View allAll Photos Tagged Liberalism.
Itagaki Taisuke transformed from a war hero samurai into a champion for individual rights. Born into a middle-ranking samurai family and volatile political scene, Itagaki Taisuke would become one of the most influential figures in Japanese history. His early exposure to western ideas of liberalism led him to become a fierce advocate of constitutional government. He became the leader of the freedom and People's Right Movement, which later developed into Japan's first-ever political party, the Liberal Party
in these days Europe remembers the August days in former Czechoslovakia, when the Soviets and their allies (including DDR, East Germany) occupied this country to destroy all efforts of a liberal and human socialism, the so called Prague Spring with Alexander Dubcek.
time to remember Dubcek, the great and liberal Vaclav Havel, and also Jan Palach, the 20y old student from Melnik, who burned himself on Wenzels place in January 1969 to protest against the soviet occupation.
twenty years later the iron curtain began to fall down, and in 1990 I had the chance for my first visit in Prague and Bohemia. the begin of my deep love for this city and this country, with which my family is connected in several ways
the photos of this first visit are blurred, shots from diapositives,. but I like them as paintings of this exciting time, full of hope for democracy and liberalism in Europe. time to remember all this. and one can imagine the Prague during the socialist time, lots of renovated buildings, but also multiple decay of historic buildings.
during all my visits there I could watch the transformation to a renovated, colourful, vibrant, capitalistic and nowadays often overcrowded city. but I am still in love with Prague...
'The New World Order' - a book by A. Ralph Epperson. Exposes the globalist plot for world domination.
Globalist agenda - World government.
The return to Babel.
thewildvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/the-wild-voic...
The European Union - the return to Babel
The irrefutable evidence in plain sight.
Also see:
AND:
EUbabel. The shocking occult symbolism of the European Union.
peuplesobservateursblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/togo-all...
Empty seat number 666
www.jesus-is-savior.com/End of the World/seat_666.htm
‘Imagine there’s no Heaven, it’s easy if you try
No Hell below us, above us only sky”
John Lennon.
‘Imagine’ a nightmare, world dictatorship.
European Union project, undemocratic, expansionist empire. Prototype and fledgling, World Government.
Brexit - The anti-globalist struggle against the NWO globalists.
Aaron Banks:
Asked if he would back the Leave side in a rerun of the 2016 referendum, Mr Banks said: “The corruption I have seen in British politics, the sewer that exists and the disgraceful behaviour of the Government over what they are doing with Brexit and how they are selling out, means that if I had my time again I think we would have been better to probably remain and not unleash these demons.”
Maybe Mr Banks didn't realise that he hit the nail squarely on the head when he described the incredibly fierce opposition to Brexit as the unleashing of "demons". The globalist agenda is truly demonic. It is no surprise that the globalists, and their puppets in the media and liberal establishment, are so desperate to stop Brexit interfering with their diabolical plans for world domination.
See: ‘Brexit, The Movie’ - available on YouTube.
Why satanism is now on the center stage in the culture war.
www.crisismagazine.com/2019/why-satanism-is-now-on-the-ce...
The EU, mystery Babylon. www.biblelight.net/tower-painting-parliament.jpg
The EU parliament in Strasbourg is modelled on the Tower of Babel.
thewildvoice.org/mystery-babylon-european-union/#comment-...
The symbolism of the EU in plain sight, is the desire of its advocates to return to the spirit of Babel.
The Council of Europe's poster produced in 1992 to promote the European Union, and the building of the EU Parliament in Strasbourg (completed in 1999) is filled with occult symbolism:
A pictorial depiction of the Tower of Babel, surrounded by 11 inverted stars (pentagrams), the 12th pentagram is behind the top (head) of the tower.
This is an obvious, Satanic parody of the crown of 12 stars surrounding the head of the Woman (Church/Mary) described in the book of Revelation (in the Bible).
The inverted pentagram is an especially evil occult symbol designed to represent the head of Baphomet (Satan or the Goat of Mendes), Look up the occult meaning of an inverted pentagram (inverted five pointed star) on Wikipedia. It is a Satanic sign that represents such evil that even many, self-declared witches won’t use it.
illuminati pyramids are also evident in the background of the poster (since when have Egyptian pyramids been part of Europe?
Square, blockheaded (indoctrinated) people (useful idiots) are featured, naively building a tower designed for their own enslavement and suppression, one is holding a round-headed baby, signifying that it is too young to have been indoctrinated.
The dangerous, climate change scam:
A high level of Co2 is essential for our survival. The exact opposite of what we a led to believe by the popular, eco- fanatic narrative which is designed to convince people of the necessity for globalist control.
See the truth here:
Who trusts the MSM? Their lies are not just fake news, they deliberately set out to slander those who don’t agree with the liberal left, globalist elite. Their lies are positively evil. Everyone should watch this video and they will never trust the media again: banned.video/watch?id=5f00ca7c672706002f4026a9
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The poison in our midst - progressive politics.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/47971464278
The war against anti-globalist Putin, and the globalist demonising of Russia.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43042520105
The reason the elite hate Trump so much is because he is opposed to the one world agenda of the globalists.
endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-reason-the-elite-h...
Ending the crime of abortion is crucial in curbing the power, of Satan.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43172544140
Ending the crime of abortion is crucial in curbing the power, of Satan.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43172544140
IF and THEN, the atheist dilemma
GUIDE AND SUPERVISION... Holistic Way, Super Vision, Eye Nutrition...pineal gland create inner light and super vision of your dreams...Lighting is a standout amongst the most imperative components in home stylistic layout. A decent lighting makes a feeling of warmth and inviting interest in the house. It likewise empowers you to perform every day errands well, makes you agreeable and above all outwardly upgrades the room.
Abstract: Sustainability has the potential to provide a holistic framework that can bridge the gap that is often found between socio-economic justice and environmental discourses. However, sustainability and sustainability education have typically accepted the prevailing socio-economic and cultural paradigm. It is my aim in this paper to demonstrate that a truly holistic and visionary sustainability (education) framework ought to demand radical and critical theories and solutions- based approaches to politicize and interrogate the premises, assumptions, and biases linked to the dominant notion of sustainability. If we are to envision and construe actual sustainable futures, we must first understand what brought us here, where the roots of the problems lie, and how the sustainability discourse and framework tackle—or fail to tackle—them. To do this is to politicize sustainability, to build a critical perspective of and about sustainability. It is an act of conscientização (or conscientization), to borrow Paulo Freire’s seminal term, of cultivating critical consciousness and conscience. In lieu of the standard articulation of politics as centralized state administration, ‘critical sustainability studies’ is based on a framing that gives prominence to a more organic, decentralized engagement of conscientious subjects in the creation of just, regenerative eco-social relations. It illuminates the ideological and material links between society, culture, and ecology by devoting particular attention to how knowledge and discourse around and across those realms are generated and articulated. I believe that future scholarship and activism in sustainability and sustainability-related fields would benefit immensely from dialoguing with this framework.
The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.
– Murray Bookchin, The Meaning of Confederalism, 1990
Introduction: Why Sustainability (and Sustainability Education)?
Despite conflicting opinions over what the terms ‘sustainability’ and its variant ‘sustainable development’ actually mean, the framework of sustainability has gained a lot of traction in the last two decades. Its Western origins can be traced back to the writings of Western philosophers and seminal environmentalists like John Locke and Aldo Leopold (Spoon, 2013). Redclift (2005) asserts that sustainability as an idea was first used during the ‘limits to growth’ debates in the 1970s and the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. Perhaps the most commonly quoted definition of sustainable development is that of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) who states that “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987, p. 43).
Sustainability has the potential to provide a holistic framework that can bridge the gap that is often found between socio-economic justice and environmental discourses. After all, recent scholarship indicates that the issue of environmental quality is inevitably linked to that of human equity (Morello-Frosch, 1997; Torras & Boyce, 1998; see Agyeman, Bullard, & Evans, 2002), and thus they need to be thought about together. I hold that an actual sustainable society is one where wider matters of social and economic needs are intrinsically connected to the dynamic limits set by supporting ecosystems and environments.
Sustainability education has emerged as an effort to acknowledge and reinforce these interrelationships and to reorient and transform education along the lines of social and ecological well-being (Sterling, 2001). By being rooted in whole systems thinking, i.e. “the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, and economy) and across different scales (local to global)” (Wiek, Withycombe, & Redman, 2011, p. 207), sustainability education strives to illuminate the complexities associated with the broad, problem-oriented, solution-driven nature of sustainability (Warren, Archambault, & Foley, 2014). If we are to devise cultural systems that are truly regenerative, this “novel” brand of education urges the teaching of the fundamental facts of life by stewarding learning communities that comprehend the adaptive qualities of ecological patterns and principles (Stone, 2012). Sustainability education highlights the centrality of ‘place’ as a unit of inquiry to devise reciprocal—and thus sustainable—relationships where one nourishes and is nourished by their surrounding social and ecological milieus (Williams & Brown, 2012).
Additionally, sustainability and, as a consequence, sustainability education are future- oriented and therefore demand ‘futures thinking’: the ability to assess and formulate nuanced pictures of the future vis-à-vis sustainability predicaments and sustainability problem-solving schemes (Wiek, et al., 2011). In a nutshell, futures thinking suggests that we need to imagine the potential ramifications of past and current human activities by critically analyzing them today if we are to conceive of new, more sustainable futures (Warren et al., 2014). Future studies can therefore help people to pursue their “ontological vocation” as history makers (Freire, 1993, p. 66) and to (re)claim their agency as a means of creating the world in which they wish to live (Inayatullah, 2007).
However, sustainability and sustainability education have typically accepted the prevailing socio-economic and cultural paradigm despite their apparent holistic intent and(theoretical) efforts to reconcile the three pillars of sustainability—equity, environment, and economy. Whether intentionally or not, they have promoted curative solutions instead of reflecting new, critical mindsets that can actually generate meaningful socio-cultural innovation by naming and discursively dismantling the systems and processes that are the root causes of the complex problems we face. And, as Albert Einstein once put it, “no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”
It is my aim in this paper to demonstrate that a truly holistic and visionary sustainability (education) framework ought to demand radical (of, relating to, or proceeding from a root) and critical (of, relating to, or being a turning point) theories and solutions-based approaches to politicize and interrogate the premises, assumptions, and biases linked to the dominant notion of sustainability.
Troubling (Monolithic) Sustainability
In order to be able to unveil and critically analyze the propositions and suppositions of what I call ‘the monolithic sustainability discourse,’ it is fundamental to start with the etymology of the word ‘sustainability’ itself. The operationalization of the term can be problematic for it implies prior judgments about what is deemed important or necessary to sustain. While some of these judgements might resonate with an array of environmentalists who perceive that the health of the planet and the well-being of our descendants are being—or are already—compromised by certain human activities, various other perilous premises and assumptions are generally left unacknowledged as a result of the depoliticized character of the dominant discourse of sustainability. Lele and Norgaard (1996) have put forward three questions that can help us to uncover and think more critically about these presuppositions in and across various contexts and scales: (a) what is to be sustained, at what scale, and in what form?; (b) over what time period, with what level of certainty?; (c) through what social process(es), and with what trade-offs against other social goals? (p. 355).
By building on these critical questions and clarifications, we can better understand the nuances of how the destructive and thus unsustainable ethos of dehumanization and socio- ecological exploitation may inform and permeate normative notions and articulations of sustainability. Yet, this is only plausible if sustainability is politicized. To politicize is to engage the existing state of socio-political affairs, to problematize that which is taken for granted, to make explicit the power relations that are an innate part of everyday life and experience (Bailey & Gayle, 2003). In an attempt to comprehend why sustainability is typically depoliticized we ought to examine briefly its discursive history.
The term ‘sustainable development’ became a part of the policy discourse and almost every day language following the release of the Brundtland Commission’s report on the global environment and development in 1987 (Redclift, 2005). While their definition included a very clear social directive, its human and political dimensions have been largely overlooked amongst references to sustainability, which, due to its environmental origins (Lele & Norgaard, 1996) and neoliberal focus on rights rather than needs (Redclift, 2005), have typically focused on bio- physical, ecological issues (Vallance, Perkins, & Dixon, 2011). Social sustainability, which has been conceptualized in response to the failure of the sustainability approach to engender substantial change (Vallance et al., 2011), is the least developed of the three realms and is frequently framed in relation to ecological and/or economic sustainability (Magis & Shinn, 2013). I assert that the reason for this is twofold: first and foremost, the sustainability agenda was conceived by international committees and NGO networks, think tanks, and governmental structures (Agyeman et al., 2002), which makes it a top-down approach and, consequently, less likely to recognize and address themes such as structural poverty, equity, and justice (Colantonio, 2009); and second, because social sustainability is made subservient to economics and the environment, it fails to examine the socio-political circumstances and elements that are needed to sustain a community of people (Magis & Shinn, 2013).
Sustainability, since its inception as a Western construct, has been progressively viewed as a crucial driver in economic development and environmental management worldwide. Nevertheless, as delineated above, its almost universal focus on reconciling the growth model of economics and the environment has served to covertly depoliticize the dominant discourse and therefore render it uncontentious if not intrinsically benign. It is worth further exploring the dynamics of depoliticization for I believe they are at the radicle of the issues sustainability attempts to address in the first place.
Bailey and Gayle (2003) identify a series of acts that can be associated with the dynamics of depoliticization, three of which can be observed when examining the monolithic sustainability discourse: (a) eschewing political discourse; (b) removing from the discourse the recognition that social advantages are given to certain constituent groups; (c) not disclosing underlying viewpoints or values. These processes are enmeshed with intricate ideological instances that help to mask the systemic and/or structural nature of a social or cultural matter (Bailey & Gayle, 2003). Further, as Foucault (1984) has stated, “power is everywhere” (p. 93) and it is embodied and enacted in discourse and knowledge. Hence, possessing the analytical tools to name and unpack these discursive ideological formations and power dynamics ought to be a prerequisite to the development of more holistic and critically conscious understandings and applications of sustainability.
Politicizing Sustainability
If we are to envision and construe actual sustainable futures, we must first understand what brought us here, where the roots of the problems lie, and how the sustainability discourse and framework tackle—or fail to tackle—them. To do this is to politicize sustainability, to build a critical perspective of and about sustainability. It is an act of conscientização (or conscientization), to borrow Paulo Freire’s seminal term, of cultivating critical consciousness and conscience (Freire, 1993). It is a call for the necessity to highlight, problematize, and disrupt what I have termed ‘the ethos of unsustainability’ and its interrelated ideologies of dehumanization and exploitation. Ultimately, to embrace a stance that fails to scrutinize the sources of degradation and exploitation is to uphold the power relations that sustain oppressive structures (Freire, 1993; Perry, 2001). I assert that only by delving into the origins of the ‘ethos of unsustainability’ can we really devise sustainability paradigms that are capable of promoting significant socio-cultural transformation.
To comprehend the contours of the predicaments that loom on our horizon as well as their premises and logics, we must go back over 500 years in history to 1492, the year that marks the beginning of the current colonial era and the globalization of the European colonial imaginary (Tuck and Yang, 2012). It is important to note that my intention in doing so is not to provide a sweeping, all-encompassing description of this genealogy/historical process, but rather, to simply name, connect, and emphasize the ideological systems and patterns that have been conceptualized and reconceptualized so as to sustain the ethos of unsustainability and its exploitative power structures. After all, as Freire (1993) has indicated, “to name the world is to change it” (p. 88).
(World) Capitalism: A Technology of European Colonialism
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word ‘colonialism’ stems from the Roman word ‘colonia,’ which meant ‘settlement’ or ‘farm.’ The OED describes it as:
… a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.
In Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba (2001) points out that this definition fails to link the word ‘colonialism’ to its ideologies of conquest and domination as it eschews any testimonial about those peoples who were already living in the places where the colonies were formalized. She offers another, more nuanced definition that hints to the processes of conquest and control of other peoples’ land and resources (Loomba, 2001, p. 2):
The process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, slavement and rebellions.
Loomba (2001) illuminates that while European colonialisms from the late fifteenth century onwards included a miscellany of patterns of domination and exploitation, it was a combination of these patterns that generated the economic disparity required for the maturation and expansion of European capitalism and industrial civilization; thus, capitalism demands the maintenance of colonial expansion in order to flourish. In spite of colonialism not being a monopoly of capitalism because it could be—and has been—utilized by so-called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ states as well (Dirlik, 2002), capitalism is a technology of colonialism that has been developed and re-structured over time as a means of advancing European colonial projects (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Colonialism was the instrument through which capitalism was able to reach its status as a global, master frame (Loomba, 2001).
A distinction between the three historical modes of colonialism might help to further elucidate the interrelationships between capitalism and colonialism.
Theories of coloniality as well as postcolonial theories typically acknowledge two brands of colonialism: external colonialism, which involves the appropriation of elements of Indigenous worlds in order to build the wealth and the power of the colonizers—the first world—, and internal colonialism, the bio- and geo-political management of people and land within the borders of a particular nation-state (Tuck and Yang, 2012). A third form, settler colonialism, is more suitable to describe the operationalization of colonialisms in which the colonizers arrive and make a new home on the land (Tuck and Yang, 2012). The settler objective of gaining control over land and resources by removing the local, Indigenous communities is an ongoing structure that relies on private property schemes and coercive systems of labor (Glenn, 2015).
In these processes of colonialism, land is conceived primarily if not exclusively as commodity and property, and human relationships to the land are only legitimized in terms of economic ownership (Tuck and Yang, 2012). These combined colonialist ideologies of commodification and private property are at the core of the various political economies of capitalism that are found in today’s globalized world (O’Sullivan, 2005). By relying on the appropriation of land and commodities through the “elimination of the Native” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 387), European colonialisms wind up restructuring non-capitalist economies so as to fuel European capitalism (Loomba, 2001). The globalization of the world is thereby the pinnacle of a process that started with the formation of the United States of America as the epitome of a Euro- centered, settler colonialist world power (Quijano, 2000).
Inspired by the European colonial imaginary, which transforms differences and diversity into a hierarchy of values (Mignolo, 2000) as well as by economic liberalism, which erases the production and labor contexts from the economy (Straume, 2011), the capitalist imaginary constitutes a broad depoliticization that disconnects its ‘social imaginary significations’ from the political sphere (Straume, 2011). Given that capitalism is imbued with European diffusionist constructs (Blaut, 1989), namely ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and ‘modernity,’ the depoliticization of this now globalized imaginary is required not only to maintain the resilience of capitalism as a master frame (Straume, 2011), but also to camouflage its interconnectedness to European colonial systems.
Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) study and articulation of the conceptualization and operation of ideologies proves fruitful in terms of understanding how the capitalist imaginary has been used to facilitate processes of globalization that benefit European colonialisms. He argued that ideologies are invaluable when manufacturing consent as they are the means through which certain ideas and meanings are not only transmitted, but held to be true (Gramsci, 1971). Hence, hegemony, the power garnered through a combination of ideologies and coercion, is attained by playing with people’s common sense (Gramsci, 1971) and their lived system of meanings and values (Williams, 1976; see Loomba, 2001). Since subjectivity and ideology are key to the expansionist capitalist endeavor and its interrelated logics of commodification and domination (Gramsci, 1971), it becomes necessary to summon and dissect the colonial ideas and belief systems that have served and continue to serve as its conduits. This can in turn help us to interrogate the value systems and mental models that directly and/or indirectly inform the dominant notion of sustainability (education).
White Supremacist, Heteropatriarchal State Capitalism
As devised and practiced by Europeans and, later, by other Euro-centered powers such as the United States, colonial ideologies of race and racial structures smooth the way for capitalist production (Wolfe, 2006). The Eurocentric construct of race as “a system of discrimination, hierarchy and power” (Olson, 2004, xvii, p. 127-128) conveys colonial experience and infuses the most essential realms of world power and its hierarchies (Quijano, 2000). The state and its many institutions are particularly pivotal in sustaining these racialized ideologies that are obligatory for the development and continuance of capitalism (Loomba, 2001).
Slavery, as the foundation of notions of race and capitalist empire and one of the pillars of white supremacy, marks the concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ as white (Painter, 2010) and renders black people as innately enslaveable, as nothing more than private property (Smith, 2010a). Within the context of the United States, the forms of slavery can and, indeed, have changed—from chattel slavery, to sharecropping, and more recently, to the prison industrial complex, which is still grounded in the premise that black bodies are an indefinite property of the state (Smith, 2010a)—yet, slavery as a logic of white supremacy has persisted (Smith, 2010a). The other two pillars of white supremacy are genocide, which expresses the need for Indigenous Peoples to always be disappearing, and orientalism, which builds on Edward Said’s influential term to explain how certain peoples and/or nations are coded as inferior and, therefore, a constant threat to the security and longevity of imperial states (Smith, 2010a).
The pillars of white supremacy may vary according to historical and geographical contexts (Smith, 2010a). Nonetheless, the centering of whiteness is generally what defines a colonial project. The formation of whiteness, or white identity, as a racialized class orientation stems from political efforts by capitalist elites and lawmakers to divide and conquer large masses of workers (Battalora, 2013). White identity is perhaps one of the most successful colonial and capitalist inventions since it “operates as a kind of property … with effects on social confidence and performance that can be empirically documented” (Alcoff, 2015, p. 23). It is a very dynamic category that can be enlarged to extend its privileges to others when white supremacist social and economic relations are jeopardized (Painter, 2010). It sustains itself, at least partially, by evading scrutiny and shifting the discursive focus to ‘non-whites’ (Silva, 2007). Whiteness is to be made invisible by remaining the norm, the standard, that which ought not to be questioned.
Capitalism therefore depends on and magnifies these racial hierarchies centered on whiteness. And, since race is imbricated and constructed simultaneously with gender, sexuality, ability, and other colonial categories—a conceptualization that serves to obscure white supremacy in state discourses and interventions (Kandaswamy, 2012)—, it is crucial to investigate the other ideologies that also shape class formation processes.
Heteropatriarchy, the combination of patriarchal and heterosexual control based on rigid and dichotomous gender identities—man and woman—and sexual orientations—heterosexual and homosexual—where one identity or orientation dominates the other, is another building block of colonialism. Patriarchy is employed to naturalize hierarchical relations within families and at a larger, societal level (Smith, 2010b). Similarly, heteronormativity paints heterosexual nuclear-domestic arrangements as normative (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, 2013) and is thus the bedrock of the colonial nation-state (Smith, 2010b). These social and cultural systems that configure heteropatriarchy are then apprehended as normal and natural whereas other arrangements or proclivities are demonized and perceived as repulsive and abnormal (Arvin et al., 2013). Heteropatriarchy is directly linked to colonial racial relations as it portrays white manhood as supreme and entitled to control over private property and to political sovereignty (Glenn, 2015). This indicates that the process of producing and managing gender frequently functions as a racial project that normalizes whiteness (Kandaswamy, 2012).
The laws and policies that were designed to institutionalize the formation of whiteness and white supremacy demonstrate that race, class, and gender are intertwined systems that uphold, constitute, and reconstitute each other (Battalora, 2013). The state and its ideological institutions are therefore major sites of racial struggle (Kandaswamy, 2012); they are responsible for devising and constantly revising the rationale that guides a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal settler colonialism grounded in the need to manufacture collective consent. These discourses are rooted in a pervasive state process that combines coercive state arbitration with societal consent by articulating the ideologies that link racial structure and representation as an effort to reorganize and distribute resources according to specific racial lines (Ferguson, 2012).
Despite increasing globalizing neoliberal urges toward deregulation and privatization, capitalism is still enabled and supported by the state. Its ‘ideological apparatuses,’ the state institutions and ideologies that enable and support the classist structure of capitalist societies (Althusser, 1989), is still fundamental to the expansion of capitalist enterprises; the nation-state is capitalism’s atomic component. The neoliberal state has utilized innovations in methods of social discipline and control along with legal practices to facilitate the process of economic globalization (Gill, 1995). Yet, all these schemes that involve retention of power through dominance and manufactured consent are rooted in divide and conquer strategies that cause those in subservient positions in society to engage in conflicts with one another (Hagopian, 2015). The interlinked logics and ideologies of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy conceived by state capitalism serve to spur dissent between potential opponents and thereby further stratify socio-economic classes. This prevents them from building a unified basis that can present a tangible threat to the status quo (Hagopian, 2015). Colonial and neocolonial powers have repeatedly deployed this stratagem to not only increase their geographical reach, but also to normalize and standardize the economic growth model of capitalism.
Colonialism is hence not just an ancient, bygone incident. The ideologies and processes delineated above demonstrate that it has remained very much in effect within contemporary capitalist and neoliberal frameworks (Preston, 2013). It then becomes critical to investigate how the dominant sustainability discourse may or may not collude in these schemes so that we may conceive of holistic blueprints that beget positive socio-ecological transformation.
Sustainability and Colonialism: Contradiction or Conscious Ideological Maneuver?
By unearthing what I believe are the roots of the predicament that sustainability attempts to heal, namely the ethos of dehumanization and exploitation rooted in divide and conquer systems, it becomes easier to analyze how the colonial political economy of capitalism may conserve hegemonic ideologies that pervade social relations and knowledge generating processes.
Yet, these ideologies and knowledge schemes have been given minimal attention in sustainability (education) scholarship. Even though some academics have contributed to the generation of a more critical comprehension of the interrelationships between capitalism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic justice (see Cachelin, Rose, & Paisley, 2015; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2011; Pellow & Brulle, 2005), this major blindspot in linking sustainability to the colonial imaginary and its legacies prompts the following questions:(awhy are critiques of colonialism and capitalism so infrequent in the sustainability literature?: (a) why are critiques of colonialism and capitalism so infrequent in the sustainability literature?; and (b) how does that impact the discourse of sustainability?
I assert that, in spite of calls for paradigm shifts, the dominant disancourse of sustainability in the West embodies a transnational, globalized standard of economic growth. The promise that economic development can eradicate or at least alleviate poverty and hunger in a sustainable way reflects some of the same goals and values of the optimistic ‘ecological modernization’ concept and perspective, which suggest that the development and modernization of liberal capitalism result in improvements in ecological outcomes (Buttel, 2000). The neoliberal, capitalist overtones of sustainable development not only expose the contradiction inherent in the term, but they also serve to further commodify nature (Cock, 2011). This neoliberalization of nature, which has recently gained a lot of attention in the corporate world and academia under the lexicon of ‘ecosystem services,’ alienates people from their physical surroundings and therefore reinforces the society-nature divide. In short, the sustainability discourse has been appropriated by the capitalist master frame and has transformed most if not all social and ecological relations into financial ones. In lieu of addressing social and environmental justice issues, this form of “green” or “natural” capitalism is responsible for deepening both social and environmental inequalities (Cock, 2011).
Since sustainability (education) is (supposed to be) a praxis-oriented framework that symbiotically combines thought and action for transformative, liberatory ends, it ought to embrace this critique of colonial capitalism and the subsequent neoliberalization of the political economy if it is to oppose and resist hegemonic ideologies in its multiple and diverse manifestations. After all, whether intentionally or not, what matters in the end is that those discourses of sustainability that do not take a stance against colonialism and capitalism only serve to preserve them and the status quo. An understanding of these interdependent systems allows for the development of critical sustainability dialogues and actions that can actually promote the paradigmatic shifts required to redress the socio-cultural problems that are at the heart of the environmental crises. Thus, sustainability can and should be reframed to suggest a process of personal, social, and cultural conscientization that is environmentally sound, i.e. one that follows ecological principles and patterns, instead of upholding the dehumanizing, exploitative, and paradoxical ‘development as growth’ standard of global capitalism.
The following section combines the analyses and critiques presented in the preceding (sub)sections into a single, cohesive, and holistic framework, and further elucidates the distinctions between monolithic sustainability and critical sustainabilities.
The Framework of Critical Sustainability Studies
[T]he political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisioned as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition.
- Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 2005
‘Critical sustainability studies,’ while not exactly novel in the sense that it draws on principles, concepts, and positions that are foundational to other frameworks and fields—more specifically, critical Indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, social ecology, political ecology, and cultural studies—, presents itself as an alternative to the sustainability theories and conceptualizations that have failed to engage a truly intersectional analysis of dominant sustainability and environmental discourses, policies, and practices. Its primary objective is to rearticulate sustainability as it has the potential to provide a more holistic conception of conscientization that can bridge the gap between social and economic justice and environmental sustainability.
The framework indicates a crucial double political intervention: to put sustainability and critical theory in conversation; to embed sustainability and ecology into critical theory and vice- versa. As I discussed in the previous section, sustainability has, for the most part, become a hegemonic and, therefore, highly problematic discourse that refuses to transform the complex ideologies and systems that undergird the ethos of unsustainability and the current socio- ecological crises. On the other hand, critical theory, which seeks to extend the consciousness of the human self as a social being within the context of dominant power structures and their knowledge management operations (Kincheloe, 2005), could benefit from incorporating ecological principles and the sustainability notion of ‘place’ into its analytical toolbox. After all, I am as interested in localizing critical knowledge—without disconnecting it from global matters and realities—as I am in putting forth more critical and radical views of sustainability. Hence, this framework brings together what I believe are some of the most robust and cutting edge theories and methodologies to facilitate the deconstruction of the questionable ideologies that guide Western epistemologies like (hegemonic) sustainability.
Critical sustainability studies encourages sustainability scholars and/or educators to move from a defined methodology of problem-solving to the more critical moment of calling something into question (Freire, 1993). By rooting it in conscientization, I propose an orientation to sustainability and sustainable development that politicizes and reveals it as an agenda, discourse, and knowledge system that ought to be contested and rearticulated so that it can incorporate and critically engage with emancipatory understandings of power and power relations. Furthermore, by problematizing and closing the culture-nature divide, it can lay down the groundwork for the paradigmatic changes necessary to heal widespread colonialist alienation from the wider ecological community and to create visions of deep sustainabilities that can engender ecologically sound socio-cultural transformation.
I stress that the notion of sustainabilities is necessary if we have the intention of opposing and displacing the monolithic, top-down and now universalized sustainability agenda, which I refer to as ‘big S Sustainability.’ After all, much like science (Parry, 2006), sustainability is not the property of any one culture or language. There are different ways of seeing and knowing sustainability, so it is time to pluralize it in the literature and discourse. This simple act is an extraordinary intervention in itself because within the colonial imaginary “sustainability” means “Western sustainability.” By centering “novel” understandings of sustainability that are concerned with the specificities of geo-political, cultural, and historical contexts and power relations, sustainability scholars and educators can create theories and visions of sustainability that can lead to the development of more just, place-based cultures and social ecologies.
Critical sustainability studies as I envision it is a consciousness-raising exercise that is particularly useful in educational settings. It indicates methodology as much as content. This praxis-oriented framework can help teachers and students alike to develop consciousness of freedom and to acknowledge authoritarian socio-cultural tendencies that have toxic environmental ramifications. The next section provides an overview of its tenets, the educational philosophy that underpins it, as well as the four preliminary methodological principles and examples of related pedagogical interventions that directly inform the framework and its liberatory, decolonizing ambitions.
Epistemological Position, Preliminary Methodological Principles, and Pedagogical Interventions for Conscientization
The epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical implications of critical sustainability studies are rooted in an ethical and political vision, one that is found in the vast majority of social ecology and political ecology projects: that “the domination of nature by man [sic] stems from the very real domination of human by human” (Bookchin, 2005, p. 1). In other words, we cannot overcome the ecological crisis unless we rid ourselves of the colonial ideologies of domination and hierarchy that permeate all forms of systemic and systematic exploitation and dehumanization. While much easier said than done, critical sustainability studies seeks to conceptualize this vision by building on the following tenets:
That sustainability and sustainability education are not neutral, they either advance or regress justice and Critical sustainability studies strives to promote justice and ecological regeneration.
That an analysis of power is central to understanding and engendering positive socio-cultural Critical sustainability studies strives to be conscious of power relations and to identify power inequalities and their implications.
That it is crucial to foreground the sociocultural identities and experiences of those who have been (most) oppressed – people of color, people with disabilities, queer and transgender people, the working class and the economically poor, undocumented immigrants, Critical sustainability studies acknowledges that just, healthy cultures and societies can only be cultivated if we examine the circumstances that cause and maintain socio-economic marginalization.
That positive socio-cultural transformation comes from the bottom up. Critical sustainability studies emphasizes and advocates a collective and decentralized approach to sustainable change.
And, finally, that the human community is inherently a part of rather than apart from the wider ecological world. Critical sustainability studies affirms that this relational ethos serves as the epistemological foundation of novel, dynamic worlds where healing and justice are at the front and center of our cultural and ecological identities.
In addition to delineating critical sustainability studies as a praxis that is founded on the above tenets, the framework is guided by a critical constructivist epistemological position. Strongly influenced by Freirean pedagogies and the Frankfurt school of thought, critical constructivism endeavors to dissect the processes by which knowledge is socially constructed; in other words, what we know about the worlds we live in always demands a knower and that which is to be known, a contextual and dialectical process that informs what we conceive of as reality (Kincheloe, 2005). This epistemological position problematizes and extends constructivism by illuminating the need for both teachers and students to develop a critical awareness of self, their perspectives, and ways their consciousness have been shaped and/or reshaped by society (Watts, Jofili, & Bezerra, 1997). Critical constructivists attempt to comprehend the forces that construe consciousness and the ways of seeing and being of the subjects who inhabit it (Kincheloe, 1993, as cited in Watts et al., 1997). This political, counter- Cartesianism, and anti-objectivist philosophy (Kincheloe, 2005) is central to an emancipatory approach to sustainability and sustainability education, and is, therefore, at the root of the critical sustainability studies conception of holistic conscientization.
www.susted.com/wordpress/content/critical-sustainability-...
Wednesday, Day 12, September 28 and Wall Street remains barricaded to the public and tourists alike. Occupy Wall Street has effectively shut down the main strip of the financial district. Photos from Zuccotti Park, September 28 2011.
Good Magazine: The (Un)Official Occupy Wall Street Photographer's 15 Favorite Frames
The Occupy Wall Street Creative Commons Project
Day 1 September 17 Photos - Preoccupation and Occupation Begins
Day 2 September 18 Photos - People settle in; cardboard sign menage begins
Day 3 September 19 Photos - Community forms; protest signs
Day 7 September 23 Photos - First rain, protest signs, life
Day 8 September 24 Photos - Pepper spray day, Zuni Tikka, people
Day 21 October 6 Photos - Naomi Klein
Day 23 October 8 - Faces of OWS
Day 28 October 13 - Tom Morello of RATM
Day 31 - protesting Chihuahua and The Daily Show
Day 36 - Parents and Kids Day and quite a crowd
Day 40 - protesting hotties, Reverend Billy and tents
Day 43 Photos - Snow storm at OWS of the first NYC winter snowfall
Day 47 - Solidarity with Occupy Oakland
Day 52 November 7 - Jonathan Lethem, Lynn Nottage and Jennifer Egan
Day 53 November 8 - David Crosby and Graham Nash play OWS
Day 57 November 12 - Former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey
Day 60 November 15 - Police evict protesters from Zuccotti
Occupy Colorado Springs Colorado on November 20
Do you want to see the Occupy Wall Street series laid out thematically? Click here
in these days Europe remembers the August days in former Czechoslovakia, when the Soviets and their allies (including DDR, East Germany) occupied this country to destroy all efforts of a liberal and human socialism, the so called Prague Spring with Alexander Dubcek.
time to remember Dubcek, the great and liberal Vaclav Havel, and also Jan Palach, the 20y old student from Melnik, who burned himself on Wenzels place in January 1969 to protest against the soviet occupation.
twenty years later the iron curtain began to fall down, and in 1990 I had the chance for my first visit in Prague and Bohemia. the begin of my deep love for this city and this country, with which my family is connected in several ways
the photos of this first visit are blurred, shots from diapositives,. but I like them as paintings of this exciting time, full of hope for democracy and liberalism in Europe. time to remember all this. and one can imagine the Prague during the socialist time, lots of renovated buildings, but also multiple decay of historic buildings.
during all my visits there I could watch the transformation to a renovated, colourful, vibrant, capitalistic and nowadays often overcrowded city. but I am still in love with Prague...
The EU promotional poster was issued in 1992 by the Council of Europe.
It portrays blockheaded people constructing a Tower of Babel building. 12 Inverted pentagrams surround the tower. A Satanic parody of the the Book of Revelation’s woman surrounded by 12 stars (representing the Church and 12 Apostles/12 tribes of Israel).
One inverted pentagrams is hidden behind the top of the tower, presumably because 11 apostles were left after Judas betrayed Jesus,
An inverted pentagram is regarded as an especially evil symbol, representing the horned, goat headed Mendes (Satan).
Pyramids can be seen in the background, another occult symbol (there are no pyramids in Europe).
In 1999 the European Parliament building in Strasbourg was completed. There was already an EU Parliament building in Brussels.
This second EU Parliament building was undeniably designed as a modernist interpretation of the Tower of Babel.
‘The New World Order' - a book by A. Ralph Epperson. Exposes the globalist plot for world domination.
Globalist agenda - World government.
The return to Babel.
thewildvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/the-wild-voic...
The European Union - the return to Babel
The irrefutable evidence in plain sight.
Also see:
AND:
EUbabel. The shocking occult symbolism of the European Union.
peuplesobservateursblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/togo-all...
Empty seat number 666
www.jesus-is-savior.com/End of the World/seat_666.htm
‘Imagine there’s no Heaven, it’s easy if you try
No Hell below us, above us only sky”
John Lennon.
‘Imagine’ a nightmare, world dictatorship.
European Union project, undemocratic, expansionist empire. Prototype and fledgling, World Government.
Brexit - The anti-globalist struggle against the NWO globalists.
Aaron Banks:
Asked if he would back the Leave side in a rerun of the 2016 referendum, Mr Banks said: “The corruption I have seen in British politics, the sewer that exists and the disgraceful behaviour of the Government over what they are doing with Brexit and how they are selling out, means that if I had my time again I think we would have been better to probably remain and not unleash these demons.”
Maybe Mr Banks didn't realise that he hit the nail squarely on the head when he described the incredibly fierce opposition to Brexit as the unleashing of "demons". The globalist agenda is truly demonic. It is no surprise that the globalists, and their puppets in the media and liberal establishment, are so desperate to stop Brexit interfering with their diabolical plans for world domination.
See: ‘Brexit, The Movie’ - available on YouTube.
The EU, mystery Babylon. www.biblelight.net/tower-painting-parliament.jpg
The EU parliament in Strasbourg is modelled on the Tower of Babel.
thewildvoice.org/mystery-babylon-european-union/#comment-...
The symbolism of the EU in plain sight, is the desire of its advocates to return to the spirit of Babel.
The Council of Europe's poster produced to promote the European Union and the EU Parliament building in Strasbourg grandmageri422.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/europe-many-to... is filled with occult symbolism: a tower of Babel, 11 inverted stars (pentagrams),, the 12th pentagram is behind the top (head) of the tower. This is a Satanic parody of the 12 stars surrounding the head of the Woman (Church/Mary) in the book of Revelation. The inverted pentagram is an occult symbol designed to represent the head of Baphomet (Satan or the Goat of Mendes), illuminati pyramids are also evident in the background (since when have Egyptian pyramids been part of Europe? Square, blockheaded (indoctrinated) people (useful idiots) are featured, building a tower designed for their own enslavement and suppression, with a round-headed baby, who is too young to have been indoctrinated.
The dangerous, climate change scam:
A high level of Co2 is essential for our survival. The exact opposite of what we a led to believe by the popular, eco- fanatic narrative which is designed to convince people of the necessity for globalist control.
See the truth here:
The reason the elite hate Trump so much is because he is opposed to the one world agenda globalists.
www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-10/reason-elite-hate-trump...
Common Purpose, Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, WEF, Davos, Google Camp, World Economic Forum, ‘fiat’ money, SWIFT, World Governance Council, G7, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, Bank of International Settlements, Institute of International Affairs, New World Order, Globalism, European Union, EU Commission, ECJ, European Empire, evil empire, global conspiracy, United Nations, League of Nations, NAFTA, Freemasonry, Edward Mandal House, Thule Society, Kabbala, Kaaba, fractional reserve banking, Company Interbank Financial Telecommunication, internationalism, IMF, World Bank, ECB, European Central Bank, usury, Ruling Elite, Liberal fascism, Euro, EU cartel, EU empire, EU single currency, federalism, EUSSR, global elite, Federal Reserve, Paul Warburg, globalists, world government, WGS, World Government Summit, liberalism, Situational ethics, moral relativism, cultural imperialism, Bribery, Corruption, blackmail, slander, assassination, Moral relativism, Propaganda, project fear, fake news, Liberty, National Council for Civil Liberties, selective democracy, Illuminati, False religion, Maitreya, false ecumenism, World Council of Churches, Cultural Marxism, Censorship, Ted Turner, Timothy Wirth, Hilary Clinton, Club of Rome, Treaty of Rome, Maastricht Treaty, Lisbon Treaty, climate change scam, global warming, EU federalism, liberal establishment, Multiculturalism, EU Army, Palmera Arch, Temple of Baal, Nazis, National Socialism, Red Flag, hammer and sickle, useful idiots, globalist puppets, quislings, internationalism, Internationale, anti-Brexit, anti-Putin, FBI, people’s vote, EU army, Islamisation, Multinationals, multinational conglomerates, nationalisation, Fake News, Bellingcat, Bureaucracy, Climategate, chemtrails, Deep State, Council on Foreign Relations, CFR, Trilateral Commission, GM seed, GM food, quantitive easing, Bilderbergers, Eco-fanaticism, Greenpeace, eco warriors, Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party, Chatham House, Bohemian Grove, New Age, Illiberal Undemocrats, EU, Open Society, Open Britain, George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Clinton foundation, John Podesta, John Dewey, Socialism, Humanists UK, Young Humanists, National Secular Society, British Humanist Association, neo Darwinism, Darwinism, evolution scam, CNN, New York Times, NBC news, PBS, MSNBC, BBC, liberal media, Drug legalisation, Money manipulation, IG Farben, quantitative easing, punitive taxation, Green taxes, progressives, Transgenderism, Social engineering, Communism, Socialist Workers Party, arch capitalism, Social Darwinism, Marxism, neo Darwinism, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Bertrand Russell, James Hutton, David Hume, National Socialism (Nazism), Racism, international socialism, Gay mafia, gay adoption, rainbow alliance, UFOLOGY, global warming, Yakov Sverdlovsk, Red Terror, new age, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Jacob Schiff, Adam Weishaupt, Alistair Crowley. Albert Pike, Theosophy, Antichrist, Abortion, Population control, Karl Marx, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, Euthanasia, Eugenics, Atheism, Soviet Union, USSR, People’s Democratic Republics, ‘People’s Vote’, Secularism, Andrew Copson, False science, Scientism, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Nye, Gary Kasparov, Pussy Riot, radical left, atheist naturalism, pagan naturalism, A C Grayling, militant atheism, secular humanism, atheist pseudoscience, Cloning, Surrogacy, Fabianism, Central Banking, Fiat Currencies, banking cartels, LGBTQ agenda, Political correctness, liberal establishment, propaganda, progressive evolution, Hollywood, State control, Labour Party, Democratic Party, Green Party, Liberal Democrats, Fabian society, Secular Society, Antifa, BHA, FFRF, RDFRS, ACLU, gay priests, gay Bishops, gay pride, child abuse, gay fascism, sodomites, Stonewall, indoctrination, LGTB, LGBT, left wing feminism, lesbianism, homosexual agenda, Redefined marriage, Gender fanaticism, gay marriage, political correctness, hedonism, false equality, gender reassignment, surrogacy, Gay adoption, perverted sex education, Embryo experimentation, sperm banks, IVF, cloning, useful idiots, globalist puppets, UN, snowflakes, quislings, internationalism, liberal media, pornography, quislings, fifth column, Trojan horses, Sankt Galen Mafia, infiltrators, modernism, amnesty international, UNICEF, CIA, cyber surveillance, CCTV, Neo Darwinism, cultural Marxism, social Darwinism, atheist naturalism, paganism, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Christianophobia, Secular Humanism, Militant atheism, abortion, Margaret Sanger, Moloch, Planned Parenthood, pro choice, Klu Klux Klan, Southern Poverty Law Centre, progressives, Christophobia, Newspeak, Satanism, Hate speech, political correctness, women’s march, False Ecumenism, election rigging, mass migration, Green taxes, climate change scam, global warming scam, carbon credits scam, debt enslavement, international bankers, Arch capitalism, Kuhn Loeb, Goldman Sachs, John D Rockefeller, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan, Max Warburg, Order of the Skull and Bones, Extortionate taxation, class war, gender war, ageism, divide and rule, centralisation, climate change scam, mass migrations, cultural imperialism, Marie Stopes, Cultural war. human trafficking. Liberal Democrats, liberal media, Socialist Workers Party, Morning Star, Emmanuel Macron, Planned Parenthood, Marie Stopes International, BPAS, British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Satanism, Wicca, Witchcraft, Luciferian. Lunar Society, secret societies, Annie Besant, Helena Blavatsky. Alice Bailey, Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Alliance for Global Justice, Malthusian League. House of Sulzberger-Ochs, House of Meyer-Graham, Mike Bloomberg, Pierre Omidyar, Sheldon Adelson, Brzezinski, Benjamin Creme, George Kennan, James Baker, Carroll Quigley, Strobe Talbott, Lev Dobriansky, PNAC, William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Walfowitz, Robert Kagan, Professor Joseph Nye, Lester Mondale, American atheists, British Humanist Association, Outright Action International, National Secular Society. Abolition of nation states, NWO. World dictatorship, Tower of Babel, European Parliament. European Commission.
The war against anti-globalist Putin, and the globalist demonising of Russia.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43042520105
The reason the elite hate Trump so much is because he is opposed to the one world agenda of the globalists.
endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-reason-the-elite-h...
Why satanism is now on the center stage in the culture war.
www.crisismagazine.com/2019/why-satanism-is-now-on-the-ce...
Ending the crime of abortion is crucial in curbing the power, of Satan.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43172544140
Ending the crime of abortion is crucial in curbing the power, of Satan.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/43172544140
IF and THEN, the atheist dilemma
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/46553358861
The poison in our midst - progressive politics.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/47971464278
Who trusts the MSM? Their lies are not just fake news, they deliberately set out to slander those who don’t agree with the liberal left, globalist elite. Their lies are positively evil. Everyone should watch this video and they will never trust the media again: banned.video/watch?id=5f00ca7c672706002f4026a9
This is the horse-drawn carriage which used by Maximilian 1 and Carlota, The carriage is in one of several restored rooms in the National Museum of History in Castillo de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Castle), Chapultepec Park.
the regals lived in in Chapultepec Castle.
Maximilian 1 & Carlotta's Carriage in
Maximilian, in full Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, (born July 6, 1832, Vienna, Austria—died June 19, 1867, near Querétaro, Mex.), archduke of Austria and the emperor of Mexico, a man whose naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution. Max did not last long. He was emperor of Mexico from 10 June 1864 to 19 June 1867.
The statue of Rammohun Roy stands outside Bristol Cathedral (background) on College Green, Bristol. The framing here is my Print Format.
"Occupation: Philosopher
Raja Rammohan Roy was born of a distinguished Brahmin family in Bengal. After liberal education he entered the service of the East India Company and rose to high office.
Essentially a humanist and religious reformer, he left the Company to devote his time to the service of his people. Profoundly influenced by European liberalism, Rammohan came to the conclusion that radical reform was necessary in the religion of Hinduism and in the social practices of the Hindus. He founded the Brahmo Samaj at Calcutta in 1828, which was initially known as the "Brahmo Sabha."
Ram Mohan's is remembered in Indian history is as the originator of all the more important secular movements in that country. His services to the cause of the abolition of suttee are well-known. He was the first feminist in India and his book, Brief remarks regarding modern encroachments on the ancient rights of females (1822), is a reasoned argument in favour of the equality of women.
He argued for the reform of Hindu law, led the protest against restrictions on the press, mobilised the Government against the oppressive land laws, argued the case for the association of Indians in Government and argued in favour of an English system of education in India.
Rammohan Roy arrived in England in 1831 as the ambassador of the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah II. He came to stay at Beech House, Stapleton Grove, Bristol in 1833.
However, ten days after arriving in Bristol he fell ill with meningitis, and died on 27 September 1833. He was initially buried in the grounds of Beech House, but ten years later his friend Dwarakanath Tagore had him reinterred at Arno's Vale. A chattri (funerary monument or mandir (shrine) was designed by William Prinsep and built with sponsorship from Dwarakanath Tagore. In 1997 a statue of Raja Rammohan Roy was placed on College Green.
The chattri has recently received a substantial amount of money for its renovation. ."
There have been many and varied references to the Marquis de Sade in popular culture, including fictional works and biographies. The namesake of the psychological and subcultural term sadism, his name is used variously to evoke sexual violence, licentiousness and freedom of speech. In modern culture his works are simultaneously viewed as masterful analyses of how power and economics work, and as erotica. Sade's sexually explicit works were a medium for the articulation of the corrupt and hypocritical values of the elite in his society, which caused him to become imprisoned. He thus became a symbol of the artist's struggle with the censor. Sade's use of pornographic devices to create provocative works that subvert the prevailing moral values of his time inspired many other artists in a variety of media. The cruelties depicted in his works gave rise to the concept of sadism. Sade's works have to this day been kept alive by artists and intellectuals because they espouse a philosophy of extreme individualism that became reality in the economic liberalism of the following centuries.
...taken on the stairs of the Deutsches Verpackungs Museum, the packaging museum...
Heidelberg, Germany...
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin. Photo: publicity still for Warlock (Edward Dmytryk, 1959).
Blue-eyed American actor Henry Fonda (1905-1982) exemplified not only integrity and strength, but an ideal of the common man fighting against social injustice and oppression. He is most remembered for his roles as Abe Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which he received an Academy Award Nomination, and more recently, Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981), for which he received an Oscar for Best Actor in 1982. Notably he also played against character as the villain 'Frank' in Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western Once upon a time in the West (1968). Fonda is considered one of Hollywood's old-time legends and his lifelong career spanned almost 50 years.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1905. His parents were Elma Herberta (Jaynes) and William Brace Fonda, who worked in advertising and printing and was the owner of the W. B. Fonda Printing Company in Omaha, Nebraska. His distant ancestors were Italians who had fled their country around 1400 and moved to Holland, presumably because of political or religious persecution. In the early1600's, they crossed the Atlantic and were among the early Dutch settlers in America. They established a still-thriving small town in upstate New York named Fonda, named after patriarch Douw Fonda, who was later killed by Indians. In 1919, young Henry was a first-hand witness to the Omaha race riots and the brutal lynching of Will Brown. This enraged the 14 years old Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for the rest of his life. Following graduation from high school in 1923, Henry got a part-time job in Minneapolis with the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company which allowed him at first to pursue journalistic studies at the University of Minnesota. In 1925, having returned to Omaha, Henry reevaluated his options and came to the conclusion that journalism was not his forte, after all. For a while, he tried his hand at several temporary jobs, including as a mechanic and a window dresser. At age 20, Fonda started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse, when his mother's friend Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon Brando) recommended that he try out for a juvenile part in You and I, in which he was cast as Ricky. Then he received the lead in Merton of the Movies and realized the beauty of acting as a profession. It allowed him to deflect attention from his own tongue-tied personality and create stage characters relying on someone else's scripted words. The play and its star received fairly good notices in the local press. It ran for a week, and for the rest of the repertory season, Henry advanced to assistant director which enabled him to design and paint sets as well as act. A casual trip to New York, however, had already made him set his sights on Broadway. In 1926, he moved to the Cape Cod University Players, where he met his future wife Margaret Sullavan. His first professional role was in The Jest, by Sem Benelli. James Stewart joined the Players a few months after Fonda left, but he would become his closest lifelong friend. In 1928, Fonda went east to New York to be with Margaret Sullavan, and to expand his theatrical career on Broadway. His first Broadway role was a small one in A Game of Love and Death with Alice Brady and Claude Rains. Henry played leads opposite Margaret Sullavan, who became the first of his five wives in 1931. They broke up in 1933. In 1934, he got a break of sorts, when he was given the chance to present a comedy sketch with Imogene Coca in the Broadway revue New Faces. That year, he also hired Leland Hayward as his personal management agent and this was to pay off handsomely. Major Broadway roles followed, including New Faces of America and The Farmer Takes a Wife. The following year he married Frances Seymour Brokaw with whom he had two children: Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, also to become screen stars.
The 29-year old Henry Fonda was persuaded by Leland Hayward to become a Hollywood actor, despite initial misgivings and reluctance on Henry's part. Independent producer Walter Wanger, whose growing stock company was birthed at United Artists, needed a star for The Farmer Takes a Wife (Victor Fleming, 1935) opposite Janet Gaynor. I.S. Mowis at IMDb: “With both first choice actors Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea otherwise engaged, Henry was the next available option. After all, he had just completed a successful run on Broadway in the stage version. The cheesy publicity tag line for the picture was "you'll be fonder of Fonda", but the film was an undeniable hit.” Wanger, realizing he had a good thing going, next cast Henry in a succession of A-grade pictures which capitalized on his image as the sincere, unaffected country boy. Pick of the bunch were the Technicolor outdoor Western The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Henry Hathaway, 1936) with Sylvia Sidney, and the gritty Depression-era drama You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) with Henry as a back-to-the-wall good guy forced into becoming a fugitive from the law by circumstance). Then followed the screwball comedy The Moon's Our Home (William A. Seiter, 1936) with ex-wife Margaret Sullavan, the excellent pre-civil war-era romantic drama Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) featuring Bette Davis, and the Western Jesse James ( Henry King, 1939) starring Tyrone Power. Fonda rarely featured in comedy, except for a couple of good turns opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney - with both he shared an excellent on-screen chemistry - in The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and the successful Rings on Her Fingers (Rouben Mamoulian, 1942). Henry gave his best screen performance to date in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939), a fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case. Henry made two more films with director John Ford: the pioneering drama Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) with Claudette Colbert, and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. In his career-defining role as Tom Joad, Fonda played the archetypal grassroots American trying to stand up against oppression. His relationship with Ford would end on the set of Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) when he objected to Ford's direction of the film. Ford punched Fonda and had to be replaced.
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) set the tone for Henry Fonda’s subsequent career. In this vein, he gave a totally convincing, though historically inaccurate, portrayal in the titular role of The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940), a rare example of a sequel improving upon the original. He projected integrity and quiet authority whether he played lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) or a reluctant posse member in The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943). In between these two films, Fonda enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, and served in the Navy for three years. He then starred in The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947), and Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), as a rigid Army colonel, along with John Wayne and Shirley Temple in her first adult role. The following years, he did not appear in many films. Fonda was one of the most active, and most vocal, liberal Democrats in Hollywood. During the 1930s, he had been a founding member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, formed in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. In 1947, in the middle of the McCarthy witch hunt, he moved to New York, not returning to Hollywood until 1955. His son Peter Fonda writes in his autobiography Don't Tell Dad: A Memoir (1999) that he believes that Henry's liberalism caused him to be gray-listed during the early 1950s. Fonda returned to Broadway to play the title role in Mister Roberts for which he won the Tony Award as best dramatic actor. In 1979, he won a second special Tony, and was nominated for a Tony Award Clarence Darrow (1975). Later he played a juror committed to the ideal of total justice in 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) which he also produced, and a nightclub musician wrongly accused of murder in The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). During the next decade, he played in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton a.o., 1962), How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, 1962) and as a poker-playing grifter in the Western comedy A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook, 1966) with Joanne Woodward. A big hit was the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours (Melvillle Shavelson, 1968), in which he co-starred with Lucille Ball. The same year, just to confound those who would typecast him, he gave a chilling performance as one of the coldest, meanest stone killers ever to roam the West, in Sergio Leone's Western epic C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) opposite Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale. With James Stewart, he teamed up in Firecreek (Vincent McEveety, 1968), where Fonda again played the heavy, and the Western omedy The Cheyenne Social Club (Gene Kelly, 1970). Despite his old feud with John Ford, Fonda spoke glowingly of the director in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary Directed by John Ford (1971). Fonda had refused to participate until he learned that Ford had insisted on casting Fonda as the lead in the film version of Mr. Roberts (1955), reviving Fonda's film career after concentrating on the stage for years. Illness curtailed Fonda’s work in the 1970s. In 1976, Fonda returned in the World War II blockbuster Midway (Jack Smight, 1976) with Charlton Heston. Fonda finished the 1970s in a number of disaster films wilth all-star casts: the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli/Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis, 1977), Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977) with Richard Widmark, the killer bee action film The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978), the global disaster film Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979), with Sean Connery, and the Canadian production City on Fire (Alvin Rakoff, 1979), which also featured Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. His final screen role was as an octogenarian in On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell, 1981), in which he was joined by Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane. It finally won him an Oscar on the heels of an earlier Honorary Academy Award. Too ill to attend the ceremony, Henry Fonda died soon after at the age of 77, having left a lasting legacy matched by few of his peers. His later wives were Susan Blanchard (1950-1956), Leonarda Franchetti (1957-1961) and Shirlee Fonda (1965- till his death in 1982). With Blanchard he had a daughter, Amy Fishman (1953). His grandchildren are the actors Bridget Fonda, Justin Fonda, Vanessa Vadim and Troy Garity.
Sources: Laurence Dang (IMDb), I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
The rider of the horse is rather short, so in order to get back on the horseback, she requires some help.
Toronto held its second anti-Trump protest in as many days outside of the U.S. Consulate General on University Avenue today. The rally was attended by thousands despite the frigid temperature. The anti-Trump protesters came from many walks of life: liberalists, left-wing and centrist people, Socialists, Communists, Black Lives Matter (BLM), labour unions, mainstream population and visible minorities, and groups from many religious groups.
Well, Nobby's cooked the Burns Night Supper with help from his Dad, and here are the boys posing for a photo before sitting down to eat their fill. It looks tasty, and they each have a (small) tot of whisky to help it down! Bon Appetit!"
Burns Night, the anniversary of the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns, is celebrated annually on 25 January.
The tradition of the Burns Night Supper was first held in 1801 by the poet's friends, five years after his death. Today, the day - otherwise known as Robert Burns Day - has become popular around the UK.
Widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, Burns is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language. He also wrote in English and is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement. After his death, he became a source of inspiration to founders of liberalism and socialism and greatly influenced Scottish literature.
His most recognised works include Auld Lang Syne, often sung at Hogmanay or New Year's Eve, and Scots Wha Hae, which became an unofficial Scottish national anthem.
Whisky is the usual choice of tipple on Burns Night, either malts or blends. It is traditional to pour a dram over the haggis, but most prefer not to as it changes the taste of the meat and can turn the meal soggy.
Historically, grace is said before a Burns Supper. As the main course was brought in - traditionally a haggis - the host would recite the poem Address to a Haggis.
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose", "A Man's a Man for A' That", "To a Louse", "To a Mouse", "The Battle of Sherramuir", "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae Fond Kiss".
Life and background
Burns was born two miles (3 km) south of Ayr, in Alloway, the eldest of the seven children of William Burnes (1721–1784), a self-educated tenant farmer from Dunnottar in the Mearns, and Agnes Broun (1732–1820), the daughter of a Kirkoswald tenant farmer.
He was born in a house built by his father (now the Burns Cottage Museum), where he lived until Easter 1766, when he was seven years old. William Burnes sold the house and took the tenancy of the 70-acre (280,000 m2) Mount Oliphant farm, southeast of Alloway. Here Burns grew up in poverty and hardship, and the severe manual labour of the farm left its traces in a weakened constitution.
He was given irregular schooling and a lot of his education was with his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief. He was also taught and tutored by the young teacher John Murdoch (1747–1824), who opened an "adventure school" in Alloway in 1763 and taught Latin, French, and mathematics to both Robert and his brother Gilbert (1760–1827) from 1765 to 1768 until Murdoch left the parish. After a few years of home education, Burns was sent to Dalrymple Parish School in mid-1772 before returning at harvest time to full-time farm labouring until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin.
By the age of 15, Burns was the principal labourer at Mount Oliphant. During the harvest of 1774, he was assisted by Nelly Kilpatrick (1759–1820), who inspired his first attempt at poetry, "O, Once I Lov'd A Bonnie Lass". In 1775, he was sent to finish his education with a tutor at Kirkoswald, where he met Peggy Thompson (born 1762), to whom he wrote two songs, "Now Westlin' Winds" and "I Dream’d I Lay".
Despite his ability and character, William Burnes was consistently unfortunate, and migrated with his large family from farm to farm without ever being able to improve his circumstances. At Whitsun, 1777, he removed his large family from the unfavourable conditions of Mount Oliphant to the 130-acre (0.53 km2) farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton, where they stayed until William Burnes's death in 1784. Subsequently, the family became integrated into the community of Tarbolton. To his father's disapproval, Robert joined a country dancing school in 1779 and, with Gilbert, formed the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club the following year. His earliest existing letters date from this time, when he began making romantic overtures to Alison Begbie (b. 1762). In spite of four songs written for her and a suggestion that he was willing to marry her, she rejected him.
Robert Burns was initiated into the Masonic lodge St David, Tarbolton, on 4 July 1781, when he was 22. In December 1781, Burns moved temporarily to Irvine to learn to become a flax-dresser, but during the workers' celebrations for New Year 1781/1782 (which included Burns as a participant) the flax shop caught fire and was burnt to the ground. This venture accordingly came to an end, and Burns went home to Lochlea farm. During this time he met and befriended Richard Brown, who encouraged him to become a poet. He continued to write poems and songs and began a commonplace book in 1783, while his father fought a legal dispute with his landlord. The case went to the Court of Session, and Burnes was upheld in January 1784, a fortnight before he died.
Mauchline
Robert and Gilbert made an ineffectual struggle to keep on the farm, but after its failure they moved to Mossgiel Farm, near Mauchline, in March, which they maintained with an uphill fight for the next four years. In mid-1784 Burns came to know a group of girls known collectively as The Belles of Mauchline, one of whom was Jean Armour, the daughter of a stonemason from Mauchline.
Burns’s first child, Elizabeth "Bess" Burns, was born to his mother's servant, Elizabeth Paton, while he was embarking on a relationship with Jean Armour, who became pregnant with twins in March 1786. Burns signed a paper attesting his marriage to Jean, but her father "was in the greatest distress, and fainted away". To avoid disgrace, her parents sent her to live with her uncle in Paisley. Although Armour's father initially forbade it, they were married in 1788. Armour bore him nine children, three of whom survived infancy.
Burns had encountered financial difficulties due to his lack of success as a farmer. In order to make enough money to support a family, he accepted a job offer from Patrick Douglas, an absentee landowner who lived in Cumnock, to work on his sugar plantations near Port Antonio, Jamaica. Douglas' plantations were managed by his brother Charles, and the job offer, which had a salary of £30 per annum, entailed working in Jamaica as a "book-keeper", whose duties included serving as an assistant overseer to the Black slaves on the plantations (Burns himself described the position as being "a poor Negro driver").[8] The position, which was for a single man, would entail Burns living on a plantation in rustic conditions, as it was unlikely a book keeper would be housed in the plantation's great house. Apologists have argued in Burns's defence that in 1786, the Scottish abolitionist movement was just beginning to be broadly active. Burns's authorship of "The Slave's Lament", a 1792 poem argued as an example of his abolitionist views, is disputed. His name is absent from any abolitionist petition written in Scotland during the period, and according to academic Lisa Williams, Burns "is strangely silent on the question of chattel slavery compared to other contemporary poets. Perhaps this was due to his government position, severe limitations on free speech at the time or his association with beneficiaries of the slave trade system".
Around the same time, Burns fell in love with a woman named Mary Campbell, whom he had seen in church while he was still living in Tarbolton. She was born near Dunoon and had lived in Campbeltown before moving to work in Ayrshire. He dedicated the poems "The Highland Lassie O", "Highland Mary", and "To Mary in Heaven" to her. His song "Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia's shore?" suggests that they planned to emigrate to Jamaica together. Their relationship has been the subject of much conjecture, and it has been suggested that on 14 May 1786 they exchanged Bibles and plighted their troth over the Water of Fail in a traditional form of marriage. Soon afterwards Mary Campbell left her work in Ayrshire, went to the seaport of Greenock, and sailed home to her parents in Campbeltown. In October 1786, Mary and her father sailed from Campbeltown to visit her brother in Greenock. Her brother fell ill with typhus, which she also caught while nursing him. She died of typhus on 20 or 21 October 1786 and was buried there.
As Burns lacked the funds to pay for his passage to Jamaica, Gavin Hamilton suggested that he should "publish his poems in the mean time by subscription, as a likely way of getting a little money to provide him more liberally in necessaries for Jamaica." On 3 April Burns sent proposals for publishing his Scotch Poems to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, who published these proposals on 14 April 1786, on the same day that Jean Armour's father tore up the paper in which Burns attested his marriage to Jean. To obtain a certificate that he was a free bachelor, Burns agreed on 25 June to stand for rebuke in the Mauchline kirk for three Sundays. He transferred his share in Mossgiel farm to his brother Gilbert on 22 July, and on 30 July wrote to tell his friend John Richmond that, "Armour has got a warrant to throw me in jail until I can find a warrant for an enormous sum ... I am wandering from one friend's house to another."
On 31 July 1786 John Wilson published the volume of works by Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect. Known as the Kilmarnock volume, it sold for 3 shillings and contained much of his best writing, including "The Twa Dogs" (which features Luath, his Border Collie), "Address to the Deil", "Halloween", "The Cotter's Saturday Night", "To a Mouse", "Epitaph for James Smith", and "To a Mountain Daisy", many of which had been written at Mossgiel farm. The success of the work was immediate, and soon he was known across the country.
Burns postponed his planned emigration to Jamaica on 1 September, and was at Mossgiel two days later when he learnt that Jean Armour had given birth to twins. On 4 September Thomas Blacklock wrote a letter expressing admiration for the poetry in the Kilmarnock volume, and suggesting an enlarged second edition. A copy of it was passed to Burns, who later recalled, "I had taken the last farewell of my few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Scotland – 'The Gloomy night is gathering fast' – when a letter from Dr Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition. The Doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction."
On 27 November 1786 Burns borrowed a pony and set out for Edinburgh. On 14 December William Creech issued subscription bills for the first Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect, which was published on 17 April 1787. Within a week of this event, Burns had sold his copyright to Creech for 100 guineas. For the edition, Creech commissioned Alexander Nasmyth to paint the oval bust-length portrait now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was engraved to provide a frontispiece for the book. Nasmyth had come to know Burns and his fresh and appealing image has become the basis for almost all subsequent representations of the poet. In Edinburgh, he was received as an equal by the city's men of letters—including Dugald Stewart, Robertson, Blair and others—and was a guest at aristocratic gatherings, where he bore himself with unaffected dignity. Here he encountered, and made a lasting impression on, the 16-year-old Walter Scott, who described him later with great admiration:
[His person was strong and robust;] his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are presented in Mr Nasmyth's picture but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits ... there was a strong expression of shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. [I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.]
The new edition of his poems brought Burns £400. His stay in the city also resulted in some lifelong friendships, among which were those with Lord Glencairn, and Frances Anna Dunlop (1730–1815), who became his occasional sponsor and with whom he corresponded for many years until a rift developed. He embarked on a relationship with the separated Agnes "Nancy" McLehose (1758–1841), with whom he exchanged passionate letters under pseudonyms (Burns called himself "Sylvander" and Nancy "Clarinda"). When it became clear that Nancy would not be easily seduced into a physical relationship, Burns moved on to Jenny Clow (1766–1792), Nancy's domestic servant, who bore him a son, Robert Burns Clow, in 1788. He also had an affair with a servant girl, Margaret "May" Cameron. His relationship with Nancy concluded in 1791 with a final meeting in Edinburgh before she sailed to Jamaica for what turned out to be a short-lived reconciliation with her estranged husband. Before she left, he sent her the manuscript of "Ae Fond Kiss" as a farewell.
In Edinburgh, in early 1787, he met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and music seller with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum. The first volume was published in 1787 and included three songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to volume two, and he ended up responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection, as well as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published in 1803.
On his return from Edinburgh in February 1788, he resumed his relationship with Jean Armour and they married in March 1788. He took out a lease on Ellisland Farm, Dumfriesshire, settling there in June. He also took up a training position as an exciseman or gauger, which involved long rides and detailed bookkeeping. He was appointed to duties in Customs and Excise in 1789. Burns chose the land of Ellisland a few miles north of the town of Dumfries, from Patrick Miller's estate at Dalswinton, where he had a new farmhouse and byre built. He and Jean moved in the following summer 1789 to the new farm house at Ellisland. In November 1790, he had written his masterpiece, the narrative poem "Tam O' Shanter". The Ellisland farm beside the river Nith, now holds a unique collection of Burns's books, artefacts, and manuscripts and is mostly preserved as when Burns and his young family lived there. Burns gave up the farm in 1791 to move to Dumfries. About this time he was offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of The Star newspaper, and refused to become a candidate for a newly created Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, although influential friends offered to support his claims. He did however accept membership of the Royal Company of Archers in 1792.
After giving up his farm, he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time that, being requested to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs. He made major contributions to George Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice as well as to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum.[citation needed] Arguably his claim to immortality chiefly rests on these volumes, which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets. As a songwriter he provided his own lyrics, sometimes adapted from traditional words. He put words to Scottish folk melodies and airs which he collected, and composed his own arrangements of the music including modifying tunes or recreating melodies on the basis of fragments. In letters he explained that he preferred simplicity, relating songs to spoken language which should be sung in traditional ways. The original instruments would be fiddle and the guitar of the period which was akin to a cittern, but the transcription of songs for piano has resulted in them usually being performed in classical concert or music hall styles. At the 3 week Celtic Connections festival Glasgow each January, Burns songs are often performed with both fiddle and guitar.
Thomson as a publisher commissioned arrangements of "Scottish, Welsh and Irish Airs" by such eminent composers of the day as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, with new lyrics. The contributors of lyrics included Burns. While such arrangements had wide popular appeal. Beethoven's music was more advanced and difficult to play than Thomson intended.
Burns described how he had to master singing the tune before he composed the words:
My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then chuse my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed—which is generally the most difficult part of the business—I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my, pen goes.
Burns also worked to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, sometimes revising, expanding, and adapting them. One of the better known of these collections is The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not Burns's), a collection of bawdy lyrics that were popular in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th century. At Dumfries, he wrote his world famous song "A Man's a Man for A' That", which was based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, one of the chief political theoreticians of the American Revolution. Burns sent the poem anonymously in 1795 to the Glasgow Magazine. He was also a radical for reform and wrote poems for democracy, such as – "Parcel of Rogues to the Nation" and the "Rights of Women".
Many of Burns's most famous poems are songs with the music based upon older traditional songs. For example, "Auld Lang Syne" is set to the traditional tune "Can Ye Labour Lea", "A Red, Red Rose" is set to the tune of "Major Graham" and "The Battle of Sherramuir" is set to the "Cameronian Rant".
Burns alienated some acquaintances by freely expressing sympathy with the French, and American Revolutions, for the advocates of democratic reform and votes for all men and the Society of the Friends of the People which advocated Parliamentary Reform. His political views came to the notice of his employers, to which he pleaded his innocence. Burns met other radicals at the Globe Inn Dumfries. As an Exciseman he felt compelled to join the Royal Dumfries Volunteers in March 1795.
Latterly Burns lived in Dumfries in a two-storey red sandstone house on Mill Hole Brae, now Burns Street. The home is now a museum. He went on long journeys on horseback, often in harsh weather conditions as an Excise Supervisor, and was kept very busy doing reports. The father of four young children, he was also frequently occupied as a song collector and songwriter.
As his health began to give way, he aged prematurely and fell into fits of despondency. Rumours of intemperance (alleged mainly by temperance activist James Currie) may have been overstated. Hard manual farm labour earlier in his life may have damaged Burns's health. Burns possibly had a long-standing rheumatic heart condition, perhaps beginning when he was 21, and a bacterial infection, possibly arising from a tooth abscess, may have exacerbated this.
On the morning of 21 July 1796, Burns died in Dumfries, at the age of 37.
The funeral took place on Monday 25 July 1796, the day that his son Maxwell was born. He was at first buried in the far corner of St. Michael's Churchyard in Dumfries; a simple "slab of freestone" was erected as his gravestone by Jean Armour, which some felt insulting to his memory. His body was eventually moved to its final location in the same cemetery, the Burns Mausoleum, in September 1817. The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried with his in 1834.
Armour had taken steps to secure his personal property, partly by liquidating two promissory notes amounting to fifteen pounds sterling (about 1,100 pounds at 2009 prices). The family went to the Court of Session in 1798 with a plan to support his surviving children by publishing a four-volume edition of his complete works and a biography written by James Currie. Subscriptions were raised to meet the initial cost of publication, which was in the hands of Thomas Cadell and William Davies in London and William Creech, bookseller in Edinburgh. Hogg records that fund-raising for Burns's family was embarrassingly slow, and it took several years to accumulate significant funds through the efforts of John Syme and Alexander Cunningham.
Burns was posthumously given the freedom of the town of Dumfries. Hogg records that Burns was given the freedom of the Burgh of Dumfries on 4 June 1787, 9 years before his death, and was also made an Honorary Burgess of Dumfries.
Through his five surviving children (of 12 born), Burns has over 900 living descendants as of 2019.
Armour died on 26 March 1834 and was interred into the Burns Mausoleum on 31 March 1834. The opening of the mausoleum provided an opportunity to exhume Burns body by a local group who believed in phrenology, a pseudo-science whose practitioners believed an individuals personality could be predicted by measuring the skulls.
The group was led by Archibald Blacklock, a surgeon, and John McDiarmid, Dumfries Courier editor and phrenologist. Other members of the group included Adam Rankine, James Kerr, James Bogie, Andrew Crombie and their assistants.
The night before Armour's funeral, the group was supposedly granted permission to exhume Burns's body by Armour's brother, Robert Armour.
The group attempted to entered the mausoleum at 7pm. There were many people present in the graveyard and they decided to try again later that evening.
The skull was removed and taken to James Fraser, a local plasterer of Queensbury Street, Dumfries. The skull was later returned to the tomb.
A plaster cast was sent to George Combe, a Scottish lawyer and practitioner of phrenology based in Edinburgh. Combe published a report about his findings, entitled ‘Phrenological development of Robert Burns. From a cast on his skull moulded at Dumfries, the 31st day of March, 1834’.
It is unknown how many casts were made by Fraser, with some sources reporting three were made. Six casts are known though some may be copies of the original cast.
Anatomical Museum, University of Edinburgh
The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
Writer’s Museum, a museum in Edinburgh
Dumfries Museum
East Ayrshire Museums
National Trust for Scotland’s Robert Burns Birthplace Museum
Burns's style is marked by spontaneity, directness, and sincerity, and ranges from the tender intensity of some of his lyrics through the humour of "Tam o' Shanter" and the satire of "Holy Willie's Prayer" and "The Holy Fair".
Burns's poetry drew upon a substantial familiarity with and knowledge of Classical, Biblical, and English literature, as well as the Scottish Makar tradition. Burns was skilled in writing not only in the Scots language but also in the Scottish English dialect of the English language. Some of his works, such as "Love and Liberty" (also known as "The Jolly Beggars"), are written in both Scots and English for various effects.
His themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period) and Radicalism, which he expressed covertly in "Scots Wha Hae", Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth).
The strong emotional highs and lows associated with many of Burns's poems have led some, such as Burns biographer Robert Crawford, to suggest that he suffered from manic depression—a hypothesis that has been supported by analysis of various samples of his handwriting. Burns himself referred to suffering from episodes of what he called "blue devilism". The National Trust for Scotland has downplayed the suggestion on the grounds that evidence is insufficient to support the claim.
Burns is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet, and he influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. His direct literary influences in the use of Scots in poetry were Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. The Edinburgh literati worked to sentimentalise Burns during his life and after his death, dismissing his education by calling him a "heaven-taught ploughman". Burns influenced later Scottish writers, especially Hugh MacDiarmid, who fought to dismantle what he felt had become a sentimental cult that dominated Scottish literature.
Burns had a significant influence on Alexander McLachlan and some influence on Robert Service. While this may not be so obvious in Service's English verse, which is Kiplingesque, it is more readily apparent in his Scots verse.
Scottish Canadians have embraced Robert Burns as a kind of patron poet and mark his birthday with festivities. 'Robbie Burns Day' is celebrated from Newfoundland and Labrador to Nanaimo. Every year, Canadian newspapers publish biographies of the poet, listings of local events and buffet menus. Universities mark the date in a range of ways: McMaster University library organized a special collection and Simon Fraser University's Centre for Scottish Studies organized a marathon reading of Burns's poetry. Senator Heath Macquarrie quipped of Canada's first Prime Minister that "While the lovable [Robbie] Burns went in for wine, women and song, his fellow Scot, John A. did not chase women and was not musical!" 'Gung Haggis Fat Choy' is a hybrid of Chinese New Year and Robbie Burns Day, celebrated in Vancouver since the late 1990s.
In January 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was invited to attend a Robert Burns celebration by Robert Crawford; and if unable to attend, send a toast. Lincoln composed a toast.
An example of Burns's literary influence in the US is seen in the choice by novelist John Steinbeck of the title of his 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men, taken from a line in the second-to-last stanza of "To a Mouse": "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." Burns's influence on American vernacular poets such as James Whitcomb Riley and Frank Lebby Stanton has been acknowledged by their biographers. When asked for the source of his greatest creative inspiration, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan selected Burns's 1794 song "A Red, Red Rose" as the lyric that had the biggest effect on his life.
The author J. D. Salinger used protagonist Holden Caulfield's misinterpretation of Burns's poem "Comin' Through the Rye" as his title and a main interpretation of Caulfield's grasping to his childhood in his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. The poem, actually about a rendezvous, is thought by Caulfield to be about saving people from falling out of childhood.
Burns became the "people's poet" of Russia. In Imperial Russia Burns was translated into Russian and became a source of inspiration for the ordinary, oppressed Russian people. In Soviet Russia, he was elevated as the archetypal poet of the people. As a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the American and French Revolutions who expressed his own egalitarianism in poems such as his "Birthday Ode for George Washington" or his "Is There for Honest Poverty" (commonly known as "A Man's a Man for a' that"), Burns was well placed for endorsement by the Communist regime as a "progressive" artist. A new translation of Burns begun in 1924 by Samuil Marshak proved enormously popular, selling over 600,000 copies. The USSR honoured Burns with a commemorative stamp in 1956. He remains popular in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Burns clubs have been founded worldwide. The first one, known as The Mother Club, was founded in Greenock in 1801 by merchants born in Ayrshire, some of whom had known Burns.[75] The club set its original objectives as "To cherish the name of Robert Burns; to foster a love of his writings, and generally to encourage an interest in the Scottish language and literature." The club also continues to have local charitable work as a priority.
Burns's birthplace in Alloway is now a National Trust for Scotland property called the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. It includes: the humble Burns Cottage where he was born and spent the first years of his life, a modern museum building which houses more than 5,000 Burns artefacts including his handwritten manuscripts, the historic Alloway Auld Kirk and Brig o Doon which feature in Burns's masterpiece 'Tam o Shanter', and the Burns Monument which was erected in Burns's honour and finished in 1823. His house in Dumfries is operated as the Robert Burns House, and the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries features more exhibits about his life and works. Ellisland Farm in Auldgirth, which he owned from 1788 to 1791, is maintained as a working farm with a museum and interpretation centre by the Friends of Ellisland Farm.
Significant 19th-century monuments to him stand in Alloway, Leith, and Dumfries. An early 20th-century replica of his birthplace cottage belonging to the Burns Club Atlanta stands in Atlanta, Georgia. These are part of a large list of Burns memorials and statues around the world.
Organisations include the Robert Burns Fellowship of the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the Burns Club Atlanta in the United States. Towns named after Burns include Burns, New York, and Burns, Oregon.
In the suburb of Summerhill, Dumfries, the majority of the streets have names with Burns connotations. A British Rail Standard Class 7 steam locomotive was named after him, along with a later Class 87 electric locomotive, No. 87035. On 24 September 1996, Class 156 diesel unit 156433 was named The Kilmarnock Edition at Girvan station to launch the new Burns Line services between Girvan, Ayr and Kilmarnock, supported by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport.
Several streets surrounding the Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.'s Back Bay Fens in Boston, Massachusetts, were designated with Burns connotations. A life-size statue was dedicated in Burns's honour within the Back Bay Fens of the West Fenway neighbourhood in 1912. It stood until 1972 when it was relocated downtown, sparking protests from the neighbourhood, literary fans, and preservationists of Olmsted's vision for the Back Bay Fens.
There is a statue of Burns in The Octagon, Dunedin, in the same pose as the one in Dundee. Dunedin's first European settlers were Scots; Thomas Burns, a nephew of Burns, was one of Dunedin's founding fathers.
A crater on Mercury is named after Burns.
In November 2012, Burns was awarded the title Honorary Chartered Surveyor by The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the only posthumous membership so far granted by the institution.
The oldest statue of Burns is in the town of Camperdown, Victoria.[80] It now hosts an annual Robert Burns Scottish Festival in celebration of the statue and its history.
In 2020, the Robert Burns Academy in Cumnock, East Ayrshire opened and is named after Burns as an honour of Burns having spent time living in nearby Mauchline.
The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative stamp, marking the 160th anniversary of his death in 1956.
The UK postal service, the Royal Mail, has issued postage stamps commemorating Burns three times. In 1966, two stamps were issued, priced fourpence and one shilling and threepence, both carrying Burns's portrait. In 1996, an issue commemorating the bicentenary of his death comprised four stamps, priced 19p, 25p, 41p and 60p and including quotes from Burns's poems. On 22 January 2009, two 1st class stamps were issued by the Royal Mail to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth.
Burns was pictured on the Clydesdale Bank £5 note from 1971 to 2009. On the reverse of the note was a vignette of a field mouse and a wild rose in reference to Burns's poem "To a Mouse". The Clydesdale Bank's notes were redesigned in 2009 and, since then, he has been pictured on the front of their £10 note. In September 2007, the Bank of Scotland redesigned their banknotes to feature famous Scottish bridges. The reverse side of new £5 features Brig o' Doon, famous from Burns's poem "Tam o' Shanter", and pictures the statue of Burns at that site.
In 1996, the Isle of Man issued a four-coin set of Crown (5/-) pieces on the themes of "Auld Lang Syne", Edinburgh Castle, Revenue Cutter, and Writing Poems. Tristan da Cunha produced a gold £5 Bicentenary Coin.
In 2009 the Royal Mint issued a commemorative two pound coin featuring a quote from "Auld Lang Syne".
In 1976, singer Jean Redpath, in collaboration with composer Serge Hovey, started to record all of Burns's songs, with a mixture of traditional and Burns's own compositions. The project ended when Hovey died, after seven of the planned twenty-two volumes were completed. Redpath also recorded four cassettes of Burns's songs (re-issued as 3 CDs) for the Scots Musical Museum.
In 1996, a musical about Burns's life called Red Red Rose won third place at a competition for new musicals in Denmark. Robert Burns was played by John Barrowman. On 25 January 2008, a musical play about the love affair between Robert Burns and Nancy McLehose entitled Clarinda premiered in Edinburgh before touring Scotland. The plan was that Clarinda would make its American premiere in Atlantic Beach, FL, at Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre on 25 January 2013. Eddi Reader has released two albums, Sings the Songs of Robert Burns and The Songs of Robert Burns Deluxe Edition, about the work of the poet.
Alfred B. Street wrote the words and Henry Tucker wrote the music for a song called Our Own Robbie Burns in 1856.
Burns Night, in effect a second national day, is celebrated on Burns's birthday, 25 January, with Burns suppers around the world, and is more widely observed in Scotland than the official national day, St. Andrew's Day. The first Burns supper in The Mother Club in Greenock was held on what was thought to be his birthday on 29 January 1802; in 1803 it was discovered from the Ayr parish records that the correct date was 25 January 1759.
The format of Burns suppers has changed little since. The basic format starts with a general welcome and announcements, followed with the Selkirk Grace. After the grace comes the piping and cutting of the haggis, when Burns's famous "Address to a Haggis" is read and the haggis is cut open. The event usually allows for people to start eating just after the haggis is presented. At the end of the meal, a series of toasts, often including a 'Toast to the Lassies', and replies are made. This is when the toast to "the immortal memory", an overview of Burns's life and work, is given. The event usually concludes with the singing of "Auld Lang Syne".
Greatest Scot
In 2009, STV ran a television series and public vote on who was "The Greatest Scot" of all time. Robert Burns won, narrowly beating William Wallace. A bust of Burns is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in Stirling.
A crater on the planet Mercury has been named after Burns.
Walker is a residential suburb and electoral ward in the south-east of Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
The place-name 'Walker' is first attested in 1242, where it appears as Waucre. This means 'wall-carr', that is to say, 'the marsh by the Roman wall', a reference to Hadrian's Wall. Today, a small fragment of the wall can be found in neighbouring Byker to the west, and Segedunum, a major site at the end of the Wall can be found in Wallsend to the east.
Large-scale coal-mining began in the area in the early 1700s, with up to ten collieries in operation in the Walker area. A wagon-way was constructed during this period to facilitate transportation of coal to the riverside staithes.
Walker used to have a large shipbuilding industry, particularly the yard of Armstrong Whitworth at High Walker, but this has declined over the past 50 years and the area has suffered as a result, with many jobs being taken away from the community.
From 1809 to 1883, Walker was home to an iron-making company, Losh, Wilson and Bell (known towards the end as Bells, Goodman and finally as Bells, Lightfoot).
Walkerville was developed as a model housing exhibition along the lines of the Garden city movement held under the auspices of the National Housing Reform Council in 1908 and is an early example of small-scale town planning prior to the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1909. One of the prime campaigners behind the exhibition was Councillor David Adams (1871-1943), who later became an MP and Lord Mayor of Newcastle. The chosen site was Corporation estate, Walker, and the gold medal for the horseshoe layout of the site was awarded to Watson and Scott of Newcastle. The exhibition was of a range of 'model cottages' for working people of different types from two to three bedrooms, by different architects and backed by a range of patrons including Wallsend Cooperative Society, at that time a provider of mortgage capital for its members. Newcastle Corporation also built homes as part of the exhibition. The Gold medal-winning architects were AT Martindale, White & Stephenson, Edward Cratney and TE Davidson. David Adams described the planning and development of the Walker and Willington estates in a series of articles for The Northern Echo.
Walker is an area between Welbeck Road and the banks of the River Tyne, although the modern electoral ward of Walker incorporates Pottery Bank and St Anthony's. When most Geordies refer to Walker they also incorporate the areas of Daisy Hill and Eastfield. Walkergate, located between Welbeck Road and the Network rail line are sometimes considered parts of Walker. Other parts of Walker are Walkerdene (which is situated south of 'Fossway' and north of 'Welbeck Road', west of 'Waverdale Avenue' and east of 'Scrogg Road') and Walkerville (which is located under the railway bridge and to the right, these houses are mainly private stock whereas other areas of Walker are council and ex-council stock). Other areas included are Daisy Hill and Eastfield which help make up the city Ward of Walkergate.
The area is notable for Walker Park, the Walker Riverside Park, and the Lady Stephenson Library (now known as 'Walker Library') as well as the Lightfoot Sports Centre, which is set to undergo a £2.5m refurbishment. Alderman Sir William Haswell Stephenson, built the library in 1908 in memory of his wife Eliza, who died in 1901. The library closed on 29 June 2013 and contents have been relocated into a purpose built area within Walker Activity Dome in July 2013 (The Lightfoot Sports Centre). Walker Park received a Green Flag Award in 2019.
Walker is served by the Tyne and Wear Metro, with a station at Walkergate, and has a main bus terminus on Walker Road, although this is quite dilapidated and badly serviced.
