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Against war, French style
The French singer Renaud wrote this song in 1994.
The translation which follows the French text is mine.
LA MÉDAILLE
Un pigeon s’est posé‚
Sur l’épaule galonnée
Du Maréchal de France
Et il a décoré
La statue dressée
D’une gastrique offense
Maréchaux assassins
Sur vos bustes d’airain
Vos poitrines superbes
Vos médailles ne sont
Que fiente de pigeon
De la merde
Un enfant est venu
Aux pieds de la statue
Du Maréchal de France
Une envie naturelle
L’a fait pisser contre elle
Mais en toute innocence
Maréchaux assassins
Le môme mine de rien
A joliment vengé
Les enfants et les mères
Que dans vos sales guerres
Vous avez massacrés
Un clodo s’est couché
Une nuit juste aux pieds
Du Maréchal de France
Ivre mort au matin
Il a vomi son vin
Dans une gerbe immense
Maréchaux assassins
Vous méritez rien
De mieux pour vos méfaits
Que cet hommage immonde
Pour tout le sang du monde
Par vos sabres versés
Un couple d’amoureux
S’embrasse sous les yeux
Du Maréchal de France
Muet comme un vieux bonze
Il restera de bronze
Raide comme une lance
Maréchaux assassins
L’amour ne vous dit rien
A part bien sur celui
De la Patrie hélas
Cette idée dégueulasse
Qu’à mon tour je conchie
Renaud Séchan
THE MEDAL
A pigeon perched
On the braided shoulder
Of the Marshal of France
And he decorated the upright statue
With a gastric offense
Marshals – assassins –
On your busts of bronze
Your superb chests
Your medals are
Nothing but pigeon’s droppings
Nothing but shit
A child came
To the feet of the statue
Of the Marshal of France
A natural need
Made him piss against it
But in all innocence
Marshals – assassins –
This unthinking child
Has nicely avenged
The children and mothers
You have massacred
In your dirty wars
A tramp slept
One night at the feet
Of the Marshal of France
In the morning, dead drunk,
He vomited his wine
Like an enormous fountain
Marshals – assassins –
You deserve nothing better
For your misdeeds
Than this filthy homage
For all the blood of the world
Shed by your swords
Two lovers are kissing
Under the gaze
Of the Marshal of France
Dumb as an old priest
He will stay set in bronze
Stiff as a lance
Marshals – assassins –
Love means nothing to you
Except, alas, patriotic love
That disgusting idea
That I, in my turn, abhor.
Renaud Séchan
The First World War: a soldier’s declaration
Unlike Wilfred Owen (see previous blog), Siegfried Sassoon survived the war. But in July 1917 he made the following statement against it:
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.”
The statement was read out in the House of Commons on 30 July and reported in The Times on the 31st. He remained in the army, was wounded in the head on 30 July 1918, was sent home and put on indefinite sick leave. He officially retired from the army on 12 March 1919. He continued to write prose and verse.He died in 1967.
Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration has at its centre the real-life encounter between Sassoon and army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglochart in 1917 (Penguin Books, 1992, and no doubt reprinted subsequently).
The Old Lie
If I understood the BBC correctly yesterday, we are in for four whole years of centenary celebrations of the First World War. I won’t be celebrating.
After gas was used for the first time on 22 April 1915, Wilfred Owen wrote this poem against the idea that Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori – it is noble and fitting to die for one’s country:
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A Christmas message to Amazon
You heard about Amazon in an earlier blog (see Amazon undercover). Please sign this petition, which demands the “Living Wage” for Amazon workers. I know the petition describes the “Living Wage” as a living wage, which you may find, as I do, very annoying indeed. But sign the petition anyway – Amazon deserves it. It also deserves to find its warehouses and offices occupied by its own workforce, who, if left to themselves, could run the whole show better than the current owners. But I suspect that’s not going to happen before Christmas!
