Great Lives - Louise Michel

This from a radio program that runs on the BBC called Great Lives, essentially a series of audio biographies on people chosen by the guests. This episode on the life of Louise Michel was chosen by Paul Mason, this was in 2013 before he reminded us all that he is firmly a social democrat. He the host and the other guest Professor Carolyn Eichner author of Surmounting the Barricades Women and the Paris Commune.



Link https://youtu.be/yIv3P1p47Ro
Its very comprehensive and covers her life from childhood to working as a teacher, to the Commune and her time in exile and her return to France.

Louise Michel

Great Lives

Transcript.

Matthew Paris Show Host:

Our Great Life this week was known as the “Red Virgin of Motmartre” the “Red She-wolf” and “Bonne-Louise”, she’s also been called the “Grande dame of Anarchy”.  And she used the pseudonym Clémence. But she had a name, it was Louise Michel. She was a school teacher, writer, orator, anthropologist, Anarchist and cat lover.

Born 1830 in Haute-Marne, died in 1905 in Marseille. Here’s one of her poems.

I have seen criminals and whores

And spoken with them,

Now I inquire if you believe them

Made as now they are

To drag their rags in blood and mire

Preordained an evil race,

You to whom all men are prey

Have made them what they are today.

Louise Michel has been nominated by the television journalist and writer Paul Mason. Newsnight’s business and industry correspondent, Paul was born in 1960 in Leigh near Wigan, the son of a miner. His books include Live Working or Die Fighting; How the Working Class Went Global, and more recently Why its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. Paul what’s so great about Louise Michel?

Paul Mason:

Well Matthew the Paris Commune of 1871 is probably the most crucial event in nineteenth century working class history, and what happened to women in it is one of the most interesting stories and the woman at the centre of that story is Louise Michel. She was a revolutionary, she was a fighter she fought you know with a rifle in her hand. And to me represents a kind of lost tradition on the left which is about principle, which is about passion and which is also about slight surrealism, her memoirs are full of dream like sequences that you don’t expect to read in the work of somebody whose spent their entire life in and out of jail fighting the system.

Matthew Paris:

Our guest expert is Professor Carolyn Eichner of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, author of Surmounting the Barricades: Women and the Paris Commune. Carolyn let’s set Louise Michel in the context of French History before start to look at her own history. This was a pretty important and strange moment wasn’t it?

Carolyn Eichner:

Yes, it was, the Paris Commune was a Revolutionary Civil War which came at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. The working classes of Paris rose up and threw off a reactionary republican government and were able to keep them at bay for 72 days. And as Paul said it’s an incredibly important moment in working class history of the 19^th century, and on the Left it has absolutely been lionised, canonised, considered to be a golden, golden moment and on the Right is considered to be one of the worst historical moments of the century.

Matthew Paris:

Let’s look at her now, she’s right at the centre of all this, and let me ask you Carolyn, what was her background?

Carolyn Eichner:

She was born in 1830 in the Haute-Marne, her mother was a servant in a wealthy home, and her father was most likely the son of the family who owned the chateau. And the owners of the Chateau the Demahis family raised her as their granddaughter. But a marginalised granddaughter, they educated her, they fed her, clothed her, treated her as a granddaughter but she was still the illegitimate child of the family. So, she grew up in a slightly privileged yet marginalised position.

Matthew Paris:

It’s notable Paul, in all the Great Lives I’ve done and I’ve done quite a few now how many the lives of people who- in whose childhood there was some kind of strange disjunction, there was something very odd happened, and this is obviously the case in her life.

Paul Mason:

Yes, I think with Louise Michel her own account of the childhood is very interesting because she’s living in a world of make believe. In this castle that’s gone to seed because the family itself is partly ruined, and the castle is partly ruined. And she kind of wonders around it collecting the skulls of birds, and animals she’s an intelligent young girl, and I think educates herself. She has access through her family to the educated world of the mid-19^th century French elite. And so, when she leaves that to become a young teacher, she very quickly was writing poetry at a young adult and sending it to Victor Hugo.

And that and there is evidence that she met Hugo very early on and remained inspired by him, so this is not somebody detached from mainstream French culture, she’s she’s plunged straight into it at the first opportunity.

Matthew Paris:

So, Carolyn she decided to become a teacher, why?

Carolyn Eichner:

There were very few career options available for women in the 19^th or most of the 20^th century, and becoming a teacher was a way that a woman could support herself and still be considered a legitimate member of society.

Matthew Paris:

And she couldn’t get into a state school because she wouldn’t swear allegiance to Napoleon is that right? The Third?

Carolyn Eichner:

Right, she was opposed to Napoleon III from a fairly early age.

Matthew Paris:

She opened her own school Paul.

Paul Mason:

Yes, she gets to Montmartre, at the time it is a slum in the north of Paris. And Louise Michel opened a series of private schools aimed at the children of the poor. Interestingly she was also one of the few teachers as far as we can tell who was prepared to teach people with severe learning difficulties. And she tried to teach them in the same classes as the kids who were not disabled.

Louise Michel’s classroom must have been an amazing place because she filled it with animals, pictures, music, quite like 1960s Primary school. But very, very different to the rote learning the 19^th century French education had become.

Matthew Paris:

One of the things that’s already striking me about her is that she was a woman who from the earliest age took everything from first principles. Not all those kinds of rules and assumptions, do you see what I mean?

Carolyn Eichner:

She really was quite an iconoclast, she lived her life exactly as she thought it should be lived. And that meant that the choice of not marrying, which made her subject to all sorts of speculation about her sexuality. Many critics mentioned her looks and criticised her looks, which was not unusual for women in the public eye to be subjected to rather intensely negative critiques of their appearance. And then the logic that well she must be a revolutionary, an activist, an unmarried person because she’s ugly.

