HAND OVER FIST PRESS
SHEEP
IN THE ROAD
24
MAY DAY
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MAY DAY INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 24
The
CONTENTS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
again, lot of odds in this issue, but have a look!
Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com Cover: detail from Dimitry Moor poster, 1920
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Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round!
Turkey 05
There is no deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, it will appear whenever, or in your dreams!
France 37
Council Election
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Bishops Cleeve
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Baghdad 25 Peterloo 29
Letters 47
artwork: Alan Rutherford
Articles to: alanrutherford1@mac.com
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... the main poin again: war is pe freedom is slave ignorance is stre – and that was news, goodnigh
nts eace, ery, ength the ht
OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
There is no reason for the end to justify the means as long as there is something worthwhile to be justified in the end
Hello, Welcome to magazine number 24. Ignoring the election media circus, lies and bullshit that parades as policy or news ... mis-directing our attention, here is a magazine produced freely to be read freely.
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Depressing articles about the worst side of the human condition ... fuckers! Uplifting stories, rare as they are, desperately needed. All articles and artwork supplied, or found in newspapers lining the bottom of the canary cage, were gratefully received and developed with love, enthusiasm and sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press. Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will now appear very sporadically.
Maybe the last issue for a while (or maybe Slyce n’Ice not?) ... in the meantime, a luta continua!
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TURKEY ON THE BRINK Robert Arnott Sheep in the Road Foreign Correspondent Turkey’s constitutional changes endorsed in the referendum held on 16 April, threatens to take that country further down the road to an extreme dictatorship. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will assume sweeping new powers with which to pursue his authoritarian, neo-liberal and Islamist agenda. Already, since his election in 2014 to what had hitherto been a largely ceremonial post, Erdogan has tightened his grip over the media, the military and the judiciary, backed by his Justice and Development Party (AKP) and extreme nationalist and pro-clerical forces.
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A failed military coup against his regime last July has been used as the pretext for extending the repression. Liberal and pro-Kurdish media concerns have been taken over or shut down, scores of editors and journalists have been imprisoned along with a dozen left and pro-Kurdish MPs and more than one hundred thousand public servants and military personnel at every level have been sacked or arrested. Further shifts of authority from parliament to president will abolish the office of prime minister and allow him to appoint judges and top public officials while remaining in office until 2029.
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Although the Turkish electorate could cut his reign short, even this scenario now looks unlikely. The referendum campaign showed how a ruthless, authoritarian and sectarian demagogue, can overcome widespread secular, democratic, working class and minority national and religious opposition. This unlikeliness is underlined by ballot rigging. It appears that more than a million unstamped ballot papers were accepted for counting by the Supreme Electoral Council during the recent referendum, clearly in flagrant breach of its own rules. Erdogan’s eighteen reforms outlined in the referendum were passed by most fewer than two million votes out of fifty million, so these tactics could have proved decisive. still in force from last summer. As it is, his programme was rejected by the citizens of six of Turkey’s eight biggest cities, including Istanbul and the capital Ankara, as well as across the country’s Kurdish region. No wonder that the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Council of Europe monitors have unequivocally condemned the unfair, oppressive and irregular conditions in which the poll took place. They echo protests from the main opposition parties. Erdogan’s well-funded propaganda offensive now dominates state broadcasting and corporate media coverage; he and his party’s giant poster hoardings were everywhere. Dissident meetings are banned or have been attacked, as the government refused to lift or suspend the state of emergency. The response from the European Union has been a little more muted. Like the IMF and OECD, the EU Commission supports Erdogan’s austerity and privatisation policies. Like the United States and NATO, it welcomes his anti-Assad intervention in Syria, while staying quiet about Erdogan’s earlier assistance to ISIS and his war against Kurdish anti-ISIS fighters.
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Then there’s the deal whereby the EU pays Ankara to keep refugees out of Europe. Nonetheless, Turkey’s possible lurch towards the right should finally put an end to its application for EU membership. Sadly, it may also postpone any end to the illegal and often brutal Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus. It remains to be seen whether the British and US governments will denounce the anti-democratic trajectory of their NATO ally, as they should. On past form, mild rebukes will accompany a strengthening of business and military links. This makes it even more important that democrats, the Labour Movement and progressive people in Britain express their solidarity with their counterparts in Turkey. The Turkish people have few enough genuine friends at the top in London, Brussels or Washington DC and now face an even more dangerous future; especially if their president succeeds in his desire to reintroduce the death penalty.