Most children attend a local primary school, These are St Vincent's RC, Tyneview, Welbeck Academy, West Walker, Walkergate, and Central Walker. The two main Secondary Schools which service the area are Benfield School, a specialist Sports College, and Walker Riverside Academy, a high performing specialist technology and visual arts school for 11- to 18-year-olds.
Newcastle City Council's Walker Riverside regeneration scheme launched in 2003 aims to revitalise the area with new houses, schools, jobs and community facilities, environmental improvements, and a new neighbourhood centre to be known as the Heart of Walker. The scheme has its own newsletter known as the "Walker Eye", which goes to almost 7,000 homes and businesses locally.
Much of the older and run-down housing stock along Walker Road is in the process of being demolished and replaced with new homes which are a mixture of council and private housing. The stated aim was to build 1,600 new and replacement homes over a 15-year period.
As part of the new Heart of Walker development, plans have recently been unveiled to open a new state-of-the-art primary school on a site next door to the redeveloped Lightfoot Centre, where the old Wharrier Street Primary School was. The £7.5m project merged Wharrier Street and St Anthony's Primary Schools in Autumn 2012 to create the new Central Walker Church of England Primary.
Plans for the area's regeneration were approved by the then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Ruth Kelly.
In August 2018 it was announced that two high-rise blocks, Titan House and Hexham House were to be demolished. The flats and neighbouring Church Walk shopping centre will be replaced by a new housing development and shops.
Notable people
Cheryl Cole, singer, born on 30 June 1983, lived in Walker and Heaton, attending Walker Comprehensive School, Middle Street, before she found fame with Girls Aloud.
Walker is the birthplace of Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, who later recorded with War at the beginning of that band's career. The Animals recorded a song called "Gonna Send You Back to Walker", a repurposed version of a song by American R&B singer Timmy Shaw, "Gonna Send You Back to Georgia (A City Slick)."
Another Walkerite, the author, journalist and broadcaster Keith Topping, titled one of the chapters in his novel The Hollow Men, The St. Anthony's Chinese Takeaway Massacre. The novelist is co author on Dr Who: The Hollow Men (1998) with Martin Day.
The former Newcastle United striker Shola Ameobi grew up in Walker, where he played for Walker Central F.C.; which was launched in 1988 by the Wallsend-born former Newcastle United footballer Lee Clark, and ex-club scout Brian Clark (no relation).
Stan Anderson, rugby union player who made one Test match appearance for England in the 1899 Home Nations Championship.
David MacBeth, an English pop music singer was born in Walker. Despite releasing a string of singles on three record labels between 1959 and 1969, MacBeth's only chart success was with his version of "Mr. Blue", which peaked at number 18 in the UK Singles Chart. MacBeth took part in the 1963 Roy Orbison/The Beatles Tour.
Geordie Shore stars Marty McKenna and Chantelle Conelly are both also from Walker.
Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 1600
Kjemi: Xtol (stock / 25 min. @ 20°C)
For the record:
I am NOT not a Communist.
Far from it.
I am European liberal.
I am Anti-Totalitarian.
I am Anti Mass Ideologies.
Europe knows Fascism.
Europe knows Communism.
Europe knows Colonialism.
Europe knows Totalitarianism.
And I AM an Anti-Fascist.
I AM an Anti-Zionist.
I Am Not Alone.
And We WILL Fight You!
For Democracy!
For Freedom!
Fascism No More!
Free Palestine!
No More Zionism!
Never Again!
German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden-Westf., no. 451. Photo: M.G.M. Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959).
Tall, well-built, and ruggedly handsome American actor Charlton Heston (1923-2008) appeared in 100 Hollywood films over the course of 60 years. With features chiseled in stone, he became famous for playing a long list of historical figures, particularly in Biblical epics.
His film debut was in the Film Noir Dark City (1950). His breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Heston became an icon for portraying Moses in the hugely successful film The Ten Commandments (1956). Furthermore, he is best known for his roles in Orson Welles' widely acclaimed film noir Touch of Evil (1958), Ben-Hur (1959) - for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, El Cid (1961), and Planet of the Apes (1968).
These starring roles gave the actor a grave, authoritative persona and embodied responsibility, individualism and masculinity. Heston rejected scripts that did not emphasize those virtues. He was a supporter of Democratic politicians and civil rights in the 1960s, but eventually, he rejected liberalism, founded a conservative political action committee, and supported Ronald Reagan. Heston's most famous role in politics came as the five-term president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003. In 2001, Heston made a cameo appearance as an elderly, dying chimpanzee in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
19. The »ideal« of dark tendencies is the person without world-views.
29. In the background of the modern world’s conceptions, elaborated by a vast rational apparatus, there work manias which are generated by demonic forces.
58. Amalgamation most extremely contrasts with unity.
137. The case when someone ignores essentiality involves not only that the most important thing starts missing but that there can be found something else in its place.
138. Sticking to the only-human leads not to remaining in the human sphere but to becoming sub-human. For persisting in something is to loose it: to loose that which was intended to be retained.
307. Those forces that manipulate the world, so that they can work undisturbed, want to accomplish two things: first and foremost that their existence be questioned, and if this does not work, they would at least like to appear undefeatable.
309. Disintegration can also be seen on the surface. The act of disintegration, however, is forever under the surface which makes it even more difficult to notice it.
310. The path leading to chaos is not yet chaotic, only in its ultimate phase. For, though a chaos-creating force is creating chaos in its course, it necessarily gets structured into dark order of things.
314. That which is in opposition to what transcends life, ultimately, is in opposition to what belongs to the domain of life - for life gets life from what transcends life.
315. As the forces of modernity first annihilate the connection with the supernatural and ruin man’s relationship with nature and only then destroy nature, in the same way they destroy the connection with what transcends life first and only then annihilate life itself.
317. First, only he who maintains his principles is considered a fool (though he is not), then it comes true that only the fool maintains his principles...
318. Those things which are usually referred to as superstitions are in fact innocent and harmless superstitions. The harming and harmful superstitions appear in totally different forms such as evolutionism, antihierarchical views, beliefs in the equality of mankind and as all those phenomena which, philosophically speaking, belong to the realm of humanism.
328. Modernity is the way to conformity - the way to conformity forever in the direction of the lowest.
329. Kali-yuga is characterised mainly by the passionate clinging to the continuous deterioration and disintegration of consciousness.
331. »Being devoured«: this is the fundamental word for what the rule of darkness realises; being devoured, which is followed by annihilation.
332. Kali-yuga is not merely a state but a threatening and devouring throat.
333. The disintegrating forces of darkness are living forces, living forces that bring death.
335. The forces of darkness can gain power in the world only because they have already gained power in the soul.
341. Kali-yuga is present in the consciousness, in the strict sense of the word, in the human psyche, in the spiritual manifestations and deeds of man, just as it is present in the surrounding world, in buildings, in music, in the different manifestations of artistic trends and in the very processes of nature. Wherever man directs his attention, be it inward or outward, he is everywhere surrounded and ruled by a world which is under the aegis of antitraditionality - that is being cut off from God, heaven, transcendence, superiority and the essence.
344. Modernity is not a stiffened, static reality, but a dynamic process, which is continuously working to make itself darker and darker.
361. Today’s man has gradually built a denatured world for himself: he has already been cut off from the supernatural, and now he is about to take leave of the natural.
364. The specific blindnesses of the dark age as a rule cloak themselves in rationalism.
366. A machine is demonic for it contributes to the emergence of a considerable alienation between producer, production and product - and this is always accompanied by an inner alienation.
377. Despite all its losing track, deterioration and dissipation, today’s world and the tendencies operating in it show one direction: the direction of nothingness.
381. The postmodern state, in which everything can be manifested without any real consequence, and in which everything will be free, but nothing will matter, must be accomplished before everything falls apart in postmodernity. Without this, the final disintegration will not come about, since there would always be left certain positive remnants.
404. As light magnetises certain insects, so spiritual darkness attracts the overwhelming majority of people.
427. Everything that is against the supernatural also turns, sooner or later, against the natural.
488. Liberalism not only represents the view according to which every man is equal (to one another), but it also does its best to abolish quality in order to make every men equal.
528. Modern culture is the culture of anti-spirituality and anti-traditionality. Consequently, it can only be considered as pseudo-culture, or rather, counter-culture. This term denotes counter-cultivation, that is, the cultivation of man and the world in such a way and to such a degree that they are continually becoming more fit to receive the dark instead of the light.
529. Counter-culture does not simply mean being a poor hand at culture or that man’s world is inundated with cheap things instead of higher values. The real meaning of counter-culture is that man and his world turn in a completely different direction to the one they ought to, since instead of dominating and cultivating the light, he dominates and cultivates the dark.
531. That which is called the Enlightenment today was, unambiguously, darkening; and exactly that which was dark in it resulted in it being called »Enlightenment«: the denial of the spirit.
533. Turning towards the earth clearly reveals darkening and decay. But how degenerated this [materialistic] view has become is really shown by the fact that it is called »Enlightenment« instead of »Endarkenment«.
[The contemporary manifestations of these kinds of processes at the time were similarly criticised by Plato, according to whom this attitude originated in »grievous ignorance which, however, appears to be the greatest discretion.« (Laws 886B).]
538. The bulk of negative processes and tendencies, be they communism, environmental pollution or economic crises, might be suppressed and reversed. However, there is one process which cannot be held back, and there is not even a wish to hold it back, namely, the rapidly increasing »not-anything-like-ness« or »not-any-kind-of-ness«.
738. Each world that has lost its origin-awareness is characterized by annihilation.
773. Since the return to the origin is only possible from well-ordered states, anti-traditional forces and powers primarily attack the internal and external order of man. This way they create such counter-conditions from which the return to the origin becomes impossible, or almost impossible.
So, you think you are an atheist?
To be a genuine atheist, one of the things you MUST believe is - that life originated by entirely, natural processes.
The questions below should make you ask yourself whether your belief in atheism is intellectually tenable?
Question 1.
Do you believe that life can self-generate from sterile matter (so-called abiogenesis)?
Yes or No?
If you answer yes, please go to Question 2.
If you answer no, please go to the footnote at bottom of this questionnaire.
Question 2.
Do you believe that matter is inherently predisposed (programmed) to develop life whenever conditions are conducive (suitable)?
Yes or No?
If you answer yes, please go to question 3.
If you answer no, please go back to question 1 and reconsider it.
Question 3.
Can you explain how an inherent predisposition for life originated in matter?
Yes or No?
If you answer yes, please go to question 4.
If you answer no, please go back and reconsider question 1.
Question 4.
Do you believe there is purpose or design in the universe?
Yes or No?
If you answer no, please go to question 5.
If you answer yes, you are certainly not a genuine atheist. You need to have a rethink.
Question 5.
Can you explain how matter can be inherently predisposed to self-generate life, if there is no purpose or design in the universe?
Yes or No?
If you answer no, you are not a genuine atheist. You need to have a rethink.
If you answer yes, please give your explanation in the comments section. But, before doing so, please read "Background to why atheism is definitely wrong about life and purpose in the universe." which is written below the following footnote...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - -
Footnote:
If your answer to question one is 'no', you are certainly not an atheist. Unlike atheists, you respect and agree with the following scientific laws and principles - so, well done!
The Law of Biogenesis. This well, established law has never been falsified, regardless of numerous attempts to do so. It tells us that life does not self-generate from sterile matter, under any circumstances.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is regarded as one of the premier laws of the universe, it tells us that the universe is subject to entropy. That the universe is running down towards an ultimate demise in energy potential and order. The self-generation of life requires an increase in order and complexity which violates the second law. The only way entropy can be temporarily halted or reversed is through an input of GUIDED energy.
Information Theory.
Life requires complex instructional and constructional information (which is encoded in DNA). Information Theory tells us that such information cannot arise of its own accord by purely, natural processes.
The Law of Cause and Effect.
An effect cannot be greater than its cause/s.
Whatever produced life (its cause), must be entirely adequate to produce it. That means, the original cause of life should not be inferior to it in any way. The cause of life should be capable of producing every property we observe in living things.
A random, or chance, interaction of energy and matter (or a 'big bang' explosion) cannot produce self-replicating cells, genetic information, or any of the qualities which are uniquely attributed to living things, such as intelligence, consciousness, creativeness, purpose, decision making, ideas and ideals.
____________________________________
Background: ‘Why atheism is definitely wrong about life and purpose in the universe.’ (If you answered 'yes' to question 5, please make sure you read this before commenting).
Is matter inherently predisposed to produce life on Earth, and elsewhere in the universe, whenever conditions permit it?
And if it is, where does that predisposition come from?
Atheists and most evolutionists believe life originated by entirely, natural processes. They believe, and present to the public as a scientific fact, the discredited notion of abiogenesis - which is life arising of its own volition (by natural, chemical processes) from sterile matter. This is similar to the ancient idea of spontaneous generation of life, which was a fairly common belief before it was soundly refuted by scientists such as Francesco Redi and Louis Pasteur.
Dedicated observational and experimental scientific research, over many centuries, resulted in the Law of Biogenesis. This law rules out the spontaneous generation of life (so-called abiogenesis) as impossible, it says that life only comes from existing life. This well, established law has never been falsified, regardless of numerous attempts to do so. It is now universally trusted as the reliable basis of medical and food hygiene, and it is confirmed by other branches of science, such as Information Theory, the Law of Entropy (based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics), the Laws of Probability and Law of Cause and Effect.
So, is it possible that chemistry or physics (the physical interaction of matter and energy) can produce biology?
The properties of biology and life are completely different to those of chemistry and physics. Life embodies, not just natural laws, as in physics and chemistry, but also complex, constructive information - stored and expressed through the DNA code. Biology has its own unique properties, such as self-replication, which chemistry and physics don’t possess.
The behaviour of natural things is entirely dependent on their inherent properties. They cannot behave in ways that exceed the limits dictated by their own properties. That is the essence of natural laws which describe the scope and limits of the behaviour of natural entities according to their intrinsic properties. For natural laws to change, or not be valid, the intrinsic properties of natural entities, on which they are based, would have to change.
It is a major problem for atheists to explain where natural laws came from, or why they exist?
In a PURPOSELESS universe there should be no regulatory principles at all.
Firstly, we would not expect anything to exist, we would expect eternal nothingness.
Secondly, even if we overlook that impossible hurdle, and assume by some amazing fluke and contrary to logic, something was able to create itself from nothing…. we would expect that the ‘something’ would have no ordered structure and no laws based on that ordered structure. We would expect it to behave randomly and chaotically.
This is an absolutely, fundamental question to which atheists have no answer. The basic properties of matter/energy, and the universe, scream …. ‘purpose’.
Atheists say the exact opposite.
Furthermore, as an effect cannot be greater than its cause, any proposed first, 'natural' cause, of the universe and life, would have to intrinsically embody the entire potential for the creation of natural laws, information, order, life, consciousness, intelligence etc.
What do atheists themselves say about this....
In a debate (available on youtube), the well known atheist, Richard Dawkins, while trying to describe the first cause (as being something coming from nothing), claimed, the something that he believed came from nothing, would have had to be something simple. Amazingly, he ignored the law of cause and effect which tells us the exact opposite, i.e. that the first cause could not be simple. It tells us that the first cause of everything HAD TO BE ADEQUATE (sufficient in every respect) to produce the effect. The effect, in this case the complex universe, life and intelligence, certainly isn't simple.
So, Dawkins believes the first cause can be inferior to the effect. Or, put more simply, he believes something, which came from nothing, can give what it doesn't possess - and he calls that science!
Atheist, Richard Dawkins tries to define 'nothing' as 'something'.
If we consider the atheist belief; that matter is naturally predisposed to produce life and the genetic information for life, whenever environmental conditions are conducive (so-called abiogenesis), the question that arises is; where does that predisposition for life come from, and why does such a property exist in a purposeless universe?
The idea that the origin of life is just an inevitable consequence of the right conditions – the right chemistry or interaction of matter and energy - is routinely presented by atheists and evolutionists as a scientific fact. They believe that is how life on Earth originated – and, also that life is likely to exist elsewhere in the universe, for the very same reason.
For this to be true, matter/energy would have to be inherently predisposed for the potential production of life, whenever conditions are conducive and - therefore, some sort of natural law/plan/blueprint for the creation of life would have to be an intrinsic property of matter. A basic principle of science (and common sense) is that an effect can never be greater than that which causes it. In this case the effect - LIFE - could not be greater than that which atheists allege caused it, i.e. the random interaction of matter and raw energy and chemical processes. So, there must be a directive principle existing as an intrinsic property of matter that endows it with the ability to create life.
Thus, atheists are left with an impossible dilemma – if life originates as a natural result of the inherent properties of matter, i.e. a natural predisposition for life, they must explain how that predisposition for life originates?
It would not be possible for matter to have such a property in a purposeless universe. Therefore, the atheist belief in a natural origin of life, denotes purpose in the universe which atheists deny. This then, is a classic catch 22 situation for atheists.
Atheists cannot have it both ways, if there is no purpose in the universe, matter cannot possibly have an inherent predisposition to produce life.
Thus, the atheist belief in ‘no purpose’ also means there is no possibility of a natural origin of life.
The denial of purpose negates a natural origin of life.
So, if atheists insist on claiming a natural origin of life, they are also obliged to admit to the existence of 'purpose' in the universe.
Therefore, either the idea of a purposeless universe is effectively debunked, or the idea of a natural origin of life is debunked - which is it?
Atheists can take their choice?
Either way, atheism is effectively debunked.
To believe in abiogenesis means that atheism is wrong.
To not believe in abiogenesis also means atheism is wrong.
Conclusion: atheism is wrong – period.
Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart said, "The most famous atheist is the one who can say the greatest absurdity with the straightest face."
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The real theory of everything.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/34295660211
Neo Darwinism - completely bonkers.
www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/35505679183
Evolutionism: The Religion That Offers Nothing.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=znXF0S6D_Ts&list=TLqiH-mJoVPB...
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FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE
The Law of Cause and Effect. Dominant Principle of Classical Physics. David L. Bergman and Glen C. Collins
www.thewarfareismental.net/b/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/b...
"The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict: (Updated Aug 3, 2017.) As documented below, trust in the big bang's predictive ability has been misplaced when compared to the actual astronomical observations that were made, in large part, in hopes of affirming the theory."
kgov.com/big-bang-predictions
Famous atheists starring in the image: Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot.
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Video clip:
Famous, militant atheist, Richard Dawkins tries to define 'nothing' as 'something', and is surprised and shocked when the audience sensibly reacts with laughter.
Toronto held its second anti-Trump protest in as many days outside of the U.S. Consulate General on University Avenue today. The rally was attended by thousands despite the frigid temperature. The anti-Trump protesters came from many walks of life: liberalists, left-wing and centrist people, Socialists, Communists, Black Lives Matter (BLM), labour unions, mainstream population and visible minorities, and groups from many religious groups.
Amsterdam, capital and largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the urban area and 2,480,394 in the metropolitan area. Located in the Dutch province of North Holland, Amsterdam is colloquially referred to as the "Venice of the North", for its large number of canals, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Amsterdam was founded at the mouth of the Amstel River, which was dammed to control flooding. Originally a small fishing village in the 12th century, Amsterdam became a major world port during the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, when the Netherlands was an economic powerhouse. Amsterdam was the leading centre for finance and trade, as well as a hub of secular art production. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city expanded and new neighborhoods and suburbs were built. The city has a long tradition of openness, liberalism, and tolerance. Cycling is key to the city's modern character, and there are numerous biking paths and lanes spread throughout.
Amsterdam's main attractions include its historic canals; the Rijksmuseum, the state museum with Dutch Golden Age art; the Van Gogh Museum; the Dam Square, where the Royal Palace of Amsterdam and former city hall are located; the Amsterdam Museum; Stedelijk Museum, with modern art; the Concertgebouw concert hall; the Anne Frank House; the Scheepvaartmuseum, the Natura Artis Magistra; Hortus Botanicus, NEMO, the red-light district and cannabis coffee shops. The city is known for its nightlife and festival activity, with several nightclubs among the world's most famous. Its artistic heritage, canals, and narrow canal houses with gabled façades, well-preserved legacies of the city's 17th-century Golden Age, have attracted millions of visitors annually.
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, founded in 1602, is considered the oldest "modern" securities market stock exchange in the world. As the commercial capital of the Netherlands and one of the top financial centres in Europe, Amsterdam is considered an alpha-world city. The city is the cultural capital of the Netherlands. Many large Dutch institutions have their headquarters in the city. Many of the world's largest companies are based here or have established their European headquarters in the city, such as technology companies Uber, Netflix, and Tesla. Although Amsterdam is the official capital of the Netherlands, it is not the seat of government. The main governmental institutions, and foreign embassies, are located in The Hague.
In 2022, Amsterdam was ranked the ninth-best city to live in by the Economist Intelligence Unit and 12th on quality of living for environment and infrastructure by Mercer. The city was ranked 4th place globally as a top tech hub in 2019. The Port of Amsterdam is the fifth largest in Europe. The KLM hub and Amsterdam's main airport, Schiphol, is the busiest airport in the Netherlands, third in Europe. The Dutch capital is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with about 180 nationalities represented. Immigration and ethnic segregation in Amsterdam is a current issue.
Amsterdam's notable residents throughout its history include painters Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh, 17th-century philosophers Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, René Descartes, and the Holocaust victim and diarist Anne Frank.
It was a time of troubles for the Tories. The Poll Tax had been enacted and Maggie had to explain her policies on TV...more than once.
Centaurea cyanus, commonly known as cornflower or bachelor's button, is an annual flowering plant in the family Asteraceae native to Europe. In the past, it often grew as a weed in cornfields (in the broad sense of "corn", referring to grains, such as wheat, barley, rye, or oats), hence its name. It is now endangered in its native habitat by agricultural intensification, particularly by over-use of herbicides. However, Centaurea cyanus is now also naturalised in many other parts of the world, including North America and parts of Australia through introduction as an ornamental plant in gardens and as a seed contaminant in crop seeds.
