history – Page 17 – Wis[s]e Words

The Fall of Yugoslavia – Misha Glenny

Published on January 4, 2008

Cover of The Fall of Yugoslavia

The Fall of Yugoslavia
Misha Glenny
314 pages, including index
published in 1996

The Fall of Yugoslavia was the first book I read in 2007, I got it as a Christmas present from Sandra. I had put this book on my Amazon UK wishlist quite a while back, after having read Glenny’s The Balkans 1804-1999, which was an impressive overview of the modern history of the Balkans. I thought it would be a good book to start the new year with and was not disappointed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the past few years blogging the War on Iraq it’s that you can follow the news on tv, read the newspaper reports and magazine coverage on a subject and think you know what’s going on, when in fact you’ve only gotten part of the facts, often arranged in a preconcieved narrative. Even if the news media are basically honest in their reporting, it is too immediate to see beyond the story being reported, to put them in context and digest them. At the same time, news thrives on new and unusual incidents, which greatly distorts the picture we get: in reality more people may die in single car crashes than multicar pileups, but the latter is the one featured on the evening news. Only the simplest of narratives can survive this process and governments and other propagandists make grateful use of it to push through their reality.

Rural Rides

Published on June 19, 2006

William Cobbett – 542 pages – published in 1830

Cover of Rural Rides

If you’ve read any of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels, like Perdido Street Station, you’ve got some idea of what pre Parliament reform England was like in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century. It may have had a parliament and some semblance of a constition, but it was far from a democracy and it ruthlessly repressed any political movement that attempted to change things. Despite this repression there was a long and diverse tradition of reform and in the early nineteenth century there were few more impressive figures within the radical reform movement than William Cobbett.

Cobbett started his professional life by taking the stagecoach to London on a whim, spending several months as a clerk before becoming a soldier. In the army he got disgusted with the endemic corruption, brought charges against his officers and had to flee to France just as the revolution there broke out. He then spent time in the United States, until bankruptcy forced him back to England. At this point he was pretty much still a monarchist Tory in his political outlook, but this slowly changed towards Radical, especially after his conviction for treasonous libel after he protested the flogging of local militiamen by Hanovarian mercenaries.

In 1802 Cobbet founded his own newspaper, the Political Register, which ran until his death in 1835. During this entire time it was one of the most well known and consistent Radical publications, with a popularity unmatched by any other. In it, Cobbett agitated for Parliamentary reform and an end to the rotten boroughs and corruption, against the tax eaters, the clergy with their tithes and in favour of the honest working folk of England getting a decent living for their labours.

His politics in short were a mixture of genuine radicalism coupled with a nostalgia for a bygone England, where there were masters and labourers, but both with rights and duties towards one another. His ideal was an England of smallholders, small independent craftsmen and masters, each trading with another directly, without interference by capitalist middlemen. His sympathies lay mostly with rural England, rather than the cities.

Rural Rides is the logical outgrowth of Cobbett’s politics and sentiments, an attempt to discover the real state of the English countryside. Originally published in the Register, it covers a period of four years, from 1822 until 1826. Its strength, the reason why it is still in print is that it is not just a political examination, but a portrait of a countryside now long gone, still partway in its transformation from the medieval to the modern.

Cobett has a real love for this landscape, and a real hatred for the pressures that are transforming it or have transformed it. Furthermore this love is coupled with an admiration for the people who inhabit it. Time after time in his descriptions the condition of the people in a given town or county is as much a reason as its natural beauty for Cobbett to praise it.

You can therefore not read Rural Rides properly if you discount its politics, decouple it from its context. Cobbett was a partisan observer at a time of deep political turmoil, with the forces of capitalism –the owners of great estates, the new factory masters, the free trade ideologues– were mounting their assaults on the ancient priviledges and rights of the English country people, when people like Cobbett were not only defending these ancients rights but were attempting to extend them. There’s a deep anger in Rural Rides, an anger at the changes happening in England, a very personal anger.

His egotism is delightful, because there is no affection in it. He does not talk about himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject and he himself is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration from a squamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well“. It is this personal feeling that keeps Rural Rides in print, because his anger, his despair and his joy are still palpatable more then 170 years after first publication

Also published at my booklog.

The Lucy Parsons Project

Published on July 17, 2003

The Lucy Parsons Project (not to be confused with the Alan Parsons Project) website is dedicated to Lucy Parsons, a late 19th century/early 20th century anarchist labour activist, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as the widow of one of the Haymarket martyrs. A remarkable woman, not in the least because she fought for workers’ rights at a time when the United States was still an extremely sexist and racist society.

[…]Born in Texas, 1853, probably as a slave, Lucy Parsons was an African,Native and Mexican-American anarchist labor activist who fought against the injustices of poverty, racism, capitalism and the state her entire life. After moving to Chicago with her husband, Albert, in 1873, she began organizing workers and led thousands of them out on strike protesting poor working conditions, long hours and abuses of capitalism. After Albert, along with seven other anarchists, were eventually imprisoned or hung by the state for their beliefs in anarchism, Lucy Parsons achieved international fame in their defense and as a powerful orator and activist in her own right. The impact of Lucy Parsons on the history of the American anarchist and labor movements has served as an inspiration spanning now three centuries of social movements.

