They built barricades from paving stones, timber and overturned lorries.
Women threw the contents of chamber pots on to the heads of policemen and children hurled marbles under their horses and burst bags of pepper in front of their noses.
Next Wednesday marks the 70th anniversary of the day that Jews, communists, trade unionists, Labour party members, Irish Catholic dockers and the people of the East End of London united in defiance of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and refused to let them march through their streets.
Shouting the Spanish civil war slogan “No pasaran” - “They shall not pass” - more than 300,000 people turned back an army of Blackshirts.
Their victory over racism and anti-Semitism on Sunday October 4 1936 became known as the Battle of Cable Street and encapsulated the British fight against a fascism that was stomping across Europe.
Mosley planned to send columns of thousands of goose-stepping men throughout the impoverished East End dressed in uniforms that mimicked those of Hitler’s Nazis.
While doing research on marsh plants, Alterra found two plant species new for The Netherlands.
In a calcineous wells area in South Limburg, Eddy Weeda found the Carex davalliana, a species of Central European calcineous marshes.
In England, Belgium and Northern Germany, this species has become extinct.
Next, in the Wieden in Overijssel province, they discovered the [moss] Pseudocalliergon trifarium, characteristic for non acidic bogs in the Arctic and in high mountains.
Millions of anchovies — a protected species in Europe — have died in northern Spain after an unexplained mass beaching, officials said Friday.
The fish, all juveniles, were found stranded along large stretches of Colunga beach, 35 miles east of the port city of Gijon, a normally pristine seaside landscape in the verdant province of Asturias.
The church is challenging in court the IRS’s demand that it turn over documents to investigators. …
The Internal Revenue Service’s probe to strip Pasadena’s All Saints Church of tax-exempt status is an act of political censorship aimed at intimidating and suppressing opposition to the war in Iraq and the policies of the Bush administration.
I call for an immediate end to the investigation.
There is no legitimate basis for the government’s demand that the church turn over documents to IRS investigators.
The IRS action is a transparently political and anti-democratic attack, coming as it does from an administration that has done more to eliminate the separation of church and state than any government in US history.
Right-wing Christian fundamentalists exercise an effective veto power over government policy on such issues as stem cell research, abortion and gay rights.
Bush repeatedly invokes God as a justification for his policies, including the war in Iraq.
The administration funnels millions of dollars to right-wing religious organizations in the name of Bush’s program of “faith-based” initiatives.
About ancient Egypt, as reported by a contemporary Egyptian in conversation with Shelley, for the sake of the poem:
OZYMANDIAS of EGYPT
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In line 7, the word “survive” is a transitive verb, with “hand” and “heart” as its direct objects.
Thus, the lines mean that those passions (arrogance and sneer) have survived (outlived) both the sculptor (whose hand mocked those passions by stamping them so well on the statue) and the pharaoh (whose heart fed those passions in the first place).
The verb “mock’d” originally meant “to create/fashion an imitation of reality” (as in “a mockup”) before meaning “to ridicule” (especially by mimicking).
In Shelley’s day, the latter meaning was predominant (as seen in the works of William Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible), but in the specific context of “the hand that mock’d them”, we can read both “the hand that crafted them” and “the hand that ridiculed them”.
So, in Shelley’s view, the ancient Egyptian sculptor ridiculed his royal patron Ramses II (more familiar name of ‘Ozymandias’).
Amarna visual artists are said to depict Pharaoh Akhenaten as too thin to look good, which might have an element of mockery.
Akhenaten’s wife, famously beautiful Queen Nefertiti, according to recent research, was depicted, though not mockingly, realistically: as a middle aged beauty.
Back to Shelley: should we blame him for archaeological inaccuracy?
Not really, as when he wrote his poem, very little was known in Europe on ancient Egypt, especially on the content of hieroglyphic inscriptions.
French scholar Champolion would start the first decipherment of a hieroglyphic inscription, on the Rosetta Stone, only four years later, in 1822, the year when Shelley died.
Only in 1829, seven years after Shelley’s death, would Champollion decipher inscriptions at Ramses II’s Ramesseum, the inspiration for Shelley’s poem.
Finally, back to the Wikipedia article on Shelley’s poem:
The impact of the sonnet’s message comes from its double irony.
The tyrant declares, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Yet nothing remains of Ozymandias’ works but the shattered fragments of his statue.
So “the mighty” should despair — not, as Ozymandias intended, because they can never hope to equal his achievements, but because they will share his fate of inevitable oblivion in the sands of time.
A second irony lies in the “survival” of the tyrant’s character in the fragments being due not to his own powers but to those of the artist.
Discussion on art and social change in the USA: here.
RUSSIA is recalling its ambassador to Tbilisi after Wednesday’s provocative arrests of four Russian officers on spying charges, and is beginning a partial evacuation of its personnel from Georgia.
The arrests coincided with the first official visit by President Saakashvili to a disputed area on the border between Georgia and pro-Russian Abkhazia which has seceded from Georgia, along with South Ossetia.
Relations between Russia and Georgia have become increasingly tense since Saakashvili came to power in 2004 and President Bush spoke in the main square of the capital Tbilisi, narrowly avoiding assassination when a hand grenade was thrown from the crowd at him but failed to explode.
Saakashvili pledged to Bush that he would take the Caucasus nation out of Russia’s orbit and join Nato and the European Union.
The United States has called for Russian troops to leave South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The US presence in the Caucasus is connected to its desire to grab the oil and gas resources of the Caspian Sea region.
US and British oil companies are already established in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and an oil pipeline has been constructed to carry the oil to Mediterranian ports.
It was to show the topicality of Frantz Fanon’s thinking on the mechanisms of colonial domination that the Espaces Marx organized a debate on this subject on Saturday, 17 September, at the Rhone regional stand at the Fête de l’Humanité.
It was to discover this man, who was born in Fort-de-France in 1925, died in 1961, and buried in Algeria - a psychiatrist, writer, and thinker, of whom Aimé Césaire said “He is a paraclet, one whose life has become a call to us to live.”
Alice Cherki, psychiatrist and author of the biography Frantz Fanon, a Portrait, described with emotion the man with whom she had worked, first in the psychiatric service in Blida, then in Tunisia, where that militant awakener of consciousness, fighting for the independence of Algeria, had to find refuge, having been expelled by the French government.
The decision, announced by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, came as the country’s Data Privacy Commission released a 20-page report finding that the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, had improperly turned over data from millions of global financial transactions to US antiterror investigators.
“It has to be seen as a gross miscalculation by SWIFT that it has, for years, secretly and systematically transferred massive amounts of personal data for surveillance without effective and clear legal basis and independent controls in line with Belgian and European law,” the report says.
That he, and Jack Straw, now have second thoughts on the war, makes them at least somewhat better than Bush and Blair who are “staying the course” of bloodshed.
However, it is still regrettable that many politicians wait with coming back to their senses till after leaving office.
From London daily The Guardian:
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