PROPAGANDA: Edward Bernays is often referred to as “the father of public relations,” Born in Austria in 1891, and Sigmund Freud’s nephew—published his seminal work, Propaganda (1928), in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity. Excerpt:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism
1935
“WHY DON’T THOSE DAMNED OIL COMPANIES FLY THEIR OWN FLAGS ON THEIR PERSONAL PROPERTY—MAYBE A FLAG WITH A GAS PUMP ON IT?”
Major General Smedley D. Butler was a military hero of the first rank, the winner of two Medals of Honour, a true 'fighting marine' whose courage and patriotism could not be doubted. Yet he came to believe that the wars in which he and his men had fought and bled and died were all pre-planned conflicts, designed not so much to defend America as to bloat the balance sheets of US banks and corporations. Excerpt from his pamphlet ‘War Is a Racket’, originally published in 1935: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics fo r the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 19021912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts I operated on three continents.”
of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific
data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints.”
Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”
Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund—he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders
the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.
“We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” We govern what the public think about.
IN AN ERA long before the advent of the periodical press, the pamphleteers were the world’s proto-journalists. As a pape r platform for a spectrum of religious fanatics, eccentrics, social commentators, an d satirists, the pamphlet evolved as a weapon of propaganda for powerful vested interes t groups, political parties, governments—and revolutionists.
AS the pamphlet form took root in the sixteenth century, then so English prose emerged from its antique form with an extraordinary rash of stylistic innovatio ns to embrace such unlikely postures as subversive fulmination, cod polemic, ferocious satire, and manifesto. In times of religious ferment, civil war, colonial unrest and revolution, such texts—risky or even dangerous to publish—were often the product of secret presses and anonymous authors
At the other exposure, there were those who encountered that risk and found notoriety or lasting fame along the way. In the hands of a select few, the pamphlet reached a level of high achievement beyond any ordinary Grub Street reckoning.
The narrative reveals how the early journalists were driven not so much by scandal and sensationalism at home and abroad but by major historical events on the world stage: the Reformation, the English Revolution, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the revolutions in America and in France. Along a mighty timeline, these were the great political tides that led to the birth of journalism, the periodical press, and the emergence of the fourth estate.
ORIGINS AND THEMES
COVER: Julian Assange
By Harry Rekas, AI assisted A REVOLUTION IN JOURNALISM: WIKILEAKS AND JULIAN ASSANGEJulian Assange has won 24 major awards for journalism and social activism, receiving glowing endorsements from the most prominent journalists in the world. Assange restored to journalism its noblest ideal, an ideal that has been increasingly perverted and debased by the corporate media in their quest for power: the idea of journalists as a Fourth Estate.
Those in the Mockingbird mass media eat their own effluent like a sort of group ouroboric scatophagia. To maintain their perverse form of “mental hygiene” they studiously avoid information sources outside of their own circular reprocessing of yesterday’s delusions into fresh steaming piles for today’s consumption. They have become so accustomed to feeding off their own delusions that if a hint of reality were to intrude into their looped intellectual food chain their minds would reject it like poison. They would likely exhibit physical symptoms, which doubtless would be attributed to evil Soviet mind rays from Havana.
THE word pamphlet has its roots with a form of Latin love poem, popular in the twelfth century: Pamphilus, seu de Amore , later foreshortened to Pamphilet, which is thought to derive from Pan as the Greek god of the pasture (paein), a chaser of nymphs. The pamphlet, then, served as the agency of transmission for such passion in the form of verse.
In the great age of pamphleteering, though, there was not much in the way of love poetry on offer. The terms Blast and Broadside are repeatedly associated with the vituperative nature of the form, as are Trumpet and even Bugle. In such soundings-off, the pamphlet form tended to be viewed as an instrument of anti-establishmentarian subversives, or as a source of unreliable or biased news. There was always the risk, too, that the pamphlet, as with some old blunderbuss, might explode in its author’s face, such that these same subversives might identify themselves
IS THE PAMPHLET, LIKE THE DOG, A DOMESTICATED CREATURE, CAPABLE OF PERFORMING DIRECTED TASKS,OR IS IT, LIKE THE WOLF, FIERCE, WILD AND NOT SUSCEPTIBLE TO CONTROL?
“LET THE GULL’D FOOL THE TOILS OF WAR PURSUE, WHERE BLEED THE MANY TO ENRICH THE FEW”
–William Shenstone, c1700s
“THE BEST DEFENSE AGAINST PROPAGANDA: MORE PROPAGANDA.”
ISBN: 9780955183447 (PAPERBACK) ISBN: 9780955183454 (HARDBACK)
From the best-selling “blockbuster” of the era, Common Sense (1776), by international revolutionary, journalist and whistleblower Thomas Paine.
Originally launched in 1948 for
The World Is Ruled & Governed By Opinion was published in 1641 by Thomas Banks. The text (partly shown) is by Henry Peacham, a writer and illustrator. Peacham collaborated with Wenceslaus Hollar, who is the artist behind the ballad’s illustration. This is one of a number of works they collaborated on. In the illustration you can see Opinion (the blindfolded woman) crowned with the Tower of Babel. She has a globe on her lap, a chameleon on her left arm and a staff in her right hand. In the tree are various pamphlets and broadside ballads. On the left is a jester-like man watering the tree. On the
BY the early years of the eighteenth century, the pamphleteers were employing satire of a vicious or excruciating nature, even at a sophisticated or sublime level there were those outsiders or non-conformists who were unable to resist aiming the pamphlet—missile to blast the establishment. Jonathan Swift, author of Tale of a Tub (1704), and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is the usual suspect for one of the most notorious pamphlets ever produced. If A Modest Proposal (1729) is high irony or satire, not everyone could be counted on to see the tract in quite that way. The ‘proposal’ of the title: that the poor should sell their babies to the rich as a source of food.. The idea that the tract might be a satirical shock-tactic passed over many heads; among the gentry, the tract was considered as “in poor taste”—a judgement basted with unintended irony. The pamphlet, supported by deadly relevant statistics, is generally regarded as a masterpiece of sustained ironical narrative.
THE Enlightenment is generally considered by historians as the span of the eighteenth century when ideas were being considered through reason and philosophical enquiry instead of the accepted norms of tradition. As such, this is a time of revolution in America and in Europe, when the established structures of society are being replaced through innovation in science, politics, and government. In this era, the zenith of the age of the pamphleteers is well represented by Tom Paine (1737–1809). The beginnings were not encouraging for the man who would eventually produce Rights of Man (1791 – 92). For Tom Paine, born in Thetford in Norfolk, the journey from stay-maker to excise man, then revolutionary journalist,
makes for a highly improbable case history in the chronicles of the pamphleteers. In late 1774, he travelled to America, where he found employment as the managing editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine
Tom Paine achieved great fame in the colonies with his forty-eight-page Common Sense, which made the case, with perfect timing (10 January 1776), for American independence from Britain. The byline “Written by an Englishman” concealed his identity, since the views expressed were high treason in the eyes of England.
For the main title of the pamphlet, Paine abandoned the tradition of the quaint, bizarre and the enigmatic; and, although Common Sense considers a great theme, the title indicates no such epic quality or dramatic perspective. Then again, there is such a quality as the power of understatement. The pamphlet sold 500,000 copies in its first year. The famous sentence: “There is something very absurd in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” forms part of Paine’s case for the break with England. In the greater sphere, Common Sense is considered to have shaped the American Declaration of Independence
IN THE AGE OF ORGANISED PROPAGANDA, saturation television coverage, disinformation, news entertainment, public relations, the libel laws, lobbyists, the spinmeister, and the ‘open sewer’ of the internet, the role of the pamphlet has been eclipsed. The authorities have never had it so good, since the public do not know what to believe in an ocean of disinformation.
From Gutenberg to the present, a direct link is traceable from pamphlet to web page, with the twin spectres of propaganda and censorship haunting these media in the long struggle between free expression, with its tendency towards nonsense, and political power, with its inclination to lunacy and tyranny. As such, these aspects of society appear to be made for each other. n
right is the aristocratic cavalier labelled “Viator”, or traveller, who is the person Opinion is debating with in the ballad’s text.
The ballad and its illustration are a good example of views held in the 1640s about the dangers of print, news and opinion—Opinion is an inversion of Justice, watered by a fool, producing nothing but confusion and a world turned upside down. This is ironic, given that the pamphlet’s publisher, Thomas Banks, was a key producer of cheap ballads, pamphlets and newsbooks during the 1640s. Paradoxically, the ballad’s very medium cuts across its message.
THOMAS PAINE’s Common Sense (1776) had helped pave the way for the American Declaration of Independence. In March 1791, Paine responded to Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution with the first part of his Rights of Man, dedicated to George Washington. The book caused a sensation, went through eight editions in that year, and was quickly reissued in the United States and distributed by the Jeffersonian societies
AINE was one of the first journalists to use media as a weapon against the entrenched power structure. Between his birth in 1737 and his death in 1809, enormous political upheavals turned the western world upside down—and Paine was in the middle of the biggest ones. His writings put his life at risk in every country he lived in—in America for rebellion, in England for sedition, in and France for his insistence on a merciful and democratic revolution. At the end of his life, he was shunned by the country he helped create, reviled as an infidel, forced to beg friends for money, denied the right to vote and refused burial in a Quaker cemetery. His grave was desecrated and his remains stolen.
The writing and distribution of seditious pamphlets that skewered the legitimacy of the monarchy and challenged the primacy of the high prelates of the Church of England. He was promptly convicted of publishing writing of “dangerous consequence and evil effect”.
For these intolerable opinions, the royal tribunal sentenced him to be publicly flogged through the streets of London, from Fleet Prison, built on the tidal flats where Fleet Ditch spilled out London’s sewage, to the Palace Yard at Westminster, then a kind of public showground for weekly spectacles of humiliation and torture. By one account, Lilburne was whipped by the King’s executioner more than 500 times, “causing his shoulders to swell almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords”.
The bloodied writer was then shackled to a pillory, where, to the amazement of the crowd, he launched into an impassioned oration in defense of his friend Dr John Bastick, the puritan physician and preacher. Only weeks before, Bastick’s ears had been slashed off by the King’s men as punishment for publishing an attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, an essay that Lilburne had happily distributed
DEPICTION OF COBBETT CARRYING A SACK CONTAINING THOMAS PAINE’S BONES
In 1819 journalist William Cobbett, a critic turned admirer, dug up Paine’s body without permission and took it to London with grand plans for a memorial that would inspire England’s democracy movement. The memorial never materialised. The boxed bones were passed down to Cobbett’s descendants and eventually sold off, bit by bit. So Paine’s bones have ended scattered over several continents, not altogether inappropriate for a man who proclaimed, “my country is the world”.
HE American Revolution was not a revolution engineered by poor people or by people who sold rats for a penny a pound down on the Long Wharf in Boston. It was engineered by the wealthy, who wanted to transfer the power of wealth from London to New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The people who fought it were those who sold rats on the Long Wharf—the tinsmiths, the blacksmiths, and so on. But those who gained the most from it were the wealthy—the slave owners.
“Freedom John Lilburne on the pillory at Westminster,18 April, 1638“Common sense will tell us that the power which hath endeavoured to subdue us is, of all others, the most improper to defend us”
“THE PAMPHLET IS USUALLY SET APART FROM THE ESSAY AS A PAPER MISSILE OR BROADSIDE IN THE WAR OF WORDS”IWC 1950s Military Issue Mark XI
Above: details from William Hone’s short news sheet, A Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang, 1821.
“In taking on these battles, he blazed a trail for those in the future who opposed government attempts to use the courts to silence their critics. ”
far and wide. Lilburne gushered forth about this barbaric injustice for a few moments, before his tormentors gagged his mouth with a urine soaked rag. After enduring another two hours of torture, the guards dragged him behind a cart back to the Fleet, where he was confined in irons for the next two and a half years. This was the first of “Free-Born” John Lilburne’s many parries with the masters of Empire. While in his foul cell in Fleet prison, Lilburne was kept in solitary confinement on orders of the Star Council (Star Chamber), his lone visitor a maid named Katherine Hadley. Somehow the maid was able to sneak pen,
paper and ink past the Fleet’s guards to the young radical. According to Lilburne’s own description, he was “lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands and legges,” when he began to write furiously, penning a gruesome account of his mock trial and torture, The Work of the Beast, and a scabrous assault on the Anglican bishops, Come Out of Her, My People. These pamphlets were smuggled out of Newgate, printed in the LowLands and distributed through covert networks across England to popular acclaim and royal indignation.
Oliver Cromwell, then a Puritan leader in the House of Commons, took up Lilburne’s cause, giving a stirring speech in defense of the imprisoned writer. It swayed Parliament, which voted to release Lilburne from jail. Lilburne emerged from prison grateful to Cromwell, but not blind to the general’s dictatorial ambitions: he would later pen savage attacks on Cromwell and his censorious functionaries.
Soon Lilburne joined the Parliamentary Army, fighting with distinction against the royal forces in numerous clashes, including the battle at the Edgehill, the first major encounter of the English Civil War, before being captured at Brentford on 12th November, 1642. Once again he faced trial, this time at Oxford, for “taking up arms against the King.” Lilburne was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death. But his friends in Parliament rose to his defense,
threatening similar reprisals against Royalist prisoners. A prisoner exchange was arranged and Lilburne was on the loose again, leading soldiers into battle against the king’s troops, eventually rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
But in 1645 Lilburne abandoned Cromwell’s New Model Army, known for singing the Psalms as they clamored into battle, after he was told that he must swear to the Solemn League and Covenant, Cromwell’s equivalent of a religious loyalty oath to the Presbyterian church. Lilburne, an Independent, hated oaths and had defied the Star Chamber, in his first prosecution, by refusing to take the oath ex officio, which he argued violated the ancient right of habeas corpus.