So SIGN THE PETITION: https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/amazonuk-this-christmas-pay-the-living-wage-across-uk-operations
Immigration, the family & the archbishop
In the UK the right to family life (Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) has been increasingly refused through all sorts of rules and bureaucratic delays, refused even to refugees and other immigrants who have already gone through enough hoops to achieve British nationality status. “You don’t earn enough”, says the Home Office, “so your spouse will be a drain on the state.” “Your wife must do an English course,” it says, “even if she has to travel through dangerous areas of Afghanistan to Kabul for the classes.” “Your wife must go from Afghanistan to Islamabad for an interview,” it says. And on, and on, and on. People wait years for their applications to be processed, and it takes even longer when the UK Border Agency + the Consulate + the private companies (the last, of course, are “our partners”) who are part of the process lose the application, and then have the cheek to ask the applicants to start again.
It looks as if these refusals will be hardening up in future, according to legislation before parliament. One result is that Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, has written an article in today’s Guardian criticising the government’s policy on these matters. Before he wrote he did his homework, including talking to many of the victims of the policy. As a result, he says that the regulations now in place are anti-family, unsavoury and a scandal. He asks:
“… is it the government’s intention to penalise British citizens? To undermine marriages and to split up families? Other EU citizens are free to come and live in the UK with spouses from outside the EU. And yet British citizens do not enjoy the same rights. The feeling of being victimised by one’s own government is a bitter pill to swallow.”
Strong words from an Archbishop, and his article should be read in full. As might be expected of an archbishop, he ends with a pious hope: “I hope that parliament, in considering the current immigration bill, will take the opportunity to correct this clear injustice.” Amen to that, Archbishop, although snowflakes’ chances in Hell (if you’ll pardon the expression) do spring to mind.
But to help the process along, let’s all write to our MPs expressing our disgust at the government’s unsavoury, scandalous (and, not least, cruel), policies.
Here’s the archbishop: http://gu.com/p/3y7nx
Here’s some research suggesting that government statistics trying to justify the policy have been – er, well, cooked:
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2013/07/09/revealed-the-financial-cost-of-theresa-may-s-immigrationl
Right in it with George: making the poor pay
I see George Osborne is preparing to make the poorest people pay even more for the mess capitalism has got us into. He told the Treasury select committee that “many billions” would need to be “shaved” from welfare to avoid deeper cuts in Whitehall.
Many billions? That doesn’t sound like a shave, George. That sounds like a major operation needing a general anaesthetic.
George wants us to know he finds some of these decisions “difficult”. The decisions only seem to be difficult, however, when it comes to cutting the Whitehall bureaucracy. In the case of cutting welfare, he can just go ahead and do it. Not that he mentions the bureaucracy. He indicates that any further cuts in Whitehall would endanger education and science. Well, that’s sliced-bread territory for sure – can’t touch them. So what to do? Let George explain:
“I don’t think all the savings need and should be made within the departments. I think we should make a balanced judgment about where government spends its money and, yes, we have got to make difficult decisions to save money further in Whitehall, but we should accompany that with savings in the welfare budget.”
So what are the results of these “accompanying” savings in welfare? They sound a bit like a piano in the background, soothing, encouraging, comforting. But it’s not quite like that. Just one example will do – and it affects some of George and Dave’s favourite people: the “strivers”, the people who are allegedly happy to work for low pay rather than claim benefits because, again allegedly, “they know it is the right thing to do”. Hidden away in two sentences in Osborne’s autumn statement are £600m worth of cuts to Universal Credit. The Guardian explains that the cut comes
“because Universal Credit work allowances will now be maintained at their current cash level for three years from 2013. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts inflation (CPI) of 8.7% over this period, meaning that the value of universal credit work allowances is set to fall significantly in real terms. During last year’s autumn statement it was announced that most working-age benefits and tax credits were to be uprated by 1% a year for three years from 2013. Taken together, the 1% uprating and the reduction in work allowances mean that by 2017 a single-parent household will be up to £420 per year worse off and a couple with children up to £230 a year worse off.”
No wonder Gavin Kelly of the Resolution Foundation calls it “a real blow to the working poor”. “It’s the sort of stealthy measure”, he says, “that often attracts little attention but still has a real impact.”