Description
Centaurea cyanus is an annual plant growing to 40–90 cm tall, with grey-green branched stems. The leaves are lanceolate and 1–4 cm long. The flowers are most commonly an intense blue colour and arranged in flowerheads (capitula) of 1.5–3 cm diameter, with a ring of a few large, spreading ray florets surrounding a central cluster of disc florets. The blue pigment is protocyanin, which in roses is red. Fruits are approx. 3.5 mm long with 2–3 mm long pappus bristles. It flowers all summer.
Distribution
Centaurea cyanus is native to temperate Europe, but is widely naturalized outside its native range.
It has been present in Britain and Ireland as an archaeophyte (ancient introduction) since the Iron Age. In the United Kingdom, it has declined from 264 sites to just 3 sites in the last 50 years.
In reaction to this, the conservation charity Plantlife named it as one of 101 species it would actively work to bring 'back from the brink'.
In the County Clare (VC H9) in Ireland, Centaurea cyanus is recorded in arable fields as very rare and almost extinct, while in the North-East of Ireland, it was abundant before the 1930s.
Genetics and breeding
Centaurea cyanus is a diploid flower (2n = 24). The genetic diversity within populations is high, although there could be a future decline in diversity due to population fragmentation and intensive agriculture. In general, Centaurea cyanus is a self-incompatible species. However, selfing still occurs occasionally, but results in inbreeding depression.
Cultivars
Several cultivars of Centaurea cyanus with varying pastel colours, including pink and purple, have been selected for ornamental purposes. The species is also grown for the cut flower industry in Canada for use by florists. Doubled blue cultivars (such as 'Blue Boy' or 'Blue Diadem') are most commonly used for this purpose, but white, pink, lavender and black (actually a very dark maroon) cultivars are also used, albeit to a lesser extent.
Breeding goals
As for all ornamental plants, important goals of Centaurea cyanus breeding include the induction of phenotypic variation (e.g. in flower coloration, size and shape, foliage characteristics or plant height), higher flower yield, resistance to pests and diseases as well as tolerance to abiotic stress (e.g., extreme temperatures, drought or salinity).
Ecology
Weed in arable crops
Centaurea cyanus is considered a noxious weed in arable crops, especially cereals and rapeseed. In winter wheat, one plant per m2 can cause a yield loss of up to 30 kg / ha. Centaurea cyanus produces around 800 seed per plant, which are either shed shortly before the harvest of cereals, or they are threshed together with the cereal grains, contributing to the further spread of the species by the harvesting machinery and contaminated seed. The occurrence of Centaurea cyanus strongly decreased during the last decades due to improved seed cleaning, more intensive nitrogen fertilization and herbicide use. However, Centaurea cyanus has become more common in cropland due to an increase in crop rotations dominated by winter cereals and rapeseed and the use of more selective herbicides with a low effectiveness against Centaurea cyanus. In addition, the emergence of resistance against the herbicide class of sulfonylureas has been reported recently. Due to its strong roots, Centaurea cyanus is difficult to control mechanically in spring.
Fodder for insects and birds
The pollen of Centaurea cyanus is used by several different insect species. Insects of the orders Hymenoptera and Diptera are particularly attracted by the flower. As Centaurea cyanus is a self-incompatible species, it needs external pollination. The nectar of Centaurea cyanus is very sweet with a sugar content of 34%. Due to its high sugar production of up to 0.2 mg sugar per day and flower, the species is highly appreciated by beekeepers.
The seeds of Centaurea cyanus are one of the favourite foods of the European goldfinch.
Control of insect pests
Centaurea cyanus was found to produce volatiles attracting Microplitis mediator, which is a major parasitoid of the cabbage moth (Mamestra brassicae), which is the most important pest of cabbage (Brassica oleracea) in central Europe. Planting Centaurea cyanus in cabbage fields as a companion plant was thus suggested as an alternative to the widespread use of insecticides to control Mamestra brassicae. Field experiments showed that planting Centaurea cyanus in cabbage fields at a density of 1 plant / m2 can result in a significant increase in parasitation of Mamestra brassicae larvae, predation of Mamestra brassicae eggs (e.g. by carabid beetles or spiders) and ultimately cabbage yield.
Cultivation
Soil and climate requirements
Centaurea cyanus requires full sun and neutral (pH 6.6–7.5) to mildly alkaline (pH 7.6–7.8), moist and well-drained soil. However, Centaurea cyanus is quite tolerant to drought once established.
Sowing
For summer-blooming plants, sowing should be executed in late spring. In moderate climates, however, it is also possible to sow Centaurea cyanus in early fall. In this case, plants will already start to flower in the following spring. Recommended spacing between plants is approx. 20 to 30 cm. Centaurea cyanus can germinate from up to 10 cm depth, but the best result is obtained at 1 cm sowing depth. Germination occurs quickly after sowing.
Fertilization and cultural practices
High phosphorus fertilization in mid-summer will increase flower production. Mulching is recommended to prevent drying out of the soil and exposure of the root system to the sun.
Pests and diseases
In general, Centaurea cyanus is not very susceptible to pests and plant diseases. However, it may be affected by stem rot and stem rust if grown too tightly or by powdery mildew. Furthermore, aphids and leafhoppers can cause relevant damage to Centaurea cyanus.
Seed harvesting
Seeds are harvested either by hand or, in an agricultural setting, with a seed harvesting machine. On average there are 97,000 seeds in a pound of cornflower seeds.
Hand collecting can be time-consuming and yields are rather low.
A seed harvesting machine is more efficient than collecting the seeds by hand, but it is costly. The main principle of such a machine is that it brushes the ripe seeds off the plant and creates a cross flow fan action that generates sufficient air velocity to hold and gather the seeds into the seed bunker.
Pruning
Deadheading will encourage the plant to produce more blooms. Cornflowers are often used for ornamental purposes and by cutting them, up to their third leaves, they will produce more blooms and grow a bigger stem.
Uses
The flowers of Centaurea cyanus can be eaten raw, dried or cooked. Dried petals are used in foods, including in spices. Their main purpose is to add colour to food. There are cheeses or oils that contain raw petals. Petals can also be added to salads, drinks, or desserts for garnishing purposes in raw or dried form.
Beverages
Dried petals are also used in teas and other beverages. Blue cornflower petals are sometimes one of the ingredients in Lady Grey tea.
Ornamental use
Centaurea cyanus is used as an ornamental plant. There are varieties with blue, white, purple, pink or even black petals.
Pigment
The blue color of Centaurea cyanus is due to protocyanin, an anthocyanin pigment that is also found in roses. Different anthocyanins derived from Centaurea cyanus are used as natural additives in food products, such as yoghurts.
Medicinal purpose
Centaurea cyanus contains a wide range of pharmacologically active compounds, such as flavonoids, anthocyanins and aromatic acids. Especially the flower head finds application in herbal medicine, but leaves and seeds are also used for pharmacological purposes, albeit to a lesser extent.
In particular, extracts from the flower heads have anti-inflammatory properties used in the treatment of minor ocular inflammations. Antioxidant properties are high due to ascorbic acid and phenolic compounds. Furthermore, extracts of the flower head and vegetative parts of the plant were shown to have gastroprotective effects due to their content of quercetin, apigenin and caffeic acid derivates.
Phytoremediation
Centaurea cyanus has been evaluated for phytoremediation of soils contaminated with lead. Inoculation of the contaminated soil with Glomus spp. (fungus) and Pseudomonas spp. (bacterium) would significantly enhance the biomass production and lead uptake of Centaurea cyanus.
Folklore and symbolism
In folklore, cornflowers were worn by young men in love; if the flower faded too quickly, it was taken as a sign that the man's love was not returned.
The blue cornflower was one of the national symbols of Germany. This is partly due to the story that when Queen Louise of Prussia was fleeing Berlin and pursued by Napoleon's forces, she hid her children in a field of cornflowers and kept them quiet by weaving wreaths for them from the flowers. The flower thus became identified with Prussia, not least because it was the same color as the Prussian military uniform. After the unification of Germany in 1871, it went on to become a symbol of the country as a whole. For this reason, in Austria the blue cornflower is a political symbol for pan-German and rightist ideas. It was worn as a secret symbol identifying members of the then-illegal NSDAP in Austria in the 1930s. Members of the Freedom Party wore it at the openings of the Austrian parliament since 2006. After the last general election 2017 they replaced it with the edelweiss.
It was also the favourite flower of Louise's son Kaiser Wilhelm I. Because of its ties to royalty, authors such as Theodor Fontane have used it symbolically, often sarcastically, to comment on the social and political climate of the time.
The cornflower is also often seen as an inspiration for the German Romantic symbol of the Blue Flower.
Due to its traditional association with Germany, the cornflower has been made the official symbol of the annual German-American Steuben Parade.
The blue cornflower has been the national flower of Estonia since 1969 and symbolizes daily bread to Estonians. It is also the symbol of the Estonian Conservative People's Party.
It is also the symbol of the Finnish National Coalition Party, and the Liberal People's Party of Sweden, where it has since the dawn of the 20th century been a symbol for social liberalism.
It is the official flower of the Swedish province of Östergötland and the school flower of Winchester College and also of Dulwich College, where it is said to have been the favourite flower of the founder, Edward Alleyn.
In France the bleuet de France is the symbol of the 11 November 1918 armistice and, as such, a common symbol for veterans (especially the now defunct poilus of World War I), similar to the Remembrance poppies worn in the United Kingdom and in Canada.
The cornflower is also the symbol for motor neurone disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Cornflowers are sometimes worn by Old Harrovians, former pupils of the British Harrow School.
A blue cornflower was used by Corning Glass Works for the initial release of Corning Ware Pyroceram cookware. Its popularity in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia was so high that it became the symbol of Corning Glass Works.
in these days Europe remembers the August days in former Czechoslovakia, when the Soviets and their allies (including DDR, East Germany) occupied this country to destroy all efforts of a liberal and human socialism, the so called Prague Spring with Alexander Dubcek.
time to remember Dubcek, the great and liberal Vaclav Havel, and also Jan Palach, the 20y old student from Melnik, who burned himself on Wenzels place in January 1969 to protest against the soviet occupation.
twenty years later the iron curtain began to fall down, and in 1990 I had the chance for my first visit in Prague and Bohemia. the begin of my deep love for this city and this country, with which my family is connected in several ways
the photos of this first visit are blurred, shots from diapositives,. but I like them as paintings of this exciting time, full of hope for democracy and liberalism in Europe. time to remember all this. and one can imagine the Prague during the socialist time, lots of renovated buildings, but also multiple decay of historic buildings.
during all my visits there I could watch the transformation to a renovated, colourful, vibrant, capitalistic and nowadays often overcrowded city. but I am still in love with Prague...
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1032a. Photo: Walter Wanger.
Blue-eyed American actor Henry Fonda (1905-1982) exemplified not only integrity and strength but an ideal of the common man fighting against social injustice and oppression. He is most remembered for his roles as Abe Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which he received an Academy Award Nomination, and more recently, Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981), for which he received an Oscar for Best Actor in 1982. Notably, he also played against character as the villain 'Frank' in Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western Once Upon A Time In The West (1968). Fonda is considered one of Hollywood's old-time legends and his lifelong career spanned almost 50 years.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1905. His parents were Elma Herberta (Jaynes) and William Brace Fonda, who worked in advertising and printing and was the owner of the W. B. Fonda Printing Company in Omaha, Nebraska. His distant ancestors were Italians who had fled their country around 1400 and moved to Holland, presumably because of political or religious persecution. In the early1600's, they crossed the Atlantic and were among the early Dutch settlers in America. They established a still-thriving small town in upstate New York named Fonda, named after patriarch Douw Fonda, who was later killed by Indians. In 1919, young Henry was a first-hand witness to the Omaha race riots and the brutal lynching of Will Brown. This enraged the 14-year-old Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for the rest of his life. Following graduation from high school in 1923, Henry got a part-time job in Minneapolis with the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company which allowed him at first to pursue journalistic studies at the University of Minnesota. In 1925, having returned to Omaha, Henry reevaluated his options and came to the conclusion that journalism was not his forte, after all. For a while, he tried his hand at several temporary jobs, including as a mechanic and a window dresser. At age 20, Fonda started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse, when his mother's friend Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon Brando) recommended that he try out for a juvenile part in You and I, in which he was cast as Ricky. Then he received the lead in Merton of the Movies and realized the beauty of acting as a profession. It allowed him to deflect attention from his own tongue-tied personality and create stage characters relying on someone else's scripted words. The play and its star received fairly good notices in the local press. It ran for a week, and for the rest of the repertory season, Henry advanced to assistant director which enabled him to design and paint sets as well as act. A casual trip to New York, however, had already made him set his sights on Broadway. In 1926, he moved to the Cape Cod University Players, where he met his future wife Margaret Sullavan. His first professional role was in The Jest, by Sem Benelli. James Stewart joined the Players a few months after Fonda left, but he would become his closest lifelong friend. In 1928, Fonda went east to New York to be with Margaret Sullavan, and to expand his theatrical career on Broadway. His first Broadway role was small in A Game of Love and Death with Alice Brady and Claude Rains. Henry played leads opposite Margaret Sullavan, who became the first of his five wives in 1931. They broke up in 1933. In 1934, he got a break of sorts, when he was given the chance to present a comedy sketch with Imogene Coca in the Broadway revue New Faces. That year, he also hired Leland Hayward as his personal management agent and this was to pay off handsomely. Major Broadway roles followed, including New Faces of America and The Farmer Takes a Wife. The following year he married Frances Seymour Brokaw with whom he had two children: Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, who also became screen stars.
The 29-year old Henry Fonda was persuaded by Leland Hayward to become a Hollywood actor, despite initial misgivings and reluctance on Henry's part. Independent producer Walter Wanger, whose growing stock company was birthed at United Artists, needed a star for The Farmer Takes a Wife (Victor Fleming, 1935) opposite Janet Gaynor. I.S. Mowis at IMDb: “With both first choice actors Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea otherwise engaged, Henry was the next available option. After all, he had just completed a successful run on Broadway in the stage version. The cheesy publicity tagline for the picture was 'you'll be fonder of Fonda', but the film was an undeniable hit.” Wanger, realizing he had a good thing going, next cast Henry in a succession of A-grade pictures which capitalized on his image as the sincere, unaffected country boy. Pick of the bunch were the Technicolor outdoor Western The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Henry Hathaway, 1936) with Sylvia Sidney, and the gritty Depression-era drama You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) with Henry as a back-to-the-wall good guy forced into becoming a fugitive from the law by circumstance). Then followed the screwball comedy The Moon's Our Home (William A. Seiter, 1936) with ex-wife Margaret Sullavan, the excellent pre-civil war-era romantic drama Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) featuring Bette Davis, and the Western Jesse James ( Henry King, 1939) starring Tyrone Power. Fonda rarely featured in comedy, except for a couple of good turns opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney - with both he shared excellent on-screen chemistry - in The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and the successful Rings on Her Fingers (Rouben Mamoulian, 1942). Henry gave his best screen performance to date in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939), a fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case. Henry made two more films with director John Ford: the pioneering drama Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) with Claudette Colbert, and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. In his career-defining role as Tom Joad, Fonda played the archetypal grassroots American trying to stand up against oppression. His relationship with Ford would end on the set of Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) when he objected to Ford's direction of the film. Ford punched Fonda and had to be replaced.
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) set the tone for Henry Fonda’s subsequent career. In this vein, he gave a totally convincing, though historically inaccurate, portrayal in the titular role of The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940), a rare example of a sequel improving upon the original. He projected integrity and quiet authority whether he played lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) or a reluctant posse member in The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943). In between these two films, Fonda enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, and served in the Navy for three years. He then starred in The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947), and Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), as a rigid Army colonel, along with John Wayne and Shirley Temple in her first adult role. In the following years, he did not appear in many films. Fonda was one of the most active, and most vocal, liberal Democrats in Hollywood. During the 1930s, he had been a founding member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, formed in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. In 1947, in the middle of the McCarthy witch hunt, he moved to New York, not returning to Hollywood until 1955. His son Peter Fonda writes in his autobiography Don't Tell Dad: A Memoir (1999) that Henry's liberalism caused him to be grey-listed during the early 1950s. Fonda returned to Broadway to play the title role in Mister Roberts for which he won the Tony Award as best dramatic actor. In 1979, he won a second special Tony and was nominated for a Tony Award for Clarence Darrow (1975). Later he played a juror committed to the ideal of total justice in 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) which he also produced, and a nightclub musician wrongly accused of murder in The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). During the next decade, he played in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton a.o., 1962), How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, 1962) and as a poker-playing grifter in the Western comedy A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook, 1966) with Joanne Woodward. A big hit was the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours (Melville Shavelson, 1968), in which he co-starred with Lucille Ball. The same year, just to confound those who would typecast him, he gave a chilling performance as one of the coldest, meanest stone killers ever to roam the West, in Sergio Leone's Western epic C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) opposite Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale. With James Stewart, he teamed up in Firecreek (Vincent McEveety, 1968), where Fonda again played the heavy, and the Western comedy The Cheyenne Social Club (Gene Kelly, 1970). Despite his old feud with John Ford, Fonda spoke glowingly of the director in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary Directed by John Ford (1971). Fonda refused to participate until he learned that Ford had insisted on casting Fonda as the lead in the film version of Mr. Roberts (1955), reviving Fonda's film career after concentrating on the stage for years. Illness curtailed Fonda’s work in the 1970s. In 1976, Fonda returned to the screen in the World War II blockbuster Midway (Jack Smight, 1976) with Charlton Heston. Fonda finished the 1970s in several disaster films with all-star casts: the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli/Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis, 1977), Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977) with Richard Widmark, the killer bee action film The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978), the global disaster film Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979), with Sean Connery, and the Canadian production City on Fire (Alvin Rakoff, 1979), which also featured Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. His final screen role was as an octogenarian in On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell, 1981), in which Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane joined him. It finally won him an Oscar on the heels of an earlier Honorary Academy Award. Too ill to attend the ceremony, Henry Fonda died soon after at the age of 77. He left a lasting legacy matched by few of his peers. His later wives were Susan Blanchard (1950-1956), Leonarda Franchetti (1957-1961) and Shirlee Fonda (1965- till his death in 1982). With Blanchard, he had a daughter, Amy Fishman (1953). His grandchildren are the actors Bridget Fonda, Justin Fonda, Vanessa Vadim and Troy Garity.
Sources: Laurence Dang (IMDb), I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
French postcard by E.D.U.G., no. 125. Photo: publicity still for Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959).
Tall, well built and ruggedly handsome American actor Charlton Heston (1923-2008) appeared in 100 Hollywood films over the course of 60 years. With features chiselled in stone, he became famous for playing a long list of historical figures, particularly in Biblical epics.
His film debut was in the film noir Dark City (1950). His breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Heston became an icon for portraying Moses in the hugely successful film The Ten Commandments (1956). Furthermore, he is best known for his roles in Orson Welles' widely acclaimed film noir Touch of Evil (1958), Ben-Hur (1959) - for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, El Cid (1961), and Planet of the Apes (1968).
These starring roles gave the actor a grave, authoritative persona and embodied responsibility, individualism and masculinity. Heston rejected scripts that did not emphasize those virtues. He was a supporter of Democratic politicians and civil rights in the 1960s, but eventually he rejected liberalism, founded a conservative political action committee and supported Ronald Reagan. Heston's most famous role in politics came as the five-term president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003. In 2001, Heston made a cameo appearance as an elderly, dying chimpanzee in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
Back to Ashton Moss to catch 66722 "Sir Edward Watkin" on 6J46 (08:50 Peak Forest Cemex to Salford Hope Street Peakstone). I wouldn't normally bother too much about plain liveried GBRf locos, but there was a strong local connection with this one. Sir Edward Watkin was born in 1819 in Salford, and after working in his father's cotton mill, he became involved in the burgeoning railway business in 1845 as secretary to the Trent Valley Railway. The LNWR bought this company in 1846, whereupon Watkin became assistant to Captain Mark Huish, the autocratic general manager of the LNWR. Watkin was ambitious and by 1854 Watkin himself was general manger of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, which was later transformed into the Great Central Railway when it embarked on construction of the "London Extension". He was also closely involved with other railway companies, such as the Cheshire Lines Committee, Great Eastern Railway, the Metropolitan Railway, the South Eastern Railway and New York, Lake Erie and Western among others. He was closely involved with planning a tunnel under the English Channel, his vision being to create a railway between Paris and Manchester. He was involved in politics, being affiliated with the Manchester Liberalism movement, and was an MP for Great Yarmouth, then later on Stockport. He was knighted in 1868, became a baronet in 1880 and was re-elected as an MP for Hythe in 1874. Watkin passed away in 1901 and was buried in Northenden.
The track that 66722 was travelling on used to be part of the Oldham, Ashton & Guide Bridge Junction Railway, another company that Watkin was involved with. The company was jointly owned by the MS&LR and LNWR and survived until 1948, albeit owned by the successors of those companies, the LNER and LMS.
(for further pictures and information please contact the link at the end of page!)
Maria Theresa monument Maria Theresa monument in Vienna
Maria Theresa Square
The Maria Theresa monument is the most important ruler monument of the Habsburg monarchy in Vienna. It is reminiscent of the Empress Maria Theresa, who ruled from 1740 to 1780, and is since 1888 on the Maria Theresa Square on the Vienna ring road (Castle Square - Burgring) between the then Imperial Museums, in 1891 opened the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) and in 1889 opened the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum), in front of the background of the Museum Quarter, then the imperial stables. This by Tritons and Najad Fountains accompanied Ensemble monument counts to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Vienna.
