CRASS
year olds out there who feel like that. But when somebody writes to you and you sit down to reply and this letter is three months old. . .” Penny Rimbaud:“There were seven of us and we’d be dealing with an average of 20-40 letters each on that day.” To this day, Dial House still receives about ten letters a week to do with the band, often from new fans. Some things clearly still matter. Still shocked at the silence surrounding the Falklands War and left feeling very isolated, Penny Rimbaud decided to write an open letter to musicians, which he sent to the music paper Sounds: An open letter to rock ‘n’ rollers everywhere “I am writing this letter in the hope that it might inspire reaction or, more importantly, action. “Last year the Falklands War demonstrated how easy it is to drift into a war, a war that in the nuclear age might easily develop into the war, the war to end all war. The cold, calculated way in which Mrs. Thatcher guided this country into what only good fortune prevented from being that final war is a grim warning of the kind of future that may be in store for us all. “For years we have been witness to horrific oppression, by government forces, of the people of Northern Ireland. More recently, in the riots of Brixton,Toxteth etc., the discontent of the poor, who are expected to live on less and less as the ruling elite grow ever richer, was viciously responded to by those same forces. Violence is becoming the accepted ‘method’ for the State to deal with the social problems that it creates.Thatcher has adopted Victorian ‘gun-boat diplomacy’ to deal with both national and, unbelievably, international problems.The appalling degree of that violence has been demonstrated time and time again in Northern Ireland; the Falklands War only confirmed Thatcher’s doctrine of ‘the sword being mightier than the pen’ and showed her up as the spiteful, malicious and revengeful person that she is. “It is quite clear, in the light of what is now commonly available material, (see One Man’s Falklands by Tam Dalyell), that Thatcher, against the advice of her own staff in both the Foreign Office and the forces, deliberately escalated the Falklands ‘dispute’ into the Falklands ‘war’. It is transparently obvious that her actions were designed not only to impress the British public with her dynamic and therefore vote-worthy character, but also to cover over increasingly glaring problems on the home front, recession, depression and unemployment, on both counts she
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