NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 1

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPERr

ON 20 August 1887 a Chicago jury condemned a Todmorden man to be hanged for a bomb-throwing incident that killed eight policemen and injured sixty more. As the turning point in Chicago’s bloody class war this sensational case was reported around the world. Back home in England, when Samuel Fielden’s invalid father was informed of his son’s death sentence he became another victim and expired within the week. Details of the bombing and trial were comprehensively recorded at the time but Samuel Fielden’s lifestory has never before been fully told.

A Northern Childhood

Samuel Fielden was born on 25 February 1847 in Walsden, on the Lancashire side of Todmorden. There’ve always been Fieldens in Todmorden and Samuel’s father, Abraham (1816-1886) worked as an overlooker at the town’s enormous Fielden Mill, though Sam’s family occupied a much lower social level than millowner, John Fielden MP (1784-1849) whose statue graces the town’s Vale Park. Sam’s mother, Alice bore Abraham seven children although only four survived into adulthood. She’d endured an impoverished childhood selling polishing sand door-to-door. Abraham first met her as she hawked her wares around the houses in the bitterest of winters, trudging through snow in bare feet.

Sam learnt nothing of anarchism or socialism in his youth but acquired an overwhelming ethical sense from the non-conformist religion and politics of his parents. Tragically, Sam’s mother died in 1858 when he was just eleven. He inherited a basic understanding of politics from Abraham who campaigned on many social issues of the day, Chartism, the ten-hour day, the co-operative movement and much more besides. When Sam was six or seven, he learned to read by attending a local dame school for six months.

Work

Aged eight, Sam started work at Fielden’s Mill. His first job was to race along the machines removing empty bobbins, taking care to keep fingers safe from the moving parts. After a couple of years he was promoted to the heavier task of taking full spools to the weavers. At this stage Sam was a statutory “half-timer”, required to attend the factory school for half of his time at the mill. He became a “full-timer” at the tender age of thirteen when he transferred to working in the factory’s warehouse. After a couple of years he learned to weave and laboured at that until he was twenty one when he’d resolved to seek his fortune in America.

Awakening

Several incidents in Sam’s youth came to shape the character that was so forcefully emerged in later life. In 1860, at the conclusion of Sam’s factory schooling, Mr Harrison, his teacher was accused by a local Methodist of brainwashing his pupils with Unitarian heresy. When Harrison sued for libel Sam was required to give witness at a Liverpool Court hearing. He was overjoyed at the prospect. Not only did he get to spend a week away from home but visited the new Menai Bridge and at Liverpool docks Sam was thrilled by the tall ships bound for America. His imagination was stimulated by the “dime novels” he brought back from Liverpool and with the outbreak of Civil War in 1861, everyone in Todmorden’s thoughts turned to events in America as supplies of mill cotton from the Southern States slowed to a trickle. Initially Fielden’s mill supplemented the raw material with inferior Surat cotton from India but this so clogged the machines that production ground to a halt. Until hostilities ceased in 1865 milling resumed only intermittently and in the interim Sam carried tiles for workmen laying drainage for the ground on which the millowner’s magnificent new Dobroyd Castle would soon arise.

Sam learned of the cultivators of that Southern cotton when escaped slave Henry Box Brown visited Todmorden in 1861 and told of how, with the assistance of abolitionists, he’d gained his freedom concealed in a crate posted away from the plantation as a parcel. Sam’s inherent disrespect for elitism was reinforced when William, his older brother, who worked as a gardener for the Fieldens, was dismissed for showing insufficient deference. Sam’s oratorical skills which came to be recognised as his political strong suit were nurtured in the chapels of Todmorden’s Methodist circuit where from 1865 until 1868 he was admired as a fervent “exhorter” well on his way to becoming a full-blown religious minister but it was not to be.

Wanderlust

Drawn by tales of the “Wild West” Sam longed to leave home but obeyed his father’s wish to remain until he was twenty-one. He’d also given his word to marry Sarah Gill, a weaver at the factory. When Sarah promised to wait for him until he was established in America, he booked his passage and in July 1868 sailed from Liverpool. His first job on landing in New York was at Prentice’s Brooklyn hat factory, but he didn’t like the work or the wages and left after only two days. Moving north to Providence, he returned to his old trade of millwork before in March 1869 starting out West. He reached Chicago in August, by way of a bit of sightseeing at Niagara Falls. Coincidentally, the very first building he entered on reaching the city belonged to John Still and his brother who ran a plumbers business and originated from Todmorden where Sam had known some of their relatives. Less happily, it was outside this building that seventeen years later the bombing occurred that led to Sam’s death sentence.

That autumn of 1869 Fielden worked on John Wentworth’s farm and the following spring laboured at dredging the Illinois & Michigan canal. His religious fervour continued to diminish as his political awareness grew. As a deck passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, in spring 1870, he embarked on a working tour of the southern states that enlightened him on the falsity of “abolition”. The “liberated” blacks continued to be dispossessed and exploited by a myriad of sophisticated social and economic measures.

Chicago Again

On returning to Chicago in May 1871 Sam laboured around the region on a variety of navvying tasks until, after a year or so, he settled into heavy haulage work serving the city’s stone yards. Belying his big, rough, burly appearance Sam never neglected his intellectual development, spending every free hour at lectures or reading in Chicago’s public library. He returned to Todmorden in the autumn of 1879 for the first and only time. After embracing his aged father who was no longer the vigorous patriarch of memory, Sam visited the overgrown grave of his mother. He also fulfilled the pledge of two decades before and married Sarah, his childhood sweetheart. The pair sailed from Liverpool on the Germanic, arriving in New York harbour on 26 January 1880 eager to start their new life together in the “Land of the Free”.

Teamwork and Anarchy

Having saved his wages over the years, on his return to Chicago Sam bought his own team of heavy horses and worked for himself in the thriving stone haulage business. After starting a teamsters union Sam was duly elected Vice President. In the autumn of 1880 he helped reorganise Chicago’s Liberal League which existed to ensure the total separation of church and state. Over time he successively served as the organisation’s secretary, vice president and conference delegate and this involvement served to enhance his growing intellectual development, confidence and political awareness.

By 1883 his involvement with the Chicago labor movement brought him to socialism which evolved into anarchism. The following year he joined the International Working People’s Association with divisions organised on the basis of language; Fielden joined the English-language “American Group”. Confronted by a corrupt oligarchy of employers and politicians intent on smashing organised labor, Chicago IWPA was defiantly militant. Sam Fielden subsequently recalled, “I wish to say (we) were all anarchists at that time.”

Chicago’s May Days

On 3 May 1886 an “army” of Pinkerton thugs and city police opened fire on striking workers at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works, killing two and injuring many more. In response, Chicago IWPA organised a mass protest for the next day at 7.30pm, 4 May at “Haymarket”. There were to be three speakers with Samuel Fielden to close the event. The meeting was peaceful but as Sam was ending his speech two hundred armed police officers led by Inspector Bonfield rushed from an adjacent building, panicking the crowd. Fielden was ordered to cease immediately and assist in dispersing his audience. As Sam remonstrated a bomb arced through the air and exploded amidst the police, who responded by shooting indiscriminately, injuring officers and workers alike. Fielden was shot in the knee and when records were compiled there were eight dead policemen, another sixty seriously injured and probably similar casualties amongst the workers though, understandably, few of these injuries were reported to the authorities.

Judicial Murder

Fielden managed to limp home and the next morning, police, without warrants, searched the house, found nothing but arrested him anyway. At the police station Sam was sworn at by Lieutenant Shea and ordered to remove his bandage and expose his leg wound. Police Chief Ebersold pointing at Sam’s forehead said, “it ought to have gone in here!”

The authorities never claimed that any named individual made, threw or had prior knowledge of the bomb. No relevant evidence tying any suspect to the bomb was ever presented in court yet Sam, along with seven other anarchists, was charged with murder. Evidence wasn’t required, for the judge, prosecutor and jury were hand-picked and the verdict a foregone conclusion.

Verdict

The verdict was delivered shortly after 10am August 20 1896. Mr Osborn, the foreman intoned, “We, the jury, find Samuel Fielden (and comrades)… guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment and fix the penalty at death.” Samuel Fielden responded from the dock: “Today as the beautiful autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheek of every free man I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again. I have loved my fellow man as I have loved myself. I have hated trickery, dishonesty and injustice. The nineteenth century commits the crime of killing its best friend but as I have said before if it will do any good I freely give myself up. I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence; and above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”

“Murderers’ Row”

Fielden was imprisoned in Cook County Jail in a stone cell measuring 6ft by 8ft, reached by a flight of iron steps. In front of the cell ran a narrow footway. Sam occupied “Cell 31” in this section known as “Murderers’ Row”. Awaiting execution he was visited by his wife Sarah and their two children, Alice and Sam junior. He’d never seen his son before as the boy was born on 1 November 1886, six months after Fielden was imprisoned and, ironically, four days after the unveiling of a giant statue in New York harbour; “Liberty Enlightening the Word”!