Matthew Paris:

We’ve pictures of her in front of us now, and I wouldn’t call her ugly, you could say it’s a plain face, but it’s terrifically striking. A thin woman, a strong serious face, what do you think of her appearance Paul? What would it say to you?

Paul Mason:

Well, she is a loner, she is a thinker, there’s not a speck of make-up. Her nickname was the Red Virgin, you can see a severity about her, in her face. When she was on trial after the Commune, one of the witnesses described her as being dark-haired, high forehead, quite small. And she objected, she said “In fact I am quite tall”.

Carolyn Eichner:

Later in life she had a female companion Charlotte Vau-velle who she was constantly with for years and of course there was all sorts of speculation about that, but there really is no way of knowing you know whether she would be what we would call a lesbian, a term that wouldn’t have existed then. Or whether she just really felt she was married to the revolution, and to the idea of bringing about social revolution.

Matthew Paris:

Let’s talk about that revolution, let’s talk about the Commune. What were the background circumstances?

Carolyn Eichner:

The Franco-Prussian war preceded the Commune, and this was a situation where the Prussians laid siege to Paris. And ultimately the French government surrendered to Prussia because they were more frightened of the working-class Parisians then they were of the Prussians.

Paul Mason:

And remember at this point one of the things that Napoleon III had done was call up the workers of Paris into a National Guard. Based street by street, so they had their rifles their uniforms and their military training on their doorstep. And when the time came for the Republican Government to say you know we surrendered, so let’s collect all the cannons that the National Guard have bought and um are currently looking after. And that was the moment that the revolution started.

Matthew Paris:

And here is her description of that moment.

I descended the hill

My rifle under my coat

Shouting treason! In the rising dawn

The people heard the alarm

We climbed the hill

Believing we would die for liberty

We were as risen from the earth

Our deaths would free Paris

Between us and the army

The women had thrown themselves on the cannons and machine guns

The soldiers stood immobile

When General Lecomte commanded them to fire on the crowd

A subordinate officer broke ranks and cried surrender!

The soldiers obeyed,

The revolution was made

So on March the 18^th 1871 the people in charge of Paris where the Central Committee of the National Guard, they had to decide what to do, they could carry on fighting the retreating army or they could set up their own Commune. Which Paul is what they did.

Paul Mason:

They called elections to a Commune, and let’s remember what Commune meant in this regard. It meant like the GLC of London it was a City Government, and Paris hadn’t been allowed to have a city government under the dictatorship for a very good reason. Everybody knew what the political makeup of that government would be. And within a week the army had cleared out and you have elections and you have basically a city government set up.

Matthew Paris:

Here is her description of that moment.

The proclamation of the Commune was splendid

Their names were announced

An immense cry arose

Vive la Commune!

The drums beat a salvo, the artillery shook the ground

In the name of the people the Commune is proclaimed

Carolyn, these were not revolutionaries in the, in the modern sense of the word, in fact Karl Marx was against the whole idea wasn’t he?

Carolyn Eichner:

Yes, Marx thought that it was premature, but some of them definitely were revolutionaries. And many others of them were working-class people who were completely fed up with the kind of repression and marginalisation they had faced. And this was very much the case for women also. So, in certain respects it was like a festival, because there was a sense that the working-class government had finally taken power. There was free Opera, there was music in the streets it was very much of a festival kind of atmosphere.

There were public meetings throughout Paris almost daily in which thousands of people attended and really got to practice there opposition to government.

Matthew Paris:

But Paul, what did these people want? Louise Michel was becoming prominent among them, what was her plan?

Paul Mason:

What most of them wanted was what was called the Social Republic, they wanted a democratic republic and they wanted it to have social justice as its key deliverable. So that meant ending starvation, ending poverty, ending the criminalisation of women. They’re thinking they’ll have the Social Republic, that means an anti-clerical Republic, it means one where Cooperatives are set up and facilitated by the state. And one in which there is above all personal freedom, I think the Commune remains, and of course Karl Marx later recognised this, the first experiment in successful self-government by a working-class community.

This is the important thing about it, and of course in the last days and Louise Michel is among the people who do this, as they fought to survive, they did adopt extreme measures that later allowed moderate socialist propagandists to say that well they were crazy, killing priests etc.

Matthew Paris:

What was Michel doing during this period? What was her role?

Carolyn Eichner:

She was involved in the Women’s Vigilance Committee, she was also involved in the Men’s Vigilance Committee, and the vigilance was essential since the city was under siege by the French government. She was involved in some of the political clubs and these were working-class clubs that met in churches, which was a real appropriation of space and power. These were very much grassroots organisations, she fought on the battlefield and then ultimately on the barricades in the final week when there was street fighting.

Paul Mason:

One of the pictures of her is in a man’s uniform, and there’s a reason for that, she wanted to fight. We that before the Commune had even started, she used to go to fairgrounds to do target practice. So, she did fight and she was involved in a number of engagements, one at Clamart station in the south of Paris another one at Issy.

Matthew Paris:

Louise later claimed that during the 72 days of the Commune she never went to bed. She was with the Communards when they made their last stand in the cemetery of Montmartre. After the fall of the Commune she was arrested and she was officially Prisoner Number One.

 Apparently, the noise from the firing squads while other Communards were being killed led to complaints from the neighbours, so the soldiers started bayonetting the prisoners to death instead. Altogether there were about 25,000 men women and children executed. Among them Louise’s dear friend Théophile Ferré.

She dedicated a farewell poem to him. The Red Carnations Oeillets Rouges.

