Stuart Christie and the Spirit of Don Quixote

by Brian Bamford

REASSESSING STUART CHRISTIE IN CONTEXT

Stuart Christie: a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. Aged 18, Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo, General Francisco Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges. When he died he was probably the best know anarchist in the UK.

Born: July 10, 1946, Partick, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Died: August 15, 2020

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From Shakespeare's Macbeth: "I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none." in Macbeth act 1

From Christie's 'My Granny...' on pages 32-33: 'I couldn't warm to Shakespeare in the classroom. He simply had no resonance with us. The language was remote and difficult, as was the historical period...'. (Rabbie) Burns* was my first encounter with the emotions and ideals I've since come to call socialism. Who could grow up to be anything but a class war socialist on reading Burns' clarion call to egalitarianism in "A Man's A Man For A' That".'

ON REVIEWING Don Quixote and Cervantes** in 'The LITERATURE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE' Gerald Brenan writes: 'the KNIGHT of the DOLEFUL COUNTINANCE is mad, and that's that. But presently it dawns on us that his madness is confined to one thing - the belief, not itself irrational by the standards of that age, that the books of Chivalry were true histories. Once that is taken for granted, it was no more mad for him to attempt to revive the profession of knight-errantry than it was for a monk to imitate the Fathers of the desert.'

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WHEN CONSIDERING the role of Stuart Christie and his adventures on the Spanish peninsular in August 1964, we would do well to observe his likeness to the knight of the Doleful Countenance. We learn for instance that Don Quixote was conceived by Cervantes in a Spanish jail at a low water mark in his life. Much like, I dare say, Stuart's autobiography 'My Granny Made Me An Anarchist'.

Interestingly Gerald Brenan writes of Don Quixote: '...in so far as Cervantes intended the figure of Don Quixote to stand for anything, it was quite simply for a man who ruins himself and others by his romantic and generous illusions and by his over-confidence in the goodness of human nature.'

Moreover, Brenan claims: In the novel '...there is the contrast between the actual situation and what it appears to be to Don Quixote: there is that between his noble and exalted way of feeling and Sancho's peasant shrewdness and self-interest: and if one likes, that between the knight's wise and sane ratiocinations and his violent fantasies whenever the subject of Chiivalry enters his head.'

In all this it is hard to escape the feeling that the Stuart that I met in Paris in August 1964, already commited to carry explosive to Madrid, was so full of Rabbie Burns* and the Bonnot Gang. So wound-up was he on romance that he could have been a younger version of Lord Byron or a kind of blunt working-class Rabbie Burns; pioneer of the Romantic movement .

In El País, the historian Julián Casanova Ruiz has recently written in what I think is the best memorial of Stuart: 'Yet he was a committed anarchist using his pen and engaged in cultural aggitation, in times when the revolutionaries with "consciences" have past into history. Anarchist solidarity, that reflects on the concequences of industrial capilalism, nuclear disarmament, and abuses by the State. He was a Scot who would have loved to live in the golden epoch of Spanish anarchism.'

Julián Casanova's suggestion that Stuart Christie was steeped in the 'spirit of the older epoch of Spanish anarchism' implies that he was indeed a romantic soul. Quixote, who has gone mad owing to reading too many books about Chivalry, according to Brenan should not be regarded as 'lacking in shrewdness or being gullible by nature' because 'his delusion is a result of a long secretly sustained wish to rise above the dullness of his monotonous life, have adventures and distinguish himself.'

Any objective reading of Stuart Christie's autobiography will I think confirm that that in 1964 he was determined to escape his dreary life in Glasgow and somehow experience what he then believed the anarchist Holy Land. I felt the same about escaping Manchester and going to Spain in the winter of February 1963.

Alas, the actual Holy Land, as was shown in Don Quixote, was in reality somewhat more complex than any of us anticipated in our overwrought and vivid imaginations. Stuart was determine and he asked: 'Why did I, for the most part an unaggressive and easy-going person, commit myself to going to Spain to engage in an unspecified but violent campaign against the Franco regime?' and he continued 'I wanted to change the world because the world needed to be changed. Right in the middle of Europe, Franco was running one of the most brutal and represive regimes in modern history - he had killed more Spanish people than Hitler killed German Jews - and the Western democracies were now helping him to survive. Even now, while the civilized world was humming along to the songs of the Beatles and the Supremes.... the number of political dissidents being arrested and tortured by Franco's secret police was steadily increasing.'

Stuart's view here is clearly that of a foreigner looking at Spain in the early 1960s, and seeing it with eye of an outsider; the Spaniards I got to know between March 1963 and August 1964 both in the fishing village in Alicante where we lived and worked, and later on in La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, certainly did not have the feel of being downtrodden. The workers I worked with were mostly optimistic, cheerful and I felt they were more amiable than the workers I knew in England, we all seemed have enough money to live on, but I struggled to put something on one side for a rainy day.

All this everyday reality in the period 1964-67 when Stuart was in jail in Madrid was outside his grasp, and he was consequently able to decieve himself about the nature of Spanish life as it was evolving for most workers in the 1960s. Clearly in 1964, I was financially better off working 5-days for the MOD at the airport in Gibraltar, earning just over £8 for a 40-hour week; than when I was working a 48-hour week in Alicante at the Casa Such for 750 Pesetas (about £5).

Among other things, Stuart seemed to have been influenced by George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia', and Orwell wrote in an essay 'The Art of Donald McGill' that 'If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?' and he wrote:

'Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with "volupuous" figures. He it is who punctures your your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth...'

