What you want to say… Open Thread, 12th September, 2012 September 12, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.
Real IRA funeral, anti-agreement republicans claiming rise in support, armed republican politics- any future? Discuss.
“Real IRA funeral, anti-agreement republicans claiming rise in support, armed republican politics- any future? Discuss.”
I don’t think there is much appetite for a return to “armed struggle”
among the Nationalist community in the North. If the dissident
republicans start a large-scale military struggle against the
British, this time the PSNI could probably count on most
Nationalists assisting them against such dissidents.
The Campaign for Labour Policies had a press conference today. They are launching on Saturday.
http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-were-labour-members-but-were-not-happy-with-the-party-592582-Sep2012/
Would anyone have any recommendations for reading material or documentaries regarding the French Revolution?
Eric Hobsbawm’s “Age of Revolution”:
The Age Of Revolution: 1789-1848: Europe, 1789-1848
For a light enough overview of the revolution and the era which followed it in Europe this one isn’t bad, “The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850″ (just finished reading it myself):
The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (Norton history of modern Europe:)
Verso have “Virtue and Terror” by Robespierre with an introduction by Slavoj Žižek:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/140-virtue-and-terror
Oxford have a well-written “The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction” by William Doyle (opposed to the Marxist
interpretation of the FR, though).
Mark Steel has a humourous and pro-Marxist take on
it “Vive La Revolution”.
I’m half-way through Ruth Scurr’s biography of
Robespierre, “Fatal Purity” (good so far). I bought
the Georges Lefebvre book on the FR but
haven’t read it yet.
Cheers! This is what sparked my interest. Though I can’t recommend it to be honest.
if you haven’t read it – j.m. thompson’s book on robespierre is really solid and a good read.
Just finished Scurry’s book, Starkadder. It’s good but could do with a bit more detail in places. For example, Scurry makes much of Robespierre’s proposed changes to the libel laws as being a precursor to his revolutionary zeal, but she neglects to give us any information on what these proposals actually were. From what was provided, they would have had little practical difference from how libel laws operate today. It sometimes feels like her publishers contractually obliged her to get a dig in at the man every 60 pages or so.
The book may also be a little ‘out of date’ since a tranche of Robespierre’s early speeches were only released in 2011.
I’ve been meaning to get the Lefebvre book. William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution goes all the way to 1802 and is pretty good.
By the way, Madurdu, Simon Schama’s Citizens is well written and should be avoided at all costs.
Scurr’s biography was pitched almost as a defence of Robespierre, and a sympathetic treatment. Wasn’t how it came across to me either RiD.
I read Scurr after Schama. It might be a low bar, but she is certainly much, much better. She does highlight his astonishing lack of vice and his commitment to serving the people (whether they appreciated it or not). She also dismisses the notion of him as a dictator and holds to him being the very model of a radical democrat. In that, she can be said to be sympathetic, but what I said above does come through from time to time. She wisely avoids mentioned Communism or the Soviet Union until the second last page, thus avoiding ‘history being about something else entirely’ problem that I mention on another thread. I think it is a very worthy read and is well written.
There is another book by a guy called McPhee which is said to be quite sympathetic and paints Robespierre as a man ruined by the Revolution. I have not read it but it is quite recent. Must take a look at J.M. Thompson’s biography.
Schama features heavily in that documentary. Essentially calls Robspierre Hitler at one point.
Henry Heller – the French Revolution – best book in ages on the event. Anything by Alfred Soboul and Georges Lefebvre. Zizek Introduces Robespierre (Verso or Pluto press), Peter Taaffe The Masses Arise, J. M. Thompson The French Revolution.
‘A Place of Greater Safety’ by Hialry Mantel is a great big fat factional read about some of the main protagonists.
Not a documentary but La Marseillaise by Jean Renoir is the best movie on the French Revolution, one of the finest works by one of the greatest ever directors.
This was politically controversial at the time but again it’s made by one of the finest directors of all-time. Danton by Andrezj Wajda.
And who can ever forget this neo-Brechtian epic with its explicit hommage to the theories of Levi-Strauss, Foucalt and Barthes.
it’s a great film as a film – but the history and politics are really dodgy.
“Thunder of Valmy” AKA “Victory at Valmy” is a great novel
for young adults about the French Revolution written by
Geoffrey Trease, written from a moderately pro-FR
viewpoint.
Fair play SA. I loved Geoffrey Trease’s books when I was a kid. A brilliant writer.
