'May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell' -- Fuck you Maggie

What the media should do, of course, is take all their editorials and op eds about a world famous politican who has died -- with their "authoritarian" and "tyrant" descriptors and their tales of economic destruction and class hatred and rising corruption and society breakdown and support for dictators -- and just do a simple find/replace, removing "Hugo Chavez" and inserting "Margaret Thatcher". Just to save some time.

The two leaders, one who died on March 5 the other on April 8, left rather different legacies -- one, for helping the poor, at home and overseas. The other for waging war on the poor, at home and overseas.

One of these two leaders' deaths sparked widespread mourning, the other street parties. Check out these images and see if you can guess which one was the "tyrant"...

HUGO CHAVEZ DIES



Hundreds of thousands of people accompany Hugo Chavez's coffin onthe streets of Caracas



Venezuela's streets were scenes of outpourings of grief.




Real News report on mourning for Chavez in Venezuela and beyond


MARGARET THATCHER DIES:



Celebrations break out in Glasgow's Green Square after news of Thatcher's death.



Thousands gather outside Belfast's City Hall to celebrate news of Thatcher's death.



A street party in Liverpool with fireworks -- to mark the death of a leader who tried her hardest to destroy the city.


So a murderer and torturer, who denounced Nelson Mandela, befriended the worst dictators like Chile's General Pinochet and gave Pol Pot a helping hand has finally fucked off to Hell.

The corporate media are eulogising her and expressing "disgust" at those who have the gall to be happy at the demise of their greatest tormentor.

But even when they might feel obliged to give some nod of recognition to the savage class war Thatcher waged across Britain, there is one aspect likely to be largely ignored -- on top of Thatcher's infamous assistance to pro-Western dictators all over the world, there was Thatcher's policies of murder and torture in the cause of deepening British control over the six counties in Ireland's north.

It is well known that -- on top of the torture and abuses in prisons and the campaign of killings and repression in Ireland's north -- Thatcher's refusal to compromise in the case of the hunger strike by republican prisoners in the infamous Long Kesh camp lead directly to the death of 10 men.

Under Thatcher, the policies of repression against the Irish struggle extended onto mainland Britain, with the gross violation of the rights of Irish people living in England that included the framing by means of torture of innocent people for bombings they had nothing to do with.

Censorship is a sign of a guilty regime -- the truth cannot be allowed out. And so the censorship in Thatcher's Britain on "the Irish question" went to absurd lengths -- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams' voice was even banned from being broadcast. But it was not just Adams' voice -- a song by a popular band that dared deal with the topic was banned from public broadcast and a TV performance of the song was pulled from the air.

The song was The Pogues "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six". Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan is now better known as an irredeemable drunk, but his lyircs savaged the British state crimes against the Irish people -- in Ireland and Britain. It campaigned for freedom for the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four -- framed for bombings they didn't commit, both before Thatcher came to power, but whose suffering continued under her government while attempts to get out truth were censored.




Thatcher's regime was one that could not even bear to hear about its own crimes in a song...





...There were six men in Birmingham
In Guildford there's four
That were picked up and tortured
And framed by the law
And the filth got promotion
But they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place
And at the wrong time

In Ireland they'll put you away in the Maze
In England they'll keep you for seven long days
God help you if ever you're caught on these shores
The coppers need someone
And they walk through that door

You'll be counting years
First five, then ten
Growing old in a lonely hell
Round the yard and the stinking cell
From wall to wall, and back again

A curse on the judges, the coppers and screws
Who tortured the innocent, wrongly accused
For the price of promotion
And justice to sell
May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell...

May the whores of the empire lie awake in their beds
And sweat as they count out the sins on their heads
While over in Ireland eight more men lie dead
Kicked down and shot in the back of the head ...





'Five simple things we asked of them, five simple things denied. But Thatcher would not compromise...'




Scenes of jubilation in celebration at Thatcher's death on Falls Road in Belfast. You can hear the banging of bin lids -- a highly symbolic gesture as the banging of bin lids was used on Falls Road (and other places in the nationalist community) to announce the death of each of hte 10 young men Margaret Thatcher let starve to death in 1981.


