Put Away The Airbrush!

by Les May

WHEN I was at school I studied ‘British and European History, 1789 to 1914’. At least that is how it was billed.  But as I now realise it should have been called ‘English and European History, 1789 to 1914’.   We studied the disestablishment of the Welsh church and what was happening in Ireland, but these were largely in the context of what Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone had to say on the subject.  But of the history of Scotland during this time, I was in ignorance.

One thing which burned itself in my memory was the events at Peterloo in 1819. Last year we had a film, a re-enactment, meetings, speeches and sundry exhibitions which we ‘lefties’ dutifully trooped off to see and hear.  But until I watched an interview with Kenny MacAskill, the author of ‘Radical Scotland’, earlier this year, I knew nothing of ‘The Scottish Rising’ of 1820 which was put down even more harshly than Peterloo.  The man in charge at the time was Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville.

I went to see the film about Peterloo with a Scottish lady who had lived and been educated in Edinburgh.   So well has this event been wiped from history that when I asked her about the Martyr’s Memorial in Edinburgh, erected some twenty years later to commemorate those executed and transported for their part in the rising, she knew nothing of it.  Nor did her brothers.

We seem to have a casual attitude to our history.  That’s not the case with some people who are always ready to air their grievances about how we remember it in our buildings and statues and monuments, and go on to demand we tear them down, effectively airbrushing them from history.  Should we who see ourselves as being ‘of the Left’ adopt their strident tones or should we put away the airbrush and set about telling the truth about historical figures, ‘warts and all’?

You can find the story at:

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

the book at:

https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/radical-scotland

and some of the truth about Henry Dundas at:

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16416274.edinburgh-ready-to-face-up-to-dark-past-of-henry-dundas-philanthropist-who-also-championed-slavery/

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Bye bye Edward Colston!

Subject: BRISTOL COLSTON STATUE PULLED DOWN 

Momentum Bristol

@MomentumBristol

Bye bye Edward Colston! If anyone misses this statue they need to have a long hard think about their priorities. Slave traders are not heroes! #BlackLivesMatter

#BLMbristol #Bristol

Click on live link below to see video:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1269634408069435392

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José Netto Gibraltarian syndicalist & Jack Jones

José Netto at the Casa de la Memoria in Jimena de la Frontera

by Brian Bamford

Editorial note:  I first met José Netto in 
March 1964, when I, my wife and baby 
6-month-old son (born in Denia, Alicante
had to leave Spain where we had been living 
and working for 12 month, and crossed the 
frontier in order to to comply with the then 
Spanish law. 

We had a 'letter of introduction' when we 
arrived at his council house in a working-
class area on the Rock.  He was living with 
his own young family and then worked on the 
tools in the Her Majesties Dockyard, but being 
an anarcho-syndicalist who had joined the 
then Syndicalist Worker's Federation 
while working in London in the 1950s.  
He and his mates helped to find me a job 
working as an electrician at the airport for
the Ministry of Defence repairing the landing 
lights on the airstrip.

One of José's close mates was Navarro, who was an 
anarchist supporter of the CNT, and had fought
for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War in
following the military insurrection in July 1936.  

Although José was an anarcho-syndicalist in Gibraltar
the syndicalists were not sectarian and had close working
relations with historic labour leaders like Albert Risso*, 
who became the first president of the Gibraltar Confederation 
of Labour which, in 1963, merged with the  
Transport and General Workers' Union, now Unite.



* Albert Risso was one of the first political activists in the British territory of Gibraltar. at a very young age, he was one of the campaigners for the involvement of the Gibraltarian civilian population (and especially its working class) in governing the colony. In 1919, he was one of the members of a so-called "deputation of working men" who went to London to meet the Secretary of State for the Colonies and ask for the creation of a representative body that could succeed the Sanitary Commission, an unelected body whose members, usually belonging to the upper class, were nominated by the Governor. The campaign, driven by the trade unions, brought about the creation of the Gibraltar City Council in 1921.^{[2] 
By the start of World War II,[1] Risso was a foreman mechanic and a City Council employee. When most of Gibraltar's civilian population was evacuated, Risso was one of the few Gibraltarians that remained on The Rock.
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José Netto, the historic syndicalist anarchist trade union leader in Gibraltar in the last half of the 20th Century, visited the Casa de la Memoria in Jimena de la Frontera (Cádiz), on the 28th, January 2019, a few months after the donation of a library of this entidad of five volumes of the encyclopedia El hombre y la Tierra, a history of humanity written by Eliseo Reclus in 1905.  Reclus was a French scientist and creator of the Geografía Social, being one of the first theoreticians of anarchism and a man of action who participated in the Paris Commune, together with other famous historic activists.