William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution (on which the shorter thing mentioned by Starkadder is based) is a great read and takes the story abroad as well as dealing with France, even if as Starkadder says it’s opposed to a class interpretation and in essence to the revolution itself.
Albert Soboul’s The French Revolution 1787-1799 is a brilliant history of the Revolution, and especially of the sans-culottes. There’s a short version of it available as well. A brilliant piece of history, and of Marxist history. George Rudé’s biography of Robespierre seemed a convincing account of his politics to me.
As for Zizek, watching the above, listening to him talk about the link between revolution, terror and virtue, I can’t help but think of his recent intervention in the election in Greece. This consisted of him addressing a SYRIZA election rally – in other words a rally of a party overwhelmingly dominated by a group from the Eurocommunist tradition that rejected traditional revolution and the sort of thing he is talking about explicitly. Add in his comment that the KKE were the people who forgot to die, and I think we got the real Zizek, not the performance-as-revolutionary that he puts on here.
Well, yes, we can certainly see that the “real Zizek” has at least a rudimentary grasp of where the action is on the Greek left at the moment, and that, unsurprisingly, he has little or no time for sectarian throwback politics like those currently espoused by the KKE.
Or to put it another way, Garibaldy, all this post really tells us is that you proceed from the assumption that the KKE is correct in all things, and you judge the politics of others, at least in so far as they comment on Greece, by how closely they conform to that prejudice.
Way to spectacularly miss the point.
No, I’m really not missing the point, Garibaldy. Its a point that only makes sense if you think that admiration for the KKE flows automatically from Zizek’s writings and that therefore his contempt for their hidebound sectarianism undercuts his sincerity.
Still massively missing the point.
Or perhaps your point isn’t as impressive as you think it is, at least for those of us who don’t share your tendency to locate the source of revolutionary fibre in admiration for the KKE.
Do feel free to explain your point for the benefit of us slow children.
I don’t think my point is massively impressive at all, and in fact nowhere in anything I have said have I given the slightest indication that I do. I just think that you have been missing it in your urge to start complaining about the KKE. You don’t actually need me to say anything for you to rehearse your dislike of the KKE, so knock yourself out.
You raised the KKE, Garibaldy, not me.
I merely responded by pointing out that your argument rests on assumptions about the KKE that people outside its ranks (or outside the ranks of its WP and CPI fans) probably don’t share.
As for my “dislike” of the KKE, you couldn’t be more wrong. I find them rather charming in their brutally frank sectarianism and I also have respect for the strength of their organisation amongst Greek workers. I do, of course, find their lingering Stalinism lamentably stupid and the political effects of their sectarianism lamentably counterproductive, but that’s not really the same as having it in for them.
I realise, of course, that their little Irish fanclubs see them as the paragons of revolutionary spirit in the world today, And, further, see any criticism of their politics or their sectarianism as motivated by jealousy / nefarious Trotskyism / insidious reformism / whatever. Which is one of the things that makes discussing them here an occasional trial.
Zizek is often grandiose and contradictory. There are certainly criticisms to be made of him in that regard. But your particular criticism rests on some rather esoteric assumptions.
G – its pretty clear that you are taking a swipe against Zizek in order to pump up the KKE – a party that is massively misunderstanding developments in Greece.
I guess one could argue that Zizek is merely making a choice between competing strands and of the opinion at this point in time SYRIZA offers a more feasible revolutionary approach in the context of Greek in 2012 and opting for SYRIZA – which ironically is the position many other CPs and orthodox communist and workers parties would have done in the past I suspect. But all that said, I think Mark P and JRG you’re both reading far far too much into what G said initially.
The Hillsborough report is extraordinary. The Tories and the Police actually come out of it even worse then The Sun given that they were involved in the cover-up and the smear campaign. They did to the 96 dead what they’d done to the miners, Militant and Irish republicans. The policing of the game had its roots in the sense of police invulnerability which stemmed from the miners strike and also in the demonisation of the people of Liverpool as a whole during the Labour Council stand-off there. Shocking stuff and it would turn your stomach to hear Cameron expressing sympathy when he’s the political heir of the people involved in the cover-up. There will no doubt be an attempt to depoliticise the story but it’s impossible to understand what went on without remembering the context in which it happened. RIP.
The linkage between politics and football in the minds of the Tories is made clear by the phrase used by Sports Minister Colin Moynihan, engaged at the time in a kind of crusade against football fans, when he called hooligans, ‘the effluent tendency.’