If I go to the black cemetery brother

Throw on your sister as a final hope

Some red carnations in bloom

In the last days of Empire when the people were awakening

It was your smile, red carnation

That told us all was being reborn

Today go blossom in the shadow of the black and sad prisons

Go flower by the sombre captive

And tell him truly that we love him

Tell him that through fleeting time everything belongs to the future

That the livid proud conqueror can die more surely

Than the conquered

Paul you’ve suggested that the ideology of the Paris Commune has been hijacked by historians of the left to explain later developments of Marxism-Leninism. If it doesn’t what does it explain? What’s its real significance?

Paul Mason:

For me Louise Michel and the Commune she was part of almost the sort of uber case study of what happens when workers make revolutions without people like Bolsheviks to help/hinder them. I think the Commune remains because above all of its personal and its sexual politics, so far in advance of the 20^th century. You know one of the things we remember Louise for, she fought for the rights of all women.

Paul Mason:

Was she a feminist, do you think Carolyn?

Carolyn Eichner:

Yes absolutely, she was absolutely a feminist. And the term feminism did not come into use until the 1880s, but if one defines feminism as a movement for gender equity, Louise Michel was absolutely a feminist.

Matthew Paris:

In December 1871 Louise Michel was brought before the 6^th Council of War, charged with offences including trying to overthrow the government, encouraging citizens to arm themselves and herself using weapons and wearing a military uniform. When she was asked if she had anything to say in her defence, she’s said to have replied

Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything

But a little lump of lead I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance

And I shall avenge my brothers. If you are not cowards kill me!

If you are not cowards kill me. That’s an extraordinary speech Paul, do we believe that that is what she said? Is in character?

Paul Mason:

I think it’s what she said and what she meant because she is in a state of grieving. Even reading her memoirs written twenty-thirty years later that grieving never stops. The dreamlike quality of the memoir comes from the fact that she’s seen a massacre. And when we as modern journalists cover massacres, we’re all to aware of what that does to people’s psychology for decades beyond that.

You know there were piles of bodies in the streets, she writes constantly about the Hecatomb, the mass grave. That’s an image that’s in her writing till the day she dies. So yeah, she’s ready to die, she knows what the future holds, and that is deportation.

Matthew Paris:

Why didn’t they kill her? When she said kill me, why was she transported to New Caledonia as her sentence when she was such a leader of the rebels?

Carolyn Eichner:

It’s an excellent question, and most likely because they did not want to make her a martyr. She had such a following which did only grow, but she was charismatic, heroic, mythical and the French state must have recognised that making her a martyr would have been a larger problem.

Matthew Paris:

Then four months in a ship the Virginie on the way to New Caledonia, which is an island off Australia. How long did she spend there?

Carolyn Eichner:

She was there for seven years. Her experience there was that of most of the Communards who were sent to New Caledonia, which was that they were basically dumped there and left to fend for themselves. Including constructing their own habitations, getting their own food, these were urban people, New Caledonia now one would think oh this is a tropical paradise, but when one reads the memoirs of the people who were there it was very hot, there were malarial mosquitoes, dengue fever. The conditions were extremely difficult and brutal, and she was among a small number of women who were sent there and very much left to fend for themselves.

Matthew Paris:

And she did fend for herself, she didn’t just vegetate she ended up teaching the native people the Kanaks, she ended up teaching the children of the colonists, she got to know and respect the indigenous culture. She wrote a rather poetic treatise about their language, their island and their culture and here’s part of it.

It is night, it was hot during the day and the coolness is good.

The tribe stretched out beneath the coconut palms, near the huts

Listens to the tales of the storyteller and the breakers in the distance tell tales as well.

The storyteller half-asleep half-awake tells while dreaming stories that we listen to while dreaming.

One would think that it is the branches of the coconut tree that move in the air

But its fruit bats, let them fly away in peace.

This evening the tribe is not hungry, here come drops of rain,

But they are hot, they feel good as they fall on us lying here on the grass

From which we feel the heat of the earth rise.

The white man’s borders are far away, very far away

This is the land of the Fathers.

Paul I’m fascinated by this completely new chapter. There are three or four lives here aren’t there?

Paul Mason:

Yes, I mean let’s remember why the French state sent people to New Caledonia. It thought it wouldn’t just imprison the Communards it would force them by having to remake their lives amid stone age people to reconsider their ideas. And the effect on many of them was depression, of course many of those people, urban people lived in a tiny neighbourhood of Paris all their lives, suddenly they’re in the wilderness.

Louise Michel fought it by being creative. This is the period where she’s constantly writing novels, plays, all kinds of lost work and she becomes and amateur anthropologist. She sets out from almost day one to engage with the New Caledonian indigenous people. And once she’s done that, she ends up going to their villages, she ends up- she takes her notebook, she writes down their songs and their folktales and publishes -actually while she’s even on the island- the first edition of the Chanson de geste book is published in Paris.

So, she’s doing anthropology but what they don’t know of course is she’s also radicalising them. When the time comes for the Kanaks to revolt, she’s given them her red scarf that she’s kept hidden since the days of the Commune and is one of the few French prisoners who is whole heartedly in favour of the Kanak revolt.

Matthew Paris:

The white man’s borders are far away, very far away she wrote, but she went back to the white man’s borders she returned to Paris in 1880 after an amnesty had been granted to the Communards. She was met at the station by a crowd of about 7,000 people shouting “Vive Louise Michel! Vive La Commune!” How had she become so famous and so popular on the other side of the world during this period Carolyn?

Carolyn Eichner:

Her legacy of the time during the Commune and her activism prior to the Commune just continued to grow and amplify in her absence. And then she was continuing to write and to send her manuscripts back to Paris, things were published and she had become in some ways really transformed by the experience in New Caledonia. Now she had actively advocated anti-imperialism, she continued to push for social revolution, and one other thing that had very much come out of her experience after the Commune was that she had become an Anarchist.