These five volumes of El hombre y la tierra were edited in Barcelona en 1933. The translation is by Anselmo Lorenzo, the principle great leader of Spanish anarchism and its representative in the First International.

These volumes form part of the particular library of José Netto, and they were offered up from the hands of a syndicalist of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) when the Campo de Gibraltar had suffered in 1936, and  Spaniards in the area had struggled with death at the hands of the military coup that rose against the Second Republic.

José Netto received the books from a man who had been an exile since the 1950s and a few days after learning that that anarchist had committed suicide. The donation to the Casa de la Memoria was effected months later during the last session of the seminar of the Cursos de Verano de la Universidad de Cádiz in San Roque, the son of José Netto, Michael Netto, in Gibraltar, and was received by the President of the Foro for the Memoria del Campo de Gibraltar, Andrés Rebolledo, to deposit in the Casa de la Memoria La Sauceda.

In his visit to the Casa, José Netto, who now lives in Atajate (Málaga), had also donated two poster images of the Second Spanish Republic. 

************************** 

The donación to the Casa de la Memoria took effect during the last session of the seminar

la efectuó meses atrás, durante la última sesión del seminario de memoria histórica de los Cursos de Verano de la Universidad de Cádiz en San Roque, the son of José Netto, Michael Netto, in Gibraltar, and was received by the President of the Foro for the Memoria del Campo de Gibraltar, Andrés Rebolledo, to deposit in the Casa de la Memoria La Sauceda.

El histórico sindicalista de Gibraltar José Netto visita la Casa de la Memoria tras donar a la Biblioteca la enciclopedia de Eliseo Reclus

14/02/2019

Biblioteca para la Memoria, Libro de la semana

José Netto wrote the following obituary for Jack Jones of the T&G:

My relation with Jack stretches back to the late 60s early 70s when I was appointed District Officer in 1972, and he was the TGWU General Secretary.  He has always been my mentor, as we shared common ideology, and has been a tremendous influence in my professional development as a trade unionist.  He was responsible for financing the construction of our premises in Town Range, which at the beginning we used to call?  La Casa del Pueblo?  He played a very leading role in supporting our fight for parity of wages and salaries, against the MOD.  As the British and local government had rejected this claim, on the grounds that it could not be sustained economically, a fact that was later proved wrong.

The intention of the fascist forces in Spain, during the Franco regime, to strangle the economy, with its restrictions and the closure of the land frontier, was defeated by the contribution of the labour movement in Gibraltar, of which I feel very proud of.

I wish to pay tribute on behalf of the working class of Gibraltar, to this comrade, so that we never forget how much we owe to him.

Rest in peace, Bro. Jack.

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

Homage to Bob Smillie in Year of Orwell?

N,V. Editor:  A few days ago Quentin Kopp, son of George Kopp the commander of the POUM military unit in the Spanish civil war, mentioned the contraversial death of Bob Smillie at the the hands of the communists when he wrote to  Tameside Trade Union Council, which is now affiliated to The ORWELL SOCIETY, to relate the following news:

'We have been informed that Barcelona wants to make 2018 the year of Orwell and will be arranging a special series of plaques, which will comemorate his time there.  Despite the political uproar in Catalonia it appears to be still going ahead. Since we received this invitation we have learned that a Spanish researcher has found the graves and a lot of the records relating to the death of Bob Smillie. We plan to incorporate taking a small scuplture to Valencia to put in the Cemetry at the same time, which will be between the 14^th and 18^th April.'

