RADIO REBEL GAEL PRESENTS :

Righteous Reels & Radical Riffs !

http://radiorebelgael.podomatic.com/

FEAT. Special Guest, John Jo of The Amadans!

http://archive.org/details/RRGAELRighteousReelsandRadicalRiffs/

And all your Favorites !

Including ; Andy Irvine, Christy Moore, Luke Kelly, Ray Collins, Pol Mac Adaim, Tommy Makem, The Logues,  The Pogues, The Navigators, The Fighting Jamesons, The Broken Shillelaghs, The Clancy Brothers, The Currency, The Rumjacks, The Irish Brigade, Spirit of Freedom, Kilmaine Saints, Claymore, Justice, Wolfhound, Phoenix 1981, Bluestack, Dust Rhinos, Dropkick Murphys,

http://www.spreaker.com/user/radiorebelgael/righteous_reels_radical_riffs

Radio Rebel Gael Says : Workers of the World Unite !

RADIO REBEL GAEL PRESENTS : MAY DAY 2013

http://radiorebelgael.podomatic.com/

FEAT. Special Guests, Colm O’Brien (formerly w/ The Prodigals),

And Ernesto Ayala of Partido Nacional La Raza Unida !!!

http://radiorebelgael.podomatic.com/entry/2013-05-01T17_51_14-07_00

And all your Favorites !

Including ; Belfast Andy, Carlos Puebla, Ciaran Murphy, Liam Weldon, Paddy Reilly, Utah Phillips, Pol Mac Adaim, Hazel Dickens, Tom Morello, Pete Seger, Sunny Ozuna, Woody Guthrie, Dead Kennedys, The Pogues, The Tossers, The Fureys, The Prodigals, The Mickey Finns, The Wages of Sin, Libertadores, Mischief Brew, The Wolfe Tones, Sydney City Trash, El Chicano …. And all your Grandpa’s favorite melodies !

http://www.spreaker.com/user/4991218/radio_rebel_gael_presents_may_day_2013

If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill ,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still.

                                                                             - Joe Hill

Ken Loach & Paul Laverty : Telling A Tale of Glasgow Grit & Working Class Fortitude

Went down to the canal yesterday to see yet another brilliant Scottish film, this new one, "Angels Share" is directed by Ken Loach, the screenplay written by Paul Laverty, whom you probably remember wrote the screenplays of "Route Irish", "Bread and Roses", "Tambien la lluvia (Even The Rain", and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"....

 

 According to wikipedia; "'Angels Share' is a term for the portion (share) of a wine or distilled spirit's volume that is lost to evaporation during aging in oak barrels. In low humidity conditions, the loss to evaporation may be primarily water."

This Whiskey-inspired caper is about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of some working class kids from "the wrong side of the tracks" in Glasgow, neighborhoods often looked down upon by the more affluent residents of Glasgow ---- where alcohol-fuelled violence is as common as the bleak poverty witnessed by the locals. This time around, writer, Paul Laverty suprises us by telling a tale that is apolitical, but one that is also very much class-conscious, showing how Proles can prevail when they stick together.

Fucking brilliant film, to say the least :()

Remember The Union Strikers of The Pittsburgh Riot, 1877

Eyewitness: 1877 / There will be blood, arson and riot

July 23, 1877, Federal Troops were called to put down over 15,000 Armed Union Insurgents :

"The strikers now multiplied, joined by young boys and men from the mills and factories (Pittsburgh had 33 iron mills, 73 glass factories, 29 oil refineries, 158 coal mines). The freight trains stopped moving out of the city. The Trainman's Union had not organized this, but it moved to take hold, called a meeting, invited 'all workingmen to make common cause with their brethren on the railroad."

 ‎"Railroad and local officials decided that the Pittsburgh militia would not kill their fellow townsmen, and urged that Philadelphia troops be called in. By now two thousand cars were idle in Pittsburgh. The Philadelphia troops came and began to clear the track. Rocks flew. Gunfire was exchanged between crowd and troops. At least ten people were killed, all workingmen......Now the whole city rose in anger. A crowd surrounded the troops, who moved into a roundhouse. Railroad cars were set afire, buildings began to burn, and finally the roundhouse itself, the troops marching out if it to safety. There was more gunfire, the Union Depot was set afire, thousands looted the freight cars. A huge grain elevator and a small section of the city went up in flames. In a few days, twenty-four people had been killed (including four soldiers). Seventy-nine buildings had been burned to the ground. Something like a general strike was developing in Pittsburgh: mill workers, car workers, miners, laborers, and the employees at the Carnegie steel plant."

"The entire National Guard of Pennsylvania, nine thousand men, was called out. But many of the companies couldn't move as strikers in other towns held up traffic. In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, one National Guard company mutinied and marched through an excited town. In Altoona, troops surrounded by rioters, immobilized by sabotaged engines, surrendered, stacked arms, fraternized with the crowd, and then were allowed to go home, to the accompaniment of singing by a quartet in all-Negro militia company......Philadelphia militia, on their way home from Altoona, shook hands with the crowd, gave up their guns, marched like captives through the streets, were fed at a hotel and sent home. The crowd agreed to the mayor's request to deposit the surrendered guns at the city hall. Factories and shops were idle. After some looting, citizens' patrols kept order in the streets through the night."

"1877 : Year Of Violence" by Robert Bruce

"The Other Civil War, A PEOPLES HISTORY....." BY Howard Zinn

.......the first Women's Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New York....An announcement was put in the Seneca County Courier calling for a meeting to discuss the rights of women on the 19th and 20th of July, 1840. Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence :

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied...

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness....

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world....."

Then came the list of grievances : no right to vote, no right to her wages or to property, no rights in divorce cases, no equal opportunity in employment, no entrance to colleges, ending with ; "He had endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life..."


And then a series of resolutions, including : "That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority."

A series of women's conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was "Sojourner Truth". She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex :


"That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches...Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a'ant I a woman?

Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could help me! And a'nt I a woman?

I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a'nt I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children and seen 'em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me ! And aint I a woman?"

pps. 123-124, "The Intimately Oppressed", A PEOPLES HISTORY, Howard Zinn


[Picture Below is of women's rights activist and Abolitionist, Lucretia Coffin Mott, one of the main organizers of that first womens rights gathering in Seneca Falls, NY, on the weekend of July 19th and 20th, 1840]

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights......passed in 1791 by Congress, it provided that "Congress shall make no law....abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...." Yet, seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech.

This was the Sedition Act of 1798, passed under John Adams's administration, at a time when Irishmen and Frenchmen in the United States were looked on as dangerous revolutionaries because of the recent French Revolution and the Irish Rebellions. The Sedition Act made it a crime to say or write anything "false, scandalous and malicious" against the government, Congress, or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into disrepute, or excite popular hatreds against them.

This act seemed to directly violate the First Amendment. Yet, it was enforced. Ten Americans were put in prison for utterances against the government, and every member of the Supreme Court in 1798-1800, sitting as an appellate judge, held it constitutional.

-- Howard Zinn, "A Kind of Revolution", A PEOPLES HISTORY... 

HOWARD ZINN : Reminded Us To Serve the People, Not The Executioners !

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks) – the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress – is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance,  as if they --- the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court --- represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States”, a subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

“History is the memory of states”, wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, “A World Restored”, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation ---- a world not restored but disintegrated.

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different :  that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Phillipines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem……And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.

---“A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present”, pages 9-10, Howard Zinn