Lord Byron: The eXile’s Patron Saint

By John Dolan, The Exiled

“Polidori once asked Byron what, besides scribble verses, he could do better than Polidori himself. Byron icily replied: 'Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.'”

OK, somebody go find a black goat somewhere, sharpen me a steak knife, and buy us some spray paint for a pentagram, 'cause we're gonna resurrect us a champion who can kick the necessary ignorant Protestant ass and make it look easy.

And lucky for you, folks, I've pre-selected us a perfect demon: George Gordon, Lord Byron. He's dead at the moment, but that's a minor problem. Like his avatar, Prometheus, Byron can die and come back as often as you need him. Hell, he likes getting killed; he was a fighter. Single-handed, he took on the Wordsworth gang and kicked the sticks they had jammed up their asses right up through their teeth.

Byron's time was like ours, a scared time, a period of reaction and retreat. His England ran the world without knowing or wanting to know a thing about it, just like our America. Our climate is in fact the same nasty Wordsworthian weather Byron fought all his life: humorless, sanctimonious, xenophobic, factional, and cruel. He spent his life firing back at that world in a long fighting retreat that saw him always heading South and East, away from “the moral North” where the Wordsworthian consensus was metastasizing.

And that, of course, is why Byron was adored in Europe but snubbed in England and America. He was everything Wordsworth's gang was not. They were utterly humorless-a Romanticist once told me that “there are three jokes in Wordsworth, or so they say…but I can't recall them.”

Byron has thousands of jokes-and better still, they're actually funny. Not that he was simply trying to amuse. On the contrary, he meant to do great harm. Jokes were, for him, simply weapons against the solemn hicks-humor to sprinkle on their high seriousness like salt on slugs.

Byron was a fighter from childhood, a clubfoot semi-cripple who made himself a boxer and with typically Olympian kindness and disdain made himself the defender of nerds at his public school. He came from serious craziness, his father earning the nickname “Mad Jack” in an era when it took real ambition to seem more mad than the run of male aristocrats.

Probability bowed quickly to him, giving him a title he was never supposed to inherit, then making him instantly famous for Childe Harolde, his first and worst album. With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.

He chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don't mean “moralism” in a normative sense-God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth's letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It's one of the curiosities of English literary history that you'll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth.

Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin's gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy's corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

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The Chicago Conspiracy [Trailer]

This is a trailer for our upcoming feature length documentary based in Chile and the Mapuche indigenous territory of Wallmapu. The concept for the film was born with the death of a former military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. His regime murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands after the military coup on September 11, 1973.

The Chicago Conspiracy takes its name from the approximately 25 Chilean economists who attended the University of Chicago and other prestigious universities beginning in the 1960s to study under the neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. After embracing Friedman's neoliberal ideas, these economists returned to assist Pinochet's military regime in imposing free market policies. They privatized nearly every aspect of society, and Chile soon became a classic example of free market capitalism under the barrel of a gun.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about today. We began this documentary with the death of a dictator, but we continue with the legacy of a dictatorship.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Day of the Youth Combatant. On this day, two young brothers and militants of the MIR, Rafael and Eduardo Vergara, were gunned down by police as they walked through the politically active community Villa Francia. March 29 is not only about the Vergara brothers—it is a day to remember all youth combatants who have died under the dictatorship and current democratic regime.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the students who fight a dictatorship-era educational law put into place on the last day of military rule. Over 700,000 students went on strike in 2006 to protest the privatized educational system. Police brutally repressed student marches and occupations.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the neighborhoods lining the outskirts of Santiago. They were originally land occupations, and later became centers of armed resistance against the military dictatorship. A number of them, such as la Victoria and Villa Francia, continue as areas of confrontational discontent to this day.

The Chicago Conspiracy is about the Mapuche conflict. The Mapuche people valiantly resisted Spanish occupation, and continue to resist the Chilean state and the multinational corporations who strip Mapuche territory for forestry plantations, mines, dams and farming plantations. The government has utilized the dictatorship-era anti-terrorism law to jail Mapuche community members in struggle. Two young weichafes (Mapuche warriors), Alex Lemún and Matías Catrileo, were recently killed by Chilean police—one in 2002, the other in 2008.

The Chicago Conspiracy is a response to a global conspiracy of neoliberalism, militarism and authoritarianism.

With music by SubVerso.

http://www.subversiveactionfilms.org

277 detained in Athens yesterday evening

36 years from the anti-dictatorial student uprising in Athens. It’s been a long while and democracy seems old enough to show its teeth: at tonight’s commemorative demonstration, 277 people (!) were in total detained by police (a “detention” also means being forcefully taken to a police station for ID checking etc). So far, out of these people, seven have been charged. It is very difficult to transmit any more verified information at the moment, although it is clear that deep into the night, the entire neighbourhood of Exarcheia was occupied by police.

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Top 10 weirdest political parties

As if the real political world weren't already weird and ridiculous enough, over the years a number of satirical and joke political parties have been formed all across the world. Whether it's thanks to their bizarre policy plans, eccentric candidates, or hilarious media stunts, some of these groups have managed to make the headlines, even if they didn't necessarily win elections. Here are some of the stranger political parties that may come asking for your vote.

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4. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party

One of the most well-known and surprisingly successful fringe political parties in England, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party was established by musician and activist David Sutch in the early 80s. The OMRLP's platform is always full of bizarre and satirical political promises, which have included adding the Loch Ness Monster to the endangered species list, banning the use of asterisks, and a pledge to see that Ozzy Osbourne receives a knighthood. Despite their intentionally frivolous platform, the OMRLP does have a number of serious policy plans, and quite a few of their original ideas, like lowering the voting age to 18, have since been signed into law. Over the years, the party has managed to win a number of seats in local government throughout the U.K., most notably in small town mayoral races, but they haven't had much success since 2005.

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UK convict accuses superiors of Iraq torture

Britain's only convicted war criminal has accused his superiors of routinely abusing and threatening civilian detainees in Iraq.

In a new disclosure in yet another controversial Iraq war torture case, former British officer Donald Payne said his commanding officers regularly tortured Iraqi prisoners to gain information.

Payne said he had witnessed Col Jorge Mendonca and a platoon commander, Lt Craig Rodgers, punching a group of prisoners, cocking pistols at them and even threatening to set them alight.

The ex-soldier was speaking at a public inquiry into the killing of Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa while in British custody in 2003.

Mousa was discovered with 93 wounds on his body after being in custody for more than 36 hours in a temporary detention centre controlled by Payne.

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