Historical Background View from the top (2010)
The Empire of Austria in 1859 and 1866 lost Lombardy and Veneto to the new Kingdom of Italy. It was in 1866 forced to resigne after the defeat of the German war, the Prussians had triggered by violation of the rules of the German Confederation from Germany, which in 1871 was constituted as German Empire under a new empire. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph I. in Compromise with Hungary had to agree to the formal division of the empire into a ruled from Vienna cisleithanian and ruled from Budapest transleithanian half of the Empire, with Hungary increasingly presenting itself not as a part of the empire, but as a largely independent state. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitha
During the World Exhibition 1873 in Vienna an economic crisis had occurred, the "founders' crash - Gründerkrach" that devalued liberalism as the leading political movement and new mass parties, for the time being, the Christian Social Party, and later the Social Democrats, putting forth. In addition, more and more national movements were felt in the multiethnic state. Those centrifugal and the imperial power eroding tendencies one would counteract by patriotic appeals to splendor and glory of the empire. At the since 1858 under construction and in 1865 opened new Vienna ring road around the old town was offered the chance. On the Maria Theresa Square the center facing adjoining Heldenplatz outside the Hofburg in 1860 and 1865 monuments of the two most important generals of the monarchy were built. For the Maria Theresa square, which with the Heldenplatz should form an Imperial Forum, it was a good occasion to erect a monument to the historical mother of the nation. She had by her marriage to Francis Stephen of Lorraine and his election as emperor, the Roman-German Empire brought back to Vienna and the continuation of the dynasty, now as House of Habsburg-Lorraine, secured. She referred to a time when the development of the monarchy was not dependent on any political party nor on national political considerations, but by the wisdom of the rulers. Her reputation and popularity should radiate to the current empire.
The monument Gypsum model of a draft of the monument Maria Theresa surrounded by the allegories of the cardinal virtues For the execution of the sculptures in 1874 the three sculptors Johannes Benk, Carl Kundmann and Caspar Zumbusch submitted designs. Emperor Franz Joseph I decided for Zumbusch, with his student Anton Brenek around 13 years working on the bronze sculptures, which have a total weight of 44 tons. Carl von Hasenauer designed the architecture of the monument. With the base, the monument covers an area of 632 square meters and is 19.36 m high, on top the seated figure of the Empress with 6 m height. Base and chain pedestal consist of Mauthausen granite from Enghagen in Upper Austria, pedestal and base of brown hornblende granite from Petersburg-Jeschitz at Pilsen in the Czech Republic, the columns of serpentinite from Wiesen near Sterzing in South Tyrol. The program's content for the monument came from Alfred von Arneth, director of the Imperial House, Court and State Archives. The monarch herself sits on her throne at the top, in the left hand a scepter and the Pragmatic Sanction, the State and the Constitutional Treaty, her allowing the rule in the Habsburg lands as woman, saluting with the right hand the people. Around the throne on the cornice are sitting as allegorical personifications of the cardinal virtues of justice, strength, gentleness and wisdom four female figures.
At the four sides of the base each is located a circular field with a relief and before that a freestanding statue in thematic context: The consultants of the Archduchess are represented by Wenzel Anton Kaunitz as a statue and Johann Christoph von Bartenstein, Gundakar Thomas Graf Starhemberg and Florimond Claude of Mercy-Argenteau in relief, the background shows the Gloriette in the garden of Schonbrunn Palace. For the administration stand Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz (statue) and Antal Grassalkovich I, Samuel Brukenthal, Paul Joseph of Riegger, Karl Anton von Martini and Joseph von Sonnenfels in a consulting room in the Imperial Palace. For the military stand Joseph Wenzel I (statue) with Franz Moritz von Lacy, Andreas Hadik of Futak and Franz Leopold of Nádasdy in front of the castle in Wiener Neustadt, in which in 1752 the Theresa Military Academy was established. Science and art are represented by the physician Gerard van Swieten (statue), the numismatist Joseph Hilarius Eckhel, the historian György Pray and the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn and the as child represented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in front of the Old University. Consultants Management Military Science and Art On the diagonal axes surround equestrian statues of four commanders from the era of Maria Theresa the monument: Leopold Joseph von Daun (1705-1766), Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller (1683-1744), Gideon Ernst von Laudon (1717-1790) and Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg and Traun (1677-1748). Leopold Joseph von Daun Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller Gideon Ernst von Laudon Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg and Traun Open base during the renovation (2008).
The monument is being totally renovated since October 2008. In a first step, the base whose granite cladding and the foundation were restored. Under the monument in the course of the work a 600-square-foot brick vault was discovered as a supporting structure that is similar to already known components underneath the equestrian statues on Heroes' Square. In a second step, the stone and metal surfaces are being rehabilitated until probably October 2013.
Reception The monument in 1888 Maria Theresa Square in 1900
(best viewed in Large)
19 june, 2010
Centaurea cyanus (Cornflower, Bachelor's button, Bluebottle, Boutonniere flower, Hurtsickle, Cyani flower) is a small annual flowering plant in the family Asteraceae, native to Europe. "Cornflower" is also erroneously used for chicory, and more correctly for a few other Centaurea species; to distinguish C. cyanus from these it is sometimes called Common Cornflower. It may also be referred to as basketflower, though the term properly refers to the Plectocephalus group of Centaurea, which is probably a distinct genus.
It is an annual plant growing to 16-35 inches tall, with grey-green branched stems. The leaves are lanceolate, 1-4 cm long. The flowers are most commonly an intense blue colour, produced in flowerheads (capitula) 1.5-3 cm diameter, with a ring of a few large, spreading ray florets surrounding a central cluster of disc florets. The blue pigment is protocyanin, which in roses is red.
In the past it often grew as a weed in crop fields, hence its name (fields growing grains such as wheat, barley, rye, or oats were formerly known as "corn fields" in England). It is now endangered in its native habitat by agricultural intensification, particularly over-use of herbicides, destroying its habitat; in the United Kingdom it has declined from 264 sites to just 3 sites in the last 50 years. In reaction to this, the conservation charity Plantlife named it as one of 101 species it would actively work to bring 'Back from the Brink'. It is also, however, through introduction as an ornamental plant in gardens and a seed contaminant in crop seeds, now naturalised in many other parts of the world, including North America and parts of Australia.
In folklore, cornflowers were worn by young men in love; if the flower faded too quickly, it was taken as a sign that the man's love was not returned.
In herbalism, a decoction of cornflower is effective in treating conjunctivitis, and as a wash for tired eyes.
The blue cornflower has been the national flower of Estonia since 1968 and symbolizes daily bread to Estonians. It is also the symbol of the Estonian political party, People's Union, the Finnish political party, National Coalition Party, and the Swedish political party, Liberal People's Party, and has since the dawn of the 20th century been a symbol for social liberalism there. It is the official flower of the Swedish province of Östergötland.
The blue cornflower is also one of the national flowers of Germany. This is partly due to the story that when Queen Louise of Prussia was fleeing Berlin and pursued by Napoleon's forces, she hid her children in a field of cornflowers and kept them quiet by weaving wreaths for them from the flowers. The flower thus became identified with Prussia, not least because it was the same color as the Prussian military uniform. After the unification of Germany in 1875, it went on to became a symbol of the country as a whole. For this reason, in Austria the blue cornflower is a political symbol for pan-German and rightist ideas. Members of the Freedom Party wore it at the opening of the Austrian parliament in 2005.
It was also the favourite flower of Louise's son Kaiser Wilhelm I. Because of its ties to royalty, authors such as Theodor Fontane have used it symbolically, often sarcastically, to comment on the social and political climate of the time.
The cornflower is also often seen as an inspiration for the German Romantic symbol of the Blue Flower.
In France it is the symbol of the 11th November 1918 armistice and, as such, a common symbol for veterans (especially the now defunct poilus of World War I), similar to the poppies worn in the United Kingdom and in Canada.
The cornflower is also the symbol for motor neurone disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
It was the favorite flower of John F. Kennedy and was worn by his son, John F. Kennedy, Jr. at his wedding in tribute to his father.
Cornflowers were also used in the funeral wreath made for Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
(Wikipedia)
One of the police horses appeared to have a foot problem, which was being checked by its rider.
Toronto held its second anti-Trump protest in as many days outside of the U.S. Consulate General on University Avenue today. The rally was attended by thousands despite the frigid temperature. The anti-Trump protesters came from many walks of life: liberalists, left-wing and centrist people, Socialists, Communists, Black Lives Matter (BLM), labour unions, mainstream population and visible minorities, and groups from many religious groups.
The French Communist Party (PCF) has been a part of the political scene in France since 1920, peaking in strength around the end of World War II. It originated when a majority of members resigned from the socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) party to set up the French Section of the Communist International (SFIC). The SFIO had been divided over support for French participation in World War I and over whether to join the Communist International (Comintern). The new SFIC defined itself as revolutionary and democratic centralist. Ludovic-Oscar Frossard was its first secretary-general, and Ho Chi Minh was also among the founders. Frossard himself resigned in 1923, and the 1920s saw a number of splits within the party over relations with other left-wing parties and over adherence to the Communist International's dictates. The party gained representation in the French parliament in successive elections, but also promoted strike action and opposed colonialism. Pierre Sémard, leader from 1924 to 1928, sought party unity and alliances with other parties; but leaders including Maurice Thorez (party leader from 1930 to 1964) imposed a Stalinist line from the late 1920s, leading to loss of membership through splits and expulsions, and reduced electoral success. With the rise of Fascism this policy shifted after 1934, and the PCF supported the Popular Front, which came to power under Léon Blum in 1936. The party helped to secure French support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and opposed the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler. During this period the PCF adopted a more patriotic image, and favoured an equal but distinct role for women in the communist movement.The party was banned in 1939 on the outbreak of World War II. Under Comintern direction the PCF opposed the war and may have sabotaged arms production. The leadership, threatened with execution, fled abroad. After the German invasion of 1940 the party failed to persuade the occupiers to legalise its activities, and while denouncing the war as a struggle between imperialists, began to organise opposition to the occupation. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union the next year, the Comintern declared Germany to be an enemy, and the PCF expanded its anti-German activities, forming the National Front movement within the broader Resistance and organising direct action and political assassinations through the armed Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) group. At the same time the PCF began to work with de Gaulle's "Free France", the London-based government in exile, and later took part in the National Council of the Resistance (CNR).Although the PCF opposed de Gaulle's formation of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the following years saw a rapprochement with other left-wing forces and an increased strength in parliament. With Waldeck Rochet as its new secretary-general, the party supported François Mitterrand's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1965 and started to move apart to a limited extent from the Soviet Union. During the student riots and strikes of May 1968, the party supported the strikes while denouncing the revolutionary student movements. After heavy losses in the ensuing parliamentary elections, the party adopted Georges Marchais as leader and in 1973 entered into a "Common Programme" alliance with Mitterrand's reconstituted Socialist Party (PS). Under the Common Programme, however, the PCF steadily lost ground to the PS, a process that continued after Mitterrand's victory in 1981.Initially allotted a minor share in Mitterrand's government, the PCF resigned in 1984 as the government turned towards fiscal orthodoxy. Under Marchais the party continued loyal to the Soviet Union up to its fall in 1991, and made little move towards "Eurocommunism". Extensive reform of the party's structure and policies had to wait until 1994, when Robert Hue became leader. The party's renunciation of much traditional communist dogma after this did little to stem its declining popularity, although it entered government again in 1997 as part of the Plural Left coalition. Elections in 2002 gave worse results than ever for the PCF, now led by Marie-George Buffet. Under Buffet, the PCF turned away from parliamentary strategy and sought broader social alliances. It condemned the Nicolas Sarkozy government's response to riots in 2005 and adopted a more militant stance towards the European Union. Buffet's attempt to stand in the 2007 presidential election as a common candidate of the "anti-liberal left" had little success. To maintain a presence in parliament after 2007 the party's few remaining deputies had to group together with those from The Greens and others to create the Democratic and Republican Left (GDR). Subsequently a broader electoral coalition, the Left Front (FG), was formed including the PCF, Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Left Party (PG), United Left, and others. The FG has continued up to the present and has brought the French communists somewhat better electoral results, at the price of some tension within the party and with other parties in the FG. With Pierre Laurent as leader since 2010, in a symbolic move the party no longer includes the hammer and sickle logo on its membership cards.The French Communist Party was founded in December 1920 by a split in the socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO), led by the majority of party members who supported membership in the Communist International (or "Komintern") founded in 1919 by Lenin after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.The outbreak of World War I in 1914 sparked tensions within the SFIO, when a majority of the SFIO took what left-wing socialists called a "social-chauvinist" line in support of the French war effort. Gradually, anti-war factions gained in influence in the party and Ludovic-Oscar Frossard was elected general secretary in October 1918. Additionally, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia aroused hope for a similar communist revolution in France among some SFIO members.After the war, the issue of membership in the new Communist International became a major issue for the SFIO. In the spring of 1920, Frossard and Marcel Cachin, director of the party newspaper L'Humanité, were commissioned to meet with Bolshevik leaders in Russia. They observed the second congress of the Communist International, during the course of which Vladimir Lenin set out the 21 conditions for membership. When they returned, Frossard and Cachin recommended that the party join the Communist International.At the SFIO's Tours Congress in December 1920, this opinion was supported by the left-wing faction (Boris Souvarine, Fernand Loriot) and the 'centrist' faction (Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, Marcel Cachin), but opposed by the right-wing faction (Léon Blum). This majority option won three quarters of the votes from party members at the congress. The pro-Kominterm majority founded a new party, known as the French Section of the Communist International (Section française de l'Internationale communiste, SFIC), which accepted the strict conditions for membership.
A majority of socialist parliamentarians and local officeholders were opposed to membership, particularly because of the Communist International's strict democratic centralism and its denunciation of parliamentarianism. These members went on to form a rump SFIO, which had a much smaller membership than the SFIC but which could count on a strong base of officeholders and parliamentarians.The founders of the SFIC took with them the party paper L'Humanité, founded by Jean Jaurès in 1904, which remained tied to the party until the 1990s. In the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) trade unions, the Communist minority split away to form the United General Confederation of Labour (CGTU) in 1922.The new communist party defined itself as a revolutionary party, which used legal as well as clandestine or illegal means. The party organization was run under strict democratic centralist precepts, until the 1990s: the minority factions were compelled to follow the majority faction, any organized factions or contrary opinions were forbidden, while membership was tightly controlled and dissidents often purged from the party.Ho Chi Minh, who would create the Viet Minh in 1941 and then declare the independence of Vietnam, was one of its founding members.In its early years, as the communists fought the SFIO for control of the French left, the new party was weakened and marginalized by a series of splits and expulsions.The "bolshevization" or stalinization imposed by the Communist International, as well as Zinoviev's power over the Communist International, led to internal crises. "Bolshevization" implied not only the adoption of the political strategy of the Communist International but a reorganization of party's structure on the model of the Bolsheviks (discipline, local organization under the shape of "cells", ascent of a young political staff which came from the working-class).The first secretary-general of the PCF, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, was often reluctant to obey the directives of the Communist International. Indeed, the party leadership was opposed to the strategy of the "proletarian unique front". Furthermore, one of Frossard's internal opponents, Boris Souvarine, was a member of the secretariat of the Communist International. Frossard resigned and left the PCF in 1923 to found a dissident United Communist Party which later became the Communist Socialist Party (but Frossard himself rejoined the SFIO). The general secretariat of the Party was shared by Louis Sellier (center faction) and Albert Treint (left-wing faction). At the same time, Boris Souvarine was expelled from the Communist International and the PCF due to his sympathy for Leon Trotsky.
In the 1924 legislative election, the PCF won 9.8% of the vote and 26 seats, considerably weaker than the SFIO. But under the leadership of the left-wing faction, priority was given to general strikes and revolutionary actions rather than elections. In the French Parliament, the PCF's first elected deputies were opposed to the Cartel des Gauches coalition formed by the SFIO and the Radical Party, which governed between 1924 to 1926.In order to reconcile the various factions of the party, Pierre Sémard, railroad worker and union activist, was chosen as the new secretary-general. He wanted to put an end to sectarianism, which was criticized by communist officeholders and leaders of the CGTU. Most notably, he proposed alliances with other left-wing parties (including the SFIO) in order to combat fascism. This strategy was criticized by the board of the Communist International as "parliamentarist". At the same time, the party campaigned against French colonialism in Morocco (the Rif War), leading to the detention of some PCF members, including Sémard. On his release from prison, he became more and more controversial. Only 11 PCF candidates were elected in the Chamber of Deputies in the 1928 election, although the PCF increased its support to 11%.
In 1927, in the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin sidelined his opponents (Zinoviev, Kamenev and Leon Trotsky) and imposed a strict "class against class" line on the Communist International. In France, a Stalinist committee took control of the PCF . Its most influential figures came from the Communist Youth, notably Henri Barbé and Pierre Célor. They applied the "class against class" political line of the Communist International, denouncing social democracy and the SFIO as akin to bourgeois parties. Simultaneously, the new leadership purged dissidents, like Louis Sellier, former secretary-general, who created the Worker and Peasant Party, which merged with the Communist Socialist Party to form the Party of Proletarian Unity (PUP). By the end of the 1920s, the party contained fewer than 30,000 members.
The collegial leadership of the party was divided between young leaders and more experienced politicians. The secretary for organization, Maurice Thorez, was chosen as the new secretary-general in 1930. In 1931, Barbé and Celor were accused of responsibility for excesses in the "class against class" strategy. Nonetheless, the strategy was continued.Indeed, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, which affected France beginning in 1931, caused much anxiety and disturbance, as in other countries. As economic liberalism failed, many were eagerly looking for new solutions. Technocratic ideas were born during this time (Groupe X-Crise), as well as autarky and corporatism in the fascist movement, which advocated union of workers and employers. Some members were attracted to these new ideas, most notably Jacques Doriot. A member of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern from 1922 onwards, and from 1923 onwards the secretary of the French Federation of Young Communists, later elected to the French Chamber of Deputies from Saint-Denis, he came to advocate an alliance between the Communists and SFIO. Doriot was then expelled in 1934, and with his followers. Afterwards he moved sharply to the right and formed the French Popular Party, which would be one of the most collaborationist parties during the Vichy regime.
The PCF was the main organizer of a counter-exhibition to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, called "The Truth about the Colonies". In the first section, it recalled Albert Londres and André Gide's critics of forced labour in the colonies and other crimes of the New Imperialism period; in the second section, it contrasted imperialist colonialism to "the Soviets' policy on nationalities". In 1934 the Tunisian Federation of the PCF became the Tunisian Communist Party.[2]
The PCF suffered substantial loses in the 1932 election, winning only 8% of the vote and 10 seats. The 1932 election saw the victory of another Cartel des gauches. This time, although the PCF did not participate in the coalition, it supported the government from the outside (soutien sans participation), similar to how the Socialists, prior to the First World War, had supported republican and Radical governments without participating.The Communist Party attracted various intellectuals and artists in the 1920s, including André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, Henri Lefebvre (who would be expelled in 1958), Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and others.This second Cartel coalition fell following the far-right 6 February 1934 riots, which forced Radical Prime Minister Édouard Daladier to cede power to the conservative Gaston Doumergue. Following this crisis, the PCF, like the whole of the socialist movement, feared that France was on the verge of fascist takeover. Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 and the destruction of the Communist Party of Germany following the 27 February 1933 Reichstag fire led Moscow and Stalin to change course, and adopt the popular front strategy whereby communists were to form anti-fascist coalitions with their erstwhile socialist and bourgeois enemies. Maurice Thorez spearheaded the formation of an alliance with the SFIO, and later the Popular Front in 1936.
During the Popular Front era (after 1934) the PCF rapidly grew in size and influence, its growth fueled by the popularity of the Comintern's Popular Front strategy, which allowed an anti-fascist alliance with the SFIO and the Radical Party. The PCF made substantial gains in the 1934 cantonal elections and established themselves as the dominant political force in working-class municipalities surrounding Paris (the Red Belt) in the 1935 municipal elections.
The Popular Front won the 1936 elections; the PCF itself made major gains - taking 15.3% and 72 seats. SFIO leader Léon Blum formed a Socialist-Radical government, supported from the outside by the PCF. However, the Popular Front government soon collapsed under the strains of domestic financial problems (including inflation) and foreign policy issues (the radicals opposed intervention in the Spanish Civil War while the socialists and communists were in favour), and was replaced by a moderate government led by Édouard Daladier.
As the only major communist party in western Europe that was still legal, the PCF played a major role in supporting the Spanish Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, alongside the Soviet Union. Blum's government officially maintained a neutral policy of non-intervention, but in practice his government ensured the safe passage of aid and Soviet weapons to the besieged Spanish republicans. The PCF often played a major role in such actions, and it sent a number of French volunteers to fight for the republicans in the International Brigades. At the end of the conflict, the PCF organized humanitarian aid for Spanish refugees.
The PCF's 72 deputies (along with only three others) opposed the ratification of the Munich Accords, signed by Daladier and Neville Chamberlain. The PCF believed that the accords would allow Hitler to turn his attention eastwards, towards the Soviet Union.
On 12 August 1936, a party organization was formed in Madagascar, the Communist Party (French Section of the Communist International) of the Region of Madagascar.[3]
New social positions[edit]
The cross-class coalition of the Popular Front forced the Communists to accept some bourgeois cultural norms they had long ridiculed.[4] These included patriotism, the veterans' sacrifice, the honor of being an army officer, the prestige of the bourgeois, and the leadership of the Socialist Party and the parliamentary Republic. Above all the Communists portrayed themselves as French nationalists. Young Communists dressed in costumes from the revolutionary period and the scholars glorified the Jacobins as heroic predecessors.The Communists in the 1920s saw the need to mobilize young women, but saw them as auxiliaries to male organizations. In the 1930s there was a new model, of a separate but equal role for women. The Party set up the Union des Jeunes Filles de France (UJFF) to appeal to young working women through publications and activities geared to their interests. The Party discarded its original notions of Communist femininity and female political activism as a gender-neutral revolutionary. It issued a new model more attuned to the mood of the late 1930s and one more acceptable to the middle class elements of the Popular Front. It now portrayed the ideal Young Communist as a paragon of moral probity with her commitment to marriage and motherhood, and gender-specific public activism.Under Buffet's leadership after 2003, the PCF shifted away from the PS and Hue's mutation. Instead, it attempted to actively reach out to and embrace social movements, trade unions and non-communist activists as a strategy to counter the PCF's decline. The party sought to create a broader alliance including 'anti-liberal' and anti-capitalist actors from civil society or trade unions.One of the shifts in the PCF's strategy after 2003 came in the form of a more militant Euroscepticism (in 2001, the PCF had only abstained rather than voted against the Treaty of Nice while they were in government). As such, in 2005, the PCF played a leading role in the left-wing NO campaign in the referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE). The victory of the NO vote, along with a campaign against the Bolkestein directive, earned the party some positive publicity.In 2005, a labour conflict at the SNCM in Marseille, followed by a 4 October 2005 demonstration against the New Employment Contract (CNE) marked the opposition to Dominique de Villepin's right-wing government; Villepin shared his authority with Nicolas Sarkozy, who, as Minister of the Interior and leader of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) was a favourite for the upcoming presidential election. Marie-George Buffet also criticized the government's response to the fall 2005 riots, speaking of a deliberate "strategy of tension" employed by Sarkozy, who had called the youth from the housing projects "scum" (racaille) which needed to be cleaned up with a Kärcher high pressure hose. While most of the Socialist deputies voted for the declaration of a state of emergency during the riots, which lasted until January 2006, the PCF, along with the Greens, opposed it.In 2006, the PCF and other left-wing groups supported protests against the First Employment Contract, which finally forced president Chirac to scrap plans for the bill, aimed at creating a more flexible labour law.
