the dead of Independence Square: does Ukraine have lessons for both patriots and security forces?

Ukraine, for the present at least, seems to be a free country. The security forces have evaporated from Kiev and protesters can finally mourn the dead of Independence Square, killed – we must assume – by aforesaid security forces.

Is there a degree to which the security forces were doing their job? That job was to protect their country, and their superior officers told them it was under attack; by people who are now being hailed internationally as freedom-fighters.

I ask this because patriots throughout the world look with increasing discomfort at their countries’ security services. In Great Britain peers have just blocked the police from being given powers to prevent "conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person". Note the phrase "capable of" – thought crime, anybody? In the US, a big story is the huge amount of ammunition bought by security forces that is banned from being used in theatres of war, firing concerns that it’s intended for use against perceived internal enemies.

So again I return to the Ukranian services – why did they stop? The full story might not come out for some time, but it looks as though a lot of them have decided – individually or en masse, or a combination thereof – that killing patriots, which is how many might see themselves, wasn’t their job.

Will US security forces personnel come to such a decision-point if they are called upon to shoot at their countryfolk? Will there come a point at which their British counterparts decide it’s not their job to suffocate social and cultural concerns which they share?

As the dead of Independence Square are mourned, perhaps it’s time for reflection on the price of freedom, on the part of both those who might be called to pay that price and those who might be called to exact it.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

In Ukraine, Mourning Amid Political Drama - Al Pessin, Voice of America

is the Kenya mutiny symptomatic of wider unrest?

The sit-down strike by soldiers of the 1st Battalion (Yorkshire Regiment) was a very British mutiny. I suppose in a sense Corporal Anthony Brown was lucky to be merely thrown out of the Army: after the 1917 Étaples Mutiny, Cpl Jesse Robart Short was executed for calling an officer a “bugger”.

The present action, taken during the Askari Thunder exercise in Kenya, also stemmed from the actions of people in charge: two commanders – who haven’t had their names plastered all over the press like the enlisted men – got drunk the night before a forced march and were found after the exercise sleeping off their hangover.

Incidents like this never spontaneously erupt; the discontent is usually slow-burning, with a possibly small incident turning into a flashpoint, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It’s also impossible to ignore what’s going on around at the same time. We have the trial of one of Gunner Lee Rigby’s killers, who has been heaping praise on the nursing and medical care he has received, treatment he ensured Gunner Lee would not live to benefit from.

And of course there’s Marine A (Sgt Alexander Blackman), who was sent to Afghanistan to engage with terrorists in irregular warfare, and is facing 10 years in prison for doing precisely that.

There is an inequality inherent in any functional system, without which systems tend to collapse – but that itself can lead to system collapse when the inequality gap is unbridgeable.

This happened literally in the Étaples mutiny, when the officers appropriated billets in the posh resort across the bridge and left troops to fester on the wrong side of the river. If what happened in Kenya is symptomatic of a wider dislocation between officers and enlisted soldiers, perhaps the veteran Fusiliers’ march on London was but the politest of warning shots.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Afghanistan veterans jailed for parade ground sit-in protest over "muppet" officers - The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Court-martial of Cpl Jesse Robart Short - National Archives

Lee Rigby murder trial: 'I’m a soldier just like Drummer Rigby... I killed him because this is war’ - Tom Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013

Sgt Alexander Blackman: Marine backed by 60,000 people over killing of Taliban insurgent - Daily Mirror, 8 December 2013

Breaking: 100,000 people (the threshold that should trigger Parliamentary time for a topic) support Sgt Alexander Blackman - Daily Mail, 11 December 2013

Click to sign the HM Government e-petition to free Sgt Alexander Blackman (Marine A) - at time of writing 37,691 signatures

Veteran Fusiliers to march on London - ITV news, October 2012

the acid test: will Lee Rigby's murderers be treated the same as Mohammed Saleem's murderer?

The murder of Mohammed Saleem while he was walking home from his mosque in Birmingham was a callous, cowardly act.

So was the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

Every crime is individual. But there is one equivalence between the murders of Lee Rigby and Mohammed Saleem. Mohammed Saleem’s murderer, Pavlo Lapshyn, hated non-whites. Lee rigby’s murderers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, hated non-Muslims.

It’s been said Lapshyn is a racist because of his hatred of non-whites, and I have some sympathy for this, especially when I read of the grief of his victim’s family, who say "He did not do anything to deserve this - other than be a Muslim". However, if you ascribe differences between groups of people to culture, not colour, it soon becomes clear that "white" is no more a race than "non-white". And "Muslim", indicating adherence to a religion as diverse as any other, is no more a race than "non-Muslim".

