History is never dead, it tells us how we got where we are, it lets us see where we went wrong, it should teach us how not to make the same mistakes again. Sadly we don't always see those mistakes and also the powers that be will do what they can to conceal, distort or destroy those parts of history that might point to ways and means of getting rid of their power and privileges. The true history of the ordinary people is a history of perpetual struggle for justice and equality, a struggle that still continues today. Let's learn and spread our history so that we don't again repeat those mistakes.
The following is an extract from Orgrad, Organic Radicals:
The spring of 1649 was a time of unprecedented hope for the people of England. Civil war had turned to revolution, King Charles I had lost his head and a republic had been declared.
The victorious “roundhead” parliamentary army which had defeated the royalist “cavaliers” was heavily imbued with the radical ideas of the Levellers and at St George’s Hill in Surrey a little group of rural rebels were setting out to reclaim the land as a “common treasury for all”. (1)
But the hope did not last and the moment turned out to be the high water mark of popular revolt. The agitators of the New Model Army were crushed at Burford by Oliver Cromwell’s cronies, the Diggers were attacked and evicted from their squatted land and “law and order” were restored. Eventually, of course, the monarchy came back as well, albeit in “constitutional” guise.
Instead of becoming a country of free men and women, growing their own food and deciding their own destinies, England became the birthplace of liberal capitalism.
The tyranny of privilege maintained by the old Stuart regime had not been ended, simply transferred into new hands.
Popular anger against feudal hierarchy had been harnessed by the entrepreneurial and banking classes to get rid of all those inconvenient old-fashioned barriers to trade and money-making.
Once the people had played their revolutionary role, and the old regime was gone, they became the enemy within and had to be quickly be put back in their place before things went too far.
The essence of this commercial coup d’état is nicely symbolised by the fact that a lavish feast was laid on for Cromwell by the City of London to celebrate his crushing of the radicals at Burford. (2)
By the first decades of the next century, Merrie England had already been replaced by the kind of society that is all too familiar today.
The Bank of England.
Read the full article HERE:
