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Edward Heath Made Me Angry: The Christie File: Part 3, 1967-1975. This third volume of Christie’s memoirs provides the historical and political context for the international anti-Franco resistance of the anarchist ‘First of May Group’, from 1967 to the dictator’s death in 1975. It is a first-hand account — by someone accused but acquitted — of the campaign of anti-state and anti-capitalist bombings by diverse groups of libertarian militants who came together as the ‘Angry Brigade’ to challenge the aggressively anti-working class policies of the Tory government of Edward Heath.

The coming to power of Edward Heath’s government in 1971 redefined the limits of protest. Opponents of government were ignored or criminalised, hard won employment rights and social reforms were rolled back, and so was democracy itself. To challenge government became life threatening, as radicals across Europe and America were to discover (Benno Ohensorg, Thomas Weissbecker, Georg von Rauch, Rudi Dutschke, Giuseppe Pinelli, the six anti-Vietnam war protestors at Kent and Jackson State universities).

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General Franco Made Me A ‘Terrorist’ The Christie File: Part 2, 1964-1967 ‘This volume picks up where the last one ended, namely his leaving Britain to take part in an anarchist plan to assassinate Franco. Christie, however, was arrested by Franco’s secret police long before he completed his mission to give the explosives he smuggled into Spain to those who were planning the assassination. Christie recounts his experiences being arrested and his time in various Spanish prisons with assurance, humanity and wit. He is not afraid to talk about the failures and cock-ups, the bickering and the surreal along with the bravery and dedication. As such, it is a real treat to read, giving the human side which history books never really manage to do. His account of the characters he met and the life of political prisoners in Franco’s regime is engrossing. Flag Blackened

(READ ON ISSUU)

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My Granny Made me an Anarchist: The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-1964 ‘Born in Glasgow in 1946, Stuart’s book recounts his life in post-war Glasgow (and round about) and his political awakening, an awakening that brought him to via the Labour Party, anti-nuclear protesting and trade union activism, to anarchism.

‘Being a Glaswegian anarchist myself I was enthralled by his account of growing up in a Glasgow which was in so many ways similar to my own but, at the same time, was slowly disappearing. He gives the reader a glimpse into working class life and culture in the 1950s and 1960s, even down to the comics he read and the films and books which influenced him and his ideas. Unsurprisingly, many of his memories, influences and experiences I can relate to. Stuart said he became an anarchist outside the Mitchell library, I discovered I was one inside it. He talks about meeting anarchists like Bobby Lynn, a comrade I came to know decades later. He gives a good overview of the ideas of anarchism, its history and the state of the movement in the 1960s, both in Glasgow and in Britain as a whole. He discusses the anarchist resistance to Franco, providing background to his decision, at the age of 18, to go to Spain to assassinate the dictator. It is here that volume 1 ends. All I can say is I cannot wait for volume 2!

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Arena 3: Anarchism in Music

In this third volume of the Arena series (£9.95 inc p+p) we gather around the proverbial camp fire where we might listen to tunes to make our toes tap and to words which might reach into our hearts and pull us into a future of wild possibilities, daring us to dream. These songs of freedom push against convention, sing of finding ways and means to move beyond the confines of staid convention and the litany of war, poverty and misery that are the direct consequence of the edifice of capitalism and those frightened elites who hide cowering behind it.

In ancient Rome, after Constantine bent his knee to Christ (or at least saw the convenient propaganda in such a coat of many colours), the music of theatre and of festival dismayed the naysayers of the ascending Christian empire that grew in his wake; the frivolity and joyousness of celebrating life became anathema to the new social order bent on obedience to the will of God and, by divine right, those masters who perpetuated his will. And so they banned it.

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La Patagonia Rebelde (Rebel Patagonia) by Osvaldo Bayer (click to read)

Patagonia rebelde (or Patagonia trágica) (written by Osvaldo Bayer) was a violent suppression of a rural worker’s strike in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz in Patagonia between 1921 and 1922. The uprising was put down by Colonel Héctor Benigno Varela’s 10th Cavalry Regiment of the Argentine Army under the orders of Hipólito Yrigoyen. Approximately 1,500 rural workers were shot and killed by the Army in the course of the operations, many of them executed by firing squads at Estancia San José. Most of those executed were Chilean and Spaniard workers who had sought refuge in Patagonia after their strike in southern Chile in 1920 was brutally suppressed by the Chilean authorities.