SO HAVE A FUCKING DRINK COZ OUR VICTORIES ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN... BUT WE ARE STILL HERE AND MAGGIE THATCHER IS NOT!!!

Good news and bad news

There is good news and there is bad news.

The bad news is the planet is looking pretty fucked if we don't take urgent action need to combat the climate crisis.

The good news is total eco-destruction will take Nickelback down with the rest of us.

Although knowing the planet's luck, members of Nickelback will prove tougher to kill than cochroaches and be the only living things to survive - and lead singer Chad Kroeger will wander the barren lands for eternity moaning about how the eco-holocaust is "how you remind me of what I really am" backed by the dullest, most irritating band ever to be manufactured by the Masters of Evil that call themselves a music industry.

In good news, my home town of Sydney did something worthwhile for the first time since thousands protested some reactionary, old git in a dress who calls himself the Pope and egged Devil Child Justin Bieber during a recent concert.



In bad news, they largely missed. In even worse news, they didn't throw grenades or even a targetted cruise missile.

In good news for the world of culture, Carlo Sands has moved into film-making and directed and co-wrote a groundbreaking film exploring some of life's most important issues.



In bad news, proving the empty, hollow and utterly corrupted nature of film business, I have yet to be awarded a fucking Oscar for this work of genius.

Seriously, this film - with a co-writing with Ben from "that night at the Courthouse" - has not yet recieved a single fucking award of any kind despite being released to the entire world on YouTube last fucking Saturday!

Some have said, "Hey Carlo, show some patience. The next Academy Awards are not till next year, give it some time."

But if the esteemed Academy had any fucking self-respect they would recall that ridiculous Oscar for Best Picture awarded to that pointless flick about some stupid fucking inbred royal who couldn't even string a fucking sentence together but was king coz of his birth and the fact his FUCKING NAZI older brother walked away from the gig to go live in the Caribbean and support Hitler, and they would immediately hand that fucking prize to Carlo Sands.

It would only be just and right. But no.

This is just like the whole Nobel Prize for Literature debacle all over again, with those fucking Swedes refusing to give me the award, despite my remarkable contribution to the field of poetry.

So I figured I had no choice but to create a sequel.



Even worse, there is more bad news. This second work of genius has also failed to secure any of the notable film industry awards. Not an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a Palme d'Or or even so much as a mention by the Australian Film Critics Association.

And don't get me started on the total silence being mantained on either of my works by The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougo and the Kansas City Film Critics Circle.

Not just that, but like so many sequels it has struggled to match the impact of the original - having at time of writing been viewed only 56 times, compared to the 105 views garnered by the original.

It was so outrageous I had no choice by to create my own award. And so, I am please to annouce, here on this blog, that the inaugural winner of the Annual Carlo Sands Award for Finest Use of the Phrase Fuckity in a Short Animation goes to ... Carlo Sands!!! For A Second Conversation: A Short Film on Refugees and Gaffer Tape.

In other news May 5 marks the 30th anniversay of the death of Bobby Sands, Honourable Member of the British Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Sands died in the British-run concentration camp called Long Kesh after 66 days on hunger strike, followed by nine other men, because the Thatcher government refused as a matter of principle to "cave into the demands of terrorists" and let the prisoners wear their own clothes or organise their own fitness regiment.

And while the bad news was the IRA missed Thatcher that time in Brighton, the good news is that walking bag of rancid shit can't have long to go.

The world being what it is, you take what you can get.



""The kind people, have a wonderful dream: Margaret on the guillotine.... when will you DIE?! When will you die? when will you die? when will you die? when will you die? ... Please die" The best bit is the way the song ends abruptly to sound of a falling guillotine. The worst bit is it was written in 1988 and we are still waiting...

The problem with the fucking British... 30 years on from Bobby Sands' hunger strike

You know the thing about the fucking British? They fucking fuck shit up.

