was there resistance in the Lager?

Was there resistance inside the Lager?
Primo Levi maintained that resistance for the ordinary Haftling inside the concentration camp, was impossible. Romantic ideas about the unity of the oppressed were, in the extreme circumstances of Auschwitz, untenable, and each prisoner was alone in the daily and unequal struggle to simply exist .
The Nazi process of dehumanisation; systematic theft of personal belongings, the replacement of names with tattooed numbers, the loss of dignity and personality associated with the cropping of hair and replacement of personal clothing with ill fitting and ‘clownish’ uniforms combined with the trauma of the constant presence of sudden death and murder all combined for Levi to make the prisoner less than a man , “To Destroy a man is difficult almost as difficult as to create one: It has not been easy or quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.” Returning to the question of Resistance in the books Afterword, Levi acknowledges that some sporadic acts of resistance did take place inside the camps, but insisted that these were carried out only by ‘privileged’ groups amongst the camp population and that for the ordinary prisoner resistance was not an option as; “people in rags do not revolt” . For Levi, those who gained positions of privilege within the camp, as ‘notables’; Kapos, or other officials, were morally compromised; complicit in the oppression of the rest.
Levi gives a number of other reasons that would inhibit resistance; the constantly changing population of the camps, as selections and transfers prevented any established community to emerge, language barriers between different groups of prisoners, exemplary executions of anyone who showed defiance, combined with random and extreme violence kept the prisoners in a constant state of disorientation and terror. For Levi, the Jewish prisoners were especially unable to resist, worn down as they were by long periods of hunger and oppression in the ghettos before even arriving in the camps. Levi dislikes the image of docile Jews patiently lining up for the gas chamber, but maintained that, “no one rebelled” . Levi cited the Germans use of Soviet Prisoners of War as guinea pigs to test the gas chambers, if these “young, army trained, politically indoctrinated, (and) not encumbered by women and children” did not resist then how can anyone expect the frighten beaten and cowed Jews?
However despite Levi’s denial of the possibility of resistance there is a great deal of evidence from the testimonies of other survivors that resistance to the Nazi genocide did exist and went far beyond a few scattered outbreaks.
In accessing the evidence for resistance inside the Lager it is useful to actually define what is meant by resistance, and as such it is possible to discuss three, distinct but overlapping, levels of resistance and defiance.
First, there was the struggle to survive. In a regime of annihilation, ‘the common struggle for survival’ itself becomes an act of defiance. For many the impetuous was to survive to bear witness to what had been done to them. Similarly, in a system which stole every facet of human identity from its captives, the maintenance of personal pride , through washing or the observance of daily exercises, for example , or the reassertion of a level of individuality, of personality through alteration or re-tailoring of the camp uniform was a minor act of rebellion.
Another, if not the ultimate, form of individual defiance was the taking control of the moment of ones death. In the Lager where every other right and dignity had been stolen from them, to take ones own life in a matter of ones own choosing was for some prisoners a last final act of defiance.
The second level of defiance and resistance was collective. The Nazis enforced upon their prisoners their own warped and racialised form of social Darwinism, prisoners were categorised and ranked according to the Nazis racial typography, ‘Aryans’ above ‘non-Aryans’, criminals above ‘politicals’, with Jews at the bottom. By pitching each against all the Nazis sought to ensure that the prisoners would keep each other in line as they scrambled for the smallest crumbs of privilege over their fellow unfortunates. This was encouraged by appointing criminal prisoners as Kapos over Jews and punishing any act of common decency and compassion.
For Levi and many other survivors the first shock of arrival at the camps, the very alien and insane nature of the Lager convinced them that all human decency and links of comradeship had been shattered; “…(I)n the Lager things are different: Here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone.” Comradeship and solidarity reasserted themselves quickly; whether through political, regional or national ties different groups of prisoners sought to protect themselves and each other by bonding together. In terms of political organisation, the communists were most successful as they deliberately sought to gain positions of influence in order to lessen the worst effects of camp life upon their comrades. As communists organised amongst both gentiles and Jews, they were able to provide a network of mutual solidarity that cut across the Nazis’ racial categories, which provided the springboard for later resistance efforts . Zionist groupings and the Jewish socialist Bund were also able to give similar support, especially by providing common language (Yiddish and/or Hebrew) and values for prisoners from widely different nations. National ties were also important, especially for prisoners who were a part of large Jewish populations in their home countries and therefore within the camps. For example Rudolf Vrba got his job in Canada partially because of his ability with languages, and partially because he recognised a fellow prisoner as from his old town . Even those who fell outside of these social and political ties were not abandoned; Vrba tells of the thief in his blockhouse who was discovered stealing bread from a Musselman, a prisoner at the very bottom of the Auschwitz social scale. The other prisoners beat the thief to death; “It was rough justice, but it was fair, for to deprive a man of food was to murder” .
Another form of collective defiance was the self sacrifice of those who gave their lives rather than abandon others, such as the Dutch nurses who were offered the chance to return to Holland but instead chose to remain with their patients, mentally and physically handicapped children, and so perished with them in the gas chambers . There were also those who abandoned positions of power and safety within the camps so that they might assist those who were suffering around them, for example the non-Jewish Kapo Franz, who when in charge of the S.S. stores sacrificed his position and put his life in jeopardy in order to provide some food for some starving Jewish women .
The third level of resistance was actual physical resistance to the Lager regime, this ranged from acts of sabotage and ‘go-slows’, only working as little as to avoid a beating, to full scale insurrections and mass breakouts.
Opportunities for acts of resistance within the camp were limited. “For the Jews, resistance almost always ended in death.” But there were uprisings in Treblinka, where the prisoners set fire to the camp and killed the chief of the S.S. as well as 15 other guards; in Sorbibor, where, led by a Soviet prisoner of war, Alexander Pechersky, Jewish prisoners killed 11 guards before some 300 prisoners were able to escape, in Birkenau, where the Sonderkommando working the crematoria rose up destroying crematorium IV by setting fire to its roof, and blowing up crematorium III with explosives which had been smuggled in by Jewish women prisoners working at the Union explosives factory, whilst prisoners at crematorium II attempted a mass break out. It was one of these fighters that Levi witnessed being executed .
There were individual acts of resistance as well, such the Dancer Horowitz, one of a number of Polish Jewish women who were being led to the gas chamber, ordered to undress she smashed a Nazi in the face with her shoe, took his pistol and shot him and another guard, the other women then started to beat the guards, scalping one and tearing the nose off another, who were forced to flee for reinforcements. The women were gunned down at the very entrance to the gas chamber.
Levi maintained that resistance was confined to the most privileged of the prisoners, the prominents, yet as approximately 90% of those sent to Auschwitz never entered the camps, but were sent directly to the gas chambers, everyone who had not initially selected could be said to be ‘privileged’ to one degree or other.
The major problem for those attempting to resist the mass murder was that resistance within the camp was far too late. The place to resist Auschwitz had to before the deportations, thus the emphasis for resistors was to escape and warn Jewish communities of what was happening, so that they could frustrate the Nazis attempts to deport them. Levi claimed that of the 600 official escape attempts from Auschwitz many were prisoners randomly shot by guards wishing to claim the bounty for foiling escape attempts, however, as some 300 or so escapes succeeded then a great number of real escape attempts must have succeeded.
The greatest asset the Nazis had in their plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews was incomprehension at the true enormity of their criminal intention. Even when confronted with clear evidence of what was happening, Hungary’s Jewish leaders preferred to believe the assurances of the ‘cultured’ S.S. officers, rather than the reports of eyewitnesses.
Revolts did take place in a number of Jewish Ghettos, but here again the Jewish fighters were isolated, cut off from a beaten and cowed general population and could only provide for the people of the Ghettos the right “to die as human beings”
Much has been made of the alleged anti Semitism of the non Jewish Polish resistance, and its failure to support the uprising, however one of the participants of the Ghetto uprising in Warsaw, Marek Edelman pointed out that in 1943 the Polish Home Army had only just been organised and had virtually no weapons for its own members let alone any for the fighters inside the Ghetto.
Whilst Poland and the Baltic states did have a history of anti Semitism it is worth noting that after the war the Israeli govt. honoured more Poles as ‘Righteous Gentiles’- non Jews who had risked their lives to save Jews- than any other country.
The most effective acts of resistance were those in communities where the Nazis had been unable to separate and demonise Jews from the mass of the population. In Denmark the resistance were able to organise the evacuation of 8,000 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden to prevent their deportation . In Bulgaria, German pressure to deport its Jewish population, led to mass protests; farmers threatened to lie down on the railway lines, and appeals called for people to “Take your stand in front of your Jewish neighbours homes and don’t let them be led away by force! Hide their children and do not hand them over to executioners!” Even the German born king intervened and Bulgarian opposition ensured that Bulgaria was the only country in Europe whose Jewish population actually increased during World War II.
Most of the obstacles to resistance that Levi identified were real and made effective resistance far harder, However despite all the obstacles placed in their way the Jews did find ways to fight back against the attempts of the Nazis to eradicate them from History . Where they could not defy the Nazis by surviving, then they sought to defy them by refusing to die as animals, but instead as Human beings.