But by now, Lilburne was plotting a more profound insurrection aimed at democratizing the army, as well as the rest of the nation. “All and every particular and individual man and woman, that ever breathed in the world, are by nature all equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or magisterial power one over or above another.”
These were the opening shots of the Levellers, aimed, in the words of one observer, “to sett all things straight and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom.” It was a movement energized by writers, headlined by Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn, and the pamphlets flew off the
“Until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly—or very—drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer. The arrival of coffee triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry and auctioneering all burst into life in seventeenth century coffeehouses—in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s and Garraway’s—spawning the credit, security and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.”
WILLIAM HONE (1700–1842) is known today chiefly in three historical contexts:
1 In 1817 he successfully defended himself against the Attorney General’s ex officio charges of blasphemy and sedition, thus earning a significant place in the history of a free press in England. 2 In 1819-21 he collaborated with George Cruikshank to produce a series of illustrated satirical pamphlets whose wide popularity helped define the public reaction to such events as the “Peterloo” massacre and the Queen Caroline affair. 3 In 1825-27 he edited and published the Every-Day Book, an antiquarian miscellany that was widely read and influential throughout the nineteenth century.
By William Hone, images by George Cruikshank, The Political House that Jack Built, 1819. Excerpt:
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.
“The seals of office glitter in his eyes; / He climbs, he pants, he grasps them— / To be a pest where he was useful once.”
THIS IS
ILLIAM HONE with illustrator George Cruikshank produced four main publications that relate to the government-sanctioned killings at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819. His three best-selling and most influential pamphlets, The Political House that Jack Built, The Man in the Moon, and A Slap at Slop, all address the outrage in Manchester—with combined sales of around 250 000 copies, they were read by the full spectrum of society, from Cabinet ministers to soldiers.
N the 16th of August 1819 the huge open area around what's now St Peter's Square, Manchester, played host to an outrage against over 60,000 peaceful pro-democracy and anti-poverty protesters; an event which became known as The Peterloo Massacre. An estimated 18 people, including four women and a child, died from sabre cuts and trampling. Nearly 700 men, women and children received extremely serious injuries. All in the name of liberty and freedom from poverty. The Massacre occurred during a period of immense political tension and mass protests. Fewer than 2% of the population had the vote, and hunger was rife with the disastrous corn laws making bread unaffordable.
“One of the most interesting things in the history of the coffee drink is that wherever it has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people began to think, they became dangerous to tyrants and to foes ofliberty of thought and action. Sometimes the people became intoxicated with their newfound ideas; and, mistaking liberty for license, they ran amok, and called down upon their heads persecutions and many petty intolerances.”
Julie Alpine julie@thedura.com.au
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Would pull down 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.
That back the Public Informer, who Would put down 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.
1815–1818
The years 1815-1817 saw Hone consolidating his status as a writer of radical critiques of the government, in addition he began to write in his characteristic parodic/satirical style.
At the beginning of 1817— when political tensions and the threat of social unrest were running so high that the government suspended habeas corpus—Hone began publishing a radical weekly newspaper called the Reformists’ Register. He wrote and published four parodic pamphlets that used the forms of church liturgy to attack the self-serving corruption of the current government. These latter pamphlets caught the eye of Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth and his network of domestic spies, and on 3 May, 1817, Hone was arrested on ex officio charges of blasphemy and sedition. He was held in the King’s Bench prison until 2 July when he was released on orders from the Chief Justice himself.
During his stay in prison, Hone began preparing for his forthcoming libel trials by collecting other parodies that used liturgical models for politicial ends. His strategy was to argue that many writers—including the current cabinet minister George Canning—had published such parodies and that the Attorney General’s claim that such parodies were blasphemous was obviously very partial. For a few months, it looked as though the libel charges would be dropped, but then in late November of 1817, Hone received notice of his trial date. The trials themselves constituted a strangely comical episode in English law. The Attorney General had singled out three of the offending parodies for separate trials, and these occurred on successive days, 18, 19, and 20 December. In each case, the Attorney General’s argument held that using liturgical texts as the basis for comic-satirical parody was an act of blasphemy because it necessarily degraded the sacred quality of religious language. In each case, Hone brought in armloads of books containing liturgical parodies written by highly respected persons (including George Canning), and he defended himself by reading these parodies in the courtroom. There were frequent eruptions of laughter from the packed galleries, and equally frequent but pompously ineffectual warnings from the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough. After each day’s trial, the jury returned a verdict of “Not Guilty” which was met by enthusiastic cheers from the gallery. The trials were widely publicised and as a result Hone became a popular hero—a kind of humble common man who had bravely stood up to the political authorities of the day. The forces of repression, as Hone put it later, had been “laughed out of court.” n
‘Some coffeehouses are a resort for learned scholars and for wits, others are the resort of dandies or politicians, or of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.’ César de Saussure.
JOHN LILBURNE
Hone had a new and objectivedangerous of indict- ing a system,political not simply its office holders.
“The Star Chamber” reached such a level of infamy during the reign of Charles I that the term “Star Chamber” still exists in our idiom today. It is generally used to denote any judicial or quasi-judicial action, trial, or hearing which so grossly violates standards of ‘due process’ that a party appearing in the proceedings (hearing or trial) is denied a fair hearing.
In a sense, the court was a supervisory body, overseeing the operations of lower courts, though its members could hear cases by direct appeal as well. The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes.
The Court’s more sinister side began to emerge by the end of the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century, when it began to lose its ‘civil’ side and, notwithstanding its inability to mete out death, by the reign of Charles I, the Star Chamber had achieved a terrible reputation for severity and tyranny.
Charles I routinely used the Star Chamber to examine cases of sedition, which meant that the court could be used to suppress opposition to royal policies. It came to be used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to trial in the lower court. During the time of Charles’ “personal rule” he ruthlessly stamped down on the freedom of the press and religious and political dissenters.
“Lilburne had a kind of Animal Farm moment, realising that the parliamentary pigs might be no better than the humansroyalist had been. This convinced him
presses, with more than 2,100 different tracts being printed in 1645. This prompted the repressive acts known as the Ordinances, which suppressed public assemblies, outlawed meetings and imposed strict censorship of the press. Cromwell’s notorious Committee of Examinations, essentially Parliament’s version of the Star Chamber, was tasked with investigating “scandalous” writing, destroying independent presses and arresting writers, publishers and vendors of documents deemed seditious.
These testy impertinences landed Lilburne in Newgate again, this time on charges of libel. But 2,000 leading Londoners signed a petition on his behalf and public riots in his defense prompted his quick release. The experience only served to sharpen his resistance to Cromwell, who he saw as a dictatorial sell-out to the forces of Empire, and the leading agent of state oppression. He fired off a threatening public letter to Cromwell, which darkly concluded: “rest assured if ever my hand is upon you, it shall be when you are in your full glory.”
