Irish Time

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Che Guevara of Galway Ireland International






This is What Imperialism Does to Men
"In our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that “Western Civilization” disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals. That is the only name that can be applied to those who have gone to fulfill such “humanitarian” tasks in the Congo. A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples. That is what imperialism does to men. That is what distinguishes the imperial “white man.”
By Ernesto Che Guevara


Che Guevara : The Legacy Endures
The 45th anniversary of the death Ernesto Che Guevara

By Syed Badrul Ahsan

October 09, 2012 "
Information Clearing House" - Ernesto Che Guevara was murdered in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967. Caught a day earlier by Bolivian soldiers in the jungles near the village, 13 days into the siege he and his fellow guerrillas had been pushed into, Che was bound hand and foot and made to lie down on the floor of a classroom in a school. Near him lay the bodies of two of his murdered comrades. Tired and worn out and obviously in a state of humiliation, Che was subjected to systematic questioning by Bolivian officers as well as Felix Rodriguez, an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. His self-esteem intact, the man who had with Fidel Castro caused the revolution in Cuba on New Year's Day in 1959 would not give anything away, save only to murmur, sadly, that he had failed.

The CIA agent Rodriguez, for all his antipathy to Che, seemed to empathise with him in his moment of defeat. At one point, he took Che outside and put his arms around the bedraggled guerrilla as a photographer recorded the scene on his camera. It was to be the last image of Che Guevara alive. Soon afterward, a ruffian named Teran, instructed to shoot Che below the face, fired at his leg. Che bit his wrist in order not to scream out in pain. Teran fired again and again. The last bullet, the ninth, hit Che in the throat. The blood filled his lungs. He was dead.

What followed once Che was killed remains a story that was to turn into a modern legend, almost of an epic sort. His body, with its eyes open (giving onlookers the eerie feeling that Che was alive) was placed on display for the public. Once the display was done, it was washed by a nurse who was later to tell people she felt she was giving Jesus Christ his last rites. There were reports that some of those present at that final ritual of a bath surreptitiously clipped off bits of Che's hair to keep them as mementoes.

The Bolivian government, then led by the military ruler Rene Barrientos, was inclined to decapitate the dead Che and keep the head as a sign of its triumph in tracking down the individual its functionaries considered the most dangerous man in the world. The thought was as macabre as it was sinister and was quickly discarded. What followed was something simpler, though no less revolting. Che's hands were sawn off and were later sent to Havana, to convince the Cuban authorities that their hero had indeed died in the jungles of Bolivia. It was a somber Castro who informed his people of the tragic end of the man who, having left his native Argentina, had identified with the Cuban revolution and then set out to revolutionise the world.

The end of Che Guevara was in several ways the culmination of an era of idealism for people across vast tracts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Che believed, and millions believed with him, that socialism offered a way out of the woods for the world's underprivileged and disenfranchised. He inhabited an era where feudalism in Latin America and pseudo-capitalism in parts of Africa and Asia threatened to undermine not only tradition but also the future of those who peopled these regions. Cuba, Che had convinced himself, could be a powerful symbol of revolution, of the socialism that could act as a catalyst for change. Steeped in the social circumstances of the region, the man trained to be a doctor went on long rides through the hamlets and villages of Argentina, in the process discovering anew the tough, hardened faces of deprivation. Poverty was a hallmark of life in South America. In his final moments, when a Bolivian army officer asked him why he had come to Bolivia with his revolution, Che answered, "I am a Cuban, an Argentine, a Peruvian, a Bolivian, a Chilean, an Ecuadorian."

Those final words defined him. In a career that would not rest on laurels, Che would reach out to every segment of society that suffered at the hands of exploitative forces. He was in the Congo when he thought men like Laurent Kabila needed to offer a clear vision about emancipation to a nation wracked by conflict since the murder of the patriot Patrice Lumumba in 1961. It was Che's belief, like that of any other Marxist, that revolution was not to be confined to geography but had to move beyond and across frontiers if it was to be purposeful. Revolution is an inclusive affair. Socialism is always about internationalism and because it is, Che persuaded himself into thinking that he could be among those who needed to play a leading role in spreading the socialistic message across the globe.

There was restlessness in Che, even at a time when it was widely believed the triumph of Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas in Havana in 1959 would have the Argentine sit back and formulate the policies that constituted governance. Che served as a minister in Castro's government and in that capacity he went out into the wider world informing global leaders of what it meant to be a Cuban revolutionary and what it would mean once the Cuban revolution was replicated around the world. Che was eminently equipped to carry out this responsibility. He was, besides being a guerrilla, a doctor and an intellectual. There was no ambiguity in him about the modalities in which revolution was to be brought to the dirt poor homes of the world's poor. He exchanged ideas with Mao Zedong on the nature of revolution; he was at home with Ahmed Ben Bella in a free Algeria; and he marvelled at the way Gamal Abdel Nasser went about constructing the edifice of Arab nationalism in Egypt. At the United Nations in 1964, he was clear in his conviction that the world, including its capitalist regions, needed to be enlightened on the utilitarian aspects of socialism. His words were a robust defence of the beauty inherent in leftwing thinking. He minced no words in his excoriation of imperialism.

