The future is hanging in the balance in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

A Last Judgment?

This triptych, attributed to Flemish painter Hans Memling and painted between 1467 and 1471, is now in the National Museum in Gdańsk in Poland. This painting is familiar to Re:LODE Radio and The Yellow House of Liverpool, connecting as it does to the:  

LODE Legacy

The story of this painting reflects a turbulent European modern history, and is recounted on the National Museum, Gdansk's webpage. The triptych was commissioned by Angelo Tani, an agent of the Medici at Bruges, but was captured at sea by Paul Beneke, a privateer from Danzig. A lengthy lawsuit against the Hanseatic League demanded its return to Italy. 

The triptych depicts the Last Judgment during the second coming of Jesus Christ, the central panel showing Jesus sitting in judgment on the world, while St Michael the Archangel is weighing souls and driving the damned towards Hell (the sinner in St. Michael's right-hand scale pan is a donor portrait of Tommaso Portinari); the left hand panel showing the saved being guided into heaven by St Peter and the angels; and the right-hand panel showing the damned being dragged to Hell.

The Fall of Princes? 

The English expression "hang in the balance" dates at least from the fifteenth century; it appeared in John Lydgate’s translation of the Fall of Princes (1430) and has been used ever since. It is based on Giovanni Boccaccio's work De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men), a work comprising 56 biographies, which Lydgate knew in a French translation by Laurent de Premierfait, entitled Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes. Lydgate's poem was written in the years 1431-38. It is composed of nine books and some 36 thousand lines. 

Like many surviving Lydgate manuscripts from this period, this copy of the poem, held now in the British Library, was probably produced in Suffolk, near the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, where Lydgate had been admitted as a monk in 1382. Lavish decoration appears throughout the manuscript, with numerous illustrations accompanying the various tales of heroic and tragic figures included in the poem’s narrative. 

One, for example, depicts the Fall in Eden, showing the moment Adam and Eve are tempted by the serpent to take the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Here, the serpent is represented as a half-human figure wrapped around the Tree itself. 

Another image shows the Greek poet/musician Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, just before Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies.

This webpage was published today by the U.S. Department of State and is an augury of either the fall of another prince, or the raising of a huge impediment to the future habitability of humankind's planetary environment. 

On the U.S. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement 

Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State explains: 

Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.  Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations.  The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.

As noted in his June 1, 2017 remarks, President Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because of the unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by U.S. pledges made under the Agreement.  The United States has reduced all types of emissions, even as we grow our economy and ensure our citizens’ access to affordable energy.  Our results speak for themselves:  U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018.  U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions dropped 13% from 2005-2017, even as our economy grew over 19 percent.

The U.S. approach incorporates the reality of the global energy mix and uses all energy sources and technologies cleanly and efficiently, including fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and renewable energy.  In international climate discussions, we will continue to offer a realistic and pragmatic model – backed by a record of real world results – showing innovation and open markets lead to greater prosperity, fewer emissions, and more secure sources of energy.  We will continue to work with our global partners to enhance resilience to the impacts of climate change and prepare for and respond to natural disasters.  Just as we have in the past, the United States will continue to research, innovate, and grow our economy while reducing emissions and extending a helping hand to our friends and partners around the globe.

In other words: Business as usual!

The presidential election results are as of today, only the first indications of the final tally, but there is no sign of a hoped for landslide victory for Joe Biden and the Democrats. On the other hand, the turnout for the election has been record breaking, with support for Donald Trump figuring well above polling predictions and media expectations. It will be a few days before the results emerge, especially as many democrat voters have chosen to use mail ballots in this time of the coronavirus pandemic. So things are "hanging in the balance" for now as far as the election results are concerned.

No resolution, no catharsis . . .

. . . the US election agony grinds on

Meanwhile . . .

The New York Times published this Questions and Answers piece by Lisa Friedman on Nov. 4, 2020, because as of today, under United Nations rules, the United States is officially out of the global climate accord. Her copy runs: 

President Trump's withdrawal formally came into force the day after Election Day in the United States. Here's what it means.

WASHINGTON — Au revoir, Paris Agreement. As of Wednesday, under United Nations rules, the United States is officially out of the global climate accord. Here’s a look at how it happened, what it means and what might happen next.

How did we get here?

You could be forgiven for thinking the United States quit the global climate change agreement a long time ago. Ever since 2017, when President Trump announced his intention to abandon the pact, he’s spoken about withdrawal as if it was a done deal. In fact, however, pulling out of the Paris Agreement has been a lengthy process.

On Nov. 4, 2019, the earliest possible day under United Nations rules that a country could begin the final withdrawal process, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo filed paperwork to do so. It automatically finalized a year later. So, as of Wednesday morning, the United States is officially no longer a part of the group of nations pledging to address climate change.

President Trump has called the Paris Agreement “job-killing” and said it would “punish the American people while enriching foreign polluters.”

Technically, though, the Paris Agreement doesn’t require the United States to do anything. In fact, it’s not even a treaty. It’s a nonbinding agreement among nations of all levels of wealth and responsibility for causing climate change to reduce domestic emissions.

The accord essentially ties together every nation’s voluntary emissions pledge in a single forum, with the understanding that countries will set even tougher targets over time over time. The United States under President Barack Obama promised to reduce its emissions about 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, but progress on that goal stopped under the Trump administration.

There are some reporting requirements to ensure that countries are making progress, but the Trump administration flouted those and so far has suffered no consequences.

Who’s still in, and what are they doing?

Almost every country in the world. Of the 195 countries that signed the Paris Agreement, 189 went on to formally adopt the accord. Initially Nicaragua and Syria withheld their support from the pact but both eventually joined the agreement.

As of Wednesday, in addition to the United States, the countries that originally signed but have not formally adopted the Paris Agreement are: Angola, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, South Sudan, Turkey and Yemen.

So far, no other country has followed the United States in renouncing the Paris Agreement. At one point President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil threatened to do so but he later reversed course.

In recent weeks there have been a spate of ambitious climate commitments from Europe and Asia. The European Parliament voted last month to cut emissions 60 percent by 2030, with the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. That measure will now be considered by the European Union’s council of ministers. China vowed to become carbon neutral by 2060. That pledge was followed by ones from South Korea and Japan, both of which vowed to zero out net emissions by 2050.

“There’s momentum continuing to build even with the U.S. pulling out,” said Alden Meyer, a director at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a 30-year veteran of international climate negotiations.

“The question is, would it continue without the U.S. fully on board?” he said.

Will U.S. greenhouse gas emissions spike?

Not necessarily. Leaving the Paris Agreement does not in itself mean the United States will stop addressing climate change.

On the other hand, it does mean the federal government has formally abandoned, for now at least, President Obama’s goal of cutting emissions about 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

In reality, the United States under President Trump walked away from that target years ago. Right now, we’re about halfway to the Obama-era goal and not on track to meet it. So, while emissions probably won’t rise, they also won’t fall fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change.

Is the U.S. withdrawal final?

No. Any future president could opt back in.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged that he would recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on Day 1. In practical terms that means on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, his administration would send a letter to the United Nations notifying it of America’s intention to rejoin. The American return would become official 30 days later.

Other countries would most likely give a Biden administration some time to get on its feet but would also want to see strong early signs that the United States has substantial plans to cut domestic emissions from cars, power plants and other sources.

By the time the United States joins other countries at the next United Nations climate conference, scheduled for Glasgow in November next year, it would be expected to have an emissions-cutting target even more ambitious than the Obama-era one.

If the United States stayed out of the agreement, it could still have a voice in United Nations climate negotiations. That’s because it would still be a member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that created the Paris Agreement. America would, however, be reduced to observer status, which means its negotiators would be allowed to attend meetings and work with other countries to shape outcomes but not be allowed to vote on decisions.

“They will still have influence, but nothing like they would as full players,” Mr. Meyer said.

Subjectivity and the "weather with you" 

The official video of the song "weather with you" by Crowded House is NOT about climate change. It is about the human psychology and: 

subjectivity! 

The video celebrates how "weather" is part of the mood music of modernity, and a consumer culture where spatial dimensions of "freedom" and "mobility", and having your own recreational "time out", are part of a good life. To quote band member Neil Finn: "Ultimately, the theme of the song is of course, that you are creating your own weather, you are making your own environment, always."  

Worrying about those carbon emissions is the is more difficult, as it is NOT about what you feel, it is about what you know! It is about objectivity!

When things hang in the balance it's time for objectivity! 

Everywhere you go . . .

. . . always take the weather with you

"Weather with You" is a song by rock band Crowded House. It was the third and most successful single released from the group's third studio album Woodface (1991), reaching top 50 in ten countries, including the United Kingdom, where it reached number seven. Crowded House formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1985. Its founding members were New Zealander Neil Finn (vocalist, guitarist, primary songwriter) and Australians Paul Hester (drums) and Nick Seymour (bass). After several years of inactivity, it was announced recently that a revised line-up of Crowded House would tour the UK in 2020. The new line-up features Neil Finn, Nick Seymour, Mitchell Froom, and Finn's sons Liam and Elroy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the band's planned 2020 concerts have had to be rescheduled to 2021.

A classic Shell Oil  "greenwashing" con?

So, what are you willing to change to help reduce emissions? 

This was the question posed in a climate poll on Twitter posted by the fossil fuel industry giant Shell.

Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian reports (Tue 3 Nov 2020) under the headline and subheading:

Shell’s climate poll on Twitter backfires spectacularly

Oil giant accused of gaslighting after asking users: ‘What are you willing to change?’

A climate poll on Twitter posted by Shell has backfired spectacularly, with the oil company accused of gaslighting the public. 

The survey, posted on Tuesday morning, asked: “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?”

Though it received a modest 199 votes the tweet still went viral – but not for the reasons the company would have hoped. The US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one high-profile respondent, posting a tweet that was liked 350,000 times.

Greta Thunberg accused the company of “endless greenwash”, while the climate scientist Prof Katharine Hayhoe pointed out Shell’s huge contribution to the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Shell then hid her reply, she said.

Another climate scientist, Peter Kalmus, was more direct, and said the company was gaslighting the public by suggesting individual actions could stop the climate crisis, rather than systemic change to the fossil fuel industry. Some Twitter users saw irony in this, while others asked if the company was “out of its mind”.

Bill Weir, the chief climate correspondent at CNN, reached for a horror analogy and climate campaign groups also piled in.

In 2017, the Guardian revealed that a “confidential” Shell report in 1986 noted the large uncertainties in climate science at the time but nonetheless stated: “The changes may be the greatest in recorded history.”

A Shell film released in 1991 said: “Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”

However, the company’s recent investments in low-carbon energy have remained tiny compared with its fossil fuel investments. Its plan to become net carbon zero covers only about 65% of the emissions from the oil and gas it produces, according to Follow This, a group of more than 5,800 green shareholders in oil and gas companies.

The climate campaigner Jamie Henn said:

Eight hours after the poll had launched, the company signed off its event sounding perhaps a little chastened.

Meanwhile . . .   

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins a second term in the US House of Representatives

The progressive Democrat and rising star in the party is easily re-elected in New York’s 14th congressional district in Queens and The Bronx.

Medicare for all

Even during the lead up to election day, with all its expected pressures, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on the case, and demanding the full degree of accountability from Shell.

Cloud the issue Or clear the air?

DESMOGUK has the answer.

Shell knew about the relationship between burning fossil fuels and climate change as early as the 1980s. So what did the company decide to do about it? Stop burning fossil fuels?

No. It changed its advertising strategy. 

The big polluters' masterstroke 

Just over a year ago (Wed 9 Oct 2019) George Monbiot flagged up how this "big polluters" system absolves them of responsibility for the climate crisis. 

George Monbiot writes: 

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

A paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead the industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5tn in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.

But the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down.

We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them.

In such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. Attempts to organise boycotts are notoriously difficult, and tend to work only when there is a narrow and immediate aim. The ideology of consumerism is highly effective at shifting blame: witness the current ranting in the billionaire press about the alleged hypocrisy of environmental activists. Everywhere I see rich westerners blaming planetary destruction on the birth rates of much poorer people, or on “the Chinese”. This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.

The power of consumerism is that it renders us powerless. It traps us within a narrow circle of decision-making, in which we mistake insignificant choices between different varieties of destruction for effective change. It is, we must admit, a brilliant con.

It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers. But how? Part of the answer is provided in a short book published by one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, called Common Sense for the 21st Century. I don’t agree with everything it says, but the rigour and sweep of its analysis will, I think, ensure that it becomes a classic of political theory.

It begins with the premise that gradualist campaigns making small demands cannot prevent the gathering catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown. Only mass political disruption, out of which can be built new and more responsive democratic structures, can deliver the necessary transformation.