In 1649. Lilburne is imprisoned once more in the Tower of London, along with
four of his Leveller cohorts, including the brilliant polemicist Richard Overton. This time they’d attacked Cromwell head-on, accusing him of being a reactionary force roaming the land with secret police threatening all dissenters. The charge was treason. His wife Elizabeth, herself a forceful agitator for peace and the rights of women, wrote an urgent pamphlet in his defense, titled A Petition of Women. Elizabeth got 10,000 people to sign a petition on Lilburne’s behalf. He was soon released. But arrested again within the year. This time for denouncing Cromwell’s genocidal raids on Ireland. But the jury refused to convict him and Cromwell had him banished from England. Lilburne spent a few months in Holland writing incendiary pamphlets before sneaking back into England. He was soon discovered and arrested on charges of treason once again. Again the jury refused to convict. But Cromwell refused to release him, shuttling Lilburne from the Tower, to the Mount Orgueil, a dank Norman castle in Guernsey, and finally to Dover castle. One of his guards described Lilburne as being
tougher to handle than “ten Cavaliers.” While locked in Dover castle, Lilburne fell under the spell of the Quakers, and became a radical pacifist, writing that he had finished with “carnal sword fightings and fleshly bustlings and contests.” His pen never stopped, though. The pamphlets continued to flow until his death in 1657. Lilburne refused to be a martyr. He faced the beast, endured prisons and tortures that would give even an inmate at
Guantanamo the chills, and remained defiant and upbeat. He lived the life of an escape artist, who could talk himself into and out of trouble, almost effortlessly. His mind ran in overdrive and so, apparently, did his mouth. His friend Harry Marten, the regicide, quipped: “If the world was emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne.” And so it should. n
Pictured: John Lilbourne.
Detail from a broadside on Laudianism linked with repression of Puritan protest in England and with Catholic excesses during the war in Ireland 1645.
“The forces that Lilburne confronted “with violent and bitter expressions” have coalesced once again (not that they ever really dissipated, mind you) and threaten to impose their preemptive will upon the living creatures of the world.— Militarism, religious bigotry, official censorship, prosecutorial inquisitions and torture, imperial expansion, monopolists, land grabbers, and those who buy and sell the earth and humans, too. In short, the whole sick crew. / As you steel yourself to confront a thuggish new breed of censors and imperialists, ask yourself: what would Lilburne do?”
that the war was not betweenreally king and parliament, so much as between the people and tyranny.”
“LILBURNE HAD A KIND OF ANIMAL FARM MOMENT, REALISING THAT THE PARLIAMENTARY PIGS MIGHT BE NO BETTER THAN THE ROYALIST HUMANS”.
—Julian Assange
“Oh,lookyeah, at those dead bastards.” “Light‘em allup.Come on,fire!”
Called both a “great American hero” and “the most hated lawyer in America,” William Moses Kunstler was born in New York in 1919.
Kunstler was an American radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, including the Chicago seven.
Kunstler’s outspoken opposition to war, racism and political repression resulted in an extensive FBI file.
In this excerpt Kunstler talks about what he sees as the “terrible myth” of organised society and the justice system, which he believes governments throughout history have used to put people to death with an “aura of legality.”
ND that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that
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a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death, all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext.”
“I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man.”
thephotographersgallery.org.uk
CHRIS KILLIP is one of the most influential figures of British photography. This retrospective exhibition of more than 140 works serves as the most comprehensive survey of the photographer's work to date and includes previously unseen images.
£8 / online £6.50 / concession £5. FRI 07 OCT 2022–SUN 19 FEB 2023. 16-18 Ramillies Street london W1F 7LW
Sea coaler in Lynemouth, Northumberland, by Chris Killip
“The power does not belong to the government. It belongs to the people, but the people have to claim it. And you see power without transparency, disempowers the people, so they cannot oversee and control the government if there is secrecy. And that’s precisely why governments want secrecy because they don’t want to be controlled Good systems are systems that don’t give any space to unckecked power. BUT ONCE IT HAS BECOME A CRIME TO TELL THE TRUTH, THEN WE WILL HAVE TYRANNY.”
—Nils Melzer, Professor of International Law and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture & Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. 2020.
“NEARLY EVERY WAR THAT HAS STARTED IN THE PAST 50 YEARS HAS BEEN A RESULT OF MEDIA LIES. THE MEDIA COULD HAVE STOPPED IT IF THEY HADN’T REPRINTED GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA.”
“I WANTED TO RECORD PEOPLE’S LIVES BECAUSE I VALUED THEM.“
“I believe that nature is the greatest storyteller. In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in balance with nature. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”
The most popular plate from Nicolaes Tulp’s book, showing the earliest known western drawing of an orangutan. From: Nicolaes Tulp’s renowned work, labelled a ‘Book of Monsters’, his Amstelredamensis Observationes Medicae, 1641, Book III, 56th Observation
“In Aesop’s Fables the actions of animals were used to provide models of good or bad behavior: ants modeled diligence, the tortoise determination, the hare complacency, and so on. The nobility of the unicorn and the uncompromising savagery of the cyclops served as opposing models, inspiring and warning, for human society.”
BETWEEN the 15th and the 18tn century, a great ex tinction took place. Unlike the later wave of extinction that would sweep away species after native species in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, and beyond, this earlier extinction was one of the mind. It did not wipe out living creatures, but rather relegated to the realms of pure fantasy—a rich bestiary that had charmed, inspired, and frightened people in ancient and medieval times.
Belief in their existence had been sustained over centuries by the faithful repetition of the statements of ancient authorities such as the Roman naturalist, Pliny. According to these stories, fantastical creatures fed on many different things—sometimes humans, or their own young, or honey, or just the air—but the meat and drink of their sustained existence in the human imagination was mystery and symbolism.
In ancient times and during the Middle Ages, animals were most commonly seen as providing moral examples to humankind.
In Aesop’s Fables, as in the Panchatantra of India, the actions of animals were used to provide models of good or bad behavior:
ants modeled diligence, the tortoise determination, the hare complacency, and so on.
The nobility of the unicorn and the uncompromising savagery of the cyclops served as opposing models, inspiring and warning, for human society. Modern scientific method cut its teeth driving these creatures to extinction. From being real but remote figures in a diverse and wondrous global fauna, they became the stuff of refined allusion, wispy figments of the collective imagination. This process of extinction was driven partly by the European overseas expansion that began in the late fifteenth century.
Those who sailed to distant lands found many marvels, but they often failed to find
confirmation of the wonderful creatures they had once taken for granted. And yet, here and there, traveling Europeans encountered something that conjured up ancient imaginations and presented the emerging inquisitive scientific frame of mind with a challenge. Early in the seventeenth century a Dutch physician, Jacobus Bontius, neatly captured the spirit of the age in his short chapter on the “Ourang Outang” when he invoked the memory of creatures that Pliny had called “satyrs,” and provided the rudiments of an eyewitness account of something remarkable and perplexing that he had seen for the first time. Travel tales, too, continued to rework old legends, but there was a new and in-
creasingly irresistible insistence on the direct evidence of eyewitnesses and the inspection of specimens, rather than on the pronouncements of venerable scholars.