Despite continuing world-wide protests and a further 1½ years of legal wrangling, it was confirmed that Samuel Fielden would be hanged at 12 noon, 11 November 1887, but this isn’t quite the end of the story….

(The concluding part of this story will be posted on NV in 3 weeks. Search our archive for more of CD’s articles of Northern Radical History)

Trump And China

by Les May

I HAVE dabbled with computers for forty years.  For the last dozen years it has been mostly ‘junked’ laptops I have resurrected by installing the free, as in free beer and free of Microsoft, Linux operating system.  Though not free like the old laptops, in recent months I’ve bought a couple of tiny machines which are less than 3cm x 6cm in size and cost me about £5 each.  In case you are inclined to think these are toys I will mention that they have dual processors, and wifi and bluetooth built in.  They are meant for the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT).   I write programs on a laptop, download them to these tiny machines and then they run autonomously.

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

(Scroll down to the section of privacy and security concerns)

But that’s not the most significant thing about them.  They encapsulate the real problem that Donald Trump and the rest of the USA have with China.   Trump may like to claim that China is involved in the wholesale theft of ‘Intellectual Property’ from the US, but these devices are an entirely home grown product, and what they show is that, like it or not, China is beating the USA at its own game; innovating and making things to sell to the rest of the world.

The same goes for the UK.  In Britain we refer to someone who makes ‘bath bombs’ in their kitchen as an ‘entrepreneur’.  The Chinese have entrepreneurs too, and they encourage and fund them, so there may be a lesson for us here. We may feel threatened by the face recognition technology is ubiquitous in cities, but lets face it, getting that working is a bit more difficult than making bath bombs.

What we have not noticed in the West is that China is a communist country in name only. It’s got its share of billionaires and an affluent middle class.  Watch the videos and TV footage and spot the Apple shops, Burberry shops etc.  MaoI recently heard a Chinese political scientist explain in impeccable English that in the US you can change your party, but not your politics, but in China you can change your politics, but not your party.

What he meant was that in the US the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, whilst in China, since the revolution which brought Mao to power in 1949 the political landscape has changed immeasurably as the country has embraced the market economy and in doing so has lifted something like a half a billion people out of poverty, but that the same political party has retained power throughout that time.

Asked whether that made China a capitalist country like the USA he explained why it did not by saying ‘In the USA the politicians have allowed the capitalists to run the country; in China the politicians made sure they do not.’

Trump’s use of ‘Kung Flu’ to describe the virus which causes Covid 19 has predictably been labelled as ‘racist’, but it tells us more about his juvenile sense of humour and misses the point anyhow; Trump is signalling to his followers that China is the new enemy.

Thirty years ago I heard schoolchildren describing something they did not think much of as ‘Chink made’ and to many of us the Chinese were just that, ‘Chinks’. We’ve grown out of that, but deep down we still believe that they cannot have invented something themselves, they must have stolen the technology from the West; they cannot possibly have been successful in keeping the deaths from Covid 19 so low, they must be lying; if the virus was circulating last autumn, (as seems to be the case), they must have known about it and did not tell the WHO; the virus could not possibly have crossed the species barrier from bat to ‘what?’ to humans, they must have created it in the lab and were too careless to contain it.   Is this an example of what is meant by ‘institutional racism’?

Reagan and Thatcher could always point to a communist USSR as ‘the Red menace’; Trump cannot do that with China as it is clearly communist in name only.  But with a little help from his friends in the West, Trump has floated all of these accusations in one way or another.  Have his western friends just played the part of ‘useful idiots’?   Is he laying the groundwork for a new cold war which will conveniently ‘hot up’ a couple of months before the November election?

The political systems in both the US and in China have one thing in common; they both rely upon an underclass to sustain them.  In the US it’s those who have two jobs and visit food banks just to survive.  In China it’s the migrant workers living three families to a single flat in a city far from home. Some things don’t change it seems.

Question:  Does having a market economy, irrespective of what you call the political system, inevitably mean having very large differences in income and wealth?  Discuss.

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Recolonising Africa?

by Les May

A FEW hours after war was declared at 11 p.m. on 4 August 1914, the paddle driven cable laying ship Alert was sent out from Dover on a planned mission to drag for, and cut, the five German cables in the English Channel which linked to the rest of the world.   The idea was to force German communications on to radio where they could be intercepted more easily and so give British codebreakers a better chance of gaining useful information.