By studying successful mobilisations, such as the Children’s March in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 (which played a critical role in ending racial segregation in the US), the Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig in 1989 (which snowballed until they helped bring down the East German regime), and the Jana Andolan movement in Nepal in 2006 (which brought down the absolute power of the monarchy and helped end the armed insurgency), Hallam has developed a formula for effective “dilemma actions”. A dilemma action is one that puts the authorities in an awkward position. Either the police allow civil disobedience to continue, thereby encouraging more people to join, or they attack the protesters, creating a powerful “symbolism of fearless sacrifice”, thereby encouraging more people to join. If you get it right, the authorities can’t win.

Among the crucial common elements, he found, are assembling thousands of people in the centre of the capital city, maintaining a strictly nonviolent discipline, focusing on the government and continuing for days or weeks at a time. Radical change, his research reveals, “is primarily a numbers game. Ten thousand people breaking the law has historically had more impact than small-scale, high-risk activism.” The key challenge is to organise actions that encourage as many people as possible to join. This means they should be openly planned, inclusive, entertaining, peaceful and actively respectful. You can join such an action today, convened by Extinction Rebellion in central London.

Hallam’s research suggests that this approach offers at least a possibility of breaking the infrastructure of lies the fossil fuel companies have created, and developing a politics matched to the scale of the challenges we face. It is difficult and uncertain of success. But, he points out, the chances that politics as usual will meet our massive predicament with effective action are zero. Mass dilemma actions could be our last, best chance of preventing the great extermination.

11 months later . . .

Richard Luscombe reporting for the Guardian on Greta Thunberg's riposte to Trump's insulting tweet he posted eleven months ago (Thu 5 Nov 2020). He writes: 

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Greta Thunberg, the teenage environmental activist mocked by Donald Trump in a tweet when she was named Time magazine’s person of the year, waited exactly 11 months before delivering the perfect riposte.

In his December 2019 insult, Trump told Thunberg, 17, to work on her “anger management problem” and to “go to an old-fashioned movie with a friend”.

“Chill Greta, chill!” the president implored in the tweet, which began with him branding her Time award as “so ridiculous”.

On Thursday afternoon, with Trump raging on Twitter in all capital letters and throwing out baseless allegations of voter fraud even as his election day lead in Pennsylvania and other states continued to erode, Thunberg threw his words straight back at him.

“So ridiculous,” Thunberg tweeted in reply to Trump’s earlier “STOP THE COUNT!” rant.

“Donald must work on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”

Within two hours of posting it, the tweet had amassed more than 452,000 likes, double the total for Trump’s original message.

Thunberg has proved something of a nemesis for the climate crisis-denying president, the original Twitter exchange coming barely two months after the pair crossed paths at the United Nations in New York. Trump skipped the climate summit at which Thunberg told world leaders, “You are failing us,” but she fixed Trump with an icy stare in a hallway as he made his way to another event on religious freedom.

This week has added poignancy for Thunberg due to the formal exit from the Paris climate agreement by the United States on Wednesday. In October, Thunberg endorsed Trump’s election rival Joe Biden, who has pledged to return the US to the global pact on his first day in office.

The future is hanging in the balance along with the truth . . . 

President Trump delivered remarks at the White House on election night and made claims about votes that remained to be counted. NBC News' Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd fact-check the president's claims.

NBC News Cuts Into Trump Speech To Fact Check Him On Election Night  NBC News 4 Nov 2020

While Donald Trump attempts to undermine the validity of the electoral process in the United States, in Belarus, along the LODE Zone Line, the election was stolen months ago by the "strongman" and erstwhile dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, but the outcome is still hanging in the balance, as the widespread refusal to accept the result by the political opposition, supported by the people of Belarus, continues.  

Just over a week ago the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya called for Belarusians from Monday to block roads, shut down workplaces, stop using government shops and services and withdraw all money from their bank accounts, in what amounts to a nationwide strike.

Shaun Walker reporting for the Guardian from Minsk (Mon 26 Oct 2020) writes under the headline and subheading: 

Belarus protests: nationwide strike looms after 'people’s ultimatum' rally

Opposition leader calls for action on Monday as Lukashenko defies demand from 100,000 marchers in Minsk to step down

Belarusian riot police launched another violent crackdown in Minsk on Sunday evening, throwing stun grenades into crowds of peaceful protesters, chasing people through courtyards and making arrests as they attempted to curtail the 11th consecutive Sunday of protest in the country.

At least 100,000 people marched through the centre of the Belarusian capital earlier in the day to give what they called a “people’s ultimatum” to Alexander Lukashenko: 

step down, or face a nationwide strike on Monday that could cripple the economy.

Long columns of protesters, wrapped in the red-white traditional Belarusian flag that has become the symbol of the protests, streamed through the city centre, shouting “resign!” and “strike!”

As usual, authorities cut off mobile internet across central Minsk, closed metro stations and placed cordons of riot police at key sites. Military and riot control vehicles were positioned throughout the centre and officers in balaclavas and wielding shields stood at almost every intersection, but they did not attack the crowds until the evening.

The human rights group Viasna said 216 people had been detained on Sunday. It was not immediately clear how many people had been injured in the clashes with police.

The current wave of discontent was prompted by Lukashenko declaring an overwhelming victory in August presidential elections that were widely believed to be rigged, and then cracking down ruthlessly on those who came out to protest.

In the first big rallies in August in response to the crackdown, euphoria and disbelief combined to create a heady excitement that Lukashenko’s days were surely numbered. The authoritarian leader, who has been in charge for 26 years, has since made it clear he does not intend to give up power without a fight.

A number of opposition leaders have been forced out of the country or arrested over the past two months, and authorities have threatened to use live ammunition on protesters.The crowds on Sunday were still largely buoyant though, with several bands of drummers providing a thudding musical accompaniment and many people flashing victory signs.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who stood against Lukashenko after her husband was imprisoned, was able to act as a lightning rod for protest voters but was forced to flee to neighbouring Lithuania the day after the vote, having been given just 10% in the official tally. Tikhanovskaya has declared herself the legitimately elected leader from Vilnius, and has said she wants to oversee a transition period before arranging a new, free election.

Tsikhanouskaya called for Belarusians from Monday to block roads, shut down workplaces, stop using government shops and services and withdraw all money from their bank accounts.

“The regime once again showed Belarusians that force is the only thing it is capable of,” she wrote in a statement. “That’s why tomorrow, 26 October, a national strike will begin.”

Few in Minsk expect the strike to be successful, however. Strikes in August and September drew some support from workers at big factories but were soon crushed.

“I support the strike, but of course I’ll still go to work,” said Sergei, a 29-year-old sales assistant who was draped in a red-and-white flag at the protest on Sunday. “We need to get rid of Lukashenko, but I also need to keep my income.”

Whether or not the strike is a success, it is clear that Lukashenko has lost legitimacy among huge swaths of the population, and he appears to have little chance of regaining it. A counter-rally in central Minsk in his support was planned for Sunday but called off late in the week, ostensibly to avoid the risk of clashes with the opposition protesters. Most people felt the real reason was a fear that embarrassingly few people would show up.

Lukashenko does retain the loyalty of his security forces, however, and if the strike does not work, the question will be whether the protest movement, which has so far remained almost entirely peaceful, will radicalise or whether it will die down as a result of fatigue and the onset of winter. The renewed violence from authorities on Sunday evening may serve to galvanise the weary protest movement again.

The incumbent president has promised, alongside the threats, to launch a constitutional reform process. He even paid a visit to the KGB prison in Minsk this month for so-called negotiations with political prisoners in an attempt to win over part of the opposition. Many have dismissed the initiative as too little too late, but how events will play out remains uncertain.

“It’s impossible to predict what will happen in a few months. We don’t know what will happen with the economy, we don’t know where Russia will stand, and we don’t know how far Lukashenko will go with concessions,” said the Minsk-based political analyst Artyom Shraibman.

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called Lukashenko on Saturday, one of the only conversations the Belarusian leader has had with a western politician since his controversial re-election. According to a description of the call published by Lukashenko’s team, the two men discussed “the internal political situations in both Belarus and the US”.

The EU has placed sanctions on many in the Belarusian regime since the protests began, and Lukashenko has turned to Vladimir Putin for support. The Russian president is known to dislike Lukashenko but appears to have decided that propping him up is better than allowing a change of power to come from the street. The head of Russia’s spy agency, Sergei Naryshkin, flew to Minsk last week in one of many high-profile Russian visits.

Workers and students in Belarus launch anti-Lukashenko strike 

Shaun Walker in another report from Minsk (Mon 26 Oct 2020) covers the degree of turnout for the day of action and writes that:

However, despite the sight of large columns of protesters in the streets again – and the sense that the protest has regained some of the momentum it has lost in recent weeks – there was no sign of significant numbers of workers at state-controlled plants joining the strike for any sustained length of time.

In those places where workers did try to strike, authorities stepped in brutally. At Grodno Azot, one of the country’s leading chemical factories, more than 100 would-be strikers were arrested, the human rights organisation Vyasna reported.

At the Minsk tractor factory, one of the big plants that are the pride of Lukashenko’s neo-Soviet economy, most workers appeared to be clocking on as normal for the Monday morning shift. The leader of an earlier strike at the factory in August was forced to flee the country under pressure from authorities, and many workers fear reprisals for striking. At most, some workers briefly expressed support for the protest before or after their shifts, but did not actually refuse to work.

Many private businesses closed for the day, and some employees took a day of holiday in solidarity. In Minsk, a number of restaurants and cafes closed, but others opened as normal. “Of course I support all of this, but we discussed it and decided it wouldn’t be fair to our customers to close down,” said Dmitry, a waiter at a cafe in central Minsk.

Students were active participants in the strike, with protest columns moving through the city all day. Outside the state linguistic university, several hundred students spent the morning standing by the road, waving flags and signs and shouting, “Strike!” Occasionally, a police car or minivan full of men in balaclavas would pull up, causing the students to scatter briefly.

The strike came a day after huge crowds took over the centre of Minsk on Sunday in one of the biggest demonstrations since August. On Sunday evening, riot police threw stun grenades into the crowds and chased protesters through courtyards after dark. The interior ministry said on Monday that more than 500 people had been detained across the country on Sunday, of which 160 were in Minsk. About 350 remained in custody ahead of being charged with minor offences.

On both Sunday and Monday, authorities allowed large groups of people to march without interfering, but pounced unexpectedly on smaller groups or those still out in the evening. It continues a pattern that has been going on for two months, in which neither side seems unable to break the uneasy stalemate. So far, the protesters have remained almost entirely peaceful, while the riot police have failed to suffocate them completely.

“The authorities are scared that the numbers on the streets are rising again, and will be forced to change their tactics,” the political analyst Artyom Shraibman wrote on his Telegram channel. “Either they’ll have to make more concessions (release more political prisoners and speed up their constitutional reform) or they’ll have to raise the level of repression … This will be an interesting week.”

Video shows riot police in Minsk bursting into an apartment in the city searching for protesters who had been seeking refuge after officers used stun grenades at a rally against the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, who continues to hold on to power despite two months of mass protests since he declared victory in the presidential election in August.

The footage, filmed on Sunday and later posted to social media, shows a policeman using a baton to beat a man who was draped with the pre-Soviet red-and-white flag, the symbol adopted by the opposition. Police detained at least three other men, while several others were sheltering on the upper floors of the building, a witness said. 

Where are they now?

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (centre), Veronika Tsepkalo (left), and Maria Kolesnikova (right) announcing their united campaign. 

The Belarusian women who opposed Lukashenko 

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

Initially a stand-in for her husband, a popular blogger barred from running and jailed by the authorities, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya became the main opposition candidate to the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, as part of an all-female opposition campaign spearheaded by herself, Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo. 

She fled to neighbouring Lithuania in early August, from where she posted a video indicating she had faced an ultimatum involving her family. 

In September, in a video appearance before the European parliament’s foreign affairs committee, she vowed that the country’s movement for democratic change would not give up, even in the face of continued intimidation and violence from Lukashenko's regime.

Veronika Tsepkalo

A former Microsoft employee, she was the campaign head for her husband Valery Tsepkalo before he was forced to flee with the couple's children to Moscow before the election. Having campaigned alongside Tikhanovskaya and Kolesnikova, she joined him there on the day of the election. 

Apart from a one-day stopover in Belarus, when she says she was threatened with jail, she has remained in exile in Moscow. She told a radio interviewer in early August "I think I can do more being in Moscow, being free, and being able to speak up for Belarus' people to the international community." 

Maria Kolesnikova

Kolesnikova had been head of the presidential campaign for another opposition politician, Viktor Babariko, also barred from the elections and jailed by the government. She was the only one of the three women to remain in Belarus in the aftermath of the disputed August election. 

On 7 September, it was reported she was abducted by unidentified masked men from the street in the capital, Minsk. Kolesnikova’s press aide, Anton Rodnenkov, confirmed her abduction to the media, then reportedly vanished himself about 40 minutes later. According to a Ukrainian minister, Kolesnikova then ripped up her passport at the Belarus-Ukraine border in order to frustrate attempts to deport her. She is currently being held in Minsk. 