You can’t take the fucking Brits anywhere, they always insist on taking their fucking armed forces with them and invading and colonising the god damn place. I hear Cromwell was invited over to Ireland back in the 17th century for a FUCKING PINT OF GUINNESS.

Next thing you know, the entire place is blown to shit and the country bloodily subjugated. Again.

The British make the worst dinner party guests ever. More than anything else, they just never know when to fucking leave.

And when forcibly evicted, they insist on holding on to what they can. They grab at whatever bottles of wine and after dinner mints within their reach and won’t let go.

Possibly even more ink than blood has been spilled over the terrible violence during the Troubles in the six counties of Ireland the British insist on pretending are British despite the fact that a simple glance at a map would seem to indicate those six countries are actually IN FUCKING IRELAND.

And yet so little of what has been written starts from the basic premise that those six Irish countries... are... well... IRISH.

I realise this is a complicated concept. I realise when you brutally conquer and pillage someone else’s land all sorts of tricky moral issues arise such as “Is this our land? Or does it belong to the people we raped and pillaged?”

It is a tricky one, as we realise here in Australia. I mean yes, the land invaded and brutally colonised did belong to someone else.

But... did it really? I mean really? And what does ownership really mean?

These are the profound philosophical questions a brutal coloniser grapples with, but I'll tell you one thing, try and take Carlo Sands’ fucking beer and you will find out what ownership fucking means.

The Israelis also struggle with this question. Actually, they don’t. They have the charm of being refreshingly blunt and prefer to complain that the Arabs are breeding too fast.

And they don’t have any qualms about passing judgments that it is perfectly legal and justified to murder Palestinians in cold blood.

The British, on the other hand, have finally decided it is not legal to shoot Irish people. The Brits can’t just go around shooting Irish people in Ireland any more — it’s been declared unlawful.

This is a true story. It happened just last year.

The context is the findings released last year in an inquiry into the January 30, 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in which 26 unarmed Irish people were shot by British soldiers at a civil rights protest. Fourteen people died, seven of them teenagers.

It only took the British some 38 years to publicly acknowledge the fucking obvious: that British troops had, in fact, gunned down unarmed Irish people, in Ireland, while they took part in a civil rights march.

It was a 12-year long inquiry that cost British taxpayers £191.2 million to decide that responsibility for the bloodshed lay with those doing the shooting rather than those getting shot.

Such a rejection of a venerable English tradition no doubt caused quite a stir among sections of the British establishment: first fox-hunting, then shooting Irish people — they must be terrified they’ll ban polo next.




It is always sad to see a venerable tradition go by the wayside of relentless modernisation




The Irish, on the other hand, should probably be grateful.

After all, it took Britain 150 years to apologise for the so-called “Potato famine”, in which about a million Irish people starved to death and another million emigrated despite the fact that plenty of perfectly good food was being shipped out of Ireland at the same time ... by the FUCKING BRITISH.

Such a deliberate policy could, by some nasty, small-minded bigots who just can’t let go of an odd million or so people being condemned to a horrific death by starvation in a totally unnecessary fashion, be considered genocide.

Regardless, at the very least, you can’t say the British are not getting quicker at acknowledging their errors/crimes against humanity.

I raise all of this because March 1 marked the 30th anniversary of the start of a hunger strike a young Irish man called Bobby Sands. He died 66 days later. Nine other men died on hunger strike in the prison they were held in.

Sands was incarcerated in what was best described as a concentration camp called Long Kesh and, with other Irish republican prisoners, was tortured and beaten remorselessly. He had been sentenced in a trail without a jury to 14 years jail for possession of a gun — five other men were charged for possession of the same gun.

Sands was a young man who personally faced brutal persecution and wanted to defend his community from fascist gangs and British soldiers (sorry, that’s a tautology).

For his troubles, he got railroaded through a jury-less trial.

In prison, republican prisoners began to protest the denial of basic civil liberties. They wished to be recognised as what they were: prisoners of a war brought to their country by Britain.