And then Ernesto Che Guevara went out into the night. Divesting himself of all the perks and perquisites of power, he went into disguise as a middle-aged western businessman before walking away into what he believed would soon become a wider, more substantive world of equality, of truly Marxist dimensions.

And then he died. He was only 39. In that brief span of a fullness of life, Che Guevara reflected on the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Federico Garcia Lorca and John Keats. In the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and Franz Kafka and Albert Camus he sought the meaning of existence. He was, as Jean-Paul Sartre was to say of him, 'the most complete human being of our time'.

Ernesto Che Guevara's remains were located, along with those of his comrades, 30 years after his assassination in a secluded spot near an airstrip in Vallegrande. In a world that had changed, if ever so slightly, for the better, they were dispatched to Havana. On October 17, 1997, they were buried in Santa Clara with full military honours.

(Ernesto Che Guevara -- statesman and revolutionary -- was born on May 14, 1928 and killed on October 9, 1967).

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, 
The Daily Star.
See also - This is What Imperialism Does to Men - Video and transcript - December 11, 1964, 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. - "In our condition as colonial slaves, we could not observe: that “Western Civilization” disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals. That is the only name that can be applied to those who have gone to fulfill such “humanitarian” tasks in the Congo. A carnivorous animal that feeds on unarmed peoples. That is what imperialism does to men. That is what distinguishes the imperial “white man.”
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Deceptive Statement of Theresa Villiers on Marian Price




Deceptive Statement of Theresa Villiers on Marian Price

category international | rights and freedoms | opinion/analysis author Tuesday October 09, 2012 07:46author by BrianClarkeNUJ - AllVoices Report this post to the editors
Another Villier's True Blue Blood Tory Vice Royal in Ireland
The British Vice Royal in British Occupied Ireland, Theresa Villiers, while on a visit to Dublin, at the start of October, asked, about the internment without trial of republican Marian Price interned in May 2011, by her predecessor Owen Paterson, claiming to revoke a non-existent licence, on which she had been supposedly released in 1980, stated. “A number of people have raised this with me, so I know it’s a sensitive issue, I know there is concern about it, but the reality is that this is not a decision for me, this is a decision for the Parole Commissioners and they are conducting their review at the moment. If I were to seek to intervene politically in what is a legal process I think that would be wholly inappropriate.”
Cutting Commoners Down to Size
Cutting Commoners Down to Size
The British Vice Royal in British Occupied Ireland, Theresa Villiers, while on a visit to Dublin, at the start of October, asked, about the internment without trial of republican Marian Price interned in May 2011, by her predecessor Owen Paterson, claiming to revoke a non-existent licence, on which she had been supposedly released in 1980, stated. “A number of people have raised this with me, so I know it’s a sensitive issue, I know there is concern about it, but the reality is that this is not a decision for me, this is a decision for the Parole Commissioners and they are conducting their review at the moment. If I were to seek to intervene politically in what is a legal process I think that would be wholly inappropriate.”

This statement is at best disingenuous, a clearly irresponsible deception and non factual. In May 2011, Marian Price was arrested and interned to Maghaberry Prison on trumped up accusations, after holding a piece of paper on a windy day, at a traditional Easter commemoration, from which a masked man read. She was taken to Maghaberry high security prison an all-male prison and placed in solitary confinement, where she was accused of, ‘encouraging support for an illegal organisation’.

Marian has now been in prison for 17 months, during which time neither her lawyers or Marian, have been allowed to see any of Britain's ‘alleged’ evidence. Having been previously force fed 400 times by the British in an English prison, in considerable, ill health, distress, extreme pain and close to death, she was given a Royal Prerogative of Mercy, witnessed by Cardinal O'Fiach the spiritual leader, of Ireland's largest Christian denomination at the time.

Villier's predecessor Patterson claimed, that this Royal Pardon was either lost or shredded by his bureaucrats, something both he and Villiers are clearly responsible. This the first and only time that this has happened. Patrick Ramsey, a Social Democratic Labour member of the elected British Assembly, wrote to Paterson about this "lost" pardon and formally om his elected capacity asked;

-- Where would Mrs. Price-McGlinchey's pardon have been held?

-- How many staff are currently seeking the document and in what departments?

-- Are those looking for it doing so on a full-time basis, if not, why not?

-- Has the Northern Ireland Office received comment from the judiciary on the apparent loss of the document?

-- How many Royal Prerogative's have been lost (or destroyed) that the government has record of?

-- Who is ultimately responsible for the care and maintenance of the building where these documents are kept?

-- What communication [has Paterson] personally had with this person/Department?

-- Can [Paterson] confirm the Department is still seeking the document and will do so until it is found?