Below is a report in THE SCOTSMAN in 2003 about Bob Smillie and George Orwell:

THE SCOTSMAN

It's time the Left faced up to the truth about Orwell

 Published: 01:00 Monday 23 June 2003

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/it-is-time-left-faced-up-to-the-truth-about-orwell-1-653034

FEW people in Scotland today remember Bob Smillie, but there was a time when his political murder by Communist Party agents during the Spanish Civil War was a cause célèbre.  During his lifetime, Orwell - otherwise Eric Blair, hence the silly Guardian pun - was vilified and lied about by the left-wing establishment for denouncing communism and its British fellow travellers as totalitarian enemies.  He came in for personal attack for two reasons.  First, he had been a leftist himself and had put his life on the line fighting against Franco in Spain: he was wounded and nearly killed.  If there is one thing the Marxist left can’t abide it’s one of their own exposing where the dead bodies are buried - literally, in Smillie’s case.  Second, Orwell’s brilliant prose - spare, honest, gripping - is some of the best anti-totalitarian propaganda ever written, be it the satire of Animal Farm or the Blade Runner world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  So much so, that his works remain permanently in print and, more importantly, read.  That’s why I think Orwell, from the grave, will be proud that he is still upsetting the unthinking left.

However, it is ironic that today’s character assassination is being led by the Guardian, which Orwell singled out for praise in his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, for its exposure of the lies being spread about the democratic Spanish left during the war (they were accused of being fascists) by the manipulative communists.  Sixty-five years later, the Guardian is claiming that Orwell secretly informed on fellow writers and academics, including the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid, whom he thought might be communist sympathisers.  And all because he was besotted by a woman called Celia Kirwan, who worked for the shady information research department at the Foreign Office.  Thus, says the Guardian, did the inventor of Big Brother turn into the monster he created (much like the liberal, free-market Manchester Guardian of Orwell’s day has become a public-sector advertising sheet).

The Guardian’s innuendo is false - which brings us back to murdered Bob Smillie.  He was the 22-year-old grandson of Robert Smillie, the leader of the Scottish miners.  The younger Smillie was a member of the radical Independent Labour Party (ILP).  Under its charismatic leader James Maxton (a hero of Gordon Brown), the ILP was resolutely pacifist.  But Franco’s attempt to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government in Spain in 1936 changed all that.  Thousands of idealistic foreign volunteers, including Orwell and Smillie (then a student at Glasgow University), went to Spain to join the International Brigades to fight fascism.  There was only one problem - the communists.  While Stalin was prepared to arm the Spanish republican government against Franco, he was not in favour of a radical Spain, lest it got in the way of his plans for an anti-Hitler alliance with France and Britain.  The Soviet secret service (NKVD), including in its ranks many foreign communist militants, effectively took over republican Spain.  Anyone on their own side who got in the way was labelled a fascist, arrested, then shot.  That included supporters of the largest left-wing party in Spain, the Anarchist CNT.  But it also included the Catalan nationalists and ordinary social democrats, whose party was forcibly merged with the communists.  When, in May 1937, the Anarchists and the POUM - the Spanish partners of the ILP - objected to all this, the communists concocted the lie that these organisations were in league with Franco, and used military force in Barcelona to suppress them.  Orwell, who had been recovering from a bullet wound in the neck, escaped to France.  But Smillie was arrested by the NKVD at the border while on his way home to conduct an anti-fascist speaking tour. He was taken to a prison in Valencia and held incommunicado despite protests from the ILP in Britain. Subsequently, the communists announced Smillie had died on 13 June, 1937, from peritonitis. His body was immediately buried before anyone could see it.

Leading ILPers, such as John McNair, who was the party’s general secretary for 20 years, believed he had been deliberately shot (as were many POUM leaders).  Maxton went to Valencia to try to find out, but to no avail - the local communist press called him a fascist too.  Whether Smillie was executed, or died of deliberate neglect, he was the first foreigner associated with the International Brigades to become a mortal victim of Stalinist repression.  He should be a Scottish hero, but decades of Stalinist propaganda in the Scottish Labour movement have buried his memory.  Smillie’s death led Orwell to break with the romantic left of his day and denounce Stalinism, and with it the closed, self-certain mentality that supports such false utopias.  As a result, he was excoriated by the left. Even today, the Guardian is happy to run a front-page story implying that one of the 20th century’s greatest writers was merely a British equivalent of Senator McCarthy, and only then because he wanted to get his leg over.  The truth is that Orwell had seen his friends murdered and, unlike lazy, middle-class intellectuals in Britain, he was prepared to defend democracy in a typically robust way. By the way, that supposedly shady Foreign Office unit was actually set up in 1948 by the Labour foreign minister Ernest Bevin to counter Soviet propaganda - there were numerous communist agents inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Orwell was advising on who would make a poor choice as a counter-propagandist. As to his assessments, consider McDiarmid, whom Orwell calls "reliably pro-Russian". Orwell died in 1950. In 1956, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and there were mass defections from the British Communist Party, McDiarmid rejoined it. Is this not all ancient history?  No: Orwell’s warning that "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere" is still in force as long as there are those happily inventing utopias to impose on the rest of us. We need to remain robust in defending freedom, and that is done best by remembering people such as Bob Smillie.