She had announced on 31 August she was forming a new political party, Together.

This is NOT a prank! 

Twelve political prisoners were gathered in a KGB office in Minsk. 

Then the president walked in

Shaun Walker reporting for the Guardian from Minsk covers this bizarre, sinister and unsettling experience of twelve political prisoners from the Belarus opposition movement (Thu 29 Oct 2020): 

The participants had printed name cards set out in front of them, there was a flower arrangement in the centre of the table, and the discussion topic was political reforms that might improve the country.

There was one unusual detail about the discussion held in Minsk this month: 12 people around the table were political prisoners, and the 13th was Alexander Lukashenko, the man who had put them behind bars.

Facing a broad, sustained protest against the continuation of his 26-year rule, Lukashenko had previously said he would not give up power “even if dead” and threatened his opponents with all manner of reprisals. Now, it seemed, he wanted to talk.

Liliya Vlasova, a 67-year-old lawyer and mediator who was arrested on tax evasion charges in late August, soon after being elected to the leadership body of an opposition council seeking a transfer of power, could not believe her eyes when she saw the familiar face. “I thought it was a body double at first – I didn’t think it was possible. But after five minutes I realised it was the real Lukashenko,” she said.

She had been woken in her cell at 6am, driven to KGB headquarters and held in an office there for four hours. Eventually she was led to a room where she saw other political prisoners including Viktor Babariko and Sergei Tikhanovsky, who had wanted to run in the August presidential election but were jailed. The group greeted each other and wondered out loud what the occasion for the strange gathering could possibly be. Perhaps, someone suggested, they would be forced to make televised confessions. Then Lukashenko walked in.

The next four and a half hours were “more of a monologue” than a dialogue, said Vlasova, though there was a heated and angry exchange between Tikhanovsky and Lukashenko. The prisoner was furious about his detention, while Lukashenko was offended that Tikhanovsky had called him a “cockroach” in YouTube videos this year. There was no water to drink and no option to use the toilet. “What made him come there? I still don’t understand,” said Vlasova.

Western diplomats were also surprised by the move, with some wondering whether Lukashenko’s backers in Moscow, alarmed at the level of discontent, had demanded he try to reach out to the opposition and reach some kind of compromise.

“Lukashenko told us he wants dialogue on constitutional reform, and he promised that this would be his last term in office,” said Yuri Voskresensky, a businessman and political scientist who was part of the Babariko campaign. “I was sitting next to him and my intuition was that he was telling the truth.”

Voskresensky was released soon after the meeting and tasked by Lukashenko with serving as an intermediary between the two sides, though charges of organising mass disturbances are still hanging over him. He said Lukashenko’s offer should be taken seriously, even if the optics of negotiating with your jailer were strange, and said he would hold a meeting next week of opposition supporters who want to take part in drafting ideas to present to Lukashenko.

“We are not western Europe, where people were already democratic 500 years ago. I could be upset that I was kept in jail for two months, but we have the chance to democratise and we should take it,” he said.

Few other opposition figures appear minded to go along with him, rubbishing the gambit as meaningless. After the violence and arrests of the past two months, they say, the only acceptable outcome now is a transfer of power.

Vlasova was released a few days after the discussion, back to the comfort of her home, where the living room is filled with vases of flowers from wellwishers. Tax evasion charges against her and her son, which she described as “completely fabricated”, have not been dropped, and her son’s business has been destroyed. 

Although she was not subjected to physical violence, the six weeks she spent behind bars was trying in the extreme. She was held in a 10-person cell with no fresh air or daylight, with eight cellmates who frequently smoked. There were long interrogations, usually in the evening, and threats that if she did not confess she would be sent to sew army uniforms in prison. 

“I had panic attacks, I couldn’t sleep at night, my heart was seizing up from fear,” she said. Just at the moment when she had made peace with the fact that she could be in prison for years, the surprise discussion took place. 

Lukashenko came to the meeting with one aide and his teenage son Nikolai, who in the past has accompanied the president to meetings with world leaders, has appeared dressed in full military uniform, and was even seen brandishing a gun one Sunday in August when Lukashenko decided to fly over the protesters in a helicopter. Nikolai sat through the meeting silently, said Voskresensky, though at one point his father sent him to fetch aerial photographs of protests, which Lukashenko showed to those at the meeting to “prove” the small numbers of people involved. 

After the meeting, Tikhanovsky was allowed to speak to his wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for the first time in more than four months. Tikhanovskaya ran in the election as a unified opposition candidate and fled to Lithuania after the vote, from where she has said she is ready to head a transitional government before new elections. She said after the call that she did not believe in “dialogue at gunpoint”, and promptly announced a “people’s ultimatum” demanding that Lukashenko leave by last Sunday. 

In the wake of the deadline passing, a new wave of protests and strikes has begun, prompting another crackdown that hardly suggests the regime is ready for real compromise. On Tuesday Lukashenko suggested students who were striking as a result of Tikhanovskaya’s ultimatum should be “sent to the street, or to the army”, while his interior minister, Yuri Karayev, said this week that the police were “at war” and should not hesitate to use violence against protesters.

“My work now is to make it clear to every local police officer that your life, the future of your children and the happiness of your wife depends on how quickly and decisively you grab your weapon and realise that you are being killed and you are still trying to use persuasion,” said Karayev, in a grim-faced and threatening video address that bore little resemblance to reality. In fact, almost all of the violence so far has come from the side of the authorities. Karayev was removed as interior minister on Thursday; it was unclear for what reason.

Part of the problem is that Lukashenko, like many authoritarian leaders, appears to be fully convinced that without him the country would fall apart. “I built this country, and if I got something wrong, it’s because you people didn’t support me, you only criticised,” said Voskresensky, paraphrasing the president’s message at the KGB roundtable.

“He is fully convinced that he is the messiah in this country, and that without him we would not exist,” said Vlasova.

At the end of the meeting, Lukashenko thanked those present and said he would be happy to invite them to his palace “to continue the discussion”. The next day the men were taken to a bathhouse, where they were able to steam, chat and eat from a table laid with snacks. Then most of them went back to prison.

Vlasova is now at liberty, but has a court case hanging over her. Her family are begging her to step away from active politics, and she is still recovering from her prison ordeal. “If I try to concentrate on anything, I either start crying or get headaches,” she said.

On the other hand, her time in prison has made her more convinced of the need for political change. “I now have a clear understanding that our regime is not just authoritarian, it’s absolutely inhumane … The process of turning us into one big gulag is under way,” she said.

This week she spent a day writing a letter to Maria Kolesnikova, a fellow member of the opposition’s coordination council and the most visible leader during the August protests. She remains in prison. Vlasova became teary as she described the contents of the letter.

“I wrote that millions of people are fighting for her, that she’s the pride and strength of our country,” she said. “I told her she’s stronger than they are, and that eventually we will win.”

The trump of doom . . . 

. . . for strongmen everywhere? So-called "strongmen" can fall as far as they have risen, and maybe even further? A day of judgement is not necessarily the end of things, just as the word apocalypse means a moment of revelation, of exposure, a time of great knowledge, and justice.

The "crack of doom" is represented in The Last Judgement by Memling. Crack of doom is an old term used for the Day of Judgement, referring in particular to the blast of trumpets signalling the end of the world in Chapter 8 of the Book of Revelation and represented here with three angels and their trumpets hovering above St Michael as he weighs human souls in the balance. A "crack" had the sense of any loud noise, preserved in the phrase "crack of thunder", and "doom" was a term for the Last Judgement, as doomsday still is. 

As mentioned before, Memling's triptych is to be found in the National Museum in Gdańsk in Poland.

And Gdansk features in the:  

LODE Legacy

Poland and the LODE Zone Line

The LODE Legacy page features seven articles covering a number of research activities resulting in shared collective artwork based environments involving The Yellow House and e-space lab. Six of the seven articles reference work conducted in the Tricity area around Gdansk, including Gdynia and Sopot, while generating social and cultural resonances between this zone with the City of Liverpool and the Merseyside borough of Sefton. 

Human rights under attack in Poland?

Christian Davis in Warsaw reports for the Observer on women's right protests (Sun 1 Nov 2020). He writes under the headline and subheading: 

Bagpipes and techno blast at Warsaw pro-choice march, but menace lurks

Women’s rights protesters incensed by the country’s strict new laws clash with rightwing gangs in the Polish capital

Christian Davis writes: 

It was a surreal sight – and a terrible sound. On Friday evening, as tens of thousands of pro-choice protesters gathered in Warsaw for a massive demonstration against a near-total ban on abortion, military police in red berets formed a protective cordon around the Church of the Holy Cross on Krakowskie Przedmieście, an elegant thoroughfare leading from Warsaw’s Old Town to the city centre.

Behind the military cordon stood far-right activists and supporters of Poland’s ruling rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS), responding to a call by PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński to “defend Polish churches” from what government-controlled state television news describes as the “leftist fascism destroying Poland” after some churches were defaced during protests last weekend.

As the pro-choice protesters filed past the church, government supporters chanting mournful incantations blasted the screams of a crying baby through giant megaphones at the entrance to the church. The sound was broadcast on a loop, the desperate screams repeated over and over as protesters marched stoically past.

Agata and Aleksandra, both doctors from Warsaw who declined to give their surnames for fear of repercussions, were among those marching past the church and doing their best to ignore the screams. Standing under a statue of the 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, they described their intense anger at a system that does so little to support the parents of disabled children and yet appears intent on banning terminations even in instances where a foetus is diagnosed with a serious and irreversible birth defect.

“The moment when a woman discovers that the baby is sick and will probably die just after birth, this is the worst moment of their life,” said Agata, a gynaecologist, who was carrying a placard reading, “Don’t make me torture my patients”.

“Usually these are older women in their 30s, women who really want this child, and the news leaves them completely destroyed. Until now they had a choice about whether to wait, give birth, and watch the child die – but they will not have that choice any more. As a doctor I want to help them, but now if I help them I would be going against the law.”

But if the protests, which by Friday had entered their ninth day, have been characterised by anger at Poland’s political and clerical establishments, the rage felt by many marching through the streets manifested itself within a joyful, even carnival atmosphere.

Accompanying the chants of “Fuck PiS!” and “This is war!” were thousands of humorous placards mocking Polish leaders and demanding the right to choose. Some protesters wore costumes and danced as techno music and 80s classics were blasted from speaker vans. Protesters brought drums, vuvuzelas, kitchen pots and pans – even bagpipes.

Huge pro-choice crowds converge on central Warsaw on Friday night to protest against the country’s restrictive abortion laws. 

There was a sense of euphoria as the various columns of the protest converged in central Warsaw into a single demonstration of 100,000 people, defying coronavirus restrictions banning gatherings of more than five. As they chanted, the red lightning bolt symbol of the Polish Women’s Strike was projected on to the giant communist-era Palace of Science and Culture as police helicopters circled.

The red lightning bolt, a motif of the Warsaw protests, is a symbol of women’s activism in Poland. The placard reads: ‘What the hell have you done’. 

Not even the nationalist football hooligans who attacked the crowd on several occasions were able to spoil the mood of the protesters.

In one incident witnessed by the Observer on the central thoroughfare of Jerusalem Avenue, about a dozen men dressed in black appeared from a side street and attacked the rear of a column of protesters, appearing to beat up one man quite severely. They were confronted by protesters with what appeared to be some kind of pepper spray or tear gas, leaving several bystanders spluttering and gasping for air.

The Polish police later confirmed that several such incidents had occurred; of the 37 people arrested on Friday, 35 were associated with nationalist circles. Police also confiscated an array of weapons, including batons and knives.

Many observers blame Kaczyński, Poland’s de facto ruler, for encouraging the violence by calling on his supporters to defend churches even after far-right groups had announced their intention to create vigilante patrols to confront the protesters. Last weekend, a woman was treated in hospital after allegedly being thrown down the steps of the Holy Cross Church during clashes between pro-choice demonstrators and nationalist activists.

Much has been made in the pro-government media of the apparent “vulgarity” of the protests, with demostraters regularly chanting “Wypierdalaj”, or “Fuck off” and holding placards with messages such as “My pussy, my swamp”, and “Kaczyński [a bachelor] is fucking us because he hasn’t got anyone else”.

But protesters argue that their language is a natural response to the contempt shown towards them by their government since it assumed office in 2015.

“Our attitude has changed in recent years because we realised that when you are dealing with louts and bumpkins you have to adapt and use language that they actually understand”, said Alicja, an IT worker who was holding a sign reading, “I tried being nice, now I’m just fucking pissed off.”

And several commentators have argued that the protesters’ anger goes far beyond the present government and the issue of abortion, extending to the indignities of living in what is still a patriarchal society and under a political and legal order that was shaped in the 1990s by a previous generation of socially conservative men from both sides of the country’s political divide.

