Padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com



49530055946English Literature Wider Reading Booklet00English Literature Wider Reading Booklet5053265198143003606803175Power and Conflict Poetry: Non-Fiction Wider Reading00Power and Conflict Poetry: Non-Fiction Wider Reading791912478703100ArticlePagesLinked poems‘The Romantics’3-6‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Shelly‘Extract from The Prelude’ by William Wordwworth‘London’ by William Blake‘How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2’7-8‘Kamikaze’ by Beatrice Garland‘Black British history: A study in erasure’9-10‘Checking’ Out Me History’ by John Agard‘The Guardian view on the Windrush generation: the scandal isn’t over’11Checking’ Out Me History’ by John AgardSuperpowers unite over Iraqi invasion of Kuwait -12-13‘War Photographer’ by Carol Ann Duffy‘Poppies’ by Jane Weir‘Remains’ by Simon Armitage‘The shot that nearly killed me: War photographers – a special report’14-16‘War Photographer’ by Carol Ann Duffy‘Sensuous life in the trenches’17-18‘Exposure’ by Wilfred Owen‘Bayonet Charge’ by Ted Hughes‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: making poetry from war’19-20‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson‘50 Years Later, Troubles Still Cast ‘Huge Shadow’ Over Northern Ireland’21-24‘Storm on the Island’ by Seamus Heaney‘THE BRITISH-PAKISTANI IDENTITY CRISIS.’25‘Tissue’ Imtiaz Dharker‘As migrants we leave home in search of a future, but we lose the past’26-27‘The Emigree’ by Carol RumensAre you in a controlling relationship? How to spot the signs of manipulation28‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert BrowningA Body of Essays: Imtiaz Dharker on the Liver. 29-31‘Tissue’ Imtiaz DharkerThe Romantics Article by: Dr Stephanie Forward. Published:15 May 2014. your vocabulary – make sure you know the definition of these words.retrospectively denounced renounced profoundly prophetic transcend legislators marginalised suffused suppressed notorious stark iconic exert00Improve your vocabulary – make sure you know the definition of these words.retrospectively denounced renounced profoundly prophetic transcend legislators marginalised suffused suppressed notorious stark iconic exertDr Stephanie Forward explains the key ideas and influences of Romanticism, and considers their place in the work of writers including Wordsworth, Blake, P B Shelley and Keats.Today the word ‘romantic’ evokes images of love and sentimentality, but the term ‘Romanticism’ has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The ‘Romantics’ would not have used the term themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th century.right1859280Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What concepts or ideas were important to the Romantics?What did the Romantics feel was ‘their duty’?00Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What concepts or ideas were important to the Romantics?What did the Romantics feel was ‘their duty’?In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared in?The Social Contract: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ During the Romantic period major transitions took place in society, as dissatisfied intellectuals and artists challenged the Establishment. In England, the Romantic poets were at the very heart of this movement. They were inspired by a desire for liberty, and they denounced the exploitation of the poor. There was an emphasis on the importance of the individual; a conviction that people should follow ideals rather than imposed conventions and rules. The Romantics renounced the rationalism and order associated with the preceding Enlightenment era, stressing the importance of expressing authentic personal feelings. They had a real sense of responsibility to their fellow men: they felt it was their duty to use their poetry to inform and inspire others, and to change society.RevolutionWhen reference is made to Romantic verse, the poets who generally spring to mind are?William Blake?(1757-1827),?William Wordsworth?(1770-1850),?Samuel Taylor Coleridge?(1772-1834),?George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron?(1788-1824),?Percy Bysshe Shelley?(1792-1822) and?John Keats?(1795-1821). These writers had an intuitive feeling that they were ‘chosen’ to guide others through the tempestuous period of change.-857251266825Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Highlight the poets that are featured in the Power and Conflict anthology.Why was the British establishment wary of the Romantics?00Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Highlight the poets that are featured in the Power and Conflict anthology.Why was the British establishment wary of the Romantics?This was a time of physical confrontation; of violent rebellion in parts of Europe and the New World. Conscious of anarchy across the English Channel, the British government feared similar outbreaks. The early Romantic poets tended to be supporters of the French Revolution, hoping that it would bring about political change; however, the bloody Reign of Terror (the French Revolution’s most violent point) shocked them profoundly and affected their views. In his youth William Wordsworth was drawn to the Republican cause in France, until he gradually became disenchanted with the Revolutionaries.The imaginationleft1917065Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Why might the Romantics be considered ‘somewhat pretentious’?00Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Why might the Romantics be considered ‘somewhat pretentious’?The Romantics were?not?in agreement about everything they said and did: far from it! Nevertheless, certain key ideas dominated their writings. They genuinely thought that they were prophetic figures who could interpret reality. The Romantics highlighted the healing power of the imagination, because they truly believed that it could enable people to transcend their troubles and their circumstances. Their creative talents could illuminate and transform the world into a coherent vision, to regenerate mankind spiritually. In?A Defence of Poetry?(1821), Shelley elevated the status of poets: ‘They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit…’.[1]?He declared that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This might sound somewhat pretentious, but it serves to convey the faith the Romantics had in their poetry.The marginalised and oppressedWordsworth was concerned about the elitism of earlier poets, whose highbrow language and subject matter were neither readily accessible nor particularly relevant to ordinary people. He maintained that poetry should be democratic; that it should be composed in ‘the language really spoken by men’ (Preface to?Lyrical Ballads?[1802]). For this reason, he tried to give a voice to those who tended to be marginalised and oppressed by society: the rural poor; discharged soldiers; ‘fallen’ women; the insane; and children.left603250Try to work out the meaning of the word in bold from its context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.How can you link this paragraph to the quote by Rousseau that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’?00Try to work out the meaning of the word in bold from its context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.How can you link this paragraph to the quote by Rousseau that ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’?Blake was radical in his political views, frequently addressing social issues in his poems and expressing his concerns about the monarchy and the church. His poem ‘London’ draws attention to the suffering of chimney-sweeps, soldiers and prostitutes.Children, nature and the sublimeFor the world to be regenerated, the Romantics said that it was necessary to start all over again with a childlike perspective. They believed that children were special because they were innocent and uncorrupted, enjoying a precious affinity with nature. Romantic verse was suffused with reverence for the natural world. In Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798) the poet hailed nature as the ‘Great universal Teacher!’ Recalling his unhappy times at Christ’s Hospital School in London, he explained his aspirations for his son, Hartley, who would have the freedom to enjoy his childhood and appreciate his surroundings. The Romantics were inspired by the environment, and encouraged people to venture into new territories – both literally and metaphorically. In their writings they made the world seem a place with infinite, unlimited potential.left802005Try to work out the meaning of the word in bold from its context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What is ‘the sublime’?How can you link it to a child’s perspective?00Try to work out the meaning of the word in bold from its context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What is ‘the sublime’?How can you link it to a child’s perspective?A key idea in Romantic poetry is the concept of the sublime. This term conveys the feelings people experience when they see awesome landscapes, or find themselves in extreme situations which elicit both fear and admiration. For example, Shelley described his reaction to stunning, overwhelming scenery in the poem ‘Mont Blanc’ (1816).The second-generation RomanticsBlake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were first-generation Romantics, writing against a backdrop of war. Wordsworth, however, became increasingly conservative in his outlook: indeed, second-generation Romantics, such as Byron, Shelley and Keats, felt that he had ‘sold out’ to the Establishment. In the suppressed Dedication to?Don Juan?(1819-1824) Byron criticised the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, and the other ‘Lakers’, Wordsworth and Coleridge (all three lived in the Lake District). Byron also vented his spleen on the English Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, denouncing him as an ‘intellectual eunuch’, a ‘bungler’ and a ‘tinkering slavemaker’ (stanzas 11 and 14). Although the Romantics stressed the importance of the individual, they also advocated a commitment to mankind. Byron became actively involved in the struggles for Italian nationalism and the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule.left910590Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Can you think of a modern day equivalent to the tensions and disagreements between first- and second-generation Romantics?00Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.Can you think of a modern day equivalent to the tensions and disagreements between first- and second-generation Romantics?Notorious for his sexual exploits, and dogged by debt and scandal, Byron quitted Britain in 1816. Lady Caroline Lamb famously declared that he was ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ Similar accusations were pointed at Shelley. Nicknamed ‘Mad Shelley’ at Eton, he was sent down (excluded) from Oxford for advocating atheism. He antagonised the Establishment further by his criticism of the monarchy, and by his immoral lifestyle.ContrariesRomanticism offered a new way of looking at the world, prioritising imagination above reason. There was, however, a tension at times in the writings, as the poets tried to face up to life’s seeming contradictions. Blake published?Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul?(1794). Here we find two different perspectives on religion in ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’. The simple vocabulary and form of ‘The Lamb’ suggest that God is the beneficent, loving Good Shepherd. In stark contrast, the creator depicted in ‘The Tyger’ is a powerful blacksmith figure. The speaker is stunned by the exotic, frightening animal, posing the rhetorical question: ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ In?The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?(1790-1793) Blake asserted: ‘Without contraries is no progression’ (stanza 8).right2535555Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What did the Romantics see as the two dominant opposing ways ‘of looking at the world’?00Try to work out the meaning of the words in bold from their context. Check your answers in a dictionary and write them in the box above.What did the Romantics see as the two dominant opposing ways ‘of looking at the world’?Wordsworth’s?‘Tintern Abbey’?(1798) juxtaposed moments of celebration and optimism with lamentation and regret. Keats thought in terms of an opposition between the imagination and the intellect. In a letter to his brothers, in December 1817, he explained what he meant by the term ‘Negative Capability’: ‘that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (22 December). Keats suggested that it is impossible for us to find answers to the eternal questions we all have about human existence. Instead, our feelings and imaginations enable us to recognise Beauty, and it is Beauty that helps us through life’s bleak moments. Life involves a delicate balance between times of pleasure and pain. The individual has to learn to accept both aspects: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ [1819]). The premature deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats contributed to their mystique. As time passed they attained iconic status, inspiring others to make their voices heard. The Romantic poets continue to exert a powerful influence on popular culture. Generations have been inspired by their promotion of self-expression, emotional intensity, personal freedom and social concern.How Japan's youth see the kamikaze pilots of WW2During World War Two, thousands of Japanese pilots volunteered to be kamikaze, suicidally crashing their planes in the name of their emperor. More than 70 years on, the BBC's Mariko Oi asks what these once revered men mean to Japan's youth.Irrational, heroic and stupid: this was what three young people in Tokyo said when I asked them about their views on the kamikaze.It is difficult to verify the figures but it is believed that 3-4,000 Japanese pilots crashed their planes into an enemy target on purpose. Only 10% of missions were believed to be successful but they sank some 50 Allied vessels. Decades after the war, opinions on the kamikaze pilots remain divided, partly because their legacy has been used repeatedly as a political tool. "During the seven years of the Allied occupation of Japan, the kamikaze reputation was one of the first things that they went after," Prof MG Sheftall from Shizuoka University explained. The suicidal tactic was portrayed as "insanity"."But when the Allies left in 1952, the right wing nationalists came out strongly and they have carried out multi-generational efforts to seize back control of the narrative," he says."Even in the 1970s and 80s, the vast majority of Japanese people thought of the kamikaze as something shameful, a crime committed by the state against their family members. But in the 1990s, the nationalists started testing the water, seeing whether they could get away with calling the kamikaze pilots heroes who were proud to die for their country. When they didn't get much push back, they got bolder and bolder," he added.But is it true that all kamikaze pilots, who were mostly aged between 17 and 24, were wholly willing to die for their country? When I spoke to two rare survivors, now in their 90s, the answer appeared to be ‘no’. "I would say 60-70% of us were eager to sacrifice ourselves for the emperor, but the rest probably questioned why they had to go," 94-year-old Osamu Yamada told me at his home in Nagoya. Before he could carry out his mission, the war ended. "I was single at that time and had nothing holding me back so I had one genuine thought in mind and that is I must give myself up to defend Japan. But for those who had families, they must have thought very differently."Keiichi Kuwahara, 91, was one of those who couldn't stop thinking about his family. He told me about the moment he was told to be part of the kamikaze unit. "I felt myself going pale." He was only 17. "I was scared. I didn't want to die. I lost my father the year before, so it was only my mother and my older sister working to support the family. I was sending money to them from my salary. I thought, what will happen if I die? How will my family eat?"So when his engines malfunctioned and he was forced to come back, he was relieved. But on paper, Mr Kuwahara was considered to have volunteered. "Was I forced or did I volunteer? It is a difficult question to answer if you don't understand the essence of the military," he said.Prof Sheftall says the pilots were asked to put their hand up in a big group if they didn't want to volunteer. Amid peer pressure, hardly anyone was able to say no to the mission. The kamikaze are often compared in