This weekend we were away to give a talk at Projectile in Newcastle. What I did not realise beforehand is that they run the Star and Shadow Cinema amazingly well as a collective. Our rant about Indymedia luckily clashed with Jamie’s “Why is it so hard to love” workshop and we also had to wait till the Argentinian video “(((i))) – the movie” finished.
Surprisingly it went quite well with connecting the laptop to the projector and getting the internet on screen and we could show people the websites and how to post and how to set up an IMC, which I was told by the organisers they would want to. Unfortunately, the half dozen sleepy hungover people in the audience were not aware of their own intentions, and they got a bit bulldozed into it, and my friends needed to hold me back in my eagerness to expand the Indymedia empire.
So, got one of the “70th anniversary of Barcelona May Days 1937” mugs to commemorate the Spanish Revolution & Counter-Revolution, signed to be a tribute to Camillo Berneri, Andres Nin, Franco Barberi, Francisco Ferrer and Domingo Ascaso. Don’t ask me who they are, because I have no clue. George Orwell might have known.
Just got it because it was the only practical thing on sale apart from the Class War lighters, and as we did not have to pay any entry as workshop leaders I thought I should leave some pounds, but I did not want to buy any more books.
And thought the mug would inspire me to read more about history.
Aha, Google tells me that at least Berneri and Barberi were murdered by Stalin’s communists in May 1937 because they wrote a communist-critical article. That old argument it is. Aha, Nin was also murdered by the Stalinists, he was one of the founders of the POUM and initiated the autonomous government of Catalonia, according to Wikipedia.
Francisco Ferrer however died in 1909 and was the founder of the Modern School movement. He was executed by a firing squad because of “The Bloody Week”, when the army clashed with the working class.
I can’t find much about Domingo Ascaso, apart from that he had a famous brother who was involved in the group around Durruti, and that Domingo was one of the first to be killed in jail during the May Day 1937 riots.
So, it seems to be quite a blood-thirsty mug. Maybe I should only drink “Bloody Mary” out of it.