When Saturday Comes reposted their Post-Hillsborough disaster editorial
http://www.wsc.co.uk/wsc-daily/1152-september-2012/8991-post-hillsborough-disaster-editorial
The idea that the police would collude to blacken the names of victims would be shocking had we not had so many high profile instances of it in recent times.
Extraordinarily, the Telegraph chose not to run it on the front page today.
Speaking of Hillsborough, kudos to ejh for this excellent smack down of Roy Greenslade’s attempt to rehabilitate the Sun after they “apologised” to the families of the victims.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/18238080
That’s the same Roy Greenslade who printed a pack of lies about Arthur Scargill when he was editor of the Mirror and faithfully defended Robert Maxwell. He’s actually writing about himself here given that he later made a similarly mealy mouthed apology which is about as much use as Boris Johnson’s or Kelvin McKenzie’s.
I think it says a lot about the media that the Hillsborough story has already been replaced as the major topic of concern by the horrendous news that someone has got a photo of Kate Middleton’s breasts. In fact most of the English papers seem to be summoning up a level of outrage at this news that they couldn’t find in themselves for the Hillsborough story.
Same Roy Greenslade that used to write for an Phoblacht under a pen name. Still spins for the on occasion too
Just out of interest, EamonnCork/eamonncork? This has been troubling me for a while…
By the way, I wasn’t especially trying to smack Greenslade down. I like a lot more of his stuff than I don’t. But it did strike me that the Sun apology was a very easy one for them to make.
Just me being haphazard with capital letters ejh, not a dark alter ego or the world’s most transparent sockpuppet or anything.
Greenslade is often good on media issues but I think he’s incredibly wide of the mark here and I can’t help relating this to his own experience. He comes badly out of Seumas Milne’s The Enemy Within, a great book about the smearing of Scargill and the NUM after the miners strike.
Very good book indeed.
By the way, have you read Andy Beckett’s book about the Seventies?
Yes, I thought it was terrific. A brilliant writer, his Pinochet In Picadilly is great too. The bit in WTLWO about the Hull trade unionists controlling the town is one which really sticks with me. I
One perceptive point, I think, is that a difference between Heath (or Macmillan) and Thatcher is that the latter essentially missed the Depression. It never impacted on her, she never really saw it. And I think that goes for a lot of today’s young (and less young) Thatcherites. They have no idea at all about the real-life consequences of the things they shriek about.
And also that Heath, and that generation of One Nation Tories, had experienced the second world war and that moment of cross class unity which meant they found it more difficult to regard any section of their fellow countrymen as enemies who could not be dealt with but had to be humiliated and destroyed.
Do you know what might be the best book on the period, a period I’m frankly obsessed with, Philip Whitehead’s Writing On The Wall written just a few years after the events it described. There’s a great, and sad, quote from Paul Foot in it about the disheartening effect of losing the Grunwick dispute. We were talking about revolution, he says, and we couldn’t even win a trade union dispute where we were clearly in the right and many people supported us.
I seem to remember him also saying that even the geography of the place was in favour of the strike.
Of course when you were twelve all you saw on the news was “violence”. Reading Dromey’s book not very much later was a formative experience for me.
It was so near the tube station and so handy that a load of people could come and picket for a couple of hours in the morning before they went to work.
Having said that, defeat notwithstanding, I’ve always thought that the journey of midlands car workers and Yorkshire miners down to London to support the rights of low paid female Asian workers was an inspiring example of solidarity. I remember the violence from the News, just about I was a kid, but I later read the small book on the strike. Fascinating. McWhirter and the right wingers viewed it as a key victory for them too.
I’ve read so many seventies books I lose track but isn’t it in Beckett’s book where he ends up in the shed where the Freedom Association sorted the Grunwick mail? Another brilliant scene. Grunwick is tailor made for a film but one will never be made because there’s no poxy feelgood apolitical Made In Dagenham line to be extracted from the story.
isn’t it in Beckett’s book where he ends up in the shed where the Freedom Association sorted the Grunwick mail?
Yup. And he meets this guy who remembered it at the time and whose cousin or brother-in-law was a miner. talks about how the boss said he’d sack anybody he knew was Labour. Also says something about having realised how many forces were ranged against the working man when it came down to it. Which came to mind just this week in relation to Hillsborough.
General election in the Netherlands. Is there anywhere else that a formerly Maoist party (now the Dutch Socialist Party) has rebranded to left social democracy and become a significant force? Great piece in the Guardian this week about how they hope to garner the stoner vote cos they’ve promised to reverse the recent crackdown on hash n coffee shops. The stoners all support them but actually getting the stoner vote out presents its own challenges!