In Spain in the past few years, there has emerged a popular movement to uncover the true facts about those who disappeared during the civil war.  The Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory wants the Spanish government to dig up and identify the corpses of the 30,000 people believed to have been executed by the fascists.  Why stop there? What about the executions in Spain by the communist secret police?  The time has come to solve the mystery of Bob Smillie’s death.  Where is he buried? Was he shot in the back of the head with a Mauser machine pistol, the method of choice of the NKVD?  Or was he just allowed to die in agony of peritonitis?  And who were the Scottish Comintern agents who informed on him?  Perhaps the Guardian has started a trend.

******

James Keogh's politics?

THE New Year issue of the International Brigade Memorial Trust's (IBMT) Newsletter reports on last year's Blue Plaque unveiling for Ashton-under-Lyne's Spanish Civil War volunteer, James Keogh.  It says that  James Keogh's sister 'Joyce Harrison unveiled a plaque to her brother, James Keogh at Tameside Central Library, Ashton-under-Lyne on 25 November 2011.'  The author of the IBMT Newsletter piece then writes:  'Keogh, who died in Spain at the age of 22, was the eldest of 11 children and as a self-taught socialist spent many hours in the library before giving up his tailoring apprenticeship and heading for Spain in May 1937.'

Tameside TUC researched James Keogh's life and involvement in the Spanish Civil War over a number of years, and could find no evidence that he was affiliated to any party or trade union and this was confirmed by the family.  There was certainly nothing in his letters to suggest that he was a 'socialist' or an 'anarchist' or anything else.  There is much more evidence to show what he was not politically rather than what he was:  despite being dismissed as a 'commie' on one right-wing web site up North there is a strong support that James was not held in great esteem by the Communist Party during the Spanish conflict.  The booklet produced by Tameside TUC in memory of James Keogh states that  'James Keogh like the nurse Lillian Urmston from Stalybridge were both flattered by being mentioned in dispatches in the Russian Archives in Moscow:  Lillian was in these secret files to be denounced for being "too friendly with the Spaniards" and James was accused of going "absent without leave".'   These files were compiled by the trusted Communist Party officials like the middle-class woman, Winifred Bates, sympathetic to Russia and sent to Spain to spy on the volunteers.  The Tameside TUC booklet reports:  'Some of the utterances in the files of the spies who reported back to Moscow suggest a particularly spiteful frame of mind of the kind we might attributed to the classroom creep:  the reference to Lillian Urmstone being "too friendly" or the false claim of James having a "criminal conviction" seem to be typical of this.'  As the author of the booklet remarks:  'People who write this kind of thing don't, unlike James, end up in an unmarked grave.'

Furthermore it is noted in the Tameside booklet that 'The fact that James Keogh was not a member of the Communist Party or indeed any other party or trade union, would mark him down as "politically unreliable" in the eyes of the Communist Party.'  Those people on certain right-wing websites who dismiss James Keogh as a 'dupe of the Reds' would do well to remember this spirit of independence about James as would those on the left who are keen to categorise James as 'a self-taught socialist'.  The fact is, as Orwell perceived, few people in England grasped the nature of the conflict in the Spanish Civil War where as Gerald Brenan said 'words of which most of history is made - feudalism, autocracy, liberalism, Church, Army, Parliament, trade union and so forth - have quite other meanings there to what they have in France or England.'  James Keogh may not have fully understood that even when he died, but nor do many of those of the British Left and the Right who write today.  Listening to Professor Paul Preston yesterday on Andrew Marr's Radio 4 program 'Start the Week', going on about the Civil War and crudely dismissing George Orwell's ethnography 'Homage to Catalonia', as someone who worked, lived and even had a son born in Spain, I sometimes wonder how much  Professor Preston has really grasped about the culture and nature of the Spanish people, despite his proud boast last month at the People's History Museum that he has studied Spain for some 40 years.
_______________________________________________________