So why is it that news of Pavlo Lapshyn’s trial was – rightly – all over the mainstream media while Adebolajo’s and Adebowale’s is conspicuous by its absence?

The media blackout of the Somalis’ trial is so deep our increasingly prone press is not even commenting on the blackout’s existence. This must only fuel rumours asserting our masters and their media lapdogs have acceded to the view that "Muslim [jihadi] blood is superior to infidel blood".

That being said, the blackout is not the most important issue. Pavlo Lapshyn was sentenced to life imprisonment with a tariff of 40 years for his repulsive act. Will Adebolajo and Adebowale receive a similar term for their equally repulsive act, caught on multiple cameras? If they aren’t, surely it would be naïve of the government not to expect those effectively declared as being of lesser worth to react accordingly?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

HM Government e-petition: lift the Lee Rigby media blackout

Pavlo Lapshyn's 90 days of terror - bbc.co.uk

Mohammed Saleem stabbing: Man admits murder and mosque blasts

"Muslim blood is superior to infidel blood" - Raymond Ibrahim, The Commentator, 19 November 2013

Mosque bomber Pavlo Lapshyn given life for murder - bbc.co.uk

Cameron must think hard about any Syria intervention

David Cameron is right to be 'sickened' by images of gassed children in Syria; and we’d be right to ask questions about his humanity if he weren’t affected.

But Cameron needs think hard about any response that requires British boots on the ground, something he has previously said he opposes, especially as both government and rebel forces are suspected of using gas against each other. If this is proven, then we will be joining forces with people not averse to using weapons of mass destruction regardless of which side we intervene on behalf of.

We also, unfortunately, need to remember the part of the world we’re talking about. The moment Western forces step onto Syrian soil, again regardless of whose side they are on, loud protests about "crusaders" and "colonialists" will soon turn to further acts of terrorism against the West.

I’m sorry that children are suffering in Syria. At the same time, I have to ask, what are other Muslim countries in the region – which isn’t short of Muslim countries – doing about it? Why does the situation require Westerners, whose intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq has been denounced throughout the Umma?

Pictures of suffering children can be very emotive. Such pictures kicked off the process that culminated in Band Aid and Live Aid – and the monies raised enabled Ethiopia’s Haile Maryam Mengistu to oppress his people, children included, for much longer than he might have done otherwise.

I also must accuse Mr Cameron of hypocrisy. Victims of Muslim child-abusers in the UK must struggle for each and every morsel of justice from the Establishment, with statutory bodies such as Social Services making things all the more difficult for them. If Cameron should prioritise foreign children over British ones, how can he hope to triumph in a fair General Election?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

EDL silent walk to war memorial, Cambridge 1 June 2013

"We don’t want you here!" spat one of the so-called "Unite against Fascism" protestors as the English Defence League silent procession approached the war memorial to lay flowers in memory of Gunner Lee Rigby.

The woman wasn’t shouting at us, though, but at a pensioner who had come independently to meditate on the short life and brutal death of the off-duty soldier.

On Thursday 30 and Friday 31 May the Cambridge News published stories attempting to raise concerns about the EDL to the level of hysteria. We’re used to its being biased, but on those two days it surpassed itself, presenting UAF opinions as fact in an exercise in disinformation that I’m sure will provide future cub reporters with plenty of material when learning how not to write articles.

Because of the News’ venom, our facilitators decided it would be prudent to process from a different place from the one advertised. There were about 30 of us, all of us uninterested in the 4 seated UAF protestors engaging in a silent protest (silent, that is, unless a pensioner happens to express an opinion they dislike).

After we’d laid our floral tributes we left, as the main body of the UAF counter-protest had seen us and was coming up the road: there were rather a lot of them. The News had quoted Richard Rose of Cambridge UAF as predicting that we were going to be "goose-stepping" – no wonder his flock were fired up.

I agree with what the woman who shouted at the pensioner wrote on her placard – "no place for racism here". That is why the English Defence League continues to oppose those who seek to trade genuine multiculturalism for a system that listens to the grievances of one religion’s abusive wing at the expense of all other groups within our shores.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Rsources

Police prepared for EDL war memorial rally - 31 May - contains remark about EDL "goose-stepping"

Confronting the rise of the far right - 31 May: "If there were just three old men putting a wreath on a war memorial we would probably not oppose it but the organised hard right has to be opposed"

Police describe EDL walk in Cambridge as "peaceful" - 1 June

don't dismiss Anonymous, their hands are dripping with blood

Reading about the Peasant’s Revolt, in which society flew apart under punitive taxation to pay for cronyism and wars, what struck me was how much historians’ access to events of June 1381 is hampered not by distance, but the deliberate muddling of contemporaneous records.