Orangutans have never been of practical importance to humans in the way of domestic animals, prey, or predators, but along with the chimpanzee, the orangutan has had a special place in the imagination because of its striking similarity to humans. Their hu manlike behaviors gave rise to a rich store of ape lore, associating them with foolishness, sinfulness, slyness, and imitation. But these apes had been miniature, vulgar parodies of humanity that did not raise metaphysical questions of any great
‘Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them.
The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. There is no arguing with it. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depth of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. And so, given your sensibility—you who are already becoming a selfexiled poet —you find that nostalgia is a form of rebellion. The world in your heart merges with the world that used to be. At least you have somewhere to hide.’
depth. The great apes that began to appear in European travelers’ tales, and as occasional curiosities exhibited in Europe itself in the 16th century, were different, closer to humans in size, in physical form, and in behavior than any creature that had pre viously come to the attention of the West. At a time when assumptions about the nature of humanity that had governed medieval thinking were under unprecedented questioning, the red ape and its African relatives presented observers with the exciting challenge of assessing, expressing, and judging just how much of humanity there could be in a creature from the jungle and just what it might mean for humans to know that there
was something of the jungle in them. In their tropical homelands, however, orangutans appear to have attracted much less attention from indigenous people than they did from Europeans. For Indonesians, even those who lived closest to the red apes in the jungles of Borneo, the orangutan seems to have conjured up no special metaphysical challenges; it was normally no threat to humans and could only survive far from human settlement. Orangutans appear in some folkloric tales, but the most striking ones seem to have been brought to Borneo by Europeans and then re-exported, as it were, as ostensibly indigenous beliefs. n
while human populations 24-year-old Ujian with his The Javanese claimed that the orangutans could talk, but did not because they would be forced to work.
If bronze could change!
Puck magazine cover by Keppler,1908, shows an unhappy Statue of Liberty; her torch spewing smoke of “Lawlessness”, her tablet states “The Unwritten Law” and she is holding a handgun and a rope labeled “Lynching”
Published Aug 18, 2014
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression ... But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West /
Since the mid 1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion.
For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian preident—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
/ Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next.
Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive
AUTHORS: Claire Provost Matt Kennard
PUBLISHED:
04 May 2023
FORMAT: Hardback
EDITION: 1st
EXTENT: 296
ISBN: 9781350269989
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing
Economic Hit Men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organisations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalisation. I should know; I was an EHM
THE CORPORATOCRACY
THE corporatocracy is a group of individuals, mostly men, who run our biggest corporations and act as the emperor of this empire. They control our media either through direct ownership or advertising. They control most of our politicians because they finance their campaigns either through their corporations or through personal contributions that come out of the corporations. They’re not elected, they don’t serve a limited term, they don’t report to anybody. They are very much running things, working under the premise that they should maximise profits regardless of the environmental and social costs.
At the very top of the corporatocracy, it’s hard to tell whether the person is working for a private corporation or the government because they’re always moving back and forth. So one moment he’s the President of a big construction company like Halliburton and the next he’s Vice President of the United States or the President who’s
in the oil business. This is true whether you get democrats or republicans in the office. There’s moving back and forth through the revolving door, so you really can’t distinguish. Our government is invisible a lot of the time. Its policies are carried out by the corporations and being forged by the corporatocracy and then are presented to the government to become government policy.
It’s an incredibly cosy and dangerous relationship. Big corporations ultimately depend on the banking system and the banks depend on the corporations to make their money, which they have to invest somewhere, so they invest it primarily in the corporations. They have a symbiotic relationship. One could not exist without the other. The corporatocracy moves people back and forth between these things working with each other, so the big corporations almost always have financial people on their boards and the big financial institutions almost always have corporate people on their boards. There’s in-
“We go in and we try to corrupt governments and get them to accept these huge loans—and basically own them. If we fail, as I failed in Panama with Omar Torrijos, and Ecuador with Jaime Roldos—men who refuse to be corrupted—then the second line of defence is when we send in the Jackals who will assassinate the people who won’t be corrupted— and that’s what happened with Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldos.”
terweaving and intermeshing at the very top where all of them at one point or another probably worked for the government or with the government, while people come into the banking system or the corporate system when they retire from government. Maybe they go back again at some point in time, so it’s a very insidious and I have to say, a corrupt system. A system that just feeds into the hands of what we call the corporatocracy which to a large degree works against everybody else in the world.
THE ECONOMIC HITMAN
WE economic hitmen really have been the ones responsible for creating this first truly global empire and we work in many different ways. Perhaps the most common is, we will identify a country that has resources like oil and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the world bank or one of its organisations. But the money never actually goes to that country. Instead it goes to our big corporations to build the infrastructure for projects in that country—power plants, industrial parks, ports, things that benefit only a few rich people in that country in addition to our corporations, but really don’t help the majority of people at all, the people who are too poor to use much electricity or the ports or don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. However those people—it’s the whole country who are left holding a huge debt. It’s such a big debt that they can’t repay it, and that’s part of the plan that they can’t repay it. So at some point, we economic hitmen go back to them and say: “listen, you owe us a lot of money, you can’t pay your debt, so, sell your oil really cheap to our oil companies. Allow us to build a military base in your country or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world like Iraq or vote with us on the next UN vote.” In that way, we’ve really created an empire, but we’ve done it very subtly. It’s clandestine. The majority of the people in the United States don’t know that they are living off the benefits of a clandestine empire. That there’s more slavery in the world today than ever before. Our shirts, our shoes, everything that we own is made under the guise of this empire and there’s a tremendous amount of people around the planet suffering as a result of this. We are less than 5% of the world population living in the United States and we’re consuming more than 25% of the world’s resources. That’s a tragedy.
IRAQ, actually, is a perfect example of the way the whole system works, so we economic hitmen are the first line of defence. We go in and we try to corrupt governments and get them to accept these huge loans which we then use as leverage—and basically own them. If we fail, as I failed in Panama with Omar Torrijos, and Ecuador with Jaime Roldos—men who refuse to be corrupted—then the second line of defence is when we send in the Jackals who will assassinate the people who won’t be corrupted—and that’s what happened with Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldos
They were assassinated because I failed, and once that happens, and the new government comes in, boy, its
gonna tow the line, because the new government owes them that, and if he doesn’t, like in the case of Iraq, both of those things failed. Economic hitmen were not able to get through, such as with Saddam Hussein, we’d try to get them to accept a deal, very similar to what the house of Saud had accepted in Saudi Arabia. It was an amazing deal from my standpoint, but he wouldn’t accept it and so the Jackals went in to take him out. They couldn’t do it. His security was very good and after all, he had one time worked for the CIA. He had been hired to assassinate a former President of Iraq and failed, so he knew the system. He had these lookalike doubles. It’s very hard to assassinate a president unless there’s people on the inside helping you, and if the people on the inside don’t even know if they’re guarding the real guy or a double, it makes it very difficult for them and very risky for them and we couldn’t take him out.