They did not wish to be branded common criminals, and refused to wear prison uniforms. Then, they refused to wash or empty the buckets the prison authorities kindly gave them as toilets — and the prison authorities reduced them to sleeping on piss-soaked mattresses and smearing their own shit on the walls of their cell.

Seeing no other way to get their grievances heard, a hunger strike was organised. Sands was the first to start, on March 1, 1981.

In return, Sands copped relentless abuse by the Thatcher government for being a cold-blooded terrorist — of the sort Thatcher would not deign to negotiate with.

This being the same government that was backing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

In the middle of Sands’ hunger strike, a by-election in the seat of Fermanagh and South Tyrone was held. Sands was put up as a candidate.

Running from within the conceptration camp, Bobby Sands won.

On May 5 1981, Bobby Sands, honourable representative for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in the British parliament, died. One hundred thousand people turned out for his funeral.

When Thatcher eventually, finally, fucking dies — millions will fucking celebrate.


‘Five simple things we asked of them. Five simple things denied. Thatcher would not compromise.’

Can you find Ireland on the map? I’ll give you a hint, it is not in Britain.


SATISFYING NEWS: In the February 26 Irish elections that resulted in the Fianna Fail government getting lynched by voters for imposing savage austerity and handing the country over to the IMF, Sinn Fein candidate Dessie Ellis won a seat the Dail in the Dublin North West constituency.

Twenty-two years ago, a Fianna Fail government handed Ellis over to the British to face “justice” for resisting British occupation. On February 26, he took a seat belonging to Fianna Fail.

JUST IN: In a piece of even MORE satisfying news, the Irish just beat the English in a World Cup cricket match...



‘And THAT’S for Cromwell...’

No, I don't think Bobby Sands would like a chicken supper, actually

November 2 and Spring is in the air! Flowers and thoughts of a wide variety of situations involving Johnny Depp and a bottle of absinthe are abundant!

At least in our hemisphere.

In the Northern hemisphere, it is deep into autumn and winter is gathering momentum for its miserable assault. And few places ever seem as miserable as Belfast.

Which has always posed the question in my ever inquiring mind: what the fuck do the British want with that place anyway?

Sure, it is up there in the global stakes of quality wall mural art, but at least half of them are not exactly flattering to the British crown.

"Sure it says 'British scum fuck off' but check out the quality strokework involved."

But surely this is all ancient history, Comrade Sands? Wasn't there some kind of piece of paper signed about a decade ago that committed everyone to put down their guns and dance around in a giant circle of love chanting "oooommmm" while Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley handed out daisies to school kids?

Well, the lovefest hasn't been going to well of late, for the simple reason: The British ruling class are fucking bastards.

And, if there is one thing worse than the fucking British, it is a fucking wannabe Brit.

Ie: Ulster unionists.

The sharpest political analysis of this bizarre situation of a bunch of Irish people desperate to be British was provided by Ali G.

Ali G: Is you Irish?

Unionist politician: No, I'm British.

Ali G: So is you here on holiday?

I mean, who the fuck actually wants to be British?

At best, the Scottish and the Welsh sort of reluctantly tolerate the situation. The English really don't have much choice in the matter — and have you seen how miserable they look?

Why don't these loyalists in Northern Ireland want to be part of some cool nationality, like Jamaican?

Or, come to think of it, what about just being Irish, seeing as that is where they actually live.

Who the fuck doesn't want to be Irish?

Everyone loves the Irish — they drink all the time, sing rowdy songs and write great plays.

The Irish gave the world Guinness and St Patrick's Day parties. The English have given us cricket.

The Irish gave us The Pogues, the English presented us with James Blunt.

Even the best English musicians, like The Beatles or The Smiths, all have Irish heritage.

The Irish have produced brilliant writers and personalities, like Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Bernard Black.

True, the Irish also gave the world Bono, but there is always a wanker in any crowd.

I just don't fucking get it.

And the thing is, each to their own. Who am I to judge these people's weird English fetish?

But there is no need to impose being British on a fair chunk of a completely different nation. That is really just cruel.

Now, I know what you are thinking. That is all well and good comrade, but it is what a majority in Northern Ireland want.