modern time to terrorists who carry out suicide missions, but Mr Kuwahara said that's not accurate. "I think the two are completely different," said Mr Kuwahara. "Kamikaze actions were taken only because it was wartime. With the so-called Islamic State the attacks are unpredictable."Mr Yamada thinks the word kamikaze, which means "divine wind" in Japanese, is misunderstood and used inappropriately in English without understanding the historical context of what Japan was facing at the time. "It hurts me because kamikaze was my youth. It was an innocent thing. It really was something pure. It was much more sublime. But now it is being discussed as if we were induced," he said.After the war Mr Kuwahara, who had been reluctant about his mission, said he felt liberated and that he needed to think about how to rebuild the country.But Mr Yamada took a while to adjust. "I was disoriented, I felt powerless, I lost my sense of self, as if my soul was pulled out of me," he recalled. "As kamikaze pilots, we were all prepared to die, so when I heard that we were defeated, I felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world."It was the necessity to work, get food and survive in post-war Japan that kept him going. And the very man he had been willing to die for, Emperor Hirohito, ultimately played a role in him moving on from the war because he set an example by shaking hands with the Americans. "The emperor, his majesty, was the heart of Japan. I think the presence of Emperor Hirohito helped the Japanese to recover from the war," he said.For Japan's post-war generation, the experiences of former kamikaze pilots are unimaginable, even to their own family members. "But when I think about his life, I notice that my life isn't mine alone," Mr Yamada's granddaughter Yoshiko Hasegawa told me. "I am obliged to live for those who could have been born as the children and grandchildren of the soldiers who died during the war."Mr Kuwahara's grandson, meanwhile, is unaware of exactly what he went through as a 17-year-old trainee pilot. "But that's the peaceful Japan I wanted to create," he said, smiling. To him, his grandson's ignorance is proof that the country has moved on from its painful past. Black British history: A study in erasureBlack people are a part of the fabric of Britain, yet pupils are not taught the full story of Black history in schools.by Paula AkpanGrowing up in the UK as a black person means that you're living an existence that is constantly erased, particularly in school. Many will recall the history topics that were covered by the National Curriculum: a look at the infamous timeline of Nazi Germany, explorations of the Vietnam war and an in-depth study of the civil rights movement that took place in the US. The latter is often a young person's first introduction to issues related to race and blackness.The common theme running throughout my history studies was the capacity the learning structure had to critique at length the mistakes made by other governments and how that shaped their nation's narrative, however, that gaze is rarely turned inwardly. The only time I learned anything to do with British history was the establishment of the English parliament and the histories of political factions such as the Whigs and Tories. I learned about Benjamin Disraeli's hand in shaping the modern Conservative party and his lasting rivalry with William Gladstone but was never taught about how his government?attempted?to wipe out the Zulu Kingdom through bloody battles - and then cover it up - in order to extend British influence in South Africa. We use the failures of other countries as our teaching aids while still never truly exploring this country's dark history of imperialism and colonisation.As a young black person, the struggles faced by African Americans utterly captured my imagination and for the first time, provided me with contemporary role models who looked like me. Rosa Parks' defiance, and how it sparked a whole boycott, left me stunned. Martin Luther King Jr's influence and oratory prowess were awe-inspiring. Malcolm X's casual disregard for white authority, which had him painted as the anti-hero and the "bad"?activist in comparison to Martin Luther King, shocked me. While I was learning about struggles that I could relate to, they still felt so far away. At the time, I didn't have the vocabulary or framework to articulate what I was feeling but now I know what had been niggling at me - what about the black people in the UK? Where were our history-makers?Do black lives matter in the UK?But centring America's relationship with its black people in our lessons, it distracts from the fact that it isn't ours. While the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 had a huge impact, studying the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott - which resulted in the employment of the first non-white bus conductor - would've been more significant. Skimming over the history of the Black Panthers was exciting and showed me a different form of black resistance through building self-sufficient structures for the community. However, what about the black women who led the Black Power movement in Britain? Important figures such as?Olive Morris,?Altheia Jones Lecointe, and?Beverley Bryan?headed up key black feminist groups like?OWAAD?and the Brixton Black Women's Group. With these organisations, they tackled housing, institutional racism, and immigration. And yet, their contributions to history have been erased. I was looking to the likes of Assata Shakur and Stokely Carmichael when I had role models closer to home that I had no idea existed.What we are and are not taught at school goes beyond the classroom; it trickles through to the rest of societal workings. When you're never taught about black peoples' contributions to history, it affects the way you contextualise yourself and your identity. Your frameworks and references are also impacted as a result and limit the extent to which you can engage with the particular content matter. However, it doesn't just stop with the individual's identity. This lack of knowledge around black British contributions and Britain's horrific relationship with race can serve racist narratives that assert that we need to "go back to where we came from".2016 saw the UK vote in a referendum as to whether or not the country should withdraw from the European Union, with campaign groups set up to sway voters. A number of pro-Leave groups used scare-mongering tactics around immigration, urging people to "take back control of our borders". The Independent reported that?the surge in anti-immigrant hate crimes?after the referendum was mostly found in areas of the UK that strongly voted to leave. The rhetoric that is often used to try to invalidate the right of black and brown people to exist in the UK is often rooted in beliefs that we have only existed in this country since relatively recently. It is often believed that we only appeared in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, often neglecting that black people have been part of British society?since?Roman times, again something that has been omitted from our education.Britain's black Muslims: Ignored, discriminated and resistingBy never teaching us about Britain's horrific relationship with race, it suggests that this country has never had a problem with race in the same way that the US has. It means that we get to boast about how multicultural our cities are and how we welcome diversity without ever having to take accountability for how many African and Asian nations have had their resources and cultures pillaged and diluted.Never learning about the legacies of black people to this country within an institutional framework means that we grow up believing that we are yet to earn our place in the UK.The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.?The Guardian view on the Windrush generation: the scandal isn’t overVictims are still in dire financial need, having lost income when they were wrongly classified as illegal immigrants. They can wait no longerWed 17 Oct 2018?17.44?BSTLast modified on Wed 17 Oct 2018?20.32?BST HYPERLINK "" \l "img-1" 03810?The Empire Windrush arrives at Tilbury, 22 June 1948. Photograph: AlamyAyear ago, the Guardian began investigating the scandalous treatment of members of the Windrush generation who, after decades of living and working in Britain, were?wrongly classified as illegal immigrants. Some were taken to detention centres; dozens were deported. Others lost homes and jobs, leaving them destitute and heavily in debt. Six months on, the government apologised and promised to redress those wrongs and pay compensation. More than 2,000 people have now been granted citizenship. Last week, Ken Morgan?was able to return?to London after spending 25 years in Jamaica because his British passport was taken from him without warning.Yet Windrush victims are still suffering. Any reassurance offered by their new documentation – which not all have yet obtained – is set against all the anguish, stress and fear they have endured. Many remain in dire financial straits, purely because of the government’s own admitted failings, having lost their work and spent hundreds or thousands of pounds on application fees and legal advice. One says she is threatened with eviction even after substantial help from her children. All are of an age at which it is harder to find new work, even if they now have the documents they need.Many seem broadly satisfied with the outlines of the?proposed compensation scheme, including the suggestion that it should take account of the devastating?psychological impact, though of course no sum can truly compensate for being denied the chance to?see a dying parent. Some are concerned by the?unspecified cap?on the amount claimable. Others have pointed to the difficulties of proving expenses accrued over years. And for a few it is?already too late.So there is shock and anxiety that the consultation is being extended for five weeks more, after the independent adviser told the Home Office that people had requested more time to respond. Clearly, any scheme dealing with issues of such complexity needs to be drawn up carefully as well as quickly, as the home secretary,?Sajid Javid, told MPs.The home affairs select committee put forward the obvious solution back in June. It warned that people in urgent need could not wait for the consultations to end, and urged the government to?immediately set up a hardship fund. Now, four months on, Mr Javid?has conceded?that in some pressing and exceptional cases it may be right to consider payments in advance of the full scheme and has asked officials to develop a framework for considering such cases. That is a small step forward – but it is long overdue. Those in acute financial difficulties have waited far too long already. They need help now.Superpowers unite over Iraqi invasion of Kuwait - 03 August 1990: President Saddam becomes the first Arab ruler in modern history to send his army, unprovoked, into another Arab country, overthrow its government and install a puppet regimeSimon Tisdall in Washington and David Hirst in NicosiaThe United States and the Soviet Union, acting together for the first time in a major international crisis, moved simultaneously to isolate Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait yesterday.Washington imposed an oil and trade ban and moved a carrier group to the Gulf while Moscow, Iraq’s main arms supplier, suspended all deliveries.Scattered resistance continued last night in the capital, Kuwait City, as the US Secretary of State, James Baker, prepared to fly to Moscow from Mongolia. The American and Soviet governments are expected to issue a joint statement today condemning Iraq’s President, Saddam Hussein. Iraq responded to Washington’s move by announcing that it would freeze debt repayments to the US. France, formerly a close ally of Baghdad, followed the American lead by freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets, while Britain announced that it would freeze Kuwaiti assets only.Mrs Thatcher, on a visit to Colorado, called in a joint press conference with President Bush for an international effort to end Iraq’s ‘intolerable’ invasion. She said it would be ‘totally unacceptable if it were allowed to endure’. The UN Security Council demanded an immediate withdrawal of Iraqi troops. In Brussels, a Nato official said the aim of sanctions was ‘to cripple Iraq totally, chiefly by refusing to buy any of their oil’.The Arab world looked on yesterday in seemingly impotent dismay as President Saddam became the first Arab ruler in modern history to send his army, unprovoked, into another Arab country, overthrow its government and install a puppet regime.3031490508000Gulf leaders are to gather in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, today for an emergency meeting called by Kuwait to consider a co-ordinated response. The deposed Kuwaiti Prime Minister, Crown Prince Sheikh Saad al-Abdulla al-Sabah, struck a defiant note after Iraq’s vastly superior army overwhelmed the Kuwaitis in a lightning invasion that had Iraqi tanks patrolling the capital within hours. In a broadcast from a secret location last night, he tried to rally the nation by vowing to fight the Iraqis ‘until we clean their treachery from our land’. Kuwait’s ambassador in Washington appealed for international military action.The Emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, fled to Saudi Arabia in a helicopter, but his younger brother, Fahd, died defending the royal palace, which was strafed by Iraqi jets. One of the Emir’s daughters was reported to have been seized.Several American nationals working on oil platforms in Kuwaiti waters were detained during the invasion, a State Department official confirmed last night. He said the US was investigating the detentions as a matter of urgency, but it did not know where the workers were, or how many were involved.The ‘Provisional Free Government of Kuwait’ announced over Baghdad Radio yesterday that it was in full control. Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council, in a statement apparently aimed at Washington, said that President Saddam would turn Kuwait into ‘a graveyard for anyone who tried to commit aggression or was moved by the lust of invasion’.The warning came as a naval battle group, spearheaded by an aircraft carrier, the USS Independence, and up to 14 other American warships, moved towards the Gulf. President Bush, however, last night ruled out American military intervention for the time being.In Kuwait, the provisional government described itself as composed of Kuwait’s ‘revolutionary youth’. Its members are unknown and it is widely assumed that they do not exist. Its announcement said that it had ‘overthrown the tyrants’ the Emir and the Prime Minister and that ‘all their stooges’ had been deposed and the parliament dissolved. It would secure stability and then hold ‘free and honest elections’.The provisional government said it had appealed to the ‘noble Arab knight Saddam Hussein’ and his countrymen for help. They had responded nobly. It would ‘work to address the issue of borders and relations with beloved Iraq on the basis of brotherhood and the supreme Arab interest’.Tanks, armoured personnel carriers, trucks full of troops, fuel and water tankers of 100,000-strong force crossed Kuwait’s borders at 2 am and trundled over sand and scrub towards Kuwait City. Aircraft and artillery bombarded the international airport, port and military airport. Helicopter-borne troops seized two key air bases where personnel surrendered without a fight.The invaders ran into the stiffest resistance from Kuwait’s hopelessly outnumbered, out-gunned, 20,000-strong army in the centre of the city, especially as they closed in on the royal palace. Diplomats said about 200 soldiers were killed or wounded, mainly from the republican guard. The Iraqis took control of the palace after two hours of heavy artillery barrages. Fifty tanks were surrounding it and the nearby American Embassy last night. The British Embassy was hit by shell fire.The official Kuwaiti radio and television went off the air when the invaders entered the city, but a mobile broadcasting unit, outside the occupied areas, continued to broadcast martial music and patriotic songs late into the day. One of its speakers was the Crown Prince, who called on Kuwaitis to resist the Iraqis ‘until we clear their treachery from our land’.‘Our valiant brothers will rebuff the aggression. Our Arab brothers are with us. Our Moslem brothers are with us.’There was little sign of Arab assistance. The nearest thing to condemnation came in a statement from Kuwait’s allies in the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council: ‘How can Arab blood be shed by Arab hands. How can an Arab country occupy an Arab country.’In Baghdad, motorists hooted their horns and flashed their lights to celebrate the news of their army’s second invasion of a neighbouring country in a decade.The shot that nearly killed me: War photographers – a special reportAttacked by a Haitian mob, kidnapped by Gaddafi's troops, shot in Afghanistan… Who'd be a war photographer????In pictures: the life of a war photographer (contains some graphic images)Sat 18 Jun 2011?00.03?BSTFirst published on Sat 18 Jun 2011?00.03?BST1524044958000Adam Ferguson, Afghanistan, 2009?Adam Ferguson: 'As a photographer, you feel helpless. Around you are medics, security personnel, people doing good work. It can be agonisingly painful to think that all you're doing is taking pictures.' I was one of the first on?the scene. The Afghan security forces normally shut down a?suicide bombing like?this pretty quickly. I?was able to get to the?epicentre of the explosion. It was carnage, there were bodies, flames were coming out of the buildings. I remember feeling very scared because there was still popping and hissing and small explosions, and the building was collapsing. It was still very fresh and there was a risk of another bomb. It was one of those situations where you have to put fear aside and focus on the?job at hand: to watch the situation and document it.This woman was escorted out of the building and round this devastated street corner. It epitomised the whole mood – this?older woman caught in?the middle of?this ridiculous, tragic event. I wish I?could have found out?how her life unravelled, but as soon as the scene was locked down, I ran back to the?office to file.As a photographer, you feel helpless. Around you are medics, security personnel, people doing good work. It can be agonisingly painful to?think that all you're doing is taking pictures.When I won a World Press award for this photograph, I felt sad. People were congratulating me and there was a celebration over this intense tragedy that I had captured. I?reconciled it by deciding that more people see a story when a photographer's work is decorated.Jo?o Silva, Afghanistan, October 20100295?Jo?o Silva: 'As the soldiers dragged me away from the kill zone, I took these pictures. When people around me have been hurt or killed, I've recorded it. I had to keep working.' Photograph: Jo?o Silva/The New York TimesI'd been in?Afghanistan?for a month when I?stepped on the landmine. I was the third man in line, and as I put my foot down, I heard a metallic click and I was thrown in the air. I knew exactly what had happened. As the soldiers dragged me away from the kill zone, I took these pictures. When people around me have been hurt or killed, I've recorded it. I had to keep working. The soldiers were yelling for the medics. I knew my legs?had gone, so I?called my wife on the?satellite phone and told her not to worry. The pain came later, back in intensive care, when infections set in?and they nearly lost me?a couple of times.I've spent enough time out there for my number to come up. I?was one of the few who kept going back to?Iraq. People think you do this to chase adrenaline. The reality is hard work and a lot of time alone. Firefights can be exciting, I'm not going to lie, but?photographing the?aftermath of a?bomb, when there's a?dead child and the mother wailing over the corpse, isn't fun. I'm intruding on the?most intimate moments, but I force myself to do it because?the world has to see those images. Politicians need to know what it looks like when you send young boys to war. If it's humanly possible, if the prosthetics allow me, I'll go back to conflict zones. I?wish I?was in Libya at?the moment, without a?shadow of a doubt.1524043561000Tom Stoddart, Sarajevo, 1992?Tom Stoddart: 'Sarajevo was the most dangerous place I have worked on a long-term basis. But I could leave. The occupants of the city could not.' I'm not really interested in military bang-bang pictures; I'm interested in documenting people living through war. Sniper Alley, where this was taken, paralysed Sarajevo. To get from one side to the other, the residents had to pass through this intersection and Serbian snipers would take shots at them. Bullets pinged past the entire time. Some people would sprint as fast as they could; others would brazenly walk, as if they were giving two fingers. Many were killed. Anyone who says they?aren't frightened during war is either lying or a fool. It's about finding a way of dealing with the fear – you have to be very calm. You're not there to get your rocks off; you're there because you feel your pictures can make a difference. Sarajevo was the most dangerous place I have worked on a long-term basis. But I could leave. The occupants of Sarajevo couldn't. That was one of the strange things about covering it – it was so close to London. You could be back at Heathrow in a couple of hours. People would pass carrying skis, or off to the Caribbean, and you'd feel like screaming, "Why don't you understand?" You become a?terrible dinner guest.Greg Marinovich, Soweto, 19903532505189186?Greg Marinovich: ' "No pictures," someone yelled. I told them I'd stop shooting if they stopped killing him. They didn't.' I was deep in Soweto when I saw a man being attacked by ANC combatants. The month before, I'd seen a?guy beaten to death – my first experience of real violence – and hadn't shaken the feeling of guilt that I?had done nothing to stop it. "No pictures," someone yelled. I told them I'd stop shooting if they stopped killing him. They didn't. As the man was set on fire, he began to run. I was framing my next shot when a bare-chested man came into view and swung a?machete into his blazing skull. I?tried not to smell the burning flesh and shot a few more pictures, but I was losing it and aware that the crowd could turn on me at any time. The victim was moaning in a low, dreadful voice as?I left. I got in my car and, once I turned the corner, began to scream. You're not just a journalist or a human being, you're a mixture of both, and to try to separate the two is complicated. I've often felt guilty about my pictures. I?worked in?South Africa?for years and was shot three times. The fourth and final injury, in Afghanistan in 1999, wasn't the worst, but I?decided enough was enough. I?was looking to settle. Nineteen months later, I met my wife.040929000Eric Bouvet, Chechnya, May 1995It was unbearable. Two crazy weeks and the most unbelievable story I ever did. I was with a Russian special commando. They were torturing, killing and raping. I saw them do it, and I couldn't stop them. Someone of a?normal constitution can't accept that. I was working on the edge.This is the morning after a night that left four men dead and 10 wounded. It was heavy fighting, and I was very afraid. I discovered a?dead Chechen four metres from me when I?got up in the night. You see movies, you read books, you can imagine anything. But when you are in front of something, it's not like the movies. We started out as 60 and came back 30 – one in?two people injured or killed. I was lucky.As soon as it was light, I took pictures. This is the first thing I?saw. The guy with the?bandage on his head has lost his friends. He has fought all night long. I?don't feel pity, but at?the same time they took me with them and?did everything to protect me. Without them, I?couldn't have done the story. I was the only witness. It's very?complicated.4483735-36700Sensuous life in the trenchesArticle created by:Santanu DasTheme:Life as a soldierPublished:29 Jan 2014From smell and sound to touch and perception, Dr Santanu Das draws on soldiers' records to consider the sensory experiences within the trenches of World War One.‘Everything visible or audible or tangible to the sense – to touch, smell and perception – is ugly beyond imagination’ wrote W. Beach Thomas after spending five months on the Somme in 1916. More than twenty years later, while writing the foreword to the?Collected Poems?(1937) of fellow poet-soldier?Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon observed: ‘Sensuous frontline existence is there, hateful and repellent, unforgettable and inescapable’.The trenchesThe trench experience?on the Western Front was one of the most sustained onslaughts on the human sensorium: it thrust man’s fragile body between the ooze of primordial slime on the one hand and the terrors of shellfire on the other. By November 1914, deadlocked armies on the Western Front encountered each other in a series of zigzagging trenches which soon developed into vast subterranean worlds. There were trenches at Gallipoli and the Italian front, but it is the pockmarked narrow stretch weaving for 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border that has come to form the emblematic terrain of First World War memory. ‘In those miles of country’, Harold Macmillan wrote on May 13, 1916, ‘lurk (like moles and rats, it seems) thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death’. Archival images bear poignant testimony to daily life within the trenches: from their construction, carried out here by the Indian Labour Corps, to a forlorn-looking soldier sitting hemmed in by sandbags, to a British soldier washing himself in a shell-crater, or a group of soldiers having their hair cut.Trench life and the sensesMud, shells, barbed wire, rain, rats, lice, trench-foot: these iconic images of the First World War have been etched on our consciousness through a handful of soldier-poets but there exist a wide variety of material – notebooks, diaries, journals, memoirs, sketches, interviews, trench songs, memorabilia, and thousands of photographs – which, read together, open up the sensuous world of the trenches. In the diary of J. Bennet, housed in the IWM, the phrase ‘Dull cold day’ is obsessively repeated, voicing the commonest complaint of trench-life, while Lewis gunner Jack Dillon recalled years later how ‘the mud there [at Passchendaele] wasn’t liquid, it wasn’t porridge, it was a curious kind of sucking kind of mud ... a real monster that sucked at you’. Rain and artillery fire joined forces to turn the trenches into cesspools where the men floundered and even drowned; or, killed by shell-fire, their bodies dissolved into the slime. ‘A nightmare of earth and mud’ recalled infantryman and French novelist Henri Barbusse, while German officer Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his celebrated novel?All Quiet on the Western Front?(1929): ‘Our hands are earth, our bodies mud and our eyes puddles of rain’. In the dark, subterranean trenches, men navigated their way not through the safe distance of their gaze, but through the immediacy of their bodies: ‘creep’, ‘burrow’, ‘crawl’ and ‘worm’ are recurring verbs in trench narratives, as the familiar 32961854715700visual universe was supplanted by a strange tactile geography. Touch became the ground of testimony and trauma: after three weeks on the Somme, Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother, ‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air I have perceived it, and in the darkness?felt’. Amidst the deafening roar of a bombardment, sound was often registered as touch: ‘I felt that if I lifted a finger I should touch a solid ceiling of sound’ wrote A. McKee as he tried to describe the bombardment at Vimy Ridge.Diversity of trench experiences44450169164000However every single day was not an exercise in horror. Frontline existence was actually one of boredom, interrupted by bursts of terror.?An ordinary day?would be spent in small, dank dugouts, where the soldier would make tea, lunch on bully beef, or ‘chat’ – which meant both delousing and gossip. At night, the trenches came alive. Under the cover of darkness, the troops would be replaced; carrying parties would replenish supplies and small parties sent out to conduct trench-raids or repair wires. However, there was no one trench experience: it varied according to the rank, the sector, the unit; life as a private was different from that as an officer. Daily experience also differed, from being sheltered in underground bunkers (with the occasional piano!) – the Germans had deeper and more comfortable bunkers – or playing with the dog, to standing knee-deep in mud. Moreover, if one visited Ypres in wartime, one would have seen not just European troops, but Senegalais tirailleurs, Indian sepoys, North African spahis, the Maori Pioneer Battalion or Chinese and South African?labourers. An Indian sepoy wrote: ‘Our hearts are breaking, for a year has passed while we have stood to arms without a rest. .. We have bound ourselves under the flag and we must give our bodies’.Trauma and intimacyThe First World War was the first war in which war neurosis or ‘shellshock’ was officially recognised, with symptoms ranging from nightmares to blindness and paralysis. By the end of 1916, there were ‘mental wards’ in base hospitals and in post-war Britain, there were around 80,000 cases of shellshock. At the same time, mutilation, mortality and shellshock also led to new levels of physical intimacy and intensity among men. They looked after each other when ill or wounded, wrapped blankets round each other and at night their bodies spooned together as they slept. When his close friend Jim Noone died, Lance Corporal DH Fenton wrote to Noone’s mother: ‘I held him in my arms to the end, and when his soul departed I kissed him twice where I knew you would have kissed him – on the brow – once for his mother and once for myself’.In a letter to Siegfried Sassoon just a month before his death in November 1918, Wilfred Owen wrote: ‘My senses are charred’. It is this sensory intensity and devastation of life in the trenches that remains one of the most haunting and powerful legacies of the First World War.?‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: making poetry from warArticle created by:Seamus PerryTheme:Victorian poetryPublished:15 May 2014Dr Seamus Perry explains how Tennyson transformed a catastrophic episode in the Crimean war into one of the 19th-century’s most successful poems, using rhythm, repetition and vocabulary to convey both the folly of the cavalry charge and the bravery of the soldiers.On 25 October 1854, as part of the Battle of Balaklava, an episode in the Crimean War, the Light Cavalry Brigade of the British Army made a disastrous frontal assault upon a well-positioned battery of Russian artillery. The British soldiers rode the mile’s length of a valley, vulnerable to heavy enemy fire on both sides as well as from the front. Despite losses, they reached the Russian forces and, using sabres, drove them from their position, before turning to ride back down the long valley, exposed once again to insistent cannon fire. About 670 men had begun the charge, of whom 118 were killed and 127 wounded: by the end of the episode, only 195 men were left with horses.It was a complete military disaster, the awfulness of which was only compounded by it being the result of a misunderstanding. The order had been given to capture some heavy guns that the Russians were attempting to withdraw from the hills to the south of the valley; but when Captain Nolan brought the order back to the brigade its precision had somehow got lost, and the charge was launched instead at the substantial artillery dug in at the valley’s far end – a task for which the lightly armoured brigade was suicidally unsuited. Nolan may have realised that a mistake had been made as his first action upon charging was, extraordinarily, to ride to the front of the company, before his senior officer; but if this was indeed an attempt to get the men to change direction it was futile: he was shortly killed by Russian artillery, and so the cavalry rode on.Reports of the ChargeTerrible mistakes happen in war all the time, of course, but this one had an unprecedented sort of publicity as the Crimean War was the first to be covered by photographers and reporters, who sent news home within just a few weeks. It was the first campaign to be covered by a war correspondent, the Irishman W H Russell, who was dispatched by?The Times? where his compelling account of the Light Brigade’s catastrophe was published on 14 November 1854. The day before, however,?The Times?had offered a first treatment of the story in its leader column. It was indeed a ‘disaster’, said the newspaper, evoking vividly the brigade ‘simply pounded by the shot, shell, and Minié bullets from the hills’ as the cavalry advanced through ‘that valley of death’, and registering a loss all the more lamentable ‘because it seems to have arisen from some misunderstanding’. But still there was something to be celebrated: ‘Causeless as the sacrifice was, it was most glorious … The British soldier will do his duty, even to certain death, and is not paralyzed by feeling that he is the victim of some hideous blunder’. Years later,?Tennyson’s?son would recall his father writing his response to the charge on 2 December, ‘in a few minutes, after reading the description in?The Times?in which occurred the phrase “someone had blundered”, and this was the origin of the metre of the poem’; but in fact?The Times?report does not contain the phrase: that is Tennyson’s work. The poem first appeared in?The Examiner?on 9 December, signed ‘A.T.’, before being collected, in a revised version, in Tennyson’s volume?Maud?the following year.Insistent rhythm and moral vocabularyThe poem is the creature of its insistent rhythm, which captures the headlong plunge of the cavalry with great brilliance. As first published, Tennyson included a documentary detail about the captain:‘Forward, the Light Brigade!?Take the guns,’ Nolan said:?Into the valley of Death?Rode the six hundred.This was amended in later versions to ‘“Charge for the guns!” he said’, which adeptly anonymises the voice of authority: for one point of this poem is the irrelevance of who is giving the order, or why, for the men to whom it applies – ‘Their’s but to do and die’. Responding to?The Times’?report, Tennyson is suspended between admiration at the reckless magnificence of the charge and a conviction of its idiocy; and the poem revolves around its insistently repeated key-rhymes –?hundred, blundered, thundered, wondered, sundered?– with an obsessed fascination. The moral vocabulary of the poem is brilliantly pitched between an endorsement of their heroism and a bewilderment at the sheer folly of its occasion. ‘O the wild charge they made! / All the world wondered’; but then wonder can be evoked by things appalling as well as things appealing: this episode of military incompetence manages to combine both.?The Times?quoted a French general who watched the whole thing:?‘C’est très magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’?(‘It’s very magnificent, but it’s not war’).[1]?Tennyson partly shares that sense of an event that has transcended its sorry reality; but he remains conscious, too, that it is indeed nothing but war at the same time, and his ambiguously celebratory lines do not flinch to imply the grisly detail of hand-to-hand combat: ‘Cossack and Russian / Reeled from the sabre stroke / Shattered and sundered’.Returns and repetitionsTennyson’s poetry was always drawn to imagine returns and repetitions, and the charge of the light brigade gave him an opportunity to explore that fascination once again, now from a bleak perspective. For this was not just a charge, but a charge and a terribly depleted return, ‘Back from the mouth of hell’; and Tennyson’s poem captures that movement in its own verbal returns. The stanzas repeat ‘Rode the six hundred’ until the fourth, with a shocked stutter on ‘not’: ‘Then they rode back, but not / Not the six hundred’. And then the fifth, when the honorific definite article has been shed too, as we start to count the war dead: ‘All that was left of them, / Left of six hundred’. The poem ends with a call to honour them, ‘Noble six hundred!’ That is a markedly better close than the revised version that Tennyson temporarily adopted in the first book printing of the poem:Honour the brave and bold!Long shall the tale be told,Yea, when our babes are old—How they rode onward.Those lines are dutiful in their regard, but since the whole thing has been so emphatically about not just riding onward, disastrously, but then riding back, disastrously, too, its clinching ‘onward’ strikes a note of falser or simpler heroism than the poem deserves. ‘Noble six hundred!’ has a more fittingly epitaphic quality, an entirely appropriate sort of utterance that brings to a public conclusion to a poem of such bewildered private feelings.Footnotes[1]?Quoted in?The Times, 13 November 1854.50 Years Later, Troubles Still Cast ‘Huge Shadow’ Over Northern Ireland185801011430000LONDON — It had been billed as a civil rights march to redress long-festering hurts, one among many that freckled Europe in the heady days a half-century ago when the streets from Paris to?Prague?became arenas of revolt.But that particular protest in Northern Ireland on Oct. 5, 1968, signaled the beginning of something that endured for three decades, seeding an insurgency that became known with weary understatement as the Troubles.From then until a settlement known as?the Good Friday Agreementwas signed in 1998, some 3,600 people died in conflict that had all the appearances of civil war, with roadblocks and bomb blasts, sniper fire and the suspension of civil rights.The British authorities deployed the army against their own citizens in a province that had been carved out as a Protestant enclave at the partition of Ireland in 1921. Protest drawing on centuries of disaffection turned to armed revolt spearheaded by the underground Irish Republican Army and its political wing, Sinn Fein, which cast themselves as the most radical champions of an aggrieved Roman Catholic minority.At the same time, loyalist paramilitary groups challenged the I.R.A., supposedly to protect a Protestant majority, fearful that any dilution of the bond with Britain might destroy its power and identity. Their activities injected one more element of violence into a war of many dimensions.The conflict was not confined to the six counties that make up Northern Ireland. The I.R.A. drew significant support from groups as disparate as Irish-Americans in the United States and the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, who supplied significant amounts of arms and powerful explosives.The bombings spread to the rest of Britain, targeting senior figures including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Mortars were fired at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence and office, and at Heathrow Airport outside London. British troops hunted down I.R.A. members as far afield as Gibraltar.Even today, 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement brought a form of peace, low-level violence persists. Quasi-tribal?divisions are preserved in huge murals?on the gable ends of rowhouses, depicting each side’s heroes. A shared executive authority, set up as part of the 1998 accord,?has been suspended?since January 2017, because of intractable disputes between the main players — largely Protestant unionists seeking continued ties to Britain and mainly Catholic nationalists pressing for a united Ireland free of British control.The Good Friday pact “cooled things down a bit,” said Paul Bew, a leading historian and emeritus professor at Queen’s University in Belfast. “But if you are talking about a shared view of history, in therapy terms it’s like an agreement between a husband and wife who still can’t stand each other but have to find a way to live together.”250952038902100Most ominously, the Northern Irish issue that preoccupied six British prime ministers from Harold Wilson to Tony Blair has interposed itself anew into the halting negotiations on?Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, expected to happen in just six months.At the time of the Good Friday pact, Britain and Ireland were both members of the European Union, meaning that they could largely dismantle?the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland?in line with the bloc’s commitment to the free passage of goods, services and people among member nations. But a chaotic British withdrawal could scuttle that arrangement.A so-called hard border would “require infrastructure that will damage economic and social ties along the border,” said Edward Burke, an international politics professor at Nottingham University in England who has written a book on the British Army’s campaign in Northern Ireland. “All the artfully created foundations of the agreement will be damaged.”Such weighty considerations might have seemed remote on Oct. 5, 1968, though the harbingers of deepening division and rival narratives were already plain enough. Even the geography of the protest reflected the schism: Unionists called the town where the march took place Londonderry; nationalists called it Derry. Merely using the wrong term in the wrong place would invite hostility in the battle of emblems and perceptions that suffused and sustained the Troubles.“I think the Troubles cast a huge shadow today,” said Susan McKay, an author, journalist and documentary filmmaker from Londonderry. “The reality is that the areas from which a lot of the Troubles emanated — the poorest and most deprived parts of Northern Ireland — are still the poorest and most deprived parts of Northern Ireland. The children and grandchildren of those who participated in the Troubles the most are still scarred by them today.”Fifty years ago, hundreds of nationalist protesters gathered on Duke Street in Londonderry. Their demonstration, organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association — inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States — had been outlawed when unionist opponents announced plans for a rival march. The organizers resolved to protest anyhow, fired by a long-simmering discontent with what was perceived as widespread discrimination.Suddenly, the terms of battle shifted. Officers from the Protestant-dominated police force — the Royal Ulster Constabulary — surrounded the demonstrators with batons drawn, cutting off lines of retreat. A water cannon sprayed the crowd.One protester, Deirdre O’Doherty, told the BBC that she fled into a cafe as “police battered people left, right and center.” One officer burst in “with a baton in his hand with the blood dripping off it,” she said. “He was young. He looked vicious. I never saw a face with so much hatred in my life.”As the strife deepened, the British Army was deployed.In time, as the Troubles burgeoned, so, too, did the competing versions of what lay behind them. For many in Britain, who became stoically inured to the threat of I.R.A. bombings, it was about suppressing terrorism. For nationalists, it was a broader fight to throw off the yoke of colonialism and foreign oppression.Northern Ireland’s heroes were often its martyrs. On Jan. 30, 1972, thousands of marchers, most of them Catholics, took to the streets of the Bogside district of Londonderry to display opposition to the new policy of internment without trial. British soldiers opened fire, killing 14 protesters, all of them Catholic.The events became known as Bloody Sunday. An official British apology did not come until 2010, when Prime Minister David Cameron described the killings as “both unjustified and unjustifiable.”Like other turning points in the Troubles, and in the propaganda war that was one of the era’s most striking features, “Bloody Sunday” became woven into the republican narrative, offsetting accusations that the I.R.A. was far more brutal in its tactics than the British Army.The chronology of the Troubles offers a tally of bloody episodes leading to yet more carnage in a murky underground war of spies, hit men, summary executions and still unexplained disappearances.In less than two weeks in March 1988, for instance, British Special Forces operatives killed three I.R.A. members in Gibraltar. When their funerals were held in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery, a lone extremist from the loyalist side, Michael Stone, attacked the ceremony with pistols and grenades, killing three mourners — one of them an I.R.A. supporter — in front of camera crews, photographers and journalists covering the burial. Three days later, I.R.A. operatives seized two nonuniformed British Army corporals mistaken for loyalist gunmen at the funeral of one of those killed in Milltown Cemetery. The soldiers were beaten and shot to death. Sometimes, the I.R.A. offered warnings of its intention to detonate explosives in Britain. In 1993, the group told the police that it planned to detonate?a bomb in London’s financial district, but the explosion killed a news photographer and injured some 40 people.But the campaign was not fought exclusively with bombs and bullets. In 1981, Bobby Sands, a jailed I.R.A. commander sentenced on firearms charges, drew global attention to a hunger strike by inmates in response to the withdrawal of their special status within the prison system. Already, by virtue of a 21526504762500since-repealed law that permitted prisoners to stand as electoral candidates, Mr. Sands had been voted into the British Parliament.After 66 days without food, he died at the age of 27.?His death?drew broad international criticism of the British government for its handling of the hunger strike.But Mrs. Thatcher, the prime minister at the time, remained resolute. “Mr. Sands was a convicted criminal,” she told Parliament in London. “He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organization did not allow to many of its victims.” Her remark was oddly prophetic.In 1984, a long-delay time bomb in?a hotel in Brighton, England, exploded as Mrs. Thatcher, its principal target, and many members of her Conservative Party elite were there for an annual conference. Mrs. Thatcher escaped unhurt, but five people were killed.“Today we were unlucky,” the I.R.A. said in a statement, “but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.”It was a reminder of the essentially asymmetric nature of a conflict that pitted a NATO army against insurgents and irregulars fueled by competing visions of destiny that have endured far beyond the formal silencing of their weapons.Decades later, the Troubles “are so burned into our lives that they are part of our DNA,” said Monica McWilliams, a former civil rights marcher, peace activist and feminist leader. “They are with us every day — especially those of us who were bereaved. It’s a festering sore, because it’s never been dealt with.”THE BRITISH-PAKISTANI IDENTITY CRISIS.ALI BOKHARIOctober 16, 2016, 6:00 pm?2?6515The journey of discovering my identity as a third generation British-Pakistani was certainly an interesting one. Going through phases of certainty, then confusion, back to certainty and then… yep, you guessed it, confused again.Growing up as a child I just assumed I was British. I was most proficient in English, my home language was largely English (unless I was being told off, then all of a sudden my mum would switch to Punjabi) and I was born in England.?However, as I grew older into my teen years and was faced with the question, “Where are you from?” my answer always used to be “British.” Then the all too familiar question would follow,?“No, I mean where are you REALLY from?”I realised the colour of my skin somehow disqualifies me from being British. Stranger still, I would never identify as English, but British. Which to me meant one thing, my nationality was British, but my identity was not.Then came my patriotic Pakistani phase, where I would only identify as Pakistani. Funnily enough during this phase, the same people who would ask, “No where are you REALLY from?” somehow got offended that I now identified as Pakistani. When they protest “but you’re British!!” I would respond with?“The piece of paper they call my citizenship is British, but the blood that runs through my veins is Pakistani.”?A little dramatic, I know, but it did the job.?Then I would proceed to ask them,“If my remains were found in rubble, and a DNA test was conducted on my corpse, would they identify a British male or a Pakistani male?”This usually gave them something to think about. However, even this became more complicated when I was granted dual nationality. That all changed when I actually went to Pakistan for the first time in about 15 years.I remember this incident clear as day.I was in Islamabad, and went to ask a man behind a street stall a question, here I was, all hyped up and ready to use my Urdu skills, but before I opened my mouth he started speaking English to me. I was perplexed, and he told me he knew I was from Britain. I was shocked to say the least, after speaking to more locals in Pakistan they told me how they can tell whether a Pakistani is born and bred in Pakistan and whether they’re foreigners.Well, being rejected by actual Pakistani’s was quite something. Back to square one. It was only then that I realised that “British Pakistani” is an actual identity, after all we have a lot of British culture, the mannerisms, we understand the humour, our language and of course who doesn’t like fish and chips on a Friday, and a cheeky beans on toast (non-British people find this insane).It was then after some hard thinking I realised that British Pakistani’s are in an identity crisis. But that nothing sums us up better than the term British Pakistani. We truly are part British and part Pakistani. I know for one whenever I go abroad, after some time I start to miss Britain, my home, and my area. I always relish in the feeling of arriving back into Heathrow after a holiday, that is until I’m pulled away by security and asked a load of questions about the stamps on my passport, where I went and why I went.There are ways which British-Pakistani’s relate to each other more than any other group. We have common experiences growing up, that are exclusive to British Pakistani’s, similar senses of humour, we fulfil certain stereotypes that we protest aren’t true but we all know they are somewhat true. As migrants we leave home in search of a?future, but we lose the pastGary YoungeImmigration is never an easy option: leaving people and places behind always comes at a painful price?