In the age of mass media you don’t need to torch the Savoy to make a point. Considering that in 1955 Rosa Parkes (right) needed only not to rise from her seat to start a cultural revolution that’s still rolling, the fecundity of Gunner Lee Rigby’s martyred blood becomes comprehensible.

You wouldn’t think it to look at the mainstream media, though; press gagging orders seem to be doing the same job Revolt chronicler Thomas Walsingham achieved with misinformation. How else to explain the silence on how the Metropolitan Police forced an unrelated Sikh protest (about Professor Bhullar) between an EDL protest and the UAF counter-protest?

So I don’t believe "hacktivists" Anonymous’ entry is a coincidence. Styling themselves as hidden masters, they say that they’ll target the EDL for trying to segregate Muslims. I wonder if reactionary Establishment forces have brought them in to erase online mentions of our policy of peaceful protest in pursuit of multiculturalism and integration?

Just look at the logo at the end of their message to the EDL:

Anonymous and its partners, Lulszec and Wikileaks, are dripping in blood through their manipulation of Arab Spring conflicts. The death-tolls in just two countries affected are 70,000 in Syria, 30,000 in Libya.

Anonymous live by Stalin’s dictum that "one death is a tragedy, one million a statistic". But I hope anybody opposing us who finds a hit-list (because that’s what Anonymous are talking about) in their hand ponders the words of another era's revolutionary, Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken", then researches us while materials are still available.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Sitting Down: the story of Rosa Parks

Sikhs protest for Prof Bhullar, crossfire cleared up by the EDL:

Who Is Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar? - India Real Time

Anonymous' Message to EDL:

Syria death toll probably at 70,000, U.N. human rights official says - CNN

Libya death toll hits 30,000" - Mirror

"our minds and consciousness consumed by current scenes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya" - AnonNews - Everything Anonymous

Click for a review of The Peasants' Revolt: England's Failed Revolution on amazon.co.uk

EDL Newcastle demo: RIP Drummer Lee Rigby

The Mail, never slow to heap abuse on the EDL, merely carried a muted statement that the Newcastle demo on Saturday 25 May had "passed off without major incident".

The police were great. Many are ex-military, and looked as angry as us. It was also great to see veterans proudly displaying their medals among the 1,500-2000 protesters, and there were several serving Forces members present – for obvious reasons.

What grated was that during a minute's silence for Drummer Rigby, all the so-called Unite Against Fascism round the corner could do was chant "Nazi scum, off our streets". I don’t know why I expected more; people who defend the ideology that killed Drummer Rigby will sink to anything.

Tommy Robinson extemporised an impassioned speech in which he was careful to warn us that we must discern the difference between Muslims and Islam, reminding us that Muslims serve in our armed forces. In the run-up to the demo, which has been planned for months, Tommy has received many death-threats on Twitter; the ones I’ve seen threatened to decapitate his family.

Kev Carroll recited a poem about Lee’s death; by the end he was weeping and so were many of us. An activist from our LGBT division told how Jihadists in East London were now boasting, after a campaign of violence and intimidation with the blessing and assistance of the UAF, that it was a "gay-free area". So much for diversity, then.

Every single speaker exhorted us to respect Lee’s memory by ensuring that the demo didn’t turn violent. It didn’t, thank God. We are all angry, and our task now is to take our anger to the ballot-box at the next general election and, if our political classes aren’t getting domestic terrorism sorted using measures already on the statute-book, vote accordingly.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

View more Newcastle demo pics on Flickr

In Memoriam: Drummer Lee Rigby - Poems Noticed

Bud, Britain's bravest police horse, returns to duty after being punched by football thug - Daiy Mail

we're more than "sickened"; we're gripped by existential rage

I don’t advocate any violence. I don’t want anyone to go out and burn a mosque…It’s not the answer, because there will be innocent Muslims and you are then as bad as these scumbags who are doing it [terrorism].

The words are those of Tommy Robinson, English Defence League founder.

In an obscene desolation of responsibility, following the brutal execution of Drummer Lee Rigby by Jihadists the EDL has come in for unprecedented condemnation by the mainstream media, and given the cauldrons of bile usually reserved for us that’s saying something.