back from holiday

got back yesterday from a weeks holiday with the family in salou, catalunya. This was our first ever foreign holiday and we loved it.

Will the real Colonel Despard please stand up? Historiography and Politics: A case study.

When thinking about history we often hold two parallel definitions: History is both the sequence of events which we believe to have happened in the past and also the attempts of historians to interpret and reinterpret those events in order to gain new understanding of the past. When historians seek to reinterpret the past they unavoidably bring their own interests and contemporary concerns to those past events, this, as Christopher Hill pointed out, is not problematic as current interests can stimulate new directions and new avenues for historical study and new questions for historians; for example, the growth of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s stimulated a expansion in interest among historians in the role of women within history. Hill warned that although contemporary concerns can create new questions for historians they should take care to avoid finding contemporary answers .
To examine the way in which different historians writing at different times and with different political interests have used the same historical evidence to come to widely different conclusions it is useful as a case study to examine the way in which the history of the British colonel and war hero turned revolutionary conspirator and condemned traitor, Edward Despard has been examined and interpreted by different historians and suggest how those historians’ own political and historical approaches have affected their interpretations.
It is fair to say that, beyond the efforts of a few modern social historians who have specialised in the study of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the story of colonel Despard, his conspiracy and trial is today almost completely unknown. However at the time of his trial Edward Despard was a most notorious and reviled traitor whose sorry end was an example and warning for all who conspired against the natural order which was broadcasted from pulpit and chapbooks across the country . Despard’s death mask, fashioned in wax and lit in lurid light was a centrepiece of Mme Tussauds’ early travelling waxworks show (ironically this was destroyed in the fires lit during the insurrectionary rioting in Bristol that accompanied the introduction of the 1832 reform act).
The decline of political agitation following the failure of the Great Chartist demonstration of 1848 and the increase of prosperity in Victorian society had convinced elements of the ruling class of the safety of extending the franchise and this allowed the development of a stable and confident new trades union movement (and its accompanying bureaucracy) this in turn assisted the development of a new historical discipline of labour history, which pursued a very definite ideological agenda, a distinct English working class tradition, uninfected by violent foreign ideologies from which sprang a uniquely English socialism that was grounded in Methodism not Marxism, its forerunners were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who had endured their transportation with pacifistic Christian stoicism rather than the armed direct action of Luddites or ‘Captain Swing’s’ rick burners, their ancient inspiration the patrician cautiousness of a Quintus Fabius Maximus rather than the servile insurrectionism of a Spartacus. These new labour historians adopted a ‘Whig’ approach to the ‘Forward March of Labour’ in which a slow, but inevitable, evolution towards the ‘promised land’ allowed no room for insurrectionary adventurers.
In order to explain the trials and repression that undoubtedly did take place and still maintain this image of a docile and pacific lower order these Fabian historians emphasised the role of the immense army of informers employed by the state, and maintained that men such as Oliver the Spy, exploited the gullibility of frightened magistrates by fabricating most, if not all, of the conspiracies. Those who were caught up in these conspiracies were either the innocent victims of the agents provocateurs, or were deluded or deranged mavericks .
The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain under the inspiration of the Bolshevik revolution may have challenged the basis of Fabian gradualism in politics, but the Comintern’s crude and formalistic Marxism continued with the same essentially ‘inevitablist’ approach to Labour history; albeit one in which a ‘disciplined’ proletariat could be marched onto the field of History and off again as required. Thus Raymond Postgate’s and G.D.H. Cole’s book The Common People dismissed such uncomfortable and unruly expressions of working class rebellion as the Luddites or the Despard’s conspiracy as ‘desperate’ or as receiving ‘microscopic’ support, as simply juvenile extravagances before the class was able to learn its ‘proper’ place in the long march to a labour victory in 1945.
The first historian to seriously examine Despard and the conspiracy around him was the distinguished historian Sir Charles Oman. A stalwart of the establishment, and a militant conservative in both politics and in history, Oman was a history professor at All Souls’ where he also served for sixteen years as one of the university MPs . Oman received his knighthood for his work in the foreign office press office during the Great War.
It was whilst working there that Oman got the opportunity of attending the trial of the Irish rebel (and former British consul) Sir Roger Casement, it was during the trial he recounts that he was first reminded of what he considered as a comparable act of treason from a servant of the crown; that of Colonel Despard.
Later historians have cited Oman as being dismissive of Despard as being “of marginal historical importance” , however, Oman wrote his essay in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and had witnessed the radicalisation which had been created by that war: the Bolshevik uprising, the toppling of the royal houses from half of Europe, and the threat caused to the very heart of the Empire by industrial unrest, internal sedition and the armed rebellion in Ireland. Oman used this recent History to reassess the threat that Despard’s conspiracy presented to the crown and for four reasons concluded that that threat was real.
Firstly, the Irish threat; Despard, like Casement, was connected to a wide ranging and real Revolutionary movement in Ireland. On his return to the British Isles from Honduras Despard was in contact with Wolf Tone and the United Irishmen, for which he was interned by the Pitt govt. During the uprising, Tone’s uprising in 1789 had been defeated but the UI and their British offshoot the United Englishmen remained active and as Emmett’s uprising in 1803 showed they remained a real force. There were clear parallels between the conspiracies of Tone, Emmett and of Despard with a revolutionary insurrection planned to take place in concert with a French Invasion.
