And Still, Worker Kills Worker.

         When worker kills worker under some coloured rag or other, called “the national flag” it is seldom, if ever, because that worker hates the other worker. It is usually they have been conscripted, (forced) or because of the mainstream media, the propaganda mouth piece of the state, has convinced them that it is their patriotic duty. That we as morally superior beings have to sort out the evil of the other. An so shop keeper goes to kill bus driver, and school teacher goes to kill mother of four. Factory worker goes to kill office worker. We have had mass protests across the globe in an attempt to stop this madness, this exploitation of people for power and wealth of the few. However a simple glance at the world to day and it is obvious we have failed miserably. State sponsored carnage continues to turn vast swaths of our planet into abattoirs, the devastation of countries is total, its people, bus drivers, office workers, school teachers, factory workers and innocent parents and children, die in fiery graves with tons of rumble heaped on them as grave stones. In days gone by, in military conflict the casualties were mainly the military. Now with aid of our wonderful technology, the civilian population are, by far, the main victims in any war.
        Four years ago I wrote the following little piece and today it is more relevant than ever, wars are still portrayed as a moral answer to problems, despite the flagrant slaughter of the innocent.

    February, 2015, When Worker kills Worker. 

        On most occasions, war, in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is portrayed as something heroic, with our side standing tall on the moral high ground, and the enemy crawling from the sewers with mean and nasty tactics. How else could they keep recruiting fresh young blood. We can be thankful for that band of heroes the poets, who experience war in all its brutality and record it, as viewed through the eyes of a human being, seeing the destruction and death of another human being.
      One such poet was the Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay, 1915-1984, born in Elderslie and brought up in Kintyre. Due to his pacifist values, for more than a year during WWII, he had tried to avoid conscription. Faced with prison, he opted for non-violent service in the army. George was sent to North Africa and given the job as night watchman. The events of the night May 7th. 1943 traumatised him, and he was never the same again. The event he witnessed was the allied saturation bombing of the German occupied town of Bizerta.

What is their name tonight,
the poor streets where every window spews
its flame and smoke,
its sparks and screaming of its inmates,
while house upon house is rent
and collapses in a gust of smoke?
And who tonight are beseeching
Death to come quickly in all their tongues,
or are struggling among stones and beams,
crying in frenzy for help, and are not heard?
Who to-night is paying
the old accustomed tax of common blood?

 
    Of course we  have to ask ourselves, why in Gaza and many, many more places on this planet, can these words still be applied. 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

My Uncle Willie.

My Uncle Willie.

        To those who know me, there will be no doubt in their minds about my hatred of the economic system we bleed under. In my eighties now, I have seen this system destroy individuals, tear families apart, and in its voracious greed for profit and power, it has murdered and maimed countless millions in its endless wars. Each individual destroyed, each family torn apart, each war grave, and each veterans hospital are all indictments against a system where people are sacrificed to keep the system functioning for the benefit of a small cabal of over privileged parasites. You would think that our humanity would demand that the system should be altered, modified and shaped to meet the needs of the people, not the other way round.
       As we look at this society we can see all around us, those unfortunate individuals whose lives are deeply scarred by a system that uses people to perpetuate its greed driven machinations. It is so easy to encapsulate the ruthless viciousness of the system in one person's life, to me my uncle Willie is such a person. To the system, a nobody, a human being of no significance, but to those around him, a friend, a father, a son, a brother, a husband and an uncle.
       My uncle Willie was my mother's younger brother, naturally I didn't know him in his early years, but I heard the stories. Willie, like the rest of my family, lived in Garngad, a Glasgow slum in the north of the city. A young man in the 30's, he was married and had three kids, and like so many of that era, unemployed. It seems that Willie was a family man and loved his kids, he could be seen most days walking with them along the waste ground off Charles Street at the back of Glenconner Park, usually two kids running in front and the youngest on his shoulders. It seems he was an excellent snooker player, and that is where he supplemented his income, by playing round the many snooker halls in Glasgow. However to the system, he was superfluous to requirements, so could scrape a living in the slums of Glasgow as best he could.
      Then, suddenly, he is a valuable asset to the system, 1939, WWII starts, and Willie is scooped up and shipped out to Egypt. We know nothing of his experiences there, but after three years there and later his demob, he returned home with malaria, this is when I got to know him, just a little. His shaking hands, the troubled look in his eyes. His return to civilian life didn't get off to a good start, on returning home to his family, of wife and three kids, he discovered that he now had five kids. This was the end of his marriage, the family broke up, and Willie moved from job to job, and his drinking got worse and he eventually couldn't hold a job, he was now an alcoholic and homeless. Moving from homeless hostel to homeless hostel, occasionally staying with family, but his alcoholism made that an ever decreasing possibility.
       I remember my mother on many an occasion, looking out the window and saying, "Oh, here's Willie coming", then a pause, then, "he doesn't look too drunk". He would sit and chat to his big sister and myself, my mother would make him something to eat and give a cup of tea. Though, it was never a full cup of tea, his hands were shaking so bad, a full cup would have been all over him, she only quarter filled the cup and kept topping it up, it was his troubled eyes that have stuck with me all these years, as he was leaving, my mother would slip a 10 shilling note into his hand.
        Willie spent the rest of his years moving around hostels for the homeless, eventually dying in one down in Ardrossan in his fifties.
       To me, my uncle Willie epitomises this stinking system, you're a worthless entity, left to rot unless the system needs you, either to make its profits, or to fight its imperialist wars, and your reward for either of these activities, is never anything worth having. 