@garyyoungeTue 24 Mar 2015?07.00?GMTLast modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017?21.17?GMTThis is not a sob story. But the tears came anyhow. They crept up on me at the 70th birthday party of a friend a few years back. We were celebrating in a hotel ballroom in Letchworth in Hertfordshire and I had struck up a conversation with distant acquaintance – a woman I had met only a few times before and have not met since. We talked about the primary school she worked at and the secondary school I went to, which were just five minutes’ walk apart in nearby Stevenage– both had declined – and about the local council and football team. She asked me when I was going back to New York, where I’d been living for seven years at that point, and I told her, the next afternoon.“You’re so lucky,” she said. “You’ve done so well for yourself. Your mum would be so proud.”And that was when my eyes started welling up. Now it could have been any number of triggers – alcohol, jet lag or the mention of my mother, who died decades ago. But what really upset me was realising that in this town, people I wasn’t even particularly close to knew me in a way that nobody else would. They knew place names that no one else in my regular life (apart from my brothers) knew. And yes, they not only knew my mother but they knew me when I had a mother.The following day I would fly to a place where people knew a version of me where very little of any of this applied. My friends in New York knew I had brothers and had lost my mother. They knew I grew up working class in a town near London. The rest was footnotes – too much information for transient people, including myself who would soon move to Chicago, who were travelling light.In short, I cried for bits of my life that had been lost. Not discarded; but atrophied. Huge, formative parts of my childhood and youth that I could no longer explain because you would really have had to have been there but without which I didn’t make much sense.Migration?involves loss. Even when you’re privileged, as I am, and move of your own free will, as I did, you feel it. Migrants, almost by definition, move with the future in mind. But their journeys inevitably involve excising part of their past. It’s not workers who emigrate but people. And whenever they move they leave part of themselves behind. Efforts to reclaim that which has been lost result in something more than nostalgia but, if you’re lucky, less than exile. And the losses keep coming. Funerals, christenings, graduations and weddings missed – milestones you couldn’t make because your life is elsewhere.If you’re not lucky then your departure was forced by poverty, war or environmental disaster – or all three – and your destination is not of your choosing but merely where you could get to or where you were put. In that case the loss is bound to be all the more keen and painful.In?Gender and Nation, Nira Yuval-Davis describes how Palestinian children in Lebanese refugee camps would call “home” a village which may not have even existed for several decades but from which their parents were exiled.You may have to leave behind your partner, your kids and your home. In time, in order to survive, you may have to let go of your language, your religion and your sense of self.“You can have a lot of love for your children, but it cannot fill their stomachs,” Mercedes Sanchez told me as she stood outside her tarpaulin home in the New Orleans tent city where she was helping rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina. She paid?coyote people smugglers?$3,000 to bring her across the desert from Mexico. Along the way she was stripped naked by bandits and robbed at gunpoint. “In Mexico I made 200 pesos a week. I can make that in two hours here,” she said. “When you walk through the desert, you think you’re never going to arrive. It costs a lot of money and a lot of tears.”I was lucky. I come from a travelling people. Those from an island as small as Barbados, buffeted by the winds of global economics and politics, tend to go where the work is. My great- grandfather helped build the Panama canal. My parents came to England from Barbados in the early sixties. Of my 14 aunts and uncles nine left the island for significant periods of time. I have cousins in Canada, Britain, the US and the Caribbean, some of whom I’ve never met.Like many black Britons of my generation, I was raised in the 70s ambivalent to my immediate surroundings. The soil I stood on and was born on to was less where I was from than where I happened to be. For several years neither me nor my brothers lived in England. My mother hung a map of Barbados on the wall and stuck a?Bajan flag?on the door. She kept her accent, lost her passport and told us if we weren’t good enough for the West Indian cricket team, we could always play for England. On the dinner table stood a bottle of Windmill hot pepper sauce that only she used – a taste of a home to which we were welcome but never took to. When she died suddenly, we honoured her wish to be shipped “home” where she now lays buried within earshot of the Caribbean sea.I fell in love with an American and here we are. My sense of loss is primarily cultural. Tapping a football to my son in the park and watching him pick it up (“Kick it! Kick it!” I’d implore); asking why there’s an armed policeman in his elementary school (“It’s a good question,” said my wife. “But that’s not particularly remarkable here”); seeing nieces and nephews grow up on Facebook; returning for a holiday to find all the teenagers you know wearing onesies and using catchphrases from shows you’ve never heard of; seeing or hearing something that reminds you of home, your first home, and realising you lack too many common reference points to share it with those with whom you share your life now.Migration is a good thing, so long as it is voluntary. I believe in the free movement of people. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have a price. I have choices that most of the world’s migrants don’t have. I can go back. And I’m happy where I am.This is not a sob story. But every now and then, when I least expect them, the tears come anyhow.Are you in a controlling relationship? How to spot the signs of manipulationAs Nigella Lawson's apparent 'assault' sparks a domestic violence debate, Iris McCann, a counsellor, and Dr Petra Boynton, a social psychologist, talk through how to spot whether you are in a controlling relationship and what to do about itImage?1?of?2Photo: JEAN-PaulBy?Iris McCann, Rachel Winwood and Dr Petra Boynton12:10PM BST 17 Jun 2013A controlling relationship is when an individual will begin to dominate and intimidate their partner, often through emotional and/ or physical abuse.It can happen to anyone: male, female, children, young people and old people, there is no distinction. And it can happen within any relationship: straight, gay, parent-to-child, child-to-parent. There are no obvious boundaries or 'rules'.Being in a controlling relationship can begin in many ways, with many forms of abuse starting off as insidious and underhand – something small, such as your partner commenting on why you shouldn't wear a particular outfit or have your hair in a certain way. In most cases, it's all about control and taking away your independence.In a relationship, abuse may start simply by your other half checking on your phone calls, or by taking charge of all financial matters, where the partner needs to ask permission to buy anything.It is first and foremost about the abuser being in the control of the abused, initially seeming to be in a protective way, then by criticising, throwing insults, insinuations and accusations. Before long, belittling takes over. Sapping the energy and fight out of the abused person, the emotional stress and anguish that ensues, the fear of what is next, all slowly eating away at the abused person's self-worth, self-esteem and confidence.Related ArticlesSome abused people can also live a double life: at home they are possibly subservient, under control, under the thumb, but in their public life, work life and social life, the bubbly confident, in control person they have always seemed to be.Emotional abuse does not always turn into violence, in many cases when we work with clients suffering from abuse they will often say that “the emotional stuff is worse," or “it’s in my head, I just feel so low, I am no good”. Others think nobody would believe them if they told them about their abuse, or blame themselves, thinking how could they have let this happen.The effects of any controlling relationship can be devastating. Unfortunately, those who have suffered the abuse of a controlling partner may suffer many negative effects; the victim will often find it very difficult to trust a new partner. The constant emotional abuse drains them of self-esteem. Living under this chronic stress can affect the victim both physically and mentally with symptoms such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, anxiety and depression, and maybe suicidal ideation or attempts. Controllers often start out as emotional abusers and can move on to physical violence over time.A Body of Essays: Imtiaz Dharker on the Liver. Transcribed form BBC Radio 4 The Essay.This essay is part of a series on Radio 4 in which five writers were asked to explore a bodily organ of their choice. To hear the original recording go to: When I was a child growing up in Glasgow my friend Catherine and I were always in and out of each other’s houses. Cathy’s mother often said Cathy was ‘her sweetheart’. My mother said I was ‘a piece of her liver’. I never thought that was odd. I knew exactly what she meant, and it felt quite natural to skip between different languages with different rules. Now that I’ve been asked to choose an organ and write about, I remember that the location my mother claimed for her deepest feelings was the liver. She wasn’t the only one. Physicians in ancient Rome, Greece, and across the Arab world also believed the liver was the true seat of love; the organ with the most fundamental role - making fresh blood rather than just pumping it around, controlling the emotions, the temperament and the character. Poets and artists have always been quick to steal medical knowledge for their own purposes. So an Arab poet could say ‘you are the soul of my soul, the blood of my liver’ or ‘her look is a spear in my liver’, and to this day an Egyptian dancer holds her hands over her liver to express extreme passion.So, it’s no wonder that when I left home my mother said on the phone ‘my liver has been torn apart’, and I imagined her standing there with her hand pressed to the right side of her body. I think of the livers heavy lobes and its tawny, satin surface held safe in a cage of ribs in the upper right of the abdomen, working as no other organ does to clean and purify the blood and throw bile and poisons out of the system. The liver was part of everyday conversation. My mother didn’t just speak about her own liver, but my fathers as well. If she’d had the words in English she might have called someone his ‘bosom buddy’, but in Urdu she spoke of his ‘jigar dost’ - a friend who lived in his liver. She also used the word to tell us to show our mettle, be courageous – ‘jigar mei tamrak’. For her, courage grew in the liver. A healthy liver showed inner ruddy complexion, a sign of robust good health. A liver that didn’t function well was believed to cause mental as well as physical weakness, and you still hear people using the word ‘liverish’ as they get out the Andrew’s Liver Salts’. If you called an Elizabethan ‘liver faced’ it meant they were mean spirited; if you said they were ‘liver sick’ you meant they had dropsy, which we would call hepatitis or cirrhosis; and a ‘gin-liver’ would have been cirrhosis caused by alcohol. In search of troubled and resurrected livers I make my way to the Whittington hospital in London, to follow gastroenterologist Dr Darius Sadiq on a ward round. Before the round the doctor discusses each patient with a discharge coordinatior, psychiatrist, nurses, CMT’s, first year doctors, students and occupational therapists. The first patient they see is Adam, whose hepatitis C has led to liver cirrhosis; a diabetic on insulin, he has suffered malnutrition and his limbs are stick thin, the stomach swollen. “Is there any pain?” the doctor asks. “No” says Adam, his eyes locked on the doctors face the whole time, watching him tap at the abdomen as if it were a door with an answer behind it. Mel is fifty-five with a cirrhotic liver. She looks seventy-five. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asks. “Absolute crap” she says. Mel is going home going home, but he says to her “when you go home you can never drink again. If you drink again you will die. If you stay off alcohol you can do very well.” Mel is nodding, but her eyes are sliding off the doctor's edges. Jane is a tiny bird-like woman. She lives with her husband but has not spoken to him for ten years. They move around each other in silence, and as soon as he leaves the house, she drinks. “What do you understand about your liver?” asks the doctor. “In trouble?” Used as she is to living in silence her answers are terse and mostly verbless. “Why do you drink?” “Unhappy” “Is your husband abusive?”“No”“Patients with cirrhosis who continue to drink don't live,” says the doctor.“Won’t touch it again.” The doctor decides to go in all guns blazing, expecting resistance. “You need to go to rehab.” “OK,” she says.Hamiba forty-nine and has a fatty liver and hepatitis C. If it's not treated fatty liver disease has the same effect as liver disease caused by alcohol - scarring and cirrhosis. The doctor decides to refer her for an early liver transplant. At every point I see the doctor probing not the body, as I would expect, but the language. He's listening for the clues in each patients’ responses; listening like a poet for what is said and what is not said and what is unsayable. Tani has rosy cheeks and a wide eyes of a child even though she's sixty-four years old. She has diabetes and is not eligible for a liver transplant. She's hoping to travel to Malaysia, and the doctor tries to manage her expectations. “I can walk around without help now,” she volunteers hopefully. The doctor advises her not to expect to get on a flight. “I would say the prognosis is a few months.” She nods, still smiling. For a moment I think she's not understood, then she says “Good I'd rather you be open” and she laughs, looking radiant as a young girl. A friend of mine announced one day “I have a beautiful liver!” I wondered how she knew this. “I had a liver scan and I heard the doctor telling the students ‘this is a beautiful liver - look at that smooth shape and it has great colour’” The miracle is that the liver has the power to regenerate - the only visceral organ that does. Depleted to as little as 25% of the original mass, a rat’s liver can grow back to its full size in hours; a human’s in weeks. When doctors speak of the liver they often bring up the myth of Prometheus. Zeus was furious with Prometheus who duped him and then stole fire from the gods for human use. He devised a dreadful and cunning punishment: Prometheus was chained on a mountain face. Every day and an eagle would swoop down tear open his stomach and eat his liver. Every night the liver would regenerate, only to be devoured again the next day. The punishment with everlasting. Zeus clearly had inside knowledge of the liver’s power to repair itself, although the timescale he went by might have been based on a rat’s rather than a human’s! It may have been this idea of playing God that led one consultant surgeon in Birmingham to write his initials on the surface of his patients’ livers during the complex transplant operation using an argon gas regulator. He was convicted; found out by another surgeon who operated on the patient years later. It emerged that he had committed the crime more than once, and it was only because the diseased surface had changed colour to pale yellow that the initials stood out and he was caught. Perhaps what led him