Bullshit it is. It's called a gerrymander, or just plain fucking cheating.

You try to win a pool game with a trick like this one, you end up with a fucking cue in the face.

“No, that's right. You're on bigs so you start with seven balls, I am on smalls so I have three balls to sink. What do you mean, it's totally fair!”

Supposedly “majority loyalist” Ulster in the north has nine counties. To manufacture a majority of people who like to pretend to be British, the Northern Ireland statelet only took six Ulster counties. And even then, the British-freaks only have an outright majority in two of them.

To quote the ultimate source, John Lennon: "Well you claim to be a majority/you know that that's a lie/you're really a minority/in this sweet emerald isle.

(And while we are on the topic, how much fucking better is John Lennon's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" compared to U2's song of the same name?

"How loooong, hoooowwww looonnng must we sing this song?" I don't know, Bono, how about you shut the fuck up right now, you pointless, whining, arrogant piece of shit?)

The end of armed conflict was a good thing, but all the rhetoric aside, the Good Friday Agreement that involved getting together to chant oom and/or share power between unionists and Sinn Fein in the six counties that Britain seems so reluctant to just admit are actually in Ireland, could only have been a pretty basic compromise at best.

Why? The British ruling class, as I believe I mentioned earlier, are fucking bastards.

Which, after a long digression, brings me back to November 2.

The British government thought it would be just a wonderful idea to have a military parade through the streets of Belfast on this no doubt already quite miserable day.

You see, the Royal Irish Regiment had just returned from occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and holding down the natives just like in the good ol' days - before all the savages got funny ideas about governing themselves. Hooray!

A good ol' military parade to celebrate a bit of "keeping the savages in their place"? Who could possibly complain?

Well, maybe the entire fucking nationalist community that suffered close to four decades of brutal military occupation by the British Army, including by the very regiment that was to hold a party on their streets.

The death toll of of the Nationalist and Catholic community at the hands of the occupying troops tops 400 people.

Bear in mind, this occurs after the formal end of British military occupation of the six counties.

My source in Belfast inform me there was no less than four separate protests on the day. (I can't reveal my source, but her code name is "Clancy-pants". And I can't recall having seen her sober.)

The largest protest was organised by Sinn Fein near the military parade. A peaceful demonstration, it was headed by family members of those murdered by British troops.

So, how did the loyalists respond?





Bottles, brioks and bigotted chants, while the police stand by.

And what is it with tough-guy bigots and baldness? What are they, scared of nits?

It isn't in the footage, but the loyalist mob also took to chanting the delightful ditty, "Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands"?

Bobby Sands (no relation) was the first of ten republican prisoners in the concentration camp of Long Kesh to die on hunger strike in 1981.

Now my first thought was, naturally enough, "what a bunch of disgusting bigots".

But then I thought about it a bit more, and thought "no, give these people a chance. Don't just jump to the worst conclusion."

So I figured, well, I mean they are clearly not altogether bright, perhaps they simply haven't followed the news over the last 27-odd years. Perhaps they never heard Bobby Sands had died, or even about the hunger strike.

Maybe they thought he was still on the blanket protest in H-block and, in the interests of healing the wounds of the past, figured the offer of a decent feed would be seen as a token of good faith and a willingness to move forward, together.

Then I saw the bottles flying towards those whose family members were murdered.

No, just fucking bigots.

So below is my response. It is also for the Iraqi and Afghan people, who, last century, both drove the British Army out, only to see the fucking scum return, tagging along after the new Empire.




“go on home, British soldiers, go on home. Have you got no fucking homes of your own?”

***

POSTSCRIPT:

It appears I have been badly misguided.

This article from the British Daily Mail, that's the paper that supported fascism in the '30s, reveals the truth of the situation, headlined "Riot police called in as protestors led by Gerry Adams mob British soldiers during Ulster homecoming parade".

It is obvious what has happened. That video on Youtube of the march I naively posted is just some sort of fenian trick.

As always, the Daily Mail have it right, never trust the Irish.