Worse still, an 83-year-old woman who shouted "go back to your own country" outside a mosque has been arrested by Kent Police. I don’t imagine her words would have been easy for worshippers to hear, but two-tier Britain, where people who protest against British policy in Afghanistan are allowed close enough to returning troops to spit on them, is seriously eroding the tolerance of the British people.

David Cameron spoke for the nation when he said the Woolwich execution "sickened us all". But he didn’t join the last dot. We are more than sick: we are gripped by existential rage at the utter failure, at the highest political levels, to tackle the Islamism which blights Muslim communities with the rest of us not far behind.

Some commentators say the death of one white man in London pales before the numbers of black men dying there. They may have a valid point, but they miss the equally valid point that Lee Rigby represented the Forces defending us, and by extension us, in this war by any other name.

Captain Dreyfus didn’t even have to die for his case to turn France upside down and inside out. This is a defining moment. I hope that cooler heads in the Police Force will see that the upcoming EDL demo in Newcastle will dissipate far more pressure than it causes, and that without the safety-valve we provide Lee Rigby’s death might well have ignited England as surely as mark Duggan’s did London.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words (minus quote)

Tommy Robinson video reacting to Woolwich execution: "I don't advocate any violence..." section starts at 28:30. Watch below, or click to watch on YouTube

Woman, 85, arrested after abuse hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham mosque in wake of Woolwich terror murder - Kent online

David Cameron: Woolwich attach "sickened us all" - Telegraph

female genital mutilation: isn't child protection for all children?

"Cultural sensitivity" isn’t a favourite phrase of French lawyer and FGM campaigner Linda Weil-Curiel (right), who prosecuted former female genital mutilator Howa Gréou after neighbours heard children screaming in her flat. Gréou found some sort of redemption in prison, and now herself campaigns against mutilation alongside Weil-Curiel.

Whether prison might similarly redeem practitioners in the UK is unknown, because there’s been no prosecutions here. 10,000 Somalis have relocated here from the Netherlands because our Establishment will not extend child protection to all children.

On Newsnight, Omar Ahmed of the Council of Somali Associations said FGM affects a "minute proportion" of the community; he was immediately challenged by Dr Comfort Momoh (left) and by girls from Integrate Bristol, whose prize-winning film The Silent Scream [see resources, below] challenges FGM. Following the film’s release their community turned against them – Bristol has an imam who advocates FGM.

Gavin Esler, interrogating equalities minister Lynne Featherstone, replied to her objections over difficulties getting witnesses to testify by reminding her that the same concerns were once voiced regarding rape.

In France, doctors intimately examine young girls every year for FGM. When Featherstone condemn this as abusive, she confirms our system of apartheid regarding children’s rights when the children are from diverse communities.

Groups such as Integrate Bristol show the determination of people seeking a new life to remake the old. I hope that in the future integrationists and patriot groups will forge a Great Britain where all have the same rights under one law, and avoid "the racism of the respectable", where "The CPS will defend women’s rights, but only the rights of white women. Girls with black or brown skins can go hang — or rather go have their genitalia cut to pieces."

I prefer a girl from Integrate Bristol’s analysis: David Cameron should "grow a pair and challenge FGM".

Gerry Dorrian 300 words

Resources

Sign the HM Government e-Petition to stop Female Genital Mutilation in Britain

Woman's Hour, Radio 4, 24/7/12 - Jane Garvey talks to Sue Lloyd Roberts from Newsnight and Dr Comfort Momoh MBE of Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

Newsnight, 23/7/12 - first of a 2-part report into FGM, including interviews with girls from Integrate Bristol (Starts at 13:00).

Newsnight 24/7/12 - starts with a film examining FGM in France, the Netherlands and the UK, then a panel discussion - highly recommended.

Watch The Silent Scream on YouTube or below:

Go to the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003

my Grandad: an unknown great Briton

Amid the rollcalls of great Britons, I’d like to tell you about my grandfather. He was born in 1890s Glasgow and was working in the Parkhead Forge at 12; the school leaving age was 14 but nobody investigated. While there he witnessed a man burn to death and was probably ahead of the game in terms of what psychiatry now calls post-traumatic stress disorder by the time he landed at Gallipoli (right).

He’d lied about his age to get escape a heavy-handed father and was a Sergeant by the time WWI started. His Lieutenant had noticed that he was what we’d call functionally illiterate and had arranged training; Grandad would go on to prevent him from messing up during the war.