While most people remember Lucy Parsons in relation to the events surrounding her husband, Albert
Parsons, and their comrades’ executions (known as the Haymarket affair), Lucy’s own legacy and passions have a long and courageous life history all their own. Lucy was known for her writings, her courage as a dissident woman of color, her unbending commitment to social justice, and, most of all, her powerful, fiery public speeches. She led tens of thousands of workers into the streets in mass protests, drew enormous crowds wherever she spoke and was considered a dangerous, explosive and robust threat to authorities across the United States. For over 30 years her lectures were shut down by the police, often arresting her before she ever reached the podium. Hearing Lucy speak at all was a rare opportunity that sparked a passion for rebellion in working and poor people from coast to coast. The Chicago police labeled Lucy Parsons “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” [1]

The Haymarket Massacre happened on 4 May 1886 when during a police raid on a meeting of labour organisors somebody threw a bomb which killed one police officer. After this the police went wild and in the ensuing riot several more police men were killed, as well as an unknown number of civilians. During the police reprisals which followed, Lucy’s husband Albert Parsons was arrested and later condemned to death

[…] Following the bomb at Haymarket the police responded the next day by rounding up several of the city’s leading anarchist labor activists, including Lucy & Albert Parsons and several of their associates, none of which had anything to do with the bombing – most were not even at the event. Lucy was jailed several times for the event and eventually released, but her husband, Albert, and 7 other anarchists were sentenced, not for the bombing, but for their beliefs in anarchism. Lucy went on a nationwide tour gathering support across the US for her husband and comrades in jail, delivering powerful speeches and reaching hundreds of thousands of people within a couple of months, but it was not enough. In the end, 1 of the anarchists, Louis Lingg killed himself in prison. 2 others, Michael Schwab, and Samuel Fielden, were sentenced to life in prison, while Oscar Neebe got 15 years; and the other 4, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hung. [2]

The IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World was one of the first American unions to push for a broad union, wanting to organise all workers, not just the ones in a given craft Its ultimate goals was not as much to improve condiutions for its members as it was revolution. Lucy herself had also helped found an earlier union, the International Working People’s Association, of which the IWW would take over several principles.

The IWW was born in Chicago in 1905, a product of more than 200 trade unionists, socialist, anarchists and industrial unionists. From its inception the IWW offered a radical strategy and perspective counter to mainstream labor unions of the day. Unlike the American Federation of Labor, for instance, the IWW set forth to organize women, people of color, immigrants and unskilled workers into one big union, organized along industry lines instead of by craft, and many prominent people of color and women took leadership roles in the IWW such as Ben Fletcher, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Frank Little. The IWW believed “the working class and the employing class” had “nothing in common” and urged direct action on the job to win demands and build working class power. [3]

It’s quite inspiring to read about Lucy Parsons and know that no matter how bad the current situation is, things were once worse, that it was due to the hard work of people like Lucy Parsons that we got the freedoms we have today. If she could overcome racism, sexism and class prejudices to do what she did, surely we can do no less.

Please check out the website as it provides an excellent overview of Lucy Parsons’ life, as well as the struggles she was involved in, from workers’ rights to civil rights for black people. If only there were more of this sort of social(ist) history websites.

[1] From the biographic summary at the Lucy Parsons Project.
[2] From the Lucy Parsons Project pages on the Haymarket Massacre.
[3] From the Lucy Parsons Project pages on the IWW

Holland was safe. Safe behind the dykes

Published on January 31, 2003

Even if you know next to nothing about the Netherlands, you know that our history has been one of struggle, a continuing struggle against the sea and its might. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that we conquered this country from the sea, polder by polder and dyke by dyke. Even in the earliest mention of what once would become our country, in the works of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder this struggle was evident, as he spoke of “a people living between water and land”.

More than a quarter of the country lies below the waterline and would flood if there weren’t dykes and dunes to keep the sea out. You see, the western and especially the south western part of the country, the part I’m from, is nothing more then a massive delta, a place where three of Europe’s great rivers come together: the Rhine, the Schelde and the Meuse, flowing into each other and into the sea, creating a borderland of islands and estuaries: Zeeland, “sealand”.

Yes, the force of the sea was well known, as flood after flood had made clear through the centuries. But by 1953 all this had changed. Thanks to the high modern dykes, the risk of another flood was minimal. The last serious flood, in 1944, had not even been a natural disaster, but was caused by the Allies bombing the dykes of Walcheren –which dominated the approach to the vital harbour of Antwerpen– to flood out the Germans. Since then, the dykes and dunes had been repaired and rebuild:
Holland was safe again.

Until that fateful moment, today exactly fifty years ago, when during the night and onto the next morning it turned out the dykes weren’t high and strong enough and the North Sea delivered a nasty surprise to the Dutch South West. On that day, the worst flood, the worst natural disaster in Dutch modern history began. Before it was under control, 1835 people would be dead, some 750,0000 people were affected; many lost their homes, had to be evacuated, had to flee the coming water with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The amount of livestock lost is unknown, but must number in the (tens of) thousands. Material damage was unmeasurable. Below is a map of the afflicted area:

a map of the area hit by the flood

Over the next few days I would like to tell the story of the disaster, the relief operations and its aftermath here at Wis[s]e Words. The disaster is one of the events that has shaped modern Holland, both figurally but aslo literally, as after the disaster drastic steps were undertaken to ensure it would never happen again. It is a story I find worth telling, hopefully y’all will find it worth reading as well.