And this sort of transformation had occurred on the boat on the way to New Caledonia. So in New Caledonia she was also thinking and writing about Anarchism and about how the failure of the Commune meant a redirection or real grassroots efforts for revolution. And she had become this enormous personality, thousands of people met her at the station and then even thousands more came to a talk she gave immediately after that. And that sort of set the situation for the subsequent decades.

Matthew Paris:

And she went back to being a revolutionary agitator. So, it was probably inevitable that she would get locked away again. Why? What did she do?

Paul Mason:

In 1883 she leads a bread riot, carrying a black flag now through the streets of Paris, there was violence at the end of that demonstration she is charged and imprisoned for three years. This already a woman who has spent two and a half years after the Commune in a French prison, then seven years on the island and now she’s back in prison.

I think what is important about this though is that by the 1880s you’ve got the emergence of an almost modern style French labour movement. You’ve got unions, you’ve got self help societies, Louise Michel thinks that this is all rubbish. And she wants to carry on the dream of activating the slum dwelling poorest classes. That’s what she’s doing on that bread riot, she sees her task as being to radicalise and ignite the poor.

Matthew Paris:

Paul Lafargue visited her in prison in 1885 and recorded that conversation.

I’m not complaining, to tell you the truth I’ve had to put up with worse.

I’ve found a happiness in prison I never knew when I was free.

I have time to study, and I take advantage of it.

When I was free, I had my classes, 150 students or more, it wasn’t enough for me to live on since two thirds of them didn’t pay me.

I had to give lessons in grammar, music, history a little bit of everything until ten or eleven o’clock in the evening.

And when I went home, I went to sleep exhausted, unable to do anything.

At the time I would have given years of my life in order to have time to give over to study.

Here in St Lazare I have time for myself, a lot of time and I’m happy about this.

I read, I study I’ve learned several languages.

Two years after she was let out of prison, she was shot in a theatre Carolyn.

Carolyn Eichner:

She was giving a political speech, and someone in the crowd stood up and shot her in the head, but it just barely grazed her head. And she recovered fully, and she refused to prosecute the shooter, saying that he was just clearly someone who didn’t understand what she meant, what her intentions were and she wanted to speak with him she spoke with the man and allowed him to go free. And this of course fed into the idea of her as the saintly figure.

Matthew Paris:

She spent some years in London, what did she do in London Paul?

Paul Mason:

We don’t know everything she did in London but she did a lot of philanthropy, she became known as the “good woman” I think she was going around the East End giving away food. She constantly gave away everything that was sent to her actually clothes, dresses, books. But the other thing she did was to form a school with a fellow Anarchist and survivor of the Commune in quite a posh part of London. Recently research has managed to unearth some of the prospectus and syllabus and its quite you know radical.

But surprise, surprise a bomb was found in the school, nobody was prosecuted but the school did close thereafter. We don’t know who put the bomb there, we don’t think it was Louise Michel and her cohorts, it might have been a police sting, or one of their more radical- you know there were lots of radical Anarchists around Louise Michel all the time by the 1880s and 90s.

Matthew Paris:

And she carried on lecturing not just all over France, she went to Algeria, and on a trip to Algeria she fell seriously ill. Back in Marseilles she died.

Carolyn Eichner:

Yes, she had wanted to go to Algeria to advocate for an uprising against the French Imperial government. And she managed to do this though she was in ill health she travelled around and spoke against the French government, spoke against religion, spoke against militarism and essentially this tour ended her life. She died shortly thereafter.

Matthew Paris:

Let’s give Louise Michel one more chance to convert us all to Anarchism. In all her writing there’s no paragraph more powerful than this one.

There are millions of us who don’t give a damn for authority because we have seen how little the many edged tool of power accomplishes.

We have watched throats cut to gain it, it is supposed to be the Jade axe that travels from island to island in Oceania.

No! Power monopolised is evil.

Matthew Paris:

Paul, in your book about working-class history you end with a mention of Louise Michel. I’d like you to read that last bit.

Paul Mason:

I have seen the young Louise Michel dancing to a samba band in a field outside Glen Eagle’s summit. Her face was painted and she was wearing pink fairy wings, she still has a lot to learn.

Matthew Paris:

Paul Mason, thank you for sharing with us your enthusiasm for the extraordinary Louise Michel. Carolyn Eichner thank you for joining us. And from me Matthew Paris until next week goodbye.

The Case of the Birmingham Six

In Birmingham in 1974 two pubs were bombed, the police suspected IRA involvement and so targeted the local Irish population. In the end their dragnet charged six men Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker with the bombings. The six men appeared in court bearing bruises and eventually they plead guilty. 

It turned out that the confessions were extracted from them by physical assault, indeed it came out that none of the six men had committed the bombings and were innocent. Eventually in 1991 after being imprisoned since 1975 the six were freed and the case declared a miscarriage of justice. 

There's a part of the above video that got overlooked but I think is really important. The wife of one of the six didn't know her husband had been arrested until the televised news broadcast despite her home being raided and searched by the police. The reason that didn't tip her off is because the police actions surrounding the bombings in 74 weren't a departure from typical police behaviour when suspecting Irish perpetrators. The UK police fully employed profiling in this period, any suspicious event that might possibly be IRA related was met with a program of harassment and investigation of the local Irish community. 

Profiling is often championed on grounds of pragmatism, it may be unfair or even illegal itself but we're assured that it works. Well it didn't work in Birmingham in 1974, six innocent men were beaten and imprisoned sixteen years, and it also didn't work in Guildford where four Irish men were wrongly arrested for another series of IRA pub bombings, and it didn't work when the police arrested an additional seven Irish men for the crime of manufacturing the explosives used. In the end all eleven men were found innocent after lengthy prison terms.