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SOUK by P
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PJ CROOK
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Chokin’ clouds of dust settle on the crumbled ruins ... a final testimony to those buried beneath the massive stones of apathy 10
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VOTE! COUNTY COUNCIL ELECTION 4 May 2017 In Gloucestershire, standing in Bishops Cleeve are 4 candidates: Bob Bird, Conservative; Peter Richmond, Liberal Democrat; Rose Phillips, Labour; and Cate Cody, Green. Bishops Cleeve, oh Bishops Cleeve, based on the 2013 County Council voting trend, where out of the villages’ 9,911 registered voters as many as 6,900 voters just didn’t bother to vote, and those 3,011 that did vote, well ... they had been convinced by Tory or Liberal Democrat that it was a ‘2-horse race’ and voted accordingly ...
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Looking at voting statistics for 2013’s County Council elections in all Gloucestershire it would appear that Bishops Cleeve is not far from the norm and around 50-60% of voters countywide did not bother to vote. The Gloucestershire County Council make decisions that affect all of us living in Gloucestershire, like: they claim to improve the state of the roads (or promise to do so whilst blaming the previous administration); provide care for elderly and vulnerable people (HUH, can you trust the tories to do this?) ... so it is important that someone trustworthy is elected to represent and be held accountable ... you may agree a shake-up is needed? ... so it was a shame that, in 2013, 6,900 voters in Bishops Cleeve sat about all day in their jim-jams glued to daytime TV, it was their vote that could have made great changes to the plod-politics of Trumpton!
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Just a thought, what if someone had stood as the ‘What is the point and I don’t give a fuck but I won’t lie to you’ candidate ... there would have been a good chance of them winning that election ... However, sadly, in Bishops Cleeve, in 2013, Bob Bird, Conservative, beat Peter Richmond, LibDem, in a 2 horse race where John Hurley, Labour, came a sorry third ... in an election where only 3,011 Bishops Cleeve voters bothered to lick their pencils and put an x on a piece of paper!
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THE VILLAGE HAS GROWN SINCE 2013, BUT FROM PETER RICHMOND (standing again) WE HAVE THE SAME OLD LIBDEM TOSH ABOUT IT BEING A ‘2-HORSE RACE’ AND THAT VOTING FOR ROSE PHILLIPS OR CATE CODY IS A WASTED VOTE ... (bloody cheek!) FOR GOODNESS SAKE, IF YOU HAVE A VOTE ... PLEASE USE IT TO END THIS ‘GOOD OLD BOYS’ 2-HORSE RACE! Bishops Cleeve voting record: Bishops Cleeve population 15000-ish (maybe more?) Registered voters in 2013: 9911 Gloucestershire County Council election: Bishops Cleeve, 2 May 2013 Con. 1486; Libdem 1129; Lab 396 Total votes cast: 3011 (30% turnout) THIS MEANS THAT 6,900 REGISTERED VOTERS IN BISHOPS CLEEVE DID NOT VOTE! Get up on the 4 May, get dressed, lick your pencil and VOTE!
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Bishops Cleeve pictures
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FOR NO THOEMME PRODUCTI THEIR NO
REASON ES PRESS ION TURN OSES UP!
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BAGHDAD For much of its extraordinary life Baghdad, the ‘City of Peace’ as it has been called almost since its foundation, has been one of the most violent cities on earth. As US troops entered in 2003, they became the latest participants in a turbulent history stretching back to the year 762, when Caliph Mansur’s masons laid the first sun-baked bricks of his imperial capital. For 500 years Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid Empire, a marvel of glittering palaces, magnificent mosques, Islamic colleges and teeming markets watered by the Tigris. This was the city of the mathematician Al Khwarizmi, who invented algebra; of Horun al Rashid, the caliph immortalized in many tales of Baghdad in A Thousand and One Nights; of the great poet Abu Nuwas, whose playful verses scandalized society, and dozens of other astronomers, doctors, musicians and explorers. It was also a thriving trading emporium that attracted merchants from Central Asis and the Atlantic, its economy the envy of West and East alike.
