Protest Against This Act of Mindless Vandalism

I would like to alert all readers of this blog to an unprecedented act of historical vandalism being prepared by the administration in the Polish city of Poznan.
Two weeks ago the councillors of Poznan decided to rid the town of the statue erected to commemorate the internationalism of General Karol Swierczewski. There is a simple reason - this General was a veteran of the International Brigades in Spain.Admittedly it is not the most beautiful of monuments, but it is the suppression of any memorial to the many Polish people who fought and died fighting fascism in Spain that I object to most strongly

The ruling centre-right Citizens Platform (PO) with the support of the rightist Law and Justice party, both essentially right wing parties, see the historic role of the International Brigades not as the first real challenge to the rise of fascism in Europe but rather as an expression of communist iniquity, and anything which places communists in the context of their undoubtedly heroic role in combatting fascism in Europe is loathed and feared.

But historical truth must prevail. Karol Swierczewski was born in 1897 in Warsaw, into a poor working class family. From the age of 12 he worked in a Warsaw factory. During the First World War, he was evacuated to Moscow. In 1918 he joined the Bolshevik Party and fought in the Russian Civil War as a soldier of the Red Army

During the Spanish Civil War, under the nom de guerre of General Walter, he commanded the XIV International Brigade, and later the 35th International Division. It is widely believed that Swierczewski/Walter was the inspiration for the figure of General Golz in Ernest Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'.

General Walter's (pictured right) estate was donated to the Association of Friends of the International Brigades. Last year, the University of Valencia exhibited 63, never before seen, images, selected from the 333 that make up the Swierczewski's/Walter archive.The case has been taken up, by the Polish Citizens’ Movement for the Defence of Monuments and Traditions of the Left, (CMDTL) with the Vice President of the European Parliament, Sr. Miguel Angel Martinez, who was jailed under Franco.

The CMDMTL struggle is very difficult in the present climate and needs international solidarity to help it prevent this act of political vandalism from taking place; such acts should have no place in modern Europe, which should cherish the heritage of anti-fascism not obliterate it

Direct representations be made to the following:

The President of Poznan and his deputies:Mr Ryszard Grobelny, President, Mr Tomasz Jerzy Kayser, Mr Miroslaw Kruszynski, Mr Jerzy Stepien,Mr Maciej Frankiewicz
at:prezydent@um.poznan.pl
Also let your feelings known to the Poznan City Hall press officer, Ms Anna Szpytko
at:rzecznik@um.poznan.pl...The Polish Embassy in Dublin- ambassador@dublin.polemb.net
OR if you are a British based reader.... polishembassy@polishembassy.org.uk

Ironically the removal of the Monument would cost 70,000 euros at a time when the Poznan Town Hall has decided to reduce the social spending budget by 21,000 euros.

No Return to Sectarian Bloodshed

Eugene McCartan General Secretary of the CPI analyses the situation facing the 6 Counties after the recent attacks by the so called 'Real IRA' and the 'Continuity IRA'... We reproduce the text of his recent article in the Morning Star since it says everything that we feel needs saying about this recent disturbing turn of events....

"The recent armed attacks by republican paramilitary groupings that killed two British soldiers and one member of the PSNI and injured a number of workers doing their job need to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

This is a retreat into failed methods of struggle that the last 40 years have shown to be nothing but a cul de sac.

It is a barren strategy that will lead us nowhere except to further deaths, imprisonment, unnecessary suffering and division.

We appeal to the individuals and organisations that carried out these and other attacks to think again.

The recent mobilisation of working people by the Northern Ireland committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in a number of cities and towns is to be welcomed as an important statement by working people that they do not want a return to violence, that the new political institutions set up under the Belfast Agreement must be made to work and that no group has the right to abrogate the will of the people.

The Communist Party of Ireland as an anti-imperialist party committed to securing national unity and sovereignty calls upon those forces that claim to act in the name of republicanism to stop these futile and counter-productive attacks.

We repudiate their approach as tactically and strategically futile and both anti-people and anti-republican.

While the condemnation of these armed attacks is important in itself, there is also a great responsibility on those forces that support the Belfast Agreement to push forward to secure its full implementation.

The Belfast Agreement and the institutions deriving from it are not the end of the process, nor the end of struggle, but rather they provide a forum from which new struggle and new demands must be made.

At this time it provides a better base towards which the people's demands and aspirations can be directed.

The alienation felt by many working-class youths needs to be addressed urgently in order to give hope and a belief that politics can deliver the much-needed change.

Progressive forces should consider the best way to allow young people to vent their frustration and articulate their demands in a meaningful and non-patronising forum.

Their natural anti-state instincts need to be harnessed into a real, coherent organised force to challenge the status quo on political grounds that unite working people rather than dividing them, to push forward the radical demands and solutions that are required.

The growing and deepening economic and social crisis being experienced by all working people in our country, north and south, can be overcome only with greater unity among all workers, by securing greater economic and social integration between both parts of the country, and by the development of an alternative economic and social strategy for the whole of the country."

Professor Joseph Stiglitz says 'Nationalise banks'

Professor Joseph Stiglitz on a BBC 'Business Daily' interview which I heard in the middle of the night has said what many are beginning to think is inevitable

“We don't have the control, so they get to make the decisions in their advantage”
There's a growing chorus of voices in the United States suggesting that temporary nationalisation may be best solution for the living dead, or 'zombie banks' among America's banks.

Listen to the interview with Professor Stiglitz here

The voices include Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The argument goes that rather than drip-feeding public support to so-called 'zombie' banks, the government should take them over, clean up their balance sheets and sell them off.

It is not something the Obama administration wants to consider right now. After all, nationalisation is a dirty word for many free-market Americans.


But then what does it really mean - full state control, or partial ownership? After all, the US government already owns about 40% of Citigroup.