Remembering the Black Triangles

I've been thinking about an often overlooked aspect of Nazi society and its campaigns of terror. Specifically I was thinking of how much of what we think about when we think of Hitler and the Nazi regime is still dominated by the myths they created for themselves. As a result a lot falls through the cracks so I'd like to try redress some of this by sharing what I've learned about the Black Triangle.

Its not much I'm afraid, most of the information on the issue in English I've found has been dominated by the controversy about how appropriate it is or is not as a symbol of Lesbian oppression[1] in the Third Reich, and about the current usage of the symbol by disabled campaigners in the UK[2]. I was able to find out that in 1938 mass arrests of anti-social individuals accounted for 10,000 people 2,000 of which were sent to Buchenwald, and that other camps such as Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Dachau had black triangle populations[3].

The Black Triangle badge was for prisoners who were deemed to be Antisocial, the official name was Arbeitsscheu which literally translates as work-shy. But long term unemployment wasn't the only criteria for imprisonment, you could also be declared Arbeitsscheu for refusing or being found unfit for compulsory labour such as digging trenches for the Autobahns or working in armaments factories. You could also be branded with the triangle if you were suspected of being of poor moral character, common targets for the anti-social category included the homeless, alcoholics, drug users and sex workers. 

Victims also included the Roma[4] and people with behavioural abnormalities and disabilities that were deemed not serious enough to warrant euthanasia were also rounded up, hence the current associations with the struggles against Department for Work and Pensions. In Ravensbruck there were four women given the Black Triangle who specifically noted as suspected lesbians, and there were cases of people being categorised as Arbeitsscheu for having relations outside of their "race".

You could also be black triangle for having a criminal record even if you had not committed a crime recently, which would have moved you into the Green Triangle category instead.

Hitler in Table Talk actually argues that all citizen with a serious offence on their records should either be executed or condemned for life in the Concentration camp system.

"After ten years of imprisonment with hard labor an individual is lost for community life anyhow. Who is going to give him any work? Such a fellow should be put into a concentration camp for life or he should be killed. In our days the latter is more important and serves as a warning. It should be an example for all followers!"

[5]

The part I've bolded is I think the key factor that unites all the various victims of the Work-shy label and the violent repression that came with it. Its the one thing the estimated 12.658 [6] Anti-social prisoners have in common. They all in one way or another were deemed unworthy of taking part in the new German national community.



Volksgemeinschafft was a key pillar of the National Socialist society, there were dozens of government and party organisations dedicated to its promotion and ensuring that all German citizens took an active part within it. Deviation from this community in any form wasn't tolerated and we see that through the Black Triangle category it carried the ultimate penalty for those who couldn't measure up to it. An estimated 6,000 Anti-social prisoners would die in the camps.

One of the largest and most powerful organisations was the Strength Through Joy (KDF) organisation.

The KDF worked for the German Workers Front the umbrella organisation that replaced the now illegal trade unions and mutual aid societies. It was also under the supervision of Goebbels propaganda ministry and collaborated with other arms of the Nazi regime. The KDF is sometimes depicted as a largely benevolent organisation, apologists are quick to emphasis cheap package holidays and trips to the cinema etc. But the truth is that it was a tool for the control of the ordinary German in their leisure time.

The aim of the KDF was to extend Nazi party regimentation to the German workers free time, it even an Office for After Work Activity (Amt Feierabend) and Office for Popular Education (Amt Volksbildungswerk). The KDF's sole function was making sure German workers took part in approved leisure activities, the cinema trips were to propaganda films, the leisure activities were strictly partisan, even the uniforms for sports clubs were all party endorsed. 

Even the package holidays were politically motivated, after the union with Austria the KDF sent thousands of Austrian workers in order to encourage loyalty to the new regime

Two weeks after the Anschluss, when SS-Gruppenführer Josef Bürckel became Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung as well as Gauleiter, the first five trains with some 2,000 Austrian workers left for Passau, where they were ceremonially welcomed. While Bürckel announced that he did not expect all KdF travelers to return as National Socialists, he did expect them to look him in the eyes and say, "I tried hard to understand you."

This is why the treatment of the "work shy" was so severe, not only were they not contributing to the German economy fully but they weren't able to take part in the German community project either, which rendered them suspect in the eyes of the regime. 

IV.26
Die Gemeinschaftsunfähigen (Those unfit for community life) by H.W Kranz and S. Koller, Giessen 1941
Title page

Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Kranz and his colleagues in the Institute for Hereditary Health and Racial Hygiene with the university of Giessen directed their focus in work on the attempt to demonstrate the hereditability of criminal and "asocial" behavior. After his habilitation paper "Lebensschicksale krimineller Zwillinge" (1936), his main work consisting of two volumes, "Die Gemeinschaftsunfähigen", was published in 1941; Kranz had edited this work together with his colleague Siegfried Koller. Kranz and Koller identified "all those'unfit for community life' or'asocial'..., who show very often significant tendencies opposing community life and who repeatedly show their incapacity or hostility concerning community life." The authors described those who were unable or who did not want to fit into the dominant Nazi condition s, crimal and non criminal individuals, "unfit for community life" as "clinkers and excretory products of human society and civilization", and recommended forced sterilization, forced labor and deprivation of national civil rights for the protection of national unity.

In 1941, the medical statistician Siegfried Koller (born in 1908) became head of the new bio-statistical institute in Berlin. In 1956, after having spent the years 1945-1952 in confinement, Koller was appointed honorary professor and head of the Institute for medical statistics in Mainz. From 1953 to 1962 he was head of the Department for Demographic and Cultural Statistics with the Federal Office for Statistics. In his function of nestor of medical statistics, Koller obtained the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Distinguished Service Medal) in 1982.

[7]

Essentially in the new German order you could potentially condemn to a forced labour camp for the crime of not liking folk dancing.


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1: http://remember.org/educate/elman
2: http://blacktrianglecampaign.org/
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_Arbeitsscheu_Reich
4: In Birkenau concentration camp the Roma population wore black triangles before the introduction of a Brown triangle badge unique to Roma prisoners http://auschwitz.org/en/history/prisoner-classification/system-of-triangles
5:  Table Talk p. 271
6: http://archive.is/BM4e#selection-315.621-315.627
7: Idib.

The Audible Anarchist

For the past couple of months or so I've been interested in and then later volunteering for a group called Audible Anarchist. Audible Anarchist is a group of volunteers making audio book versions of texts thought to be useful for the development of Anarchism and education.


Intro video

"What is anarchism? Anarchism is a diverse and overlapping set of political ideologies dedicated to creating a stateless society where all individuals are free from arbitrary authority, hierarchy, and oppression. Because our current society is based on hierarchy--the ingrained beliefs that some people should have more power than others--we believe we must destroy the systems of power that keep all people oppressed.

Audible Anarchist is a collective of volunteers from around the world dedicated to sharing anarchist ideas through audio recordings of books and essays, through podcasts, and through collaboration. Subscribe to our channel and discover the myriad resources available to you. Uploads several times each week."

Currently the main project is reading Rudolf Rocker's Nationalism and Culture but readers are free to contribute a reading on any text they wish. Speaking of the group is always open to more volunteers, all you need is a means to record audio and access to the text you wish to read. Audio editing skills are a bonus but speaking from experience its not necessary as the group has some very experienced editors.

One strength of the current Anarchist community is that it has preserved many books, essays and speeches and still continues produce more to add to it. However material in other mediums is lacking, so audio books are a way of filling in some of the gap. I myself struggle to get into some books and even short essays and have found the readings on Audible Anarchist very helpful. Currently much of the work is being done on the Youtube channel but their is also a Dischord server and subreddit. There is also a website and plans to collaborate further with Librivox the worlds largest publisher of public domain audio books.

If you wish to volunteer or get in touch feel free to contact the group using the email

audibleanarchist@gmail.com 

Edit: Audible Anarchist also has Sound cloud account 

Italy's Secret State Within the State

Earlier I uploaded a video about the life and murder of Giuseppe Pinelli and Italian Anarchist. While I thought the video was excellent at covering Giuseppe, I took issue with the later discussion about that period of Italian history. The guest downplayed and ridiculed the pretty well known strategy of tension and collaboration and infiltration of the Italian government and its policing arms, especially the intelligence services. Well it seems like the BBC agreed with me, because later they did another program on the murder of Roberto Calvi under Black Friar bridge. And in the process document his many, many connections to the conspiracy and interview two men instrumental in exposing it.

Murder and conspiracy among Italy's elite Roberto Calvi, head of Banco Ambrosiano, who was convicted of fraud but released on appeal shortly before his murder

At the time I thought the guest made the mistake of taking the strategy to its most extreme interpretation, that the government of Italy as a block including politicians and bureaucracy were united in a fiendish plan to use manufactured outrages like the Piazza Fontana bombing to pave the way for an openly Fascistic regime. Whereas the above video makes clear this was a plot motivated by one faction within and without the governmental system with some very powerful friends.

Also of interest, this appears to be one of the few times in history where a chapter of the Free Masons, Propaganda Du, or P2 where up to some very sketchy and murderous schemes. With that in mind and the obsessive fixation on the Masonic brothers in conspiracist circles its a little surprising this incident doesn't play more of a prominent role in that scene.

Classical Liberalism: Classical Menace

I encountered YouTube user and social commentator Sargon of Akkad about a year or so ago. He seemed like a rather obnoxious man who seemed to be deliberately playing up to the stereotype of a toxic intellectual. So I ignored him, though due to his popularity and infamy he kept popping up on my radar like in this video clip where he ends it saying he'll support Fascist terror.




Flicking through the comments and seeing his fans come out the woodwork reminded me of something else Sargon has been pretty heavily committed to in his internet career, the rehabilitation and promotion of the ideology of `classical liberalism`. Classical Liberalism, I'm just going to call it Liberalism from now on, promotes itself by appearing as a moderate and open and tolerant view point that is in strict opposition to all the various political extremists. The horseshoe fallacy is common talking point amongst this crowd.

So far as I'm aware this liberal revivalism unlike Neoliberalism doesn't appear to have grown into a full fledged political movement, so this may seem like tilting at windmills, but this is early days and I think given the prevalence of a certain smug frog its best to knock this thing on the head sooner rather than later. In my personal experience if you let a self professed Classical Liberal talk for long enough you'll eventually start hearing some pretty extreme and violent reactionary ideas. Sargon is pretty typical in that regard, but this more than just individual moral failings the whole project is rooting in some pretty vile stuff and is inherently reactionary.

This particular strand of liberalism likes to based itself on the Enlightenment period, specifically the early United States and United Kingdom, and the personalities they really like come from the 18th and early 19th century. But these societies were not wonderful bastions of reason and tolerance, they both were heavily involved in slavery, conquest and complete oppression of women. And a mans social worth and standing was dependent entirely on the size of their property holdings. Even in the democratic and republican USA property gave you unique entitlements like the right to vote or stand for office.

These weren't aberrations they coincided quite a lot with the views of many of this periods most prominent thinkers. For example John Stuart Mills On Liberty is a foundational text on Liberalism written in 1859 it largely codifies a lot of earlier liberal thinking. It outlines for example the limits of government authority, it also fully endorses colonial expansion and domination.

This isn't a man from an earlier time carrying some baggage either this is at the core of Mill's liberal framework of authority, if you're not advanced enough you should be ruled for your own good. He also was not being guilty of theoretical abstraction, Mill worked for the East India Company and assisted in the Despotic control of millions of "barbarians".

Another influential thinker often cited as one of the best thinkers of early liberalism is Thomas Jefferson the well known democracy advocate and American revolutionary. He not only drafted the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights the two pillars of liberal thought but he was so committed to them that he declared them `self evident`.

He was also a slave owner and even raped some of those slaves  . He also opposed the free coloured population, he tried to declare free black people living in Virginia declared outlaws, and wanted to expel the children of white women and black men.[1] Like Mill he also took a dim view of "Barbarians" and endeavoured to pressure the tribes living in or near US territory to leave and move further west if they couldn't be "civilised". His favourite method was tricking the tribes into debt by selling to them on credit, then using that as leverage in negotiations. In exchange for debt cancellation the government would get land for cheap and parcel it off, this would weaken the ability of the tribe to pay off any future debts and establish a negative spiral eventually forcing the tribes to either leave US territory or assimilate into the towns.

Jefferson first instructed his agents to persuade Indians to adopt agriculture. That new way of life, the agents explained, would require less land than hunting. With no need for their vast forests, the Indians were encouraged to sell their uncultivated territories for 25 cents per acre, the profits of which Indian farmers could use to purchase agricultural tools and manufactured goods. To stimulate Indian consumerism, Jefferson increased the number of government trading houses located near Native villages, arguing publicly that the establishments enabled Indians to share in the fruits of white "civilization." But it was a ploy. His real motive, he confided in 1803, was to lure Indians into spending themselves into debt, obligations that would be paid off through the sale of tribal lands.

The weapons in Jefferson's arsenal of dispossession were many and varied, and they worked to perfection. As the historian Colin Galloway has observed, Jefferson's strategy yielded some 30 treaties with approximately a dozen tribes, who ceded some 200,000 square miles of land in nine states.

The fact Jefferson owned slave is no secret of course, even his admirers acknowledge it, though they quickly make excuses. For example when his slave estate is brought up the quotation about the wolfs ear is often cited as an example of his sad reluctant compromise with that bloody institution.  "but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." But that is a very selective quote, the full letter that it comes from makes it clear that he advocates expanding slavery throughout the Union including the newly acquired territory of Missouri. Indeed he goes so far as to call abolition a form of treason and the death of the nation.

Monticello Apr. 22. 20.

I thank you, Dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. it is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read the newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once concieved and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of co-adjutors. an abstinence too from this act of power would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress, to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a state. this certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the general government. could congress, for example say that the Non-freemen of Connecticut, shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other state?

I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of '76. to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it. if they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the hopes of the world.

to yourself as the faithful advocate of union I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. Th. Jefferson

This is all terrible but again it is not an aberration, these horrible views are part of the bedrock of Jeffersonian liberalism.  He believed that for the democratic society he championed to work it must be primarily agricultural and based on a large body of small land owners. The Yeomen farming class[2] essentially. In order for this class to survive and prosper it needed several things, plenty of unoccupied land, hence the pushes to removal of the tribes to free up vast acres. It also explains in addition to naked racism and belief in pseudo science the drive to maintain and expand slavery and expel the free coloured population. If the slaves were freed many of them would become free farmers and so compete for land, and so would be a destabilising influence on the yeoman farmer society Jefferson wanted to cultivate.

And speaking of cultivation...

Voltaire! The above is basically classical liberalism's slogan. If they ever do become a full fledged movement with rallies and marches that will be on most of the banners. Minor tangent, when I looked up where exactly Voltaire said this and the second result was Stormfront, I don't have a point here, just thought it was worth mentioning. Also it appears that he didn't and the quotation was attributed to him in a book written after his death by an English admirer  but the association has stuck so I'll keep going.

Voltaire was of course very influential and still is to an extent, the problem is while his works have many merits, Candide is a favourite, both his personal life and his legacy aren't very good omens if this liberal revival takes off. Voltaire was not afraid to offend or risk punishment for what he believed in, though he didn't relish being sent back to the Bastille so often used pen names and moved around when the authorities had had enough of him. The problem is though that he had a very, very poor track record when it came to defending the rights of anyone else.

He was the close friend and confidant of Frederick the Great, and may have been his lover. Frederick's regime was built on conquest and serfdom[3] so he does not appear to have made much impact in Prussia. He also had little success with his other great admirer Catherine the Great. Again he found an enthusiastic fan at the head of an autocracy built on military conquests and serfdom. He had a lively correspondence with the "enlightened despot"[4]. Indeed before the French revolution Voltaire was the most important and popular thinker amongst the Russian nobility.

Now because of the two previous examples I want to make it clear that unlike Mill and Jefferson I don't think Voltaire actively promoted any of this, though his comments praising Catherine's war with the Turks for example are pushing. I'm mainly bringing up Voltaire because he's an enlightenment figure many classical liberals openly aspire to and his legacy shows just how insufficient his ideas are for addressing extreme injustice. 18th century Russia was a society where the nobility could in effect do what they pleased so long as they did not anger a more powerful member. And yet despite years of infatuation the Russian enlightenment never translated into effective social change. On the contrary after 1789 Catherine ditched the enlightenment and aggressively stamped out what little progress had been made.

Now back to the UK. Arguably the United Kingdom since its founding in 1707 was the nation where classical liberalism made the most inroads. Indeed the UK has had several liberal Prime Ministers, and by strange coincidence these premierships often occurred during some pretty dark and bloody periods of UK history. For example Prime Minister John Russell who essentially caused the Irish famine. Now he didn't go around spreading the blight, the blight actually appeared while his predecessor the Conservative PM Robert Peel.

But the majority of the deaths can be lead squarely at Russell's feet since he not only did not take measures to prevent or limit the damage of the famine, he ended what relief efforts Peel's government had made, (small scale public works, price guarantees of corn etc.). He was the Prime minister from 1846 to 1852 nearly the entirety of the famine, and he never changed course. His actions, or rather deliberate inaction lead to the displacement of 2-3million people and the deaths of 800,000 to 1,000,000 people depending on estimates. All of whom were British subjects due to the act of Union in 1800. And again as with Mill and Jefferson this wasn't some personal failing, it was the direct result of a firm belief in a cornerstone of classic liberalism, that of the market economy.

As far as Russell was concerned the real tragedy of the famine was that it lead the British government to intervene in the economy for them it was most important to get the market back on track. To quote Trevalyn a member of Russell's government who oversaw Ireland and its (lack of relief)

Our measures must proceed with as little disturbance as possible of the ordinary course of private trade, which must ever be the chief resource for the subsistence of the people, but, coûte que coûte (at any cost), the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.

Which seems not too bad, but the commitment to not let people starve quickly proved hollow, under Trevalyn exports of Irish food stuffs continued regularly and when in 1847 he was confronted with news that the years potato harvest had been riddled with blight this was his response.

'The only way to prevent the people from becoming habitually dependent on government is to bring the operation to a close. The uncertainty about the new crop only makes it more necessary. Whatever may be done hereafter these things should be stopped now or we run the risk of paralysing all private enterprise and having this country on you for an indefinite number of years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer strongly supports this policy.'

And there you have it, liberal economics in a nutshell. Property and commerce before and above human costs. Whenever someone praises liberal economics and laissez-faire commerce this is what they mean.

Before I wrap up I'd like to hammer home this point with the example of the most successful liberal statesman in the UK, Gladstone. Gladstone was Prime minister four times, and Chancellor of the Exchequer another four times, so a man of influence and power. In opposition he developed a reputation for opposing the growth of the Empire. When he was in office though he made no move to withdraw British rule from any of its overseas territories. Indeed, he personal investments in several Imperial ventures. The case of Egypt is very revealing, in the 1880's tensions were growing there. Gladstone decided to intervene, the fact he had 37% of his stock invested in the country was probably just a coincidence.

Gladstone funnily enough justified Imperial aggression and domination in much the same way J.S. Mill did, for their own good, and it would end once the conquered "savages" reached an appropriate level of civilisation whatever that actually means.

The Liberal project old and new is one steeped in violence and hostile elitism. In that respect the modern "classical liberals" of today are not much different from their forefathers. The reputation political liberalism has of being an emancipatory movement for civil discourse and polite toleration is largely a product of misdirection and propaganda to cover up the atrocities and structural tyranny it presided over.

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1:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/the-real-thomas-jefferson.html
2: The term Yeomen farmer in the United States didn't have any feudal connotations
3: Frederick II past an abolition of serfdom decree in 1763 after he had fallen out with Voltaire and the decree only extended to crown lands. It wouldn't be until the revolution of 1848 when Prussian peasants would finally be freed from all feudal obligations.
4: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/02/russia.books

The effects of the Hillsborough disaster and police cover up

"And I didn't realise I was helping their case then, and I was so, so vulnerable. I think they used that to their advantage." Steve Kelly

Steve Kelly is the brother of one of the 96 Liverpool FC fans crushed to death in 1989 in Hillsborough, this is his account of how the police treated the families of the victims and the impact of the cover up and media smears.

A bit different from the other entries in the series on political prisoners but its account of a massive police cover up and attempt to discredit and harass grieving family members for wanting to know the truth is very familiar.

Episode guide:

A heartbreaking story of a long campaign for justice in the UK. Steve's brother, Mike, was killed in the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, when 96 people died in a crush at a football stadium. Fans like Mike were blamed for the deaths, but Steve and others knew that something was amiss. In Their Own Words is a podcast from Amnesty International, where people around the world tell their extraordinary stories of fighting for their rights.

The effects of the Hillsborough disaster and police cover up https://t.co/fbzrj7387s via @libcomorg

— Reddebrek🏴 (@Reddebrek) December 7, 2017

I had some more thoughts on the Hillsborough disaster and this lead to a thread on twitter.

The Hillsborough stadium disaster and the police response are very instructive. Despite billions of pounds being spent on PR for the police, criticism and opposition to them is still fairly common provided it comes with a number of qualifiers. From my own experience, contempt and hostility toward individual coppers is widespread and when news or rumours of police corruption and or brutality surface it's not hard to convince someone that there is at least some truth to the allegations.

However, the distrust usually falls under the `few bad apples` scenario. Yes, those officers were corrupt and worse than the criminals they allegedly protect us all from, but they're the exception. Again from personal experience, the only time I've encountered people -who aren't already involved in political radicalism of some kind-willing to believe in widespread or even total corruption or abuse from the policeis in regard to a foreign police force in a nation that has a very poor reputation overall. Though there has been a bit of an exception with the police of the United States. The Black Lives Matter campaigns have really damaged the reputation of the American police internationally.

This is why I feel it's very important not to let Hillsborough fade from memory after the second inquest. This was a cover-up and harassment campaign organised by the entire South Yorkshire police force, from the officers at the scene on that day all the way to the top. They were supported in this endeavour to cover up the deaths of 96 people by the elected and parliamentary government and elements with the free press. It's an incontestable example of the power and attitude of the police as an institution and how even modern parliamentary democracy and independent media are not only not up to the task of keeping the police in check, but when push comes to shove will actively support even its worst excesses.