#political murders

[scotianostra]

Leaders of the “Radical Rising”, John Baird and Andrew Hardie were put to death on September 8th 1820 at Stirling.

I last covered the Rising just over a week ago when I posted about the execution of James Purilie Wilson on Glasgow Green.

By 1820, living and working conditions for Scottish weavers, spinners, colliers and manual labourers were often brutal. Many had no work; the labour market flooded with demobbed soldiers from Wellington’s army.

Radicals wanted wide-sweeping change: reform of the corrupt Westminster parliament, universal adult suffrage (not necessarily excluding women), annually elected parliaments and the repeal of the hated Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread artificially high, protecting the interests of landowners and grain merchants at the expense of the poor.

A strike of some 60,000 workers was called in April 1820 and a so-called ‘provisional government’ was even called in Glasgow. A group of Scottish Radicals, mainly weavers armed with pikes, prepared to break into the Carron Ironworks to seize armaments. They were easily overcome by the Yeomanry at Bonnymuir and 47 were arrested on charges of treason. After their trial, three of the ringleaders, Andrew Hardie, James Wilson and John Baird, were executed and nineteen others sentenced to penal transportation to Australia.

What may have looked to the governing authorities of the time as dangerous insurrection, can with hindsight be regarded as part of the 19th century struggle for social justice and democratic human rights. The Scottish Radicals are now regarded as courageous campaigners for justice who fought for the democratisation of Scotland. One of them, John Baird, has a local primary school named after him.

Shortly before he died, standing on a scaffold erected in Broad Street, Andrew Hardie declared: ‘I die a martyr to the cause of truth and justice.’ John Baird said the same. The two men were buried in pauper’s graves in the graveyard of Stirling’s Church of the Holy Rude.

Decades later, their bodies were exhumed and brought to Glasgow, where they were re-interred at Sighthill Cemetery in the north of the city. The monument above their last resting place also honours James Wilson.

The pics include a Broadside reporting the trial, you can find a transcript of here

https://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=14665...

[humanfreedomextremist]

WHITE MURDERERS

Just like the White Murdering officials in Flint, these White Murderers will never be seen in a perp walk. So they should be…

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Gaston is such a funny choice for a disney villain. everyone else is a ruthless despot or a dark sorcerer being evil on purpose. and then there's just this guy, the village asshole

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[defleftist]

Thrilled to see someone carrying on the tradition of protest folk music. Keep fighting the good fight!

[logorrhea5mip]

-quote by Friedrich Engels

[qqueenofhades]

Kamala’s taking absolutely no prisoners tonight!!!! Came right out swinging with how he handled 2020 and didn’t stop dragging him with aaaaaaaaall the receipts!

Look. I have so many better things to do with my limited and finite time on this beautiful planet than to listen to Donald Trump talk about anything, so I did not watch the debate. However, I did peep on twitter and the unanimous consensus is that she is absolutely killing, KILLING HIM:

And like. I knew she would do well, but I didn't think it would be an absolute clean clock KTFO, not least because the media will be desperate to help him clean it up in the next few days. But when the legacy media is desperately trying to figure out how to make "Here's how Kamala's crushing debate win is actually bad for her!!!" work, I'd say that's a very good position to be in.

[noonesgaylikegatson]

Some messages left by queer Palestinians who face annihilation by the Israeli government in their retaliation against Hamas. The Israeli government has dropped thousand of bombs, leveled streets, cut off water, gas, and electricity, bombed hospitals, ambulances, mandated evacuation and then bomb evacuees. Innocent people are dying in the mass.

There is no need for this government to employ these acts of collective punishment. The same logic that is used to condemn the acts of Hamas, should be used to condemn the actions of the Israeli government. No one deserves to slaughtered and dehumanized.

And keep in mind, that this terror is not unusual for the Palestinian people, and this is another horrific event in a decades long oppression and apartheid.

[politijohn]

Source

[rejectingrepublicans]

[aestariiwilderness]

[gingerswagfreckles]

It's become extremely obvious over the past 15 months that the only reason much of the Western world ever basically agreed that the Holocaust was bad and was willing to teach about it is because for a brief period of time, Jews and gentiles in most of Europe + America had a common enemy in the Nazis. But this acknowledgement of Nazi antisemitism was only ever the same kind of acknowledgement of antisemitism that we get right now, where people are only willing to acknowledge the antisemitism of the people they already had a completely separate reason to dislike or fear. Antisemitism in this worldview is just a tool, a secondary accusation one can lodge at someone who is already for different reasons an enemy. It is never acknowledged as a form of bigotry in and of itself, that exists on its own and not as a follow up to another "more serious" form of oppression or bigotry against gentiles.

Obviously any Holocaust education we do get in Europe and the US has very much been the result efforts by Jews and our allies in a practical sense, but it is undeniable that there was a brief 70 or so year period where the white Western consciousness found it valuable (or at least politically convenient) to recognize antisemitism as wrong and the Holocaust as horrific. As true, original-brand Nazism fades, though, we see opposition to antisemitism and the Holocaust becoming less and less valuable to the white Western identity, as actual threat of Nazi occupation fades to historical memory. Newer, rebranded neo-Nazis and leftist Hamas supporters pose little to no threat to white Western gentiles. And thus, we see now not only a growing acceptance of antisemitism, but also a growing hostility towards the idea that we should study or condemn the Holocaust as anything particularly terrible. The Holocaust no longer represents a way for gentiles to additionally condemn an ideology that also threatened them, that also killed their families, that also resulted in their own countries and communities being occupied or destroyed by foreign fascist governments. It no longer represents to them an ideology that is in any way a threat to their own safety or way of life.

This is why we see such a massive rise in Holocaust denial among Gen Z, and, even more broadly than overt Holocaust denial, the rejection of the idea that the Holocaust should be particularly studied or condemned. More and more, we see people "questioning" the "propaganda" of The Jews Crying Victim All The Time, we see young people wondering why they are so cruelly forced to acknowledge on very rare occasion the suffering that the Jewish people went through in their own homes and towns. Often this is framed not only as intellectual bravery but moral bravery, as if this new generation rejecting Holocaust education is somehow fighting back against the unfair valuing of Jewish tragedy above gentile tragedy. What they don't understand, of course, and what many Jews up until now didn't understand either, is that no one ever valued the Holocaust because it WAS a uniquely horrific event in history, because it WAS the first and only industrialized genocide that gassed millions to death on a scale we can only pray the world will never see again, because it WAS only 70 years ago and is still a living part of the history of many Western countries. No. The Holocaust was only ever given the acknowledgement it was because it represented, at one time, an ideological threat that also included gentiles, though less overtly than it targeted Jews.

That ideological threat against Jews has not gone anywhere, and is in fact is seeing a new glory day dawning with the rise of fascism worldwide and the normalization/glorification of antisemitism on the left. But this new form of antisemitic hatred, be it neo-Nazism or support for Hamas, does not represent a threat to white Western gentiles, their way of life, or the integrity of their governments. And so we as we see the decoupling of the Holocaust from something that also incidentally threatens gentiles, we see standing against the Holocaust and antisemitism as a symbol of white Western identity disappearing as fast as it came.

[hussyknee]

[angeljpg]

self proclaimed n*zis will write entire manifestos about how [insert marginalized groups here] are the scum of the earth and then kill them in a mass shooting in hopes of inspiring others to do the same but won’t even be charged with a hate crime, yet luigi killed one (1) man and he’s being charged with terrorism? it’s scary how blatantly the government protects the rich and puts their interests over all else jfc. they’re making the class divide look so much more obvious.

[a-multifandom-mess12]

Will Graham: *Sweating shaking and covered in dog hair* Fuck off, don’t talk to me, you can literally go die

Hannibal: You are the sexiest person I have ever laid eyes on.