It seems to me that these attitudes have been poetically displayed in the adventures of Stuart Christie and is amply demonstrated in his autobiography especially were he describes his chance meetings with many amiable fellow prisoners who he concluded to be 'champion' only to later learn that they had committed unimaginable crimes: someone he thought was a 'nice chap' turned out to be Gestapo officer awaiting extradition on charges of mass murder, or an OAS terrorist, a South American gangster, a professional assasin, an arms dealer, a rapist etc. Prison life is like that, you come across all sorts of folk, I don't know about Spain but in places like Strangways prison in Manchester there were clear hierarchies with the wife-killer and the murders at the top, and then people like debtors would be at the bottom, and in the 1960s, this last category were distinguished by having to wear brown, and these days I believe the child abuser is the lowest of the low.

Stuart had been brought up a protestant and he writes:

'Before I went to prison my world-view was black and white, a moral chessboard on which everyone was either a goody or a baddy. But the ambiguities in people I came across in prison made me uneasy and I began to question my assumptions about the nature of good and evil.'

Orwell felt that to be among Spaniards in Spain was to be in the best country in the world for a foreigner. The 10th, July 1967 was Stuart's 21st birthday, and the jefe de servicio agreed to use the infirmary dining room to organise a party for him. The menue was set-up with a kid goat cooked in wine with roast potatoes, ensalada, coffee, cheese and ice cream. Beer, wine and Spanish brandy were supplied. The cabaret was put on by a Philipino rock star who was inside for murdering his agent, together with a band of gypsies who singing and dancing flamenco. The 'do' lasted from 2pm to 11pm. Everyone ended up legless.

Anyone who has lived in Spain and worked among Spaniards in the 1960s will find this account perfect plausable. No wonder Stuart was later to favourably compare his Spanish prison experience with life in an English jail. Somehow the Spaniards conduct themselves a more human manner, sometimes it can be delightful as it was for me when I was detained in the barracks of the Civil Guards up in the province of Segovia after I'd failed to carry my passport as identification returning from a journey to report on a strike of miners in the Asturias. The Civil Guards were unbelievably kind and considerate, and their wives served me up a dinner fit for a King. Maybe a Spaniard who'd failed to carry his identity card would not have received such sympathetic treatment because, as the Gibraltarians have often noted, Spaniards can be cruel to each other; I note for example that Fernando Carballo, Stuart's contact in Madrid, was treated much more roughly in police custody: his wrists were hammered with the butt of a policeman's pistol while another 'systematically punched him in the kidneys and stomach'. (see 'Granny' page 165).

We learn from Gerald Brenan that 'Don Quixote grew out of Cervantes' long and painful experiences of frustration and failure' and he adds 'It thus deals with one of the classic themes of Spanish literature - disillusionment.' According to Brenan, who lived in Spain on and off from 1919 when he came out of the British army after the First World War, 'Spaniards who commonly set their hopes too high and expect a miracle to fulfil them, often come to feel themselves deceived by life.'

When we were in Paris in February 1963 and about to leave for Spain, Salvador Gurucharri our handler told me he was atheist who believed in the God of nature,and I've noticed this with other Spaniards over the years. Gerald Brenan in his book The Spanish Labyrinth writes about this importance of nature with regard to Bakunin: 'He (Bakunin) therefore maintains that a free society will necessarily create strong, open, outstanding men and accepts without fear a strengthening of those great conservative forces that govern societies - custom and public opinion, which are good "because they are natural".' Brenan writes 'Something must be said about this word "natural", for it is one of the keys to Bakunin's ideas.' Bakunin, rather like John Ruskin and the romantics, seems to have felt angish at the growing artificiality of modern life, Brenan claims that for Bakunin 'all artificiality in his eyes was bad, so all "nature" was good.'

Bakunin is recognised as having a great influence on Spanish anarchism.

When I set out to write this piece on Stuart Christie I had in mind a critique based on the idea that he was a romantic who had too much faith in actions like setting off small bombs that at best only got the coverage of a small column in a foreign newspaper outside Spain. Yet I've been seduced by re-reading Stuart's autobiography in conjunction with re-reading Gerald Brenan's Literature of the Spanish People.

Yet, I am aware of that some would have liked me to contrast Stuart Christie's approach to anarchism with that of David Graeber who also died in August this year. Graeber in the USA, and for example Colin Ward in the UK, took a more considered rationalist approach. When I thought about it I remembered what George Orwell said about Tolstoy in his essay 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool', in it he wrote of Tolstoy: 'Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His (Tolstoy's) reaction is that of an irritable old man pestred by a noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?".' What Orwell concludes is that people like the pacifist Tolstoy would 'make children senile'. On reflection my worry is that those of who argue for a more cerebral approach to life and social change may simply be urging that the young should become old before their time.

It would seem, from this point of view, that the journey for all of us is bound up in an eternal pilgrimage from the madness of youth to the senility of old age.

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* Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and the Ploughman Poet and various other names and epithets,[nb 1] was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country.

** Wikipedia on Cervantes: Aside from these, and some poems, by 1605, Cervantes had not been published for 20 years. In Don Quixote, he challenged a form of literature that had been a favourite for more than a century, explicitly stating his purpose was to undermine 'vain and empty' chivalric romances.[61] His portrayal of real life, and use of everyday speech in a literary context was considered innovative, and proved instantly popular. First published in January 1605, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza featured in masquerades held to celebrate the birth of Philip IV on 8 April.[51]

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J.K. ROWLING & tyranny of historical processes

ON the 10th, June 2020, J.K. Rowling Wrote about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues:

'But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces.'

She added: 'The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people. All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.'