The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with our report on Tameside TUC's application for a Blue Plaque for James Keogh, covers all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:

Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included) Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH. 
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com









_______________________________________________________

Anarchist Censorship

by Christopher Draper

SOVIET citizens said there was no real news in Izvestia (NEWS) and no truth in Pravda (TRUTH). Ironically, the editors of the leading organ of the British anarchist movement have shown there's also no freedom in 'FREEDOM'.

Through a series of five articles published in consecutive issues of FREEDOM Donald Rooum, one of the editorial collective, charted 'the turbulent history of the UK's longest running anarchist paper'. Although presented as an objective history it's really the view from Donald's own editorial chair and I think his editorial visor must have slipped over his eyes when he was composing it.

Regular readers of FREEDOM will appreciate how much its appearance and approach has altered over the years. Positive reports of small-scale political initiatives and social experiments were once commonplace but these are long gone, replaced by repetitious pictures of masked youths confronting various agents of a repressive state. Anarchism is thus visually and philosophically reduced to conflict, violence and confrontatiobn; a rather unpleasant and unthinking cross between Socialist Worker and the Sun.

The most obvious and dramatic change resulted from a 'palace coup' engineered by Donald that resulted in Toby Crowe replacing Charles Crute as the main editor. Under Charlie the paper had appeared old-fashioned and was often politically inconsistent but it remained unerringly libertarian, under the new Crowe regime it looked more modern and dynamic but promoted a rigid party-line exemplified by an editorial column headed, 'What We Say'!

I took issue with the editors at the time and when Toby began interfering with my own articles I resigned as a regular contributor yet nothing of this radical realignment was reflected in FREEDOM's recently published history of itself. I therefore wrote to FREEDOM in March submitting a short alternative account, along with a comradely personal letter to the editors. Neither were acknowledged and nothing of my account appeared in the April edition of the paper.

As a lifelong anarchist I've always considered FREEDOM a sort of newsletter of the movement, sadly it seems to have declined into the mere mouthpiece of a clique uninterested in the lives, views and opinions of others. I won't persevere with what now seems a lost cause but in the interests of open debate I've reproduced below my recent submission to FREEDOM that editors don't want you to read.
_________________________________________________

Chris Draper's letter to FREEDOM:

WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE!

Like Alan Bennett, Donald Rooum is a national treasure but unlike his dramatic counterpart he makes a very unreliable 'History Boy'. Donald's concluding episode in his 'Short History of Freedom Press' (March 2012) was a rewriting of history more akin to the work of Joseph Stalin than Alan Bennett.

The appointment, a decade or so ago, of 'a big, energetic young man who had been General Secretay of the Socialist Party of Great Britain' as editor of 'FREEDOM' was far from being the 'rescue' that Donald claims, it was a disaster. Promoting Toby Crowe, a Marxist since reborn as an Anglican priest, drove many old libertarians like myself away from writing for the paper as Toby determined to create an 'anarchist' version of 'Socialist Worker'. The Crowe soon proved to be more of a cuckoo.

Prior to Toby's ascendancy, 'FREEDOM' reflected the diversity and inconsistency of the wider anarchist movement. Under Charlie Crute's editorship the paper was admittedly rather ragged and un-dynamic but crucially it was open-minded and characteristically libertarian. When Toby took over he imposed a visual and ideological uniformity on 'FREEDOM' that it has not entirely abandoned.

I wrote to Toby at the time challenging what he was doing but to no effect. Long-time readers might well recall Toby's notorious SWP-style, 'What We Say' column: as if anarchists are, or should be, of one hectoring opinion. Regrettably, Donald's role in recruiting and promoting Toby blinds him to the debititating effects of such unthinking agit-prop anarchism.