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artwork: Onny Thomson
The history of Baghdad, since its foundation has been relentlessly tempestuous. Baghdadis have been tremendously talented in creating beauty and culture and, tragically, just as skilled in destroying them. Tet one of the world’s most violent cities is also one of its most resilient. Baghdad has seen foreign invaders come and go during the past 1,300 years, from eighth-century Byzantines to twnty-first-century Americans. It has survived the furious onslaught of Hulagu’s Mongols in 1258 and
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Tamerlane’s Tatars in 1401, when the Tigris ran red with blood and black with ink from the literary treasures of the ransacked House of Wisdom. It has shrugged off the indignity of falling under the rule of minor Turkmen chiefs, endured the Ottoman conquest of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent in 1534, the Iranian incursion of Shah Abbas in 1623 and four centuries of haughty Ottoman pashas. ‘The old Turkey-cock’s city of Horoun al Rothschild’ saw off the British invasion in 1917 and emerged from two world wars bloodied but unbowed. Beset by Baathist tyranny, Sadam’s dictatorship, a shattering war against Iran and the pulverizing Gulf War One, Baghdad still managed to haul itself through a savage regime of UN sanctions, only to be met with the full fury of the Iraq War in 2003. Instead of bringing the longed-for peace and calm after decades of unimaginable suffering, the conflict ignited Baghdad’s oldest demons, and sectarian strife exploded across the city and the nation. Once again the City of Peace was at war, and blood ran on the streets. Yet, despite all this devastation, Baghdadis do not give up on their city. With a prodigious history of intellectual, cultural and Islamic preeminence, it stands for dignity, pride and, above all, endurance. ‘It is a city unlike any of its peers,’ says Manaf, a retired diplomat steeped in the history of Baghdad. ‘You have to wonder whether the good caliph Mansur, if he had had the slightest foresight of the city’s bloody future, would have built his circular seat of power here. The cycle that sees Baghdad lurching between mayhem and prosperity has been long and gory, but of course we must have hope. May the city of Peace live up to its name before we ourselves depart to eternal peace.’ Lifted from: Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood by Justin Marozzi
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ETERLOO By the early 1800s many in Britain were suffering. The Corn Laws drove up the price of bread, and only two percent of the population were entitled to vote. On 16 August 1819 tens of thousands of men, women and children gathered on St Peter’s Field, Manchester to hear campaigners for political reform. Fearful of an uprising, the local authorities arrested the principal speaker, Henry Hunt, and sent in the Manchester Yeomanry, sabres at the ready, followed by the army. At least 18 people were killed on the field or later, and hundreds were injured. The radical press named this shameful massacre ‘Peterloo’, in ironic contrast to the recent glorious victory of Waterloo. The Tory government quashed all attempts to bring the authorities and army to account. Two years before, in 1817, they had brought liberal publisher William Hone to court three times for three of his satirical titles. He was acquited each time, garnering wide public support and a collection to help fund his activities. In early December 1819 Hone wrote and issued the cheap pamphlet The Political House That Jack Built, amid fierce debate about the massacre, illustrated by George Cruikshank. It was based on the traditional cumulative nursery rhyme ‘The House That Jack Built’, the ‘Jack’ in this case being John Bull. The poem’s fourth verse is illustrated with a printing press, the powerful technology for spreading ideas, which is repeatedly described as:
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‘This is THE THING, that, in spite of new Acts, And attempts to restrain it, by Soldiers or Tax, Will poison the Vermin, that plunder the Wealth That lay in the House That Jack Built.’
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Touching a raw nerve, Hone’s pamphlet went through multiple printings until mid-1821. Around 250,000 copies were sold, spreading the call for freedom of the press, and for electoral reform which eventually came in 1832.