Evolution of Fashionable Addiction in the Cultural Realm

When I read the above address from a children's author of which I must admit to having only read the occasional oddments in newspapers, and I haven't even seen any of the associated films related to her work; I was drawn back to George Orwell's essay 'Inside the Whale' written in 1940. Orwell was then aware and worried about the poor state of English literature and he wrote of the period: 'Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe.'

Back in 1940, Orwell was clearly as pessimistic, as J.K. Rowling seems to be today, and he felt the writer was living in 'an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction'. He believed that: 'As for the writer, he [sic] is sitting on a melting iceberg: he is merely an anachronism, a hangover from a bourgeois age...'

A few years earlier in 1936 Orwell clarified the problem while reviewing 'The Novel Today' by the Marxist critic Philip Henderson, when he wrote that the official 'art for art's sake' school was finished and it was then being replaced by two gangs of extremists: 'Both the Catholic and Communist usually believe, though unfortunately they do not often say, that abstract aesthetic standards are bunkum and that a book is only a "good" book it it preaches the right sermon. To the Communist, good literature means "proletarian" literature. (Mr Henderson is careful to explain, however that this doesn't mean literature written by proletarians; which is just as well, because there isn't any.)'

Sermons and the Winter of Anarchistic Free Thinking

In that bleak world of 1940 with the bombs falling, the year in which I was born, Orwell pinned his hopes on Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and a novel 'With No sermons, merely subjective truth'

Orwell during the war regarded Henry Miller then as the best bet in the circumstances: 'a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceper of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.' Not very edifying but once read never forgotten; J.K. Rowling is clearly a much more fragrant specimen and one more easy to get behind in the battle against the current cancel culture fanatics. For freedom of expression is under attack now just as much as it was in the 1930s when the Marxists held the sway; today it is now the obsessive identity politicians cracking the whip, and as a consequence writing and literature is suffering under the current historical process.

Nowadays though, it's not just the general message which is under threat from the 'cancel culture' clans, but anyone can pulled-up for some throwaway remark: a recent example is J.K.Rowling for mentioning 'Never trust a man in a dress' in her book 'Troubled Blood[' a 900-page novel that is said to be Dickensian in its scope.

Nick Cohen in The Spectator [15/09/20] reviewed Ms. Rowling's sin thus: 'Troubled Blood is a 900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters. Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s. Detectives at the time thought Creed had killed her, but no one knew the truth and the woman’s body had never been found. Strike and Ellacott investigate Creed, but then they investigate a good dozen others. You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral 'seems' to be "never trust a man in a dress". But then relentless searches for the tiniest evidence of guilt are the marks of heresy hunters.'

The trouble is that this kind of censorship is that it is not just the preserve of the usual suspects among the political authoritarians on the left and the right. Curiously, the socalled libertarians at the 'anarchist' Freedom Press have been vigously rooting out dissidents who have supported people like Helen Steel and J.K.Rowling. Dave Douglass, an anarcho-syndicalist, and in August 2019 a member of the Friends of Freedom Press, was told by the secretary of the group Steve Sorba that he had 'had embarrassed his fellow Director colleagues by favouring a booklet which questions some of the stranger aspects of gender politics'. Dave was then encouraged to spare his colleagues blushes as directors of Freedom Press and to step down.

The Freedom Press directors have had a troubled history since it was found that Secretary Sorba had been been running the show without reference to his fellow directors, and even placing the names directors on the Company's House register without their knowledge. Since that was discovered and exposed on the NV Blog, Secretary Sorba is believed to have cleaned-up his act.

The Seed within el Culo de un Burro

There was a time more than two decades ago when the anarchist newspaper Freedom had a good reputation for being courageous, controversal and a kind of political Daniel in the lion's den, but that seems no longer to be the case. Its current publishers seem shy and quite willing to censor folk, and to court any fashionable fad no matter how despicable.

When a few years ago two distinguished academics and historians, David Goodway and Peter Marshall, gained entry as directors of Friends of Freedom Press it was thought that things may improve. Alas, it has not really happened. Not only was Dave Douglass effectively shown the door by Secretary Soba, but the rest of the directors have not covered themselves with glory and their committee seems to continually side with censorship and the prescriptions of the cancel culture.

In 2005, David Goodway wrote 'Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - left libertarian thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward' which tried to show that anarchistic forms and projects can be discovered within the structures of everyday life if we seek them and that these 'seeds beneath the snow' should be thrown into relief and promoted by anarchists. It is a seductive theory and can easily be shown to have some credibility substance by focusing upon the ordinary and everyday activities of 'people's methods' which Orwell himself had long ago advocated as a form of common place sociology. In 1967, Harold Garfinkel had even introduced what he came to 'ethnomethodology' [people's methods], which became a form of response to the then conventional sociology of Talcott Parsons with social action theory and structural functionalism.

Colin Ward had long ago criticised British anarchists for being too obsessed with history when he thought they would do better by focussing on a more sociological approach. The work of Colin Ward is very popular in Italy, and the original author of the novel 'The Seed Beneath the Snow'* Ignazio Silone is Italian. But Goodway and Peter Marshall are themselves both English historians, and both are historians presenting artful historical naratives. Now Silone was one of those writers who Orwell in 1944 said belonged to the school of foreign writers who are 'what one might call concentration-camp literature' in that they had seen and understood totalitarianism from the inside. In his book Silone has the seed hidden from the police by the peasants, not beneath the snow, but up the culo of a donkey. It is perhaps a more approprate place since neither of the two historians on the Friends of Freedom Press directorate have covered themselves with glory.

