It was inevitable that at some point I would do this, and the time has come for a short breakdown of the “dark side” of Noam Chomsky, which on a moral level completely discredits everything worthwhile he may have said. Guess what, the fact he has behaved in these harmful and disturbing ways means that whatever insights may remain from his very long career of talking about US society, politics and imperialism – maybe there are some, but a broken clock can be right twice a day, and if you’re over 90 years old like him, that possibly adds up to quite a lot over the years – must be recontextualised/revisited and better sources of analysis ought to be prioritised. Lots of very smart people across history had bad-to-horrendous politics or were racist, etc. We don’t have to keep relying on them, why not aim for better intellectuals/sources that don’t…

The critical role that violent outbreaks of rebellion played in the Indian Independence Movement is too often overlooked.  In fact, by the 1940s violent rebellion had become the rule rather than the exception in India. 

By late December 1989, the revolution sweeping across the Eastern Bloc had reached Romania and in the days before Christmas, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu attempted to shore up his regime by launching a military offensive against those protesting against the dictatorship. On December 21, Ceausescu attempted to give a speech in Bucharest which descended into open revolt and a massively violent crackdown by sections of the army and police loyal to Ceausescu.

The Ceausescus fled the capital, but were captured by sections of the military who supported the revolution. On Christmas Day 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were quickly tried and executed on national television.

The Morning Star, formerly the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain but by then connected to the breakaway Communist Party of Britain, had reported on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but, as I have shown here, had reported the…

The Anarchist Convicts of Guyana,

“The Voice of the Penal Colony” (1893)

Not everything we share originates from the North of England. We occasionally like to share writings or literature for no other reason than that we like them or for the fact that they move us so much as to want to post them on here. The following is such, originally from “The Libertarian Labyrinth” website.

THE VOICE OF THE PENAL COLONY

While the populations panic and cheer the hangman tsar, while the bourgeois and the governmentals congratulate themselves on the success of their stratagems and observe that human stupidity is always so great, a protest must come, proud and energetic, to remind the bourgeois that there are still free men, even, and especially, in their prisons and their penal colonies.

We must remind our leaders, who, in the joy of their triumph, lick the boots of the…

We have previously highlighted the life of a CNT militant who settled in Middlesbrough, Teesside, North East England in an interview with Miguel Rico. Interview here…

https://tynesideanarchistarchive.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/cnt-anarchist-militant-interview/

Today we share the life of Vicente Blasco Carrillo who settled in Stockton on Tees, North East England after the war. The following obituary, written by Teesside Anarchists in 1994 is from ANARCHY ! Libertarian broadsheet for the North East. Issue 2. 1994.

Obituary

Vicente Blasco Carrillo (1917-94)

Vicente Blasco Carrillo who died in North Tees Hospital on July 18, aged 77, was one of the last few of the once-numerous Spanish Anarchist emigration in Britain. Born in Barcelona, he was active in the anarchist movement in his youth, being a militant in the ‘Faro’ group of the FIJL (Iberian Libertarian Youth Federation). After the fascist military coup was defeated in Barcelona on July 19th 1936 by the armed working class, Blasco joined…

When the Liberal Democratic Party wanted to produce an educational pamphlet earlier this year about its desire to change the Constitution of Japan, it chose a medium that many in the West might find surprising, even unbecoming, for such a serious subject: it published the pamphlet as a manga. However, for Japanese audiences, whichever side of the political spectrum they vote, there was arguably little out of the ordinary about such a choice. Politics and manga are far from mutually exclusive.

The Liberal Democratic Party’s manga about proposed constitutional changes

The characters discuss how “unfair” it is that other nations change their constitutions, but Japan doesn’t.

The tale of the so-called Yodogō Group — the members of Sekigun-ha (Red Army Faction) who carried out Japan’s first ever airplane hijacking in 1970 — is a strange one. The surviving hijackers, if they hadn’t tried to commandeer a JAL airplane and fly…