to do it was the idea that somehow he could put his name on eternity. I remember lines from the poet Rumi: ‘this frantic heart has etched your name on my liver’. When my mother died of cancer of the liver I was told she had a snag in the liver. In my mind I could see you this ’snag’ knotted in, and it seemed to spell out my name. It wasn't until 1931 that Higgins an Anderson were able to prove that a rat liver begins to regenerate hours after partial removal. It was 1963 before doctor Thomas Starzl attempted the first human liver transplant unsuccessfully as the patient died of bleeding during the operation, and not until 1967 that he was able to keep a child alive for over a year after a transplant. It’s quite common law for parents to donate a piece of their liver for their child; the child, in an echo of my mother's words, becomes a piece of the parents liver. In a living transplant, the right lobe - 70% of the liver - is taken from a healthy living donor. The donor’s remaining left lobe could grow back into a fully functioning liver, with two lobes, within six weeks. The recipient’s 70% regenerates too. But the footballer George Best joked “I spent a lot of time on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest, I just squandered.” He had a liver transplant, courtesy of the NHS, but didn’t stop drinking and died three years later. Nowadays, in order to receive a liver transplant there has to be some confidence that the recipient will try to stay sober.It’s also a precious food, rich in nutrients for animals and humans. Orca’s disembowel sharks and seals just for their liver, which is full of squalene which helps produce steroids and hormones; Nubians enjoy a great dish of raw camel liver; the French force feed a goose until the fatty liver swells to many times the normal size to make foi gras; and who could forget Dr Hannibal Lecter’s meal of liver with fava beans and a nice chianti? Down the road from where I live, in Smithfield market, chefs haggle over succulent calves liver; on the streets of Bombay mutton liver is chopped and tossed on a sizzling pan with chilli and cumin, and sold for ten rupees; in fine restaurants monkfish liver and skate liver are a delicacy served on toast with melted butter and lemon juice. People across the world demand it from every kind of fish and animal and they eat it sliced and fried with onions, in tureens and pates, in dumplings, meat pies and pasties, or stuffed into worst and haggis.Once a week, on the orders of the family doctor Gordon Kerr, my mother used to hold my nose and pour foul cod liver oil down my throat for vitamins A and E. When I stopped gagging and finally agreed to forgive her with a hug, she would sigh “you have cooled my liver” and I am sure that is exactly where she felt whatever it was that she felt, right there, in the centre of her being, in the liver. 357505118110Animal Farm Wider Reading.00Animal Farm Wider Reading.384810-1049889YCL/Challenge Song BookEwan had joined the Young Communist League in 1929 and wrote?The Manchester YCL Song?a couple of years later (a typescript is in the WCML collection):Young Unemployed, who by means test are bled,Close up the ranks in the struggle for bread,Comrades from spindle, machine and the mine,Led by Young Communists fall into line.Chorus:Forward young workers, come surging ahead,Hacking the pathway that our class must tread.Smash the oppression and boss class greed.Led by the fighting Young Communist rades from sports field and Salford dark mills,Hikers who tramp over Derbyshire Hills,In factory and sport fields we fight for our rights,Against speed up and wages cuts, for access to heights.Young workers from Cheetham who slave day by day,In waterproof factories for starvation pay.Young engineers and girls from the loom,Workers from Salford - from Cheetham and munist spy ring found 11 April 1953: Thirty-five people have been taken into custody in West Germany. Eight other warrants have been issued for further suspectsA pro-democracy march at the Brandenburg gate, 1953. Photograph: AP 42672005334000Bonn, April 10The West German authorities have uncovered what they believe to be the biggest Communist spy ring which has existed in the Federal Republic since the war.Snap arrests were made yesterday in various parts of Western Germany and so far 35 people have been taken into custody by the police. Eight other warrants have been issued for further suspects.The Federal Vice-Chancellor, Herr Blücher, told the press to-day that the spy ring was an exclusively Communist organised affair. It was run by departments of the Soviet Control Commission in Berlin, and Soviet officials actually held executive posts in the organisation. The main “cover” organisation through which they worked was the Institute of Economic Studies in East Berlin.Close Observation Herr Blücher pointed out that this was the third spy ring to be uncovered during the last twelve months. The two others had been organised by Poland and Czechoslovakia. The German security officers had thus shown that they were fully capable of carrying out their duties. Herr Blücher is presumably referring to the officials of the “Office for the Protection of the German Constitution,” headed by Dr Otto John, and to the Federal Ministry of the Interior.The spy ring had a code name “Volcano.” It has been under close observation for a long time and the German authorities are confident that they have seized enough material in the houses of the arrested men to put it completely out of operation. The “Volcano” spy ring was concerned with collecting political as well as economic information and with the study of the Western armed forces stationed on German soil.Some of the arrested people have been named in a statement made this afternoon by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. None of them is known in public life. They appear to have worked in two ways – they either functioned as purely political spies or they have been employed by industrial firms which do illegal business with the Eastern block. Some of these firms exist only on paper, but are backed by handsome bank balances.The two towns where most arrests took place were Hamburg and Stuttgart. Hamburg has always enjoyed a strategic importance in the workings of illegal, interzonal, and East-West trade. In the Ruhr, arrests were made in Essen and Duisburg, and Essen appears to have been the local headquarters of the spy ring in this area. The German Iron and Steel Federation in Essen has denied any knowledge of the ring or any association with its active members.Legal proceedings will be in the hands of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. It is likely that two kinds of charges will be preferred against the arrested men. They will either be accused of conspiring against the Federal German State or of having contravened the terms of the embargo on the export of “strategic” goods to countries of the Eastern block. The individual cases are likely in any event to take some time to prepare.Stalin's legacy lives on in city that slaves built 29 December 1994 James Meek in Norilsk talks to a victim of the gulag 50 years ago whose Arctic exile is still not over06921500At the end of the second world war, as Europe was preparing to celebrate its victory over fascism, the Soviet authorities arrested an entire school of teenage girls from western Ukraine, named them enemies of the people, took them to an Arctic concentration camp and forced them to expend their youth in slave labour.Half a century later Galina Skopyuk is still there. She is a prisoner of circumstances now rather than a prisoner of Stalin, but beginning her 49th winter in a land where the winters are nine months long is hard. “I’m always hoping to leave. I don’t want to die here. But I don’t have any chance,” she said.Mrs Skopyuk is one of the few living links between the present-day city of Norilsk and the dark years of its creation, starting in 1935, when Stalin willed thousands of political prisoners hither to claw a city out of the tundra in a metal-rich volcanic crater.When a researcher from Norilsk Museum was given access to the records of prisoners last year, she was not allowed to count the exact number who had passed through before the camps were closed in 1956.All she had time to do was take a ruler, work out the number of card-index files in each four-inch block and measure the blocks. The figure Nina Kandrushina came up with was 350,000. She reckons some 100,000 of them died, many summarily executed.In Norilsk’s registry office is a book of death certificates of executed prisoners, “rehabilitated” long after they were murdered. Flicking through it, the different names and places of birth are a blur, but one word stands out because it is the same on each page: “Shot.”Conditions were harshest before the war but as the war ended the Norilsk camps were flooded with Soviet soldiers released from captivity in Germany, and with thousands rounded up from the territories the Soviet Union had absorbed - the Baltic states, western Ukraine and Bielarus.“It was plain hard labour,” said Mrs Skopyuk, who was 17 when she arrived. “From seven in the morning till eight at night every day, without a midday meal. We didn’t have any days off, except when it was minus 45, minus 50 outside.“You were only allowed to write one letter a year. You weren’t allowed to have photographs of your relatives.“Your morale was terrible. It wasn’t one day, or two days, it was 10 years, day after day. Yet people worked hard. You’d go out to work, it was cold, and you’d hack at the earth, that raw, frozen earth, in order to keep warm.”428053536893500Mrs Skopyuk still has frostbite pains from the time she lay on the ground as guards shot at them for talking out of turn.Norilsk today, a city of some 250,000 people, neither hides nor advertises its origins.Smoke rises from the smokestacks of the Norilsk Nickel plant in Norilsk, northern Siberia. Photograph: Boris Koltsov/AP “I think there’s a certain group of people who’ll always feel guilty. But most people say it’s not my fault, it’s nothing to do with me,” said Ms Kandrushina.There is a fine new exhibition about the camps in the museum, and at the foot of the steep, snow-dusted rock of Schmidt Hill, where in 1957 the city authorities bulldozed the mass graves of Stalin’s victims, a small privately funded chapel has just been built.Nearby are three wooden crosses erected by the Baltic states to commemorate their dead.Most of the dead are unmarked and forgotten.Norilsk was not a death camp: death was, for the planners, a tiresome by-product of underfeeding, overworking, brutal discipline and cold. But comparison with the much-mourned victims of the Nazi camps is unavoidable.The old heart of the Norilsk camps is now an industrial zone. The smelters, furnaces and mills fume furiously away in the noonday Arctic twilight around the graves of the people who built them. Trucks rattle over their bones.Largely unmarked, too, is the camp uprising of 1953, a brave, doomed attempt by the 35,000 political prisoners to defy the authorities after the death of Stalin.The women’s camp, number 6, where Mrs Skopyuk was held, was one of the last to surrender.On July 7, after the women had refused to work for a month and been on hunger strike for a week, the authorities fixed machine-guns to the watchtowers. The 3,000 women prisoners came out of their barracks and as a sign of contempt for the authorities began to dig graves for themselves.Instead of shooting, the authorities fired jets of hot water at the women and attacked them with bricks and truncheons. They fled into the tundra and found more troops waiting for them.Mrs Skopyuk was freed in 1954. She was not allowed to leave Norilsk for another five years and was not given an unrestricted internal passport, allowing her to move back to her home near Lutsk, until 1965.By then she had married and her old home had become part of a collective farm; she decided to stay, assuming she would be able to retire to Ukraine later. But now, with no state accommodation available in Ukraine and her flat in Norilsk practically worthless, she is trapped.“I used to think that if the situation changed they’d call us home, us Ukrainians, and give us somewhere to live. But it hasn’t happened.”Life under the Soviets in Moscow and its surroundings By a Wanderer in Russia26 June 1928 06858000Moscow is still, as it always was, a big village. Only the centre of the town, where the boulevards are, is “European.” There the streets are well paved; the shop, windows are attractive (although the shelves inside are empty and dusty). Electric trams and buses are plentiful. Placards and advertisements (some of them very beautiful) are abundant. Theatre, picture-palace, and music-hall announcements are suspended across the streets like huge banners. There are loudspeakers in every square. The streets are crowded, and in the early summer sunshine far more beautiful and heavily rouged women are to be seen than in winter. Foreign newspapers can be bought at the kiosks, but only such numbers as do not contain any more news than the Soviet press. For example, when the fate of Trotsky and of the Opposition was being decided we were without foreign newspapers for a week.Strong drink is plentiful. Wine can only be bought in special shops. Vodka can only be obtained in small quantities in the centre of the town – but it is abundant elsewhere. It is possible to get vodka of pre-war quality but “plain vodka” is more usual, although it is a downright poison. The peasants prefer a distillation of their own.Beyond the BoulevardsOutside the ring of boulevards the city takes on a different aspect. The houses are low, small, and dirty; the streets are ill-paved and rarely swept and cleaned; there is a vast number of beer and tea saloons. The shops are dirty, the wares of poor quality. Even the bread is bad.All round the Moscow railway stations there are all kinds of rough and disreputable-looking people. The thieves and pickpockets are not too badly clothed. Great care is necessary lest your pockets are picked or your handbag stolen, and it is always as well to look and see who is following you. All kinds of legal and illegal trade goes on near the stations, and you can buy all kinds of stolen and smuggled articles. Vodka can be bought at all hours of the day and night. HYPERLINK "" \l "img-2" Home made spirit ‘Samogon’, a precious commodity in post revolutionary Russia. Its production, although illegal, was in progress until early 1930’s. Photograph: Slava Katamidze Collection/Getty Images The quarters where the working classes live lie towards the outskirts of the city. Amongst the older houses the newly built, gigantic, barrack-like tenements are conspicuous. On the outskirts and beyond are allotments and bungalows meant for holiday residence but serving largely to house the surplus population of Moscow. These little huts are grouped all along the railways. Some 10,000 workmen and employees live 30-10 versts (20 miles and upwards) from Moscow and travel to town every day. The number of landlords is enormous. Nearly all the former landlords have retained their houses. In addition to these there are the new landlords – partly Communists who have acquired the villas and dwellings over which they were placed in charge, and partly persons who have saved enough to build huts or houses of their own. But most of the houses are in the hands of the administration and of the “housing trusts.” Theoretically they are let to workmen, especially to railwaymen. But the “housing trusts” are brazenly corrupt and let the houses to “their own people” – that is to say, to Communists and their relatives. Thus, in spite of all laws to the contrary, there are many Communists who have a house in town as well as a villa or bungalow in the country. This privilege is shared by those who have enough money to pay bribes. All these things are done openly. There is no concealment about the sums that are paid. Only those are indignant who have not enough money for bribery.The Communist BourgeoisieThe Communists drink more than anyone else – not because they are worse than the others, but because they have more money to spend. As a rule it is not easy to distinguish a Communist from an ordinary workman. Yet they do differ. The Communists are more adaptable, supple, and better able to look after their own interests. “They get everything,” “He’ll get a house now that he’s become a Communist” – such remarks are continually being made by the working people. The word 'bourgeois' is now widely used to denote a Communist - many are almost American in their All who join the Communist party do so for the sake of some material advantage or to be one of a privileged set. There is no doubt that the Communist party is the