George Bush declared major combat operations to be over on May 1st, 2003. 139 US soldiers had been killed by that date. Two years later over ten times that number have died. No one knows how many Iraqis have been killed, as the Americans aren’t even bothering to count. Estimates like that published in Lancet last October suggested a likely death toll of around 100,000.
Anarchists are for the defeat of British imperialism. We would like to see an end to the killings in the 6 counties but we understand that the ultimate cause of the troubles lies at the feet of Britain and the northern sectarian statelet. But we want more, we stand for the creation of a new society in the interests of the working class and against the bosses, both orange and green.
The IRA CEASEFIRE is approaching its first anniversary. That year has been striking for two things, on the one hand the success of the ‘peace process’ in turning Sinn Féin from demonised pariahs to lauded peace makers. On the other hand, the failure of the process to produce any substantial gains for the nationalist community.
THE 12th OF JULY, always a high point of tension, was used this year by the ‘respectable’ unionist parties to try to provoke the IRA into breaking the ceasefire. Nothing made this clearer than the events surrounding the attempts of Orangemen in Portadown to march through the Garvaghy Road nationalist estate.
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Robert Emmet and the rising of 1803
The traditional history of the 1803 rising is of little more than a ‘blood sacrifice’ intended to confirm Ireland’s right to independence. Ruan O’Donnell’s book concentrates on exploding the myth that the rising was doomed from the start. It was planned not as a noble gesture of a handful of nationalists but rather as a mass uprising intended to decapitate the British state in Ireland at the very moment of a French invasion and liberation of the country.
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On the bin tax jailings of 2003
Cover story for WSM paper. Contracts the jailing of anti-war and bin tax protesters with what happened to tax evaders and corrupt politicans.
Xinhua has reported the death of the Chinese anarchist Ba Jin after a six year battle with cancer. Ba Jin was born Li Yaotang on 1904, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province but changed his name to taking Ba Jin which combines the names of two Russian anarchists. The first syllable in Chinese is that of the surname of Mikhail Bakunin and the last syllable that of Kropotkin. He translated Kropotkin’s work into Chinese.
Gale Ahrens has done the anarchist movement a real service in putting together this collection, which should rescue Lucy Parsons from the dark corner she has existed in. In it she emerges from the shadow of her martyred husband as a central if neglected figure in the development of anarchism in the USA.
The fundamental idea of anarchism is that as long as a minority make decisions on our behalf then we cannot be free. The decision making and enforcing apparatus this minority uses is the state; in Ireland it is the Dáil, local councils, the judiciary, the police force and a hundred other bodies, some visible, some invisible. While every other political current seeks to become part of the apparatus of decision making, the anarchists suggest something quite different. We want to smash the whole apparatus.
Over the weekend of March 31st an international libertarian/anarchist gathering was held in Madrid. It was hosted by the largest anarchist union in the world, the Spanish CGT, which has around 50,000 members. A number of other large libertarian unions attended including the SAC of Sweden and the Italian UNICOBAS.