Although they may seem old and outdated undersea cables, now having the benefit of fibre optic technology, still carry the majority of the Internet traffic around the world.   The amount of Internet traffic which a cable can carry at any one time is called its ‘bandwidth’.  The more people who want to use the Internet at any one time, the more bandwidth is necessary.  Compared with America, Asia and Europe the cables linking Africa to the rest of the world are seriously lacking in bandwidth.

Whether changing this situation is more important than improving access to clean water and sanitation, and improving access to health care, is a moot point, though in my book I regard these as a ‘human right’.  But earlier today I heard two Africans, one in Ethiopia and one in South Africa claiming that access to the Internet was itself a human right. (Remember how six months ago Corbyn was laughed at when he said a Labour government would promote free Internet access?)

Within Africa mobile phones and the Internet have expanded what people can do even in areas where not everyone has access to an electricity supply. Some enterprising individuals allow mobile phone owners to recharge their device for a small sum. Potentially there is a huge unsatisfied market in Africa. Unsurprisingly this has attracted the attention of cash rich multi-national businesses.

Facebook and Google are intending to team up to lay 37,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable to link African countries with the rest of the world.  The Chinese company Huawei, Microsoft, like Facebook and Google a USA based company and the Norwegian company Opera, (see below), also have projects targeting Africa. Should we be worried about this? Should Africans be worried?

Huawei’s interest seems clear. It supplies the hardware which makes systems run. Microsoft has an interest in making sure that the millions of new users become hooked on its software.

Potentially the ownership by Facebook and Google of the physical network and their control over what content Internet users have access to, seems to me problematic.  It has been suggested that Facebook has harvested up to 4,000 snippets of data about many users.  This is enables the company to form a profile of every individual user.  Likewise Google has the power to harvest a great deal of information from the search terms we use.

There is good evidence that Facebook was used to sway the outcome of the 2016 elections in the USA when about 77,000 voters in three states were targeted. Trump lost the popular vote by about 3 million ballots, but gained the presidency because the make up of the electoral college had been influenced via Facebook. Not all African leaders are models of integrity and defenders of democracy.

https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/fln36fd-soc-2016election/facebook-and-the-2016-election-the-facebook-dilemma/

Another issue is that Europe in particular has gone a long way to recognising the importance of personal privacy and protection of personal data.  This is not the case in other countries and many African states may have legal systems which are very weak in this regard.  Facebook and Google will only respect these issues if they are made to.

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

https://www.contagious.com/news-and-views/shoshana-zuboff-on-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism

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

We are familiar with the term ‘Scramble for Africa’ which refers to the invasion, occupation, colonisation and annexation of African territories by European countries in the period 1880 to 1914.  Are we about to see this process happening again, but this time led not by nation states.  Has colonialism been privatised?

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

(I struggled to determine the exact ownership of ‘Opera’.  It may be owned by a Chinese private equity firm or it may still be Norwegian.  I am not sure which of these is correct.)

Author's Note:  

Les May said...

In the above piece I suggested that many African states which may have legal system that are weak with respect to personal privacy and data protection, and that Facebook and Google will be in a position to take advantage of this.

A report by several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) published today (18 June) highlights the problems facing a country, Nigeria, which had weak laws regarding the protection of the environment, which was taken advantage of by Shell. So polluted by oil contamination is the water supply for people living in the delta of the Niger that the cannot by any reasonable standards be said to have access to a clean water supply.

https://cloud.foeeurope.org/index.php/s/LyqrCFskx2RRdcf#pdfviewer

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/nigeria-shell-still-failing-clean-pollution-niger-delta

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JOHN CLEESE SLAMS 'COWARDLY BBC'

by Brian Bamford

 Ludwig Wittgenstein said: 'Humour is not a mood but a 

way of looking at the world.'  'So if it is correct to say

that humour was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that 

does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or

anything of that sort, but something much deeper and

more important.'

Perhaps to understand what that 'something' is, it would be best

to look at humour as something strange and incomprehensible. 

For example, the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed reading 

  American detective novels and the casual humourous way 

they bumped off their characters. For instance in 

'Rendezvous with Fear' by Norbert Davis desribes a man 

named Garcia cross-eyed with a thin yellowish face sat 

drinking beer the colour and consistency of warm 

vinegar.  Meanwhile, when Doan shoots Bautiste Bonofile, 

another 'bad man', the romantic but naïve heroine, Jane

asks with concern:  'Is he hurt?' 'Not a bit' says Doan, 'he's

just dead.'