So in 1991, the first President Bush sent in the troops, which is the last step if the economic hitmen fail, and the Jackals fail, then we send in the military. Of course all these people always know when the military are standing off in the wings to go in if everything else fails. In 1991 we send in the troops and we take up the Iraqi military, so we assume at that point that Saddam Hussein would come around. We could have taken him out of course at that time, but we didn’t want to. He was a strong man and well liked. We thought if he could control the Kurds, control the borders and keep the Iranians pumping oil for us and then once we take out his military, he’d come around. So the economic hitmen go back in the 90s, but without success. If they had success, he’d still be running the country. It wasn’t a success. The Jackals couldn’t take him out again, so we sent the military in once more and this time we did the complete job and took him out. In the process we created for ourselves some very lucrative construction deals to reconstruct a country that we’d essentially destroyed. A pretty good deal if you own construction companies—big ones. So, Iraq shows the three stages. The economic hitmen failed there, the Jackals failed there and as a final measure, the military goes in. n
military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico. / Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West. / Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia—a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear. [...]
Literature, said:
“The crimes of the U.S have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless ... You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”Mearsheimer, Cont: Sir, has anyone noticed the resemblance between Prince William and Grommit? Could they possably share the same DNA? I think we shoud be told. Lookalike William Grommit
1. Diogenes of Sinope (or Diogenes the Cynic), c400–325 BC (The Greek word for “dog” or “dog-like” was “cynic”)
2. Diogenes Laërtius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers, c300 AD
From the forward by Noel Riley Fitch of The Letters of Sylvia Beach by Sylvia Beach:
YLVIA BEACH was the midwife of literary modernism. Certain people are meant to be midwives—not mothers of invention.
the novel under the imprint of ‘Shakespeare and Company’. The Little Review case had added to the notoriety of the book, the technique of which had already joined the regular topics of comment in the echoing world of little magazines. Beach’s effort made her bookstore, already well known, the focus of international attention; and it made Beach, depending on the source, either her generation’s friend of the arts or its pornographer.
‘ULYSSES IN PARIS’ , by Sylvia Beach.
E. M. Cioran.
A twentieth century celebrated philosopher and aphorist.
Born: 1911, Romania
Died: 1995, France
from A Short History of Decay (1949) by E. M. Cioran UNKNOWABLE, what a man must lose to have the courage to confront the conventions—unknowable what Diogenes1 lost to become the man who permitted himself everything, who translated his innermost thoughts into actions with a supernatural insolence, like some libidinous yet pure god of knowledge. No one was so frank; a limit case of sincerity and lucidity as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not rein in our desires and our gestures. “One day a man invited him into a richly furnished house, saying ‘be careful not to spit on the floor.’ Diogenes, who needed to spit, spat in his face, exclaiming that it was the only dirty place he could find where spitting was permitted.”—Diogenes Laërtius.2
We are all absurdly prudent and timid: cynicism is not something we are taught in school. Nor is pride.
The man who affronted Alexander and Plato, who masturbated in the marketplace (“if only heaven let us rub our bellies too, and that be enough to stave off hunger!”), the man of the famous, cask and the famous lantern, and who in his youth was a counterfeiter (what higher dignity for a cynic?). Without suffering the falsifications of any ethic and any metaphysic, he strove to strip man in order to show him to us nakeder and more abominable than any comedy, any apocalypse has done
Sylvia was one. Through her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, she published James Joyce’s Ulysses, running interference with the printer so that he could rewrite and add at least a third more of his novel to the renewable proofs. She spent a decade promoting and caring for his business and reprints of the novel, and presented him to the leading men of letters in France.
Beach’s contribution to modernism went far beyond what she did for Joyce, for she created and presided over a literary center, serving as librarian, promoter, and sometimes banker and broker for many established and aspiring writers. She introduced William Carlos Williams to Valery Larbaud, F. Scott Fitzgerald to Andre Chamson, and Eugene Jolas to James Joyce. In short, she orchestrated many of the transactions between English and French literature during the first half of the twentieth century.
For some twenty years, this was the destination if you wanted English books in Paris, but it was also a locus of drink and conversation, a place, on days when your writing ran dry, where you could go and be seen to be a writer
An autobiographical account of her relationship with the Irish novelist James Joyce, 1956, New York. Excerpt:
OYCE's chief concern at this time was the fate of Ulysses. It was still appearing, or trying to appear, in the Little Review, but the future looked dark for both the book and the magazine.
In England, Miss Harriet Weaver had already fought and lost the battle of Ulysses. It was Miss Weaver, pioneer Joycean, who had published in her review, the Egoist, A Portrait of the Artist, which first gained recognition for the new Irish writer James Joyce.
So Ulysses had wandered overseas to the Little Review and now was again in trouble. A big fight was going on between the Little Review and the American authorities.
THE APHORISTIC STYLE of writing–which involves terse observations, opinions, and statements of wisdom—has existed for millennia. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates coined the term in his aptly named work Aphorisms; the word is derived from ancient Greek and denotes “delimitation”, “definition”, and “distinction”. You know, very often aphorisms have been the last sentence of a page. Aphorisms are conclusions, the development is suppressed, and they are what remains. It’s a dubious genre, suspect, and it is rather French. For me it was mostly due to my dislike of developing things... I only write this kind of stuff, because explaining bores me terribly. And so, the aphorism is scorned by “serious” people, the professors look down upon it. When they (professors) read a book of aphorisms, they say, “Oh, look what this fellow said ten pages back, now he’s saying the contrary. He’s not serious.” Me, I can put two aphorisms that are contradictory right next to each other. Aphorisms are also momentary truths. They’re not decrees. And I could tell you in nearly every case why I wrote this or that phrase.
N 1921, when it seemed that nobody would publish Ulysses—when an obscen ity suit forced The Little Re view to stop bringing out installments of the novel, and when no English or American publishing house would touch the manuscript—Beach made arrangements with a printer, hunted down a thousand subscribers, found volunteers to tran scribe script, cajoled typesetters into laying out miles of baffling prose, and brought out
Joyce brought me any news he had from the battlefield, and most disturbing it was... Three suppressions of the magazine by officials of the United States Post Office, on the grounds of obscenity. All hope of publication in the English speaking countries, at least for a long time to come, was gone. And here in my little bookshop sat James Joyce, sighing deeply. It occurred to that something might be done, and I asked: “Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?" He accepted my offer immediately and joyfully. I thought it rash of him to entrust his great Ulysses to such a funny little publisher. But he seemed delighted, and so was I. We parted, both of us, I think, very much moved... Imagine how happy I was to find myself suddenly the publisher of the work I admired above all! Undeterred by lack of capital, experience, and all the other requisites of a publisher, I went right ahead with Ulysses.
”
“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal— less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
E. M. CIORAN, 1911–1995
“People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation. ”
KIERKEGAARD, 1813–1855
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around ”
CHESTERTON 1874–1936
“Snark isn’t wit. Cynicism isn’t wisdom. And arrogance will open a lot of doors but get y ou no-where in the room with anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.”