“Little attention” was George’s aim, of course when he hid this lot away in two sentences. The question for us all is: should someone as tricky as this be in charge of the public purse? Or, indeed, our welfare?
Some of the detail: see http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/12/osborne-working-families-reduced-allowances-2017
Flora’s story
Those of you who remember Moh (see the Dangerous Detention and Dangerous Job pages here) may be interested to hear about Flora. Flora lives in Hull. Her case is different to Moh’s case because she is not an asylum seeker, and her claim to stay is on other grounds, as I explain below.
What happened
Flora Yennyuy has applied for leave to appeal to the Immigration Appeals Tribunal against the Home Office’s refusal to allow her to remain in the UK. An acquaintance from Cameroon, who is an EU citizen, sent her the names of several universities to apply to in 2006. She came to the UK from Cameroon in 2007 to do a Master’s degree at the University of Hull, and she received her MSc in Environmental Technology in 2010. They later began a relationship in the UK and he supported her application for a work visa based on their relationship. The visa was due to expire in 2016.
However, the relationship broke down after he subjected her to abuse, violence and, finally, sexual assault. He then informed the Home Office that the relationship had broken down and the Home Office revoked her work visa. They did not inform her of this. She went to Germany to visit friends and on her return she was refused entry and placed in Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre. She was released on bail after 5 months, and she had a tribunal hearing in October 2013. The tribunal judge rejected her appeal, saying that she did not believe her claim of domestic violence and that Article 8 (the right to family life) of the human rights legislation was not engaged. If her claim of domestic violence had been accepted she believes she would have been given indefinite leave to remain. She has now made an application for leave to appeal to the Upper Tier of the Tribunal.
Flora’s history in Hull
Flora came to the UK as a student and then to work. She has made herself part of the community in Hull in a number of different ways: she has worked at the Open Doors Project at Princes Avenue Methodist Church since 2008 as a volunteer, where she campaigned in schools together with other volunteers to break the stigma attached to refugees and asylum seekers. She has also worked in Humber All Nations Alliance (HANA), the Mental Health Action Group (MHAG), the Refugee Council, The Haven Project, Positive Assets and Environmail Hull. She has also been an active member in the Catholic Compliancy. In terms of jobs she has worked as a Health Care Assistant under NHS-Hull and HICA, a sales assistant in the British Heart Foundation and as a factory operative at Greencore cake and dessert factory. The relationship she was in broke down through no fault of her own and she should not be punished for it. She wishes to stay and continue building her life in the UK.
Flora’s application is supported by Unite the Union’s community branch in Hull.
Amazon undercover
Just watched Panorama on Amazon’s ultra-exploitative battery-hen type working conditions (and pay scales – the daily rate is £6.50 per hour, the nightly rate £8.25). See the BBC’s webpage report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25034598
In addition to the stress of work patterns, the constant surveillance, the system of disciplinary warnings, intense pressure on how fast you work and the real health issues that arise from this exploitation, there is the fact that profit-rich Amazon has been given millions in taxpayers’ money as an incentive to set up warehouses in Wales, Scotland and elsewhere. So the state uses public money as a bribe to big business but withdraws public money (in the shape of benefits) from individuals in order to force them into low-paid, temporary, health-threatening jobs at places like – well, yes – Amazon.
What can be done? The GMB was mentioned in the programme but I’m not sure that the union has members there. Individuals, of course, could withdraw their custom or other kinds of involvement (I have published a book in the Kindle store, for example, and could withdraw it). But individual action (though it makes you feel better) feels like a long route to nowhere. At the end of the day union organisation and action is the answer. I can’t apply for a job myself – I’m 71, and the young man who did the undercover job for Panorama was 23 and he nearly keeled over! There are worse epitaphs than one that says, “He tried to organise a union at Amazon”, but I’m not volunteering!
I’m going to retweet this to various unions (GMB, Unite, Unison, USDAW – any more?). If you’re concerned, let them know. And let Amazon know.
And if you have any ideas, use the comment box or reply. I’m out of ideas. I’m just angry.
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