****************

JOHN CLEESE has laid into the "cowardly and gutless and contemptible" BBC after an episode of Fawlty Towers was removed from a BBC-owned streaming platform.

A 1975 episode titled The Germans was taken off UKTV's streaming service because it contains "racial slurs".
In it, the Major uses highly offensive language, and Cleese's Basil Fawlty declares "don't mention the war".
Cleese wrote on Twitter: "The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats."
He added: "I would have hoped that someone at the BBC would understand that there are two ways of making fun of human behaviour.
"One is to attack it directly. The other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behaviour."

Skip Twitter post by @JohnCleese

I would have hoped that someone at the BBC would understand that there are two ways of making fun of
human behaviour

One is to attack it directly.

The other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behaviour

Thank of Alf Garnett...

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) June 12, 2020

Report

End of Twitter post by @JohnCleese

He went on to compare the situation with that of Alf Garnett, the racist character in sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and In Sickness and in Health.
"We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him," Cleese wrote.
"Of course, there were people - very stupid people - who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy."
He continued: "But it's not just stupidity. The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more.
"So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible. I rest my case."

'Audience expectations'

UKTV also operates channels including Gold, and many of its channels and its digital player were taken over by the BBC's commercial arm BBC Studios last year. A BBC spokesman declined to comment.
A UKTV spokesman said: "UKTV has temporarily removed an episode of Fawlty Towers The Germans from Gold's Box Set.
"The episode contains racial slurs so we are taking the episode down while we review it. We regularly review older content to ensure it meets audience expectations and are particularly aware of the impact of outdated language.
"Some shows carry warnings and others are edited. We want to take time to consider our options for this episode."

****************************************

The Dress Rehearsal Not The Show?

by Les May

EVERY year we have a ‘flu season’.  It runs from week 40 of one year to week 20 of the next. There are two peaks, one before Christmas and the other after. Sometimes these are caused by different influenza ‘types’.  People like me toddle off to the medical centre and get a ‘jab’ each October which gives us short term immunity to the strains circulating in the world that year.  It’s all well understood. Some years it is worse than other, but by and large the system works.

• But it only works so long as the influenza virus behaves itself reasonably well. It didn’t in mid 1917 or early 1918.  Somewhere in the middle of America a new, more virulent strain emerged which was more deadly to the youngish than the old.   It spread through the training camps preparing young American men to fight in the Great War.   Woodrow Wilson despatched 300,000 of them to Europe in crowded troop ships.  The rest, as they say, is ‘history’.

No one could foresee the emergence of Covid19, so the need for massive quantities of PPE and the death traps that care homes became could not be foreseen either.  Or so the story goes.

But what we do know is that every so often the influenza virus ceases to behave in manner we have found a way of dealing with. When it will do this cannot be predicted, but that at some time it will is a certainty.  It is, in that famous phrase, ‘a known unknown’.  We know it will happen, but we don’t know when.  In the past century this has happened four times; Spanish flu 1918-20, Asian flu 1957-58, Hong Kong flu 1968-69, Swine flu 2009-10.

Had the virus which emerged in China last year been a new and more virulent form of our old enemy, the influenza virus, something akin to the 1918 form, Johnson and the Tories would have been equally deep in the ‘do-do’, because they still would not have had enough PPE.

The fact that the virus causing Covid19 is ‘new’ has allowed the government to shield itself from the more serious criticism that it had become complacent about the possibility of having to deal with an influenza pandemic, not just ‘seasonal flu’.   It is not only the government which has become complacent, we, the public, have as well.

Every year we have reminders of the slaughter in the Great War, we have memorials to those killed and many of us will remember the names of relatives who were amongst them.  The people who might have known the names of relatives who died of Spanish flu themselves died in the 1980s and 90s, so it has never embedded itself in the public consciousness.

Influenza usually has a mortality rate in the region of 1 to 2 people in a thousand which is probably slightly less than that of Covid19.  Spanish flu had a mortality rate estimated as high as 1-200 per thousand people infected in some areas. Even at low mortality rates if enough people become infected the number of deaths will be large; so far more than 300,000 people are thought to have died from Covid19. Spanish flu killed some 50 million people.

