Of course, in a hierarchical social system like we British left you, there's never been much room at the top to begin with.
Let's be honest Paddy, you will never win the lottery. The chances are pretty good you will slave away at some menial job the rest of your probable short pleb life. That's because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class in Dublin or Belfast. Let's be honest you're a member of the working class. Tough !
As a result you don't have the right sort of education, affirmative healthy nourished upbringing, good connections to the privileged, snotty manners, refined appearance, and acquired good taste of quality to ever become one of us. You would probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those delusional media fairytales we plant in your media about "justice" and "equal opportunity" in Ireland..
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like we British left you, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us and we like it up here so much, that we intend to keep it that way. But don't get too upset, there's usually someone lower down the social hierarchy that you can feel superior to and kick in their teeth once in a while. Even if you are a lowly dishwasher, you can easily find some poor slob further down the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people.
Always remember that if the likes of you were monetarily secure and privileged like us, there would be no one left, to do all those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs. There would be no idiots to fight our wars for us like some of you Paddys still do or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. There would certainly be no one to meekly go to their early grave without having lived a full and creative life. So please, keep up the good work!
Most of you probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. We understand that even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're also afraid of the change you desire, that ensures keeping the likes of you and suckers like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you'll go through life mechanically playing your given social role, terrified what the neighbours would think if you ever dare to "break out of the mold."
We Brits learned a long time to play you off against each other, whenever it suits our purposes, reasonably paid workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Protestant against Catholic, Black against White, male against female, British workers against Japanese against Irish against.... We continually push your wages down talking about "foreign competition," "the law of supply and demand," "national security," or "the bloated deficit."
We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you dare step out of line or endanger our profits. We do give you an occasional break from the monotony of your daily economic blackmail, your allowed to participate in our stage-managed electoral tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum games, FF or FG, Adams or Robinson, better known to you ordinary Irish peasants as "elections." Happily, you haven't a clue as to what's really happening, instead, you blame, "Taigs", "Prods", "Aliens," "Tree-hugging Environmentalists," "Niggers," "Jews," Welfare Queens," "blowins," and countless others for your troubled situation.
We're also very pleased that most of you still embrace the "work ethic," even though most jobs in the economy, degrade the environment, undermine your physical and emotional health, and basically suck your one and only short life right out of you. I'm afraid we don't know much about work but we're glad you do!
Of course it could be different. Ireland could be intelligently organized to meet the real needs of ordinary Irish people. You and others like you could intelligently and collectively fight to free yourselves from our domination. But you don't know get it, do you ?. In fact, you probably can't even imagine that any another way of life is possible. That's probably the greatest, most significant achievement of our British Empire's unique civil service, bequeathed to you, our first colony, robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, your ability to think or act for yourself.
So we British ruling class would truly like to thank you Irish from the bottom of our heartless hearts. Yes, there are a few of you, "Gombeens," I believe you call them, who try to be clever with new bank money and try to ape us but "Old Money" will always win the day, Your loyal sacrifice, especially our loyal commoner in the north makes all our corrupt luxury possible; your work ethic makes our system work. Thanks so much for "knowing your place" without even knowing it !
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
Intelligence officials and fellow policemen are to be questioned in
connection with the car bombing of a policeman in Ireland this week.
Initial reports of the incident, strongly suggest the bombers had
access to classified material which should have been kept
confidentially in an office or police station..
The level of inside knowledge required to carry out the bombing in the
manner it happened, suggests that the bombers had precise inside of
confidential material. Despite the spin, the nature and timing of the
attack, pre-supposes very specific details that are unlikely to be
anything other than highly significant, according to one source.
A highly secretive embarrassing internal inquiry will be
investigating, recently recruited
nationalists suspected of Crown force collusion, including the role of
forces within the Special Branch and covert forces within British army
units who formerly had their offices raided.
According to one official, the leaks further expose the weakness of a
force mixed with all sorts of conflicting interests, including
nationalists and the fact that there are no mechanisms for democratic
accountability of the various British departments in Ireland or their
activities.
Moreover, the British government's failure some time ago to implement
Patten's requirements, for a new beginning for policing, has left
everyone powerless to investigate this matter.The various forces have
a force within a force, immune from accountability and immune from
scrutiny. Recent recruiting of nationalists and promotion of Special
Branch into senior positions of authority throughout the paramilitary police, have
polluted any new policing ethos within the force, with security
breaches, left right and centre.
The bomber's iuntelligence accomplices recently passed through
security checkpoints, staffed by armed guards, gained entry to secured
coded keypads and opened secure cabinets. They knew exactly what they
wanted and they knew exactly where to look.
They initially gained access through a ringed 20-metre steel fence with
watchtowers, floodlights, classed as impenetrable. They then cracked a
network of elaborate security systems, designed to protect some of the
northern statelet's most dangerous secrets and intimate details of all
paramilitary police personnel.
Clearly operating with insider's knowledge, the bombers intelligence
operatives, penetrated the heartland of all covert operations. They
targeted also an office which runs the network of informers, agents,
an important nerve centre for military intelligence and the inner
sanctum of counter insurgency operations.
According to confirmed reliable reports, having breached the outer
security cordon, the masked unit entered the first floor office. One
of the men had a Dublin accent. A British agent on the premises was
subsequently bound and gagged.
The unit gained access to secret files and removed a number of
documents, described as highly confidential. They apparently made copies of all
the material. They downloaded information from all of the computers.
A paramilitary police source has admitted the raid must have involved "someone
closely involved with us". 'Very close'; not every officer would have
had specific knowledge to access the security systems protecting the
most 'highly sensitive' material the British have in Ireland. A former
officer admitted, "I worked with the secret services for 30 odd years
and I wouldn't know how to do this thing."
Nevertheless the paramilitary police remains unacceptable to both unionists and
nationalists, because it is widely acknowledged, that no government has
the power to curtail the forces within forces. The paramilitary police operates in
exactly the same manner that forces within the Special Branch, and
forces within MI5, controlled the RUC.
"Castlereagh was at the heart of operations in the Six counties for 30
years. It is from Castlereagh that, shoot-to-kill operatives,
collusion with loyalists and the torture of republicans was directed."
There are also recent revelations, concerning Crown force collusion in
the attempted murder of three RUC/paramilitary police members. Further, of the 20,000
official complaints made against the RUC/paramilitary police in recent years only
nine have been successfully prosecuted. More 6,000 files were sent to
the DPP arising out of the complaints.Of 24 recommended for
prosecution, just two police have been found guilty and jailed, one
received a suspended sentence, six fined.
These figures clearly show the DPP and the system in the six counties
are not capable of policing the police. It confirms what nationalists
have always known. The RUC/paramilitary police are a law unto themselves, regardless
of what crimes they commit.
BBC BRUTISH BULLSCUTTER COPERATION
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
If they knew about this, pampered Ulster pooches would choke on their Irish stew or Ulster frys. In Asia, however, the dogs aren't so fussy. For them, another dog's steaming offering is an appetizing free lunch. Only one thing tempts them more, human excrement. It's so much tastier than dog dirt that they go crazy for it.
Lacking a toilet in her own home, a local pupil at my friend's school used to lay her logs in the forest. She also had a pet dog. Each day, as she set off for the trees, her canine companion would be hard on her heels. Her turds would barely touch the ground before he gobbled them up. Toilet paper was quite unnecessary. For dessert, he would clean her up with his rasping tongue.
The high and mighty of Ulster often take their usual winter breaks from the cold Irish winter in beautiful exotic places like Phuket, otherwise known as the Pearl of the Andaman. Indeed more than a few secret affairs of the rich and famous have been uncovered there. The following is an incident that happened prior to X-Mas the real names have been altered for legal reasons and any resemblance is coincidental.
A Phuket bargirl swallowed an Ulsterman’s diamond ring after he refused to pay her for services she rendered to him and his his high profile female partner after an all-night menage-a-trois in Cherngtalay. The local police received a complaint from a bargirl who fingered an Ulsterman identified as Mr William and his partner a well known Ulster celebrity. The 28-year-old bargirl claimed she was assaulted and accused of being a jewelry-gulping culprit. Mr William under interrogation, told the police that on the evening of December 8 he went to a non alcoholic pub, where he met Panjit and a friend named Pla. Mr William invited Panjit to join him for a three-way at his hotel in Phuket, with his partner who for legal reasons we shall call Irish, who it is believed was suffering emotionally in a loveless marriage.
All was going well. Panjit reported that the Ulsterman ejaculated twice with each of them during the first session and repeated the performance five hours later under duress from his female partner. But when it came time to cough up, the Ulsterman’s performance was less impressive. He refused to pay the 2,000 baht he had promised to Panjit she told the police. When the Ulsterman went to the bathroom, Panjit searched his drawers and found a diamond ring, which she hid in her bra. The Ulsterman immediately discovered the theft and demanded the ring back, searching her intimately for the missing jewel. Panjit said that Mr William slapped her, which so enraged her that she swallowed the encrusted annulus while he wasn’t looking. After the police were called, she began having stomach spasms, diamonds being somewhat harder to digest than somtam. This led the police to suspect that she had swallowed the ring.
An X-ray at Phuket International Hospital confirmed it. Doctors there gave Panjit laxatives in an attempt to purge the ring, which Mr William said was a family heirloom passed down though generations frm Holland and possibly even a few digestive tracts. Panjit was then apparently released and, for reasons unknown, returned to Mr William’s hotel. The Ulsterman and his partner stood by with plastic bags at the ready to collect the excrement from over 20 bouts of explosive diarrhea that she experienced but Phuker the dog got their first, so still no ring. She became so ill she had to be readmitted to hospital this time to Wachira Phuket Hospital where she finally gave birth to a beautiful diamond ring which Irish put on her marriage finger immediately, after she recovered it from a dog called Phuker who has one milky eye, countless skin lesions with a scrotum big enough to carry his golf clubs as he faithfully follows Panjit everywhere. Hardly petting zoo material but he gives a whole new meaning to "rimming" as William and Irish will vouch for.
The Holocaust was discrimination, harassment and eventual liquidation of European Jews by Nazi Germany and it's allies. The Nazi called this organized murderous policy as 'The Final Solution'. The Nazis also believed in the chosen race and racial theories that made them superior to everyone else, especially the Jews and Gypsies. Others eliminated included homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Free Masons, physically and mentally handicapped people, socialists and dissidents.
Out of the nine million Jews from twenty-one European countries, six million were killed in the Holocaust. Nazis established a total of thirty-nine concentration camps. Infants, young children, old people and the infirm were all usually gassed had to face hard labour, starvation, exposure, brutality and disease. Nearly 1.5 million Jews died in Auschwitz alone. After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Jews in those territories were rounded up and killed they were also marched to wooded ravines in the outskirts of towns, forced to dig ditches and then made them undress before being shot, falling in the open grave on top of one another.
The camps were also notorious for using inmates as guinea pigs to carry on horrific experiments, sterilization and castration. Children were experimented on by the 'Angel of Death', Dr. Josef Mengele. Many individuals and groups in Germany and the occupied countries, did everything they could, at considerable personal risk, to help save the Jews and other people from the Nazis.
The number of collaborators, unfortunately, were higher. Many Nazis were hanged for their crimes. Criminals today on the other hand, are getting away with their war crimes. The Holocaust stands out for it frightening rationality and efficiency in systematically killing people, but, when you look at events in Palestine, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems nothing has been learned about respecting human rights and human lives.
I urge you to investigate for yourself Gaza's reality, share information about what is really happening in Gaza with your friends and colleagues and let them decide for themselves if Gaza is another Warsaw ghetto. Please support the boycott of War criminals worldwide as you identify them.
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
The RUC/PSNI despite considerable anger are still not prosecuting the Adams case and stand accused of being involved in wholesale child abuse, following revelation that a thirteen-year-old boy from the Ardoyne area was
"blackmailed by the discredited force into working as a low level informer against his own community,"
The family have been in contact with a reputable human
rights lawyer and have also contacted both the Irish and British governments with a view to getting the child's case raised at the European Court of Human Rights."
