A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
Running scared from the huge numbers mobilising to resist the water charge the establishment are now pulling out all the stops. Over the weekend we saw an image of a single brick being thrown at a Garda car used to try and divide the movement through saturation coverage of the brick and the demand that resistors condemn ‘violence’
The official British commemoration of the dead of World War One is about preparing new generations to go out and kill “again, and again, and again, and again"
Could there be a more fitting place for remembering the imperialist slaughter of WWI than the Tower of London. It was built in 1078 by William the Conqueror to rule over the latest subjects added to his kingdom. Then used for centuries afterwards to imprison, torture and execute those who rebelled against the royal parasites. What better way to commemorate the millions of the royals subjects who fell fighting the subjects of their cousins in WWI than to symbolically dumb their bodies in the moat of the oldest symbol of their rule.
I was rather surprised to see a talk I gave in Galway back in 2003 used for a smear campaign article written by a ‘Victoria White’ against the current mass resistance to the water charges. It’s worth dissecting this to understand how establishment power works in Ireland, in this case a connection between an ex-Government party and the media that would probably be invisible to almost all the readers of the smear in question.
There were significant disturbances in Santry & Coolock last night following a Garda assault on water charge campaigners protesting a visit by Enda Kenny and Denis O’Brien.
These images are from the video at the link which shows why the campaigners became so outraged. As Enda Kenny drove through the crowd (flashing a dismissive thumbs up sign at the protesters) Garda were assaulting them and throwing them to the ground.
Nov 1st saw demonstrations against the water charge all over Ireland. Around 1000 people from Dublin 7 alone marched down Constitution hill to join the huge anti Water Charges rally at the GPO
Well, we managed it – we got a new Black Flag (issue no. 236) out for the London Anarchist bookfair! So after a 2 year break, it looks like the Black Flag collective is back and viable. This is good news, particularly as there was a last issue of Freedom produced for the bookfair. A movement without a paper or magazine is hardly a movement at all.
According to RTE these are the changes in the Budget. After years of making us pay for the crisis it appears that a few carefully selected crumbs are being thrown under the table to quiet us down. Predictions are that most people won’t see a significant change in take-home pay. Most of the positives on social welfare and services represent the government returning a fraction of what was taken and the ‘Make the Youth Emigrate’ dole rates remain in place.
Following increasing Garda suppression of community resistance to water meters tens of thousands of people took part in a march against the water tax in Dublin on October 11th. This was the largest demonstration since 2010 and reflects a broad rejection of the way the costs of the capitalist crisis continue to be imposed on ordinary workers. The huge size of the demonstration certainly suggest a mass boycott of the tax could make it impossible to implement, as was the case in the last attempt to introduce a water tax.
On October 8th about 200 people marched though Dublin to show solidarity with Kobane under attack by ISIS in an emergency demonstration organised at short notice.
What was intended as a rally turned into a march on the Dail (Irish parliament) when more than the expected 30-40 people turned up. The attendance was made up of members of the Kurdish community in Ireland, Turkish leftists and anarchists, left-republicans and other socialists.
Below is a newly translated article by Kropotkin from 1890. It is part of the debates over the May Day demonstrations and libertarian participation in the labour movement. Of note is Kropotkin’s talk of the General Strike years before it became associated with syndicalism (although, as discussed before, Bakunin and his comrades raised it twenty years before).