* The Seed Beneath the Snow, the final novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy, follows the fugitive Pietro Spina as he refuses to accept the conditions of pardon for his transgressions against the fascist state and flees to the mountains. As in Fontamara and Bread and Wine, Silone achieves a rich harmony of allegory and realism in his portrayal of the cafoni of Abruzzo and their struggle for freedom. An extraordinary, unburnished vision of the conflict between good and evil, communicating to its reader, in the words of F. W. Dupee, “Silone’s deep integrity, his sufferings and aspirations, his radical sense of the world’s wrongs.” ****************************************************************

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.

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*   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:'

Media Freedom in Oldham & Beyond

From journalism's Oven-Ready Corporate Cooks
to a kind of 'Cook Your Own Local Media' 
by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY Chris Rea, the President of the Manchester Branch of the National Union of Journalists, addressed a packed Focus Day:  'Creating Our Own Media' [sponsored by The WORD] aimed at promoting a move towards grassroots media by encouraging and energising the emergence of a free and independent journalism based in the community.

Chris said that control the national press in this country was in the hands of three companies:  News UK; the Rothermere group and Trinity Mirror.  He added that the local press is owned by only about ten companies. 

This media corporatism, he argued required the 'development of of our own institutions'. 

The problem of the decline of liberal culture

In his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' [Tribune 4th, January 1946], George Orwell wrote:

'In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature will arises, but no such thing is at present is imaginable.  It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance actually comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.'

Is the liberal culture we once took for granted coming to an end with the shift from reading printed hard copy media?

In some of the workshops at yesterday's Focus Day, some of the participants were concerned about print journalism's rapid decline.  A workshop discussed the technicalities of production of an alternative media in both print and on-line journalism.  The problems of distribution, circulation, finance and advertising was considered.  The content, the lack of a coherent 'House Style', and the layout of The Word newspaper were examined critically.  

The Word newspaper, it was admitted, had not always had a clear 'House Style':  Slabs of column-justified print smothered in some cases a full A3 size page from side to side and in some cases from top to bottom without the relief of a picture.  It was claimed that what was needed was short snappy articles, sometimes with quirky story-lines and photos was what was needed.

It was pointed out that these problems were not unique to the present time, and that George Orwell had discussed the issues of straight forward language in the presentation of ideas.  That fanciful writing often resulted in confusing the meaning of what we are saying, even from ourselves.

One lass from Romania argued for a free press and suggested that 'identity politics' in her view was an underlying threat in this country to the liberties her people had struggled to get in Romania when it was ruled by a regime of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Orwell himself had predicted in 1946 [The Prevention of Literature] that:
'Newspapers will presumably continue until television techniques reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in industrialised countries feel the need for any kind of literature.'

He added:  'Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.  Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor belt process that reduces human initiative to a minimum.'

The Shape of Modern Media 

Well, newspapers are not surviving very well even in the main stream.  Any idea of truth being presented fearlessly in the press often seems to be an illusion.  Yet, even when Orwell was around he was then able to write:  'Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors.'

So need the participants at the Oldham's Focus Day worry about this historic development down hill?  It may explain why in 1979, when the conduct of Cyril Smith abusing lads at Cambridge House was first exposed, it was the alternative newspaper RAP [Rochdale's Alternative Paper] that then ran the story and not the mainstream press.  Indeed, the national press and local papers backed off when threatened by possible court action.  Nationally, at that time only Private Eye published the RAP revelations about Cyril Smith, and in consequence the man who became the Rochdale MP went on to serve for 20-years until 1992; only to be denounced in 2012 on this NV Blog discredited.

What we have now got is as Orwell argued, is a kind of self censorship rooted in 'stupidity' and 'economic self interest' or as he puts it more precisely: 

'The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. …  The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.  But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio.' 

If anything with the coming of corporate media this situation has deteriorated since the time Orwell was writing in 1946.

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

The 'New Offensive' on the Bullshit Generation?

&

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT from 'NEW OFFENSIVE'

Editorial note on background to 'New Offensive'

Constructive Dismissal at the Anarchist HQ:

'Murder in the Central Committee' (Asesinato en el Comité Central) is a novel by the Catalan novelist and Marxist writer Manuel Vázquez Montalban, who wrote the book in 1981.  The plot of the book is about  how during a meeting in Madrid of the Central Committee of Spain’s Communist Party a crime is committed when there is a brief power failure.  The lights are back on a few seconds later, but in that short span of time the Secretary General, Fernando Garrido, is killed, stabbed in the chest.  (1)

Who stabbed Dave Douglass?

 ON the day of the Glorious Twelfth of August this year a stabbing was enacted at the meeting of the Friends of Freedom Press Directors at Angel Alley in Whitechapel in London's East End; the stabbing was announced when Steve Sorba told the Freedom Friend's directorate meeting that the highly respected former miner Dave Douglass had embarrassed his fellow Director colleagues by favouring a booklet which questions some of the stranger aspects of gender politics and their censorious brethren; describe as 'Cocks in Frocks' in the contentious booklet.*

THE statement below from 'NEW OFFENSIVE' comes from one of the author of the controversial booklet 'Shit Wigs & Steriods'.  A recent consequence of this publication has been that the former public schoolboy Simon Saunders employed by Freedom had urged the Friends of Freedom Company Secretary, Steve Sorba, to ban a formerly appointed Friend of Freedom director, the highly respected ex-miner Dave Douglass from South Shields.  The reasoning for this effective constructive dismissal and no-platforming of Dave Douglass was that he had been accused of commenting sympathetically on this booklet.  In a panicky email issued on the eve of the weekend before the meeting of the Freedom Friends directors, Secretary Sorba was to declare to his fellow directors in an e-mail:  'It has been brought to my attention that Dave Douglass has made public comments supporting a pamphlet which is fundementally transphobic (and in places homophobic as well).'  **

Dave Douglass told Secretary Sorba that nothing he had ever said was 'transphobic' or 'homophobic'!