Equally important is the social disruption a flu pandemic will cause.  The means by which the person to person transmission can be reduced are identical to those which have been applied to combat the spread of Covid19, social distancing, good hand/nose/mouth hygiene school closures, work from home etc.

Politicians who are capable of thinking strategically would recognise that a flu variant equal in killing power to that which caused the 1918-20 pandemic could arise at any time and would have in place strategies for coping with it.  On this basis the Johnson government, and perhaps the people advising it on public health matters, have failed miserably, but would any recent government have done any better?   Once you are in thrall to market forces you buy where things are cheapest.

Such strategies would include not just larger stocks of PPE, but would include support for a national garment sector making such PPE which could increase production rapidly in case of need, ditto manufacturers of face masks, ventilators, anti-viral drugs, realistic assessment of the capacity of care homes and similar facilities to isolate sick residents, etc.  Had these already been in place because someone had recognised the possibility of a new and more virulent form of influenza arising, the number of deaths from Covid19 would probably have been lower.

*********************

English speakers: Grappling with the Grammar

 by Brian Bamford

SOME time ago my co-editor, partly-what jokingly, questioned my spelling and grammatical abilities, and I was reminded of this when more recently a commentator and meticulous Marxist complained in a P.S. 'You can at least take the trouble to spell my name correctly.'
 

The name, Charles Charalambous, had a French ring to it and, to be honest, I had some trouble getting it right.

 'FORGET GRAMMAR' & start 'acquiring a vocabulary'

As it happens I'm just reviewing a book entitled 'The Conspiracy of GOOD TASTE', and I was researching what the art critic Wyndham Lewis had had to say about vulgarity, slang and what he calls slum city English, as well as his thoughts on art and architecture.  On this very subject of the English language Lewis in his essay 'MEN WITHOUT ART' commenting on H.L. Mencken's treatise, The American Language, had cause to write:

'English is of all languages the simplest grammatically and the easiest to make into a Beach-la-mar* or pigin tongue.  Whether this fact, combined with its "extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind," is against it, is of some importance for the future - for it will have less and less grammar, obviously, and more and cosmopolitan slang. - Mr Mencken is of the opinion that a language cannot be too simple - he is all for Beach-la-mar.  The path towards analysis and  the elimination of inflection, has been trod by English so thoroughly that, in its American form, it should today win the race for a universal volapuk.  Indeed, as Mr Mencken says, "the foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief  difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of form.  He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is forget grammar.  Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary".'

I suppose that I became more aware of the limited forms of English grammar, my mother tongue, not at school but while living in Spain and trying to get my head around Castillian Spanish using a book entitle 'Colloquial Spanish', while at the same time working among people speaking Valenciano [a form of Catalan] in the 1960s, yet I hadn't realised that English has this special quality through its limited grammatical form which lends it a vitality and richness that adds to its universality.  Wyndham Lewis warns 'There is, it is true, the difficulty of the vowel sounds'  It seems that according to him 'Standard English possesses nineteen distinct vowel sounds: no other living European tongue except Portuguese', so Mr Mencken says, 'possesses so many'.  Modern Greek, it seems, 'can boast only five'.  The answer, according to Lewis, is the neutralised vowel, which he says 'supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress' in America.  

Perhaps, it occurs to me, this formless grammar of English may explain why the Brexit lobby triumphed in the referendum.  Wyndham Lewis writes that:  'Watch your vowels should be our next national slogan!'  And he adds, 'The fatal grammatical easiness of English is responsible, however, for such problems as these, as much as the growing impressionability of the English nation, and the proletarianization, rather than the reverse of the American.'

Hitherto, while England was a powerful empire, run by an aristocratic caste, its influence on speech and even the psychology of the American ex-colonies was paramount.  Yet today, the tables have been turned and cultural domination has for long been coming from Hollywood and elsewhere across the pond.  Lewis foresaw this in 1934 saying:  'the cinema brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the "Americanising" process is far advanced, "done gones," "good guys" and 'buddies' spout upon the ips of cockney children as readily as those to the manner born of New York or Chicago: and no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British 'Banker's Olympus,' to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech.'

BREXIT, 'Airstrip One' & '1984'

Wyndham Lewis well understood the proletarianision of the anglo-saxon people in which he grasped, in the 1930s, that '...if America has come to England, there has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States: indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out: and all the great influence that England exerted formall - merely by being there and speaking the same tongue and sharing the same fundamental political principles - that is today a thing of the past.' 