Tweeted by C. ROBERT CARGILL
“The opposite of success isn’t failure; it is name dropping.” NASSIM TALEB
In The Yes Machine, waxen, evanescent profiles of grossly caricatured heads wreath the hulking, corpulent frame of a well-dressed man at the center. Champagne and a roast pig—signs of his gluttony and wealth—await his consumption.
Hoeckner targets the injustices of industrial capitalism. Hoeckner noted: “Under Capitalism is the flattering of the boss which is common to social structures hence the title. Symbols of the boss’ power are to be found in the machinery and police protection in the background & a ‘mirror’ of himself in the stuffed pig in the foreground.”
KIRIN ICHIBAN is brewed from only malt, hops and water. Unlike other beers, only the first press of the wort is used. That´s why it´s called ICHIBAN —meaning “first” and “best” in Japanese.
“Ichiban Shibori” is a unique method of brewing beer at its purest from a single pure ingredient: 100% malt. This one–and–only technique gives KIRIN ICHIBAN a unique taste and flavor found nowhere else in the world.
“ART IS NOT A MIRROR HELD UP TO REALITY, BUT A HAMMER WITH WHICH TO SHAPE IT.” Bertolt BrechtThe Yes Machine by Carl Hoeckner, 1934 Cold War Steve, September, 2022
“The judge was hauled into the air on the hanging rope, until he fell unconscious, and was then
The Jimmy Dore show is an irreverent take on news, politics and culture.
Jimmy Dore is outrageous and outraged, bothersome and bothered. A crucial, profane, passionate voice for progressives and freethinkers in 21st century America
By Christopher Ketcham. Excerpt:
A little violence can sometimes work to defend against predatory bankers. Consider the
CITY HATTERS BEGAN TRADING AS A HAT SHOP UNDER THE CLOCKS AT FLINDERS STREET STATION IN 1910
The RSA was founded in 1754.
We are the RSA. The royal society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce. Where world-leading ideas are turned into world-changing actions. Our vision is a world where everyone can fulfil their potential and contribute to more resilient, rebalanced and regenerative futures. We invite you to be part of this change.
www.thersa.org
Afinance bubble on Wall Street had crashed the economy, the gears of industrial production had ground to a halt, and 13 million Americans had lost their jobs. Across the Corn Belt, farmers couldn’t get fair prices for milk and crops, their incomes plummeted, and their mortgages went unpaid. Seeing opportunity, banks foreclosed on their properties in record numbers, leaving the farmers homeless and destitute.
So they organised. Under the leadership of a boozing, fist-fighting Iowa farmer named Milo Reno, who had a gift for oratory, several thousand farmers across the Midwest struck during 1933, refusing to sell their products. “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs” went the popular doggerel of the movement. “Let them”—the bankers—“eat their gold.”
They called it a farmers’ holiday and named their group the Farmers’ Holiday Association. In speeches across the Midwest, Reno inveighed against “the destructive program of the usurers”—by which he meant, of course, the ruinous policies of Wall Street and the banking industry.
“robbed by a legalised system of racketeering.” He said that the “forces of special privilege” were undermining “the very foundations of justice and freedom upon which this country was founded.” He compared the farmers’ fight to that of the Founders, who had taken up arms. He warned that the farmers might have to “join hands with those who favor the overthrow of government,” a government that he considered a servant of corporations. “You have the power to take the great corporations,” he said, and “shake them into submission.” One of his deputies in Iowa, John Chalmers, ordered FHA men to use “every weapon at their command.” “When I said weapons,” Chalmers added, “I meant weapons.”
In Le Mars, the weapon of choice was the hanging rope. On April 27, 1933, in a series of incidents that would become national news, hundreds of farmers descended on a farm that was being foreclosed under the eye of the local sheriff and his deputies. They smacked the lawmen aside, stopped the foreclosure, and dragged the sheriff to a ball field in town, where they brandished their noose. Instead of hanging the sheriff, however, they went for a bigger prize: the county judge, Charles C. Bradley, who was presiding over the foreclosures Bradley was seized at his bench, dragged from the courtroom, driven into the countryside, dumped on a dusty road, stripped naked, “beaten, mauled, smeared with grease and jerked from the ground by a noose as [the] vengeful farmers shouted their protests against his foreclosure activities,” reported the Pittsburgh Press. According to one account, the mob “pried his clenched teeth open with a screwdriver and poured alcohol down his throat.” An oily hubcap was placed on his head, the oil running down his face as the
The banker Patrick Oliphant
farmers smashed Iowa dirt into his mouth. “That’s his crown,” they said.
The judge was hauled into the air on the hanging rope, until he fell unconscious, and was then hauled up again. When he revived, the farmers told him to pray. “Only a prayer for Divine guidance which Judge Bradley uttered as he knelt in the dust of a country road sobered the mob,” reported the Pittsburgh Press, decrying the event as a harbinger of “open revolution”.
The farmers, knowing they were about to involve themselves in murder, spared Bradley. He was bloodied, covered in filth, humiliated, and this was enough.
The threat of continued unrest fomented by Reno and the FHA had its intended effect: State legislatures across the Midwest enacted moratoriums on farm foreclosures. By 1934, the country was seething with revolt. Industrial laborers in Toledo, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota; dockworkers across the West Coast; and textile workers from Maine to the Deep South mounted strikes and protests demanding fair pay, worker protections, and union representation. They encountered brute force at the hands of local authorities and thugs in the pay of business interests. The strikers in Toledo and Minneapolis responded not by peaceably dispersing but by fighting back with clubs and rocks. According to the newspapers, a savage battle unfolded between autoworkers and the militia of the Ohio National Guard in Toledo, with the tear-gassed strikers unleashing their own gas barrage against the authorities, “matching shell for shell with the militiamen”. Truck drivers fought in bloody hand-to-hand combat against the enforcers of the pro-business Citizens’ Alliance in the streets of Minneapolis. A prominent corporate leader in the city was said to have announced, “This, this—is revolution!”
Indeed, it was in part the specter of violent revolution during the 1930s that spurred Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Congress to legislate the historic reform of capitalism called the New Deal. The government protected labor from the cruel abuses of big business, legalised unions, established the social security system, and put the usurers on Wall Street under the thumb of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal watchdogs, locking them in the regulatory cage where they belonged. The people had spoken and forced the government to listen.
The bailouts of 2008–9 saved the banks (but mostly the bankers). Bankers who lost more money than ever earned in the history of banking, The asymmetry (moral hazard) and what we call optionality for the bankers can be expressed as follows: heads, the bankers win, tails and the taxpayer loses.
A SOLUTION FOR BANKERS WHO TAKE RISKS THAT THREATEN THE GENERAL PUBLIC:
ELIMINATE BONUSES. Bonuses are particularly dangerous because they invite bankers to game the system by hiding their risks—black swan events. The ancients were fully aware of this upside-without-downside asymmetry, and they built simple rules in response. Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi’s code specified this: If a builder builds a house and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death
RADICAL, REVOLUTIONARY, POLITICAL ACTIVIST AND SOCIAL CLOWN.
