longer we will put up with this galloping corruption? Isn't it time for a steward's Enquiry?

State corruption on a grand scale

 

 

“The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale that is harmful to public health,” The British Medical Journal

 

Richard Burgon MP tweeted this today - “Serco says it expects profits to be up by millions more than expected – to £200 MILLION. Serco says it’s due to growing demand for Test and Trace. These private companies are treating this pandemic as a get-rich-quick scheme. They should all be booted out of Test and Trace.”

We’re still waiting for the BBC to ask what happened to the £37 billion handed out in test and trace and PPE contracts.

I have written about this many times and here’s what I wrote eight months ago about Serco’s profiteering.

Not so much booted out, but criminally prosecuted

G7 - A Tale of Two Duchies

 

As Royal Navy Culdrose sees helicopters unloaded from giant transporters, cruise ships anchor off Falmouth to house the 5,000 police and as Boris Johnson flies in from his 300 mile journey from distant London, locals have the chance to contemplate the £70 million cost for all this.

 

This is a truncated version of Tanya Gold’s excellent, “The Prostitution of Cornwall”

 

 

"The Carbis Bay Hotel at St Ives, which is hosting the G7 summit this week, contains a parade of ugly beachside villas that rent for thousands a week They exists for people who travel here with their own fantasies, which rarely involve Cornish reality.

 

There was Daphne Du Maurier and Manderley now it’s Boris Johnson, the G7 and Carbis Bay

 

It’s an old story: rich and poor competing for the same space.

 

There is only one road into Carbis Bay and on it a sign: “St Ives Foodbank Welcomes You”.

 

Living costs are high, but wages are low; work is often seasonal, zero hours and without benefits. If the average Cornish salary is less than the national average, housing costs are explosive. The average house now costs eight times the average salary: and prices are still rising. You buy a house, rent it out (but not to locals, that is unprofitable), and either enjoy the income or sell it on. The old cottages by the sea are rentals or second homes.

 

It is normal to be evicted for the summer: people camp in fields or squat in campervans. One third of children under five live in insecure and privately rented accommodation, which is some of the worst maintained in Britain. 36% of children in St Ives live in poverty. That isn’t on the postcards.

 

Cornish people are up the hill on the Penbeagle Estate, a pale and uniform collection of houses, from which they contemplate their own town from a distance. 

 

Carbis Bay Hotel has destroyed a portion of woodland to build meeting rooms for the summit, despite planning permission being denied for the same site in 2018, and yet still calling itself an “Eco hotel”.

 

The “global elite”, have had footpaths closed and taken hotel rooms from vulnerable homeless people. Cornwall is two duchies now, and the G7 is happening in one of them.

 

A resident at the Treneere estate in Penzance says the housing shortage is so acute adult children are living in parents’ garden sheds. People are inhabiting cottages with water running down the walls; or they are evicted so the home can be an Airbnb. “We might as well go back to days of the poorhouse. It feels like that. What about lovely, ordinary people?” They have been obscured, I think, by lovely, extraordinary landscape, and the desire of others to possess it. "

Get Beckett

 

BBC Newsnight wore their knuckle dusters last night to get Howard Beckett, the leading left-wing candidate for General Secretary of the UNITE union. We were told that “Keir Starmer has had an epic battle to bring different factions of the Labour Party together” and "launch a new era with a leader pledged to restore unity.”

Newsnight went on to tell their viewers that, “We’ve seen emails sent to one of the top candidates to take over the UNITE union showing the depth of planning to challenge established Labour figures.” 

 

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Howard Beckett put up a strong defence in the face of this assault, but the programme's sympathies for them were little more than allowing air time for BBC 'balance'. 

First up on camera was Tom ‘let’s bomb Syria’ Watson whose contribution to unity was summed up in this comment on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership: “The Stalinist cabal has a lot of responsibility for creating internal political tensions.” Newsnight billed him as former deputy leader of the Labour Party, but failed to mention that he is now an adviser to Paddy Power, Betfair and SkyBet on a salary in the region of £100,000. He told Newsnight that, “While UNITE carries on with its internal politics and plays these hard left games, that plays very badly with mainstream voters on the doorstep … I have no doubt that Keir Starmer can face these people down.”

Next up was Margaret Hodge whose contribution to party unity can be found in her comment to Jeremy Corbyn, “You are a fucking antisemite and racist.” She told Newsnight that, “It is outrageous that at a time when all our focus should have been on defeating the Conservative government, UNITE was having discussions on how to undermine sitting MPs and get rid of the Labour Party General Secretary, (Iain McNicol).”

After their efforts at “unity” which ensured the return of a Tory government, they have all been well rewarded. Watson with his lucrative betting job, McNicol with his ‘elevation’ to the House of Lords and Margaret Beckett as new Chair of the Labour Party NEC.