The Homeless.

Tenebrous spectres, they exist,    out there,

on the crumbling edge of chaos,

a father, a son, a brother,

a daughter, a sister, a mother.

Fragments of some shattered family structure;

waste products

from a society being driven to destruction

by a hurricane of greed,

living a life that wears out life,

dying,

the devious death of exhaustion from existence. 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Blood For Wealth.

     I have always held that wars are an economic tool of capitalist governments. They can start them and prolong them, to suit their own economic ends. There is lots of money to be made in destruction and re-building, plus creating chaos in your rival's camp. Think of all the public money that flows into the arms industry during conflict. Every bullet, rocket, shell, missile, fired has to be replaced, every damaged piece of equipment has to be replaced, and it is all tax payers money pouring into the corporate bank accounts. Think how much easier it is to control the assets in a region if that region doesn't have a strong local government. Chaos allows the powerful to walk in and dictate what happens to that region's assets.
 

      WWI was a brutal imperialist scramble for power and resources, a blood bath for markets and territory. WWII was a clash of empires as the British empire felt threatened by the resurgence of the German empire. All the blood that has flowed in the Middle East since then, has been for the control of its oil, none of it has been for the welfare and benefit of the people of that area.
      In all these brutal capitalist tactics for power and wealth, other forces hedge their bets until they think they can see a winner, or feel their power and assets are threatened, then they throw in their hand with this side or that side. In this insane blood letting for power, your ally in this conflict could be your enemy in the next, loyalty depends on wealth and power.

      Having said all that, I have always been puzzled how a band of vicious religious nutters, in this case, ISIL, can march through country after country, taking on the state armies of Syria, Iraq and the Kurds and win massive swaths of land. Even now, with the “coalition” forces bombing the shit out of them they still manage to hold and take territory. Remember our "air-strikes" managed to bring down the well armed Libyan state. Of course our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, will not shed any light on that, as all they do is pour out misinformation, illusions and propaganda, for their lords and masters.
      However, if the following report has and validity, which I see no reason why it shouldn't, it does help explain the long life and continued success of that rat-bag of religious nutters that go by the name of ISIL.

     This from Global Research:

Iraqi Army Downs Two British Planes Carrying Weapons for ISIL Terrorists
GR editor’s Note
      There are no reports in the Western mainstream media pertaining to this issue.
      This report is based on statements emanating from the Iraq parliament, with photographic evidence. We have not been in a position to corroborate this report by FARS News.
       Iraq’s army has shot down two British planes as they were carrying weapons for the ISIL terrorists in Al-Anbar province, a senior lawmaker disclosed on Monday.
       “The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” Head of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to a Monday report of the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

When Workers Kill Workers.

    On most occasions, war, in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is portrayed as something heroic, with our side standing tall on the moral high ground, and the enemy crawling from the sewers with mean and nasty tactics. How else could they keep recruiting fresh young blood. We can be thankful for that band of heroes the poets, who experience war in all its brutality and record it, as viewed through the eyes of a human being, seeing the destruction and death of another human being.