It would seem that this process is now well developed and should progress further as we associate  ourselves more closely with the United States and Trump and his cultivation of American Nationalism.

Later than this in the 1940's George Orwell he portrayed England as 'airstrip one'.  Air  part of Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.   Within the novel, London is the capitol of the province called Airstrip One, which is itself part of the nation of Oceania. Oceania is one of three world powers, and is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.  In this novel unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak.

************************************

*   C19: quasi-French, from bêche-de-mer (trepang, this being a major trading commodity in the SW Pacific; hence the name was applied to the trading language)

**  commenting on 'Air Strip One' one commentator writes:  'I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States.  Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (War is Peace) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:'

Euro-federalists funded by US spy chiefs?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels = 12:00AM BST 19 Sep 2000

http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=172680#172680
DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

The leaders of the European Movement - Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak - were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE's funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth.

It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which "adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable".

In Whose Interests?

by Martin S. Gilbert

WHAT is in the interests of those in power as opposed to 'the public interest' ?   If you believe we have democracy they are synonymous others see a big gap.  When, for example will we see full publication of Chilcot’s enquiry into the Iraq war?  He does not want to embarrass certain people too much but is that caution 'in the public interest'  if so, how?  Also, while definitions of torture change over time, there will not be a Public Enquiry into how IRA suspects were treated during 'the troubles' (1)  The states torturers may have extracted relevant information. In doing so they created hatred, fear and reprisals, aiding IRA recruiters.  It all delayed what became 'the peace process' which was hailed as a victory for office holders. An explanation of such torture would pose the 'one bad apple in the barrel' idea, there being at its height some 22,000 troops in Ulster at that time.  The truth will remain hidden.  A main cause of the present tensions between Russia and NATO has also escaped general attention.

America’s 'missile defence system' has caused much unplanned-for, unreported trouble. In theory such missiles are directed by “spy satellites” space-placed hardware. Dubbed 'star wars' by its critics it has control centres is at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill Yorkshire. A problem for it’s boffins and American tax payers is that this system has never actually worked in spite of it’s vast budget.

Records released by the Kremlin showed that the Cuban situation was resolved by quiet diplomacy, not by “nuclear deterrence”. Removal of NATO bases on Turkey’s border with Russia helped that process. Such facts got little attention in the media, maybe they were “not in the public interest”.

Subsequently, a major cause of tension was America’s plans to build a star-wars base in Poland by 2018. On 15.10. ’09 Reuters International News reported that Russia “was worried about” (such plans) that could hinder efforts to 'improve their relationship with America.' (2)  That year Obama’s administration cancelled these plans but without making Putin feel any safer.  Military hardware was 'rolled out' in Poland and the Czech Republic in response to perceived problems with Iran (3)  Again, NATO had placed heavy weaponry too close for Putin’s comfort.

It does not help that the Russian premier has a foreign policy based on unpredictability.   Putin needs to keep his macho image, so no official complaints were made internationally.   Any major leak could have alerted the Russian public to this potential threat on their door step, detracting from Vlad the athletic horseman’s P.R.  The crisis in Ukraine and Crimea can be seen as an attempt to show military muscle, preserving Putin’s image and those close to that leader. 

Linked to these events are the recent revelations about the death of spy - defector Alexander Litvinenko. Although he was murdered in 2006, the enquiry into his death has finally been published. Delay also seems to be due in an effort not to embarrass a public
figure – Mr. Putin. In whose public interest was that lengthy concealment? Certainly not that of the Russian people.

martin s. gilbert, Cumbria, March . ’15

references:- 1. John McGuffin, “The Guinea Pigs” Penguin Special, 1974

2. Conor Sweeny, “Business and Financial News, Breaking US &
International News / Reuters.com page 1

3. Richard Weitz, World Politics Review, 29.4.’14 www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13739/nato-s-missiledefense-counteroff  

Bloody Monday in Iraq: 15 April 2013

WHILE the US and UK corporate media was awash with stories about the Boston Marathon bomb, in which three people were killed, this is what was happening on one day in Iraq, which the media ignored:  

Not really in the news:

1. At least 75 Iraqis were killed and 356 more were wounded in a series of attacks across the country. Only the far south and Iraqi Kurdistan were spared. Many of the attacks were apparently coordinated and occurred at about the same time this morning. They also came a few days ahead of local elections in most provinces. Nineva and Anbar province, both heavily Sunni, had their elections postponed by the Shi’ite-led government.