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Reading both words and pictures together is vital to grasping the pamphlet’s full meaning: Cruikshank’s 13 engravings are essential to clarify and amplify Hone’s poetry, those words in bold capitals doubling as captions for the images. In the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (December 2011), American academics Michael Demson and Heather Brown argue persuasively that ‘these pamphlets announced a new era of – and a new medium for – radical activity and expression: comics’.
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Use your VOTE ... This is the alternative to an election!MAY 2017
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FRANCE BETTER A NEOLIBERAL THAN A FASCIST Robert Arnott Sheep in the Road Foreign Correspondent THE first round of the French presidential election represents a huge missed opportunity, not only for the people of France, but for Europe as a whole. Jean-Luc Melenchon came within a whisker of going into the run-off against either Emmanuel Macron or National Front leader, Marine Le Pen. Just one-quarter of the votes wasted on the Socialist Party and Trotskyist candidates would have made that a reality. Had Melenchon had to face Le Pen in the run-off election on 7 May, he would have won and become the most left-wing president in French history. As it is, Melenchon and his French Communist Party allies won almost twenty per cent of the poll for policies that challenged the establishment and big-business.
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artwork: FHK Henrion
The people of France, if they want to stop the neo-fascists, have little option but to vote for Macron in the second round. Although third-place candidate Francois Fillon has urged his right-wing supporters to plump for Macron, that would not guarantee Macron’s victory alone, even if they all obeyed. Not surprisingly, Macron’s aides have begun to play up his allegedly radical
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and anti-establishment credentials to entice left-wing electors. They have a rather steep hill to climb, if not a Pyrenean mountain.
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Former investment banker Macron enthusiastically supported the austerity policies of president Francois Hollande’s hugely discredited Socialist Party government in which he served as Business Minister, before leaving the sinking ship to start-up his own party. He now wants to add up to one hundred and twenty thousand civil service jobs to the French unemployment rate of ten per cent, as part of his five-year plan to stay within EU budget deficit rules. Macron also backed last year’s “labour flexibility” law imposed by Hollande, while calling for further restrictions on employment and collective bargaining rights. Predictably, the only cuts he proposes for business are in the fields of regulation and taxation. This approach will not inspire genuinely left-wing and anti-establishment electors. Indeed, it echoes the discredited policies of the French Socialist Party, which was eclipsed with little over six per cent of the vote last Sunday. In France on May 7, the choice is clear. When president Jacques Chirac faced Jean-Marie Le Pen in the final round in 2002, the slogan for many on the left was “better a crook than a fascist.” This time around, as Macron faces Le Pen’s daughter, it’s a case of “better the neoliberal than a fascist” – although, at the end of the day, Macron’s policies are likely to increase the populist appeal of the far right as well as of the real left. At least, after Brexit, Trump and heavens knows what on 8 June, the keeping of the fascists out in France, as well as in the Netherlands some weeks ago, does give one hope.
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oye editor, gulp... its a piss-taking watchdog!
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Writing worth reading Photos worth seeing
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http://www.coldtype.net
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Artwork: still unknown
oye matey editor ... we have had a few more comments and goodly remarks, and two articles from robert for publication
46 oh shit this letters page is just boring me to death
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WAFFLE LETTERS –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Dear Editor ... Same old ... same old! Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning? [this looks like a letter we have already published? ... (‘yes, some’, ed.)] Worryingly, we have left even that irrational road, the one where stupidity reigns, and now follow a path where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The shit-faced fudge of complacency and the mad spouters will now be defended to the death by the threat of nuclear war.
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Reason cannot be relied on in the present or near future (if ever?) and its utterly terrifying. Just who are the terrorists? For evidence of this I direct your attention to a President Donald Trump and his campaign to trump-trump-trumpety-trump all over the world. And also, as Britain’s government happily applies for Brexit, faking it over questions waving wet fish whackers, like Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, Scotland ... May and her ministers wander the despotic nations trying to flog them weapons ... Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges, Blairites and Tories – or the US circus and their trumping flunkies – will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on fucking us all. MAY 2017
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1 9 8 6 2 0 1 7 SHEEP IN THE ROAD (as magazine) #3 October 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014
KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014
IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014
NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 24
SHEEP
IN THE ROAD Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. Contributors have included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... A pleasure to produce ... thank you
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