Secondly, Despard sort to organise his rebellion among the rank and file of the Grenadier Guards, stationed at that time in the city of London, outlandish it may seem to have attempted to ferment mutiny within the British army in the heart of the Capital, but Oman pointed to both contemporary and more recent history to take the threat very seriously. He drew direct parallels between the mutinies that had presaged the fall of the Romanov and Hohenzollern dynasties and Despard’s plans and described Despard’s conspiracy as aiming to constitute a “soviet of soldiers and workmen” . He also pointed out that less than 3 years previously the British had faced their greatest crisis of the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; when the ‘wooden walls’ that had protected Britain’s shores from invasion had collapsed when mutinies at Nore and Spithead had left the country undefended for a month and caused panic within the establishment.
Oman acknowledged that the conspiracy that Despard had gathered around him were far too weak to be capable of to have been able to challenge the establishment, however this did not necessarily negate its threat to the establishment, Despard expected that the seizure of the Tower, with its cache of arms, and the capture or killing of the King would be the spark that would trigger a wide ranging uprising, both in London and across the Industrial North. Oman showed that Despard was convinced that the industrial regions were ripe for rebellion, and whilst believing that Despard and his co conspirators were the most desperate and impatient of the “British Jacobins” , he rejected the assertion of Whig and Labour historians that Despard was a lunatic. Oman noted that, less than 20 years before Despard’s conspiracy was hatched, London had for 8 days been at the mercy of the Mob which although roused by a sectarian firebrand, Lord Gordon, to oppose catholic emancipation, had taken on the distinct character of a class uprising which terrified both establishment and radical politician alike. This, Oman said, made Despard’s plan a realistic one in the terms of the day.
Oman completed his work on Despard by saying that: “there can be no doubt that he was a typical British Jacobin, and a most dangerous personage.”
Oman, when beginning his work about Despard, writes that he was reminded of the case whilst attending the trial of Sir Roger Casement (in 1916), however the references within the essay itself to Bolsheviks and Soviets suggest that it was in fact written much later. If that is the case there is a possible explanation for what directed Oman toward reviving the memory of the “unfortunate Colonel Despard”.
The senior officer in charge of the Home front in 1916, and thus the officer responsible for both the capture of Roger Casement and the suppression of the Easter Rising was Major General Sir John French, who later during the Irish war of independence was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In that role French was responsible for the formation and deployment of the infamous ‘Black and Tans’, and thus made himself the number one hate figure and target for the nationalist forces. One of the more famous of these, living in the shadow of French’s residence in Dublin Castle, was French’s older sister- Charlotte Despard. Charlotte French had married Maximillian Despard in 1870 and, following his death in 1890 had become active in philanthropic works in London’s East End, her work rapidly radicalised her and she became prominent in socialist and suffragette politics and on the outbreak of the first world war had joined with Sylvia Pankhurst on a resolutely anti war and socialist platform. Charlotte was a supporter of both Bolshevik communism and of the Independence movement in Ireland . The tension between the general and his rebellious sister was common knowledge (Sir John refused to speak to his sister ever again) and may well have stimulated Oman’s interest in a previous errant member of the Despard family.
Charlotte Despard was unable to long to enjoy Ireland’s freedom from British rule, Connolly’s prediction that a divided Ireland would cause “a carnival of reaction north and south” was proved true and Charlotte who had been disheartened by Irish nationalism in the fraternal bloodletting of the civil war, and placed her hopes in communism. She was forced to flee Dublin in 1933 when a catholic mob attacked her home and found shelter in the British ruled north.
The next Historian to take seriously the conspiracy of Colonel Despard was the Marxist historian Edward Thompson.
Thompson had joined the Communist Party in 1942 whilst at university, influenced by reading Christopher Hill’s Marxist analysis of the English Civil War, and by the example of his older brother, Frank, a party member and SOE operative who died whilst fighting alongside the partisans in Bulgaria. Thompson became a member of the Communist Party Historians group, which brought together Historians like Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Leslie Morton and Eric Hobsbawm . The revelations in Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of the crimes of Stalin’s rule combined with the shock of the Russian Intervention that crushed the workers uprising in Hungary shattered Thompson’s loyalty to the party and convinced him of the necessity to restore the human element to socialism, which he believed Stalinism had jettisoned.
Thompson also sought to refashion a Marxist approach to history that reject the mechanical and “inevitablist” form of history that had become common among Marxists, instead he adopted a humanistic interpretation of Marxism that took its inspiration from the early Marx: “History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”
In his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson sought to challenge the various ‘orthodoxies’ which had dominated the writing of labour and social history; the Fabian orthodoxy, that saw the mass of the poor as passive victims of laissez faire, awaiting their far sighted saviours (like Francis Place), the orthodoxy of the “empirical economic historians” who saw the poor as data in statistical series, or finally; “the ‘pilgrim progress’ orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners-pioneers of the welfare state, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations.” Of this orthodoxy, Thompson said; “only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.” Thompson’s history was about how real men and women reacted both individually and collectively to the birth pangs of the industrial revolution and how those reactions; accommodation, collaboration or resistance, contributed to the development of a distinct working class consciousness.
For Thompson Despard was a Janus figure, who through his association with Jacobin conspirators looked back to an eighteenth century form of radical practise, and in his links with the new secret underground in the industrial North, the “Black Lamp” , presaged a new, working class and collective resistance movement, which Thompson linked directly to the industrial direct action of the Luddites a decade later.
Thompson’s work was highly influential it: “...redefined the subject matter of social and labour history, and pushed open more than one door of historical closure.” And a generation of historians, many of whom had been Thompson’s students were inspired to deepen and expand on his work. When they did so they were affected by the political events around them and this was reflected in their work. Marianne Elliott efficiently refuted the attempts by critics who attacked Thompson’s work on Despard and questioned whether there was sufficient, or indeed any, evidence for these nationwide conspiracies. Writing in the aftermath of strikes which had destroyed power sharing at Stormont and had brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath Elliott could easily demolish Dinwiddy’s argument that there was no connection between trade union activity and radical and subversive politics.