2. In Baghdad, the bombings left 30 dead and 92 wounded. Among them, a blast in the Kamaliya neighborhood left four dead and 13 injured; security forces then fired into the air to disperse crowds. Near the airport a pair of bombs killed three people and wounded 16 more. Four people were killed and 15 more were wounded in a bombing at a market and bus station in Umm al-Maalif. In Karrada, another bomb left two dead and 15 injured. A car bomb in Shurta killed two people and wounded nine more. A roadside bomb wounded five policemen in Baladiyat. Two people were killed and nine more were wounded in a blast in Habibiya.

3. In Kirkuk, at least nine people were killed and 79 more were wounded in a string of six car bombings. The downtown bombs exploded in three different ethnic neighborhoods, suggesting that no particular group was targeted. Those explosions took place in Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen neighborhoods. The other three blasts hit neighborhoods outside of the city. One bombing targeted the home of a Shi’ite politician. Also, gunmen wounded a doctor last night.

4. Explosions in Tuz Khormato left six dead and 67 wounded.

5. In Mosul, gunmen killed a civilian. Two people were wounded in roadside bombings. Gunmen killed a married couple. Security forces killed a bomber. Another blast left no casualties. A soldier was killed in a clash. Three policemen were wounded in a bomb blast.

6. In Falluja, a suicide car bomber killed two policemen and wounded six more at a checkpoint. Acivilian was shot dead. A sticky bomb killed two civilians. Another bomb south of the city left no casualties.

7. A car bomb in Mussayab killed four people and wounded 13 more.

8. Four people were killed and three more were wounded in a Tikrit bombing at political office. Another bombing left 13 policemen wounded.

9. In Nasariya, a car bomb killed two people and wounded 14 more.

10. A policeman was killed in Buhriz when a sticky bomb exploded.

11. Near Ramadi, a bomb targeting a Sunni cleric and leader of anti-government protests killed two bodyguards and wounded at least one more. His cousin was killed in a sticky bomb blast in Falluja.

12. A policeman was shot dead in Tarmiya.

13. A bomb in Khalis killed one child and wounded eight more.

14. Nineteen people were wounded in bombings in Babil province.

15. In Dowr, 13 people were wounded in a blast there.

16. Bombs wounded seven people at a political candidate’s home in Salah ad Din province.

17. In Muqdadiya, a car bomb wounded seven people.

18. In Tal Abta, a blast killed a policeman and wounded two more.

19. In Baquba, two policemen were wounded during a bombing. Three people were wounded in a blast.

20. Gunmen in Sabeen killed a captain and wounded two soldiers.

21. A young man was gunned down in Shirqat.

22. On a rural road in Bani Saad, a bomb wounded a civilian.
Also in this edition of the weekly update, reflections on the Muslim Brotherhood's declining support from some states and groups, the implications for Khalid Meshaal and Hamas of being 'embedded' with the Emir of Qatar, and what Sergei Lavrov thinks of the 'Friends of Syria' who met in Istanbul yesterday..

http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1366462380.html

America's Black Spring!

Denver cinema shootings:  Some thoughts on Henry Miller's fantasy foresight

Henry Miller's book Black Spring, published in 1936, was described at the time as a book in which the ordinary events of everyday life are bye-passed in order to venture into a surrealist world of fantasy.  George Orwell accused him in a letter of moving away 'from the ordinary world into a sort of Mickey Mouse universe where things and people don't have to obey the rules of space and time.' 

Given the events over the weekend at the Denver cinema in which dozens of people were shot, Miller's book may not seem so fantastic or surreal.  Here is a paragraph taken from the book:
'... Men and women promenading on the sidewalks:  curious beasts, half-human, half-celluloid.  Walking up and down the Avenue their eyes glazed.  The women in beautiful garbs, each one equipped with a cold-storage smile.  ... smiling through life with that demented, glazed look in the eyes, the flags unfurled, the sex flowing sweetly through the sewers.  In had a gat with me and when we got to Forty-Second Street I opened fire.  Nobody paid any attention.  I mowed them down right and left, but the crowd got no thinner.  The living walked over the dead, smiling all the while to advertise their beautiful white teeth.'

That was from the book Black Spring by Henry Miller, written by an American at the time of Hitler, Stalin, and at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, but written while Miller was living in exile in Paris.  Yet at that time George Orwell considered this prose rather like a dream sequence that had drifted beyond the real world where the 'grass is green, stones hard etc', but to us, after the Second World War and 9/11, it may not now seem quite so unreal or so dreamlike.