nucleus of the future bourgeoisie. Many of the Communists are almost American in their business instincts and their assiduity. Altogether, the Communists in Russia are a better-situated class. Nevertheless there is not much indignation felt against them; a little envy, perhaps, a little contempt. “He will not go under – he’s a Communist,” is what the simple working folk will often say. The officials of the GPU (the Soviet secret police) are also a privileged set. There are many in our colony. Most of them own houses and allotments and let them out to tenants. They are not feared or hated as the Tsarist policemen used to be feared and hated. Generally speaking, they are regarded just like any other Communists by Russian working folk – that is to say, without much indignation but with a certain amount of contempt.Revolution Feb 1917 So far as can at present be judged, casualties among civilians amount to a few hundred, the great majority being wounded-5715034861500Petrograd, TuesdayThe first duty of a British correspondent in these days of national upheaval is to assure our compatriots that “Russia is all right” as a friend, ally, and fighter. The fiery trials she is undergoing will only steel her heart and arms.I have been day and night in the streets for the last three days; I have seen long queues of hungry men, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin addresses a crowd in Moscow after the Russian revolution. Russian activist Leon Trotsky is on the right of the podium. women, and children at the bakers’, seen wanton firing with rifles and machine-guns, seen civil war in the main thoroughfares: but I have not heard a single word against the war.The shortage of food, the lack of organisation and the neglect of the most elementary precautions are popularly ascribed to German influences. The word “provocation” was on the lips. These influences the Russians are resolved to exterminate.The killing of Rasputin was the match which set fire to a vast heap of patriotic determination. Russia would deserve well of her Allies. She would give herself a chance.The fire quickly spread, and ran from class to class, from caste to caste, from the civilians to the troops. It smouldered in Petrograd on Saturday, flamed up on Sunday, and became a conflagration yesterday. This morning I heard that its purpose had been achieved.All the regiments in Petrograd have declared for the Duma and the people, and the Naval Barracks have been opened to enable the sailors to make common cause with the rest.A Weak FusiladeI live next to the English Church behind the English Quay. Up to the early hours of the morning bombs, guns, and the rattle of machine-guns and rifles were heard from Vassily Ostrov, which is across the Neva. They were the culminating salvoes of the national awakening.Owing to the interruption of the tram service and the want of droshkies it would have been difficult personally to watch the successive events. Commander Locker-Lampson, however, placed his motor-car at my disposal on Saturday, and I drove slowly along the Nevsky Prospekt through crowds numbering tens of thousands, intermingled with cavalry, Cossacks, and patrols of infantry with fixed bayonets. The motor-car was driven by a soldier and was frequently stopped, but my explanation that I and my companion were British invariably evoked cheers and the heartiest good wishes.Orders were suddenly given to use rifles and machine-guns. There were only a certain number of live cartridges in the belts of the machine-guns, but the crowds were so dense that many fell. As regards the riflemen, either a large number of blank cartridges were used or the shooting was intentionally bad.The garden in front of the Kazan Cathedral was packed when a large force of Cossacks came up. All kneeled, and the Cossacks did not fire.Guards Regiments Come OverSeveral of the police, including a high official, were shot. The resentment of the people was directed especially against the police, for it had become known that a considerable proportion of the troops had already refused to fire. On Sunday some of the police sent to assist the military fired on the people, to the great indignation of the soldiery.Sunday was a repetition of Saturday on a more extensive scale in various quarters of the town.On Sunday night a secret meeting of the Duma was convened for Monday. The majority of the members had reached the Tauride Palace on foot.The first thing in the morning several Guards regiments declared for the people, and some officers were killed. The Litovsky Regiment refused to fire, and the Volynsky, Pavlovsky, Preobrazhensky, Simeonoffsky, Keksholmsky, and other Guards, altogether 25,000 men, joined their comrades with their arms.The arsenal, the artillery headquarters, was taken and the commandant killed.Colonel Knox, the British Military Attache, who was at the arsenal at the time, was escorted to the British Embassy by a guard.The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was also entered, and the prison was opened. The fortress is now the headquarters of the revolutionary forces. There are thousands of soldiers in the streets leading to the Duma, fraternising with the people.Revenge on the PoliceTuesday eveningAll the military and naval forces in Petrograd have now declared themselves on the side of the people, and troops from Kronstadt have arrived and joined their comrades, but so far they are not accompanied by many of their officers. The streets are now perfectly safe, although people with weak nerves are occasionally startled by exuberant firing in the air.There has been a wholesale demolishing and burning of police stations in revenge for police in soldiers’ uniforms having manned machine-guns on the roofs of buildings such as the Imperial Marie Theatre and the Hotel Astoria, besides police stations and private houses, from which they also dropped grenades on the people.Machine-gun fire was opened on the Naval Brigade from the roof of the Hotel Astoria, which since the war has been transformed into an hotel for officers, including British officers and other foreigners. The naval men retaliated with a sharp fusilade, broke into the hotel, arrested most of the Russian officers there, numbering some 200, and took them to the Duma. The foreigners in the hotel were treated with the greatest courtesy, and were transferred to quarters elsewhere.Small mercy was shown to the police, who are believed to have been responsible for most of the casualties among the civilians. These, so far as can at present be judged, amount to a few hundred, the great majority being wounded. A military police force is now being organised.Joyous ThanksgivingA walk through the chief streets between eleven and one showed that there was everywhere the greatest animation. There were ceaseless outbursts of cheering. Sailors and Sisters of Mercy were especially popular. The sisters cheered back and threw kisses. It was a beautiful early spring day, which seemed to reflect the political hour and the mood of the populace. A feeling of the deepest thanksgiving for what has been accomplished with so little bloodshed fills all patriotic hearts.Without a great change it was doubtful whether Russia could have finished her bit. She is determined to win with a determination which Germans will soon realise, and will remember and rue for long years to come. With a mighty effort Russia has burst her bonds.Stalin's reputation as a ruthless master of deception remains intactFifty years after Stalin's death, one of the first western historians to document the violence perpetrated by the brutal leader describes how his demise saved citizens of the Soviet Union from greater sufferingRobert ConquestWed 5 Mar 2003?10.48?GMTFirst published on Wed 5 Mar 2003?10.48?GMTIt is lucky for many - for the world - that Stalin did not live as long as Mao. His death in Moscow 50 years ago, in circumstances that are still dubious, proved a direct and immediate benefit to large numbers of people.In the prisons, for example, the large group of physicians arrested in the "doctors' plot" and charged with conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leadership had confessed and faced execution. Their "trial" was due in a couple of weeks. The men were freed almost immediately after Stalin's death.Other prospective victims who were saved by his death came from the political leadership, his old colleagues and comrades: Vyacheslav Molotov, whose wife, formerly Stalin's wife's best friend, was in jail, Anastas Mikoyan and others, all suspected of espionage for the US or Britain (or in Mrs Molotov's case, the Jews).Stalin's last year, 1952, had been particularly brutal and even now the appearance of new material is shedding further light on the extremes of his regime. Stalin's officials oversaw the secret trial of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the full text of which again only emerged in the 1990s. Execution of suspects followed months of torture, with one key suspect testifying that he had been severely beaten 80 odd times in the "interrogation".It is only by chance that evidence of many of these violent acts survives. One of the most "Stalinist" acts of the period had been the murder of the leading Jewish actor and producer Solomon Mikhoels. Here again, the full story only came out in the mid-90s. The killing was done by a secret police team from Moscow, headed by the deputy minister, Sergei Ogoltsov.The actor was crushed under a Studebaker, then his body was left in a side street and his death attributed to a car accident. Mikhoels was buried with honours. We have the details because, on Stalin's death, police chief Lavrenti Beria arrested the perpetrators, though they were later released and the case was hushed up.But we now at last have their confessions, which include the detail that they were instructed to "put nothing on paper", one of them adding that this was always the rule in such cases. Which means, of course, that there must be much information about the regime's actions that will never be "documented". We have learned much in recent years, but much will remain beyond our grasp forever.What of the mind behind all this? In his private life, if you can call it that, Stalin wanted adulation, was extremely touchy, but at the same time wished to appear the hearty comrade. All this informed the long, dreary soirees described by his daughter, with colleagues in constant fear. But in contrast, he is often described by foreigners as having charm - a word used by the Nazi negotiators in 1939, though HG Wells said much the same, and even Churchill felt it occasionally.From the start, Stalin was noted for an extraordinary capacity to enforce his will, as is also said of Hitler. This is a characteristic little studied, and doubtless hard to analyse. The Old Bolshevik Fyodor Raskolnikov, rehabilitated under Khrushchev, and de-rehabilitated by his successors, saw Stalin as lacking "farsightedness".The purge of the great majority of experienced red army officers was a huge negative, as was, in another sphere, the execution of many of the engineers newly trained to run the state-driven economy, the former for treason, the latter for sabotage. As a consequence, both army and industry had been gravely weakened by the second world war and this nearly produced disaster when Hitler invaded.Historians have written that Stalin was a "consummate actor". When post-Soviet Russian historians saw that Stalin had deceived Roosevelt in crucial world war two negotiations, academics pointed out that this was perhaps not very surprising, since he had even managed to deceive Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as head of the Soviet government, who had served with him on the politburo in daily, close contact for over a decade - only to be shot later.In fact, if we look back at Stalin, we see not only terror and ruthlessness, but - even more - deception. Not only in such things as the faked public trials, the disappearance of leading figures, of writers, of physicists, even of astronomers, but in the invention of a factually non-existent society. The British socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb were taken in by the not very sophisticated trick of having meaningless elections, trade unions, economic claims and so on.One major attribute of Stalinism was stupefaction or stultification. His subjects, or dupes, had to act as if they believed what the Kremlin was telling them in the press, on the radio. Anna Akhmatova, the poet, said that no one could understand the Soviet system who had not been subjected to the continuous roar of the Soviet radios at street corners and elsewhere. And, with all that, the effective banning of non-Stalinist thought, or its expression.HypnosisEven the wise physicist Andrei Sakharov, one of the finest minds of the generation, said later that he was deeply affected by Stalin's death; it took him years to break out of what he described as a "type of hypnosis" that had blinded him and so much of the population to the reality of Stalin's regime.As one Russian scholar later remarked, "we wiped out the best and brightest in our country and, as a result, sapped ourselves of intelligence and energy".Any comparison of post-Nazi Germany with post-Stalinist?Russia?throws up the obvious difference that one regime was totally destroyed and its ideas totally discredited. There was no formal process of de-Stalinisation in Russia; the disorganised breakdown of the Soviets left a detritus of both ideas and interests, which took decades to disintegrate.Stalin's heritage today? He remains respected by a swath of what may legitimately be called reactionaries in Russia: nationalists - chauvinists. This might have surprised him, because Stalin was not Russian and did not even begin to learn the language until he was eight or nine. Those who remain devoted to Stalin often combine Stalinism with religion. How Stalin, the rebellious young theology student who went on to blow up the Cathedral of the Christ the Saviour, would have jeered.·?From Soso to Koba to StalinBorn?December 21 1879 to cobbler Vissarion Djugashvili and wife Catherine. Grew up in Gori in Georgia. Father died when he was 11. His hard childhood was not helped by two of his toes growing together and smallpox scars on his faceNames?His mother called him"Soso". In his early years he got the name "Koba" after a literary outlaw. When he was 34, he changed his name from Djugashvili to Stalin, meaning "man of steel"First job?After studying theology, he fell in and out of work. He was exiled twice to Siberia in 1902 and 1913, and even robbed trains as he supported the revolutionary cause. Got his first real job on the newspaper Pravda in St Petersburg before the 1917 revolutionFirst rose to fame?In 1917 helped Lenin direct a meeting of Bolsheviks who approved armed uprising. Became Communist general secretary in 1922Worst legacy?Killed millions across Russia. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, artists, priests and intellectuals perished in the GulagBetter legacy?Transformed Russian industry, enabling Russia to resist the Nazi advanceIn 1946, The New Republic Panned George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'September 2, 1946By?GEORGE SOULESeptember 26, 2013In honor of Banned Books Week, we're publishing our original reviews of frequently banned books. In 1946, our critic George Soules read?Animal Farm?with disgust, calling the book "on the whole dull...a creaking machine...clumsy." We imagine he may have lived to regret these judgments.?George Orwell in his critical writings shows imagination and taste; his wit is both edged and human. Few writers of any period have been able to use the English language so simply and accurately to say what they mean, and at the same time to mean something. The news that he had written a satirical allegory, telling the story of a revolution by farm animals against their cruel and dissolute (immoral) master, and of their subsequent fortunes, was like the smell of a roast from a kitchen ruled by a good cook, near the end of a hungry morning. The further news that this book had been chosen and was being pushed by the Book of the Month Club, though it occasioned surprise, was pleasant because it seemed to herald one of those instances when unusual talent of the sort rarely popular receives recognition and a great tangible reward.There are times when a reviewer is happy to report that a book is bad because it fulfills his hope that the author will expose himself in a way that permits a long deserved castigation (criticism). This is not one of them, I was expecting that Orwell would again give pleasure and that his satire of the sort of thing which democrats deplore (criticise) in the Soviet Union would be keen and cleansing. Instead, the book puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly. And many of the things said are not instantly recognized as the essence of truth, but are of the sort which start endless and boring controversy.Orwell does know his farm animals and gives them vivid personalities. Many will recognize Benjamin, the donkey who never commits himself, never hurries and thinks that in the end nothing much matters. Mollie the saddle horse, who wanders from the puritanical (fanatical) path of the revolution to seek ribbons for her mane, the cat who never does any work, the hens who sabotage by laying their eggs in the rafters, Clover and Boxer, the powerful, trusting and honest draught horses, are all real enough. But these spontaneous creatures seem in action like circus animals performing mechanically to the crack of the story-teller's whip.Part of the trouble lies in the fact that the story is too close to recent historical events without being close enough. Major, the aged pig who on his deathbed tells the animals of their oppression and prophesies revolution, must be Karl Marx. His two followers who lead the revolution, Napoleon and Snowball, are then readily identified as Lenin and Trotsky. This identification turns out to be correct in the case of Snowball, but the reader soon begins to puzzle over the fact that Napoleon disapproves the project of building a windmill—an obvious symbol for electrification and industrialization—whereas this was Lenin's program. The puzzlement is increased when Napoleon chases out Snowball as a traitor; it was Stalin who did this.And so it goes through incident after incident. The young dogs are alone selected for schooling; later they appear as the secret police. Is this a picture of Soviet education? The pigs not only keep the best food for themselves, but also become drunkards, taking over the pasture reserved for retirement of the superannuated (retired) in order to raise the necessary barley. Of course prohibition (the banning of drinking alcohol) was abolished early in the revolution, but have the leaders drunk too much and has social insurance been abolished? There is a pathetic incident when Boxer, the sturdy and loyal old work horse, is sent off to be slaughtered and turned into dog food and bone meal, under the pretext that he is being hospitalized. Just what part of Soviet history corresponds to this?Nobody would suppose that good allegory is literally accurate, but when the reader is continually led to wonder who is who and what aspect of reality is being satirized, he is prevented either from enjoying the story as a story or from valuing it as a comment. Masters like Swift and Anatole France, with whom Orwell is compared in the blurbs, were not guilty of this fault. They told good stories, the interest of which did not lie wholly in their caricature. And their satire, however barbed, was not dependent on identification of historical personages (people) or specific events.The thoughtful reader must be further disturbed by the lack of clarity in the main intention of the author. Obviously he is convinced that the animals had just cause for revolt and that for a time their condition was improved under the new regime. But they are betrayed by their scoundrelly, piggish leaders. In the end, the pigs become indistinguishable from the men who run the other nearby farms; they walk on two legs, have double and triple chins, wear clothes and carry whips.?Animal Farm?reverts to the old Manor Farm in both name and reality.No doubt this is what George Orwell thinks has happened in Russia. But if he wants to tell us why it happened, he has failed. Does he mean to say that not these pigs, but Snowball, should have been on top? Or that all the animals should have been merged in a common primitive communism without leaders or organization? Or that it was a mistake to try to industrialize, because pastoral (rural) simplicity is the condition of equality and cooperation? Or that, as in the old saw criticizing socialism, the possibility of a better society is a pipe-dream, because if property were distributed equally, the more clever and selfish would soon get a larger share and things would go on as of old? Though I am sure he did not intend this moral, the chances are that a sample poll of the book-club readers in the United States would indicate that a large majority think so and will heartily approve the book on that account.There is no question that Orwell hates tyranny, sycophancy (being a ‘teacher’s pet’), deceitful propaganda, sheeplike acceptance of empty political formulas. His exposures of these detestable (hateful) vices (sins) constitute the best passages in the book. There have been plenty of such abuses in Russia, They also crop up in other places. It is difficult to believe that they determined the whole issue of the Russian revolution, or that Russia is now just like every other nation. No doubt in some respects she is worse than most; in other respects she may be better.It seems to me that the failure of this book (commercially it is already assured of tremendous success) arises from the fact that the satire deals not with something the author has experienced, but rather with stereotyped ideas about a country which he probably does not know very well. The plan for the allegory, which must have seemed a good one when be first thought of it, became mechanical in execution. It almost appears as if he had lost his zest before be got very far with the writing. He should?try?again, and this time on something nearer home.Animal Farm?and the beast fableArticle created by:Dr Mercedes AguirreThemes:Power and conflict,?Literature 1900–1950Published:25 May 2016Mercedes Aguirre explores how George Orwell rewrote the beast fable for the 20th century in?Animal Farm.George Orwell’s?Animal Farm?is one of the best-known examples of animal fable, a symbolic narrative in which animal characters are endowed with (given) human qualities. The best-known beast fables in Western literature are the narratives attributed to Aesop, an ancient Greek story teller who is thought to have lived circa 620–564 BCE. Aesop’s fables were characterised by their brevity (shortness) and clarity, and by the inclusion of an explicit moral at the end which summarised the lesson illustrated by the story. Showing human values through animal characters allowed readers to examine their behaviour from a distanced perspective.Orwell’s satirical tale is a more developed version of the beast fable. Rather than stating a moral at the end, the emphasis is placed on the plot of the story, on the narration of different episodes that show the progressive degeneration (deterioration and collapse) of the pig-led administration of the farm. However, Orwell’s novella still contains some of the features that made beast fables traditionally popular: it is relatively brief and fast-paced and it is written in a straightforward style.Most of the elements that form the plot of?Animal Farm?correspond directly to specific historical events relating to the Stalinist regime, and the pigs Napoleon and Snowball have an allegorical relationship to Stalin and Trotsky. However,?Animal Farm?can also be read as a broader fable warning against totalitarian regimes and their use of violent repression and propaganda campaigns.The animals of?Animal FarmAnimal stories have traditionally been associated with children’s literature, and Orwell himself gave his novella the subtitle of ‘A Fairy Story’. While the subject matter of?Animal Farm?is unquestionably political, there is something whimsical (quirky) and evocative (suggestive) about the use of talking animals as characters. The reader learns about the events on the farm through the perspective of the largely na?ve (inexperienced), idealistic animals who witness, astonished, the evolution of the pig-led regime.While Orwell gives us a grim description of the brutal and corrupt behaviour of the pigs in charge of the farm, the majority of the animals are portrayed sympathetically. Traditional fables were not so much stories about animals as about human qualities expressed symbolically though the figure of the animal. But in?Animal Farm?Orwell goes one step further. Episodes such as the exploitation of the hens for their eggs are written with true compassion for the mistreatment of animals.Orwell himself was familiar with barnyard animals, as he kept goats and hens at his house in Wallington. In the preface to the Ukrainian edition of?Animal Farm, he explained to his readers that the idea to write the novel had occurred to him while he watched a boy driving a carthorse and repeatedly whipping it when it tried to turn. Orwell explained how ‘It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat’.[1]The 1954 animated film version of?Animal Farm?by John Halas and Joy Batchelor also paid particular attention to the physique of the animals, and how their bodies – the birds’ lack of arms, for instance – would have conditioned their ability to run the farm. From the comedic interpretation of how an animal could do the work of a human farmer, to the portrayal of the physical suffering of Boxer the carthorse, the film makes an effort to understand the story through the perspective of the bining aesthetics and politicsOrwell considered himself to be a political writer. His purpose in writing?Animal Farm?was to expose the evils of the Stalinist regime to a reading public whom he felt had an unacceptably uncritical view of Stalin and his government. But he was also very conscious of the necessity to balance political commentary and aesthetics (artistry) in his work. In his well-known essay ‘Why I Write’, published one year after?Animal Farm, Orwell outlined his aims in combining politically motivated writing with artistic expression:What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship (bias), a sense of injustice. ... But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic (artistic) experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant.[2]Animal Farm?is indeed much more than political propaganda. By using the form of the fable, its straightforward use of language and the simplicity of the point of view of the animals, Orwell gave?Animal Farm?a lightness that would be difficult to find in a political essay, and is one of the reasons that accounts for its success. The use of animal characters adds a lyrical (poetic; emotional) quality to a political theme, helping us understand the idealism that characterised the beginning of the revolution, and making us care deeply about the fate of the characters. At the same time, the symbolic system of the fable provides a structure for the story and it imbues (fills) it with the magical rhythm of children’s fairy tales.While for most readers the meaning of?Animal Farm?is tied to its author’s disenchantment (disappointment) with communism, the novella can be read at different levels: as an allegorical narration of the Stalinist regime, as a fable about totalitarianism, or as a story about the betrayal of the revolutionary regime of the animals on a farm. In fact, when the work was published, several of Orwell’s acquaintances wrote to him praising?Animal Farm?and stating that both they and their children were greatly enjoying the work.Thawing Out Cold War HistoryBy?JANE PERLEZOCT. 6, 1996WAS the Soviet Politburo determined to squash the 1956 Hungarian uprising right from the start? Did the broadcasters on the C.I.A.-financed Radio Free Europe excoriate Imre Nagy, Hungary's reform Communist leader? Did the Chinese encourage the Soviet Union to crack down on the Hungarians?No to the first. Yes to the second. And maybe to the third.Until recently, many people believed the Hungarian revolt was a well-documented episode of the cold war. But now it is becoming clear that it is but one more example of how uneven our understanding has been and how much more history there is to be explained.The Iron Vault OpensIn the last several years, the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project, two not-for-profit groups in Washington, have been pressing governments, from Japan to Guatemala to Romania, to open up their archives to historians.But access to archives that were once behind the Iron Curtain does not always mean access to information. Some documents are missing. Some have been destroyed.For instance, Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences has found that the Communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who introduced martial (military) law to Poland in 1981, ordered the documents and tapes of the Polish Communist Party's Politburo meetings between 1982 and 1989 destroyed. Someone must have obeyed. The pages of the minutes have been torn and the tapes are nowhere to be found, Mr. Paczkowski said. That means that historians will have to fill in the gaps with interviews.The same thing must be done by historians studying the Hungarian revolt of 1956. And so far, it seems to be yielding (getting results) a lot. At a gathering last weekend of political scientists and Hungarians and Americans involved in the stormy events of 40 years ago, delicious and surprising new findings emerged. Archival materials, memories and notes hastily jotted down and stored in obscure places have started to fill in the cracks of that period.The Hungarian uprising is turning out to be an even more disquieting (disturbing) event than historians thought.During some dramatic moments at the conference in Budapest, Maria Wittner, a Hungarian rebel who was imprisoned for 13 years, presented a paper of a fellow street fighter who happened to have written down some of the phrases used by Radio Free Europe to discredit Mr. Nagy in 1956.On Oct. 30, four days before the revolt was crushed by Soviet tanks, one of the radio's commentators -- all of them were Hungarian emigres who had not been in their homeland for more than a decade -- said, ''Imre Nagy has not enough Hungarian blood to resign.'' On another occasion, the radio said Mr. Nagy ''is not fit to govern.''At the same conference, John Matthews, who was a young American journalist working at Radio Free Europe in 1956, revealed that the political advisers at the radio said Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty should rule Hungary. Mr. Matthews not only personally remembered such wild remarks but was able to support his memory with a discovery he made last year in a Prague attic, where the Radio Free Europe archives are now stored: he found a memorandum written by the political advisers of the Munich-based radio that supported Cardinal Mindszenty.Khrushchev WaveringOther, even more striking, discoveries came from handwritten minutes that were taken by V. N. Malin, a member of the Soviet Politburo, during the Hungarian crisis and declassified in Moscow last year. The notes suggest that Khrushchev was not at all sure he wanted to dislodge Mr. Nagy. He veered between letting the Hungarians handle the situation themselves and cracking down on them. Mr. Malin's notes also suggest that a delegation of Chinese Communist Party leaders, who were present at some of the Politburo deliberations (discussions) in Moscow, may have been a big factor in the Soviet Union's final decision to send in the tanks.Chen Jian, an associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University, backs up this account. He said the memoirs of a Chinese Government interpreter show that Mao Zedong saw the Hungarian crisis as a fundamental threat: not so much as an anti-Soviet revolution but an anti-Communist one. Under Mao's instructions, the Chinese in Moscow told the Politburo that the rebellion should be crushed.The disclosures about Hungary are emotional matters for Hungarians and for the cold warriors. But they also make for heady stuff for historians with works-in-progress. Prof. William Taubman of Amherst College, who has been researching and writing a Khrushchev biography for nearly 10 years, said the idea that the Soviet Union was wavering about Hungary on the eve of the crackdown raised tantalizing possibilities.-857257683500''The question is: Were Khrushchev and Molotov considering what Gorbachev allowed in 1989 -- letting Hungary go -- or was it just a crazed moment where they latched on to the possibility and then dropped it a few hours later?'' Mr. Taubman said.Khrushchev – after Stalin’s death he succeeded Stalin as leader of the Soviet Communist party. Under his leadership repression and censorship were relaxed and some communications and trade between East and West was allowed.Molotov – a pro-Stalin Soviet politician and diplomat who was removed from all positions of power in the first years of Khrushchev’s premiership.Gorbachev – last president of the Soviet Union before its collapse in the 1990’s. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download