A groundbreaking exhibition exploring international state propaganda from the 20th and 21st centuries. From leaflet drops to tweets, for intentions good and bad. Book now at www.bl.uk/propaganda
ABBIE HOFFMAN
IF SOMEBODY IS AGAINST SOMETHING, ODDS ARE GOOD HOFFMAN IS AGAINST IT TOO. ALTHOUGH HIS FAME IS CEMENTED IN THE 1970S, HIS REVOLUTIONARY BONA FIDES ARE ESTABLISHED IN THE 1960s Hoffman’s career as an activist starts modestly, with some civil rights work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By 1966, he leaves the “straight” life behind, begins using drugs, and immerses himself in counterculture politics. With a handful of other top-drawer radicals, he creates the Youth International Party (Yippies), a flamboyant political group with no official membership or leadership. Hoffman’s personal specialty is revolution-via-the ridiculous. On August 24, 1967, he leads a group of activists into the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. In protest of capitalism, the Vietnam War and assorted other crimes of the establishment, they throw fistfuls of dollars (mostly fake) floating down toward the trading floor, tricking the traders into a pathetic scramble for cash. Trading was interrupted, briefly. News coverage was massive—a nonviolent shot heard ‘round the world in the battle against greed. But Hoffman is also a key figure in some of the most important political trials of the century. In 1968, Hoffman is one of the Chicago Seven activists accused of inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention. By the early 1970s, Hoffman starts to gain acclaim as a radical journalist and author-but is charged with cocaine possession in 1974. Desperate to avoid trial, he has plastic surgery and lives underground as Barry Freed, until surrendering to authorities in 1980. Released in 1982, he resumes a life of political activism
On April 12, 1989, Hoffman is found dead in his apartment. Hoffman’s death is ruled a suicide.
Abbott (Abbie) Hoffman, 1936–1989
(Memetics sees ideas as a kind of virus, sometimes propagating in spite of truth and logic.)
Those rejecting the official accounts of significant suspicious and impactful events are often labelled conspiracy theorists and the alternative explanations they propose are often referred to as conspiracy theories. These labels are often used to dismiss the beliefs of those individuals who question potentially hegemonic control of what people believe. The conspiracy theory concept functions as an impediment to legitimate discursive examination of conspiracy suspicions. The effect of the label appears to constrain even the most respected thinkers.
“It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best-Sellers list.” —Hoffman, on his success with ‘Steal This Book’
“THIS IS NOT A DRILL, is a groundbreaking new rock & roll, cinematic extravaganza, performed in the round. It is a stunning indictment of the corporate dystopia in which we all struggle to survive, and a call to action to love, protect, and share our precious and precarious planet home.”
—Roger Waters
farmers of Le Mars, Iowa. The year was 1933, the height of the Great Depression.Luigi Galleani; August 12, 1861 – November 4, 1931) was an Italian anarchist active in the United States from 1901 to 1919, viewed by historians as an anarchist and insurrectionary anarchist. He is best known for his enthusiastic advocacy of “propaganda of the deed”, i.e. the use of violence to eliminate “tyrants” and “oppressors” and to act as a catalyst to the overthrow of existing government institutions. From 1914 to 1932, Galleani’s followers in the United States (known as i Galleanisti), carried out a series of bombings and assassination attempts against institutions and persons they viewed as class enemies. After Galleani was deported from the United States to Italy in June 1919, his colleagues were accused of having carried out the Wall Street bombing of 1920, which resulted in the deaths of 38 people. The bombing was never solved. The Wall Street Bombing on 16th September 1920
hauled up again. When he revived, the farmers told him to pray”
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THE DISTINCTION OF OLD WORLD-CRAFTMANSHIP
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ROASTING COFFEE IN EAST LONDON SINCE THE CRACK OF DAWN.
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PANELS
The foundation had purchased the shares in September 2019, just months before the pandemic was announced—at a pre-public offering price of $18.10 per share. When the foundation sold the shares at an average sale price of $300 per share, it pocketed a profit of approximately $260 million, or more than 15 times
FAST FACTS:
• Defender of pharmaceutical profits over Covid-19 patients in impoverished countries.
Allegations of sexual harassment at Microsoft
• Extensive ties to sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.
its original investment. The $242 million of that profit is untaxed because the money was invested through the foundation. Bill Gates secured hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from his foundation’s impeccably timed investment in BioNTech—the Pfizer partner for its mRNA Covid shots—before dramatically reversing course and proceeding to openly cast doubt on the whole of mRNA technology.
WHO HAS PROFITED FROM THE PANDEMIC Corporations flush with billions in pandemic profits and disproportionately benefitting from taxpayer-funded economic relief, now have the opportunity to gobble up smaller companies and deepen their market power at the expense of true competition. The share of household wealth owned by billionaires has risen by a record amount during the pandemic, with millionaires also coming out of COVID-19 ahead. The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world's population, reveals a new Oxfam report. During the past decade, the richest 1 percent had captured around half of all new wealth Among the biggest gainers are eight
tech barons with large stock holdings: Elon Musk (Tesla), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Alphabet), and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft). The new study, which comes from Americans for Tax Fairness, a lobbying group, and the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based think tank, notes that between March 18th and December 7th, Musk’s worth rose by $118.5 billion, Bezos’s worth rose by $71.4 billion, and Zuckerberg’s worth rose by $50.1 billion. The other five—Ellison, Page, Brin, Gates, and Ballmer—each saw gains of between twenty billion and thirty billion dollars. As a result of these developments, the report adds, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates have joined Bezos as “centi-billionaires,” meaning that each is now worth more than a hundred billion dollars.
Doctor inspects growth of cowpox on milkinga maid.
‘The Origin of Vaccination.’ French cartoon version of Edward Jenner’s development of the first vaccine against smallpox. Jenner established the principle of vaccination (derived from vacca, Latin for cow) and introduced the idea of induced cross-immunity.
The longest continuous-running radical bookshop in the UK, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959. Specialising in books, magazines, and periodicals. Housmans is one of London’s epicentres of social change activism for over six decades, as Ramsey Kanaan beautifully points it out: “Housmans just looks like any other bookstore… What made it vibrant was being part of something bigger. Now it remains a gateway to a whole world of histories, radical ideas, radical potentialities.”
HOUSMANS, KING’S CROSS 5 CALEDONIAN ROAD, N1 9DX. 020 7837 4473
One of the strongest Vodkas in the world. This behemoth from the Balkans is triple distilled for smoothness and coming in at a whopping 88%—it even has 13 health warnings on the label, including one in Braille. Originally distilled to an eye-watering 94% ABV and then diluted with de-ionised water to make it more palatable. This superb Serbian spirit is an attestation to the craftsmanship that it takes to produce high strength quality spirits.
One reviewer’s experience was: “let’s just say I lost my keys, I was walking on the highway, I lit a cigarette and my tongue caught fire. Hell of night.”