Last week, Tomasz Grodzki, the opposition speaker of the senate, in a clumsy attempt to express his support for the protests, declared: “It is women who ensure that our daily lives go harmoniously and smoothly in an almost unnoticeable way.”

‘These codgers seem to think that the [protesters’ chants of] ‘Fuck off’ only concern politicians from PiS,” wrote commentator Kaja Puto in response. 

“Women have taken to the streets to fight for their rights, not so that you can return to power … For the last 30 years, as you have repeated the same conservative rubbish, Polish women have changed.”

. . . and Bob Marley is being quoted on the streets of Warsaw!

Much has changed over the last 30 years and including the period since 1992 when the LODE project created a Cargo of Questions on the outskirts of the Polish city of Szczecin.

LODE 1992 and Re:LODE 2017 Cargo of Questions - Szczecin 

The Guardian published an Opinion piece by Karolina Wigura and Jarosław Kuisz a few days before the protests took place this last Friday. Karolina Wigura is a historian, political editor of the Polish weekly Kultural Liberalna and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. Jarosław Kuisz is a historian, editor-in-chief of the Polish weekly Kultura Liberalna and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. They take a critical view in analysing the failing politics of illiberal and populist forces in Poland. They write under the headline and subheading:

Poland's abortion ban is a cynical attempt to exploit religion by a failing leader

Kaczyński’s populist move aims to keep the Catholic church on side, but mass protests suggest he’s gone too far

Coronavirus may be new, but the authoritarian instinct is as old as politics itself. One of the standard tricks of the Covid-19-era illiberal populist is to reach for religion when you are being accused of incompetence. Donald Trump posed for photos with the Bible, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and in Poland Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS), has resorted to an almost total ban on abortion.

A ruling from Poland’s constitutional tribunal last week outlawed abortion in cases where the foetus is severely damaged or malformed. This in practice now means almost all forms of abortion are banned.

Poland already had some of the strictest abortion legislation in the EU. In the three decades since the end of communism the country has lived under what is called the “abortion compromise”. Public opinion favoured retaining liberal post-communist abortion laws. But politicians, bowing to the power of the Catholic church, tightened the law anyway in the mid-1990s without recourse to a referendum, leaving foetal abnormality as one of the only available routes for women seeking terminations. Since 1997, of approximately 1,000 legal terminations performed annually in Poland, the vast majority cite severe foetal abnormality. After last week’s ruling by the tribunal, this too will be illegal.

The street protests of recent days are on a scale not seen in Poland since 2016. Back then a grassroots women’s movement forced Kaczyński to back down from proposals to criminalise anyone seeking abortion. Clad in black, thousands took to the streets demanding that parliament reject the plans. The protesters were furious, but they also had hope. Kaczyński’s party duly shelved the planned changes.

This time, the same anger is there but accompanied by a sense that this ultra-conservative government (which unlawfully appointed loyalist judges to the constitutional court) is engaged in a form of humiliation of Polish women. Many who had until now remained silent about politics are speaking publicly. The slogan “women’s hell” has gone viral. A renowned sportswoman and two-time Olympic medal winner, Justyna Kowalczyk-Tekieli, said: “Polish women are diminished to the role of incubators. I do not know how one could condemn a woman to give birth to a dead foetus.”

So why is Kaczyński, in the middle of a global pandemic, lining up with a minority of reactionary anti-abortion activists allied to the Catholic church to declare war on women’s rights? Partly, this is another line of attack on the post-cold war liberal democratic order he holds in such contempt. More pragmatically it is a move by a leader on the back foot as he fights one losing battle against Covid-19 and another to keep a fragile governing coalition from falling apart. Using the constitutional court is a trick to dodge a repeat of 2016 and any potential pushback by parliament.

On the far right, meanwhile, Kaczyński has to compete with the Confederation, a party that is gaining ground with a more radical set of policies. Kaczyński’s move to revive the anti-abortion law aims to boost the coalition, marginalise the Confederation and thank the church for its support in recent years. It is also a ‘“populistainment” classic beloved of the PiS: light a fire, arouse strong emotions and make spectators choose sides. Kaczyński’s address to party rank and file via social media on Tuesday night, calling for a defence of the Catholic church “at all costs” was a perfect example of this tactic.

This time, however, the populist playbook isn’t quite working. A new political faultline has been created and Kaczyński can’t control the outcome or put the genie back in the bottle. He has another three years until elections but women who had shown no interest in party politics are outraged and on the march. Heavily armed policemen and vans have had to be deployed around Kaczyński’s villa in Warsaw.

Almost 300 years ago, Montesquieu noted that while a despot is busy enslaving his subjects he may also be enslaving himself. This is the trap the embattled Kaczyński is falling into. As he deprives Polish citizens of their freedom of choice, he is becoming increasingly ensnared by the distorted political system he has himself created. And it could eventually consign him to the scrapheap of Polish history.

His cynical and potentially incendiary exploitation of religion reflects his political powerlessness in the Covid era. Liberals should draw their own practical conclusions and learn from his failing tactics to come up with a convincing strategy for the future.

The Polish government taken aback? 

The abortion ruling has caused anger beyond the usual groups of PiS opponents, and the scale of the protests appears to have taken the government by surprise.  

Shaun Walker, Central and eastern Europe correspondent for the Guardian reports on the Polish government's delay to the implementation of the abortion ban in the wake of large scale and continuing protests (Tue 3 Nov 2020). He writes: 

Poland’s rightwing government has delayed implementation of a controversial court ruling that would outlaw almost all abortion after it prompted the largest protests since the fall of communism.

“There is a discussion going on, and it would be good to take some time for dialogue and for finding a new position in this situation, which is difficult and stirs high emotions,” Michał Dworczyk, the head of the prime minister’s office, told Polish media on Tuesday.

The decision by the country’s constitutional tribunal promised to further tighten Poland’s abortion laws, which were already some of the strictest in Europe. The tribunal ruled that terminations should be illegal even in cases where a foetus is diagnosed with a serious and irreversible birth defect. This kind of abortion accounts for almost all of the small number of abortions performed legally in the country.

The decision has still not been published, despite a Monday deadline, and as such has not entered into force. “It’s clearly a political decision,” said Anna Wójcik, a researcher at the law studies institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Judgments are meant to be published with no delay. It’s a legal trick to withhold publishing.”

The tribunal’s decision, which was in response to a challenge from a group of rightwing MPs, has focused anger on the Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS has ruled Poland since 2015 and has been accused of eroding democratic norms during its time in power, including by packing the constitutional tribunal with its supporters.

The abortion ruling has caused anger beyond the usual groups of PiS opponents, and the scale of the protests appears to have taken the government by surprise. The more extreme wing of the party supports the constitutional ruling, but surveys show that much of the party’s voter base does not support tighter abortion restrictions, so the PiS hierarchy finds itself in a difficult spot.

The prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has called for talks with protesters and opposition MPs, while the PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, suggested a new proposal that would allow abortion in cases of life-threatening birth defects but not for conditions such as Down’s syndrome.

Duda’s proposal is likely to be criticised from both sides – as too weak by the extreme right of the ruling coalition, and as not going far enough by those leading the street protests.

The protesters have ignored a ban on gatherings of more than five people, intended to slow the spread of coronavirus, and have come out in force. More than 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Warsaw on Friday evening for the largest gathering so far. They shouted pro-choice and anti-PiS slogans.

There has also been violence in which far-right groups have attacked protesters, and government figures appeared to stoke the tensions. The PiS leader and deputy prime minister, Jarosław Kaczyński, told people they should “defend churches” from the protesters after some were defaced. Senior figures in the country’s powerful Catholic church have spoken out in favour of the constitutional ruling. 

Preacher man, don't tell me . . . 

Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote again from Bob Marley's song Get Up, Stand Up: 

Preacher man, don't tell me, Heaven is under the earth. I know you don't know What life is really worth. It's not all that glitters is gold; 'Alf the story has never been told: So now you see the light, eh! Stand up for your rights. come on! Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight! Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight! Most people think, Great god will come from the skies, Take away everything And make everybody feel high. But if you know what life is worth, You will look for yours on earth: And now you see the light, You stand up for your rights, jah!

The history of the struggle for democracy and human rights in Poland has been a long and winding journey 

Aspects of this history are contained in a number of articles and news stories on the LODE 1992 Re:LODE 2017 Information Wrap for the Polish city of Szczecin. The LODE cargo for Szczecin attempts to present a complex history, a history that in living memory includes the the fact that Szczecin was the German city of Stettin until the border between Germany and Poland was re-drawn in the aftermath of World War II.   

The last fifteen years, or so, in Poland have seen an erosion of human rights, of civility, the rule of law, of progressive policies and to some extent, democracy itself. Conservative aspects of Polish society, especially in rural communities, have morphed into a reactionary, and sometimes extreme and nativist type of nationalism. The very notion of national identity in Poland is inextricably entwined with the history of the Polish Catholic Church, resulting in the present tensions that exist between Catholic social teaching and a developing urban and secular society. 

Any version of the recent history of Poland must include the Solidarity movement, and it is in modern Gdansk that you will find the European Solidarity Centre. Attached to the gates of the shipyard is a portrait of Pope John Paul II, a significant actor in the fall of communism in Poland during the 1980's.

Close by to the Centre is the Sala BHP building where the historic Gdansk shipyard strike of 1980 was temporarily resolved in the Gdańsk Agreement at a public signing ceremony involving the strike's figurehead Lech Wałęsa. 

This building is now the SALA BHP Muzeum celebrating the historic events that took place here in August 1980.

LODE Legacy

In the LODE Legacy section of the Re:LODE 2017 project (Bluecoat Arts Centre Liverpool) there is an article LODE Legacy 2003 on the Loop-pool II project that e-space lab instigated, a live video streaming event that connected The Yellow House with students from the Gdansk High School immediately opposite the Gdansk Shipyard entrance. This took place over a period of three days as in international cultural exchange project, and using the then very novel and revolutionary Flash technology as the interface. The Yellow House group were based in Liverpool at the ICDC centre, while the Gdansk group were based in a room at the SALA BHP centre. 

These were days when the cultural atmosphere had not yet been significantly shaped by the present cultural divide between city and countryside. The following year e-space lab conducted a mapping project around the Shipyard zone in the expectation of the imminent and incremental erasure of its material industrial history. Not much of this fabric has survived, including the spaces occupied and used by an artistic community, apart from the SALA BHP.

Industry replaced by pasture?

The video documents both these projects to contextualise a sense of place during the period 2003/2004.

Loop-pool II

This year marked the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Gdańsk Agreement and was the subject of this DW story (30 Aug 2020):

Poland's Solidarity movement turns 40: A nail in the coffin of communism in Europe

Forty years ago, the independent trade union Solidarnosc was founded in Poland. It paved the way for the end of communism in Europe. But the country is divided on whether Lech Walesa, its leader, was a hero or a traitor.

Priest and electrician . . .

Date 30.08.2020

Author Monika Sieradzka

Forty years ago, the independent trade union Solidarnosc was founded in Poland. It paved the way for the end of communism in Europe. But the country is divided on whether Lech Walesa, its leader, was a hero or a traitor.

On August 31, 1980, shipyard electrician Lech Walesa, who was representing striking Polish workers, sat down at a table with Poland's vice premier, Mieczyslaw Jagielski, to sign a joint agreement.

The most important concession made by the government after weeks of strikes at several Polish companies was to allow the formation of a free trade union. On September 17, Solidarnosc (meaning 'Solidarity') was officially founded as the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain.

But at the time, Walesa did not really believe the promise made by the communist regime. "They will destroy it; they have to, is what I thought back then," he told DW in an interview. He still had fresh memories of previous anti-communist protests in Poland in 1956, 1970 and 1976, which ended in bloody clashes with the police.

Millions against the communists

Walesa had been working as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard (now Gdansk Shipyard) in Gdansk since 1967. The shipyard built ships for the international market and brought considerable amounts of foreign currency into the communist country. The strikes at the shipyard began in mid-August 1980, but there had already been smaller protests at companies in other parts of Poland in July.

A picture of Pope John Paul II appeared on the Lenin Shipyard gate during strikes in August 1980

Polish-born Pope John Paul II provided one important source of inspiration when, during a Mass in Warsaw in 1979, he spoke the sentence "Be not afraid." These words became a mantra for millions of Poles who were angry at the way the country's communist rulers had granted themselves privileges and let the economy go to rack and ruin during their 35 years in power. Within a few weeks, 10 million of Poland's 35 million inhabitants had joined the Solidarnosc movement.

Worker power

"What made it special was that the movement was driven by workers. That gave it its impetus and power," says German historian Peter Oliver Loew, the director of the German Poland Institute in the city of Darmstadt.

"When a couple of intellectuals take to the streets, it doesn't make a revolution. But when there is a strike at a business that a state relies on for part of its revenue, it very much calls into question a communist system that legitimates itself by claiming to represent the proletariat," says Loew, who sees many parallels between Solidarnosc and the current wave of protests in Belarus.

Walesa was constantly aware of the danger that the protests could again be brutally put down. "You have to be totally determined; otherwise you can't lead the others. You have to think: There is no family anymore, no death, no money. I knew that they could kill me at any time. But I thought: They can kill me, but not vanquish me," he said.

Fight for freedom

The East German dissident Joachim Gauck, who was later to become president in the reunited Germany, reacted to the events in Poland "with enthusiasm and skepticism," he says today.

He told DW that people in the former communist East Germany had lost any hope of change after events such as the suppression of the protest on June 17, 1953 and the construction of the Berlin Wall, leading to a feeling of political helplessness. By contrast, he said, Poles had shown for centuries that they were ready to fight for their own identity whenever possible. He related how he had once said on a visit to Poland that "the language of freedom is Polish."

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, Poland already had its first non-communist prime minister. There had been "Round Table" talks between the government and Solidarnosc in the spring of 1989, and the first semi-democratic elections behind the Iron Curtain took place in Poland in June.

The high price of freedom

But this leadership role in the fight against communism came at a high price. On December 13, 1981, the dream of freedom had by the Poles a year before was dashed. The government imposed martial law, a state that continued until 1983, and dramatically restricted civil liberties. Some 10,000 dissidents were detained, and dozens were killed. Solidarnosc had to go underground and was not allowed to register again until 1989.

The situation in Poland at the time provoked very mixed reactions from Western countries. The then German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), saw martial law in the neighboring country as a stabilizing factor. But the USA and Britain both condemned its imposition. The anti-communist opposition in Poland received a boost from Norway in 1983, when Walesa, in prison at the time, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Solidarnosc's legacy

The democracy movement associated with the independent trade union Solidarnosc has now become a founding myth of present-day Poland. When Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says that "today's Poland has grown from Solidarnosc," he is speaking for all Poles, regardless of their political orientation. That is because Solidarnosc brought together people from many different parts of the political spectrum, from right to left.

And it is precisely because of this that it is often a bone of contention among present-day Polish politicians. "Many people have the right to see themselves as continuing the tradition of Solidarnosc, but what we are seeing in Poland at the moment is that representatives of the right-wing, the PiS (Law and Justice Party) government, claim that they are the only ones qualified to carry out its legacy," says Peter Oliver Loew.

Hero or traitor?

In the almost five years since the national-conservative Law and Justice party has been in power, those people from Solidarnosc who are politically in line with the government are held up as heroes at official ceremonies and cultural events. Walesa, who was Poland's president from 1990 to 1995, is not one of them; he has often sharply criticized the anti-liberal policies of the PiS government.

Walesa is a thorn in the flesh of the PiS. In government-friendly media, he has been mostly depicted as an agent of the communist Security Service, a secret police and intelligence agency along the lines of the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB.

In 2015, documents were found pointing to his collaboration with the former secret police. Walesa is said to have been pushed into this collaboration in 1970 when he was arrested with some 130 other workers during anti-government protests in Gdansk. But by the end of the 1970s, before he joined the opposition movement, his contacts to the communist secret service had ended.

The debate on whether Walesa was a hero or a traitor, and whether his later achievements canceled out his guilt, still divides Poland. This year's commemorations of the foundation of Solidarnosc will be overshadowed by the dispute as they are every year.

Lech Wałęsa interviewed forty years on . . .

. . . still a thorn in the flesh?

Here is a link to The Guardian picture essay (Fri 23 Oct 2020), including the photography of Kasia Strek covering the fight over abortion in Poland under the headline:

The price of choice

After a court ruling in Poland imposed a near-total ban on abortions, police used pepper spray against those protesting against the changes.

Polish photojournalist Kasia Strek, based between Paris and Warsaw, has covered the past few years of debate, protest and activism over Poland’s restrictive abortion laws as part of a wider project on abortion around the world

The contextualisation of the images is by Shaun Walker, Central and eastern Europe correspondent for the Guardian. Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote this informative extract from the essay text:  

Poland, where the Catholic church remains hugely powerful, and rightwing social conservatives are in power, has some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in Europe, but one thing had seemed clear in recent years: attempts to tighten the rules even further were doomed to fail, due to public outrage.

In 2016, a huge grassroots movement led by women sprung up in cities across the country, when the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party flirted with the idea of backing draconian proposals put forward by rightwing groups seeking criminal liability for women looking to have abortions, and investigations into “suspicious” miscarriages.

The legislative plans were shelved after the huge traction gained by the so-called “black protests”. The government backed off the plans, and then again in 2018 from a version that removed criminal liability but would still ban all abortion.

But now, with mass protest difficult amid the pandemic, the constitution tribunal, which has been politicised by PiS, has moved ahead with tightening the law. The new provision bans abortion in cases where “prenatal tests or other medical indications indicate a high probability of severe and irreversible foetal impairment or an incurable life-threatening disease”.

This kind of abortion, which rightwing Catholics have dubbed “eugenic abortion”, has accounted for around 98% of the small number of legal abortions in Poland in recent years. The constitutional tribunal agreed with a submission from rightwing MPs claiming it violates the constitutional right to life.

A number of surveys have shown that only a radical minority in Polish society is in favour of further restrictions on abortions, even if attitudes on further liberalisation are more split.

Solidarity . . .

. . . and a particular version of "freedom" and the neoliberal agenda

"GONE WITH THE WIND"

Milton Friedman in association with Pentagon productions presents . . . 

. . . the two most prominent politicians in the 1980's who were proud champions of the neoliberal version of "freedom", Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The artist Hans Haacke, already referenced in a previous post, continued his institutional critique throughout the 1980s to target corporations and museums in his work through larger scale installations and paintings. In 1982, at the documenta 7 exhibition, Haacke exhibited a very large work that included oil portraits of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 19th-century style, facing on the opposite wall a gigantic photograph of the demonstration against nuclear arms held earlier that year - the largest demonstration in Germany since the end of the Second World War. The clear implication, supported by Haacke's remarks, was that these two figures were attempting to roll back their respective nations to the socially and politically regressive, laissez-faire, and imperialist policies of the 19th century. 

In 1988 he was given an exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London at which he exhibited the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, full of iconographic references featuring cameos of Maurice and Charles Saatchi. The Saatchis were well known not only as art collectors on an aggressive scale, widely affecting the course of the art world by their choices, but also as the managers of Thatcher's successful, fear-based political campaigns as well as that of the South African premier, P. W. Botha. On the table Haacke depicts a sculpture by Harry Bates of Pandora from the Tate collection. According to Hesiod, when Prometheus stole fire from heaven, Zeus, the king of the gods, took vengeance by presenting Pandora to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus. Pandora opened a jar left in her care containing sickness, death and many other unspecified evils which were then released into the world. Though she hastened to close the container, only one thing was left behind – usually translated as Hope, though it could also have the pessimistic meaning of "deceptive expectation". 

During the 90's Poland had its fair share of offices and their very important new occupants furnished with desks, behind which portraits of Margaret Thatcher and/or Ronald Reagan were displayed with a certain pride and posturing. These two works, by Hans Haacke from the 1980's, capture a certain unguarded quality in the masks of power, power at war with people and their right to act in their own interests. 

Internationalism and solidarity . . .

. . . has a history, and significant political and philosophical leadership of various persuasions, of both the right and the left. But it is significant figures from the left that these days, more than ever, run the risk of being discarded, and ending up;  

"on the ash-heap of history!" 

This phrase was used by Ronald Reagan in a speech addressing the UK parliament in Westminster on 8 June 1982. Solidarity was to be a watchword in the cold war mobilisation, and weaponisation, of ideas around "freedom" that were to be used in a propaganda war of ideologies, in what we would now recognise as a culture war. What kind of "freedom"? Individual freedom? Freedom from poverty and exploitation? Freedom from political oppression? Freedom to strike? Freedom to protest? Freedom to speak?

This video montage presents the speech to the UK parliament in which Ronald Reagan speaks of "the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism Leninism on the ash-heap of history." This is contrasted with Reagan's abuse of state power to suppress the legitimate protests of students at the University of California, Berkeley. The last segment is the opening of the film "Let Poland be Poland", hosted by Charlton Heston. Heston introduces the international day of Solidarity with Poland, and explains that Poles have not yet lost hope in freedom. So the rhetorical use of the term freedom in this propaganda effort was already being mobilised in this broadcast of Jan. 31, 1982, and taking advantage of the circumstances of martial law in Poland. 

Political rhetoric . . .

. . . and hypocrisy!

What it was all about, actually, was freedom for global capital? Freedom from social responsibility? Freedom to exploit? Freedom from the collective ownership of the means of production? 

Ronald Reagan, when as President Ronald Reagan and an ex-actor and a fan of the film comedy Back to the Future, referred to the film in his 1986 State of the Union Address when he said; 

"Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads'." 

Apparently, when he first saw the joke about him being president, "Ronald Reagan! The actor?", he ordered the projectionist of the theatre to stop the reel, saying: 

"roll it back . . . 

. . . and run it again!

Reagan was first elected to the Board of Directors of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in 1941, serving as an alternate member. After World War II, he resumed service and became third vice-president in 1946. The adoption of conflict-of-interest bylaws in 1947 led the SAG president and six board members to resign; Reagan was nominated in a special election for the position of president and was subsequently elected. He was chosen by the membership to serve seven additional one-year terms, from 1947 to 1952 and in 1959. Reagan led the SAG through eventful years that were marked by labor-management disputes, the Taft–Hartley Act, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and the Hollywood blacklist era.

During the late 1940s, Reagan and his then-wife, Jane Wyman, provided the FBI with the names of actors within the motion picture industry whom they believed to be communist sympathizers. Though he expressed reservations, he said, "Do they expect us to constitute ourselves as a little FBI of our own and determine just who is a Commie and who isn't?"

Reagan also testified on the subject before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A fervent anti-communist, he reaffirmed his commitment to democratic principles, stating, "I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment."

Reagan gained national attention in his speeches for conservative presidential contender Barry Goldwater in 1964. Speaking for Goldwater, Reagan stressed his belief in the importance of smaller government. He consolidated themes that he had developed in his talks for GE to deliver his famous speech, "A Time for Choosing":

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing ... You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream—the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.

    — October 27, 1964

This "A Time for Choosing" speech was not enough to turn around the faltering Goldwater campaign, but it was the key event that established Reagan's national political visibility

California Republicans were impressed with Reagan's political views and charisma after his "A Time for Choosing" speech, and in late 1965 he announced his campaign for Governor in the 1966 election. He defeated former San Francisco mayor George Christopher in the GOP primary. 

In Reagan's campaign, he emphasized two main themes: "to send the welfare bums back to work," and, in reference to burgeoning anti-war and anti-establishment student protests at the University of California at Berkeley, "to clean up the mess at Berkeley." In 1966, Reagan accomplished what both U.S. Senator William F. Knowland in 1958 and former Vice President Richard Nixon in 1962 had attempted to do: he was elected, defeating two-term governor Pat Brown, and was sworn in on January 2, 1967. In his first term, he froze government hiring and approved tax hikes to balance the budget.

As Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, Ronald Reagan had been publicly critical of university administrators for tolerating student demonstrations at the Berkeley campus. He had received popular support for his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to crack down on what the public perceived as a generally lax attitude at California's public universities. Reagan called the Berkeley campus "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants." Reagan considered the creation of a People's Park in Berkeley a direct leftist challenge to the property rights of the university, and he found in it an opportunity to fulfil his campaign promise.

In an address before the California Council of Growers on April 7, 1970, almost a year after the events of what came to be known as "Bloody Thursday", and the death of demonstrator James Rector, Governor Reagan defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell the Berkeley protests: 

"If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."

 

Berkeley Tribe editors decided to issue this quote in large type on the cover of its next edition.

Authoritarians and the rule of law 

On the death of Margaret Thatcher the English section of Polish Radio at Radio Poland ran this article:

Sikorski - 'Thatcher was a fearless champion of liberty'

08.04.2013 

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has described former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as 'a fearless champion of liberty' after news of her death was released on Monday.

Sikorski, who was himself granted asylum in the UK after martial law was declared by Poland's communist authorities in 1981, reflected that Baroness Thatcher “stood up for captive nations” and “helped the free world win the Cold War.”

Writing on his Twitter account, Sikorski declared that the late British leader “deserves a statue in Poland.”

Sikorski's sentiments were echoed later on Monday by former president Lech Walesa, the erstwhile leader of the Solidarity trade union.

“She was a great person. She did a great deal for the world, along with [late US president] Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Solidarity, she contributed to the demise of communism in Poland and Central Europe,” Walesa told Agence France Presse (AFP).

“I'm praying for her,” he added.

Baroness Thatcher died of a stroke aged 87 on Monday morning, according to her spokesman Lord Bell. She had been suffering from dementia for several years, as was first acknowledged by her daughter Carol, in 2008.

As head of Britain's conservative party, Thatcher, dubbed 'the Iron Lady,' became the UK's first female prime minister in May 1979, holding the post until November 1990.

Although a staunch anti-communist, recently declassified documents indicate that she wavered over throwing Britain's weight behind Solidarity in December 1981, after martial law was declared in Poland.

30.12.2012

Documents on martial law in Poland have been made public by the British state archives, with President Reagan describing the crackdown as “a watershed in the political history of mankind.”

Many of the documents show that while President Ronald Reagan thought that sanctions should be brought against the regime in Moscow and not just Warsaw, Britain was less keen to widen the conflict.

In a note to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a week after martial law began on 13 December 1981, Reagan, signing his note with an informal “Ron”, writes: “[M]easures must be addressed to the Soviet Union as well as to the Polish regime. There can be no doubt about the ultimate responsibility for the plight in which the Polish people find themselves.”

Reagan adds that the democratic struggle by the Solidarity trade union and the resulting communist crackdown “may well be a watershed in the political history of mankind.”

Another document shows a transcript of a conversation between Thatcher and her foreign secretary at the time, Lord Peter Carrington.

Thatcher describes Reagan's note as “vague” and “not worth reading when it came in about half eleven [at night].”

“He says that he's sending someone over to talk about what we can do between the two of us to tackle the situation. But it's simply an internal situation,” Prime Minister Thatcher adds.

The diplomatic reports released by the British this week had been classified as secret for over a thirty year period and released along with documents relating to the reaction of the government led by Margaret Thatcher to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

The files include personal evaluations of the main characters responsible for the clampdown on Solidarity and pro-democratic forces.

British diplomatic notes from Moscow suggest that though martial law had been actually imposed by the Polish communist regime, it was thought that the Kremlin had been pushing for such force solution already in early autumn of that year.

A Moscow-based diplomat under the pseudonym of “Keeble” reported that Warsaw Pact communications systems had been used for planning the operation.

Another report sent from Warsaw 10 days after the imposition of martial law and signed by someone going under the name of “James” includes character sketches of communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski and his closest associates.

Jaruzelski is described as “an idealistic communist, who had severed all ties with family members that still remembered his father’s death during their exile to Siberia.”

General Florian Siwicki is portrayed as “a staunch Soviet admirer who joined the Red Army at the age of seventeen and has family ties with Russia,” while another communist leader, General Wlodzimierz Oliwa is “Moscow’s man with whom even Jaruzelski must reckon.”

In successive reports from Warsaw “James” anticipates that after tanks are withdrawn from public places, Poland awaits a long “period of normalization” in the rendition of the Security Service and erstwhile police forces which, apart from the professional party apparatchiks, had been the only groups not to have been infiltrated by revolutionary Solidarity ideals

Another article published in New Eastern Europe around the announcement of the death of Margaret Thatcher, reflecting on the the Thatcher/Reagan legacy and the fall of communism. 

Margaret Thatcher and the Collapse of Communism

Published on Wednesday, 10 April 2013 

Category: Articles and Commentary

Written by Filip Mazurczak

Margaret Thatcher, one of the great political figures of postwar Europe, has died at the age of 87. Thatcher’s accomplishments are significant, especially her revitalisation of the British economy following the disappointing 1970s mired in stagflation. However, Margaret Thatcher’s role in the collapse of Communism was much more modest than many have exaggerated.

In assessing the true role that Thatcher played in the collapse of Communism a helpful starting point is The Cold War: A New History written by Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis, arguably the greatest living historian of the Cold War. Gaddis identifies six “saboteurs of the status quo” most responsible for the end of the Cold War: Pope John Paul II, Lech Wałęsa, Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Of these six individuals, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping arguably have the most modest role in the end of Communism. Lewis essentially limits their role to; 

reigniting the world’s faith in the superiority of laissez-faire capitalism over the planned economy in the economic crisis-hit 1980s.

The British journalist John O’Sullivan – himself a former speechwriter for Thatcher – went a step further, writing a book titled The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. According to Sullivan’s book – whose bibliography mostly consists of secondary notes and, at least in regards to its discussion of Poland, contains some factual errors – Margaret Thatcher is one of the three individuals most influential in the end of Communism. O’Sullivan’s book typifies much of the Cold War literature that grossly exaggerates Thatcher’s role in ending Communism.

Thatcher’s relationship with Solidarity was quite ambiguous. In January 1982, right after the imposition of martial law in Poland, the United States Information Agency produced a television special for American viewers entitled Let Poland Be Poland. Hosted by Charlton Heston, the film features uplifting words of support for the Polish nation from celebrities as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles. Margaret Thatcher also makes an appearance in the programme, claiming that many in Britain admire the bravery of the Polish fighter pilots who fought in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and that the Poles’ defiance of totalitarianism again impresses many Britons.

Another gesture of support for Poland was Thatcher’s visit to Gdansk, the cradle of Solidarity, in 1988. She had rejected General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s invitation three years earlier, and insisted that she would once again decline to visit Poland if she could not meet with the head of Solidarity Lech Wałęsa and Cardinal Józef Glemp, the head of the Catholic Church in the country. During the visit, Lady Thatcher laid flowers at Westerplatte, the site where the first shots of the Second World War were fired.

Despite these sympathetic gestures, Thatcher herself was skeptically disposed towards Solidarity. Recently declassified archives discussed at length in Germany’s Der Spiegel reveal that, based on the notes of West German diplomats, Thatcher herself distrusted Solidarity and Lech Wałęsa. Specifically, she feared that Solidarity’s demands as a labour union would radicalise Polish society and lead to Soviet intervention. Whereas the United States directly helped fund Solidarity through the CIA, Thatcher’s foreign minister, Peter Carrington, claimed that Britain would not directly support Solidarity and its aid to Poland would be limited to kind words. Thus, Margaret Thatcher opposed the Reagan White House’s imposition of sanctions against General Jaruzelski’s Poland in the 1980s. This fact should be somewhat surprising to the many Polish politicians and journalists who in the past few days have been repeating that they owe their freedom in large part to Margaret Thatcher.

Also, it is worth noting that Thatcher vociferously opposed the reunification of Germany, a symbol of the reunification of Europe after 1989 to many, fearing that it would lead to an aggressive rearmed German state. In this regard it is surprising that so many in the media regard Margaret Thatcher and not, for example, Helmut Kohl, as one of the figures most responsible for the unification of Europe.

The enemy without and the enemy within

"We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty," 

Margaret Thatcher speech to the backbench 1922 committee, July 1984.

In 2013 the release of government documents to the national archive from Downing Street reveal how: 

Margaret Thatcher wanted to crush power of trade unions

Alan Travis, Home affairs editor, reports for the Guardian in 2013 (Thu 1 Aug 2013):

The Cabinet papers published under the 30-year rule lay bare the scale of Margaret Thatcher's long-held ambitions to crush the power of Britain's trade unions even before she had won her historic 144-seat majority landslide victory.

The Downing Street papers from 1983 show she told Ferdinand Mount, then head of her policy unit, that she agreed that Norman Tebbit's gradualist approach to trade union reform was too timid and that they should "neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership".

Thatcher told Mount to put the policy work in hand but to keep his trade union reform paper, in which he referred to the unions as "a politicised mafia", wholly confidential. "We must neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership wherever this corresponds to the wishes of the workforce. We must see to it our new legal structure discourages trade union membership of the new industries," wrote Mount.

He said that by the end of the century they also hoped to see "a trade union movement whose exclusive relationship with the Labour party is reduced out of all recognition. Again, it is absurd and unjust that millions of Conservatives, Liberals and Social Democrats should be supporting the Labour party directly or indirectly. This relationship fossilises the Labour party and stultifies the whole political dialogue."

Although the prime minister responded by saying she agreed with Mount, his demand to ensure that trade union members had to opt in, rather than opt out of the political levy – as now being contemplated by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband – was regarded as a step too far at that time by Thatcher and Tebbit because it revived the argument about the financing of political parties. The Tories feared it could also lead to a quid pro quo ban on company donations.

They were not alone in their determination to take on the unions. As early as January 1983, Nigel Lawson – who had already spent two years as energy secretary building up coal stocks in preparation for the expected showdown with the miners – was telling Thatcher: "If Scargill succeeds in bringing about such a strike, we must do everything in our power to defeat him, including ensuring that the strike results in widespread closures."

In March, Thatcher's press secretary, Bernard Ingham, also urged her to take on the miners, telling her: "Events have not, however, challenged the post-war impression of their invincibility, for we have yet to beat a national stoppage … In my view the last thing we should do today is lend credibility to Scargill."

The cabinet papers released by the National Archives on Thursday show that the preparations – including a debate among Whitehall officials over whether troops should be used during the miners' strike – were well under way. Lawson also argued for a rapid acceleration in the pace of the pit closures secretly scheduled for 1983/84, demanding that 34 pits, including a dozen in Yorkshire and the Midlands, should be listed, rather than the 20 that eventually sparked the start of the strike in March 1984.

The papers show that detailed discussions on withstanding a coal strike went on in a secret committee of Whitehall officials known as Misc 57 throughout 1983. A good deal of work had already been done in 1982, when it was decided that it was not practicable to use servicemen to move coal by rail.

By that October, in a "secret and personal" note to Thatcher, Peter Gregson, the Cabinet Office deputy secretary, was telling her that using the army to move coal by road would be a formidable undertaking: "4-5,000 lorry movements a day for 20 weeks … the law and order problems of coping with pickets would be enormous … a major risk would be the power station workers would refuse to handle coal brought in by servicemen this way".

Misc 57 had thought there might be a limited role for the troops in delivering ancillary materials, such as lighting-up oil, under close supervision.

But Thatcher was careful not to close the door on the use of the army to move coal from the working pits to the power stations, and ordered further work to be done. In the following May, the issue was reopened when the Cabinet Office derided such uses of the army as "spectacular gestures which are likely in practice to worsen the situation".

Brigadier Tony Budd, secretary of the civil contingencies unit in the Cabinet Office, took exception, pointing out that this had not been the case when the army was used for "firefighting, providing an emergency ambulance service, refuse collection and even providing emergency car parking in London", despite some union "huffing and puffing".

In the event it was the paramilitary use of the police in pitched battles with mass pickets, rather than the army, that was to lead to some of the bitterest scenes in the miners' strike.

But the ultimately successful strategy was spelled out by Lawson to his cabinet colleagues in late 1982: to do everything to undermine the miners' will to continue a lengthy strike by demonstrating that its effects were limited. The preparations particularly focused on ensuring that electricity supplies were not interrupted for a considerable period of time.

What kind of liberty? Liberty for whom? Freedom for capital? Freedom to exploit? Freedom to destroy the biosphere? 

The former Conservative PM Harold Macmillan had something to say about Margaret Thatcher's view of British mineworkers. The New York Times reported on November 14, 1984, on a rousing speech given by the 90 year old Macmillan. The story sits alongside the headline Poland Warns Civic Watchdog Groups.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote these passages from this story: 

Lord Stockton, who was granted a hereditary earldom earlier this year by Queen Elizabeth II on the recommendation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, confined himself to measured words of praise for the Prime Minister and her policies - even though he, too, is a Conservative.

At 90 years of age, he said, he was too old to hope to see a bright new future for this country and could only ''hope to see the first gleams that precede the dawn.''

It was his maiden speech in the Lords, 60 years after his first appearance in the House of Commons, and more than 300 of his fellow peers came to listen to the familiar figure with the drooping mustache, now bent with age, discuss Britain's past, present and future. 

Lord Stockton said that the country needed a new industrial revolution that would come about only with intellectual, moral and spiritual revolutions as well.

Speaking of the coal miners' strike, which has lasted for almost nine months and has produced widespread violence on the picket lines, he told the assembled peers:

''It breaks my heart to see - and I cannot interfere - what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's and Hitler's armies and never gave in. It is pointless and we cannot afford that kind of thing.

''Then there is the growing division of comparative prosperity in the south and an ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows, but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred that has been brought in by different kinds of people.'' 

He brought whoops of laughter from all sides when he asked where the theories of monetarism, which the Prime Minister has doggedly supported, had really come from.

''Was it America?'' he inquired, ''Or was it Tibet? It is quite true, many of Your Lordships will remember it operating in the nursery. How do you treat a cold? One nanny said, 'Feed a cold'; she was a neo-Keynesian. The other said, 'Starve a cold'; she was a monetarist.''

That's just the way it is . . . 

. . . but don't you believe them!

The Cargo of Questions Information Wraps end with this coda. "That's the way it is", we are told, "but don't you believe them!", is good position to take in the information war. This coda links to a number of articles framed by the presence of the elephant in the room. The Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang is quoted: 

The free market doesn't exist. 

Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

This article is followed by an article on the First International where the following question posed by Friedrich Engels is quoted: 

What have the working classes to do with Poland?

Friedrich Engels answered this question when he came up with this article at Karl Marx’s request after controversy developed at the 1865 London conference of the International concerning including a demand for Poland’s independence in the upcoming Geneva Congress. 

In order to substantiate the position of the Central Committee on the “nationalities question,” it was necessary to deal with; 

• the Proudhonists who contended politics and national liberation movements have nothing to do with the working class, indeed, detracted from real working class issues, and;
• reveal the demagogic essence of the so-called “principle of nationalities” that helped the Bonapartists make use of national movements for their own political ends. 

This "internationalizing" of industrial workers across Europe and arguing for a degree of common political purpose across national boundaries is reflected in a number of articles by Friedrich Engels between the end of January and April 6, 1866 and first published in The Commonwealth, Nos. 159, 160 and 165, March 24, 31 and May 5, 1866. This is the beginning of the first of these articles:

Friedrich Engels writes: 

Sir – Wherever the working classes have taken a part of their own in political movements, there, from the very beginning, their foreign policy was expressed in the few words – Restoration of Poland. This was the case with the Chartist movement so long as it existed, this was the case with the French working men long before 1848, as well as during that memorable year, when on the 15th of May they marched on to the National Assembly to the cry of “dive la Pologne!” – Poland for ever! This was the case in Germany, when, in 1848 and ’49, the organs of the working class demanded war with Russia for the restoration of Poland. It is the case even now; – with one exception – of which more anon – the working men of Europe unanimously proclaim the restoration of Poland as a part and parcel of their political programme, as the most comprehensive expression of their foreign policy. The middle-class, too, have had, and have still, “sympathies” with the Poles, which sympathies have not prevented them from leaving the Poles in the lurch in 1831, in 1846, in 1863, nay, have not even prevented them from leaving the worst enemies of Poland, such as Lord Palmerston, to manage matters so as to actually assist Russia while they talked in favour of Poland. But with the working classes it is different. They mean intervention, not non-intervention, they mean war with Russia while Russia meddles with Poland, and they have proved it every time the Poles rose against their oppressors. And recently, the International Working Men’s Association has given a fuller expression to this universal instinctive feeling of the body it claims to represent, by inscribing on its banner, "Resistance to Russian encroachments upon Europe – Restoration of Poland.” 

Internationalism, solidarity and facing the climate emergency 

The present climate emergency can only be addressed successfully by nations working together in a common cause, and suspending the capitalist model of generating profit by one form of competitive advantage or another. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were right in their attempts to internationalise the politics of people power. 

During July 2017, as part of the Manchester International Festival, Turner Prize-nominated artist Phil Collins returned Friedrich Engels to the city where he made his name – in the form of a Soviet-era statue, driven across Europe and permanently installed outside HOME as part of:

Ceremony

The HOME webpage explains: 

Ceremony was a singular moment in our city’s history, for which performers, musicians and the people of Manchester created an extraordinary live film to bring MIF17 to a close, mixing footage from the statue’s journey with live coverage of its inauguration. The welcome celebration included a soundtrack by Mica Levi and Demdike Stare, a new anthem by Gruff Rhys, and stories of today’s Manchester workers filmed by Collins during his year-long MIF17 residency.

Friedrich Engels and communism . . .  

. . . are coming home!

Charlotte Higgins for the Guardian writes eloquently on why Phil Collins took a Soviet statue of Friedrich Engels from Ukraine across Europe to Manchester.  

Friedrich Engels spent two decades in Manchester. The horrific conditions he saw in the cradle of industrialism forged his great works. But the city has never commemorated him – until now 

Charlotte Higgins writes (Fri 30 Jun 2017): 

This month, the Berlin-based, British-born artist Phil Collins transported a 3.5 metre statue of Friedrich Engels from a village in eastern Ukraine, through Europe, to Britain on a flat-bed truck. Next month, during the Manchester international festival, the sculpture, a 1970s concrete image of the bearded revolutionary, will be erected in the city where he researched The Condition of the Working Class in England, its new permanent home.

Engels lived in Manchester for more than two decades in the mid-19th century, honing his revolutionary philosophy through his observations of the horrific conditions endured by the working children, women and men in that cradle of industrial capitalism. And, as Collins points out, though the philosopher’s life in Manchester is well studied and documented, there is no permanent marker to him in the city, no visual symbol of the man at all – despite the fact that his Manchester-forged thinking changed the course of 20th-century history.

This will be rectified on 16 July when, from its new perch in Tony Wilson Place, the lichen-encrusted figure with its air of “emphatic lyricism”, as Collins puts it, will gaze out over the contradictions of the “northern powerhouse”: its newbuilds, its post-industrial aspirations, its wealth that, just as it did in the 1840s, sits cheek by jowl with poverty. Perhaps it will foment revolution.

Collins’s recent works (he was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2006) have often burrowed into communist and post-communist history. A pair of films, Marxism Today and Use! Value! Exchange! (2010) examined what became of the teachers of Marxist theory in East Germany. One day they were teaching compulsory lessons in the DDR’s schools; the next their subject was obsolete. In Use! Value! Exchange! Collins filmed such a teacher giving one of her old lessons to a contemporary class, at the school she had both studied at and, before the fall of the wall, taught in. The footage was intercut with scenes of a statue of Marx being physically shifted from a commanding spot in Marx-Engels Forum in Berlin to a less prominent position.

Collins is interested in such acts of translation – the teaching that travels through time, the statue that travels through space. The abrupt shift in significance for the objects and ideas associated with communism fascinates him. “What happens to the symbols of your childhood when they are contaminated by the fall of the wall so that the only prism you can see it through is the prism of dictatorship, rather than life and love and friendship and all the other things that happened in everyday society?” he asks.

This is where the moving of the Engels sculpture to Manchester comes in. Since 2015, the signs and symbols of the former communist era have been outlawed in Ukraine. Statues and murals are supposed to be removed and destroyed, and streets renamed. “But a lot of towns don’t know what to do with the sculptures. There’s no rationale for what to do with these icons or monuments, or what method of destruction to use,” says Collins. Sometimes the statues are left in a strange limbo – removed from their old spots, but left to moulder quietly out of the public gaze – for who knows whether one day they will be needed again? 

It took nearly two years to track down a suitable statue of Engels. Finally one was discovered in the village of Mala Pereshchepina, in a district formerly named after Engels in the Poltava region of eastern Ukraine. It had been deposed from its central position in the village, cut in half at the waist, dumped in an agricultural compound and covered over with large raffia bags. It had the traces of pale-blue and yellow paint on its legs, the Ukrainian national colours.

Eight months of negotiation followed, for the sculpture was in a legal, as well as physical, limbo. But it wasn’t a “wrangle or a barter”, says Collins. It was a gift – albeit one that necessitated a lot of paperwork. Its appearance in Manchester will be another translation – a statue abruptly transplanted from one edge of Europe to another, but also from one sense of history to another, and from one community to another.

Engels is not an uncomplicated figure. If he is discredited in Ukraine, associated with a cruel and inhuman regime, then one might ask what business Collins has in commemorating him in Manchester. The artist, however, like a number of his biographers (including V&A director and former Labour MP Tristram Hunt, author of The Frock-coated Communist), forbears to hold him responsible for the atrocities committed under communist regimes in the mid-20th century, and points out that “millions of lives have also been squandered via the interpretation of the words of other figures” – not least Christ.

“Manchester is a meeting point. It represents both the birth of capitalism and the factory system and the magic of capitalism, the magic of surplus value. But Manchester is also a site of resistance to that – of the Chartists and the 1842 general strike and the suffragettes and the Vegetarian Society,” he says. It’s this latter, radical side of the city that can’t be found, says Collins, among its memorials and statues and street names. The sculpture of Engels will subtly shift the balance.

Engels has often played second fiddle to Marx. That was true in life, when the younger man toiled away to support the Marx family, and when, after his friend’s death, he completed Capital from Marx’s notes. But, just as many thinkers looked at Marx afresh after the 2008 financial crisis, it is to Engels that some have turned as Britain reaches a crisis of austerity. Engels’s early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, was written after a sojourn in Manchester between 1842 and 1844, where he was sent from his home in Barmen near Wuppertal in Germany to learn the family business: the Engelses were wealthy cotton-mill owners with interests in Manchester.

The book, which was translated into English only in the 1880s, makes pretty grim reading in 2017. He wrote, in Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky’s translation, of the “tender concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie”, and of Manchester, a city so in hock to profit that “no hole is so bad but that some poor creature must take it who can pay for nothing better”. Engels repeatedly used the phrase “social murder” to describe the conditions in which the proletariat were obliged to live. It is hard not to think of Grenfell Tower.

After the 1848 revolutions in continental Europe, and the publication of his and Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Engels returned to Manchester, living there from 1850 for another two decades. He established two lives: one of the capitalist, the other of the revolutionary. On the one hand, he was the bourgeois industrialist, working for the Engels firm, on the other his lover was Mary Burns, a poor Irish immigrant who was Virgil to his Dante in the slums of Manchester (after Mary’s death, he transferred his affections to her sister Lizzie, a passionate Fenian).

On the one hand, he rode out with the Cheshire hunt, an activity that he guiltily adored, and that he justified to Marx on the grounds that, in John Green’s translation, “we need to be able to outride the Prussian cavalry when we return to Germany”; on the other, he was keeping himself permanently short, siphoning off his income to feed his fellow revolutionaries. On the one hand, he was a poetic soul, whose first book had been a study of the poet Horace and who loved Shelley; on the other, he was a philosopher sharpening his applications of historical materialism. On the one hand, he married Lizzie Burns on her deathbed; on the other, he abhorred the capitalist institution of marriage. 

It is to precisely such contradictions that Collins was drawn. “He was bound to the system in a way that a lot of us are,” he says. “His resistance within the system is very familiar. There is no anterior position now, no position outside the system. You take an easyJet to an environmental conference. We are all compromised by the system and articulate resistance within it. He’s a perfect reflection of our problems today.”

While the statue was found and acquired, Collins was working in Manchester, where he has been largely based since October. He began working with local organisations – crisis centres for homeless people, Get Ready for Work clubs and others – learning of people’s experiences under the past seven years of austerity measures. The results of these investigations will form part of a new film that will accompany the inauguration of the statue – an inquiry, of sorts, into the condition of the working class in England, in the spirit of Engels. There is one crucial difference: the voices of the people Collins encountered will take centre stage, which marks a change from Engels’s book in which the Mancunian workers themselves are mostly silent. What has struck Collins forcibly, he says, is “a new concealed language” used to mask the grimness of life among Britain’s precarious poor.

He is referring to euphemistically named schemes such as workfare, which obliges people to work for free, sometimes for profit-making companies, in return for receiving benefits. “The way the benefits system works is so byzantine and so ugly, and named in ways that people don’t understand. That for me is the central point – the systems built over the past seven years mean there is a lack of care between us and towards the most vulnerable,” he says. We are living “in a time of absolute prosperity but we are unable to see the stress and misery of people living with measures like the bedroom tax, of people suffering under forms of hidden punishment that is meted out to, broadly, migrants and immigrants.” These people are, he argues, the new proletariat.

On the day of the grand inauguration, the film will be shown to the public on a big screen in the neighbouring car park, and workshops and events will take place in what the artist is calling “Engels Exchange” in Tony Wilson Place – discussions with academics and activists, poster- and banner-making workshops, a “dress up as Engels” stall, a Mary Burns lookalike competition. “If you only have a party, you don’t honour his importance,” says Collins. “If you only have a serious discussion, you lose part of his froth and love of life.”

At the moment, awaiting removal to its new home, the sculpture sits in a crepuscular old depot near Piccadilly station. When we went to visit it, forlorn under its protective wrappings, Collins greeted it like an old friend. They had bonded on their journey from Ukraine. The sculpture had been sung to by a children’s choir on the Ukrainian border and been the subject of artists’ performances in Berlin. It had passed through Engels’s birthplace in Barmen. Now it was awaiting the last leg of its long journey, and its new life.

Songs for Friedrich . . . Engels is joined by a choir in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which is, coincidentally, another location situated along the LODE Zone Line.

A new proletariat . . . 

The origins of the modern use of the word proletariat are to be found in the early 19th century, when many Western European liberal scholars — who dealt with social sciences and economics — pointed out the socio-economic similarities of the modern rapidly growing industrial worker class and the definition of a social class of Roman citizens known as the proletarii. This term originated with the census, which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a register of citizens and their property, which determined their military duties and voting privileges. 

Those who owned 11,000 assēs or less fell below the lowest category for military service, and their children - prōlēs (offspring) - were listed instead of property; hence the name proletarius (producer of offspring). 

Roman citizen-soldiers paid for their own horses and arms, and fought without payment for the commonweal, but the only military contribution of a proletarius was his children, the future Roman citizens who could colonize conquered territories.

Swiss liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi was the first to apply the proletariat term to the working class created under capitalism, and whose writings were frequently cited by Karl Marx. Marx most likely encountered the term while studying the works of Sismondi. 