Yet as Secretary Soba insisted that he had 'embarrassed the "committee"', Dave Douglass agreed to take the bullet as he didn't want to be on a committee that was 'embarrased' by him in such a way.  In other words just as in Vázquez Montalban's noir detective novel Spanish Communist Party's Secretary General, Fernando Garrido, is killed, stabbed in the chest so Dave Douglass wasn't stabbed in the back, but he was stabbed in the chest by Secretary Sorba acting at the behest of posh public schoolboy Simon Saunders, a Morning Star hack using his smart phone weapon he sometimes uses for blacklisting folk.  ***

Northern Voices believes that Freedom should adopt an approach which encourages free debate and we avoid a party-line in our columns.  How can an organisation that claims to be anarchist possibly uphold a postion that seeks to avoid drama and controversy?   Clearly Secretary Sorba is a businessman, a manager and a Director, but has not understood anything about anarchism.  Moreover, Secretary Sorba is short-sighted if he believes that he can have a quiet life by disposing of Dave Douglass in this way: does he not realise that by seeking to avoid complicated issues like this merely allows them to fester.  Dave Douglass is merely the canary in the coal mine for Secretary Sorba, Simon Saunders and Freedom Press.  We judge this by considering the statement of support for Northern Voices below; it states that those who are those who are attacking Dave Douglass, Helen Steel**** and those who support free speech will 'wipe the floor' with the enemies of liberty and free discussion.  

After the debacle that led to the closing of the London bookfair when Helen Steel was surrounded, bullied and intimidated for defending free speech, Freedom hesitated before finally adopting a stand supporting the 'Cocks in Frocks.  It seems now that they backed the wrong horse.

*  northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2019/07 › review-transsexuals-vs-cock...

** (https://tinyurl.com/y3msflq6 )

***northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2016/07 › pensioner-attacked-at-anarc...

****northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2019/08 › helen-is-feminist-who-holds...

 ***********

Solidarity Statement for Northern Voices from 'New Offensive':

 I WANT TO STATE that the New Offensive Booklet: ‘Shit Wigs and Steroids’ is a series of short articles and it contains considerable references to more in-depth discussions around the subject of Transgender.  These articles are by Women, Lesbians and Gay activists, victims of male violence and many other critical thinkers on the subject of gender politics.  The gang of us who put it together are not connected with Northern Voices, so seeing the same tactics used on some of us used on yourselves, shows patterns of censorship that are in no way acceptable, fair, just or logical.

We are proud to have done this booklet and to see the positive impact it is having.  Our use of language, is the language that we use.  We are not conservative in our approach, nor approach issues touching us as working class people with the privilege of objective viewpoints.

Class privileges? we are exempt of!

We had proof readers and discussions covering all aspects of the booklet (yes there are a few spelling errors in spite of our abilities).

We are engaged with many people in this discussion, both in England and amongst other European working class radicals and anarchists.  We are very pleased to state we are in this (as always) for the long game.  We hope to force people out of their self identified ‘safe spaces’.  We will name and confront them if they have played roles in trying to shut down or discredit working class activists, or bullying them into silence.

Those of us who put the booklet together and stand proudly by it are not lightweights intellectually. We are seeing it picked up by all kinds of people that are open to discussion.  We understand Simon Saunders declared the booklet ‘homophobic’, considering it is in defence of  lesbian and gay identity, we do expect an explanation of  such absurd claims.  We are proud to stand our ground.  As working class people.

Basically we don’t give a fuck if you find our ‘crude’ language demeaning, abrasive, provocative, or threatening.  At ‘New Offensive' we still have a sense of humour, irony and determination to straighten out some bullshit.

We hope any future attention our publication gets will actually focus on the blacklisting of activists, the right to self defence, and the rejection of authoritarian and bogus ideologies etc. 

'Door policies' to publiseed events simply seem to protect a minority of people from ridicule, scrutiny and the harsh criticism of their Thatcherite indulgent identity politics. 

One point that is clear is that anyone looking seriously at gender politics, has to include prisons; Suicide rates; sexual abuse; health and inequalities; class bias; and the enviromental  brutalisation of the working classes.  To see gender politics, just being reduced to nothing in the hands of  the likes of Pablo, Steve Moss, Simon Saunders (public school boy) is beyond cringeworthy.  To look at Transgender as an issue without looking at 'De-Transitioning'; drug dependancy; the erasing of Lesbian and Gay identity; health issues; etc. etc. is irresponsible. 

So rather than being supporters of the issues surrounding gender and sexual politics, this group of wannabe gate-keepers, are silencing the issues on the very subjects they claim to be the champions of.   Thankfully the discussion does exist  outside of their declared safe spaces.   The discussion is now in full flow without them!! 

From us at 'New Offensive' it is time to call out these sponging bastards . When Rob Ray (Simon Saunders) comes to terms with the wider discussions around Transgender, he might also  take a look at his own class privilege and the way he is using that as a weapon to demonise, control and shut down working class anarchists.  So quite simply,   Solidarity with you at Northern Voices, we are proud to see you take this stuff seriously.  Shit Wigs and Steroids is us documenting the absurdity of the situation for the wider working class movement and for sincere discussion amongst  class struggle anarchists .

'WE ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO WIPING THE FLOOR WITH A FEW PEOPLE'.