"But I also hold the very strong view that republicans need to lead by example." Quote - Gerry Adams
Gerry Adams the master of vacuous soundbites has himself generated more than a few recently
"Gerry Adams is a Liar " more than 20 publications have said thia.
"As a Catholic, albeit one who has much difficulty with many of the
religion's tenets, I am shocked and ashamed by this particular cover-up."
"While I sympathise to a certain extent with sincere Catholics who
refuse to acknowledge the perverted crimes of so many you should be aware that your wilful ignorance of these criminal acts puts yet more children at risk even now. There comes a point where deliberate refusal to see the facts makes an accomplice of even the most decent of people. My faith and the sanctity of a child's innocence come first for me."
"They were assisted by the " GARDA "police force of Ireland:' to rape, terrorise, and destroy innocent children's lives: What they have done in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ who died on the cross to save us all, is beyond words. Sorry if i hurt your feelings, but the truth is a hard pill to swallow."
"The arrogance is astounding. would Jesus think this was representative of his church or would he condemn them. By their fruits you shall know them Jesus says anyone who causes a child to sin it would be better if he had never been born."
Their management style is dogmatic, autocratic and keep mouth shut and do as you are told; 'we are not here to answer your questions, so don't accuse us of anything, we are whiter than white. This style of management went out with Noah's Ark, in their eyes they are accountable to no-one.
"As a Roman Catholic and as an American..I'm deeply ashamed at the bowing and grovelling being shown to this horrible man. He gave a speech the other day "apologizing" for the abuse..as if he hadn't had such a part in protecting the abuser. A large spittle hung in the right corner of his lying, duplicitous mouth. He is the devil incarnate in patent leather gucci."
" Catholics and Republicans who close their eyes to this awful tragedy are doing their beliefs no good. Reform it and fix it. Expose the demons before nothing is left. Sadly"
Gerry Adams facilitated this cover-up and endangered children for decades by not fulfilling his responsibilities, to ensure the protection of children in West Belfast and Muirhevnamor, places that republican law was applied equally to all and allowing his brother to be beyond the reach of parents who entrusted Adams with leadership responsibilities, that included the protection of their children.
Failure to report suspected abuse is against the law and harms children. Every state has laws that require responsible citizens to report suspected child abuse to the appropriate law enforcement agency or child protective service. In Adams case the IRA. When circumstances suggest a reasonable suspicion that a child could be a victim of abuse, a report is required. It is not the job of the "mandatory reporter" to investigate the facts in these cases. The law simply directs them to file a report with a law enforcement agency or child protective service whenever facts might suggest a reasonable suspicion of abuse. Mandatory reporters are not permitted to pick and choose which cases they will report based on their personal opinion. Those who may feel that there is nothing wrong with adult-child sex cannot simply pretend child rape is merely consensual sex. By law, an underage girl cannot consent to sex. Nor does the law allow a mandatory reporter to decide whether or not a report should be filed based on the statements of the child, because cover stories are often concocted to cover up cases of abuse. Failure to comply with child abuse reporting laws is a criminal offense and it is also a felony to assist in perpetrating the ongoing abuse of a child. If an elected official facilitates child abuse by their failure to report, the victim and/or her parents may be able to recover damages against them."
"Given his choice to turn a blind eye to known sexual abuse, the operator could be targeted not only for obstructing justice by covering up the crimes, but perhaps even as an ongoing accomplice to them."
Rev Thomas Doyle, a US Air Force chaplain in Germany and a specialist in Church law, has said, ‘There are too many authenticated reports of victims having been seriously intimidated into silence to assert that such intimidation is the exception and not the norm.’
"And so Adams has visited the sins of the father upon the whole of Ireland and more particularly republicanism?"
BBC BRUTISH BULLSCUTTER COPERATION
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
She was of noble birth, and — best —
A Jewess; her bad lips enticed
My lips to taste; I held her breast
Fresh from the crucifying Christ;
It seemed her thighs were hot with blood
Sucked from the bastard Son of God.
I saw his broken body hang
Sweating and bleeding o n the cross;
I heard his curses champ and clang;
I spat o n his reeking corpse;
I licked the spear; my feet were shod
With iron as I kicked my God…
So runs my dream; but what am I?
A lover by a Jewess’ bed,
A lover waiting wistfully
For his desires to be fed;
His o nly lust—a lover’s bliss,
And with no language but a kiss…
Her breasts are Golgotha to me!
Her lips, his dripping hands and feet!
Her secret-cinctured armoury
Of pleasures seems—how utter sweet!—
The gaping spear-wound in his side
Wherein I smote the Crucified…
Ah! thy red lips, and its green glint!
Its wavy splendour, and the dance
Thy belly weaves, a triple hint
Of Hell, and Algiers, and France!
Ah! Judas-love! this flask we’ll drain,
Kiss hard—and so to bed again!
It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.
Johnny Rotten (Lydon)
BBC BRUTISH BULLSCUTTER COPERATION
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
"oh rafah, aching rafah" - A poem from the journal of Rachel Corrie
Oh rafah. aching rafah. aching of refugees aching of tumbled houses bicycles severed from tank-warped tires and aching of bullet riddled homes all homes worm-eaten by bullets and then impregnated through bullet holes by birds.
oh rafah. aching fingers of rafah. children born without fingers and fathers
unable to travel the 20 or 30 miles to Gaza to repair their children's
fingers. clawed knuckles from old gunshots bandaged fingers and slimy small
poking fingers between puffy lips of children - slobbery and wondering and
blinking like all children - but fingers patting and tapping at strange big
hands amidst the music of shelling and the constant anonymous night vision
telescope of murder above and beyond and around and even inside. fingers
cracked crusts of spackle concrete fingers of the endless rebuilding of
things crashed: home.
home. oh rafah. aching homes of rafah. home of the rafah camp rafah grown
permanent with the names of the countries that paid for the neighborhoods
still attached. home of rafah unleavable. homes stickered with glow in the
dark stars in teenager's rooms. homes constructed over a lifetime and
unraveled in the night. ache of rubble and weedy rebar craning out of
concrete boulders. ache of ghost homes looming without volume without mass straddling this wall and this wasteland the wall demands. ache of dinners knees and haunches kneeling dinners spread over floors in the music of gunfire the irregular heartbeat of the border and living-dead homes waiting immobile for bulldozers and tanks and the shattering of tea glasses the bending of rebar the tumbling of concrete and the ejection of people: baby. grandmother. small girl curling her entire small hand around one big finger. teenage boy with teenage boy legs and teenage boy laugh ejected into rubble and homelessness and scattered if not killed.
oh rafah. aching rafah. children of rafah exploded. children of rafah
deafened: deafened to tank wheels. deafened to explosions gunshot music
shocking claps drones.
BRUTISH CENSORSHIP
There is a particular entry in Rachel Corrie's diary, probably written some time in 1999, four years before she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes. She is aged 19 or 20. "Had a dream about falling, falling to my death off something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah," she writes, "but I kept holding on, and when each foothold or handle of rock broke I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn't have time to think about anything - just react as if I was playing an adrenaline-filled video game. And I heard, 'I can't die, I can't die,' again and again in my head."
Last year, I was asked by the Royal Court theatre to edit the writings of Rachel Corrie into a drama with Alan Rickman, who was also directing. I had read the powerful emails she sent home from Gaza, serialised in G2 in the days after her death, and I'd read eye-witness accounts on the internet. But I didn't know that Rachel's early writing - before she even thought of travelling to the Middle East, from her days as a schoolgirl, through college, to life working at a mental-health centre in her home town of Olympia, Washington - would be similarly fascinating, and contain such elements of chilling prescience. Nor did I have a sense of the kind of person Rachel Corrie was: a messy, skinny, Dali-loving, listmaking chainsmoker, with a passion for the music of Pat Benatar. I discovered all that later.
Rachel was killed, aged 23, on March 16 2003, by a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, a vehicle especially built to demolish houses. Three decades before, her father had driven bulldozers in Vietnam for the US army. Her death was the first of a string of killings of westerners in Gaza in spring 2003, as the war was taking place in Iraq: Briton Tom Hurndall, 22, shot on April 11; another Briton, cameraman James Miller, 34, shot on May 16. She and Hurndall were activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organisation set up "to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel's military occupation". Rachel was killed only two days before the start of the assault on Baghdad while the world was mostly looking elsewhere.
She became a martyr to the Palestinians, a victim of their intifada who had stood up to the mighty Israeli army; Edward Said praised her actions as "heroic and dignified at the same time". But many Israelis considered her at best naive, interfering in a situation she didn't understand. And to some Americans she was a traitor; websites blared that "she should burn in hell for an eternity"; "Good riddance to bad rubbish"; "I'm thankful she died."
Those close to Rachel would rather she had not become famous for being the blonde American girl who got killed. As her ex-boyfriend Colin Reese said in the documentary Death of an Idealist: "The person that I knew has been summed up as a bullet point... Everything that Rachel was, every brilliant idea she had, every art project she did, it doesn't matter, because she has become her death." Reese committed suicide last year.
In developing this piece of theatre, we wanted to uncover the young woman behind the political symbol, beyond her death. As Alan Rickman, whose idea it was to turn Rachel's work into drama, says: "We were never going to paint Rachel as a golden saint or sentimentalise her, but we also needed to face the fact that she'd been demonised. We wanted to present a balanced portrait." We hoped to find out what made Rachel Corrie different from the stereotype of today's consumerist, depoliticised youth. Having received permission from Rachel's parents to shape her words into drama, we were sent an enormous package - 184 pages of her writing, most of which had not been seen before.
The material revealed a woman who was both ordinary and extraordinary: writing poems about her cat, her friends, her grand mother, the wind; but also, from a strikingly young age, engaging passionately with the world, trying to find her place in it. The earliest material we have is political; aged 10, Rachel wrote a poem about how "children everywhere are suffering" and how she wished to "stop hunger by the year 2000". Her juvenilia shows, as Rickman says, that she "already knew what language was. She was witty, a storyteller, she had flights of fancy". It also shows a rather sweet seriousness, and an insight into the wider world and her place in it. Aged 12, she writes, "I guess I've grown up a little. It's all relative anyway; nine years is as long as 40 years depending on how long you've lived".
In her teens, Rachel started to write about the "fire in my belly" that was to become a recurring theme. She visited Russia, a trip that opened her eyes to the rest of the world - she found it "flawed, dirty, broken and gorgeous". And she engaged in a striking way with her parents, with writing that beautifully expresses ordinary anxieties about safety and freedom, which become particularly poignant in light of Rachel's violent death. Aged 19 she wrote to her mother, "I know I scare you... But I want to write and I want to see. And what would I write about if I only stayed within the doll's house, the flower-world I grew up in?... I love you but I'm growing out of what you gave me... Let me fight my monsters. I love you. You made me. You made me."
She stewed, in typical late-teens fashion, on her future, and wrote about men and sex, from falling "in love with someone who is perpetually leaving you... and tells all stories as if they are blues songs" to bumping into an ex-boyfriend with his "hoochie-ass" new lover. Her wit was of the sardonic kind, and is one of the main things her friends remember about her.
Rachel's political evolution gathered pace in her early 20s. She went to Evergreen state college, a famously liberal university in Olympia, itself a famously liberal town. She began railing against how "the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall". After September 11, she became involved in community activism, organising a peace march, but questioned the wider relevance of what she was doing: "People [are] offering themselves as human shields in Palestine and I [am] spending all of my time making dove costumes and giant puppets." When she finally decided that she wanted to go to the Middle East, she explained her reason quite specifically: "I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to fund the US and other militaries."
When Rachel arrived in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, as Rickman says, "the rhythm of the writing changes dramatically. She has less time to consider but you can feel the growing fear." The Gaza dispatches are hard-hitting and intense, representing a profound experience. On arrival in Jerusalem she was shocked to see the Star of David spray-painted on to doors in the Arab section of the old city: "I have never seen the symbol used in quite that way... I am used to seeing the cross used in a colonialist way". In Gaza, she carried the body of a dead man on a stretcher while the Israeli army shot in front of her, but mostly her activism involved protection: staying overnight in the homes of families on the front line to stop their demolition; standing in front of water workers at a well in Rafah as they they came under fire; "close enough to spray debris in their faces". (Before her death, Rachel believed, as did many activists, that her "international white person privilege" would keep her relatively safe.) Witnessing the occupation in action inspired in Rachel her strongest writing; in her last days her rage and bafflement at what she saw led to work of astonishing and cumulative power.
But the quantity of the material left us with a series of questions. How much of Rachel's life before she went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote other people? The trend in political theatre, from David Hare's The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo's Guantánamo, is journalistic: the use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record material rather than invention. But for us there could be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that Rachel's parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the kind of worries any parent might have if their child was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never came home, they have a devastating poignancy. Two weeks before her daughter's death, Cindy emailed Rachel: "There is a lot in my heart but I am having trouble with the words. Be safe, be well. Do you think about coming home? Because of the war and all? I know probably not, but I hope you feel it would be OK if you did."
And what about the voices of Rachel's friends? I interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom have been deported from Israel since her death. We watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services: one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army, another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the subject, most notably Sandra Jordan's powerful The Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in the end the power of Rachel's writing meant that, apart from a few short passages quoting her parents and an eye witness report of her death, her words were strong enough to stand alone.
The challenge, then, was trying to construct a piece of theatre from fragments of journals, letters and emails, none of which was written with performance in mind. It helped, as Rickman says, that Rachel's writing "has a kind of theatricality. The images jump off the page." As the process went on, the difference between my usual job, journalism, and theatre, became obvious: stagecraft is what makes theatre what it is, and there was no point creating scenes that read well on the page if the actor playing Rachel, Megan Dodds, could not perform them.
We've tried to do justice to the whole of Rachel: neither saint nor traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented, devastatingly prescient and human and whole. Or, in her own words, "scattered and deviant and too loud". We chose Rachel's words rather than those of the thousands of Palestinian or Israeli victims because of the quality and accessibility of the writing: as Rickman says, "The activist part of her life is absolutely matched by the imaginative part of her life. I've no doubt at all that had she lived there would have been novels and plays pouring out of her." The tragedy is that we'll hear no more from Rachel Corrie.
By
Katharine Viner is deputy editor of the Guardian. She joined the paper in 1997 and has worked as a feature writer, deputy women's editor, deputy features editor and editor of Weekend magazine
Footage from Rachel's interview conducted by Middle East Broadcasting Company on March 14th, 2003, two days before she was murdered by Israeli Forces.
BBC BRUTISH BULLSCUTTER COPERATION
Don't even give them a chance to launch their Bullscutter !
Oh, no. Brutish Bullscutter Coperation. Don't come fucking near me today. Dear Jaysus, you Kerry fucking recruits and gobshites all over the Irish media are their by-product. There are so many things I could say to express my deep mistrust and yes, anger of these new media Irish opinion makers. Their world service can be a titillating export but their rampant censorship of the restless native's replies stinks to high heaven, of arrogance, cultural imperialism and age old repression.
I don't vote right wing as far as I know, so maybe that also explains my antagonism to them. I don't believe the Brutish Bullscutter Coperation, which henceforth will be simply called the BBC, offer anything approximating legitimate alternatives for this country, indeed any country but thats their business. I disagree with their monarchy, class system of commoners, lords, inherited privilige and intolerance of diversity or alternatives.
Lest you think nationalism is blinding me, do not confuse my rants against Brutish Bullscutter with the many Scottish, English and Welsh friends I have known down through the years, most of whom are the salt of the Earth in my opinion and great people.
It goes against every fibre of my being and tradition to be rude to people but you have got to stand up for your identity these days or become a smiling zombie product of their pundits and seductive manipulating bullscutter.
Brutes are people too but we must take this tour d'arse with all of its insanity, as a relief from the bland sanitized, couldn't give a fuck mercenary BULLSCUTTER ! of our age.
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