I was going to reply to this slur on the stoner electorate but actually, y’know, I can’t really be bothered.
Though like one time I was in Amsterdam in this basement place and there was this guy called Stiggi and he was playing bongos and it was just incredible.
Depending on your definitions of “Maoist”, “left social democracy” and “significant force”, you could argue for certain parties in Nepal. You could also make a case for Portugal, where the Left Bloc is half descended from a Maoist party. And India, where the CPI (Marxist) was pro-China if not strictly Maoist and is now social democratic. It really depends on how broadly you define your terms.
Maoism was a reasonably big force on the far left in many Western countries in the 70s particularly. It mostly disappeared as quickly as it grew, but you get some peculiar remnants. It’s still a major force in some Asian countries, and on a much bigger scale.
Also Sendero Luminosa in Peru.
Edit: they haven’t rebranded, though. But a significant force that is Maoist. 2 out of 3
I’m not sure that they qualify as a significant force any more either. Their “People’s War” was pretty thoroughly defeated. As I understand it, they have been reduced to a couple of small armed bands.
Their history is tragic, brutal and fascinating.
Small enough I know, but Rødt (Red) in Norway
Today is the 32nd anniversary of the 1980 Coup D’etat in Turkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
It marked the beginning of a wave of savage repression; censorship, imprisonment, executions, torture, and disappearances whose consequnces are still felt today. The regime also implemented economic reforms rather similar to those seen in Latin America during the same period. This era also saw the intensification of the conflict between the state and the Kurdish population.
Among the first of those executed by the Generals was 17 year old Erdal Eren who declared before his death by hanging that he “looked forward to it in order to avoid thinking of the torture he had witnessed”
The perpetrators of the coup have yet to face up to their crimes though some have been charged in recent years.
http://bianet.org/english/english/137418-military-coup-case-begins-with-victims-cry-for-justice
Just thought i’d share it with you. Its interesting how less high profile this coup is compared with others such as Greece or further afield.
Thanks for posting that. I hadn’t known of it and interesting to see yet another coup linked to economic ‘reforms’.
Interesting to note SF’s stance on National Parks in the North. Compared to England and Wales, Ireland both sides has a woeful record when it comes to public access to the countryside. National Parks would begin to put this right and take on the land owners in favour of some public access. I hate to say this but Alex Attwood SDLP might be a peoples champion if he has the back bone to push this through. First it was Quinn now the farmers lobby in the North, SFNI or FF nua lining up with some quare boys.
1995 documentary on clubbing in the North
Has anyone got a copy of Liverpool – A City That Dared To Fight handy? It’s Militant’s account of the battle between the Thatcher government and Neil Kinnock on one side and the Liverpool Labour council of the mid eighties on the other. By two authors, far as I remember, one of whom was Peter Taafe.
I just want to source a couple of quotes on media demonisation of the city of Liverpool as a whole at the time. There are a few pages dealing with this, an example being a headline in one of the broadsheets ‘a majority of lumpens,’ and an article describing Liverpool as, ‘the capital of self-pity.’ I have a copy of the book somewhere but can’t find it.
Would Mark P have it?
Wasn’t the ‘capital of self-pity’ line a more recent one from the Spectator? Saw it back in circulation on the day that was in it as a facebook meme – I believe Simon Heffer wrote the editorial, Boris Johnson was editor at the time. It repeated the line about the cops being blameless and the drunken scouse yobbos being responsible for all the deaths.
(although maybe ‘capital of self-pity’ was already a popular catchphrase with Tories and Heffer was just reaching for a handy club)
The Liverpool book is all online now: http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/liverpool/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGHD7VpJ-sk There’s a video here.
http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_headline=i-was-wrong-about-the-self-pity-city&method=full&objectid=12631838&page=2&siteid=50061-name_page.html
Thanks Branno. Great stuff.
Some background on the anti-Islamic film that has caused
the riots in the Middle East:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-mocking-muslim-prophet-sparks-anti-u-s-protests-in-egypt-and-libya/
ASDA on Shore Road Belfast have allowed for the commemoration and adoration of Loyalist murderer Hunter. Wreath etc. Please either boycott ASDA or call for more info. We need a unified approach to institutionalised sectarianism.Workers Unite!
I presume you are talking about Billy Hunter? According to Google there were several loyalist with the surname Hunter, a bit more context would have been useful.
Are these wreaths inside or outside the shop?
If they are outside the shop how can you be sure it is on their property?