(1)  Murder in the Central Committee (Spanish: Asesinato en el Comité Central) is a 1982 Spanish thriller film directed by Vicente Aranda. It stars Patxi Andión and Victoria Abril.^[1] The plot follows a private detective, an ex-communist and former CIA agent, who travels from Barcelona to Madrid to discover the identity of the assassin of the leader of the Spanish Communist Party who was stabbed during a blackout while presiding over a meeting of the party's Central Committee. The film is a thriller with ironic political overtones.
The script was written by director Vicente Aranda. It was based on a book of the same name by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, one of a series of novels that featured the character of a hard-boiled detective called Pepe Carvalho. It was adapted for the screen the year after its publication.^[2] Asesinato en el Comité Central was Aranda’s first work shot in Madrid instead of his native Barcelona. The film received a cold commercial response.^[3]

 
'Murder in the Central Committee' (1981) has Pepe leaving his beloved Barcelona to investigate the murder of the General Secretary of the PCP and is a profound -- and often hilarious -- commentary on the changing face of post Cold War Europe.

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

Burnley Literary Festival

From Mike Waite
Event on 1968 / counterculture at Burnley Literary Festival

THE third annual Burnley Literary Festival runs from 28 September to 1 October, and features a wide range of events, including street theatre about the campaign for womens’ suffrage, lectures on Sylvia Plath, interactive workshops and much more: www.burnleyliteraryfestival.co.uk

We thought that you / your readers / people you are in contact with could be particularly interested in one of the sessions:  ‘Anarchist poets and Burnley Wood communes: ‘1968’ counterculture around Burnley & East Lancashire’.

This will run at Burnley Central Library on Saturday 29^th September, starting at 11.30 a.m., and finishing a little after 12.30.

The key inputs will be from Tina Morris, a poet and children’s writer, who contributed to Michael Horovitz's landmark anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Penguin Books, 1969), and Bruce Wilkinson, author of Hidden Culture, Forgotten History: a northern poetic underground and its countercultural history  (Penniless Press, 2017) : http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/hidden_culture.htm

More details: The ‘summer of love’ and radical counter-culture didn’t just happen at the Woodstock music festival or amongst student protestors in Paris. ‘1968’ and its promise of alternative lifestyles and new progressive values drew in young people in Burnley and Blackburn.  The culture and politics of East Lancashire were enlivened by theatrical ‘happenings’ on the streets, and a lively subculture of poetry readings and little magazines. This session will include discussion, reminiscence and declarations, touching on a 1960s obscenity trial in Blackburn, and the beginnings of local co-operative housing and environmental politics.

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance:

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/burnley/burnley-central-library/anarchist-poets-and-burnley-wood-communes-1968-counterculture-around-burnley

'Smile As You Go' with Simon Danczuk

Dust-up at Danczuk's Deli!

IT was not quite a performance akin to our Gracie and 'Sing as you Go', but last Friday night's book reading at Danczuk's Deli in Rochdale was something of a treat. The event, part of the Rochdale Festival of Literature and Ideas, was a book reading of excerpts from the forthcoming paperback
version of 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith' by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker which we were told will be out next March. Matthew solemnly did the readings, and Simon followed up with 'there is much more to come out!' about Cyril Smith and child abuse.

We were told by Simon that it was difficult for people who had suffered thus to share their experiences: that they had spoken to a middle-aged man in London who said he had been abused as a young boy when Cyril took him to the National Liberal Club, and that the lad later 'went off the
rails'; of a former prisoner at Buckley Hall (young offender's prison) who had been abused by Cyril; and a boy from Knowl View who had also been similarly abused. We were told that the consequences of this was far reaching for the victims or survivors as Simon insisted on calling
them.

People at the book reading quite naturally asked 'Was there a cover-up?'.
Simon said: 'People were colluding to see that no light was shone upon it [and there is much more to come out!'. Though as we shall see later Simon is equally eager to make sure that no one shines a light on just how reliable his version of Cyril's activities really is.  Simon then said: 'The good news is that both front benches (Labour and Conservative) are now in favour of the mandatory reporting of child abuse (by people in responsible positions in relation to children).' and that 'the Chair of the (over-arching inquiry into historic child abuse) must have credibility now that we have got rid out Butler-Sloss.'

(Two days later in the Mail of Sunday, Simon Danczuk wrote a piece entitled '...she must stand aside', in which he argued that Fiona Woolf the new chair should resign from the Government's child abuse enquiry.)

Someone asked: 'Are you saying the police protected Cyril or the Party?'

We were told: 'It was not the front-line police (like Tasker) but some (higher up?) were frightened because Cyril had a big mouth' and he may have implicated others in the establishment who were behaving inappropriately. Hence, we were left to believe that there was a network people in power who went out of their way to protect Cyril.

Simon Danczuk may be right but the jury is still out of these matters, and any resolution is in the long grass and we won't have any real answers before the General Election in May next year. Alternatively it may all be an overactive imagination at work.

Another questioner pointed out that 'Cyril was a Big Fish' in Rochdale.

When I suggested that 'Cyril was a Big Fish in the Labour Party at the time he was abusing teenage boys at Cambridge House in the early 1960s', both Matthew Baker and Simon Danczuk disputed this arguing that he was a big fish on the Council but not in the Labour Party.

When I asked: 'As this is a Literature Festival what literary tradition did their book "Smile for the Camera" fit into because I found it hard to grasp the  research methodology used by the authors'- such as "how many victims were interviewed?; were tape-recordings taken?; were any transcripts kept?'

Simon Danczuk told me that he wouldn't answer these simple methodological questions despite being asked on several occasions in the past. No light to be shone here it seems!

Shortly afterwards I was shoved out of the door of Danczuk's Deli. 