Donald is a good lad but he slipped up on this one. The pernicious influence of Commissar Crowe lives on with 'FREEDOM's' continuing overemphasis of the violent and confrontational aspects of anarchism. The positive, creative and often low-profile initiatives that delighted anarchists from Kropotkin to Colin Ward are all too often overlooked in favour of 'exciting' pictures and articles attacking agents of the State.

Come on Donald admit it, Toby has a new pulpit better suited to his Milleniarial beliefs, it's time for 'FREEDOM' to finally escape from his shadow. Drop the pretence that we are on the verge of revolution and rediscover the less sexy but more constructive aspects of anarchism.

Chistopher Draper,
Llandudno.

Catching on! The Musical!

HISTORICAL MEMORY & THE BOYS ON THE BLACKLIST
______________________________________________________

Here's an issue for discussion at the newly formed
Greater Manchester Radical History Group:

Meeting to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.
Entrance Free. Everyone welcome.
______________________________________________________
WHY was Steve Acheson from Denton in Tameside and a handful of Manchester contracting electricians left standing on lonely pickets around the city's building sites fighting the blacklist in the building trade and almost ignored by the British left and the trade unions for so long? Why do some things become documented and celebrated, and others disappear from the historical memory?

In 1899,a strike took place in New York that forced the press barons, Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst, into a compromise. This month, Dan Barry in his theatre column of the International Herald Tribune, wrote: 'There really was a newsboy's strike in 1899 that unsettled the empires of Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst' and 'there really were thousands of children using muscle and wit to thwart delivery of Pulitzer's Evening World and Hearst's Evening Journal...' The sheer embarrassment of these gaffers, Pulitzer and Hearst, being portrayed as heartless scoundrels by thousands of young ragamuffins demanding the right to 'sale or return' on the newspapers they sold on the streets of New York was remarkable, and perhaps more remarkable was that they had some success. Yet, afterwards the New York newsboy's strike, which spread to other cities, disappeared off the historical radar and almost a century would pass, writes Dan Barry, 'before the Newsboy's Strike of 1899 received its due...' It has now been remembered because the historian, David Nasaw, spotted a footnote and wrote 'Children of the City' about the 1899 Newsboy's Strike in a book in 1985, and this month Disney has put on a Broadway musical 'Newsies the Musical' which began previews on the 15th, March: the actor and playwright, Harvey Fierstein who wrote the play says 'facts are not what drama is'. Mr. Fierstein said he wanted to plumb the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realisation: 'That they matter.'

Why was the New York newsboy's strike forgotten about for almost a century? Why did it disappear from the historical memory for so long and now it is being remembered in a musical on Broadway by Disney? Surely not because of some conspiracy by an historical hierarchy? Some things like the consequencies and sufferings of the parties in the Spanish Civil War were clearly shelved and hidden in a great forgetfulness by 'el Pacto de Olvido':
'Pact of Forgetting (in Spanish: el pacto de olvido) is the Spanish political decision (by both the leftist and rightist parties) of avoiding having Spain deal with the legacy of Francoism after the 1975 death of Gen. Francisco Franco, who remained in power since the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939.'*

The Spanish case was a very special instance of taking an event off the political/ historical record, but it is unlikely that the New York newsboys fell into such a deliberate act of exclusion or that the Manchester electricians were deliberately overlooked by the media during the early years of their campaign against the blacklist; much more likely it was down to a failure of madia management on the part of the workers in the early days. But does this apply to Captain Swing and the Luddites in the 19th century as some radical historians are now suggesting? Was it bad media management or something else that has led to them being overlooked by many main stream and left-wing historians?

This coming Saturday this will be discussed at
Greater Manchester Radical History Group Meeting
to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.


*This pact underpinned the transition to democracy of the 1970s and meant that difficult questions about the recent past were suppressed for fear of endangering 'national reconciliation' and the restoration of liberal-democratic freedoms. Further, responsibility for the Spanish civil war, and for the repression that followed, was not to be placed upon any particular social or political group. 'In practice , this presupposed suppressing painful memories derived from the dictatorship's division of the population into "victors" and "vanquished".'
This pact has since been challenged with the arrival of a socialist government in 2004 under the prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather, himself a republican officer, was condemned to death and shot by Franco's Nationalist troops in the Spanish Civil War.