Patagonia rebelde 1 ; Patagonia rebelde 2 ; Patagonia rebelde 3 ; Patagonia rebelde 4 ; Patagonia rebelde 5 ; Patagonia rebelde 6 ; Patagonia rebelde 7 ; Patagonia rebelde 8; Patagonia rebelde 9 ; Patagonia rebelde 10 ; Patagonia rebelde 11

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Emidio Recchioni (1864-1934) Kensal Green Cemetery, Harrow Road, London (© Hey, mippy)

Emidio Recchioni (1864-1934), a republican railway worker, born in Ravenna, who converted to the anarchist Idea in the early 1890s under the influence of Ancona-based Cesare Agostinelli, publisher of the anarchist newspaper Sempre Avanti.

Arrested in 1894 in the repression that followed the assassination attempt on hated Prime Minister Francesco Crispi by the anarchist Paolo Lega, Recchioni was sentenced to three years imprisonment. Released in 1897 he, Errico Malatesta and other comrades launched another Ancona-based newspaper ‘L’Agitazione’ which led to his rearrest and deportation to the prison island of Ustica (one of Italy’s many island prison colonies) in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Escaping in 1898, he fled to London where he opened a popular delicatessen in Soho’s Old Compton Street, specialising in Italian wine, pasta and smoked hams. He also traded in Carrara marble, Carrara being a centre of Italian anarchist activism, and supported financially — and wrote for under his pen name ‘Nemo’ — the Italian anarchist press, especially La Protesta and the Galleanist paper L’Adunata dei Refrattari.

'King Bomba' (the guys in the Trilby's and macs look suspiciously like Special Branch)

Named ‘King Bomba‘ — an ironic reference to the tyrant King Ferdinand II of the two Sicilies (1810-1859) — Recchioni’s shop was frequented by British writers, intellectuals and political and literary exiles of the day and, later, following Mussolini’s accession to power, Italian anti-fascists. As a political activist and sociometric star of the radical and literary Soho milieu, Recchioni acquired a wide and influential friendship circle of British socialists and liberals, among them the man who in 1924 was to become the first British Labour prime minister, James Ramsey MacDonald.

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Cuba Libertaria 25 (January 2012) Bulletin of Cuban libertarian and independent union support groups. (Click to read)

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Flag of the 26th of July Movement, an anti-Batista organization which recruited many Cuban anarchists in the 1950s.

Anarchism as a political and social solution has many enemies. Its fiercest opponents, however, are those authoritarian regimes who, distorting and subverting the ideas of socialism, have promoted themselves historically as embodying the values ​​of liberty, equality and fraternity. In every situation, state capitalist governments, in line with the secularization of religious thought, have infanticised and divided the conflict between “believers”— those who support them, and “heretics” — those who oppose them.

In this alleged confrontation between the two models (in religious terms the struggle of “good” against “evil”) authoritarian states demand the committed support of all revolutionaries to jointly confront the forces of reaction.

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San Celoni Cemetery, 5 January 2012

Francesc Sabaté Llopart (Hospitalet de Llobregat, 30 March 1915San Celoni, 5 January 1960), better known as Quico Sabaté or El Quico, was (along with José Lluis Facerias) probably the best known of the Catalan-based anti-Francoist urban guerrillas.

‘What is referred to as the “Spanish republicans’ defeat” is crucial to any understanding of the life of Quico Sabaté who crossed the border with his brigade on 10 February 1939. They were the last organised troops to quit Catalonia. At that point QS did not consider himself defeated, and promised himself that he would resume a struggle that had been being momentarily interrupted. As far as QS was concerned, the war was not over — and Franco thought so too: Franco’s was – as Antonio Téllez put it – “a tyrannical rule during which thousands of Spaniards enjoyed some hypothetical freedom of choice only in the manner of their dying”.

’1939 was not, as far as QS was concerned, the beginning of an irreversible exile, because he could not conceive of life for him and his family other than in his homeland (my father rejected our becoming French citizens, an option offered by the French authorities to the French-born offspring of Spaniards.) His only thoughts were of action in his chosen theatre of operations, i.e. Spain, because QS felt closely connected with the Spaniards in Spain proper.

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Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura, Piazza Fontana, Milan, December 12, 4.37 p.m. 1969

The Piazza Fontana massacre of 12 December 1969 is a crucial milestone in post-war Italian history. It was on that date that the criminal intentions of a political class — which demonstrated it would shrink from nothing to cling on to power in the face of ‘the onward march of communism’ — was made flesh. This class did not baulk at leaving a trail of corpses in its wake in order to prevent its leadership being called into question. The Piazza Fontana massacre is not some ‘obscure episode’ in Italy’s history — ‘the nightfall of the republic’. It is a clearly defined chapter whose narrative is that dead bodies are preferable to political change and over the years that followed many more would perish — mainly at the hands of the right, but also some at the hands of the left. It was a perverted game. The right had attacked, therefore the left had a duty to retaliate, thereby cranking up the ‘index of conflict’.

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© 2012 Christie Books Security: MediaBear