Instituto Cervantes & Manchester Literature Festival

Ada Parellada - Vanilla Salt Wednesday 15th October, 6.30pm Instituto Cervantes This intimate event at Instituto Cervantes offers audiences a rare chance to hear Catalan chef and restaurateur Ada Parellada wax lyrical about her debut novel Vanilla Salt. A richly sensual exploration of the kitchen and the human heart, it’s a Catalan love story in which an eccentric chef and a beautiful Canadian woman discover that, despite their different backgrounds, they share a painful past. Parellada made a name for herself with the innovative restaurant Semproniana in Barcelona, and now also owns Coses de Menjar and Acontecimiento in Lisbon. An ideal evening for lovers of Catalan culture, food and romance more info...Free event: Bookings on: secman@cervantes.es and 0161 6614201

Manchester Literature Festival at the Cervantes

Andrés Neuman: Talking to Ourselves ExhibitionThe Faces of Masculinity in Cuba Friday 10th October, 6.30pm Instituto Cervantes Sooner or later, we all face loss. Spanish writer Andrés Neuman comes to Manchester to promote his new novel, Talking to Ourselves. Told in alternating narratives, it's the story of a family transformed by grief, journeying along the fringes of the Spanish speaking world and beyond the borders of their own moral comfort zone. The son of Argentine musicians who emigrated to Spain, Neuman has published numerous short stories, essays and poetry collections. His book Traveller of the Century was awarded the Alfaguara and national Critics Prizes, and was described in The Guardian as 'a beautiful, accomplished novel: as ambitious as it is generous, as moving as it is smart'. more info... Free event: Bookings on: secman@cervantes.es and 0161 6614206 This exhibition is the personal work of photographer Javier Pinto Grajera and is a graphic representation of the different realities of Cuba in relation to masculinity. The images play with the ideas mentioned in some of the interviews the photographer did while he was there and the validated realities on the streets of Cuba, showing in a personal way the typical masculine-feminine stereotypes that appear in the island.more info... The opening of the exhibition will be on the 10th of October at 20.00, after the presentation of writer Andrés Neuman. A food and drink reception will be served. Please book in advanced on secman@cervantes.es and 0161 6614206.

Simon Danczuk Promotions in Rochdale

Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival» What’s on » Simon Danczuk & Matt Baker

Simon Danczuk & Matt Baker

Book reading: Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith

Friday 24 October 2014
6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Danczuk's Deli
Price: FREE

No booking required

Suitable for: Age 14+

Details

There are few debut books that make quite the political impact of Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith.
Hailed by Michael Crick as 'the best political book of 2014', it was serialised in The Daily Mail with four front pages and subsequently saw Greater Manchester Police launch a criminal investigation into whether child abuse was covered up.
Tonight’s reading with authors Simon Danczuk MP and Matt Baker will explain how they came to write the book and include new material from a forthcoming paperback edition.

Terroristic Transgressions in Art & Literature

Warning the public before cultural consumption of film, literature & theatre

 

LAST year this Northern Voices' Blog produced a major rumpus over a question we asked about a warning issued by young man about a scene towards the end of the Spanish Civil War film 'Libertarias' in which a nun is raped by a 'Moro', one of General Franco's mercenary soldiers from Morocco.  This was perhaps of more consequence because it was being shown as a radical film at a Manchester Film Co-operative gathering in a Salford pub, and I think we pointed out at the time this was a Spanish film in which the significance of the rape to Spanish viewers was that it is who is doing the raping and to who, that is important.  One reason is the deep fear of the 'Moro' in Spanish and Catalan culture, and the implied blasphemy (for which the Spaniards are famous) of a scene in which an 'islamico' forces himself onto a Christian nun.  The everyday Spanish language is full of rich blaspheming utterances which are used on a regular basis and the ironic idea of a 'Moro' acting as an instrument of Franco Fascism whose goal was to defend Christianity, would not be lost on most Spaniards as it appeared to be on the more shallow members of the English audience in Salford.  

 

So a scene that in the Spanish mind may produce one set of excited responses in almost the finale of the film when the 'Moro' rapes the Christian nun, became in a Salford pub last year something that required a special health or trigger warning so that the comfort of Anglo-Saxon lefties in the audience brought up in a welfare state may not be disturbed  or offended by the content of the film in which the Spanish people went through the jaws of hell.   The whole idea of this film was to inflict transgressions on the audience so that they would understand what it's like to suffer in wartime.  To indulge in warnings is merely to blunt the impact of the film.

 

Why do the squeamish Anglo-Saxon peoples require these kind of health warnings in films like 'Liberterias' about what are perceived to be disturbing scenes in films, or theatre or even literature?  

 

This question is now even more relevant, because this year colleges across the USA are wrestling with student requests for explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in the classroom that might upset them, or as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.  

 

The International New York Times journalist Jennifer Medina writes: 

'These trigger warnings, which have their roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of Califonia, Santa Barbara, where the student government called for them.  But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and others.'   

Some academics have challenged these fragility claims arguing that being provocative is part of their job.  They say that 'trigger warnings' suggest 'a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to challenge not embrace.'   

Some of the literature being suggested for these 'trigger warnings' are Shakespeare's 'The Merchant of Venice' (contains anti-Semitism), Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway' (addresses suicide), and 'The Great Gatsby' for its scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence.   

There is something profoundly sterile in all this seeking to be protected from the unpleasant.  Perhaps the spread of this poisonous attitude seeking to comfort the reader or student is responsible for the lack of any really talented literature being produced in England these days.  Bertolt Brecht wrote in his essay 'Three Cheers for Shaw' that Bernard Shaw is a terrorist and that his brand of terrorism is that  'he uses an extraordinary weapon, that of humour'.  And Brecht adds:

'Shaw's terrorism consists in this:  that he claims a right for every man to act in all circumstances with decency, logic and humour, and sees it as his duty to do so even when it creates opposition.' 