He married after the war and, moving from Townhead to Garngad, borrowed a horse-and-cart from an associate in the Independent Labour Party (ILP): a coalman who had conditioned the horse to move only when it heard The Red Flag sung. (Grandma’s first vote under universal suffrage went to the Conservatives!)

Conscripted for WWII for his training skills, the heavy drinking common in Glasgow had taken root so He oscillated between Private to Sergeant like a yo-yo.

He died at 66, having been unable to claim his pension because of the lie about his age; already the golden thread of patriotism that had bound together socialists, capitalists and everybody in between was inconvenient to unelected officialdom. His officer, whom he hadn’t seen since WWI, attended the funeral.

He'd lost his birth certificate and Mum also suspected it only surfaced after his death because the ILP – rooted in working-class activism – was seen as "extremist" by cadres who were sharpening elbows for social ascent. But on such as my Grandad are founded the precarious freedoms of modern Britain.

Tony Urquhart
300 words

Shipbuilding - was it worth it?

"Every conflict, every war that’s been waged in our time, has had its soundtrack: calls to arms, calls to lay down arms, but nothing like Shipbuilding."

Thus Annie Nightingale (right) introduced Is it worth it? showcasing Robert Wyatt’s Falklands War-era song, written by Elvis Costello. It was named after the first line, and by halfway through the hour-long documentary I'd heard those words sung so often I was asking myself the same thing.

My heart sank from the moment Nightingale mentioned "the controversy over who the Falklands Islands – or Las Malvinas – should belong to". Then followed paeans to music’s ability to express anti-capitalist sentiments as well as Pat Kane of Hue and Cry declaring that to have people building ships for the navy to prosecute war from – the theme of Shipbuilding – was both "dignified and shameful" and an offshoot of "the poisonous need to create contracts" for industries that supply the military.

The second half-hour was balanced by contributions from shipbuilders, veteran Andy Eakins and war-widow Barbara Macauley. But it failed to present the Falklands War as more than a product of Margaret Thatcher doing things that annoy the BBC.

For instance, scriptwriters might have mentioned that while Britain and Spain had often disputed ownership, the Islands never belonged to Argentina. That the Islanders are predominantly of British and American descent. Or, indeed, that Pope Alexander VI prepared the ground for conflict in 1494 by arbitrarily delcaring where the line dividing the future Atlantic territories of Spain and Portugal would lie.

To argue that proximity renders the Falklands Argentinian exemplifies outdated colonialist thinking. This was by no means the most biased documentary the BBC has come up with but, with the prospect of British Armed Forces members going in harm’s way not receding, it needs to reappraise its student-union internationalism and remember why it’s called the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

RESOURCES

Click to go to the BBC Radio 2 webpage for Is it Worth It

Click to view a Falklands Islands timeline

Click here to see Robert Wyatt's video for Shipbuilding on YouTube or watch it below:

Military Wives: did Simon Cowell scuttle his own single?

I’m not sure why music-buyers were so resentful of Simon Cowell’s hits machine that they let Rage Against the Machine swear their way to the top in Christmas 2009. Cowell’s progenies were certainly manufactured; but so were, say, the Monkees, Cream and the Spice Girls.

The Girls managed to bag the Christmas number one three times consecutively, the same as The Beatles – although after a year’s hiatus they got Christmas back again with Hello Goodbye.

X Factor winners had four consecutive number ones until Rage in the Machine, then winner Matt Cardle scored with When we Collide, powered by the well-oiled media machine that is Cowell’s record label Syco.

So why did this year’s winners’ record, Cannonball by Little Mix, get released just in time to peak a week too early? Did the skilled media manipulator make a mistake?

I don’t think so. He’s had what he wanted: a number one from them. I reckon he scuppered their chances to get this Sunday’s top spot so that the Military Wives Choir have a clear run with their single Wherever you Are, going so far as to "concede" their victory.

As choirmaster Gareth Malone explained to Chris Tarrant on Radio 2, the frequency of repatriations of bodies coupled with the tenth anniversary of our engagement in Afghanistan has concentrated minds upon the plight of serving and former soldiers and their families in a fashion unprecedented in modern times.

If Cowell’s act were seen to be fighting the Wives for Number 1, the national repercussions could shake his shows to their foundation on both sides of the Atlantic, so it seems he’s wisely decided to fight another day.

But there’s still competition out there, and the Military Wives will only succeed if we buy their song – listen to it below, then DOWNLOAD from iTunes or Amazon!

Gerry Dorrian
300 words