    One such poet was the Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay, 1915-1984, born in Elderslie and brought up in Kintyre. Due to his pacifist values, for more than a year during WWII, he had tried to avoid conscription. Faced with prison, he opted for non-violent service in the army. George was sent to North Africa and given the job as night watchman. The events of the night May 7th. 1943 traumatised him, and he was never the same again. The event he witnessed was the allied saturation bombing of the German occupied  town of Bizerta.  

What is their name tonight,
the poor streets where every window spews
its flame and smoke,
its sparks and screaming of its inmates,
while house upon house is rent
and collapses in a gust of smoke?
And who tonight are beseeching
Death to come quickly in all their tongues,
or are struggling among stones and beams,
crying in frenzy for help, and are not heard?
Who to-night is paying
the old accustomed tax of common blood?

    Of course we  have to ask ourselves, why in Gaza and many, many more places on this planet, can these words still be applied.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Who Was Peter McKellar?

    I believe that we should never forget those comrades who stood against authority when it was at its harshest and most repressive. Reading through an old copy of The Word, on the Sparrow's Nest site, I came upon the case of Peter McKellar. The article starts with:-- 

     Our comrade Peter McKellar of 38 South Annadale Street, Glasgow, will have been court-martialled for the second time before these lines are printed.
     Then aged 22, a glazier by trade, he registered as a conscientious objector on December, 26, 1939. His case was heard on April 23, 1940, by the Glasgow Tribunal, consisting of Sir A. C. Black, K.C., Sir Robert Bruce, J.P.. L.L.D., and Mr. (now Sir) R. Bryce Walker, C.B.E., etc.
    McKellar told the Tribunal that his father was killed in the great war. He would not butcher nor yet be butchered. It was enough that this had happened to his father. The Tribunal sympathised with him. He replied that he wanted justice as an anti-militarist, not sympathy. --------

      Who was Peter McKellar, is there anybody out there who can throw some light on this comrade and man of principle. We should remember our own, record their life, they are part of our history, the history of the ordinary man and woman of our communities.  So if you have any wee bit of info, no matter how little a detail, please share it with ann arky, so that we can try to put his page in its rightful place in our history.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

First They Came For The Anarchists----!!!

       Proof, if ever it was needed, that Europe keeps lurching to the right. Spain has started dawn raids and dragging people from their homes because of their beliefs. No, it is not anti-religion, it is anti-free-thought, those having their doors knocked in are anarchists. Obviously the privileged, pampered establishment, see anarchism as the greatest threat to their plundering, repressive regime. First they give their repression an inoffensive name, the this case of the Spanish onslaught on freedom it is call “Operation Pandora”, rather than “let's kill the opposition”.
       As expected, the people of Spain didn't take this lying down, and there have been mass demonstrations in various parts of Spain, Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Seville, to mention a few. These early morning raids are seen in Spain for what they are, state kidnappings, as the state comes down hard on those who would dare to resist its repression.

    The Spanish state, Like the rest of Europe is attempting to crush any resistance to the ideology of the financial Mafia, namely “austerity”, a brutal treatment meant only for the ordinary people.
       The financial Mafia are determined to force wages and conditions in Europe down to sweatshop standards, so as to compete with the Eastern sweatshop economies. And as the resistance grows, so does the repression. You don't have to have committed any crime, just hold a particular point of view that sees the plundering of the ordinary people as wrong, and you could see yourself facing the full force of the “law”.
     Europe today is no different from the 30's, it is in turmoil, as resistance grows as the capitalists carry out what they call economic and labour relation adjustments, which translates into getting rid of organised labour, so as to reduce wages and decimate conditions, and increase profit. World War II saved their bacon then, as the imperialists set about redrawing their borders, under the banner of “democracy” and patriotism. What will they dream up to save them this time, and will we let them? 

 

This from Contra Info:

      On December 16, Operation Pandora was unleashed. The State’s security forces burst into different houses and squats in Barcelona and Madrid, and eleven anarchist comrades were kidnapped.
    This kidnapping—and it couldn’t have been done any other way—was coordinated with the media, who helped justify and legitimate it with heart and soul, spreading the news that the police had carried out an operation against international anarchist terrorism. This kidnapping of eleven comrades set off a multitude of rallies and demonstrations that same day in different cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Zaragoza, for example—thousands of people coming out in solidarity with the kidnapped comrades and showing rage and hatred towards the State’s new repressive operation against the libertarian movement.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk