Sheep magazine Archive 3: issues 18-24

HAND OVER FIST PRESS 

SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

The Magazine: volume 3 

Issues 18 to 24


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

The Magazine: volume 3 

Issues 18 to 24 

December 2016 - May 2017

This Volume’s 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

Edit & Design: 

Alan Rutherford 

Published online by 

www.handoverfistpress.com 

Photographs, words and 

artwork sourced from ‘found 

in the scrapbook of life’, no 

intentional copyright 

infringement intended, 

credited whenever possible, 

so, for treading on any toes 

... apologies all round! 

Sheep ... 

from no. 18 

(December 2016) 

to no. 24 

(May 2017) 

1 

Articles to: 

alanrutherford1@mac.com 

December 2016 – May 2017

2 

Without contributors this project has 

failed to live up to its original ideal! 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : The Magazine, issues 18 to 24

ANOTHER 

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

Blah-blahblah-blahde-blah- 

Hello, 

Welcome to a 20 months worth of Sheep, 

from magazine number 3 to 24, in 3 

volumes. This is volume 3 and contains 

issues 18 to 24 and covers a time period 

from December 2016 to May 2017. 

All articles and artwork contained in 

these flashes were supplied, or found in 

newspapers lining the bottom of the canary 

cage, and all were gratefully received 

and developed with love, enthusiasm and 

sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press. 

3 

Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the 

problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will 

now appear sporadically! 

Without contributors this project is 

failing to live up to its original ideal! 

a luta continua! 

December 2016 – May 2017

20 months’ worth of the magazine (in 3 volumes), started in October 2015 

and continued until May 2017 – playful layouts, socialist politics, many 

borrowed (most times credited) pieces of interest, social commentary – coupled 

with some wonderful original pieces by contributors, twitchy and inventive 

artwork ... and probably not enough craziness to really reflect the editor’s 

surrealist pillow. 

Here is volume 3, issues 18 to 24, covering a period from 

December 2016 to May 2017, what a mad time! 

Alan Rutherford, editor.


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

The Magazine volume 3 

Issues 18 to 24


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

18

& again, its money money money

& you still can’t take it with you

d 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 18

Artwork: Alan Rutherford 

The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 





Cover photograph: 


Frontispiece: Hans Holbien 









There is no deadline for 

submitting articles to be 

included in the next issue, it 

will appear whenever, or in 

your dreams! 

Articles to: 


Opening 03 

Trump Trump Quack 5 

Fidel Castro 13 

10 lies 17 

Born a Crime 27 

Another Angry Voice 34 

The Lucas Plan 36 

Joana Foster 39 

Rape articles 43 

Letters 55 

1 

XMAS 2016

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

Print by Karena Colquhoun of MAGIC JELLY, Adelaide, Australia 

Blah-blahblah-blahblah- 

The end may 

justify the means 

as long as there 

is something that 

justifies the end 

Leon Trotsky 

Hello, 

Welcome to magazine number 18. 

Still trying to ignore the media circus, lies 

and bullshit that parades as news ... misdirecting 

our attention, here is a magazine 

produced freely to be read freely. 

All articles and artwork supplied, or found 

in newspapers lining the bottom of the 

canary cage, were gratefully received 





now appear very sporadically. 



Maybe the last issue for a while (or maybe 

not?) ... in the meantime, a luta continua! 

3 

XMAS 2016

4 



TRUMP TRUMP QUACK 

Donald Trump is being briefed on the US’s ‘deep secrets’. The 

US President-elect is scheduled for numerous briefings on US intelligence, 

security and defence 

Bob Woodward 

Mr Trump is being briefed on the US’s nuclear weapons tactics. One of 

the most important phases of the transition to power for President-elect 

Donald Trump includes briefings on U.S. intelligence capabilities and 

secret operations as well as separate descriptions of the extraordinary 

powers he will have over the military, especially contingency plans to use 

nuclear weapons, according to officials. 

5 

In 2008, after then-President-elect Obama was given one sensitive 

intelligence briefing at a secure facility in Chicago, he joked, ‘It’s good 

that there are bars on the windows here because if there weren’t, I might 

be jumping out.’ 

Though Trump has been given some intelligence briefings on threats 

and capabilities, there are a series of separate briefs scheduled for the 

president-elect into what Obama has called ‘our deep secrets.’ 

XMAS 2016

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said she could not provide any 

information on the schedule for the briefings. Previous presidents received 

them over the course of the entire transition. 

6 

First is a detailed look at technical and human intelligence sources and 

methods that provide critical information on Special Access Programs – 

the most sensitive top-secret undertakings – for drone strikes and other 

intelligence operations. This would include the disclosure, if Trump wants 

the names, of the dozens of officials abroad paid by the CIA, to the 

tune of millions of dollars. Though entitled, presidents normally have 

not asked for names unless the secret relationship involves a particularly 

important CIA asset. 

Other methods include the most sensitive technical capabilities of the 

National Security Agency to intercept communications abroad, store them 

and make them instantly available to analysts and operators. 

Trump will learn that the president is considered ‘The First Customer’ by 

the intelligence community, which has a tradition of responding to any 

and every presidential request. 

A second briefing will be on the covert actions undertaken by the CIA that 

are designed to change events abroad without the hand of the United States 

being revealed publicly. There are currently about a dozen such ‘Findings’ 

– intelligence orders signed by the president. Some are broad authorities to 

conduct lethal counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries. Others 

are narrow, such as support for clandestine efforts in a single country to stop 

genocide or payments to political opposition or rebels. 


Under law and procedures, such covert-action orders are issued by the 

office of the president, and Obama’s orders will continue unless Trump, as 

president, changes them. Normally, the president-elect will review current 

covert actions and decide before the inauguration whether he wants to 

continue, modify or cease any. He also could add new covert operations 

after taking the oath. 

Under law, the president can decide to launch new covert operations but 

must inform the Senate and House intelligence committees. For particularly 

sensitive operations, the president has to see only that the Gang of Eight is 

informed. The eight are the two party leaders of both the Senate and House, 

plus the chairman and ranking member of the intelligence committees. 

Among the most important ‘Findings’ are counter-proliferation operations 

designed to prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon or a nuclear 

weapon delivery capability. 

7 

Other operations are offensive aggressive cyberattacks involving stealthy 

computer hacking designed to break into computer systems of foreign 

governments. Previously, they have been called the Computer Network 

Attack (CNA) and are among the most highly secret undertakings of the U.S. 

government. 

In addition, Trump will receive information on domestic counterterrorism 

overseen by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. After the 9/11 

attacks, the FBI was turned loose to stop the next attack. Efforts to penetrate 

banks, communications and foreign corporations in the United States have 

been significantly expanded. 

XMAS 2016

Trump will also be given information about ‘Continuity of Government,’ 

which are the plans and procedures designed for implementing the line 

of presidential succession. That could be in case of a terrorist attack or 

other emergency in which the president dies or could not carry out the 

duties of his office. 

A third briefing will be on nuclear-war plans and options. The ‘football,’ 

a briefcase carried by the military aide to the president, includes 

authentication codes designed to ensure that any launch order comes 

only from the commander in chief. 

8 

The ‘football’ also contains a book of options benignly called the 

‘Presidential Decision Handbook.’ This top secret/code-word book, 

known as the ‘Black Book,’ of about 75 pages has separate contingency 

plans for using nuclear weapons against potential adversaries such as 

Russia and China. 

The president can select nuclear strike packages against three categories 

– military targets, war-supporting or economic targets and leadership 

targets. There are sub-options, and the menu allows a president to 

withhold attacks on specific targets. 

Two officials said that the ‘Black Book’ also includes estimates on the 

number of casualties for each of the main options that run into the 

millions, and in some cases over 100 million. Officials who have dealt 

with nuclear-war options said that learning the details can be horrifying 

and that there is a ‘Dr. Strangelove’ feel to the whole enterprise. 


President-elect George W. Bush did not receive his briefing on nuclear 

options until five days before inauguration in 2001. 

Top White House officials say that presidents in the past have had no love 

and little interest in getting the nuclear war plans briefing and almost 

recoil at the prospect of having such authority. Under practice as the 

commander in chief, the president can employ U.S. military forces as he 

sees fit. 

The system of authentication and options is designed for quick response 

to attack in an emergency. A president might have to make a decision 

in a matter ofminutes with little or no time to consult the secretary of 

defense, military leaders or the National Security Council. 

9 

In addition, Trump will receive briefings from the Pentagon on current 

military operations, including the deployments in the ongoing wars in 

Afghanistan, against the Islamic State and other Special Operations 

actions abroad. 

After one of the briefings in 2008, Obama told a close adviser that it was 

perhaps one of the most sobering experiences of his life. He said, ‘I’m 

inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in half a dozen ways, 

and I will have some powerful but limited and perhaps even dubious 

tools to keep it from happening.’ 

In an Oval Office interview on July 10, 2010, Obama confirmed that he 

had made that sort of comment. 

XMAS 2016

‘Events are messy out there,’ he said. ‘At any given moment of the day, 

there are explosive, tragic, heinous, hazardous things taking place.’ He 

acknowledged that as president it was his responsibility to deal with all 

these problems. ‘People are saying, ‘You’re the most powerful person in 

the world. Why aren’t you doing something about it?’’ 

The power of the presidency has two sides. On one, it is an extraordinary 

concentration of constitutional and legal authority. On the other, as 

Obama said, it can be limited and dubious. 

Soon, Trump will experience both the power and its limits. 

10 

from The Washington Post 


WHEN 

ELEPHANTS 

FIGHT 

ITS THE 

GRASS THAT 

SUFFERS 

11 

A KIKUYU PROVERB 

XMAS 2016

12 

OBITUARY 


FIDEL CASTRO 

(1926-2016) 

Fidel Castro stood for the liberation of humanity; not only 

for his own country Cuba whose struggle for freedom from 

US imperialism he led and won alongside Che Guevara and 

others; but also for the peoples of the world fighting for selfdetermination, 

freedom from colonialism and the right to 

choose political and economic systems based on equality, not 

exploitation. He was a towering figure of twentieth century 

politics. The CIA tried and failed to as invade Cuba and many 

times tried assassinate him. 

13 

The role of Cuba in international solidarity has been 

remarkable; from fighting against the apartheid regime in 

South Africa, to working countries such as Venezuela and 

others. Nelson Mandela always acknowledged that apartheid 

was dealt a crushing blow by the intervention of Fidel troops 

in Angola where they took on and helped defeat the South 

African Defence Force. The support given by Cuba to the 

Vietnamese people in face of US aggression, will also never be 

forgotten. 

XMAS 2016

From 1959 onwards, Cuba under Fidel, inspired a generation 

of anti-imperialist struggles all over the third world. Cuba has 

the most highly educated population in Latin America and its 

free healthcare system is, to this day, universally admired. It 

was the first country to respond to the recent appeal for help 

with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and regularly has 

50,000 trained doctors and other healthcare workers in other 

parts of the world. 

14 

As the world enters a dangerous period with the rise of the far 

right, Fidel remains an inspiration in our work to unite and 

defeat this reactionary wave. 

Hasta la victoria siempre! 

Fidel Castro Obituary by 

Professor Robert Arnott 


15 

XMAS 2016

16 

Grand Hotel Abyss: 

The LIves of the Frankfurt School 

by Stuart Jeffries 

is published by Verso. 


10 LIES ABOUT THE XMAS 

CONSUMERIST CIRCLE OF HELL 

As we approach the Christmas shopping season finale, 

what can neo-Marxist analysis teach us? 

Stuart Jeffries 

from The Guardian 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have started our descent. From now until closing 

time on Christmas Eve, we are destined to fall towards an existential abyss. 

Some of us may have experienced an unpleasant altercation with another 

shopper on Black Friday over the last discounted PS4 in a warehouse on 

the North Circular. Others will be on our knees in Hamleys begging the 

assistant to check again in the storeroom to see if they have that on-trend 

Zoomer Chimp, a £119.99 plastic robotic ape that comes complete with 

voice command recognition and – please God, no – 100-plus tricks. And 

then, sometime around 10am on Christmas Day, our nation will be united 

by a warm fuzzy feeling. What’s that feeling called again? Buyer’s remorse. 

17 

One thing I’ve learned in researching the lives of that bunch of mostly dead 

neo-Marxist German Jews called the Frankfurt School is that shopping 

isn’t so much a satisfying pastime that boosts the economy as a burning 

wheel of Ixion on which we are bound until death secures our release. ‘The 

‘modern’ [is] the time of hell,’ wrote Walter Benjamin, the brains behind 

the Frankfurt School operation, in his critique of consumer capitalism, The 

XMAS 2016

Arcades Project. He wasn’t writing about Saturday at 5pm in Toys R Us, 

but he could have been. Here then are 10 lies about shopping to help you 

escape the seasonal consumerist circle of hell so appalling that even Dante 

didn’t dare imagine it. 

18 

1 

More choice makes us happier 

No, it doesn’t. The idea of shops offering us 101 kinds of muesli is that 

we are rational utility maximisers who have the time and temperaments 

to make sense of endless options. But we aren’t: that’s why Nobel 

economics laureate Herbert Simon came up with the idea of ‘satisficing’. 

Any firm that tried to make decisions that would maximise its returns 

would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option. 

Instead, they ‘satisfice’, which means they content themselves with results 

that are ‘good enough’. And what goes for firms goes for shoppers: 

endless choice makes us miserable and so to reduce that misery we make 

bumbling choices that are good enough. The Frankfurt School argued 

that we have been conditioned to accept the goods that are on offer; 

effectively, we are ideologically shaped to demand what is supplied. That 

is why Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their classic Dialectic of 

Enlightenment wrote, ‘freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology 

always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to 

choose what is always the same’. 

2 

Stuff comes for free 

On the back of the Zipvan in my street is a logo telling passers-by that 

the rental car firm pays for fuel, insurance and the congestion charge, 


adding in brackets, ‘We’re nice like that’. Did these guys never hear 

of Milton Friedman? ‘There is,’ said the economist, ‘no such thing as 

a free lunch.’ Somebody always pays for it, usually me. Businesses are 

never ‘nice’ and don’t give stuff away without expecting to cultivate 

misplaced positive feelings from their customers and as a result prise 

more cash from their bank accounts. When Adorno and Horkheimer 

wrote the following words, they weren’t thinking of my experiences in 

BOGOF bookshops or with on-street car rental firms, but they apply to 

them perfectly well: ‘All the violence done to words is so vile that one can 

hardly bear to hear them any longer.’ 

3 

Stuff is built to last 

No, it isn’t. In 1921 the Phoebus cartel created lightbulbs that would 

break after 1,000 hours instead of providing the 1,500-2,000 hours 

previous bulbs managed. Why? To make profit from, as far as I can 

tell, consumer misery. The nightmare of ending-is-better-than-mending 

consumption imagined by Aldous Huxley in 1932’s Brave New World has 

been realised. Nowadays the practice is everywhere: you have to buy a 

new toothbrush because the batteries can no longer be replaced. 

19 

Walter Benjamin recognised that in consumerist society we’re locked 

into a kind of degrading compulsion: we buy new stuff to conceal from 

ourselves our disappointment about the failings of the old stuff. And then 

the new stuff becomes old, and so we upgrade – in part to hide from 

ourselves our disappointment at the unbearable failure of our earlier 

purchase. Benjamin strove to make us see that what we’re doing is nuts. 

As Benjamin scholar Max Pensky puts it: ‘The promise of eternal newness 

XMAS 2016

and unlimited progress encoded in the imperatives of technological 

change and the cycles of consumption now appear as their opposite, as 

primal history, the mythic compulsion toward endless repetition.’ Which is 

just one reason why you shouldn’t upgrade to an iPhone 7. 

20 

4 

Some brands can be trusted to make great products 

Remember the Apple Newton? Of course you don’t. Steve Jobs pulled 

the plug on this much-mocked disaster in 1997, four years after it was 

launched. It was supposed to be a personal digital assistant that worked 

through handwriting recognition: you scribbled on the pad and – lo! – a 

digitised note appeared. Except it didn’t: like Mr Magoo, it was always 

mistaking something for something else. Garry Trudeau satirised the 

Newton in his Doonesbury cartoon strip: it misreads the words ‘Catching 

on?’ as ‘Egg Freckles’. Maybe some of you are thinking Apple’s Siri is the 

Egg Freckles of voice recognition software. I couldn’t possibly comment. 

If Benjamin were still alive, he would own an Apple Newton. He collected 

the worthless, the trashy, the things that seemed to promise utopia but 

quickly became embarrassingly naff, obsolete. In doing so he thought 

he could expose the lie at the heart of consumer capitalism and effect 

revolutionary change. But the revolution, you’ll have noticed, didn’t 

happen. Argos still exists; Amazon Prime still seems like a solution to, 

rather than cause of, our problems. We’re still in the hell he diagnosed. 

5 

You can never have too many shoes 

Such, at least, is the wisdom of Joanna Lumley’s Patsy Stone from 

Absolutely Fabulous. (The full quote is even more bonkers: ‘You can 


never have too many hats, gloves, and shoes.’) In fact you can. Consider 

Imelda Marcos. She left behind 1,220 pairs of shoes when she fled 

Manila with her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, during a 1986 

uprising. That’s too many. Thirty years later that collection of shoes is 

reportedly worthless. 

Marcos’s shoe fetishism is an example of what Marx called the fetishism 

of commodities, and which the Frankfurt School thought had become 

more widespread since their mentor wrote Das Kapital in the Victorian 

era. What is the fetishism of commodities? When a pair of shoes or 

an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for 

instance). The exchange takes no account of the fact that, for example, 

some of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers contemplated 

suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing musthave 

commodities for you and me. That erasure of the economic 

circumstances in which a commodity is made, and the phantasmagoric, 

unreal life it takes on as a result, makes us fetishists. 

21 

György Lukács, the great influence on the Frankfurt School’s developing 

neo-Marxism, put it in his classic History and Class Consciousness 

that a new kind of human arises in this world of rampant commodity 

fetishism, along with 20th-century mechanisation and specialisation of 

industrial work processes. That new human sees the world as a series of 

commodities and his or her own self as a thing to be bought and sold. 

That new human is so degraded that buying and selling is its essence: 

truly, the new human Lukács envisaged can say: I shop therefore I am. 

Instead of uniting to start the revolution, we buy more shoes. 

XMAS 2016

6 

It’s worth paying more for quality 

When Vivienne Westwood launched a collection in 2010, she said we 

should not buy new clothes for six months. ‘My message is: choose well and 

buy less,’ she said – as if to suggest you should buy one Westwood dress 

rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly with disposable tat. But, Dame 

Vivienne, sustainable consumerism isn’t that simple. A couple of years after 

I interviewed Westwood about her fashion worldview, a friend bought me a 

Vivienne Westwood watch. It was beautiful and I was happy, thinking it was 

built to last. Then the numbers fell off, the strap broke and the clock hands 

collapsed within a year. Next time I need a new watch, I’ll try Poundland. 

22 

Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers 

becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism 

are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The Vivienne 

Westwood brand had, for me, just such magical powers. Even when its logo 

appeared on a dodgy watch made under licence. Reading the Frankfurt 

School disabused me of this fetish. When it comes to shopping, I don’t trust 

anyone anymore, not even one-time punk couturiers. 

7 

There are things that we ‘must have’ 

Hollister has a range of must-have T-shirts. Business Insider can direct you to 

a list of 20 must-have tech accessories for under £20 (including a multi-port 

USB wall charger, armband phone case and a carphone mount). And then 

there’s musthave.co.uk, whose beauty products include a 15ml pot of Truefitt 

& Hill Moustache Wax for £17.50. What do all these must-haves have in 

common? You don’t need them. 


Why haven’t we revolted against consumer capitalism and its system of 

lies masquerading as injunctions? Because, for the Frankfurt School, we’ve 

become comfortably corrupted. Such at least was the view of Herbert 

Marcuse in his 1964 classic One-Dimensional Man, where he despaired 

of the working classes to rise up and cast off their guided chains: ‘If the 

worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the 

same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter 

of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same 

newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of 

classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the 

preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.’ 

As Malcolm X put it in a different context: ‘I say you’ve been misled, you’ve 

been had, you’ve been took.’ 

23 

8 

There are things that are ‘investment pieces’ 

Most cars lose between 50% and 60% of their value in the first three years 

of ownership. The great French novelist Marcel Proust, who was a profound 

influence on the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, saw through that kind of 

nonsense at the age of 18: ‘Desire makes all things flourish,’ he wrote, 

‘possession withers them.’ True, he was mostly focused on the objects of 

sexual desire, but his words apply equally to a used BMW X5. 

9 

Flatpack furniture makes a happy home 

Earlier this year my wife and I assembled a Pax wardrobe. Only because 

we have agreed to lock the memory of that weekend in our marital psychic 

vault does our relationship survive. Indeed, there’s a very useful pie chart 

XMAS 2016

showing how time is spent immediately after shoppers return from Ikea: 

just under 25% involves making ‘that’s what she said’ jokes, more than 

40% involves swearing, and a substantial proportion includes taking 

whatever you were assembling apart because you did it wrong. 


But here’s the twist, diagnosed by the Frankfurt School 70 years ago. We 

all know that when we buy Ikea we’re buying flat-packed misery, but we 

carry on shopping regardless. Our knowing cynicism about shopping 

doesn’t stop us buying, since we’re too ideologically entrenched. As Adorno 

and Horkheimer put it: ‘The triumph of advertising in the culture industry 

is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though 

they see through them.’ 

10 

Happiness rises in line with material possessions 

On the contrary. ‘Strong materialist values are associated with a pervasive 

undermining of people’s wellbeing, from low life satisfaction and 

happiness to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as anxiety, 

and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behaviour,’ wrote 

psychologist Tim Kasser in The High Price of Materialism. 

For the Frankfurt School, the pursuit of happiness through shopping and 

material acquisition is obscene. Benjamin wrote: ‘There is no document of 

civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ One 

application of this dictum is that the pursuit of happiness through buying 

consumer goods involves erasing the human misery and exploitation that 

made the degrading and, ultimately, self-defeating pursuit possible. Merry 

xmas! 


25 


XMAS 2016

26 


BORN A CRIME 

Trevor Noah charts his rise from South Africa’s townships 

The Daily Show host’s new book reveals how he bridged the race gap to 

become one of the country’s brightest exports 

Marianne Thamm 

from the Daily Maverick 

Trevor Noah is regarded as one of South Africa’s biggest exports: the boy 

from the townships who made it big in the US and ended up hosting The 

Daily Show, one of the most influential satirical news programmes on 

American television. 

27 

But the odds always seemed stacked against Noah, as they are for South 

Africa’s black citizens. Many are trapped by the legacies of colonialism, 

apartheid and post-apartheid profligacy and face poverty, hunger, 

violence, bullying, racism and limited opportunities. 

But there was an extraordinary buffer between this brutal world and 

Noah, as his autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from a South 

African Childhood, makes clear. 

‘For my mother. My first fan. Thank you for making me a man,’ Noah 

writes in the book’s dedication. For indeed without his mother, Patricia 

Nombuyiselo Noah, and the rebellious spirit that enabled her to face 

XMAS 2016

down a hostile and inhospitable world, Noah would not have ended up 

where he is. 

There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t lie. I 

was having a great time 

Trevor Noah 

28 

Born a Crime is an engaging, fast-paced and vivid read, traversing 

Noah’s early childhood, confined by the absurdities of apartheid, where 

he could not walk openly with either of his parents, where he was often 

closeted inside his grandmother’s two-roomed home, where he was 

mistaken for white, through to his troubled years at school, his brief 

incarceration and to his budding success as a hustler selling pirated CDs 

and DJing at parties. 

Noah was ‘born a crime’ because his Xhosa mother had conceived a 

child with a white Swiss-German, which was illegal at the time. And while 

Noah was born in 1984, in the turbulent dying days of apartheid (he was 

only six when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990), the world 

into which he was delivered was riven with the deep scars of history. 

‘The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident,’ Noah 

writes. ‘Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, 

but for almost all the kids I knew in my grandmother’s neighbourhood in 

Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different 

reasons. 


‘Their fathers were off working in a mine somewhere, able to come home 

only during the holidays. Their fathers had been sent to prison. Their 

fathers were in exile, fighting for the cause. Women held the community 

together.’ 

Noah writes of his profiling as white in a black world with characteristic 

insight and humour. ‘There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a 

black family, I can’t lie. I was having a great time,’ he writes. Only the 

young Noah did not think this special treatment was because he was 

light-skinned, but because he was special. ‘It wasn’t ‘Trevor doesn’t get 

beaten because Trevor is white’. It was ‘Trevor doesn’t get beaten because 

Trevor is Trevor’,’ he writes. 

This was, he says, because he had no other points of reference. ‘There 

were no other mixed kids around so I could say ‘Oh, this happens to us’.’ 

29 

In the end Noah chose to be black, a state of mind that had so much 

more to do with his lived experience than someone else’s notion of who 

he was, and is. 

‘I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through 

language. Soweto was a melting pot: families from different cultural 

groups, and thus different homelands. Most kids in the township spoke 

only their home language, but I learned several languages because I 

grew up in a house where there was no option but to learn them.’ 

Noah’s story provides an intimate ringside seat, for those who might not 

have one, to the fractured arena where a divided South Africa – white, 

XMAS 2016

lack, coloured, Indian, Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Tsonga and so on – intersects. 

There is a deeply touching moment in the book when Noah describes 

how his violent stepfather (who later shoots his mother) kicks his beloved 

dog, Fufi. 

‘The strange thing was that when Fufi got kicked she never whelped or 

cried. When the vet diagnosed her as deaf, he also found out she had 

some condition where she didn’t have a fully developed sense of touch. 

She didn’t feel pain.’ Noah, too, appears not to have felt the pain or, at 

least, to have turned it into humour. 

30 

The book is essential reading not only because it is a personal story 

of survival, leavened with insight and wit, but because it does more to 

expose apartheid – its legacy, its pettiness, its small-minded stupidity and 

its damage – than any other recent history book or academic text. 

That Noah has emerged miraculously unscathed, filled with 

determination, grit, wisdom, a searing intelligence (cultivated through the 

books he read as a loner) and an enduring mischievous glint, is inspiring. 

These are all qualities that the millions who know him as a standup 

comedian in South Africa have come to love. 

A version of this article first appeared on the Daily Maverick. 


31 

XMAS 2016

32 


33 

XMAS 2016

34 From Thomas Clark aka ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

I began writing this blog in 2010 in order to express my opinions about 

current political, social and economic issues. I chose the name Another 

Angry Voice on the spur of the moment because I thought it sounded 

good at the time and I had to call it something. I don’t believe it is a 

particularly acurate descriptor, given that I strive to to base my arguments 

on facts and analysis, and to include reliable sources, rather than simply 

writing emotionally fueled rants. 

The objective of this Political Myth Busting series is to demolish some of 

the facile and often completely counter-factual myths that get used over 

and again. 

anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com 


35 

XMAS 2016

THE LUCAS PLAN 

The Lucas Plan was a pioneering effort by workers at the arms company 

Lucas Aerospace to retain jobs by proposing alternative, socially-useful 

applications of the company’s technology and their own skills. It remains 

one of the most radical and forward thinking attempts ever made by 

workers to take the steering wheel and directly drive the direction of 

change. The ideas being proposed filtered out to other factories and the 

plan was looked at by some workers at Smiths Industries, Bishops Cleeve. 

36 

Today, in 2016 – 40 years after the Lucas Plan – we’re facing a 

convergence of crises: militarism and nuclear weapons, climate chaos, 

and the destruction of jobs by automation. 

These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, 

as the Lucas Aerospace workers did. 

You can be part of this. It’s in our hands: we have to show that 

alternatives are possible. Together we can start creating the Lucas Plans 

of the future. It could be the best way to make sure we still have a future. 


37 

XMAS 2016

38 


JOANA FOSTER 

‘She made African women realise they can do anything’ 

Joana Silochina Foster, the formidable Ghanaian-British activist 

and lawyer who died last month, co-founded Africa’s first feminist 

philanthropic institution. She oversaw the expansion of a women’s law 

network in 26 African countries through her work with Women in Law 

and Development in Africa. 

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah 

39 

Before the fourth world conference on women, held in Beijing in 1995, 

Joana Silochina Foster, a Ghanaian-British activist and lawyer, attended a 

workshop organised by the Global Fund for Women. She happened to be 

seated next to Dr Hilda Tadria, a Ugandan scholar and activist whom she 

had not met before. Turning to Tadria, Foster said: ‘What we really need 

are our own resources.’ 

And so the idea of a fund for African women was born. At the time, it 

was a groundbreaking notion: no such institution existed on the African 

continent, where funding for women’s rights was primarily channelled 

through international NGOs based in the global north. 

XMAS 2016

The creation of a fund to support the work of an African women’s 

movement began, but was put on hold when Foster took up the role of 

regional coordinator at Women in Law and Development in Africa, in 

which she oversaw the organisation’s gradual expansion into a women’s 

law network covering 26 African countries. 

40 

Despite her engagements, Foster did not give up on her dream of a fund 

led by African women that would support the work of African women’s 

rights organisations. In 1996, a conversation with Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi 

– a Nigerian feminist who, at the time, headed Akina Mama wa Afrika, 

a pan-African women’s rights organisation based in the UK – led to a 

partnership that culminated with the creation of the African Women’s 

Development Fund (AWDF) in 2000. 

Co-founded by Foster, Tadria, and Adeleye-Fayemi, the institution has 

since provided funding of more than $28m (£22m) to a total of 1,200 

women’s rights organisations in 42 African countries. Speaking on 

AWDF’s 10th anniversary, Foster said: ‘The concept of a fund for African 

women was an innovative idea. The launch of AWDF in 2000 was the 

result of a compelling vision, strategic planning and years of hard work. 

AWDF is an excellent example of solidarity amongst African women.’ 

Foster died on 5 November 2016, after a two-year battle with cancer. 

She was 70. Her lifelong journey as an activist started at 17 when she 

became a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK. 

She studied law, and practised in both the UK and Ghana, focusing on 

poverty, race equality and women’s rights. From the early 1990s Foster 

devoted her working life fully to the non-governmental sector, becoming 


the country director of Cuso, Ghana, a Canadian non-profit organisation 

committed to social justice around the world. 

Foster was an elegant, graceful woman, with an aesthetic and style that 

spoke to her dual Ghanaian and Indian heritage. She often dressed in 

white or cream-coloured cotton tunics, with a colourful shawl draped 

around her slender frame. She always made time to give everyone a hug, 

and had a particular interest in connecting with – and inspiring – younger 

feminists. 

‘Joana put all her energy into everything she did,’ said Dorcas Coker- 

Appiah, executive director of the Gender Studies and Human Rights 

Documentation Centre based in Accra, which Foster co-founded. ‘[She 

was] willing to stand back and let others take the limelight. As a cofounder 

of the gender centre, she was always ready to support our work, 

pointing us in the right direction.’ 

41 

Akua Kuenyehia, a Ghanaian lawyer and former international criminal 

court judge, said: ‘Joana, together with others, began the process of 

getting African women to realise that they can do whatever they set their 

minds to because they are capable.’ 

The African women’s movement has lost a formidable activist. 

Joana Foster is one of 60 feminists commemorated in Awid’s 2016 online 

tribute to women’s human rights defenders who have died 

XMAS 2016

42 


IT’S A FUCKING EVIL CRIME! 

AND YET MORE THAN A QUARTER 

OF EUROPEANS BELIEVE RAPE IS 

SOMETIMES JUSTIFIED 

27 per cent of people living in Europe believe rape is acceptable under 

some circumstances, most commonly citing drug or alcohol intake, 

‘revealing’ clothes or going home alone with an attacker 

Edited from Siobhan Fenton 

43 

Research suggests that a quarter of people living in Europe believe that 

a crime against humanity, rape, is justified in some circumstances. 

Shocking! 

The figures have been published in a report commissioned by the 

European Union into gender-based violence. Researchers asked 30,000 

citizens of different EU countries whether they thought forcing someone 

to have sex against their will was acceptable under a number of 

circumstances, such as if a person is wearing ‘revealing’ clothes or if they 

are incapacitated with alcohol consumption. 

As shown in the chart above, created for the Independent by Statista, 27 

per cent of respondents across the EU thought forced sexual intercourse 

XMAS 2016

was acceptable in at least one set of circumstances. 12 per cent said it 

was acceptable if the victim had taken drink or drugs, 11 per cent said 

it was acceptable if the victim voluntarily went home with someone, 10 

per cent said it was acceptable if they didn’t clearly say no or physically 

fight back. 

The figures vary by country, with 60 per cent of people living in Romania 

telling researchers that they felt it was acceptable in at least one set of 

circumstances. 

44 

Among UK respondents, 22 per cent of people think the criminal 

offence is acceptable in some circumstances, with 12 per cent citing a 

victim’s drink or drug intake as a reason. 

It is estimated that around 1 in 5 women are raped at some point in their 

lives, while around one in 71 men will be raped. 

YES MEANS YES, NO MEANS NO FUCKERS! 


DIRTY LAUNDRY 

WASHING LINE ART HIGHLIGHTS 

SOUTH AFRICA’S RAPE EPIDEMIC 

INSTALLATION FEATURES USED KNICKERS SAID TO 

ILLUSTRATE NUMBER OF ATTACKS THAT TAKE PLACE 

AGAINST WOMEN EACH DAY 

Peter Lykke Lind 

45 

Thousands of pairs of used knickers have been hung above the streets 

of Johannesburg as part of an installation to raise awareness about the 

country’s record rates of rape. 

Devised by two sexual assault survivors, the installation consists of 

washing lines 1,200 metres long displaying 3,600 pairs of pants – 

matching the number of rapes estimated to occur on a daily basis, 

according to the artists. 

Jenny Nijenhuis and Nondumiso Msimanga put out a public call for 

donations of underwear under the hashtag #SasDirtyLaundry, and set up 

a Facebook page, Pantiesplea. They arranged collection points across the 

city. 

XMAS 2016

46 


Carmen Ives, a volunteer who helped with the project, said each pair 

donated ‘speaks loudly’ of severity of the situation in South Africa. ‘One 

pair of panties is one pair too many. It made me think that today, some 

girl is being raped somewhere,’ she said. 

On display until Sunday, the installation has received a largely positive 

response from the public. On Twitter, one user wrote that the project ‘feels 

like a movement’. 

Another said the project connected ‘very deeply with experience of sexual 

assault, emotional abuse and trauma’. 

However, the exhibition has faced questions over the rape statistics it uses. 

While South Africa undisputedly has the highest rates of rape in the 

world, estimates on the number of assaults each day vary greatly. The 

3,600-a-day estimate from the medical research council is far larger than 

the UN estimate of 132. 

47 

Responding to criticism Nijenhuis said that the figure was ‘symbolic’, 

adding that just a fraction of attacks are reported to the police. 

Lisa Vetten, a research associate at Witwatersrand University in 

Johannesburg, said: ‘The problem of under-reporting [assault] means 

that we cannot know whether the drop [in recent rape statistics] is due to 

fewer rapes occurring, or fewer victims reporting. 

‘The most conservative research estimate suggests that only one in seven 

victims report being raped, but other studies suggest the figures may be 

higher.’ 

XMAS 2016

Africa Check, an organisation promoting accuracy in public debate and 

reporting, said the 3,600 figure remained unproven. 

‘When people use flawed statistics, and have a voice as is the case here, 

they neglect the complexity of issues, and make it seem like there are 

valid statistics, which is not the case,’ said Anim van Wyk, editor-in-chief 

of Africa Check. ‘We need better statistics to do something about the root 

of the problem … to offer solutions.’ 

48 

Anne Githuku-Shongwe, a representative for UN Women, said southern 

Africa was ‘the epicentre of the pandemic of violence against women and 

girls’, and the cost of violence ‘economically, physically and emotionally’ 

must be recognised. 

She advocated caution when using numbers. ‘[The exhibition] is great to 

spotlight the issue, but we must be careful not to sensationalise,’ she said. 

Sheep in the Road comment: Picking up on ‘numbers’ here is a deliberate 

misdirection, just one rape is one too many! 

One has to wonder at the motives of anyone who would want to diffuse 

the impact of such a powerful protest/exhibition by quibbling over 

numbers? 


49 

Activists Nondumiso Msimanga and Jenny Nijenhuis. Photograph: Zeno Paterson 

XMAS 2016

50 

Crickey ... a virtual keyboard, 

use it at your own peril 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 14

deep breath 

comrades ... capitalism, war, 

brexit and a macho trump sit 

high on our compost heap 

stinking the place out ... they 

need to be turned over! 

51 


XMAS 2016

52 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 

http://www.coldtype.net 


Why trump Won | r.w. johnson 

the rocky road to independence | thomas harrington 

spiralling into permanent War | Conn m. hallinan 

ColdType 

Writing Worth reading | photos Worth seeing issue 129 

53 

XMAS 2016

Artwork: still unknown 

54 


WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 

Dear Editor ... 

Same old same old! 

Absolutely damaged by the swiftly decaying state of 

the world ... Words fail me, what is the use of words 

when the person you are saying them to is unable 

to grasp your, and their, meaning? [again, is this the 

only letter we have? ... (‘yes’, ed.)] 

Worryingly, we have left even that irrational road, 

the one where stupidity reigns, and now follow a 

path where basic facts and knowledge acquired over 

time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, 

hearsay and superstition. The shit-faced fudge of 

complacency and the mad spouters will now be 

defended to the death by the threat of nuclear war. 

Reason cannot be relied on in the present or near 

future (if ever?) and its utterly terrifying. Just who 

are the terrorists? For evidence of this I direct your 

attention to a President Donald Trump and his 

campaign to trump-trump-trumpety-trump all over 

the world. And, as Britain’s government is the happy 

lapdog of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly 

loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our May 

government do now as Trump begins his Term of 

Ignorance? 

55 

Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am 

absolute in my scepticism about whether the 

business-arses and their sycophantic political 

stooges, Blairites and Tories – or the US circus 

and their trumping flunkies – will come up with 

anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than 

the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on 

fucking us all. 

XMAS 2016

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 6


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

20

shizen, its still money money money

& you still can’t take it with you

there is no reason 

and you better 

believe it, heh-heh 

d 


The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 
















Opening 03 

Liars! 07 

Eugenics 16 

Zapiro 24 

Exceptionalism 27 

Sam Stone 30 

No Pasarán! 35 

Letters 61 

1 






your dreams! 

Articles to: 


JANUARY 2017

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 


There is no reason 

for the end to 



is something 

worthwhile to be 

justified in the end 

Slyce n’Ice 

Hello, 

Welcome to magazine number 20 (19 got 

pulped). 

Still trying to ignore the media circus, lies 

and bullshit that parades as news ... misdirecting 

our attention, here is a magazine 

produced freely to be read freely. 













3 

JANUARY 2017

4 


REJECT 

BIG FISH EAT 

LITTLE FISH 

CAPITALIST 

SHIT 

5 

Artwork: Brueghel - Naomi Henig 

JANUARY 2017

... the main 

again: war 

freedom is 

ignorance is 

– and that 

news, go 

6 


points 

is peace, 

slavery, 

strength 

was the 

odnight 

LIVING WITH LIARS 

We are not living in a ‘post-truth’ world, we are living the lies of others 

Nigel Farage is not a Nazi and nor is Donald Trump. But what is terrifying 

– and deeply akin to fascism – is our ability to ‘think’ our way from truth into 

lies 

by Robert Fisk in The Independent 

After Donald Trump’s election, the term ‘post-truth’ was coined to describe a 

world in which fake news stories gain easy traction on social media. 

We do not live in a ‘post-truth’ world, neither in the Middle East nor in the 

West – nor in Russia, for that matter. We live in a world of lies. And we always 

have lived in a world of lies. 

7 

Just take a look at the wreckage of the Middle East with its history of people’s 

popular republics and its hateful dictators. They feast on dishonesty, although 

they all – bar the late Muammar al-Gaddafi – demand regular elections to 

make-believe their way back to power. 

Now, I suppose, it is we who have regular elections based on lies. So maybe 

Trump and the Arab autocrats will get on rather well. Trump already likes 

Field Marshal/President al-Sissi of Egypt, and he’s already got a golf course 

in Dubai. That he deals in lies, that he manufactures facts, should make 

him quite at home in the Middle East. Misogyny, bullying, threats to political 

opponents, authoritarianism, tyranny, torture, sneers at minorities: it’s part 

and parcel of the Arab world. 

JANUARY 2017

And look at Israel. The new US ambassador-to-be – who might as well be 

the Israeli ambassador to the US – can’t wait to move the American embassy 

to Jerusalem. He seems to feel more antagonism towards the Jewish left in 

America than the Palestinians who claim East Jerusalem as a capital and 

whose state he has no interest in. Will Trump enrage the Arabs? Or will he 

get away with a little domestic rearrangement of the Israel embassy on the 

grounds that the Gulf Arabs, at least, know that Israel’s anti-Shiism – against 

Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – fits in rather well with the Sunni potentates 

who’ve been funding Isis and Jabhat al-Nusrah and all the other jolly 

jihadis? 

8 

I suspect that ‘post-truth’ has more to do with social media than mendacious 

elections. The use of social media in reporting the battle of eastern Aleppo 

has been extraordinary, weird, dangerous, even murderous, when not a 

single Western journalist could report the eastern Aleppo war at first hand. 

Much damage has been done to the very credibility of journalism – and to 

politicians – by the acceptance of one side of the story only when not a single 

reporter can confirm with his or her own eyes what they are reporting. 

We handed journalism to social media – and the armed men who control 

the areas from which these reports came know that they can pull the same 

trick again next time. They will, in Idlib. But this problem in the region is 

much, much bigger than a Syrian province. It’s now about the malleability of 

facts across the whole Middle East. 

The 250,000 ‘trapped’ Muslims of eastern Aleppo – now that 31,000 have 

chosen to go to Idlib, many more to western Aleppo – appear to have been 

somewhat fewer than 90,000. It’s now possible that at least 160,000 of the 


civilians ‘trapped’ in eastern Aleppo did not actually exist, but no one says 

so. That vital statistic of 250,000, the very punctuation mark of every report 

on the besieged enclave, is now forgotten or ignored (wisely, perhaps) by 

those who quoted it. 

Nor does anyone tell us about the civilians of Palmyra now that Isis has 

returned. And what about Mosul? Weren’t we about to liberate one million 

civilians trapped there by the jihadis – no less deserving, surely, than the 

250,000 or 100,000 or 90,000 or fewer civilians trapped in eastern 

Aleppo? 

Now the Americans say that Iraqi forces are ‘regrouping’ and ‘repositioning’ 

around Iraq’s second city; but ‘regrouping’ and ‘repositioning’ is what the 

British Expeditionary Forces did on their retreat to Dunkirk. 

9 

How can we complain about the lies of Trump and the Brexiteers when we 

journalists are chopping up the facts of the Middle East? Still, I notice in our 

newspapers and on television, Israel’s wall is a ‘security fence’, its colonies 

are ‘settlements’ which are ‘disputed’ rather than illegal. 

Can we really shake our heads in disbelief at electoral lies when we have 

been lying to our readers and viewers for years? 

Trump’s tweets aren’t narcissistic ramblings, they’re pure politics 

My favourite journalistic philosopher, Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times, got 

it right this month when he wrote that ‘the mendacity of politics in 2016 has 

indeed been astonishing both in its brazenness and in its effectiveness. 

JANUARY 2017

The claim by the Leave side in the Brexit referendum that £350m a week 

would be taken from the United Kingdom’s contribution to the European 

Union’s budget and put into the National Health Service was quickly and 

comprehensively demolished. Being caught out in a lie did not matter... it 

was a proof of a weird kind of authenticity. Flagrant lies showed that you 

were not one of the experts that the leading Brexiteer Michael Gove invited 

UK voters to despise and ignore...’ 

10 

Lying, according to O’Toole, ‘floats freely, with no pretence to be anchored in 

evidence’. Nowhere could this be more fearfully represented than in denial 

of the Jewish Holocaust (or the Armenian Holocaust, for that matter) when 

social media – O’Toole specifically names Facebook and Google – ‘now 

direct users towards fake news stories and sickening neo-Nazi propaganda 

with barely a shrug of the shoulders. The companies evoke in their defence 

a notion of the ‘diversity of perspectives’, an Orwellian euphemism in which 

the belief that the Holocaust never happened is as valid as the knowledge 

that it did.’ 

I’ve never accepted the nonsense about Nazism and the American right. 

Trump is not Hitler, although there is a kind of theatrical fascism about his 

performance. He’s more buffoon than satanic, more Duce than Fuehrer. 

Cesare Rossi, an early collaborator of Mussolini, once described his leader 

as moving quickly ‘from cynicism to idealism, from impulsiveness to caution, 

generosity to cruelty... moderation to intransigence. It was as though he 

never knew his genuine self and was always striving after some counterfeit 

impersonation.’ Could there be a better description of Trump? As Mussolini’s 

philosopher of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, said, ‘laughter is of the devil, and 

true believers do not smile except in bitter sarcasm.’ 


That grim use of the word ‘laughter’ is a key to this. The Second World War 

finished before I was born. But there are distressing habits which those on 

the right of European politics demonstrate when they wish to sneer at their 

enemies, characteristics which I find deeply disturbing. It is the politics of ‘the 

last laugh’; of the humiliation of those who thought they knew better and 

must now rue the day of their supposed superiority. Just count how many 

headlines and writers have referred to Trump’s ‘last laugh’. It is vicious and 

vengeful. 

Most of us remember Nigel Farage’s disgraceful – and untrue – words to 

the European Parliament on 28 June when he claimed that most members 

‘have never done a proper job’. But it was his other remark which was so 

frightening: ‘Isn’t it funny? When I came here 17 years ago and I said I 

wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you 

all laughed at me – well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?’ 

11 

Those words jogged my memory. Where I had I heard this sneer before? 

Then, quite by chance, there I was in Poland a few days ago, reading the late 

Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies, about the US and British failure to 

respond militarily to news of the Nazi death camps. And there I read these 

words, uttered by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1942: ‘In Germany, too, 

the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don’t know whether they are still 

laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can 

assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.’ In 1925, newly released 

from prison, Hitler had written a lengthy editorial in Volkischer Beobachter, 

attacking Jews, Marxists and the Weimar Republic. And that was 17 years 

before his 1942 ‘not laughing’ speech. 

JANUARY 2017

Contempt lies deep in the antechamber of an angry man. No, Farage is not 

a Nazi and nor is Trump. Nor are the tinpot right-wing European politicians 

who frighten us with their racist dialogue. What is terrifying – and deeply akin 

to fascism – is our ability to ‘think’ our way from truth into lies. 

Today we don’t need rallies or newsreels because we have the internet 

and social media, the addiction of our age. It is a dependency on a drug 

which under the infamous ‘diversity of perspectives’ presents morality and 

immorality as part of a landscape that spreads out flat to the horizon. 

Even we humble reporters can see what is happening. To an extent never 

witnessed before, a lot of people have started believing things that aren’t 

true. And it is acceptable to do this. And we help them. 

12 

Today, you can not only deny history – the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, 

Anne Frank’s diary, the gas chambers of Auschwitz – you can also tell fibs, 

big or small, about almost anything which annoys you. The Middle East, with 

our journalistic help, is deep in the same false world. Every dictator is now 

fighting ‘terrorism’ – along with the US, Nato, the EU, Russia, Hezbollah, 

Iran, the entire Arab Gulf (minus Yemen, for rather embarrassing reasons), 

China, Japan, Australia and – who knows? – Greenland as well. 

But justice is not on the menu. This is a word which few politicians, 

statesmen, even journalists, any longer use. Neither Trump nor Clinton, nor 

the Brexiteers, have talked about justice. I’m not talking about justice for 

victims of ‘terror’, or Brits who think they’ve been cheated by the EU, but 

real justice for entire nations, for peoples, for the Middle East, even – dare 

I mention them? – for Palestinians. They do not live in a ‘post-truth’ world. 

They’ve been living among other people’s lies for decades. 


The only effect of last year’s political earthquakes is that we shall feel less 

guilty in repeating all these lies. They have now – like war – become normal, 

a ‘diversity of perspectives’, part of a familiar, fraudulent world in which 

untruthfulness has acquired a ‘weird authenticity’. 

Trump is Hitler. Trump is Jesus. National suicide is reincarnation. We may 

not yet have understood this. But there are many in the Middle East who will 

understand us. Maybe they’ll have the last laugh. 

13 

war is peace 

freedom is slavery 

ignorance is strength 

(1984) 

JANUARY 2017

its 

fucking 

2017! 

14 


Prejudice, 

faith, war and 

trumpism all 

have something 

in common: 

they all 

flourish when 

reason has 

died 

15 

good luck and best 

wishes for 2017 

JANUARY 2017

A TRUMP RACE & 

HORSE-SENSE EUGENICS 

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has offered a litany of 

racist comments, which it turns out may be rooted in his deeper belief in 

the inherent superiority of some people ... and not others. 

16 

The Huffington Post dug back through the archives and found numerous 

examples of Trump suggesting that intellect and success are purely 

genetic qualities and that having ‘the right genes’ gave him his ‘very 

good brain.’ 

The Frontline documentary ‘The Choice’ premiered a week or so ago on 

PBS in the US, and it proves that Trump is pretty much an orange, sniffily 

pro-eugenics asshole. 

In the documentary, Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio explains that 

Trump was raised to believe that success is genetic, and that some people 

are just more superior than others: 

‘The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human 

development. They believe that there are superior people and 

that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a 

superior man, you get a superior offspring.’ 


17 

JANUARY 2017

The Huffington Post also took the liberty of compiling a whole bunch of 

times Trump suggested that genes are the main factor behind brains and 

superiority. Here are just a few choice quotes from good ol’ Trump: 

‘All men are created equal. Well, it’s not true. ‘Cause some are smart, 

some aren’t.’ ‘When you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with 

a fast horse.’ ‘Secretariat doesn’t produce slow horses.’ ‘Do we believe in 

the gene thing? I mean, I do.’ ‘I have great genes and all that stuff which, 

I’m a believer in.’ Oh, good. 


One of the first cabinet appointments made by President-elect Donald 

Trump was of Steve Bannon as his ‘chief strategist and senior counselor.’ 

Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, a leading 

white nationalist website known for spreading fake ‘news’ and for 

pushing racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic tropes. 

Bannon’s selection drew widespread condemnation from Democratic 

members of Congress as well as civil rights, reproductive rights, and 

immigrant rights groups. 

Retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) called Bannon a ‘champion of racial 

division.’ The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate 

groups, noted Bannon’s ‘long history of bigotry’ and his role in making 

Breitbart the media arm of the racist ‘alt-right’ movement. And several 

organizations, including MoveOn.org and BoldProgressives, launched 

‘Stop Bannon’ campaigns. Leaders of white nationalist groups in the 

United States, on the other hand, rejoiced at Bannon’s ascension. In 

fact, I suspect every time Trump and his surrogates have said, ‘this isn’t a 

campaign, it’s a movement,’ it’s a call-out to the very white nationalists 

celebrating Trump’s win. 


This should be no surprise: Bannon may be the most blatant example 

of Trump’s true intentions, but he is by far the rule. Trump’s campaign 

was relentlessly and unapologetically rooted in racist, misogynistic, anti- 

Semitic, and anti-immigrant statements, themes, and proposals, and his 

cabinet reflects the same. As the saying goes, when someone tells you 

who they are, believe them. 

Indeed, rather than creating a Team of Rivals – in which, as documented 

by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Abraham Lincoln filled his cabinet 

with former rivals who came together and worked toward the greater 

good – Trump’s cabinet is shaping up to be a ‘Team of Racists’ hellbent 

on further dividing the United States, a strategy that would inevitably 

help him to further consolidate power during his first term by sowing 

fear and conflict. Virtually all those already appointed, nominated, or 

floated for cabinet positions in the new administration are white men 

with deeply troubling histories of making statements, promoting policies, 

or enforcing laws promoting systemic racism. Based on the people and 

the politics they espouse, Trump’s selections must be read as a promise 

of an administration that will, in the end, increase the violence toward, 

marginalization of, and attacks on Muslims, immigrants, women, LGBTQ 

people, and people of colour. 

19 

Among the selections to date are Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions for 

attorney general of the United States. Sessions has fought against legal 

immigration into the United States and has voted against virtually every 

immigration bill introduced in Congress in the past two decades. He 

opposes a path to citizenship for those who entered the country without 

documentation or prior approval. According to the Washington Post, 

JANUARY 2017

Session opposes ‘guest worker programs for immigrants in the country 

illegally and visa programs for foreign workers in science, math and 

high-tech. In 2007, Sessions got a bill passed essentially banning for 10 

years federal contractors who hire [undocumented] immigrants.’ 

‘No Senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of 

Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions,’ said Rep. 

Luis Gutiérrez, an Illinois Democrat, in a statement last week. 

20 

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC reports that Sessions is closely 

affiliated with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremist groups who have 

cultivated him to be their voice in Congress. The center notes that ‘John 

Tanton, founder of the modern-day nativist movement, highlighted the 

need for such a congressional champion as a key goal in strategy memos 

he drafted in the 1980s. ‘Think how much different our prospects would 

be if someone espousing our ideas had the chairmanship!’ Tanton wrote.’ 

The center further reports that Sessions is closely associated with and 

attends meetings held by the Federation for American Immigration 

Reform (FAIR), the mission of which is to severely limit immigration into 

the United States: 

Its leaders have longstanding ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists 

and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected 

because of racist content. Dan Stein, FAIR’s current president, told Tanton 

[FAIR’s founder] in 1994 that those who supported the Immigration and 

Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the racist national origins quotas that 

favored immigrants of European descent, wanted to ‘retaliate against Anglo- 

Saxon dominance’ and that this ‘revengism’ against whites had created a 

policy that is causing ‘chaos and will continue to create chaos.’ 


Sessions is a longtime critic and opponent of civil rights, and while he 

voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, he also praised the 

U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the law in 2013. He has called 

the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union ‘Communist-inspired’ 

and ‘un-American.’ He was denied a federal judgeship in the mid-1980s 

because of his racist views and actions. 

‘Jeff Sessions has a decades-long record – from his early days as a 

prosecutor to his present role as a senator – of opposing civil rights and 

equality,’ Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, 

told USA Today in a statement. ‘It is unimaginable that he could be 

entrusted to serve as the chief law enforcement officer for this nation’s 

civil rights laws.’ 

21 

Another appointee is retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as national security 

advisor, a position very close to the president. Flynn has been widely 

described as an ‘extreme Islamophobe’ who believes that Islam is a 

political ideology, not a religion. The New York Times reports that, 

like Trump, Flynn ‘exhibit[s] a loose relationship with facts: General 

Flynn, for instance, has said that Shariah, or Islamic law, is spreading 

in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common 

that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came 

up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them ‘Flynn facts.’’ 

Flynn is a proponent of preventing Muslims from entering the United 

States and registering those who are here. Flynn is also believed to have 

financial and other ties to Russia and Turkey, indicating serious conflicts 

of interests. 

JANUARY 2017

A third selection is Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) for director of the Central 

Intelligence Agency. Pompeo, who is supported by the Koch brothers, 

has numerous times made racist and anti-Muslim remarks. In his 2010 

election campaign, he tweeted an article referring to his opponent, Indian- 

American Raj Goyle, as an ‘evil’ ‘turban topper.’ After apologizing for 

that, a campaign supporter put up billboards exhorting people to ‘Vote 

American. Vote Pompeo,’ and ‘True Americans Vote Pompeo,’ implying, 

of course, that Goyle, who is indeed American, was not. According to the 

Guardian, in 2013, ‘Pompeo was widely criticised by Democrats and the 

Council on American-Islamic Relations for saying that Muslim clerics who 

did not properly chastise Islamic terrorists were ‘complicit’ in terror attacks.’ 

22 

The list of names for other positions is long and changes daily. But other 

possible contenders for positions include former New York Mayor Rudy 

Giuliani and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. 

Giuliani is well known for failed policies such as ‘stop-and-frisk,’ which 

is based on racial profiling, and for his clams that Black Lives Matter 

fostered violence against police. In the early ’90s, he actually egged 

on a riot by white police officers protesting demands that they be held 

more accountable for their actions against people of color. And among 

many other things, he’s alternately defended and denied Trump’s birther 

crusade and claimed that President Obama does not love America. 

Kris Kobach is, among other things, an immigration hard-liner who is 

associated with nativist groups and helped Arizona Republicans write 

the infamous ‘Show Me Your Papers’ law, SB 1070, later tossed out by 

the courts. He is virulently anti-choice and has advocated strongly for a 

Muslim registry. He also has pushed hard for laws restricting voter rights. 


As the saying goes, you know a person by the company they keep. And 

Trump is surrounding himself with racists many layers deep. 

So it’s time for all of us – the media, pundits, Democratic legislators, and 

the public – to stop waiting for the ‘pivot.’ It ain’t coming and if we don’t 

realize that now, we are all at fault for the unraveling of democracy in the 

United States. 

Eugenics, first emerged during the 19th century and was used as a 

pretext for the sterilisation of disabled people until the practice was 

discredited after the Second World War. 

Adolf Hitler’s justification for the Holocaust – in which 11 million people 

were killed, 6 million of them Jewish – was based on a similar theory of 

racial hierarchy. The PBS documentary featured clips of Mr Trump on the 

campaign trial claiming that he ‘believes in the gene thing’ and saying he 

had a ‘very high aptitude’. It also ran footage of previous interviews from 

the real estate magnate’s time as a reality TV star in which he shared his 

thoughts on the subject, including a 2010 interview with CNN. 

23 

He said: ‘Well I think I was born with the drive for success because I have 

a certain gene. I’m a gene believer ... Hey, when you connect two race 

horses, you usually end up with a fast horse. I had a good gene pool 

from the standpoint of that, so I was pretty much driven.’ Mr Trump has 

become notorious for his bravado on the campaign trail and claimed he 

could solve problems that have plagued policymakers for decades with 

ease because he is a ‘smart guy’. 

Story edited from articles by Jodi Jacobson and Sammy Nickalls 

JANUARY 2017


Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro), born in Cape Town, South Africa, 

fulfilled his military requirement before becoming active in the 

anti-apartheid movement, the United Democratic Front. In 1988, 

on a Fulbright scholarship, he studied at the School of Visual Arts 

in New York City with premier comic artists Art Spiegelman and 

Harvey Kurtzman. 

Today Zapiro is a noted editorial cartoonist with a busy schedule 

drawing for South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and Sunday 

Times. He has published 16 book compilations of his work and 

received the 2007 Courage in Editorial Cartooning award from the 

Cartoonists Rights Network International, which monitors and 

supports the well-being of political cartoonists who find themselves 

in trouble because of the power and influence of their professional 

work. For several years, he’s been an invited speaker at the World 

Economic Forum in Davos. 

According to the Daily Maverick, “He didn’t censor himself 

before the apartheid government (and he was jailed for it), he doesn’t 

censor himself to appease big business, and he certainly doesn’t censor 

himself to please the African National Congress — he is one of 

those who takes most seriously Section 16 of the South African 

constitution, the part where freedom of expression is enshrined.” 

(below, left) 

This cartoon conveys the 

sense of loss of many South 

Africans in 1999, when 

their beloved President 

Mandela retired. 

(below, right) 

In September 2008, Zapiro 

depicted South African 

President Jacob Zuma about 

to rape Lady Justice with the 

help of his allies. Zuma, who 

had previously been accused 

and acquitted of rape, was 

about to receive a judgment 

on whether a corruption case 

against him would proceed. 

Enormous pressure was being 

put on the judiciary; anarchy 

was threatened if the accusations 

were upheld by the 

court. The cartoon provoked 

intense worldwide debate. 

Jonathan Shapiro 

12 S A M P S O N I A W A Y 

From 

photo: Karina Turok 


(right) 

In response to the Everybody Draw 

Muhammad Day Campaign of May 

2010 — designed to protest the chilling 

effects on free speech Muslim death 

threats have had in targeting artists 

who depict or parody the prophet — 

Zapiro drew a cartoon showing 

Muhammad visiting his psychologist 

and asking why his followers don’t have 

a sense of humor. Zapiro sees himself 

as asserting his right to free speech. 

“I was detained without 

trial in 1988.” Jonathan Shapiro 

SAMPSONIA WAY: How did you become a 

cartoonist? 

ZAPIRO: From the age of 8 or 9, I knew that 

cartooning was my favorite thing. At 4, I remember 

reading [Carl] Giles. But the big ones for me 

were Peanuts and Tintin, which I discovered at 

about 7 and 8. Those cartoons are still two of 

my great inspirations. Schulz and Hergé are 

geniuses. At 13, I started to make a book based on 

the Tintin action films to impress Hergé and get 

him to let me be part of his team. Then I decided, 

no, I wanted to do my own stuff. 

At the age of 15, there was some pressure to 

“be something,” and, of course, there was that 

ogre, the army. I thought I’d better do something 

“proper” to stay out of the bloody army. 

Architecture seemed a good marriage of arts 

and science. I got into Cape Town University 

easily enough, but I realized architecture was 

not where my heart was. 

Although I thought of being a cartoonist from 

a young age, it was only when I became a political 

activist in my mid-20s that I really became a 

cartoonist. Drawing cartoons for political organizations 

is what really got me started. 

SAMPSONIA WAY: What challenges have 

you faced as a response to your cartoons? 

ZAPIRO: I’ve been involved in a large number 

of controversies around my cartoons, 

beginning with the very first political pamphlet 

I ever did, which was banned by the apartheid 

government in 1983. Other bits of graphics and 

cartoons I did were also banned. I was interrogated 

by the security police about one of them 

and was detained without trial in 1988. The 

same year an apartheid cabinet minister ranted 

in parliament about cartoonists, apparently 

attacking me and a colleague. Many of my cartoons 

about political, religious, and sexual 

issues have been controversial and have sparked 

debate in newspapers and other media. 

But nothing I’ve ever done has come close to 

creating the kind of media frenzy and public 

debate sparked by my September 2008 Sunday 

Times “Rape of Justice” cartoon. 

SAMPSONIA WAY: Have you ever come 

close to giving up the work because of the difficulties 

imposed on you? 

ZAPIRO: For me the problems that I sometimes 

face are part of the job. My best way of 

dealing with this is to keep doing hard-hitting 

cartoons and not get intimidated. I have no 

plans to stop doing cartoons. 

25 

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 11 13JANUARY 2017

26 


EXCEPTIONAL 

EXCEPTIONALISM 

Exceptionalism is the doctrine that one’s own people or country has 

some special status and destiny. Its probably always been about in 

human societies but, in a modern sense, came to the forefront when 

europeans took to wandering the globe in search of new markets, cheap 

labour, gold, colonies, oil and opium, slaves and strategic advantage ... 

discovering new lands and claiming them for their king despite the fact 

that these lands were already populated with indiginous societies. 

27 

Using the ‘we are civilised, you are not’ mantra, marching to a eugenics 

tune and claiming their actions were ordained by god or providence, 

these europeans either annihilated or cruelly subdued the populations 

of these new-found lands. In the 19th century, for example, British 

imperialists believed they had a mission to bring ‘superior’ British values 

to benighted parts of the world like America, Africa, Australia, Asia ... 

Even today, in the ugly spirit of ‘exceptionalism’, and following detested 

apartheid solutions, ultra-religious Jews believe that god gave them 

the Palestinian land they now occupy on the West Bank, overspilling in 

defiance of international law. 

JANUARY 2017

Christmas may be over, but for Jews celebrating the festival of Hanukkah 

festivities still are in full swing. Though the story of the Maccabees fighting 

their oppressors took place thousands of years ago, disputes over who 

should control swathes of land in Israel and Palestine are pressing and 

pertinent to this day. 

28 

Following the recent United Nations Resolution 2334, which describes 

Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as ‘illegal’ 

and an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians, the Israeli government 

has made its position clear: ‘Israel believes itself to be an exception’; 

settlements in the occupied territories will continue growing, and any 

states or persons who criticise this are ‘anti-semitic’ and making a 

‘declaration of war’ against Israel. Ambassadors have been recalled; 

meetings with leaders have been cancelled; Israeli aid to Senegal has 

been stopped. 

However, today the doctrine of exceptionalism is perhaps most pervasive 

in the USA. It is part of the national mythology that god inspired the 

early colonists, such as the pilgrim fathers, to come to America, and that 

settlers of european origin had a ‘manifest destiny to overspread the 

continent allotted by providence’. Many in the USA still believe that their 

country has a special purpose, to hold up some kind of beacon to the rest 

of the world. 


oh, say! does that starspangled 

banner yet wave 

o’er the land of the free and 

the home of the brave? 

ironic or what? 

29 

JANUARY 2017

30 

SAM 

STONE 


Sam Stone came home, 

To the wife and family 

After serving in the conflict overseas. 

And the time that he served, 

Had shattered all his nerves, 

And left a little shrapnel in his knees. 

But the morhpine eased the pain, 

And the grass grew round his brain, 

And gave him all the confidence he lacked, 

With a purple heart and a monkey on his back. 

There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, 

Jesus Christ died for nothin I suppose. 

Little pitchers have big ears, 

Don’t stop to count the years, 

Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. 

31 

Sam Stone’s welcome home 

Didn’t last too long. 

He went to work when he’d spent his last dime 

And soon he took to stealing 

When he got that empty feeling 

For a hundred dollar habit without overtime. 

And the gold roared through his veins 

Like a thousand railroad trains, 

And eased his mind in the hours that he chose, 

While the kids ran around wearin’ other peoples’ clothes... 

JANUARY 2017






32 

Sam Stone was alone 

When he popped his last balloon, 

Climbing walls while sitting in a chair. 

Well, he played his last request, 

While the room smelled just like death, 

With an overdose hovering in the air. 

But life had lost it’s fun, 

There was nothing to be done, 

But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill, 

For a flag-draped casket on a local hero’s hill. 






Written by John Prine 


SAM 

STONE 

DEAD 

33 

JANUARY 2017

34 

AN 

INTERESTING 

PAMPHLET 


¡No pasarán! 

The ITF 

and the 

fight 

against 

fascism 

35 

International Transport 

Workers’ Federation 

JANUARY 2017


The ITF and the fight 

against fascism 

© ITF 2016 

Eyewitness report 

compiled in 1933 by ITF 

representative Jaap 

Oldenbroek on the 

situation in Germany 

following the Nazi 

takeover. 

36 



49-60 Borough Rd, London SE1 1DR 

+44 (0)20 7403 2733 

www.itfglobal.org 

Image courtesy of Manuel Moreno 

ITF report from 1935 

describing the 

underground trade 

union networks in Nazi 

Germany. 

Cover picture: 1936 Spanish 

Civil War poster by Pere Catalá. 


¡NO PASARÁN! 

The ITF and the fight 

against fascism 

The struggle to defeat fascism in the 20th century didn’t 

begin in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World 

War. The anti-fascist fight had been going on for many 

years, and trade unionists were among the first to recognise 

the unique dangers posed by this toxic ideology based on 

racial superiority, anti-semitism, militarism and dictatorship. 

Anti-Nazi illustration produced 

for ITF publications in the 

1930s. 

Trade union activists were key targets of fascist repression. In 

Italy, they were blacklisted and punished after Mussolini 

seized power in 1922. Strikes were outlawed and opponents 

of the fascist regime were brutally persecuted. 

37 

Trade unionists suffered a similar fate in Germany from 

1933 under Hitler’s rule. Unions were closed down, their 

assets confiscated and many thousands of union activists 

were sent to Nazi concentration camps. 

Unions resisted and fought fascism throughout these years. 

They did so clandestinely in countries under the heel of 

fascist dictators, as well as more openly in those whose 

governments pursued a disastrous policy of appeasement 

of fascism. 

Transport trade unions and the ITF played a leading role in 

this fight. 

Although not an avowedly 

fascist regime, the dictatorship 

of Miklós Horthy in Hungary 

from 1920 to 1944 displayed 

many repressive fascist 

characteristics and led Hungary 

into alliance with Nazi 

Germany. In the summer of 

1920 the ITF organised an 

international rail border 

blockade of the country in 

protest at the persecution of 

trade unionists and other 

opponents of the regime. As a 

result the government was 

forced to make concessions. 

¡No pasarán! ● 3 

JANUARY 2017

38 

An Italian poster produced by 

ITF unions in the 1920s to 

encourage transport workers 

to take action against fascism. 

In Italy more than 30,000 

railway workers were sacked 

after Mussolini came to power. 

The union’s head office was 

closed, its leaders were 

arrested – and only released 

following ITF pressure via the 

International Labour 

Organization. The same 

pattern of repression was 

repeated across all transport 

sectors. By 1926 only fascist 

organisations were allowed to 

represent workers. 

4 ● ¡No pasarán! 


ANTI-NAZI ACTIVITIES 

Then based in Amsterdam, the ITF was active in 

underground anti-Nazi activities in Germany following 

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Undercover missions were 

carried out by ITF officials, and anti-fascist leaflets and 

newsletters were distributed via secret trade union networks. 

But the dangers for trade unionists were immense if they 

were discovered. Hermann Jochade, who had been the ITF 

president from 1904 to 1916 and was the leader of the 

banned German railway workers’ union (Einheitsverband 

der Eisenbahner Deutschlands), was beaten to death by 

concentration camp guards in 1939. 

He was not the only transport union leader to die at the 

hands of the Nazis. Ludvik Buland of the NJF Norwegian 

railway workers’ union (Norsk Jernbaneforbund) and Pierre 

Semard of the French railway workers’ federation 

(Fédération des cheminots CGT) were also murdered. 

From 1933 the ITF published the fortnightly Hakenkreuz 

über Deutschland (Swastika overGermany). This was 

renamed as Faschismus (Fascism) and its focus spread to 

include Italy, Austria, Spain and Portugal. It continued 

publication until the end of the Second World War in 1945. 

Most of this printed material originated in the Netherlands 

and was smuggled to Germany by Dutch inland waterway 

skippers and crews. Such action helped raise early political 

awareness of fascism in Holland and gave many Dutch 

The anti-fascist newsletter 

Faschismus was published by 

the ITF until 1945. 

Hermann 

Jochade: 

murdered by 

the Nazis. 

39 


JANUARY 2017

There is a memorial 

plaque at the head 

office of the RMT rail 

and maritime 

workers’ union in 

London that names 

the British seafarers 

and railway workers 

who volunteered to 

fight in the Spanish 

Civil War. 

IBMT 

40 



people experience in secretive operations and in building 

underground organisations – something that would prove 

useful during the Second World War. 

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR 

From 1936 to 1939, the international cause of antifascism 

was focused on defending the Spanish 

Republic against a rebellion led by General Franco and 

supported by Hitler and Mussolini. 

The Spanish Civil War saw the ITF and transport trade 

unions around the world play an active part in efforts to 

stop another fascist takeover in Europe. 

They warned that Franco’s victory would embolden the 

fascist dictators and lead inevitably to a catastrophic world 

war. They were proved right, and Britain and France 

declared war on Hitler’s Germany in September 1939, just 

five months after the defeat of the Spanish Republic. 

Many hundreds of transport workers also joined the 

International Brigades – the 35,000 volunteers from more 

than 50 countries who took up arms to fight for the Spanish 

Republic in a remarkable display of international solidarity. 

In addition, trade unions played a leading role in 

humanitarian campaigns to send food and medical supplies 

to Spain and to help refugees from the war. 

The Spanish Republic had introduced social reforms, giving 

The ITF compiled secret 

reports of arms shipments 

and troop movements to 

fascist-held Spain. 

41 


JANUARY 2017

42 

International Brigader and Liverpool docker Jack 

Jones was the general secretary of Britain’s 

biggest union, the Transport & General Workers’ 

Union, from 1969 to 1978, during which time he 

was also a vice president of the ITF. He is pictured 

(right, in leather jacket) with other International 

Brigaders before the Battle of the Ebro in the 

summer of 1938. 

IBMT 

IBMT 

British volunteers in 

Barcelona in September 

1936 named their unit after 

Tom Mann, president of 

the ITF from 1896 to 1901. 



women the vote, expanding education and devolving 

powers from Madrid. 

IBMT 

These moves were anathema to fascist and reactionary 

forces in Spanish society. Meanwhile, the Western 

democracies stayed out of the war and banned arms sales to 

the Republic, thereby effectively condemning it to defeat. 

Britain and France enforced a policy of ‘non-intervention’, 

and turned a blind eye to attacks on merchant ships 

lawfully trading with Republican Spain. Scores of 

seafarers were killed and injured in these attacks by 

German and Italian bombers and submarines. At least 

29 British ships were sunk. 

Only the Soviet Union and Mexico supported the 

Republic. But their help was vastly overshadowed by the 

volume of arms, aircraft and troops sent by Fascist Italy 

and Nazi Germany to help Franco. He was bolstered too 

by sympathetic US corporations who sold him vital 

supplies of oil and trucks. 

This 1937 Spanish poster says: 

‘All the peoples of the world 

are in the International 

Brigades on the side of the 

Spanish people.’ 

43 

The Spanish Civil War was the first major ‘modern’ war of 

our age. Civilians and urban centres were deliberately 

targeted by the fascists. The bombing of Guernica, for 

example, was portrayed in a painting of the same name 

that Pablo Picasso painted for the Spanish Republic. 

British Film Institute 

As was to be the case in the Second World War, more 

civilians than combatants were killed in the civil war, and 

the sight of refugees in their thousands fleeing the fascist 

advance in Spain would soon be replicated throughout 

much of Europe. 

The British ship Stanwell 

following a bombing raid on 

the port of Tarragona. 


JANUARY 2017

During the Spanish Civil War a group 

of exiled anti-fascist Germans made 

regular radio broadcasts from 

Barcelona and Madrid to support the 

resistance inside Germany. There were 

talks by politicians and writers, often 

recorded in Paris and brought to Spain 

for broadcasting. The ITF’s 

underground newspaper Faschismus 

(Fascism) was mentioned in 

broadcasts. 

Artist John Heartfield made this poster 

advertising the broadcasts. 

44 



ACTION TO HELP SPAIN 

The call to help the Spanish Republic resulted in many 

ships bound for Franco-held ports being boycotted by 

trade union action. The ITF raised funds to send foodships 

to Republican Spain, and Edo Fimmen, the ITF general 

secretary, and other ITF leaders paid several visits to Spain 

to coordinate assistance. 

According to one report, the ITF even had its own unit that 

was fighting on the side of the anti-fascist militia. 

From the start of the war the ITF called on affiliated 

unions to inspect all shipments to Spain in order to prevent 

armaments reaching the rebels. 

45 

On visits to Republican Spain, ITF leaders met Spanish 

transport trade unions to coordinate assistance. Two 

ambulances were donated, and a special fund was set up to 

help transport union members killed in action. 

This ITF report details u-boat 

activity around Spain in the 12 

months to February 1938. 

Transport unions in Scandinavia urged a complete trade 

boycott of Franco’s Spain. But this met resistance from 

British unions, who did not want to defy their 

government’s ‘non-intervention’ policy. 

However, several individual transport unions did take 

action, notably dockers in Antwerp. 

In August 1936 the Norwegian Transport Workers’ Union 

(Norsk Transportarbeiderforbund, NTF) sent a circular to 


JANUARY 2017

Prominent Belgian trade unionist Omer 

Becu – who would later serve as ITF 

president and general secretary from 

1947 to 1960 – organised the 

smuggling of weapons to Republican 

Spain on the Raymond. For this he was 

arrested in 1937 and briefly imprisoned. 

A Belgian 

newspaper 

reports the 

arrest of Omer 

Becu for arms 

smuggling to 

Spain. 

During the Second World War Becu was 

exiled in London and New York, where, 

as general secretary of the IMMOA 

International Mercantile Marine 

Officers’ Association, he worked 

closely with the Allies, particularly the 

Office for Strategic Studies, a US 

wartime intelligence agency. Becu 

recruited other union leaders to work 

with the OSS and built a radio counterespionage 

network that made an 

important contribution to the fight 

against German u-boats. 

46 

An Aid Spain antifascist 

meeting 

organised by the ITF in 

Mexico in 1938. 



local branches urging them to take steps to monitor and 

halt any shipments of arms and ammunition to fascist 

Spain via Norwegian ports. 

At the same time Norway’s national trade union federation 

(Arbeidernes Faglige Landsorganisasjon, AFL) launched a 

solidarity campaign, supported by the NTF, with the aim of 

giving financial support to Spanish unions and to the 

Spanish socialist party. 

In the autumn of 1936 the Norwegian seafarers' union 

(Norsk Sjømannsforbund, NSF) advocated a blockade of 

all fascist-held ports in Spain. The union told members to 

sign off from ships on their way to such ports. 

More than 550 Danes, most of them seafarers, went to 

Spain to fight in the International Brigades. 

Richard Jensen, chair of the Danish marine mechanics’ 

union, became the agent for a Spanish government-owned 

shipping company. He bought and chartered vessels, 

mostly manned by Danish seafarers, and smuggled 

ammunition and weapons to the Spanish Republic. 

In Germany, the ITF’s secret information network, 

especially among Hamburg dockers, was able to collect 

information on arms shipment to Hitler’s Condor Legion 

in Spain. 

ITF observation posts were also established in the ports of 

Cardiff, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Gdynia in order to 

monitor shipping traffic to Spain, and in numerous cases 

shipments of weapons and ammunition were stopped. 

Dockers in Hamburg, from 

where Hitler’s Condor Legion 

set sail for Spain, secretly 

monitored shipments to 

Franco’s Spain. 

Aircraft parts in Hamburg 

ready to load on a vessel 

bound for Spain. 

47 


JANUARY 2017

48 

Published in Antwerp, the anti-fascist newsletter 

Die Schiffahrt (Shipping) was distributed among German 

seafarers and was circulated in Antwerp, Rotterdam and 

ports in Denmark, Norway and the US. 



Seafarers in Franco-held ports also relayed military 

information back to the ITF, which was then passed on to 

the Spanish Republican authorities. 

By the end of 1938, however, when it became clear that 

Franco would win, the ITF’s work in Spain shifted more 

and more to helping refugees. 

SEAFARERS IN SOLIDARITY 

Here is an extract, titled ‘On the situation in Spain’, 

from the illegal German ITF newsletter Die 

Schiffahrt (Shipping), which was published between 1936 

and 1938… 

The struggle of the working people of Spain against the 

reactionary fascist military clique goes on. Every worker, 

every peasant, every seafarer and every salaried employee 

knows now what the war is about. The workers are fighting 

for bread and freedom, that is to say, for a socialist Spain. 

The rebel generals are fighting for the suppression of the 

workers and their trade unions and political parties. They 

want to combine the supremacy of profiteering capitalists and 

the reactionary landed estates with the power of the 

malevolent Spanish clergy within an anti-progressive 

dictatorship. 

The German ITF group has given practical expression to 

the solidarity of all German seafarers and boatmen, by which 

ranks of its stewards and activists have gone to Spain to take 

part in the fight against the fascists alongside the government 

of the Popular Front. 

Extracts from reports given 

to the ITF by escaped inmates 

of German concentration 

camps in 1938. 

49 


JANUARY 2017

50 

Edo Fimmen (above) and Nathan 

Nathans (below). 

The ITF’s headquarters were in Amsterdam during the 

1930s. In anticipation of war, most ITF staff relocated to 

London in August 1939. One, however, Arie Treurniet, 

volunteered to stay behind in charge of the Amsterdam 

office. He was there when the Nazis invaded the 

Netherlands a year later, was arrested shortly 

afterwards and spent over two years in Buchenwald 

concentration camp. 



German seafarers! Report all weapons shipments that are 

leaving German ports bound for the Spanish fascists! Stop 

these transports by any means! 

Down with fascism! Long live the victory of the Spanish 

workers and peasants! 

DUTCHMEN AT THE HELM 

Three Dutchmen at the head of the ITF were closely 

identified with the anti-fascist struggle. 

As its general secretary, Edo Fimmen led the ITF through 

the period that witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe. He 

took personal charge of much of the clandestine activity in 

Nazi Germany and strongly championed the cause of 

democracy in Spain. 

Nathan Nathans, a former clerk with Dutch railways, was 

ITF assistant general secretary from 1924. He was a 

tireless campaigner for the Spanish Republic in the early 

months of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1937 in 

an air crash near Brussels while on a mission to help 

Spanish refugees. 

Fimmen, who died in 1942, was succeeded as ITF general 

secretary by another Dutchman, Jaap Oldenbroek (later to 

become, from 1949, the first general secretary of the 

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions). 

Oldenbroek used the ITF’s underground trade union 

networks to collaborate with the intelligence services of the 

Correspondence from exiled 

German anti-fascist Willy 

Brandt to ITF general secretary 

Edo Fimmen. 

51 


JANUARY 2017

52 

For more information 

●‘The International Transportworkers 

Federation 1914-1945: The Edo Fimmen 

Era’ by Bob Reinalda (ed.), Stichting 

beheer IISG: Amsterdam, 1997. 

●‘Solidarity:The First 100 Years of the 

International Transport Workers’ 

Federation (no author), Pluto Press: 

London, 1996. 

●‘Widerstand und internationale 

Solidarität. Die Internationale 

Transportarbeiter-Föderation (ITF) im 

Widerstand gegen den 

Nationalsozialismus’ by Dieter Nelles, 

Klartext Verlag, Essen, 2001. 

●‘La Marina Mercante y elTráfico 

Marítimo en la Guerra Civil’ by Rafael 

González Etchegaray, Editorial San 

Martín, Madrid, 1977. 

●ITF archives at the Modern Records 

Centre, University of Warwick; see 

www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ 

library/mrc/studying/docs/ 

antifascism 

●Article on the website of Stichting 

Spanje 1936-1939, the Dutch 

International Brigades memorial 

association: https://spanje3639. 

org/2015/04/24/zender-298 

●See also the Finnish-based ‘Train to 

Spain’ project, bringing together 

artists, historians and labour 

movement activists to remember the 

Scandinavian volunteers in theSpanish 

Civil War: www.atraintospain.com 

Allies to defeat Nazism. He oversaw many covert 

operations, including acts of sabotage against transport 

facilities used by the Axis Powers. 

REMEMBER THEM TODAY 

The heroic efforts of transport trade unionists who 

opposed fascism deserve to be remembered today. The 

early decades of last century saw the rise of modern 

fascism, a toxic creed that remains alive in the 21st century 

– though it tries to hide its true nature. Fascist-inspired 

beliefs still have the power to divide workers, provoke 

racial and ethnic conflict, destroy trade unions, trample on 

human rights – and cause wars. 

Trade unions around the world must always be vigilant in 

the face of such challenges. In doing so we can draw 

inspiration from that generation of brave transport trade 

unionists who, against the odds and often sacrificing their 

lives, were the first anti-fascists to say, as their slogan in 

Spain declared: ‘They shall not pass!’ – ‘¡No pasarán!’ 

18 ● ¡No pasarán! 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 20 

‘Money for Hitler means war in Europe’: anti-Nazi sticker circulated 

by the ITF in the 1930s.

This booklet has been written by 

Jim Jump, of the International 

Brigade Memorial Trust, 

London. 

Designed by Mick Jones, 

the commemorative plate 

to mark the ITF’s 

centenary in 1996 

made reference to 

the ITF’s role in 

the fight 

against 

fascism. 

53 

With thanks to 

●Rien Dijkstra, of the Stichting Spanje 1936-1939, 

Amsterdam. 

●Tore Are Johansen, of the Arbeiderbevegelsens Arkiv 

og Bibliotek, Oslo. 

●ReinhardtSilbermann of the Kämpfer und Freunde 

derSpanischen Republik 1936-1939 e.V., Hamburg. 

This project has also 

received help from the 

British train drivers’ 

union ASLEF and from the 

Norwegian locomotive 

workers’ union NLF. 

JANUARY 2017


The ITF and the 

fight against 

fascism 

54 



49-60 Borough Rd, London SE1 1DR 

+44 (0)20 7403 2733 

www.itfglobal.org 


55 

JANUARY 2017

56 

Crikey ... a virtual keyboard, 



deep breath 


brexit and a macho trump still 

sit high on our compost heap 

stinking the place out ... they 

need to be turned over! 

57 


JANUARY 2017

58 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 



59 

JANUARY 2017


oi editor ... 

we have had a couple 

of comments and goodly 

remarks, but no articles 

or things for 

publication 

60 


WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 
























Ignorance? 

61 









JANUARY 2017

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 7


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

21

Ah, money money money 

in a rich man’s world

it is so funny, that you fuckers 

can’t take it with you

d 


The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 



a lot of odds in 

this issue, but 

fuck it! 



Photograph of Bill: Alan Rutherford 
















your dreams! 

Articles to: 


Opening 03 

John Berger 05 

The Lottery 11 

February 1917 17 

On the farm 25 

Law Centre 41 

Letters 65 

1 

FEBRUARY 2017

... the main poin 

again: war is pe 

freedom is slave 

ignorance is stre 

– and that was 

news, goodnigh

ts 

ace, 

ry, 

ngth 

the 

t 

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 






is something 



Slyce n’Ice 

Hello, 

Welcome to magazine number 21. 

Ignoring the media circus, lies and bullshit 

that parades as news ... mis-directing our 

attention, here is a magazine produced 

freely to be read freely. 













3 

FEBRUARY 2017

4 


JOHN BERGER’S RARE ART 

CRITICISM 

by Elisa Wouk Almino 

Berger’s art criticism succeeds because of its tangibility — it is grounded 

in human experience, historical events, and the physical artworks. 

“Reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held — I am 

tempted to say salvaged,” John Berger writes in his 1983 essay “The 

Production of the World.” Berger, the art critic and author who died 

yesterday at age 90, believed reality was obscured by a “screen of 

clichés,” controlled by mainstream culture and those in power. For him, 

good art brought reality back into focus, and in that sense could be 

revolutionary. The job of the art critic was to distill and understand how 

and why an artist accomplished this, and why her work resonates. 

5 

In 2017, reality seems to be quickly slipping from our grasp — in my 

lifetime, it seems, more than ever. Following the election of Donald 

Trump, Paul Holdengräber interviewed John Berger, who gave the 

following advice: “The less hot air you make and the more tangible you 

are, the better chance you have at this moment.” 

Berger’s art criticism succeeds, I think, because of its tangibility — it is 

grounded in human experience, specific historical events, and always 

the physical marks on the artworks. In art writing, these qualities are 

FEBRUARY 2017

are, as enough of it panders to an art market which has given every 

indication of carrying on with business as usual under Trump. However, 

the dearth of art criticism, which is a relatively nascent form in itself, is 

not a new problem. In 1957, Berger wrote an extensive article for the 

Universities & Left Review outlining the various shortcomings of Britain’s 

art critics and how they could improve their craft. Titled “Wanted — 

Critics,” the article condemns the still-common tendency for writers to rely 

on description and technical (or straight-up nonsensical) language. The 

result is that too many art writers avoid saying much at all. 

6 

At graduate school, I was introduced to Berger’s larger body of work, 

besides his seminal book and TV series Ways of Seeing. He has since 

been among the critics who’ve kept me company, whose words have 

always seemed worth revisiting, referencing, and arguing with. Berger’s 

criticism is by no means perfect; his focus, like the art history most of us 

are taught, is overwhelmingly Western and male. But it is his approach 

that marked me, his uncommon ability to dive into the sensory details 

of an artwork and resurface with a politicized argument that applies far 

beyond the work itself. Writers, especially in art, tend to choose politics or 

aesthetics. Berger made no such distinction. 

I recently spoke with a group of college art journal students, and when 

asked to share reading material, I brought John Berger. I wanted to 

encourage them to do what I’ve been striving to do myself: write what I’m 

actually thinking, and with feeling. To let go of fear and be direct. 

Berger likes to ground his essays in a question. He asks of the Dutch 

painter Johannes Vermeer, “What was it that he wanted to say in the 


stillness of his rooms which the light fills like water a tank?” And of the 

French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, “What was his color for?” 

Berger’s questions, while simply put, are not obvious. He often answers 

them by inhabiting the artist’s perspective, tracing back to her initial 

gestures, “invisible to us but imaginable,” like Rembrandt looking in 

the mirror while painting himself. Or, sometimes, Berger conjures the 

moments that inspired an artist to create, like JMW Turner observing the 

froth building in the sinks of his father’s barbershop, manifesting later 

as painted, violent waves. These accounts have not been verified, but 

that didn’t make them any less true for Berger. 

His keen interest in the process of making art, and the artist’s 

commitment to sharing a new way of looking at the world, was informed 

by Marxism. This is especially clear in the first essay I quoted by him, “The 

Production of the World,” where he finds reality “confirmed” in Vincent 

van Gogh’s paintings. For Berger, they “imitate the active existence — the 

labor of being — of what they depict.” “When he painted a road,” he 

confidently speculates of van Gogh, “the roadmakers were there in his 

imagination.” The artist, in his “endless yearning for reality,” is at work to 

produce and communicate it. 

7 

Berger, who started off as an artist himself, was familiar with the labor of 

art. In an essay about drawing his father in his coffin, he describes how 

each successive line on the page carries with it its own moment in time. 

A drawing is a summary of acts of looking, of being with your subject. For 

Berger, the portrait offered “a door through which moments of a life” — 

his father’s — “could enter.” It transferred his father’s being more than 

any photograph or material object could. 

FEBRUARY 2017

Berger’s art criticism, for me, functions almost as another mark on the 

artwork, imbuing more life and memory into its porous surface. Art, 

with Berger, is not an escape, but brings us back to earth, to what we 

love and why. Because good artists take the time to scrutinize the world 

around them. And right now, that’s the best advice we can get. 

John Berger died 2 January 2017. 

This essay taken from hyperallergic.com 

8 

I have a couple of books by John Berger. 


9 

FEBRUARY 2017

10 


THE LOTTERY 

A review of the Graphic Novel by Myles Hyman: a reincarnation of 

a sinister Shirley Jackson story. Hyman’s adaptation is a strong effort 

to retain the original tale’s sparse horror while making the most of its 

compelling visual possibilities 

Review by Rachel Elizabeth Jones 

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of American literature’s most 

famous and crystalline examples of using the “banality of evil” — a 

theory put forth by Hannah Arendt to describe Nazi Adolf Eichman’s 

role in the Holocaust — to shock, enrage, and, hopefully, instruct. First 

published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, the 3,430-word short 

story describes the quaint hustle and bustle of a small town’s annual 

tradition: a systematic game of chance that ends in the stoning to death 

of one of the villagers. 

11 

As the United States and the world struggle for purchase in the fog of 

Donald Trump’s election and reckon with the fascist trajectory of recent 

history, “The Lottery” has been reincarnated as a graphic novel by 

Jackson’s grandson, Myles Hyman. Hill and Wang released the Parisbased 

artist and illustrator’s visual adaptation in late October of 2016, 

amid a revival — and ad nauseam claims of a revival — of interest in 

Jackson’s work and persona. 

FEBRUARY 2017

12 

In his book’s preface, Hyman writes that his grandmother’s story is a 

“no-nonsense, largely hermetic structure, words joined with a jeweler’s 

precision.” Jackson wrote “The Lottery” in the same style as the action 

that unfolds: perfunctorily, with minimal fuss and negligible room for 

interpretation or change. (There has been much speculation about the 

degree to which the story expresses the way Jackson perceived life in 

the small New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. These 

discussions often include unconfirmed rumors that her family’s home was 

once vandalized with a swastika drawn in soap.) 

I 

Despite such narrative impermeability, Hyman deftly shapes his rendition 

by introducing some key visual elements: extreme shadow and contrast, 

attention to timepieces, and the repeated use of circles, which gesture 

toward both the shape of a clock and the heavy graphite dot that marks 

the lottery’s “winner.” 

Hyman also elongates and embellishes the original timeline, so that the 

story opens not on the morning of June 27 as Jackson had it, but on the 

night before. A full moon rises above the empty, shadow-mottled streets 

of a rural Small Town, U.S.A., as a lone car passes through the eerie 

town center, high beams aglow. Two men meet in a storefront, preparing 

folded slips of paper, which they then deposit into a black box through 

a single hand-sized hole in the top. Here, Hyman introduces the first 

of multiple views from within the box, an “impossible” perspective that 

suggests the involvement in the rite of a nonhuman force. 

For maximum effect, Jackson avoided foreshadowing anything sinister; 

Hyman’s distinctly noir opening sequence is a departure that — smartly 


— does not attempt to recreate the blasé horror of her original. It does, 

however, echo the story’s emphasis on both ritual and ordinariness; of 

course, someone would have to prepare the paper slips in advance. 

The drama of Hyman’s shadowing carries forward from that evening 

into the next morning — “The morning of June 27 was clear and sunny, 

with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” Jackson began. Hyman’s 

muted colors and heavy shadows negate summer airiness, just as the 

mundane scenes — chopping wood, looking out the window, a hand 

on a doorknob or fingers unbuttoning a shirt — are made meaningful 

through careful framing. 

Hyman also takes an early liberty with the story’s ultimate victim, Tessie 

Hutchinson, through his invention of a bath scene. Here, Tessie is young, 

slender, and mildly sexualized — a far cry from Olive Dunbar’s portrayal 

in the 1969 Encyclopedia Brittanica film adaptation, an educational 

16mm that clocks in at just 19 minutes. 

13 

Hyman’s return to timepieces throughout— the day-by-day wall calendar, 

a windowsill alarm clock, a pocket watch, clocks in the bank and the 

diner — match well with the time-centric lines he chose to extract from 

the text. Far more so than the grave, unsmiling faces of the villagers, 

Hyman’s focus on units of time captures Jackson’s insinuation of the 

dangers of tradition fiercely salvaged from the endless passing of days 

and generations. 

FEBRUARY 2017

Another way Hyman’s contemporary visual interpretation of “The Lottery” 

is significant is that it presents the community as an entirely white one. 

Readers of the original story could have easily inferred this, but Hyman’s 

retelling confirms it. So while Jackson’s allegory offers layered warnings 

about the dangers of historically justified closed-mindedness and mob 

behavior — which, throughout time, has fueled violence against specific 

groups based on identity— at surface level, it uses a homogenous 

community to play out its point to its absurd, barbaric conclusion. 

Hyman’s adaptation is a strong effort to retain the original tale’s sparse 

horror while making the most of its compelling visual possibilities. 

14 

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by Myles Hyman is now available from Hill 

and Wang. 

This review taken from hyperallergic.com 

I have bought this book: powerful images; thought provoking storyline. 


15 

Artwork: Myles Hyman 

FEBRUARY 2017

16 


RUSSIA 

FEBRUARY 1917 

From ‘1917: Russia’s Red Year’ by Tim Sanders and John Newsinger: 

After more than three years of war, the Russian Empire is at a turning point. 

Already two million Russians, soldiers and civilians, have been killed and 

yet Tsar Nicholas demands more sacrifice. In the cities, the workers are 

going hungry and cold while the rich get richer from the profits of war. The 

army and the navy are both in the grip of growing unrest. Across Petrograd 

meetings are being held in factories and workshops to vote whether or not 

to strike and demonstrate against the war on 23 February, International 

Women’s Day. 

17 

From ‘Russia in Revolution’ by Harrison E. Salisbury: 

Few who lived through Monday February 27 in Petrograd ever forgot a 

detail of the day. Members of the Duma gathered early at the Tauride 

Palace. No one had issued a call for them to assemble. They simply 

gravitated there. Before noon the great place was filled with men trying 

to understand the meaning of what was in progress, trying to understand 

what their role should be. The Duma was not exactly a revolutionary 

stronghold. The members were parliamentarians, many of them 

Conservatives and supporters of the monarchy. The last thing which they 

wanted was to become the centre of a revolution which would bring down 

the 300-year rule of the Romanovs. 

Anonomous, 1920 

FEBRUARY 2017


Yet it was quickly clear to men like Rodzyanko that the Duma had become 

the eye of the hurricane. As, one by one, the Czar’s crack regiments moved 

into the streets of Petrograd and joined the crowds in demolishing the 

symbols of Czarist power the Duma emerged as the only instrument of 

authority. 

Soon word spread through Tauride Palace that troops and workers were 

headed there. What was the Duma to do? It was a tricky question. The 

Duma had been prorogued by the Czar. Technically, at least, it had no 

legal function. Finally, it was agreed to form a ‘Provisional Committee’ 

of all the parties except those of the right. The purpose of the Committee 

was to restore order and establish contact with public organisations and 

institutions; in a word, to fill the power vacuum which was being created by 

the dissolution of the Czarist government. 

Hardly had the new Committee been formed than those within the 

Tauride Palace heard a distant murmur which grew louder until it swelled 

into a noise like rolling thunder. This was the sound of tramping feet, of 

shouting voices. It was the sound of the people of Petrograd, thousands 

upon thousands of them, marching to the Tauride Palace, surrounding it, 

enveloping it, engulfing it. 

The crowd filled the courtyards, it surged into the palace, it thronged the 

corridors and flowed into the halls and chambers. No Duma member had 

ever seen anything like it. Nor had anyone in Petrograd. There had never 

been anything like it. 

Some members wer in panic. they thought they would be lynched. But not 

Kerensky. He rushed to greet the soldiers and workers, to join and unify 

their aspirations and emotions with those of the Duma. Quickly other 


Duma leaders took up this posture, welcoming the people, haranguing 

them in the name of the Revolution. Without anyone quite noticing, 

the ‘February events’ became on that Monday afternoon the ‘February 

Revolution’, a revolution in which not a single revolutionary had yet played 

any role. It had been made by ordinary citizens, particularly by angry 

women, housewives sick and tired of standing in freezing queues before 

empty shops, and by sympathetic soldiers who felt their role was with the 

people rather than with the distant Czar and his bureaucrats. To only a few 

of those in Tauride Palace that afternoon was the meaning of this complex 

yet simple transition clear and even later confusion persisted over what had 

happened, how it had happened and why it had happened. 

In the course of attacks on the prisons some radicals and revolutionaries 

were released, most of them from the lower echelons, and these men 

and women began to drift toward the Tauride Palace. For several days 

the factories had been naming members to a Soviet or Council such as 

had been set up in 1905 and a meeting of these delegates, together with 

representatives of the troops, was called for the vening of the 27th at 7pm 

at the Tauride. 

19 

Events moved swiftly, without support of the army the Duma’s provisional 

committee and the Czar were cast aside and by October, through popular 

demands and the necessary party discipline of vanguard revolutionaries, 

the Bolsheviks had become leaders of the many Soviets and Councils and 

ultimately the Russian Revolution ... a brief but glorious flash of Socialism! 

FEBRUARY 2017

20 


21 

FEBRUARY 2017

Royal Academy of Arts 

REVOLUTION: 

RUSSIAN ART 

1917-1932 

on until 17 April 2017 

Artwork on right by 

Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev 

Bolshevik 1920.



FREE FLIGHT 

GROUNDED 

& SQUASHED 

THE 

REVOLUTION 

25 

BETRAYED 

Photograph: Alan Rutherford 

FEBRUARY 2017

26 


ON 

27 

PHOTOGRAPHS 

ALAN RUTHERFORD 

THE 

FARM 

FEBRUARY 2017

28 


29 

FEBRUARY 2017

30 


31 

FEBRUARY 2017

32 


33 

FEBRUARY 2017

34 


35 

FEBRUARY 2017

36 


37 

FEBRUARY 2017

38 


39 

FEBRUARY 2017

40 


41 

FEBRUARY 2017

42 


The LAW CENTRE 

in Gloucester: 

the early years 

The Law Centre was opened by the then Mayor of Gloucester, Councillor 

Elsie Hedge, on 15 September 1985. The campaign to set up a Law 

Centre in Gloucester had begun in 1977, and following much hard work 

by the Steering Group the Labour and Liberal Democrat Groups on a 

balanced City Council voted to fund the project. The original staff team 

was one solicitor, three advice workers and one interpreter/administrator, 

and the following year the City Council accepted the need for an 

additional solicitor. 

43 

For the first two years, the Law Centre was based in cramped, 

inaccessible premises in Park Road. On 11 August 1987 the Centre 

moved to Widden Street. The Chair of the Management Committee, local 

solicitor Jon Holmes, received the keys to the building from the Chairman 

of the landlords, the Muslim Welfare Association, and the building was 

officially opened by the then Mayor, Councillor Andrew Gravells. The 

Widden Street premises were fully accessible to wheelchair users and had 

enough space to involve volunteers in the running of the Centre. 

FEBRUARY 2017

44 


45 

Posters: Alan Rutherford, 1987 

Shortly after the Law Centre moved to Widden Street, the Conservative 

led Council elected in May 1987 announced plans to cut half a million 

pounds from its budget. The Law Centre was singled out as a target, 

with a proposed cut in funding of 50%, and the first of two campaigns 

to save the Law Centre began. Four hundred people marched through 

Gloucester protesting, petitions were signed by thousands, and 

eventually two Conservative councillors voted against their group to 

restore full funding for 1988/89. 

FEBRUARY 2017

The following year, sfter the Law Centre supported and advised 

Gloucester Council tenants campaigning against the sell-off of their 

homes to a Housing Association based in Newcastle, the Conservative 

led Council announced plans to withdraw funding from the Law Centre 

completely from April 1989. A second, even omre vigorous campaign 

began, and a thousand people braved torrential rain to march through 

Gloucester in protest. In early March 1989 the Conservatives lost overall 

control of the Council after losing a by-election, and the Law Centre was 

saved again. 

46 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 21 

Signage: Alan Rutherford, 1985

47 

FEBRUARY 2017

Artwork & Photograph: Alan Rutherford, 1987 

48 


49 

CHELTENHAM 

1987 

FEBRUARY 2017

50 

Photograph: of Tewkesbury Alan Rutherford 


51 

FEBRUARY 2017

52 


53 

FEBRUARY 2017

www.rrbphotobook 

http://strangelyfam 

54 

Scarecrow 

Photograp 

Peter Mitch 

and his 

publisher 

Rudi Thoem 

New book: 

A New Refutati 

Viking 4 Space 


her 

ell 

... 

mes 

55 

on of the 

Mission 

s.com 

iliar.co.uk 

FEBRUARY 2017

56 


57 

FEBRUARY 2017

58 


59 

FEBRUARY 2017

60 


61 

FEBRUARY 2017

62 




deep breath 



sitting high on our compost 

heap stinking the place out ... 

they need to be turned over! 

63 


FEBRUARY 2017

64 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 



65 

FEBRUARY 2017


oi matey editor ... 

we have had a few more 

comments and goodly 

remarks, but still no 

articles or things for 

publication 

66 

oh shit 

this letters page is just 

boring me to death 


WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 
























Ignorance? 

67 









FEBRUARY 2017

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 7


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

22

in a rich man’s world 

Ah-ha, money money money

it is so funny, that you fuckers 


d 


The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 



again, lot of odds 

in this issue, but 

have a look! 



Photograph of Joe at Didley: Alan Rutherford 

Cover: Bolshevik flyposter, 

photograph: Alan Rutherford 














your dreams! 

Articles to: 


Opening 03 

Trumpmen: Carson 05 

Beyond Theory 09 

River Avon 18 

Brian 25 

1851-1951 26 

Letters 111 

1 

MARCH 2017






news, goodnigh

ts 

ace, 

ry, 

ngth 

the 

t 

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 






is something 



Slyce n’Ice 

Hello, 


















3 

MARCH 2017

4 


TRUMPMEN 

From the African American Republican ‘brother’, now one of Trump’s 

coterie, who recently said that Egypt’s pyramids were built by the biblical 

Joseph to store grain (Nov 2015), Dr Ben Carson compared slaves to 

immigrants seeking a better life in his first official address as Housing 

and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, setting off an uproar on social 

media (7 March 2017). 

In what appears to be an embarrassing pattern of missteps on race for 

the Trump administration, Carson told a room packed with hundreds 

of federal workers that the Africans captured, sold and transported to 

America against their will had the same hopes and dreams as early 

immigrants. 

5 

“That’s what America is about. A land of dreams and 

opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in 

the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for 

less,” said Carson, speaking extemporaneously as he paced 

the room with a microphone. “But they, too, had a dream that 

one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, 

great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue 

prosperity and happiness in this land.” 

MARCH 2017

SAIL AWAY 

In America you’ll get food to eat 

Won’t have to run through the jungle 

And scuff up your feet 

You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day 

It’s great to be an American 

6 

Ain’t no lions or tigers ain’t no mamba snake 

Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake 

Everybody is as happy as a man can be 

Climb aboard little wog sail away with me 

Sail away sail away 

We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay 

Sail away-sail away 


In America every man is free 

To take care of his home and his family 

You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree 

You’re all gonna be an American 

Sail away sail away 


Sail away-sail away 


Randy Newman 


sh-i-i-i-t! 

that ben did a top 

job on me 

7 

MARCH 2017

8 


BEYOND THEORY 

Spain 1936-39, France 1968 

Peggy Kornegger 

The revolution is a thing of the people, a popular creation; the counterrevolution 

is a thing of the State. It has always been so, and must always be 

so, whether in Russia, Spain, or China. 

Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FAI) , Tierra y Libertad, July 3, 1936 

The so-called Spanish Civil War is popularly believed to have been a simple battle 

between Franco’s fascist forces and those committed to liberal democracy. What 

has been overlooked, or ignored, is that much more was happening in Spain than 

civil war. A broadly-based social revolution adhering to anarchist principles was 

taking firm, concrete form in many areas of the country. The gradual curtailment 

and eventual destruction of this libertarian movement is less important to discuss 

here than what was actually achieved by the women and men who were part of it. 

Against tremendous odds, they made anarchism work. 

9 

The realization of anarchist collectivisation and workers’ self-management 

during the Spanish Revolution provides a classic example of organization-plusspontancity. 

In both rural and industrial Spain, anarchism had been a part of the 

popular consciousness for many years. In the countryside, the people had a long 

tradition of communalism; many villages still shared common property or gave 

plots of land to those without any. Decades of rural collectivism and co-operation 

laid the foundation for theoretical anarchism, which came to Spain in the 1870s 

(via the Italian revolutionary, Fanelli, a friend of Bakunin) and eventually gave rise 

MARCH 2017

to anarco-syndicalism, the application of anarchist principles to industrial trade 

unionism. The Confederacion National del Trebajo, founded in 1910, was the 

anarco-syndicalist union (working closely with the militant Federacion Anarquista 

Iberica) which provided instruction and preparation for workers’ self-management 

and collectivization. Tens of thousands of books, newspapers, and pamphlets 

reaching almost every part of Spain contributed to an even greater general 

knowledge of anarchist thought 5 . The anarchist principles of non-hierarchical 

cooperation and individual initiative combined with anarco-syndicalist tactics of 

sabotage, boycott and general strike, and training in production and economics, 

gave the workers background in both theory and practice. This led to a successful 

spontaneous appropriation of both factories and land after July 1936. 

10 

When the Spanish right responded to the electoral victory of the Popular Front 

with an attempted military takeover, on July 19, 1936, the people fought back 

with a fury which checked the coup within 24 hours. At this point, ballot box 

success became incidental; total social revolution had begun. While the industrial 

workers cither went on strike or actually began to run the factories themselves, the 

agricultural workers ignored landlords and started to cultivate the land on their 

own. Within a short time, over 60% of the land in Spain was worked collectively 

— without landlords, bosses, or competitive incentive. Industrial collectivization 

took place mainly in the province of Catalonia, where anarco-syndicalist influence 

was strongest. Since 75% of Spain’s industry was located in Catalonia, this 

was no small achievement 6 . So, after 75 years of preparation and struggle, 

collectivization was achieved, through the spontaneous collective action of 

individuals dedicated to libertarian principles. 

What, though, did collectivization actually mean, and how did it work? 

In general, the anarchist collectives functioned on two levels: (1) small-scale 

participatory democracy and (2) large-scale coordination with control at the 

bottom. At each level, the main concern was decentralization and individual 


initiative. In the factories and villages, representatives were chosen to councils 

which operated as administrative or coordinating bodies. Decisions always came 

from more general membership meetings, which all workers attended. To guard 

against the dangers of representation, representatives were workers themselves, 

and at all times subject to immediate, as well as periodic, replacement. These 

councils or committees were the basic units of self-management. From there, they 

could be expanded by further coordination into loose federations which would 

link together workers and operations over an entire industry or geographical 

area. In this way, distribution and sharing of goods could be performed, as well 

as implementation of programs of wide-spread concern, such as irrigation, 

transportation, and communication. Once again, the emphasis was on the 

bottom-to-top process. This very tricky balance between individuality and 

collectivism was most successfully accomplished by the Peasant Federation of 

Levant, which included 900 collectives, and the Aragon Federation of Collectives, 

composed of about 500 collectives. 

11 

Probably the most important aspect of self-management was the equalization 

of wages. This took many forms, but frequently the “family wage” system was 

used, wages being paid to each worker in money or coupons according to her/ 

his needs and those of dependants. Goods in abundance were distributed freely, 

while others were obtainable with “money”. 

The benefits which came from wage equalization were tremendous. After 

huge profits in the hands of a few men were eliminated, the excess money was 

used both to modernize industry (purchase of new equipment, better working 

conditions) and to improve the land (irrigation, dams, purchase of tractors, etc.). 

Not only were better products turned out more efficiently, but consumer prices 

were lowered as well. This was true in such varied industries as: textiles, metal 

and munitions, gas, water, electricity, baking, fishing, municipal transportation, 

railroads, telephone services, optical products, health services, etc. The workers 

MARCH 2017

themselves benefited from a shortened work week, better working conditions, 

free health care, unemployment pay, and a new pride in their work. Creativity 

was fostered by self-management and the spirit of mutual aid; workers were 

concerned with turning out products which were better than those turned out 

under conditions of labour exploitation. They wanted to demonstrate that 

socialism works, that competition and greed motives are unnecessary. Within 

months, the standard of living had been raised by anywhere from 50-100% in 

many areas of Spain. 

12 

The achievements of the Spanish anarchists go beyond a higher standard of 

living and economic equality; they involve the realization of basic human ideals: 

freedom, individual creativity, and collective cooperation. The Spanish anarchist 

collectives did not fail; they were destroyed from without. Those (of the right and 

left) who believed in a strong State worked to wipe them out of Spain and history. 

The successful anarchism of roughly eight million Spanish people is only now 

beginning to be uncovered. 

C’est pour toi que tu fais la revolution. 

(“It is for yourself that you make the revolution”) 

Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit 

Anarchism has played an important part in French history, but rather than delve 

into the past, I want to focus on a contemporary event — May- June, 1968. 

The May-June events have particular significance because they proved that a 

general strike and takeover of the factories by the workers, and the universities 

by the students, could happen in a modern, capitalistic, consumption-oriented 

country. In addition, the issues raised by the students and workers in France (e.g. 

self-determination, the quality of life) cut across class lines and have tremendous 

implications for the possibility of revolutionary change in a post-scarcity society. 

(See Murrey Bookchin’s Post Scarcity Anarchism (Ramparts Press, 1974) for both 


an insightful analysis of the May-June events and a discussion of revolutionary 

potential in a technological society.) 

On March 22, 1968, students at the University of Nanterre, among them 

anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit, occupied administrative buildings at their school, 

calling for an end to both the Vietnam war and their own oppression as students. 

(Their demands were similar in content to those of students from Columbia 

to Berlin protesting in loco parentis.) The University was closed down, and the 

demonstrations spread to the Sorbonne. The SNESUP (the union of secondary 

school and university teachers) called for a strike, and the students’ union, the 

UNEF, organized a demonstration for May 6. That day, students and police 

clashed in the Latin Quarter in Paris; the demonstrators built barricades in the 

streets, and many were brutally beaten by the riot police. By the 7th, the number 

of protesters had grown to between twenty and fifty thousand people, marching 

toward the Etoile singing the Internationale. During the next few days, skirmishes 

between demonstrators and police in the Latin Quarter became increasingly 

violent, and the public was generally outraged at the police repression. Talks 

between labour unions and teachers’ and students’ unions began, and the UNEF 

and the FEN (a teachers’ union) called for an unlimited strike and demonstration. 

On May 13, around six hundred thousand people — students, teachers, and 

workers — marched through Paris in protest. 

13 

On the same day, the workers at the Sud- Aviation plant in Nantes (a city with 

the strongest anarco-syndicalist tendencies in France 9 ) went out on strike. It 

was this action that touched off the general strike, the largest in history, including 

ten million workers — “professionals and labourers, intellectuals and football 

players.” 10 Banks, post offices, gas stations, and department stores closed; the 

subway and busses stopped running; and trash piled up as the garbage collectors 

joined the strike. The Sorbonne was occupied by students, teachers, and anyone 

who wanted to come and participate in discussions there. Political dialogues which 

MARCH 2017

questioned the vary basis of French capitalist society went on for days. All over 

Paris posters and graffiti appeared: It is forbidden to forbid. Life without dead 

times. All power to the Imagination. The more you consume, the less you live. 

May- June became both an “assault on the established order” and a “festival of 

the streets”. 11 Old lines between the middle and working classes often became 

meaningless as the younger workers and the students found themselves making 

similar demands: liberation from an oppressive authoritarian system (university or 

factory) and the right to make decisions about their own lives. 

14 

The people of France stood at the brink of total revolution. A general strike had 

paralysed the country. The students occupied the universities and the workers, 

the factories. What remained to be done was for the workers actually to work the 

factories, to take direct unmcdiatcd action and settle for nothing less than total 

self-management. Unfortunately, this did not occur. Authoritarian politics and 

bureaucratic methods die hard, and most of the major French workers’ unions 

were saddled with both. As in Spain, the Communist Party worked against the 

direct, spontaneous actions of the people in the streets: the Revolution must be 

dictated from above. Leaders of the CGT (the Communist workers’ union) tried 

to prevent contacts between the students and workers, and a united left soon 

became an impossibility. As de Gaulle and the police mobilized their forces 

and even greater violence broke out, many strikers accepted limited demands 

(better pay, shorter hours, etc.) and returned to work. Students continued their 

increasingly bloody confrontations with police, but the moment had passed. By 

the end of June, France had returned to “normality” under the same old Gaullist 

regime. 

What happened in France in 1968 is vitally connected to the Spanish Revolution 

of 1936; in both cases anarchist principles were not only discussed but 

implemented. The fact that the French workers never did achieve working selfmanagement 

may be because anarco-syndicalism was not as prevalent in France 


in the years prior to 1968 as it was in Spain before 1936. Of course, this is an 

over-simplification; explanation for a “failed” revolution can run on into infinity. 

What is crucial here, once again, is the fact that it happened at all. May-June 

1968, disproves the common belief that revolution is impossible in an advanced 

capitalist country. The children of the French middle and working classes, bred 

to passivity, mindless consumerism, and/or alienated labor, were rejecting much 

more than capitalism. They were questioning authority itself, demanding the 

right to a free and meaningful existence. The reasons for revolution in modern 

industrial society are thus no longer limited to hunger and material scarcity; they 

include the desire for human liberation from all forms of domination, in essence a 

radical change in the very “quality of everyday life”. 12 They assume the necessity 

of a libertarian society. Anarchism can no longer be considered an anachronism. 

It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come and do 

not see things which happen today. We see them only too well, and in their 

true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of 

prejudices that besets us. 

Peter Kropotkin 

15 

There are two main reasons why revolution was aborted in France: (1) inadequate 

preparation in the theory and practice of anarchism and (2) the vast power of the 

State coupled with authoritarianism and bureaucracy in potentially sympathetic 

left-wing groups. In Spain, the revolution was more widespread and tenacious 

because of the extensive preparation. Yet it was still eventually crushed by a 

fascist State and authoritarian leftists. It is important to consider these two factors 

in relation to the situation in the United States today. We are not only facing a 

powerful State whose armed forces, police, and nuclear weapons could instantly 

destroy the entire human race, but we also find ourselves confronting a pervasive 

reverence for authority and hierarchical forms whose continuance is ensured 

daily through the kind of home-grown passivity bred by family, school, church, 

MARCH 2017

and TV screen. In addition, the U.S. is a huge country, with only a small, sporadic 

history of anarchist activity. It would seem that not only are we unprepared, we 

arc literally dwarfed by a State more powerful than those of France and Spain 

combined. To say we are up against tremendous odds is an understatement. 

16 

But where does defining the Enemy as a ruthless, unconquerable giant lead 

us? If we don’t allow ourselves to be paralysed by fatalism and futility, it could 

force us to redefine revolution in a way that would focus on anarca-feminism as 

the framework in which to view the struggle for human liberation. It is women 

who now hold the key to new conceptions of revolution, women who realize 

that revolution can no longer mean the seizure of power or the domination 

of one group by another — under any circumstances, for any length of time. 

It is domination itself that must be abolished. The very survival of the planet 

depends on it. Men can no longer be allowed to wantonly manipulate the 

environment for their own self-interest, just as they can no longer be allowed to 

systematically destroy whole races of human beings. The presence of hierarchy 

and authoritarian mind-set threaten out human and planetary existence. Global 

liberation and libertarian politics have become necessary, not just Utopian pipe 

dreams. We must “acquire the conditions of life in order to survive”. 

Taken from an article in Second Wave, an American feminist magazine edited 

by Peggy Kornegger, 1975 


17 

MARCH 2017


RIVER AVON 


19 

MARCH 2017

20 


21 

MARCH 2017

22 


23 

MARCH 2017



Artwork 

Brian David Rutherford 

1950-1977 

... I recently found some letters from him, re-reading them makes me 

quite sad as I think, were he alive now, it would be the most wonderful 

thing and we would chat and chat ... I miss him. 

25 

From ‘Sheep in the Road 1’, 2014 

MARCH 2017

26 


TRADE 

UNION 

PAMPHLET 

FROM 

1951 

27 

MARCH 2017

28 


29 

MARCH 2017

30 


31 

MARCH 2017

32 


33 

MARCH 2017

34 


35 

MARCH 2017

36 


37 

MARCH 2017

38 


39 

MARCH 2017

40 


41 

MARCH 2017

42 


43 

MARCH 2017

44 


45 

MARCH 2017

46 


47 

MARCH 2017

48 


49 

MARCH 2017

50 


51 

MARCH 2017

52 


53 

MARCH 2017

54 


55 

MARCH 2017

56 


57 

MARCH 2017

58 


59 

MARCH 2017

60 


61 

MARCH 2017

62 


63 

MARCH 2017

64 


65 

MARCH 2017

66 


67 

MARCH 2017

68 


69 

MARCH 2017

70 


71 

MARCH 2017

72 


73 

MARCH 2017

74 


75 

MARCH 2017

76 


77 

MARCH 2017

78 


79 

MARCH 2017

80 


81 

MARCH 2017

82 


83 

MARCH 2017

84 


85 

MARCH 2017

86 


87 

MARCH 2017

88 


89 

MARCH 2017

90 


91 

MARCH 2017

92 


93 

MARCH 2017

94 


95 

MARCH 2017

96 


97 

MARCH 2017

98 


99 

MARCH 2017

100 


101 

MARCH 2017

102 


103 

MARCH 2017

104 


105 

MARCH 2017

hmmm ... ju 

a wee bit topical 

what is going to 

to ‘northern ir 

after brexi 

Can be viewed and read at: http://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/31910753/the

st 

maybe? 

happen 

eland’ 

t? 

There is no solution to the 

Northern Ireland Problem: 

NORTHERN IRELAND IS THE 

PROBLEM 

Paul Kaill & Alan Rutherford 

Hand Over Fist Press: 1987 

(out of print, but see below) 

Poetry, prose and illustration argue for 

a realisation that Ireland’s future lies with 

the Irish working class, North and South 

of the border, and not with the assemblies 

of bourgeois democracy in Westminster 

and Dublin. That there is no solution to the 

Northern Ireland problem, but that the very 

existence of the Northern Irish state is the 

problem. 

re-is-no-solution-to-the-northern-ireland-problem-northern-ireland-is-the-problem

108 




deep breath 



sitting high on our compost 

heap stinking the place out ... 

they need to be turned over! 

109 


MARCH 2017

110 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 



111 

MARCH 2017







publication 

112 

oh shit 




WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 
























Ignorance? 

113 









MARCH 2017

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 7


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

23

Ah-ha, money schmoney baloney 

in a rich man’s world

it is priceless, that you fuckers 


d 


The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 





have a look! 



Photograph of Benn at Thoemmes Press: Alan Rutherford 

Cover: Constuctivists: 

Rodchenko and Stepanova 














your dreams! 

Articles to: 


Opening 03 

Brown eyes 07 

Castle Cabs 11 

Feat of Clay 21 

Kathe Kollwitz 27 

Peter Mitchell 32 

Letters 47 

1 

APRIL 2017






news, goodnigh

ts 

ace, 

ry, 

ngth 

the 

t 

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 






is something 



Slyce n’Ice 

Hello, 


















3 

APRIL 2017

4 


5 

APRIL 2017

6 


A PAIR OF BROWN EYES 

One summer evening drunk to hell 

I stood there nearly lifeless 

An old man in the corner sang 

Where the water lilies grow 

And on the jukebox Johnny sang 

About a thing called love 

And it’s how are you kid and what’s your name 

And how would you bloody know? 

7 

In blood and death ‘neath a screaming sky 

I lay down on the ground 

And the arms and legs of other men 

Were scattered all around 

Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed 

Then prayed and bled some more 

And the only thing that I could see 

Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me 

But when we got back, labeled parts one to three 

There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me 

And a rovin’ a rovin’ a rovin’ I’ll go 

For a pair of brown eyes 

APRIL 2017

I looked at him he looked at me 

All I could do was hate him 

While Ray and Philomena sang 

Of my elusive dream 

I saw the streams, the rolling hills 

Where his brown eyes were waiting 

And I thought about a pair of brown eyes 

That waited once for me 

8 

So drunk to hell I left the place 

Sometimes crawling sometimes walking 

A hungry sound came across the breeze 

So I gave the walls a talking 

And I heard the sounds of long ago 

From the old canal 

And the birds were whistling in the trees 

Where the wind was gently laughing 

And a rovin’ a rovin’ a rovin’ I’ll go 

For a pair of brown eyes 

by 

SHANE MACGOWAN 


9 

APRIL 2017

10 


CASTLE CABS: SMOKING 

KILKENNY 

Martin Taylor 

Here are a few photographs I took some years back while working in 

Castle Cabs taxi office in Kilkenny. They capture a few of the drivers 

waiting for the next call to come in. The cab office is no longer in 

operation since deregulation of the industry and the massive boom in 

the number of taxis on the road, ranks were created and the cab office 

debunked. The building was originally a ticket office for the railway (see 

right), I am unsure what else it may have been used for before becoming 

a cab office but it now has a new lease of life as a sweet shop. It is hard 

to recognise the place now. Gone is the smoke stained ceiling, the cab 

office was one of the last bastions of freedom to smoke in a public place 

after the smoking ban swept the country and subsequently the whole of 

Europe, gone is the gaudy dirt engrained velour seating, recycled from 

the pub across the road, gone are the crackling two-way radios, the 

piped local radio competing with the tv and the fruit machine flashing in 

the corner, the constant tea making, the ringing telephone and the banter 

between the drivers; all this before any customers add to the mix, the 

fighting, the shouting, the haggling, the singing, the laughing, the crying, 

the puking, the kissing, the sleeping. Drama that one could not dream 

up. As awful as it was in some aspects, I feel something magical has 

been lost forever with the demise of the cab office. 

11 

APRIL 2017

12 


13 

APRIL 2017

14 


15 

APRIL 2017

16 


17 

APRIL 2017



Thanks Martin: good photographs, but some sort of comment is required 

and I offer the following piece which was written in 2007 ... [ed] 

That first Neanderthal to dangle a rolled up leaf from the corner of his 

mouth, wandering for days before he decided, probably on a whim, 

to set fire to it. Evolving into fidgets who roll their own and still wander 

through no-smoking zones, being quaintly disparaging about the 

existence of such areas and seemingly unable to see that theirs is the 

most truly odd behaviour – their sliver of a paper dangling oh so naturally 

from a lower lip whilst purposely searching out a communal shoot-up 

area, for, despite their protestations ... they are drug addicts! 

19 

All the while trying desperately to emulate the romantic vision of a 

cowboy on the range, or the heroicly pathetic picture of something 

working class – but sadly just being hopelessly addicted to the lords of 

tobacco and king rizzla. Yes, pity those hooked on the weed of tobacco 

– especially those with a taste for the 100 or so chemicals added to the 

branded cigarette, added just to keep it burning whilst no one is dragging 

and it’s just fuming – for death resulting from the smoking habit is not at 

all pleasant, quick or dignified ... for those left behind. 

APRIL 2017

20 


FEAT OF CLAY 

Wandering about Stroud we came upon the Republic of Stroud, a 

gallery showing the art of Clay Sinclair. I particularly like the stolen art 

angle, for ... although by reproducing iconic images he is still giving them 

a nod of approval, and using them to give his slogans credibility … he 

is, in my opinion, also subverting and undermining their ridiculous ££$$ 

value by his irreverence, insolence, and in-frame captions/slogans. Love it! 

Upon recommending Clay’s website to a painter friend of mine, his 

response was, ‘Rip-off, stealing great artwork blah blah blah …’ 

21 

I mentioned the way I saw his thought process on appropriation (how 

I see it?) which kind of shut my painter friend down a bit, but he is a 

believer in the ‘great artists’ equals ‘objects of great £££ value’ where 

the argument goes ‘once the art establishment has decided someone is 

an ‘artist’ anything they do is object value’ … my friend, thankfully, still 

considers himself a ‘painter’. 

I personally go for the ‘all art is theft’ notion, all copy from, take from, 

borrow from, imitate to the point of absurdity, while standing on the 

shoulders of … those they admire. I am fascinated by the Constructivists/ 

Bauhaus/DeStijl period and it shows. 

acrylic on perspex/plexiglass 

125 x 100cm (incl ornate frame) 

What is an artist? Am I really an artist? Is everyone an artist? Does it really matter? 

APRIL 2017

22 


23 

APRIL 2017



Clay, here is a question: how do you see the reasoning behind your ‘art’, 

its use of icons and its probable entry into the ‘£££ value’ marketplace? 

Alan, interesting question ... 

The reasoning behind my art goes pretty much like this: 

1) My art always starts with a question or issue I want to explore, ie. What 

is happiness? Reasons to live? Religion? Why do I do what I do? Identity 

is at the centre of most of my works. 

2) My sketch book is full of words exploring the issue without filter. 

Humour usually at the centre of it. 

3) If the ideas seem worthy of a painting, I then explore how best to 

express this in a way that is doesn’t distract from my initial question 

and purpose of the art. Familiar images are a way to connect with the 

average person. I have absolutely no desire to prove what a technically 

gifted painter I am or create something that pushes the boundaries of 

taste or what is perceived as art. The last thing I am seeking to do is 

impress the art fascists that abound. I just follow my intuition and I’m 

happy with that. If people like it great, if they don’t, they obviously have 

terrible taste (smiley-face). It’s worked for me so far and I’m still really 

excited about where my creativity is leading. 

25 

Hope this gives a basic idea behind my art. Off to get started on my latest 

painting “State of Religion”. Based around national flags and renaming 

them, ie. The Ultra Secular State of France. 

Thank you Clay. 

www.claysinclair.com 

APRIL 2017

26 


A WEAVER’S REBELLION 

leaf 5: Riot. 1897 

from book, 

KATHE KOLLWITZ: Graphics, Posters, Drawings 

Published by Writers and Readers 

Born Kathe Ida Schmidt, in 

1891 the artist married Karl 

Kollwitz, a doctor in a poor 

section of Berlin. A committed 

socialist, she witnessed 

first hand the travails of 

poverty, and her art became 

intimately bound with the 

plight of the underprivileged. 

Kollwitz’s first major series, 

A Weaver’s Rebellion (1897- 

98), recounts the 1844 revolt 

of Silesian weavers against 

their oppressive employers. 

The series of six prints was 

exhibited in Berlin in 1898 

and in Dresden in 1899, 

where it received a gold 

medal. Here are 2 of the 

prints ... 

27 

APRIL 2017

28 


29 

APRIL 2017

30 


31 

APRIL 2017

Peter Mitchell signing his 

book at Vernissage 

Peter Mitchell, 

his gallery event 

hosted by Galerie 

Clémentine de la 

Féronnière, Paris 

32 

Resplendent in his 

endpaper jacket, Peter 

poses opposite the title 

page of his book ... and 

overleaf, a couple of the 

photographs from the 

book and the gallery 

event, hmmmm, nice. 


A NEW 

REFUTATION 

OF THE 

VIKING 4 SPACE MISSION 

P E T E R M I T C H E L L

12 

Mrs. McArthy & her daughter. London, 1975 

34 


13 

Mrs. Lee. Leeds, 1975 

35 

APRIL 2017

36 

REVIEW from The Yorkshire Warbler, 10 March 2017 

Hello Rudi Thoemmes at RRB 

Thanks for the reply, here is a 

remnant of issue 133 for your 

files. Unfortunately once its 

printed we move on to the next 

issue of fartiness ... we don’t 

keep files. 


PEEPER 

by Raisin Wind 

My reward for being around during the seventies is to be sent from Leeds 

to Sheffield to interview Edna Morgan, who should have appeared in a 

new photobook of mainly Yorkshire folk and their environs but whose 

‘photograph’ was lost. 

The book is made from an assemblage of photographs taken by Peter 

Mitchell in the 1970s and exhibited at the impressions Gallery of 

Photography in York under a title refuting the Viking 4 Space mission at 

the end of the seventies. 

37 

I arrive at the spot where Edna tells me the ‘Flying Pig’ pub once stood, 

Edna is with me and points to a nondescript modern block of offices, 

nothing to see here now … so we move on. The lost photograph, which 

Edna saw once, was of the pub, the street, herself and an array of the 

characters who frequented the Flying Pig posing at the door and under 

the pub sign. 

I am here to talk about the photographer, 1975 and the three weeks of 

preparation and anguish he took to take a photograph, which he then 

lost. Edna is philosophical in colourful language about the loss. By now 

we have moved to a quiet pub and the malt whiskey’s are muddling me 

APRIL 2017

as I scratch a few notes in my wee book … I listen as she fires up the 

scene, she is delightful company with conflicting accounts but I get the jist 

… 

‘For 3 weeks in June 1975, Peeper, as they called him, skulked around 

the area, occasionally with his camera but most days just crouching, 

standing on a box, even lying in the road, gesticulating and squinting 

through his hands, where by touching forefinger to forefinger and thumb 

to thumb, he squared up and directed the vistas before him.’ 

38 

I try to ignore Edna’s constant derogatory references to Peeper and that 

he was well known about this part of Yorkshire as ‘weird’, but cannot 

shake the image of his square-signing at the hint of a good composition 

… god, at that sight, I would have cracked up too. 

From that drunken afternoon’s ‘notes’ I have deciphered: ‘… he once 

said he was interested in our pub (Flying Pig) because he had heard it 

had been frequented by Ivor Tinkler’ and ‘ … a man called Bladder had 

told all at the pub that Peeper had approached him where he worked at 

the ‘Gents’ in the centre and asked him to pose outside with his collection 

of bog-brushes … we don’t know what happened to that photograph 

either?’ 

A recent photograph of ‘Peeper’ Peter Mitchell shows he is still squaring 

up, his new book, ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’ 

is jointly published by RRB Photobooks and editions Clémentine de la 

Féronnière … and available from www.rrbphotobooks.com and www. 

galerieclementinedelaferonniere.fr 


39 

APRIL 2017

40 


JUST 

41 

FLOATING 

ONE 

APRIL 2017

42 


ARTHUR BEAGLE’S DIARY 

43 


APRIL 2017

44 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 



45 

APRIL 2017







publication 

46 

oh shit 




WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 



Words fail me, what is the use of words when the 

person you are saying them to is unable to grasp 

your, and their, meaning? [this looks like a letter we 

have already published? ... (‘yes, some’, ed.)] 








47 






the world. And also, as Britain’s government happily 

applies for Brexit, faking it over questions waving 

wet fish whackers, like Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, 

Scotland ... May and her ministers wander the 

despotic nations trying to flog them weapons ... 









APRIL 2017

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 7


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 


MAY DAY

1 

MAY DAY 

INTERNATIONAL 

WORKERS’ 

DAY

d 


The 

CONTENTS 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 





have a look! 

artwork: Alan Rutherford 



Cover: detail from Dimitry 

Moor poster, 1920 













your dreams! 

Articles to: 


Opening 03 

Turkey 05 

Council Election 11 

Bishops Cleeve 15 

Baghdad 25 

Peterloo 29 

France 37 

Letters 47 

1 

MAY 2017






news, goodnigh

ts 

ace, 

ry, 

ngth 

the 

t 

OPENING 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 






is something 



Slyce n’Ice 

Hello, 

Welcome to magazine number 24. 

Ignoring the election media circus, lies 

and bullshit that parades as policy or news 

... mis-directing our attention, here is a 

magazine produced freely to be read freely. 

Depressing articles about the worst side of 

the human condition ... fuckers! Uplifting 

stories, rare as they are, desperately 

needed. All articles and artwork supplied, 

or found in newspapers lining the bottom 

of the canary cage, were gratefully received 








3 

MAY 2017

4 


TURKEY ON THE BRINK 

Robert Arnott 

Sheep in the Road Foreign Correspondent 

Turkey’s constitutional changes endorsed in the referendum 

held on 16 April, threatens to take that country further down the 

road to an extreme dictatorship. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan 

will assume sweeping new powers with which to pursue his 

authoritarian, neo-liberal and Islamist agenda. Already, since his 

election in 2014 to what had hitherto been a largely ceremonial 

post, Erdogan has tightened his grip over the media, the military 

and the judiciary, backed by his Justice and Development Party 

(AKP) and extreme nationalist and pro-clerical forces. 

5 

A failed military coup against his regime last July has been used as 

the pretext for extending the repression. Liberal and pro-Kurdish 

media concerns have been taken over or shut down, scores of 

editors and journalists have been imprisoned along with a dozen 

left and pro-Kurdish MPs and more than one hundred thousand 

public servants and military personnel at every level have been 

sacked or arrested. Further shifts of authority from parliament 

to president will abolish the office of prime minister and allow 

him to appoint judges and top public officials while remaining in 

office until 2029. 

MAY 2017

6 

Although the Turkish electorate could cut his reign short, even this scenario 

now looks unlikely. The referendum campaign showed how a ruthless, 

authoritarian and sectarian demagogue, can overcome widespread 

secular, democratic, working class and minority national and religious 

opposition. This unlikeliness is underlined by ballot rigging. It appears that 

more than a million unstamped ballot papers were accepted for counting 

by the Supreme Electoral Council during the recent referendum, clearly 

in flagrant breach of its own rules. Erdogan’s eighteen reforms outlined 

in the referendum were passed by most fewer than two million votes out 

of fifty million, so these tactics could have proved decisive. still in force 

from last summer. As it is, his programme was rejected by the citizens 

of six of Turkey’s eight biggest cities, including Istanbul and the capital 

Ankara, as well as across the country’s Kurdish region. No wonder that 

the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Council 

of Europe monitors have unequivocally condemned the unfair, oppressive 

and irregular conditions in which the poll took place. They echo protests 

from the main opposition parties. 

Erdogan’s well-funded propaganda offensive now dominates state 

broadcasting and corporate media coverage; he and his party’s giant poster 

hoardings were everywhere. Dissident meetings are banned or have been 

attacked, as the government refused to lift or suspend the state of emergency. 

The response from the European Union has been a little more muted. Like 

the IMF and OECD, the EU Commission supports Erdogan’s austerity and 

privatisation policies. Like the United States and NATO, it welcomes his 

anti-Assad intervention in Syria, while staying quiet about Erdogan’s earlier 

assistance to ISIS and his war against Kurdish anti-ISIS fighters. 


Then there’s the deal whereby the EU pays Ankara to keep refugees out of 

Europe. Nonetheless, Turkey’s possible lurch towards the right should finally 

put an end to its application for EU membership. Sadly, it may also postpone 

any end to the illegal and often brutal Turkish occupation of Northern 

Cyprus. It remains to be seen whether the British and US governments will 

denounce the anti-democratic trajectory of their NATO ally, as they should. 

On past form, mild rebukes will accompany a strengthening of business 

and military links. This makes it even more important that democrats, the 

Labour Movement and progressive people in Britain express their solidarity 

with their counterparts in Turkey. The Turkish people have few enough 

genuine friends at the top in London, Brussels or Washington DC and now 

face an even more dangerous future; especially if their president succeeds 

in his desire to reintroduce the death penalty. 

7 

MAY 2017

SOUK by P 

8 


9 

J CROOK 

MAY 2017

Chokin’ clouds 

f dust settle on 

the crumbled 

ruins ... a final 

testimony to 

those buried 

beneath the 

massive stones 

of apathy 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 24 

10

VOTE! 

COUNTY COUNCIL ELECTION 

4 May 2017 

In Gloucestershire, standing in Bishops Cleeve are 4 candidates: Bob 

Bird, Conservative; Peter Richmond, Liberal Democrat; Rose Phillips, 

Labour; and Cate Cody, Green. 

Bishops Cleeve, oh Bishops Cleeve, based on the 2013 County Council 

voting trend, where out of the villages’ 9,911 registered voters as many as 

6,900 voters just didn’t bother to vote, and those 3,011 that did vote, well ... 

they had been convinced by Tory or Liberal Democrat that it was a ‘2-horse 

race’ and voted accordingly ... 

11 

Looking at voting statistics for 2013’s County Council elections in all 

Gloucestershire it would appear that Bishops Cleeve is not far from the 

norm and around 50-60% of voters countywide did not bother to vote. 

The Gloucestershire County Council make decisions that affect all of us 

living in Gloucestershire, like: they claim to improve the state of the roads 

(or promise to do so whilst blaming the previous administration); provide 

care for elderly and vulnerable people (HUH, can you trust the tories to do 

this?) ... so it is important that someone trustworthy is elected to represent 

and be held accountable ... you may agree a shake-up is needed? ... so 

it was a shame that, in 2013, 6,900 voters in Bishops Cleeve sat about all 

day in their jim-jams glued to daytime TV, it was their vote that could have 

made great changes to the plod-politics of Trumpton! 

MAY 2017

Just a thought, what if someone had stood as the ‘What is the point and 

I don’t give a fuck but I won’t lie to you’ candidate ... there would have 

been a good chance of them winning that election ... However, sadly, in 

Bishops Cleeve, in 2013, Bob Bird, Conservative, beat Peter Richmond, 

LibDem, in a 2 horse race where John Hurley, Labour, came a sorry third 

... in an election where only 3,011 Bishops Cleeve voters bothered to lick 

their pencils and put an x on a piece of paper! 

12 

THE VILLAGE HAS GROWN SINCE 2013, BUT FROM PETER RICHMOND 

(standing again) WE HAVE THE SAME OLD LIBDEM TOSH ABOUT IT 

BEING A ‘2-HORSE RACE’ AND THAT VOTING FOR ROSE PHILLIPS OR 

CATE CODY IS A WASTED VOTE ... (bloody cheek!) 

FOR GOODNESS SAKE, IF YOU HAVE A VOTE ... PLEASE USE IT TO 

END THIS ‘GOOD OLD BOYS’ 2-HORSE RACE! 

Bishops Cleeve voting record: 

Bishops Cleeve population 15000-ish (maybe more?) 

Registered voters in 2013: 9911 

Gloucestershire County Council election: 

Bishops Cleeve, 2 May 2013 

Con. 1486; Libdem 1129; Lab 396 

Total votes cast: 3011 (30% turnout) 

THIS MEANS THAT 6,900 REGISTERED VOTERS IN BISHOPS CLEEVE 

DID NOT VOTE! 

Get up on the 4 May, get dressed, lick your pencil and VOTE! 


13 

MAY 2017

14 


Bishops 

Cleeve 

pictures 

15 

MAY 2017

16 


17 

MAY 2017



19 

MAY 2017

20 


21 

MAY 2017

22 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 24 

FOR NO 

THOEMME 

PRODUCTI 

THEIR NO

23 

REASON 

S PRESS 

ON TURN 

SES UP! 

MAY 2017



BAGHDAD 

For much of its extraordinary life Baghdad, the ‘City of Peace’ as it has 

been called almost since its foundation, has been one of the most violent 

cities on earth. As US troops entered in 2003, they became the latest 

participants in a turbulent history stretching back to the year 762, when 

Caliph Mansur’s masons laid the first sun-baked bricks of his imperial 

capital. 

artwork: Onny Thomson 

For 500 years Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid Empire, a marvel of 

glittering palaces, magnificent mosques, Islamic colleges and teeming 

markets watered by the Tigris. This was the city of the mathematician 

Al Khwarizmi, who invented algebra; of Horun al Rashid, the caliph 

immortalized in many tales of Baghdad in A Thousand and One Nights; 

of the great poet Abu Nuwas, whose playful verses scandalized society, 

and dozens of other astronomers, doctors, musicians and explorers. 

It was also a thriving trading emporium that attracted merchants from 

Central Asis and the Atlantic, its economy the envy of West and East alike. 

The history of Baghdad, since its foundation has been relentlessly 

tempestuous. Baghdadis have been tremendously talented in creating 

beauty and culture and, tragically, just as skilled in destroying them. 

Tet one of the world’s most violent cities is also one of its most resilient. 

Baghdad has seen foreign invaders come and go during the past 1,300 

years, from eighth-century Byzantines to twnty-first-century Americans. 

It has survived the furious onslaught of Hulagu’s Mongols in 1258 and 

25 

MAY 2017

26 

Tamerlane’s Tatars in 1401, when the Tigris ran red with blood and black 

with ink from the literary treasures of the ransacked House of Wisdom. 

It has shrugged off the indignity of falling under the rule of minor 

Turkmen chiefs, endured the Ottoman conquest of Sultan Suleyman the 

Magnificent in 1534, the Iranian incursion of Shah Abbas in 1623 and 

four centuries of haughty Ottoman pashas. ‘The old Turkey-cock’s city of 

Horoun al Rothschild’ saw off the British invasion in 1917 and emerged 

from two world wars bloodied but unbowed. Beset by Baathist tyranny, 

Sadam’s dictatorship, a shattering war against Iran and the pulverizing 

Gulf War One, Baghdad still managed to haul itself through a savage 

regime of UN sanctions, only to be met with the full fury of the Iraq 

War in 2003. Instead of bringing the longed-for peace and calm after 

decades of unimaginable suffering, the conflict ignited Baghdad’s oldest 

demons, and sectarian strife exploded across the city and the nation. 

Once again the City of Peace was at war, and blood ran on the streets. 

Yet, despite all this devastation, Baghdadis do not give up on their 

city. With a prodigious history of intellectual, cultural and Islamic preeminence, 

it stands for dignity, pride and, above all, endurance. ‘It is a 

city unlike any of its peers,’ says Manaf, a retired diplomat steeped in 

the history of Baghdad. ‘You have to wonder whether the good caliph 

Mansur, if he had had the slightest foresight of the city’s bloody future, 

would have built his circular seat of power here. The cycle that sees 

Baghdad lurching between mayhem and prosperity has been long and 

gory, but of course we must have hope. May the city of Peace live up to its 

name before we ourselves depart to eternal peace.’ 

Lifted from: Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood by Justin Marozzi 


27 

MAY 2017

PE 

28 


TERLOO 

By the early 1800s many in Britain were suffering. The Corn Laws 

drove up the price of bread, and only two percent of the population 

were entitled to vote. On 16 August 1819 tens of thousands of men, 

women and children gathered on St Peter’s Field, Manchester to hear 

campaigners for political reform. Fearful of an uprising, the local 

authorities arrested the principal speaker, Henry Hunt, and sent in the 

Manchester Yeomanry, sabres at the ready, followed by the army. At least 

18 people were killed on the field or later, and hundreds were injured. 

The radical press named this shameful massacre ‘Peterloo’, in ironic 

contrast to the recent glorious victory of Waterloo. 

The Tory government quashed all attempts to bring the authorities and 

army to account. Two years before, in 1817, they had brought liberal 

publisher William Hone to court three times for three of his satirical 

titles. He was acquited each time, garnering wide public support and a 

collection to help fund his activities. In early December 1819 Hone wrote 

and issued the cheap pamphlet The Political House That Jack Built, amid 

fierce debate about the massacre, illustrated by George Cruikshank. It 

was based on the traditional cumulative nursery rhyme ‘The House That 

Jack Built’, the ‘Jack’ in this case being John Bull. The poem’s fourth verse 

is illustrated with a printing press, the powerful technology for spreading 

ideas, which is repeatedly described as: 

29 

‘This is THE THING, that, in spite of new Acts, 

And attempts to restrain it, by Soldiers or Tax, 

Will poison the Vermin, that plunder the Wealth 

That lay in the House 

That Jack Built.’ 

MAY 2017

30 


31 

MAY 2017

Touching a raw nerve, Hone’s pamphlet went through multiple printings 

until mid-1821. Around 250,000 copies were sold, spreading the call for 

freedom of the press, and for electoral reform which eventually came in 

1832. 

32 

Reading both words and pictures together is vital to grasping the 

pamphlet’s full meaning: Cruikshank’s 13 engravings are essential to 

clarify and amplify Hone’s poetry, those words in bold capitals doubling 

as captions for the images. In the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 

(December 2011), American academics Michael Demson and Heather 

Brown argue persuasively that ‘these pamphlets announced a new era of 

– and a new medium for – radical activity and expression: comics’. 


33 

MAY 2017

34 


35 

Use your 

VOTE ... 

This is the 

alternative 

to an 

election! 

MAY 2017

36 


FRANCE 

BETTER A NEOLIBERAL 

THAN A FASCIST 

Robert Arnott 

Sheep in the Road Foreign Correspondent 

artwork: FHK Henrion 

THE first round of the French presidential election represents a huge missed 

opportunity, not only for the people of France, but for Europe as a whole. 

Jean-Luc Melenchon came within a whisker of going into the run-off 

against either Emmanuel Macron or National Front leader, Marine Le Pen. 

Just one-quarter of the votes wasted on the Socialist Party and Trotskyist 

candidates would have made that a reality. Had Melenchon had to face 

Le Pen in the run-off election on 7 May, he would have won and become 

the most left-wing president in French history. As it is, Melenchon and his 

French Communist Party allies won almost twenty per cent of the poll for 

policies that challenged the establishment and big-business. 

The people of France, if they want to stop the neo-fascists, have little option 

but to vote for Macron in the second round. Although third-place candidate 

Francois Fillon has urged his right-wing supporters to plump for Macron, 

that would not guarantee Macron’s victory alone, even if they all obeyed. 

Not surprisingly, Macron’s aides have begun to play up his allegedly radical 

37 

MAY 2017

and anti-establishment credentials to entice left-wing electors. They have a 

rather steep hill to climb, if not a Pyrenean mountain. 

38 

Former investment banker Macron enthusiastically supported the austerity 

policies of president Francois Hollande’s hugely discredited Socialist Party 

government in which he served as Business Minister, before leaving the 

sinking ship to start-up his own party. He now wants to add up to one 

hundred and twenty thousand civil service jobs to the French unemployment 

rate of ten per cent, as part of his five-year plan to stay within EU budget 

deficit rules. Macron also backed last year’s “labour flexibility” law 

imposed by Hollande, while calling for further restrictions on employment 

and collective bargaining rights. Predictably, the only cuts he proposes for 

business are in the fields of regulation and taxation. This approach will 

not inspire genuinely left-wing and anti-establishment electors. Indeed, 

it echoes the discredited policies of the French Socialist Party, which was 

eclipsed with little over six per cent of the vote last Sunday. 

In France on May 7, the choice is clear. When president Jacques Chirac 

faced Jean-Marie Le Pen in the final round in 2002, the slogan for many 

on the left was “better a crook than a fascist.” This time around, as Macron 

faces Le Pen’s daughter, it’s a case of “better the neoliberal than a fascist” 

– although, at the end of the day, Macron’s policies are likely to increase 

the populist appeal of the far right as well as of the real left. 

At least, after Brexit, Trump and heavens knows what on 8 June, the keeping 

of the fascists out in France, as well as in the Netherlands some weeks ago, 

does give one hope. 


39 

MAY 2017

40 


oye editor, gulp... 

its a piss-taking 

watchdog! 

41 

MAY 2017

42 


43 

MAY 2017

44 

Writing 

worth reading 

Photos 

worth seeing 



45 

MAY 2017


oye matey editor ... 



remarks, and two 

articles from robert for 

publication 

46 

oh shit 




WAFFLE 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 

LETTERS 


Same old ... same old! 

Words fail me, what is the use of words when the 

person you are saying them to is unable to grasp 

your, and their, meaning? [this looks like a letter we 

have already published? ... (‘yes, some’, ed.)] 








47 






the world. And also, as Britain’s government happily 

applies for Brexit, faking it over questions waving 

wet fish whackers, like Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, 

Scotland ... May and her ministers wander the 

despotic nations trying to flog them weapons ... 









MAY 2017

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

BOOKS • MAGAZINES • DESIGN 

at 


48 

1 9 8 6 

2 0 1 7 

SHEEP IN THE ROAD 

(as magazine) #3 

October 2015 


Vol. 2 


2015 


Vol. 1 


2014 

To read/view a book, 

or magazine go to 

website and click on 

their cover and follow 

the links ... 

KAPUTALA 

The Diary of 

Arthur Beagle & The 

East Africa Campaign, 

1916-1918 


Updated 2nd edn: 

2014 

IRISH GRAFFITI 

some murals in the 

North, 1986 


2014 

NICETO 

DE LARRINAGA 

a voyage, 1966 


2014 


SHEEP 

IN THE ROAD 

Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, 

cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... 

eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. 

Contributors have included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, 

Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, 

Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, 

West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, 

Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... 

A pleasure to produce ... thank you 

All issues available to view/read free at 

www.handoverfistpress.com

HAND OVER 

FIST PRESS 

2 0 1 7

Sheep magazine Archive 3: issues 18-24

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?