The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve dismiss the idea of nationalisation. But uncertainty about it is causing upset in the markets.

Business Daily's Lesley Curwen spoke to professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, who believes it is only a matter of time before nationalisation happens.

Edward Upward- Farewell to a Gentle Man.

I wish to say farewell to the writer, teacher, and communist Edward Upward who has died recently in Pontefract at the remarkable age of 105, which adds further to my theory that all these active politically committed comrades seem to have quite long lives . I see that there have been a number of serious obituaries about him most notably the one in The Times. There has also been a good obituary to Edward in The Guardian , one that deals with his political commitment with the greatest clarity is that which appears in the Morning Star

I wish to merely record how it was in rather bizarre circumstances that my path crossed with that of Edward Upward. The remarkable thing was that the day that I met him 1981 I had just the previous night finished reading the third volume of the dialectical triad 'The Spiral Ascent' so it was rather like finding oneself talking face to face with the main character from the book that you have just finished reading, which was a little surreal, I also met his wife Hilda who is of course a key figure in the novels, which does not try too hard to pretend that the characters are all fictional, it is clear that the three volumes, 'In the Thirties' 'The Rotten Elements' and 'No Home but the Struggle' were all pretty close to auto-biographical.
Anyway I was selling a quire of the Morning Star in Kings Heath high street in Birmingham with a girlfriend and comrade. I was approached by a well spoken elderly man in navy blue corduroy cap, who stood looking at me and said after a while...'I used to do that a lot'...fearing he was a'nutter' or at best a current opponent , I ignored him...He repeated the comment and added "my wife and I used to do that an awful lot you know"...convinced now that he was indeed 'a nutter' of some sort I asked him what he was on about and he started to chuckle..I then realised he was having a bit of sport with me..'selling the Daily Worker of course, you two remind me so much of us at that age'..Well a conversation commenced and I as it happened just happened to mention that I had just finished reading an excellent triad of novels about life in the CPGB in the 30's and 40's which I supposed, he being an elderly former CP member might find of interest. He started to laugh once again and said...'really now what were those books called?' and asked me to tell him more about them. At length I twigged that he knew about them and in a while he revealed that he was the author, this was getting very very bizarre.... He invited us back to his son's house 'for tea and cakes', his son was a lecturer at Birmingham and is since sadly now deceased also . I was charmed by Edward Upward's gentle humour and his wonderful diction and beautifully precise speech. I was also fascinated by his life story and his encyclopedic experience of the literary world. He told a hilarious tale about going to the Woolfs home in Bloomsbury for a meal and to be given his cheque for a contribution he had written for their journal. Virginia instructed hubby to draw up the cheque but Upward recalled, ' it visibly pained him, and his hand shook and his face was agonised as he slowly drew out the cheque, at long last, reluctantly handing it to me before I left for home'...he also recollected his close association with the likes of Auden, and Spender, the latter he was scathing about for his political conversion to the right and his association with a CIA sponsored magazine in his latter years. Christopher Isherwood he spoke of with great warmth though. On another occasion I, forgetting precisiely his age, asked him had he known Burgess or Philby et al..he said ' oh no...I had long left Cambridge before they came up'...a comment which emphasised to me his extraordinary longevity...he was already the senior member of the group consisting of Auden, Spender and Isherwood at that stage and they regarded him as THEIR mentor. I am glad to say, that with the exception of a gap in the 1990's which was my fault, we maintained contact until he moved to Pontefract from his beloved Isle of Wight. He liked greatly the retrospective of his life which I wrote about him in in the Morning Star,which I was particularly pleased succeeded in appearing on his 100th birthday, He joked to me that it felt a little like a sort of 'rehabilitation'. He would talk at length about a wide range of subjects, and never lost the political edge that his grasp of Marxism and Leninism afforded him.He was convinced that the US 'empire' was in terminal decline, drawing parallels in his conversations with me to the fate of the Roman Empire. He had an utter contempt for Tony Blair, who he referred to only as 'Toady Blair'..I thought at first that he had a slight head cold when he said this first , but after the joke was repeated a number of times, I realised it was not just a humorous play on words but a studied insult that he delighted in.
The last thing he asked me to do was to take down a message from him to be written into the memorial book on his behalf at the visitors book at the museum to the International Brigade in Spain, which I did. I was honoured to have met him, I am pleased that I will be able to continue to read his wonderful novels and short stories long after his passing...I am convinced that his stature as a writer will continue to grow long after his death, I also believe that much of the negative criticism of his literature was in fact a literary and critical form of political opposition to his chosen form of creativity, and of course a dismissal and a contemptuous dismissal at that, of any attempt to employ the socialist realist or written documentary form. A dismissal that was primarily political in its motivation, in reaction of course to the profoundly political issues raised by his writings and his aesthetic sensibilities themselves. Whilst he did indeed suffer from writers block, it is wrong to ascribe this to his embracing of Marxism. On the contrary in the conversations I had with him he was always clear that it had been his political commitment which had saved him from the powerlessness which could so easily, he knew, slump into depression.Upward related that, "in those days, even using the word 'capitalism' was enough to damn you, so not much was said. But I carried on my political work in the evenings selling the Daily Worker, and politics was my salvation. I was miserable and couldn't have borne the life of a teacher without it."

My memories of him are warm, he contributed something of value to my life, and I am grateful to him for that, he allowed me to understand some of my own feelings about the nature of political commitment, and how it can be redemptive, he was most interested when I told him that I was very struck by the phrase he created as the title of his third novel 'No Home But the Struggle' since I felt that it rang a chord with me, he knew exactly what Iwas driving at. I fear that so many of the literary critics will never really understand that sentiment either, since it is in fact alien to their own experience. I believe that he is home now. SALUD!