Stuart Christie, who dead recently was a remarkable man, an anarchist, with incredible  skills, resilience, and a remarkable history, it is wonderful that his family and friends are creating an archive of his life and work. We must always remember and record our own, the society we live under would rather such people were erased from history, we must never let that happen, we have a rich and remarkable history we should be very proud of, Stuart Christie made it that bit richer. 

The following from Kate Sharpley Library.

Stuart Christie

The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive

       Friends, family and comrades of Stuart Christie have come up with a plan to commemorate his life by creating an archive at London’s Mayday Rooms and online.
      “Stuart’s life may have been plastered with headlines, Britain’s most famous anarchist was the usual description, but the small print of it was what was important. His courage, imagination, his loyalty, not just to what he believed in, but to his friends and family, his remarkable intelligence, his self-deprecating, droll and spiky humour. He was a man of parts, each one of them remarkable.
     “To reveal the richness of Stuart’s life and the many histories he was a part of, we intend to establish a memorial archive in his name. The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive will be housed at the MayDay Rooms in Fleet Street in London.”
      Read more about the project (and donate!) at
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stuart-christie-memorial-archive

 

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Our History.

 

       We should always remember our own, no matter how little or how much they gave, they were on our side. Some give what they can when they can, others dedicate their entire life to the just cause of freedom and justice for all. Their stories must be told, remembered and recorded, it is our history, one way to destroy a movement is to destroy its history, we can never let this happen, we owe it to those who walk that path before us, and to those who will follow. We are where we are because of those who cleared a path before us.

 

 The following from Act For Freedom Now:

         Italy: In memory of anarchist comrade Marilù Maschietto
        The following are the words with which two comrades wanted to remember Maria Ludovica Maschietto, known as Marilù (February 14, 1932 – December 29, 2020).
        Farewell Marilù, with you another piece of my anarchy dies. Thank you for always being a safe haven for me and the people I loved.
        Thank you for snatching me away from apathy and disillusionment when I was 18 years old and the anarchists seemed to me a bunch of wordsmiths and idiots.
        And thank you above all for teaching me the critical spirit and that anarchists need no leaders, that contempt and superiority towards the naive and clueless must not find room in our hearts.
        I wanted to tell you looking into your eyes but I didn’t have time… forgive me.
        I owe you a lot, I love you, I will not forget you.

Alfredo, prison of Ferrara
        Forgive me if I take the floor reading a text and not by improvising a speech as it would deserve a comrade who has lived an entire life giving all he could – in terms of forces, means, ideas – to the anarchist movement with the same naturalness with which she spoke in the living room at home.
        Marilù knew she was leaving us. The last words she said to me a few days ago were: «Always remember me». But despite this awareness she continued to make plans, to try to give until the last moment her contribution to the fight for anarchy.
        Remembering Marilù is difficult, indeed very difficult, because her is not just a personal story, but is part of the historical heritage of the revolutionaries. It is made of links, intertwining of stories, especially collective, but also clashes. She left us testimony of the experience of Azione Rivoluzionaria, including through books, contributed to the birth of the “Gianfranco Faina” Committee Against Prison and Repression, standing by the prisoners throughout her life.
        I knew the history of the anarchist movement from her lips, even before books. Some might say that it is biased history. Yes, it is. This is because it is the story told by those who have always supported the anarchist action without being a mere spectator, between the pleasure of an achieved hit and the pain of seeing the comrades die with weapons in hand or in jail or, even worse, distance themselves from the revolutionary practices.
        So, thanks to her stories, I tried to live with the same passion, I learned to defend the same principles, as well as to hold the same grudge.
        Remembering Marilù, as she asked us to do, is therefore to defend the revolutionary hypothesis, to put it into practice knowing that it is full of choices to be made. A certain partisanship is not only inevitable, it is a must. Because if there must be a passing of the baton – as is customary to say on such occasions –, then we must make the history of the revolutionaries our own, with all that this entails. We must have the courage to choose, to know how to be on the side. On the side of the exploited, but even more so on the side of those who, among the exploited, have abandoned all hesitation, embracing the fight for freedom, without compromise and especially without denying anything.
       To you Marilù, to the comrades who died but lived fully, to those who still pay the price for their choices.
        You do not deserve our tears, but those of fear of the oppressors.

Marco

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Our Mistakes.

         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:

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"I AM ONE OF MANY".

     One of my favourite quotations, it is from the poem "From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion" by Ken Roxroth.

They shall rise up heroes, there will be many,
None will prevail against them at last.
They go saying each: “I am one of many”;
Their hands empty save for history.
They die at bridges, bridge gates, and drawbridges.
Remember now there were others before;
The sepulchres are full at ford and bridgehead.
There will be children with flowers there,
And lambs and golden-eyed lions there,
And people remembering in the future.

     Today as poverty and repression sink their teeth into our daily lives, as turmoil and anger ravages our hopes, we should always be aware, "I am one of many" and recalling our history remember, "there were others before", but never forget, "none will prevail against them at last".

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