The escalation of the civil right movements into the armed struggle in the six counties created a renewed interest in the history of the previous nationalist movements in Ireland this led Marianne Elliott and Roger Wells to reassess both Despard’s and Emmett’s roles as parts of a far wider conspiracy of which neither of whom where the true central players but whose capture fatally weakened the overall plot.
The struggles for social equality and against discrimination by women, black people and gays were amongst the most significant outcomes of the revolutionary upsurges of 1968. These struggles highlighted and inspired historians to study and explore previously ‘hidden histories’, establishing new historical disciplines.
Two American former students of Thompson, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, took inspiration from these new avenues of study and taking as their starting point Marx’s comment about capitalism being born from ‘blood and filth’ and Raymond Williams’ work on the financing of the industrial revolution through the slave trade Rediker and Linebaugh examined the lives and the communities of those at the front line of the Atlantic ‘Triangular trade’.
Rediker and Linebaugh found that all along the Atlantic coast communities of “...dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors and African slaves” formed a multiracial and polyglot “many headed Hydra” of resistance to the attempts of the emerging imperial states to impose order on the Atlantic trade.
Linebaugh and Rediker’s Despard was at the centre of this ‘Motley crew’, extending his story outward from London and Ireland to the West Indies and Central America. It was there, at the source of the Slavocracy’s wealth, whilst fighting against French and Spanish alongside black former slaves and white former American revolutionaries, that Despard learnt both his egalitarianism and met his wife, the African- American Catherine Despard.
Linebaugh and Rediker rescued Catherine from the shadows into which she has been thrust; they showed that beyond the snobbery of the Despard family who described Catherine as ‘the deluded woman who calls herself a wife’ Catherine was a stalwart fighter and organiser in her own right, coordinating the campaign for the release of Despard and the other Habeas corpus prisoners, and later, during Despard’s trial impressing Nelson so much that he successfully petitioned for her to receive an officer widow’s pension ( which was withdrawn after Despard’s inflammatory speech at the scaffold, which Catherine was believed to have conspired with Edward in authoring.
Rediker and Linebaugh showed the links between Irish and American revolutionaries, the London mob, and slave rebellions in the Caribbean and placed the Despard’s at the very heart of them.
When the radical movements of 1968 began to run out of steam in the late 1970s through a combination of economic uncertainty, rising unemployment and ‘the crisis of militancy’: in which both the annoying failure of the revolution to materialise, and the inexplicable refusal of the workers to accept the leadership of the ex-student vanguard led many of those who had formed the central organisation of ‘the movements’ to conclude that in order to ‘make a real difference’ it was necessary to pursue their careers by going to work in social welfare agencies, Social Democratic local government or into the academy.
Separated from the struggles that did exist, and increasingly acting as the point of contact between the state dole and the needy poor, these former radicals found increasingly that they were more in sympathy with the state than with surly and ungrateful ‘proles’. However, in order to retain the illusion of radicalism both in academia and local government the left became increasingly preoccupied with identifying and challenging the language of oppression rather than the oppression itself. In their role as both petitioners for, and distributers of, state aid they encouraged the development of a ‘victim culture’ in which the poor, the needy, the oppressed were seen not as active agents in their own liberation but as helpless and voiceless victims awaiting the advocacy and largesse of professional carers.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc deepened the radicals disillusion with any progressive alternative to capitalism and accentuated their love/hate relationship with the liberal state. For them, the state was both the defender of the suffering created by capitalism’s crimes; of war, imperialism, racism, poverty, etc. and the only hope of relieving some of that suffering.
The most recent study of the life of colonel Despard is firmly rooted within this political current; for Mike Jay, author of The Unfortunate colonel Despard: hero and traitor in Britain’s first war on terror (2004) Despard’s story has immediate resonance with today’s ‘war on terror’; like the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Jay’s Despard was an innocent victim of an all powerful state, martyred for being different and to justify state terror. Jay rejects all the previous historians who have examined Despard’s case and asserts that Despard, who suffered years in jail and a horrific death for his beliefs, did not really want the revolutionary overthrow of the state and whose cause was actually met by the passing of the Reform Act in 1832! Jay has further claimed that Despard was in fact “better characterised as patriotic and strongly conservative” . Although Jay happily ransacks the work of the social Historians he rejects all of their conclusions as in his view “E.P. Thompson et al” sought to “crudely” incorporate Despard into a direct line of working class resistance and “Chartism/ socialism/ Marxism” (which shows that even if Mike jay has actually read any Thompson, he has certainly not understood him!).
Instead Jay returns to the method of the nineteenth century patrician Fabian historians in seeing the masses as essentially passive and helpless victims, at risk from the spies and machinations of the all powerful state, but whose only relief was, and is to place ones trust in the liberal humanity of that same state. His attempt to shoehorn contemporary political parallels into the Despard story leaves Despard stranded out of time.
It might be argued that to compare Mike Jay with the other historians who have studied Despard is unfair- after all he isn’t a professional historian and his work is designed as a piece of popular non-fiction. However Jay’s book is the most readily available work on the subject, available in a paperback edition and copies are found in many libraries, and it displays perfectly the warning made by Christopher Hill: “It is right and proper that historians should ask new questions, and such questions may well be stimulated by happenings in our own society. I see no harm in this so long as our answers do not derive from the present.”
Each of the other historians, even if one can disagree markedly with their interpretations or conclusions, increased our understanding and have brought us new insights into the period. Jay, on the other hand, by dismissing the work previously done so that he can mould the facts to fit his own contemporary world view, hides the reality and brutality of the times and in doing so diminishes the courage and achievements of both Edward and Catherine Despard.

Snowdonia, the cops graveyard

Thank fuck for North Wales, keep up the good work.

A police officer who was cleared of wrongdoing after punching a woman while trying to arrest her has died after being found in north Wales.

Pc Mulhall's death comes just four months after Michael Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was found dead on Mount Snowdon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/7515251.stm

A night at the Races

on friday mrs redstar and me celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary with a night out at Newbury Races, lovely food, good racing, inspired(!?!) betting, and beautiful company, a perfect night! An 8-1 win in the first, a 7-2 in the second and a 12-1 win in the last meant it was also a damned cheap date! after the races UB40 played in the Paddock, brill!

The 43 Group- fighting the fascists

mugabe and friends

Gordon Brown has described Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's regime as a "criminal and discredited cabal" which "should not be recognised by anybody".

But old Rob has alot of friends happy to shake his hand.

Rob and Jack

Rob and Chuck

Rob and Thatch

fat cop, little cap

What the f***! Let me get me kebab!

one asylum seeker who is definately not welcome here

congratulations to the Nepalese for Kicking out their parasitical leech of a king and declaring their country a republic.

An excellent Idea which should be copied everywhere- however, this means that another bunch of aristocratic spongers are loose on the World cadging stage.

We say Piss off you Bastard you aren't welcome here!

here is a hint for anyone with surplus Royals

making Holocaust revisionism respectable

for a while now there has been a serious weakness at the heart of mainstream liberal and leftist politics. The Idea that in opposing imperialist war it is the duty of leftists to support uncritically any and all who stand against U.S. or other Western interests. This has led the anti war movement to embrace and cheerlead for some decidedly unsavoury charactors and movements- whether the embarrassment of "We are all Hesbollah!" or the presence of the spokesmen for Hamas and Al Sadr's Mahdi Army on 'Stop The War' podiums. In recent weeks this has even led some to defend the murderous dictatorships of the Generals in Burma and Mugabe in Zimbabwe, because if the British and Americans are against them then they MUST be supported.
Given these anti-imperialists other fixation, with Israel and Palestine, and the supposed power and influence of the 'zionist' lobbys on western politics, it isn't all that surprising that eventually they would seek to exonerate the reputation of earlier opponents to American and British imperialist designs and the powerful Zionist forces that controlled them.
Last month the Guardian's forum CiF printed an article by the former editor of the New Statesman Peter Wilby which trumpeted a new book by the American author Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, which argued that the Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust, and if it was not for the brutal warmongering of the British under Churchill and the US under Roosevelt, goaded on by the Zionist Lobby then Hitler would have peacefully relocated Europe's Jews to Madagastar. Nazi occupation and domination of all of Europe and colonisation of the East were to be prefered to fighting the fascists.
David Aaronovich's interview with Baker in yesterdays Times is fascinating showing how far such Idiot anti- imperialism can go; twisting history to fit into their conspiracy laden world view.

sex tips for trots

from last years eurotrot summer camp newspaper:
"Bring together 500 young revolutionists of all Europe, in a place closed in full summer. To take pleasure? You want of it but you do not know yet ; how that will occur, if the heterosexual reports will be soaked with sexism than in your life of every days This had to be said, between revolutionists!
For opening out reports and a maximum catch of pleasure without doubts nor risks, there are sexual tools hyper. The first element is to fight presupposed that the system policies encrusted in our heads, until our ass. For that it is important to speak about sex most freely possible: to know its desires, to discuss, understand of it that the sex as it is political… in light to dilate its spirit at the same time as its bottom.
The hood is the only means of stopping the AIDS. Lubricated well, it will be able to return in any opening according to the desires One will be able to place it with the hands or the mouth.
The female condom consists of a matter which transmits much more heat that the latex. There is almost no chance that it crash and its external ring rubs the clitoris (hmmmmmm!). It is enough to place it and await 30 min that it is fixed. And it left for 8h pleasure!
To eat an ass or a pussy, it is enough to use a dam (right-angled latex has to apply with gel ) or a hood cut in the direction length to apply the side lubricated to the vagina or the anus. One places it on the zone so much desired with a little freezing between it and the opening and it left: our languages muscular of militant can act differently. Obviously, a hood by opening and partner. And if I do not want to kiss?

The sexual release is not to set up a against-standard where everyone kisses together It is to respect its desires and the desires of the others. One inevitably does not want to kiss, one can want to build other reports that reports of seduction. One can want to hold his she-cat with his own fingers. Like said it Marx *: when, how, with which, with how much: it is me which knows if I want or not; it is me which decides if I make or not! >>
* Dialectical of sodomy and gross wet beard, 1871"

five years on- Why are we still marching?

IF MARCHING CHANGED ANYTHING THEY'D ABOLISH IT

Back in 2003 the Stop the War Coalition had two tactics to prevent war in Iraq: marching from A to B and then going home, and marching from B to A and then going home. Neither of these cunning plans worked, but they seemed so good to Tony Benn, Lindsey German and their friends it is all the StWC’s done to stop the war. This may let them claim the moral high ground: but how many divisions can that muster? Any superiority this might give them has, anyway, been squandered by their adherence to tactics which have failed to achieve their stated objectives. The British state has faced StWC down once and knows it can do so again if, for example, it chooses to partner the US in an attack on Iran.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

Thankfully not all protestors followed the supine policies of the StWC. School and college students walked out of their institutions, disrupted traffic, and showed a willingness to wrestle with the police. When demonstrators travelled to disrupt the Fairford airbase, there was no ‘right’ to demonstrate, only the illegal actions of the police. Clearly they recognised the threat posed by direct action to the Government’s war plans, even if the StWC could not.

NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR

Gordon Brown is committed to the neo-conservative project. Those who celebrated Tony Blair’s resignation ought to consider that he handed over at a time of his choice to the successor of his choice who shares his politics. Britain remains in the missionary position and will remain so regardless of whether Bush, McCain, Obama or Clinton’s on top. Given this, a militant anti-war movement is as necessary as ever. Sadly the StWC is as impotent now as five years ago.

TALKING A GOOD FIGHT

To cover up its flaccid nature, the StWC has as many excuses as an incapable lover. Their 2008 pamphlet begins with the following astonishing claim by Viscount Stansgate (Tony Benn): ‘The Stop the War movement is the most powerful and influential popular political movement of my lifetime and possibly of any period of our history’. If the last five years have been a victory, we would have hated to see a defeat! Such lies can also be found amongst the witterings of the SWP leadership, with John Rees informing us that ‘Tony Blair was Britain’s worst ever prime minister’ (has he never heard of Margaret Thatcher?) and that ‘we [the StWC] had driven him out of office’. This is nothing short of collective delusion and helps explain why the 1.5 million marchers in 2003 have been followed by ever decreasing turnouts. Working class people are used to being lied to by mainstream politicians – we do not need such lies from the self-proclaimed leaders of the anti-war movement as well.Given it has been such a flop when it matters, the Stop the War Coalition needs a good dose of Viagra. We are calling on demonstrators today to let the Stop the War Coalition leadership know their feeble approach satisfies only the state and the war-mongers.

foxtons consequences

House prices directly affect the accessibility and availability of housing for everyone, but especially the working class - for us, particularly, the housing squeeze is increasing.

The social housing stock is decreasing whilst waiting lists increase. This inevitably leaves the options down to private rentals or owner occupation. However housing costs impact on rents, private rentals being considerably more expensive than those for social housing, and clearly purchase price puts most houses well out of reach for many people.

The trouble with Foxtons, and their ilk, is that they artificially inflate prices to increase their commissions. They also expand their operations into traditional working class areas which, together with their pricing policies, further restricts housing availability for the working class.

We should all support Class War's picket at Foxtons, the target is justified.

Picket Foxtons, 3pm, 3rd March

CLASS WAR PRESS RELEASE:

Picket Foxtons: Islington Branch, 3 pm March 3rd:

Monday March 3rd at 3pm sees Class War's picket of Foxtons in Islington, in a demonstration against the greatest con-men of our time - estate agents.

We've been ripped off by them, and are sick of them driving up house prices in our part of town.

So come along and tell one of the worst of the lot, Foxtons, what you think of them.

Foxtons Islington branch at 355 Upper Street will be picketed from 3pm - 7pm on Monday 3rd March.

There is however a lot that can be done before then (and afterwards!) - and not just towards Foxtons. Many estate agents routinely break the law by placing advertising signs without permission on council property, and sometimes on private property. One very simple way to fight back against the damage estate agents are doing to our communities is simply to take these signs down where ever you find them. Don't let them advertise - illegally - over-priced properties in your community.

Take these signs down, and return them to the estate agents concerned - the bigger this campaign gets, the better it gets for us, and the worse it gets for the likes of Foxtons.

Lets get busy!



NOTES:

The BBC TV Whistleblower programme found agents putting forward false offers, faking landlords' signatures and falsifying documents to inflate property prices.

Foxtons are here to drive up house prices, it's their avowed intent: their founder Jon Hunt, who sold up last year and pocketed £370 million, liked to talk of 'going to war' for his sellers. Foxtons takes a bigger commission than any other agent to flog each house which it justifies by promising to wring from a buyer the highest possible price.

QUOTES:

"Some of the people I hate most in the world are estate agents. I hate generalisations, but all estate agents are slimy, money obsessed, lying idiots, who went to public school, but still didn't get any A levels and so have to do an essentially unnecessary job for too much money. It's not a generalisation. Show me one estate agent who isn't like that and I will show you an estate agent who has lied to you to convince you that he isn't like that and has thus confirmed just exactly how much he is like that in reality." Richard Herring

"For those of you who don't live in London and have no intention of ever living in London: well, lucky you. Lucky you for not having to put up with......extortionate house prices, but mostly lucky you for not having to put up with Foxtons, the people who sell those houses for extortionate prices." Bryony Gordon

Tel: 07986 041 207
Email: londoncwf@yahoo.co.uk
http://www.classwaruk.org/
http://www.myspace.com/fkfoxtons

northern rock mantra

Privatise profits, socialise risk.

The fuckers.

Fuck the Pope

Thanks to jez for this- when we were chatting about my course and I mentioned that I was studying the french revolution and he assumed that I knew about this already. I didn't- and so I stole it:

Jacques Hébert 1790
The great anger of Père Duchesne against the bishop of Rome, who has just excommunicated all the French and who, with the Cardinals, the Bishops and all the damn priests, cooked up the plot to slaughter the National Assembly, the Jacobin Club and all good citizens. The nomination of a Patriarch to govern the clergy of France.
Who does he take us for, that bastard of an indulgence seller? Does he think that with his toilet paper — his bulls — his cannons without primers, and all the thunder and idiocies with which he put to sleep or scared our fathers, dammit, does he still believe he leads the French of today? We're no longer in the time of King Dagobert, and today we're no longer such dupes as to buy the pardons that priests trafficked in in past centuries, nor to be upset by an interdiction that the bishop of Rome will cast upon the Kingdom. The hell with them; we won’t let ourselves be fooled by those sons-of-bitches of priests. Their confessions, their purgatory, their absolutions, their indulgences are nothing but feed for the foolish. The so-called keys of St. Peter, with which the Pope’s criers once opened the doors to the great salon of the eternal father, now seem to us to be nothing but skeleton keys with which the Latin pontiff wants to pry open our houses and our coffers so as to take what we own.
How does this bastard still have the audacity to use such methods today? It’s said that he has responded to all the mitred Ravaillacs who fired him up against the French nation and he issued a brief of excommunication against us. O lord, what is going to become of us? In order to make a greater impression on people’s spirits, it’s during the fortnight of Easter that the lightning bolts are going to be thrown at us; all the croziered — and to-be-clubbed — priests must, during this holy time, make a last effort to overthrow the constitution. At the head of the devoted, escorted by knights of the dagger, the fuckers are going to lay siege in groups to the house of every deputy to the National Assembly, and those of all the members of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution and kill them during the night, and then fall upon the guards of the Tuileries and take away the King.
These are the peaceful projects of these sons-of-bitches of priests, and they dare flatter themselves that the French will back them in this abominable enterprise; they think that upon hearing their voices brother will arm himself against brother, son against father, and finally, that for the second time, we'll give them the abominable joy of a new St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
They've lied, these rascals, and we'll know how to handle them. I can reply for the Parisians, dammit, and our pals from the faubourg Saint Antoine are all disposed to fix them. I pity the bastard who will dare assume his chair to pronounce the excommunication they threaten us with. He can be sure it'll be only one small leap from there to the lamppost. And if the sons-of-bitch priests think they'll do better in the Departments; if they flatter themselves that the same brigands who they armed with daggers in Nimes, Montauban, and Vannes will back up their efforts, then, dammit, 20,000 of us are ready recall them to order.
And so, dammit, all their projects, all their plots will fail miserably, and these bastards of sons-of-bitches would do well to make of necessity a virtue and take the side of the constitution. This is the only choice left to them, and it is in vain that they place their hopes in Capet the Redhead. Despite him, despite the Germans, despite his army of Savoyards, despite his bandits from Spain, we'll accomplish our task, dammit, and we will maintain the constitution ...
So let the old rascal put away his baubles; let him remain peaceably in his Vatican. Let him feast with all the red donkeys of his fucking college, let him sip the good wines of France and Spain every day with the gluttonous de Bernis, or let him amuse himself with tender young thing, but dammit, let him not trouble his old age by messing in politics.
The bishops we'll name, dammit, will be worth as much as those of la Guimard[1], and those who will have benefices granted by the people will deserve their confidence more than all those valets of the court, those schemers, those payers of arrérages who won bishoprics and abbeys and who lived off the patrimony of the poor as once was done. But to ward off the blows that those damn low-lives want to deal us, I make the motion to cut off the living of those conspirators, and to take from them the pensions that the nation still accords them, and that we name a patriarch for France, and that the most virtuous of prelates be chosen for that eminent post, and fuck the court of Rome, its cardinals, its bishops, its abbots, its indulgences, its pardons and the Pope himself.

1. The traffic that dancer carried out in benefices while the bishop of Orleans was among her pursuers is well known. A doctor who, as a price for the exactitude and dexterity with which he rubbed that beauty down during her frequent indispositions asked her to accord him a post. Become a priest, Guimard answered him, I don’t know how to read — what difference is it...But don’t you know that between my legs I have a page of benefices. He became a priest had had a priory worth 20,000 livres.

Adultery Rocks

pigs at the trough

The police have always been happy to jump to their masters needs when breaking strikes and beating up demonstrators. Now in a bizzare twist of irony they are planning to march to demand the right to strike.

If you have found the police to be idle, useless, stupid, bigoted, dishonest, violent or just plain wrong, like us you probably see little point in giving them even more money from the public purse.

If so, now is the time to make your voice heard. We already pay for their tasers, CS gas, guns, extendable batons, surveillance squads and fast cars - now they want us to pay for fat wage increases.

Trot on copper!

We want to see everyone who has ever had a bad experience of the police in central London on Wednesday 23 January.

The police never care about the "rights" of any other workers - why should we care about theirs?

Make your voice heard when the police demonstrate in London.

Class War says give the greedy pigs what they deserve - nothing!

Protest against the Police. January 23rd Central London

further details to follow at http://www.londonclasswar.org/

police porn

Flashy dies

There have been a large number of obituaries and tributes to George Macdonald Fraser, the creator of Harry Flashman, who died recently. In the continuing spirit of RSC we have stolen a couple: A poem from Bill on Harry's Place, a pastiche of 19th century mawkishness. and an article from History Today may 2000 reproduced from the Flashman Society

The Burial of Sir Harry Flashman

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
In the trollop our hero had married.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,
When the strumpets were out gallivanting,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
At the hour Flashy was lustfully panting.

No useless coffin made up his bier,
Not in sheet nor in shroud was his corse girt;
But he lay like a poltroon quaking in fearHiding,
till the end, ‘neath a lady’s skirt.

Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we silently thought ‘at least it’s not I who is dead’,
Though we bitterly thought of the morrow.

We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed –
It was high time he slept alone –
Of the dangers we’d rather pile on his head,
While we lived it up safely at home.

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone,
I doubt if we'll miss him that much
And little he'll notice, if they let him sleep on
While his girls writhe ‘neath our fresh touch.

But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Quickly and suddenly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame cold and sterile;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we ran far away from all peril.

Flashman author George MacDonald Fraser explains how 'history disguised as fiction' has been his inspiration and is also his aim.
`YOUR EYES ARE blinded by the sight of gold, man!' Thus Sir Daniel Darnley Darnley (or was it Darnby?), the Laughing Pirate, duelling in an Aztec treasure-house, despatching some unfortunate Spanish villain with a lightning rapier 'thrust -- and awakening my interest in history for the first time.
I was about eight years old and until I encountered Sir Daniel in a D.C. Thomson 'tuppenny blood' my acquaintance with the past had been limited to the odd Bible story, Greek and Norse myths, and my first school history book, The World Family. I'm sure it was an excellent primer, but all I remember of it is a couplet about Hannibal crossing the Alps because he wanted the Roman scalps, and a law of King Hammurabi's condemning arsonists to be thrown into the fire they had started, which seemed drastic, though not illogical. I became disenchanted with the book when, asked to read aloud from the last chapter which dealt with the Great War, I was mocked for my mispronunciation of 'the warring navies', which I rendered as though the last word was spelt with two 'v's, thus conjuring a picture of labourers swarming out of the trenches brandishing picks and shovels.
And then I chanced on Sir Daniel, and it dawned on my infant mind that history (in his case Elizabethan or Restoration, I forget which) was not only a sober record of the past, but a wonderland of action and excitement, where gallant adventurers swaggered and fought and intrigued, usually for patriotic but occasionally for mercenary reasons, against sinister enemies, most of them foreign, and life was a series of battles: escapes, ambushes, rescues, conspiracies, duels, and general romantic activity. I knew it was fiction, of course; only later did I discover that true history left fiction far behind.
This began to dawn through the exploits of another true-blue British buccaneer named Morgan, who swung a hearty cutlass and sang a merry jingle about 'the Spaniards who sail the Spanish Main, we hunt their craven souls; We cut off their heads and trim their ears, to make a game of bowls.' (It will be seen that even at the age of eight I was tending towards the Macaulay rather than the Gibbon school of history.)
But Morgan was a turning-point, for I discovered that there really had been a buccaneer of that name, whose real-life exploits were pure Hollywood; he was my bridge from dream history to true history, from the pages of The Skipper to (eventually) Esquemeling, Charles Johnson, Defoe, Dampier and Prescott; from ripping yarns to the great escape from Maracaibo and the epic march on Panama.
My progress along this path was assisted by a writer whom I regard as the best historical novelist since Walter Scott -- and I am well aware that I am giving him priority over a talented host headed by R.L. Stevenson. Rafael Sabatini it was who confirmed for me that history was not only a serious study but a magical entertainment, and showed me how historic fact may be wedded to exciting fiction. At this he was a past master, a historian turned story-teller who excelled in both fields. I should guess that he influenced more writers than any academic teacher.
I first came across Sabatini in a school library, and Captain Blood, that sweeping piratical saga inspired by the life of my old friend Morgan (the real one), held me enthralled. Months later the cinema curtains opened on the film version, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's majestic overture thundering out, the novice Errol Flynn defying Judge Jeffreys, pinking Basil Rathbone, wooing and winning Olivia de Havilland, and scattering Dons and Frenchmen in all directions... and I was seeing history for the first time, or thought I was, which is much the same thing when you are ten years old.
From that moment I became a sort of history alcoholic, absorbing it from every available source, factual and fictional, but mostly the latter. Treasure Island, Ivanhoe, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Three Musketeers, and the works of Jeffery Farnol, Philip Lindsay, and many others were consumed, but I did not abandon my first mentors, the Wizard, Hotspur, and Rover, who took me through the Napoleonic Wars in The Fighting Temeraire, the '45 Rebellion with an Alan Breck clone named Red Fergie, the Border raids with one Black Musgrave, and the Seven Years' War with The Ten Scarlet Feathers, which dealt with a sacred war bonnet belonging to the celebrated Indian chief, Pontiac. This inspired my own first attempt at historical fiction, a lurid but (I'm proud to say) factually-based account of the massacre of British-American settlers at Fort Venango. I was writing it during a maths lesson when it was confiscated and destroyed by an unsympathetic vandal of a master; the Nazi book-burnings were taking place about this time, and I brooded on the coincidence. I still haven't forgiven that man; as Dr Campbell said of James Boswell: 'When I think of the murdered literature that lies at the door of that drunken little ass ...'
But I digress. By this time I was getting past the 'tuppenny blood' stage (so far as I ever have) and had developed a new enthusiasm, for a work by one Robert Graves, embellished with a stone bust and the title 'I, Clavdivs'. Being unfamiliar with the Roman 'u' at that time, I went about calling it 'I, Klav-divs', but if this was derided I didn't notice, for Graves had me hooked, and I still rate Claudius as one of the four best historical novels I have ever read (Scott always excepted), the three others being Captain Blood, Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, and de Coster's Legend of Ulenspiegel.
I was caught reading Claudius during a Latin class (no wonder my education was erratic), and was rebuked by the teacher: 'You'll never get anywhere, Fraser, reading that sort of thing instead of Kennedy'. (Kennedy's ghastly Primer was the book of the century with Latin teachers). And then he added: 'And yet, who knows?' which was perceptive in its way, for wherever I've got (not, admittedly, very far) it has been as a result of devouring historical fiction.
All this must seem terribly juvenile and trivial -- 'tuppenny bloods', cloak and sword romances, and cinema swashbucklers as a springboard into history. Well, I have now been producing historical fiction of a fairly sensational kind for over thirty years, and I wish I had a pound for every reader's letter I have received saying, in effect: 'Thank you for awakening my interest in history, for telling me what I didn't know, and for pointing me to the sources'. That is the ultimate reward, and I know they mean it, because it happened to me too.
As I've said, it was Sir Daniel Darnley who led me to Esquemeling, and Conan Doyle to Froissart, Graves to Suetonius and Tacitus, Henry to Kinglake, Mayne Reid to Bancroft, the Wolf of Kabul to Kaye and Mallinson, and Sabatini to more than I can count. Yes, and Forever Amber to Macaulay, Pepys and Evelyn, and Gone With the Wind to Bruce Catton and Samuel Eliot Morison. Nor must I omit 1066 And All That, the best introduction to history ever written.
If this proves anything, it is that there is no truer guide to the past than good historical fiction. There is nothing phoney about it; while I tend to distrust approaches to education which suggest that it is an enjoyable game (when we know it is just hard slogging), the good costume novel is telling no more than the truth when it suggests that real history is fun and excitement and glamour and suspense; that it has all the ingredients of a great adventure story. But of course, that is what history is.
It does not matter if the historical novel is pure unashamed fiction, with plot and characters owing nothing to historic fact, so long as it is properly researched and reflects, as faithfully as the writer knows how, the period and its spirit. Better still, of course, to write what a Sabatini reviewer called 'history disguised as fiction' -- that is, to take historic truth and present it as a story, weaving in whatever fictitious incidents and characters are needed to oil the narrative's wheels, but never, never falsifying or distorting the truth on which it is based. Fairness above all, to the best of the writer's ability; it isn't always easy, but history and the reader deserve no less.
It is a rule which the best of them -- Scott, Dumas, Doyle, Graves, Forester, Sabatini, Roberts and the rest -- never broke, and far beyond the entertainment they gave and continue to give to countless millions, they did history good service, and set an impossible standard for those emulators who trudge vainly in their footsteps. I for one owe a lifetime's work to all of them. And to Sir Daniel Darnley.

how to avoid talking out of your arse

Our old Mucker Gerry has started a new Blog animated by the collapse of Respect.
Taking 'The Gorgeous One's' comments upon the desirability of the derriere of the antipodean chantreuse, and the row it triggered she has titled it the split of kylies arse.
As is our usual practise we have shamelessly stolen this piece from it:


The current collective consciousness on the left around oppression is such a miasma of postmodern, subjective, sentimental, victimised, emotive dreck. I feel a certain responsibility for having added my bit to the heap. Here by way of restitution, I offer the following insights painfully gleaned over a lifetime of politcal twaddle.
1. Membership of an oppressed group does not confer authority. It does not guarantee authenticity. It does not make you right. You should be judged by what you say and do not by what you are. I offer in evidence my Cabinet of the Oppressed: Margaret Thatcher (women’s rights), Robert Mugabe (racial equality), David Blunkett (disability), Osama bin Laden (international relations), Golda Meir (special responsibility for minorities), the entire Gandhi dynasty (democracy and anti-corruption). Feel free to nominate others to strengthen our inclusivity.
2. Being a VICTIM does not make you right. You may be worthy of sympathy, redress, sensitive consideration, but it has no bearing on the quality of your argument. Reality is dialectical: the victim becomes the oppressor, and vice versa.
3. History is not a licence to kill. An atrocity is an atrocity, however badly treated the perpetrators, wwhatever legitimate grievance they may have. I give you Nazi Germany, Dier Yassin, 9/11, Beslan…
4. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend. people and nations change sides; alliances shift. If you base your position on tactical considerations, you will end up incoherent. We endlessly repeat the argument that it was the West who armed Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. The argument applies equally to us. We may lack the fire power, but we give hostages to our future enemies if, for example, we lie about the repressive regime in Iran simply because it is threatened by the US: it will come back and bite us.
5. If you feel it, suspect it. If it feels good… wait a minute. Outrage is the crack of left polemic. There’s that flaming high - oh it feels so good! All too soon, you come down. You regret giving in to the seductive flame. You feel a bit bad, a bit ashamed, a bit depressed. Someone flames back. It feels good to join the fray again - a bigger hit. And so it goes on and on and on..Emotion brings an aura of authenicity. If you feel it, it must be real. Aint necessarily so. The evolutionary point of emotion is to move you to action. Sometimes it’s rash, dangerous to move. Except in a literal emergency, it’s better to think first. Left polemic is full of pseudo-emegencies, where the adrenalin pumping makes it feel like life and death, but nothing is lost by taking time to consider.
6. You have to laugh or else you’ll cry. The situation of the left today is a tragic absurdity, if you lose your sense of humour, you may as well shoot yourself.