Marx, who studied Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, used the term proletariat in his socio-political theory (Marxism) to describe a progressive working class untainted by private property and capable of revolutionary action to topple capitalism and abolish social classes, leading society to ever higher levels of prosperity and justice. 

Marx defined the proletariat as the social class having no significant ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, land, mines, buildings, vehicles) and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary.

Marxist theory only vaguely defines the borders between the proletariat and adjacent social classes. In the socially superior, less progressive direction are the lower petty bourgeoisie, such as small shopkeepers, who rely primarily on self-employment at an income comparable to an ordinary wage. Intermediate positions are possible, where wage-labour for an employer combines with self-employment. In another direction, the lumpenproletariat or "rag-proletariat", which Marx considers a retrograde class, live in the informal economy outside of legal employment: the poorest outcasts of society such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes.

. . . the gig worker in a gig economy? 

The world's oldest colony . . . 

. . . is Puerto Rico. The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, situated along the LODE Zone Line, was originally a colony of Spain from 1493 to 1898 and subsequently, of the United States, from 1898 to the present. As the outcome of the US presidential election hangs in the balance, the voice of opinion as well as the political will of the people of Puerto Rico, will have significant weighting, even though as United States citizens, they cannot vote in presidential elections.  

Aina Khan for Al Jazeera reporting on the eve of the presidential election, 2 November 2020, under the headline:

Puerto Rico cannot vote but could be important in US election

Islanders cannot vote in the United States presidential election, but both parties have sought to win Puerto Ricans on the mainland.

A boy carries the U.S flag while wearing a pro-Trump cap in Puerto Rico

In the days before the United States presidential election, Kemuel Delgado has been working hard to galvanise voters – even though he and his fellow Puerto Rican islanders are not able to vote themselves.

Delgado, the first Puerto Rican Muslim to represent precinct 029 Hatillo as electoral commissioner, has been urging Puerto Ricans to encourage their relatives and friends to vote on the US mainland, where Latinos are expected to be largest minority voting bloc in the November 3 polls.

“We have no congressional representation in the US despite having more citizens than 21 states,” Delgado told Al Jazeera.

“It’s horrible to be treated as a second-class citizen, to feel not wanted in your own country. I want my people to have the same rights as the US mainland citizens.”

Following in the footsteps of his uncle, who is the mayor of Hatillo, Delgado became involved in politics as a teenager in 2012. He was appointed president of the Hatillo youth branch of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) or New Progressive Party, one of Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood parties currently in power.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in 2017, which killed thousands of people, sparked a political awakening for Delgado, when the PNP’s mishandling of the disaster and a leaked text-message scandal exposed a range of failures.

Hurricane disaster supplies were left to rot, and millions of dollars in federal education and Medicaid funds were misplaced under then-Governor Ricardo Rossello, who resigned in August of last year following weeks of mass protests.

“Ever since that moment that I saw my people treated as second class, I knew I wanted to be an advocate for statehood,” he said.

Kemuel Delgado

Decolonising Puerto Rico

Disillusioned with the PNP, Delgado left the party in 2017, later joining the anti-colonial Citizen’s Victory Movement when it was created last year. The nascent party, formed from a collective of pro-independence parties, focuses on promoting equality, education and labour reforms, tackling corruption, and the decolonisation of Puerto Rico, which has been an “unincorporated territory” of the US since 1898.

Puerto Ricans have been recognised as US citizens since 1917 and their island’s 3.1 million residents are able vote in US presidential primaries, but they are not allowed to vote in US presidential elections.

Julio Ortiz-Luquis, professor in international politics at the City University of New York, said their political status is entangled in US colonial history.

“Puerto Rico was occupied and colonised as part of US’s imperial expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which also saw the 1848 annexation of half of Mexico, the 1898 Spanish American War, and the occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” he said.

Since 1968, Puerto Rico has held five referendums on its political status. The first referendum saw residents vote for its current commonwealth status as an unincorporated state, subject to Congress’s authority. Other questions on the ballots have included whether to vote for statehood, which would see the annexation of Puerto Rico to the US to become its 51st state, or to vote for independence from the US.

On November 3, Puerto Ricans will have another chance to vote in a statehood referendum, when voters will be asked whether Puerto Rico should be immediately admitted to the union as a state.

The most recent referendum held in 2017 saw weak turnout and overwhelming support for statehood. “The 2017 plebiscite was boycotted by all anti-statehood Puerto Rican parties, resulting in statehood receiving 97 percent support, with only 23 percent of registered voters’ participation,” Professor Ortiz-Luquis said.

Florida and the Puerto Rican vote

The exodus of Puerto Ricans to the US mainland after Hurricane Maria has lately created enough political gravitas to attract the attention of the campaigns of US President Donald Trump and opponent Joe Biden this election season. Both candidates have distributed printed posters and promoted social media hashtags in Puerto Rico to sway residents to urge a burgeoning electorate living in the mainland US to cast a vote in their favour.

While Trump secured the endorsement from Puerto Rico’s current governor, Wanda Vazquez, the island’s largest circulated newspaper, El Nuevo Dia, endorsed Joe Biden, the first time the paper endorsed a presidential candidate in its 50-year history.

Though voter turnout among Puerto Ricans in the US has historically been low, according to Professor Ortiz-Luquis, labour unions and Puerto Rican organisations such as Vamos4PR, Power 4 Puerto Rico and Boricua Vota have sought to mobilise voters mostly in swing states.

Among these crucial political battlegrounds is Florida, home to the largest Puerto Rican diaspora in the US, with an estimated population of 1.2 million, more than 850,000 of whom can vote.

Florida is often seen as a bellwether state: In the 2016 presidential election, Trump clinched a win in Florida against Hillary Clinton by a single percentage point. Barack Obama won the state twice in 2008 and 2012.

Isha Rodriguez, a 22-year-old Puerto Rican, will cast her vote for the first time on November 3 since moving to Jacksonville, Florida. Among her key reasons for backing Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden were his positions on abortion, immigration, guns, education, healthcare and the minimum wage.

However, she was not optimistic about the outcome of the election. “Even though I’m voting for Joe Biden, I believe that Trump will win again,” she said.

Delgado believes that Trump’s attempts to paint his Democratic opponent as a socialist could prove effective in turning Puerto Rican voters against Biden. Moreover, the Republican party’s alignment with conservative Christian values also appeals to older Puerto Rican voters who have recently migrated to Florida, according to Delgado.

“I do think [Trump] might win the Puerto Rican vote in Florida due to the Republican’s conservative values. There is a bit of cultural disconnect between the Puerto Ricans in the island that are more conservative, and the ones in the States,” Delgado added.

“Many Puerto Ricans in the States are more liberal, and the ones on the island are more conservative. [Older voters] might cast their presidential vote for the first time for Donald Trump, because they don’t see their values align with Democratic ideals. When they see Donald J Trump, they see the fulfilment of biblical prophecies through his hands and his presidency.”

A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage saw more opposition from Puerto Ricans living on the island, which is predominantly Christian, compared to those living on the mainland US.

Statehood resolution?

Ahead of the 2020 vote, Delgado is hopeful that the election of a Democratic president will bring a resolution of Puerto Rico’s statehood question.

While neither Biden nor his vice-presidential running mate Kamala Harris has indicated a clear position on the question of statehood, Republican senators have claimed that the Democrats would make Puerto Rico a state if they win the elections.

On September 16, Biden hinted at his support for statehood at a Hispanic Heritage Month event in Kissimmee, Florida, when he said statehood “would be the most effective means of ensuring that residents of Puerto Rico are treated equally.”

“The people of Puerto Rico must decide, and the United States federal government must respect and act on that,” he added.

Delgado said: “We’re the first colony in the Americas and we’re the last standing. Many Puerto Ricans here are trying to tell Boricuas [Puerto Ricans] in the States, ‘Please vote in the presidential election. Your vote actually determines the future of Puerto Rico.'”

Kemuel Delgado attends a statehood rally

The future of Puerto Rico's statehood is; 

hanging in the balance! 

The 2020 Puerto Rican status referendum result

Based on the completed unofficial election night count, the option to pursue statehood won the referendum 52.34%–47.66%.

In Liverpool, sharing with Kingston upon Hull as a nodal point in determining the LODE Zone Line, the high rates of transmission of the Covid-19 coronavirus in the Merseyside region are to be tackled using a new test-trace-and-isolate regime, along with the severest of the three tier restrictions.

Sarah Boseley and Jessica Elgot for the Guardian report on a new test and trace initiative to mass test for the Covid-19 virus (Mon 2 Nov 2020) under the headline and subheading:   

Liverpool to pioneer UK's first attempt at mass Covid testing

Up to 500,000 people in city will be tested in bid to measure feasibility of mass population screening

Up to half a million people in Liverpool are set to be tested for Covid-19 under the UK government’s first attempt to embark on city-wide mass testing and track down every case of the virus.

The Guardian also understands that the self-isolation period for those who test positive for coronavirus, and their contacts, could be cut from the current 14-day period to seven days as early as this week.

It comes after ministers, who announced a new England-wide lockdown from Thursday amid soaring cases, face pressure to improve the beleaguered £12bn test-and-test trace system to control outbreaks and limit the lockdown to four weeks.

Under the Liverpool mass testing programme, which begins on Friday and will cover everyone living and working in the city, a variety of test types and the logistical help of the army will be deployed in a pilot to see whether mass population screening is feasible across other regions of England, as proposed in Operation Moonshot.

To be successful, it will need not only to find those who are infected regardless of symptoms, but convince them to self-isolate. Only 20% to 25% of people are estimated to quarantine fully when asked to do so by test and trace.

With that in mind, the government is also pushing forward with plans to cut the self-isolation period. It is understood to be preparing to make changes this week, including potentially halving the 14-day timeframe.

The move comes amid rising concerns in Downing Street about compliance with the new lockdown rules and instructions to quarantine.

“Those who have been contacted need to self-isolate,” Johnson told MPs in the Commons on Wednesday. “We’ll be making a big, big push on that. Because, I must be candid with the house, alas the proportion of people who are self-isolating in response to the urges of NHS test and trace is not yet high enough.”

An all-out effort to get as many people tested as possible in Liverpool – one of the country’s worst-hit areas with weekly Covid cases of 410 in every 100,000 last week – will depend on people’s willingness to come forward.

Testing of the 500,000-strong population will be carried out in new and existing sites, using home kits, in hospitals and care home settings, and in schools, universities and workplaces. Some will be invited for tests but walk-up and online bookings will also be possible, and 2,000 army personnel will be involved.

The tests will include rapid lateral-flow tests that can use nose-and-mouth swabs or saliva and produce results in 15 minutes, as well as the more reliable PCR tests, which are designed to return results within 24 hours – although this turnaround time is often doubled. “LAMP” technology will be used in Liverpool university hospitals NHS foundation trust for testing NHS staff.

People who test positive will receive a text or email from NHS test-and-trace staff and will be asked to self-isolate and share details of close contacts.

The Department for Health and Social Care says the pilot will help inform a mass testing blueprint and demonstrate how fast and reliable Covid-19 testing can be delivered at scale.

Johnson thanked the people of Liverpool in anticipation of the programme. “These tests will help identify the many thousands of people in the city who don’t have symptoms but can still infect others without knowing. Dependent on their success in Liverpool, we will aim to distribute millions of these new rapid tests between now and Christmas and empower local communities to use them to drive down transmission in their areas,” he said.

“It is early days, but this kind of mass testing has the potential to be a powerful new weapon in our fight against Covid-19.”

Liverpool city council will let people know how to access tests this week. Joe Anderson, the Labour mayor of Liverpool, said: “During negotiations with central government, myself and Steve Rotheram [the regional mayor] have always highlighted the need for enhanced public health intervention measures in Liverpool and the wider city region, and we were keen that we should be considered for any new strategies to tackle the worrying rise in Covid-19.”

The first successful example of mass testing was in Vo in Italy. When the country’s northern region was struggling with the earliest deadly outbreak of Covid-19 in Europe, the small town near Venice tested all its 3,000 inhabitants, whether or not they had symptoms.

On 6 March, when the programme began, there were no rapid tests. The University of Padua and the Red Cross who jointly carried it out used PCR swab test. They picked up even asymptomatic people and all those with a positive test were quarantined. The first round of testing picked up 89 people with infection. A second round nine days later found six. In 14 days, they had eradicated the virus. The scientists who masterminded it recommended the approach to the UK at the time.

What is feasible in a small community gets harder the larger the population. Slovakia’s decision to test its entire population of 5.4 million is considered hugely ambitious but on Monday it was reported that two-thirds had been tested, with 38,359 people, or 1.06%, found to be Covid-positive.

Slovakia is the biggest country so far to embark on mass testing of the population. Luxembourg, which is smaller, has done it and so have some Chinese cities with larger populations than Slovakia, such as Wuhan where the coronavirus first appeared.

Keir Starmer accuses PM of 'catastrophic failure of leadership' over England lockdown

The future is hanging in the balance . . .