Again the unelected English Vice royal Paterson contemptuously dismissed the elected Irish assembly member, Ramsey's inquiry, the fruits of a Peace Process, after 30 years of war, stating that "unfortunately the Royal Prerogative of Mercy was not recovered but had no bearing on current circumstances. Patterson went even further and demanded, the local elected Assembly be downsized and it's 'peace process' structures be dismantled, as he regarded it simply as a talking shop, that interfered with unelected, Vice Royal English rule in Ireland.

Ms. Villiers herself, to be sure, to be sure, apparently, wrote an academic legal book, titled the Law of Estoppel, Variation and Waiver while apparently being an Academic of King's College London. She would hopefully then, be vaguely aware of her responsibilities and familiar with British law. It follows therefore, if the institutions to which she has been aligned, have any international credibility, she ought to be aware of the serious nature and consequence, of perverting the course of her own supposed British Justice system, something clearly not a reality in British Occupied Ireland, as this affair demonstrates to any objective observer not insignificant in a Peace Process without Due Process.

The facts of the case are as follows;

• Marian has been kept in solitary confinement in a ‘male’ high security prison
• She is effectively interned without a trial, sentence, or release date.
• She has not been given any timescale for any investigation.
• She has not been allowed to see the evidence that the state claims to have
• Her release has been ordered on two occasions by judges. However, on both occasions the secretary of state has overruled those decisions.
• The secretary of state claimed he ‘revoked Marian’s license’. This is despite Marian never being released on license. She was given a Royal Pardon.
• Marian’s Royal Pardon has ‘gone missing’ from the home office (the only time in history). The secretary of state has taken the view that unless a paper copy can be located – it must be assumed that she does not have one.
• Despite no ‘license’ existing for her release from prison in 1980, it is the non-existent license that is being used to keep her in prison.
• She can only be released by Theresa Villiers the current Secretary of State responsible despite her protestations

The charges against Marian Price were thrown out of their own British courts, for lack of evidence by a Judge, the last time she appeared and now the very same charges have been re-instated against Marian again in a British judicial system, that can provide any tangible evidence as to the reason for her internment. The farcical affair, demonstrates the British have learned nothing from their intransigence around Bloody Sunday and further the disingenuous nature of Cameron's belated, superficial apology. Neither have they learned from their collusion in the sectarian murder of thousands of Irish innocents or their shoot-to-kill policies, or any of their errors, in the last forty years of occupation and repression in British Occupied Ireland, never mind over 800 years of bloody oppression of the whole island of Ireland. Ms Villier's statement on the Marian Price debacle, smacks of the same arrogance, falshoods, injustice and sheer bloody mindedness, so much part, of their far-reaching colonial and recent bloody history.

Marian Price, is a symbol of her community, an Irish community, that the British ruling elite have spent years, trying and failing to silence and and subjugate. They have tried and continue to try, batter it into submission with internment, torture, state sanctioned murder and genocide. Milosevic's role in the tragic massacre an war crime of Srebrenica, was chicken feed, compared to the role the Villier's family have played in ethnic cleansing, war crimes and the holocaust in Ireland. Marian Price will not be silent until she is six foot under and for her lack of compliance she must silenced with political internment torture, without a proper trial, by the British occupiers and Ms Villiers is another insincere, superficial expensive mouthpiece for their criminal activity which includes kidnap. Despite her long family ancestry of being directly involved, as previous Vice royals in the Irish Holocaust, that cost 6,257,456 Irish person's lives, Villiers comes to Ireland, like so many of her predecessors, ignorant, not surprising with the sort of irresponsible, selective, subjectivity her statement demonstrates.

Marian Price has suffered enough and while we may not have agree with her tactics, we must defend her human rights. Britain has never voluntarily been interested in human rights or fairness and their intransigence is nothing new. For those of us who have been willing, despite considerable historical evidence to the contrary, to give the Peace Process in Ireland a fair chance and accept the challenge of it being an alternative avenue to physically resisting British political state violence, the Marian Price affair, is a poor omen. There have been many superficial calls for peace in Ireland but for those of us confronted with the daily reality of political violence, we know, as sure as night follows day, a Peace Process without Due Process or justice is going nowhere.

Ms Villiers despite her education at the King's Inn, appears to be selectively ignorant of this obvious fact or perhaps its just plain old familiar British hypocrisy and more of their worldwide piracy. Ms Villiers after graduating, worked as a barrister and as a lecturer at King's College London, 1994–99, perhaps like a lot of her colleagues, she partakes of an extra sup with them, before making public utterances, that fans the flames of injustice, that incites otherwise peaceful people to desperate and unwise reactionary violence.

Marian Price must be freed, that is the challenge to you and to all of us who claim to love peace. For those of us of the Irish diaspora, we are all Marian Price, consciously or subconsciously and we have as much freedom or the lack of it, as we allow irresponsible leaders like Villiers, and her long line of British blue bloods, steal from us in Ireland and worldwide. We need international help to achieve this peacefully, despite Tory provocation in the interests of their political sponsors, the British industrial war complex.
Related Link: http://irishblog-brianclarkenuj.blogspot.com/

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