Furthermore Brecht writes: 

'He (Shaw) gives the theatre as much fun as it can stand.  Strictly speaking what makes people go to the theatre is nothing but stuff that acts as a vast incubus to the quite real business which really interests the dramatist and constitutes the true value of his plays.  The logic must be such that he can bury them beneath the most wanton transgressions, and it is the transgressions that people most want to have.'   

It may have been true once that film and theatregoers wanted 'transgressions', but not now it seems among the righteous non-blasphemers of the anarchist-left and beyond..  Whereas once the likes of Brecht, Shaw, Orwell, and other writers may have been wallowing in transgressions today we have the triumph of the bumpkins and the shallow minded on what is represented as the progressive left. 

Silone police informer turned novelist

& Skinner's gansta rap lyrics!

DOES art mirror life?  Is it possible to find in the fictional writings of a novelist or the lyrics of a song-writer historical evidence of real events or even confessions of past sins?   

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers in the USA have used FBI analysts to look at rap lyrics when investigating gangs.  The New Jersey Supreme Court will soon hear arguments on if 13 pages of lyrics written by Vonte Skinner – including lines like 'four slugs drillin' your cheek to blow your face off and leave your brain caved in the street' – should have been admitted at his trial for attempted murder.   

Erik Nelson, an assistant professor of liberal arts at the University of Richmond, has said:  'What's getting really unnerving, is the amount of time it appears both police and prosecutors are spending over rap lyrics and videos on social media rather than using that time to go and rather more convincing, more conventional evidence.'   

Lorne Manly, a journalist on the New York Times writes: 

'In the profane world of hardcore rap, verisimilitude is prized.  Growing out of the ghettos on the West Coast in the 1989s, gangsta rap made the gritty reality of gangs, violence and drugs central features.'   

Prosecutors believe that such lyrics can be useful in building cases because of the search for status:  attaining it, crowing about it, expanding it, is, some think, integral to gang life.  It is claimed that if you listen to these songs you will hear gang members confessing to crimes they had committed previously and were through their art disseminating within their neighborhoods.   

Similarly, in an essay entitled 'The Secret Life of Ignazio Silone' by John Foot in Left Review it is claimed that between 1920 and 1930 Silone was an informer to Mussolini's political police.  A letter from Silone, written in early 1930 and addressed to Emilia Bellone, sister to Guido Bellone, General Inspector of Public Security charge with stamping out subversion in which he pleaded to be released from 'all falsehood, doubt and secrecy', expressing a desire 'to repair the damage that I have caused, to seek redemption, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am bound with every fibre of my body) and my country.'  

An article detailing Silone's history as an informer almost up to his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1931 was written by Mauro Cananli entitled 'Ignazio Silone & the Fascist Political Police' and published in Modern Italian Studies, 5 (1) in 2000, it was greeted with consternation because Silone after his career as a police informer went on in the 1930s to write books that represented some of the best attacks on Fascism and which John Foot describes this by saying 'his novels had become very effective weapons against it (the Mussolini regime).'  He was central to Italian literature of the period and widely respected outside the circles of the communist party.  George Orwell wrote of a special class of literature that had come out of  the European struggle since the rise of Fascism: 

'Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koester himself.  Some of these are imaginative writers, some are not, but they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers.'  

As with the US police investigators into gangsta rap some Italian intellectuals claim to be able to see in Ignazio Silone's novels such as 'Bread & Wine', 'The Fox' and 'And He Did Hide Himself' an author finding himself wrestling with issues of treachery and collaboration.  The spy in 'Bread & Wine' relates:  'In my solitary broodings, that left me not a moments peace,I passed from fear of punishment to fear of non-punishment..'  And Adriano Sofri asked in La Republica on the 15^th, April 2000:  'One re-reads all of Silone, and one thinks: how could we not have seen it before?'  John Foot's essay doesn't provide us with any clear evidence as to what might have been Silone's motivation for becoming an agent of the secret police and why he became one at the age of nineteen, but there was 'little to reveal ideological commitment to Fascism later'.  Foot writes:  '... it is striking that the regime did not expose Silone in the thirties, when his novels had become very effective weapons against it.'  The problem was that once Silone had begun to inform it was, says Foot, 'very difficult (and dangerous) for him to stop'.   

Crime fiction was used in the USA to establish the guilt of an author and show he had a violent streak three decades ago, but the case was overturned on appeal, with the decision rejecting the proposition 'that an author's character can be determined by the type of book he writes'.  In the Skinner case the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has used 'Crime & Punishment' and 'Folsome Prison Blues' to make a  similar point:  'That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no more reason to ascribe to him a motive and intent to commit violent acts than to saddle Dostoyevsky with Raskolnikov's motives or to indict Johnny Cash for having “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”.'   

The mystery still remains about the relationship between between the artist's real live experience and his creative work.  George Orwell writing his essay about Artur Koestler in 1944 wrote that 'there has been nothing (written in England) resembling for instance, Fontamara or Darkness at Noon, because there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside.'   Orwell continues:  'Most of the European writers I mentioned above (Silone, Malraux, Victor Serge and Koestler) and scores of others like then, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought street battles, many have been in prison or concentration camp, of fled across frontiers with false names and forged passports.'  Orwell then says one could not expect Professor Laski 'indulging in activities of this kind' nor  indeed today, nor could one anticipate anything of this kind from the henpecked anarchists who operate the Manchester book fair or those Londoners who stay stum about malicious and false allegations of 'anti-Antisemitism' and the destruction of book stalls.