Nevertheless, the PCF's new strategy did not bring about a major electoral recovery. In the 2004 regional elections, the PCF ran some independent lists in the first round - some of them expanded to civil society actors, like Marie-George Buffet's list in Île-de-France. The results were rather positive for the party, which won nearly 11% in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardy, 9% in Auvergne and 7.2% in Île-de-France. In the 2004 cantonal elections, the PCF won 7.8% nationally and 108 seats; a decent performance, although it was below the party's result in previous cantonal elections in 2001 (9.8%) and 1998 (10%). The PCF did poorly in the 2004 European elections, winning only 5.88% and only 2 out of 78 seats.
The new strategy, likewise, also faced internal resistance on two fronts: on the one hand from the party's traditionalist and Marxist-Leninist "orthodox" faction and from the refondateurs/rénovateurs ("refounders" or "rebuilders") who wanted to create a united front with parties and movements on the left of the PS.Buoyed by the success of the left-wing NO campaign in 2005, the PCF and other left-wing nonistes from 2005 attempted to create "anti-liberal collectives" which could run a common 'anti-liberal left' candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Buffet, backed by the PCF (except for the réfondateurs), proposed her candidacy and emerged as the winner in most preparatory votes organized by these collective structures. However, the entire effort soon fell into disarray before collapsing completely. The far-left - represented by Oliver Besancenot (Revolutionary Communist League) and Arlette Laguiller (Workers' Struggle) was unwilling to participate in the efforts to begin with, preferring their own independent candidacies. José Bové, initially a supporter of the anti-liberal collectives, later withdrew from the process and announced his independent candidacy. The PCF's leadership and members voted in favour of maintaining Buffet's candidacy, despite the failure of the anti-liberal collectives and called on other left-wing forces to support her candidacy. This support was not forthcoming, and after a low-key campaign she won only 1.93%, even lower than Robert Hue's 3.4% in the previous presidential election. Once again, the low result meant that the PCF did not meet the 5% threshold for reimbursement of its campaign expenses.The presidential rout was followed by an equally poor performance in the subsequent legislative elections, in which it won only 4.3% of the vote and 15 seats. Having fallen the 20-seat threshold to form its own group in the National Assembly, the PCF was compelled to ally itself with The Greens and other left-wing MPs to form a parliamentary group, called Democratic and Republican Left (GDR). The PCF's poor showing in 2007 weighed a lot on its budget.
French Communist Party in Paris 2012
In the 2008 municipal elections, the PCF fared better than expected but nevertheless had contrasted results overall. It gained Dieppe, Saint Claude, Firminy and Vierzon as well as other smaller towns and kept most of its large towns, such as Arles, Bagneux, Bobigny, Champigny-sur-Marne, Echirolles, Fontenay-sous-Bois, Gardanne, Gennevilliers, Givors, Malakoff, Martigues, Nanterre, Stains and Venissieux. However, the PCF lost some key communes in the second round, such as Montreuil, Aubervilliers and particularly Calais, where an UMP candidate ousted the PCF after 37 years. In the cantonal elections on the same day, the PCF won 8.8% and 117 seats, a small increase on the 2004 results.
Left Front (2009- )Marie-George Buffet at the launch of the FG, 2009The PCF, to counter its slow decline, sought to build a broader electoral coalition with other (smaller) left-wing or far-left parties. In October 2008, and again at the PCF's XXXIV Congress in December 2008, the PCF issued a call for the creation of a "civic and progressive front".[23] · [24] The Left Party (PG), led by PS dissident Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and other small parties including the United Left responded positively to the call, forming the Left Front (Front de gauche, FG), at first for the 2009 European Parliament election. The FG has since turned into a permanent electoral coalition, extended for the 2010 regional elections, 2011 cantonal elections, 2012 presidential election and the 2012 legislative election.The FG allowed the PCF to halt its decline, but perhaps with a price. The FG won 6.5% in the 2009 European elections, 5.8% in the 2010 regional elections and 8.9% in the 2011 cantonal elections. However, paying the price of its greater electoral and political independence vis-a-vis the PS, it fell from 185 to 95 regional councillors after the 2010 elections.Nevertheless, the FG strategy caused further tension and even dissent within PCF ranks. Up to the higher echelons of the PCF leadership, some were uneasy with Mélenchon's potential candidacy in the 2012 presidential election and the PCF disagreed with Mélenchon's PG on issues such as participation in PS-led regional executives.[25] In 2010, a number of leading réfondateurs within the PCF (Patrick Braouezec, Jacqueline Fraysse, François Asensi, Roger Martelli...) left the party to join the small Federation for a Social and Ecological Alternative (FASE).
At the PCF's XXXV Congress in 2010, Buffet stepped down in favour of Pierre Laurent, a former journalist.
In 2010, the PCF played a leading role in the protests against Éric Woerth's pension reform, which raised the retirement age by two years.On 5 June 2011, the PCF's national delegates approved, with 63.6% against, a resolution which included an endorsement of Mélenchon's candidacy as the FG's candidate in the 2012 presidential election. A few days later, on 16–18 June, an internal primary open to all PCF members was held, ratifying Mélenchon's candidacy. Mélenchon's candidacy for the FG, the position endorsed by the PCF leadership, won 59%. PCF deputy André Chassaigne took 36.8% and Emmanuel Dang Tran, an "orthodox" Communist, won only 4.1%.[26][27] Mélenchon won 11.1% in the first round of the presidential election on 22 April 2012.
The 2012 legislative election in June saw the FG win 6.9%, a result below Mélenchon's first round result but significantly higher than the PCF's result in 2007. Nevertheless, the PCF - which made up the bulk of FG incumbents and candidates - faced a strong challenge from the PS in its strongholds in the first round, and, unexpectedly, found a number of its incumbents place behind the PS candidate in the first round. Applying the traditional rule of "mutual withdrawal", FG/PCF candidates who won less votes than another left-wing candidates withdrew from the runoff. As a result, the FG was left with only 10 seats - 7 of those for the PCF. It was the PCF's worst seat count in its entire history.Despite this defeat, the PCF leadership remains supportive of the FG strategy. Pierre Laurent was reelected unopposed at the XXXVI Congress in February 2013.On the same occasion, the hammer and sickle were removed from party membership cards. Pierre Laurent stated that "It is an established and revered symbol that continues to be used in all of our demonstrations, but it doesn't illustrate the reality of who we are today. It isn't so relevant to a new generation of communists."
Dumfries – at the end of the town centre, the statue in white marble of Burns leaning on a tree stump, a dog laying across his foot, is opposite Greyfriars Church. The front panel is inscribed: "Erected by the inhabitants of Dumfries (with the aid of many friends) as a loving tribute to their fellow townsman, the national poet of Scotland. 6th April 1882."
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose", "A Man's a Man for A' That", "To a Louse", "To a Mouse", "The Battle of Sherramuir", "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae Fond Kiss".
White marble bust of the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704).
His reflections on what we now call epistemology (how do you know what you think you know): "Essay on Human Understanding", were published in 1689.
Continuing the approach of Thomas Hobbes on the foundation of a political science from a rational speculation on the abandonment of the "state of nature", we see in his interpretation of the same mechanism the premises of liberalism.
Philosopher as he was, he did not forget his material interests having been one of the main investors in the Royal African Company, whose royal façade poorly hid the reality of the slave trade...
* * *
Buste en marbre blanc du philosophe anglais John Locke (1632-1704).
Ses reflexions sur ce que nous appelons désormais l'épistémologie (comment connaîs-tu ce que tu crois connaître) : "Essai sur l'entendement humain", furent publiées en 1689.
Poursuivant la démarche de Thomas Hobbes sur la fondation d'une science politique à partir d'une spéculation rationnelle sur l'abandon de l"'état de nature", on voit dans son interprétation du même mécanisme les prémisses du libéralisme.
Tout philosophe qu'il était, il n'oubliait pas ses intérêts matériels en ayant été l'un des principaux investisseurs de la Royal African Company, dont la royale façade cachait mal la réalité de la traite négrière …
Museo Histórico Nacional
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Wikipedia says:
"The defeat of the Spanish was followed by a long civil war between unitarians and federalists, about the organization of the country and the role of Buenos Aires in it."
This painting probably shows civilians fleeing from the chaos of one of the many armed conflicts that took place in Argentina between about 1820 to 1850.
Wikipedia continues:
Argentina was subjected to a series of civil wars during much of the 19th century, as a result of which the form of government that governs that country until today was defined.
The period of the Argentine civil wars extended from 1814 to 1880. In the first of those dates the appearance of the federal party became an alternative to the centralism inherited from the colonial administration.
In 1880, once a general agreement was reached on the liberal government and liberal economy, the federal organization of the government and the Argentine Constitution of 1853, the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires as capital of the Argentine Republic was decided.
In different periods, foreign forces, neighboring countries and European powers participated in the conflicts, which generally supported the centralist side in defense of their commercial and strategic interests.
In the Western historical tradition, civil war is denominated any armed warlike confrontation that takes place in the same country, confrontations of people from the same place, defending two ideologies or different interests. These conflagrations also sometimes involve foreign forces, helping or collaborating with the different sides of it.
Many times, civil wars involve non-regular military forces, formed or organized by people from the civilian population.
In the Argentine case, the difference between regular and irregular forces was much diluted with the passage of time. The irregular forces of cavalry generally took the name of montoneras.
The boundaries between the concepts of "revolution" and "civil war" are often confused. In general, revolutions are short-term clashes-hours or days-that take place at a certain point, usually in the same city.
Civil wars, on the other hand, develop along a more or less extensive territory, with war operations at different points, generally in the open, and last considerably longer.
At least in Argentina, the distances between the cities forced the armies to travel for weeks from one city to another; that is why the war operations lasted at least several weeks.
Some of the civil wars that ravaged Argentina lasted several years, with permanent alignments of the contenders.
For example, the war between Santa Fe and the Directorio lasted about five years, albeit with several interruptions. The campaign of Lavalle against Rosas lasted almost three years, without any interruption or truce.
They are usually classified as "Argentine civil wars" to all the clashes that included displacements of troops outside the cities, or between them.
However, since they are related to civil wars, several revolutions occurred in that period are included in them.
The ambition of the provincial caudillos is usually mentioned as the main cause of civil wars.
While it is possible that some have had the ability to conduct masses of soldiers for the sole interest of their boss, the support of a leader should be interpreted, in general, as identification with the ideas of this, their group interests, or belonging to a group that that leader was supposed to favor.
Among the questions that were settled by means of civil wars, the most important were linked to the pre-eminence of the capital, Buenos Aires, or of different alliances of provinces in a federal or confederation form; the establishment of liberalism or conservatism as a form of government; commercial openness or protectionism; and the constitutional organization that defined all these issues.
In his already classic essay "Study on the Argentine civil wars", Juan Álvarez would reveal that the changes in the economic structure of the Río de la Plata basin after the dissolution of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata meant economic mismatches between the regions , giving an economic preponderance to the province of Buenos Aires, which the others judged excessive and unjust.
This situation would have led to the reaction of the federal caudillos against the centralism of Buenos Aires; that is, against the political expression of that economic preponderance.
There were also confrontations between two or three provinces, in which the causes could be the previous ones, but to which were added the pretension of the governments of one province to meddle in the affairs of another. Or, earlier, the secession of some districts to become autonomous provinces.
Finally, there were several internal civil wars in the provinces, in which the participation of foreign forces was scarce or nonexistent. If they sometimes resolved ideological issues, they were more often factional power struggles.
Unitarians thought that Buenos Aires should lead the less-developed provinces, as the head of a strong centralized government.
Federalists thought instead that the country should be a federation of autonomous provinces, like the states of the United States.
During this period the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata lacked a head of state, since the unitarian defeat at the Battle of Cepeda had ended the authority of the Supreme Directors and the 1819 Constitution.
There was a new attempt in 1826 to write a constitution, leading to the designation of Bernardino Rivadavia as President of Argentina, but it was rejected by the provinces. Rivadavia resigned due to the poor management at the Cisplatine War, and the 1826 constitution was repealed.
During this time, the Governors of Buenos Aires Province received the power to manage the international relations of the confederation, including war and debt payment.
The dominant figure of this period was the federalist Juan Manuel de Rosas, who is portrayed from different angles by the diverse historiographic flows in Argentina: liberal history usually considers him a dictator, while revisionists support him on the grounds of his defense of national sovereignty.
He ruled the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, facing military threats from secession attempts, neighboring countries, and even European nations. Although Rosas was a
Federalist, he kept the customs receipts of Buenos Aires under the exclusive control of the city, whereas the other provinces expected to have a part of the revenue. Rosas considered this a fair measure because only Buenos Aires was paying the external debt generated by the Baring Brothers loan to Rivadavia, the war of independence and the war against Brazil.
He developed a paramilitary force of his own, the Popular Restorer Society, commonly known as "Mazorca" ("Corncob").
Rosas' reluctance to call for a new assembly to write a constitution led General Justo José de Urquiza from Entre Ríos to turn against him. Urquiza defeated Rosas during the battle of Caseros and called for such an assembly.
The Argentine Constitution of 1853 is, with amendments, still in force to this day. The Constitution was not immediately accepted by Buenos Aires, which seceded from the Confederation; it rejoined a few years later. In 1862 Bartolomé Mitre became the first president of the unified country.
Source: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerras_civiles_argentinas
======================
Wikipedia dice:
"La derrota de los españoles fue seguida por una larga guerra civil entre unitarios y federalistas, sobre la organización del país y el papel de Buenos Aires en él".
Esta pintura probablemente muestra civiles que huyen del caos de uno de los muchos conflictos armados que tuvieron lugar en Argentina entre 1820 y 1850.
A continuación, Wikipedia dice:
La Argentina estuvo sometida a una serie de guerras civiles durante gran parte del siglo XIX, como resultado de las cuales se definió la forma de gobierno que rige a ese país hasta la actualidad.
El período de las guerras civiles argentinas se extendió desde 1814 hasta 1880. En la primera de esas fechas se registró la aparición del partido federal como opción al centralismo heredado de la administración colonial.
En 1880, una vez logrado un acuerdo general en torno a la economía liberal y aperturista, la organización federal del gobierno y la Constitución Argentina de 1853, se decidió la federalización de la ciudad de Buenos Aires como capital de la República Argentina.
En diversos períodos participaron en los conflictos fuerzas extranjeras, de países vecinos y de potencias europeas, los cuales apoyaron en general al bando centralista en defensa de sus intereses comerciales y estratégicos.
En la tradición histórica occidental, se denomina guerra civil a cualquier enfrentamiento bélico armado que se desarrolla en un mismo país, enfrentándose entre sí personas de un mismo lugar, defendiendo dos ideologías o intereses distintos. En estas conflagraciones intervienen también a veces fuerzas extranjeras, ayudando o colaborando con los distintos bandos de la misma.
Muchas veces, en las guerras civiles participan fuerzas militares no regulares, formadas u organizadas por personas de la población civil.
En el caso argentino, la diferencia entre fuerzas regulares e irregulares se diluyó mucho con el paso del tiempo. Las fuerzas irregulares de caballería llevaron generalmente el nombre de montoneras.
Los límites entre los conceptos de "revolución" y "guerra civil" suelen confundirse. En general, se llaman revoluciones a enfrentamientos de corta duración —horas o días— y que se desarrollan en un punto determinado, generalmente una misma ciudad.
Las guerras civiles, por el contrario, se desarrollan a lo largo de un territorio más o menos extenso, con operaciones bélicas en distintos puntos, generalmente a campo abierto, y duran considerablemente más tiempo.
Al menos en la Argentina, las distancias entre las ciudades obligaron a los ejércitos al desplazamiento durante semanas de una a otra ciudad; fue por ello que las operaciones de guerra duraron, como mínimo, varias semanas.
Algunas de las guerras civiles que asolaron la Argentina llegaron a durar varios años, con alineaciones permanentes de los contendientes.
Por ejemplo, la guerra entre Santa Fe y el Directorio duró cerca de cinco años, bien que con diversas interrupciones. La campaña de Lavalle contra Rosas duró casi tres años, sin ninguna interrupción ni tregua.
Se suelen clasificar como "guerras civiles argentinas" a todos los enfrentamientos que incluyeron desplazamientos de tropas fuera de las ciudades, o entre las mismas.
No obstante, dado que están relacionadas con las guerras civiles, varias revoluciones ocurridas en ese período están incluidas en las mismas.
Habitualmente se menciona la ambición de los caudillos provinciales como principal causa de las guerras civiles.
Si bien es posible que algunos hayan tenido la habilidad de conducir masas de soldados por el solo interés de su jefe, el apoyo a un líder debe ser interpretado, en general, como la identificación con las ideas de éste, a sus intereses de grupo, o la pertenencia a un grupo al que se supone que ese líder favorecía.
Entre las cuestiones que se dirimieron por medio de guerras civiles, las más importantes estuvieron ligadas a la preeminencia de la capital, Buenos Aires, o de distintas alianzas de provincias en una forma federal o confederación; el establecimiento del liberalismo o del conservadurismo como forma de gobierno; la apertura comercial o el proteccionismo; y la organización constitucional que definiera todas estas cuestiones.
En su ya clásico ensayo "Estudio sobre las guerras civiles argentinas", Juan Álvarez revelaría que los cambios en la estructura económica de la cuenca del Río de la Plata a partir de la disolución del Virreinato del Río de la Plata significaron desfasajes económicos entre las regiones, dando una preponderancia económica a la provincia de Buenos Aires, que las demás juzgaron excesiva e injusta. Esta situación habría llevado a la reacción de los caudillos federales contra el centralismo porteño; es decir, contra la expresión política de esa preponderancia económica.
Hubo también enfrentamientos entre dos o tres provincias, en las que las causas pudieron ser las anteriores, pero a las que se les agregó la pretensión de los gobiernos de una provincia de inmiscuirse en los asuntos de otra. O, más tempranamente, la secesión de algunos distritos para erigirse en provincias autónomas.
Por último, hubo varias guerras civiles internas en las provincias, en que la participación de fuerzas foráneas fue escasa o nula. Si algunas veces dirimieron cuestiones ideológicas, más frecuentemente se trató de luchas por el poder entre facciones.
Belgian postcard by Papeterie, Bruxelles no. 3847. Photo: Paramount. Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956).
Tall, well-built, and ruggedly handsome American actor Charlton Heston (1923-2008) appeared in 100 Hollywood films over the course of 60 years. With features chiselled in stone, he became famous for playing many historical figures, particularly in Biblical epics.
His film debut was in the Film Noir Dark City (1950). His breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Heston became an icon for portraying Moses in the hugely successful film The Ten Commandments (1956). Furthermore, he is best known for his roles in Orson Welles' widely acclaimed Film Noir Touch of Evil (1958), Ben-Hur (1959) - for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, El Cid (1961), and Planet of the Apes (1968).
These starring roles gave the actor a grave, authoritative persona and embodied responsibility, individualism and masculinity. Heston rejected scripts that did not emphasize those virtues. He supported Democratic politicians and civil rights in the 1960s, but eventually, he rejected liberalism, founded a conservative political action committee, and supported Ronald Reagan. Heston's most famous role in politics came as the five-term president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003. In 2001, Heston made a cameo appearance as an elderly, dying chimpanzee in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes.
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
344. Modernity is not a stiffened, static reality, but a dynamic process, which is continuously working to make itself darker and darker.
361. Today’s man has gradually built a denatured world for himself: he has already been cut off from the supernatural, and now he is about to take leave of the natural.
366. A machine is demonic for it contributes to the emergence of a considerable alienation between producer, production and product - and this is always accompanied by an inner alienation.
9. The »ideal« of dark tendencies is the person without world-views.
29. In the background of the modern world’s conceptions, elaborated by a vast rational apparatus, there work manias which are generated by demonic forces.
58. Amalgamation most extremely contrasts with unity.
137. The case when someone ignores essentiality involves not only that the most important thing starts missing but that there can be found something else in its place.
138. Sticking to the only-human leads not to remaining in the human sphere but to becoming sub-human. For persisting in something is to loose it: to loose that which was intended to be retained.
307. Those forces that manipulate the world, so that they can work undisturbed, want to accomplish two things: first and foremost that their existence be questioned, and if this does not work, they would at least like to appear undefeatable.
309. Disintegration can also be seen on the surface. The act of disintegration, however, is forever under the surface which makes it even more difficult to notice it.
310. The path leading to chaos is not yet chaotic, only in its ultimate phase. For, though a chaos-creating force is creating chaos in its course, it necessarily gets structured into dark order of things.
314. That which is in opposition to what transcends life, ultimately, is in opposition to what belongs to the domain of life - for life gets life from what transcends life.
315. As the forces of modernity first annihilate the connection with the supernatural and ruin man’s relationship with nature and only then destroy nature, in the same way they destroy the connection with what transcends life first and only then annihilate life itself.
317. First, only he who maintains his principles is considered a fool (though he is not), then it comes true that only the fool maintains his principles...
318. Those things which are usually referred to as superstitions are in fact innocent and harmless superstitions. The harming and harmful superstitions appear in totally different forms such as evolutionism, antihierarchical views, beliefs in the equality of mankind and as all those phenomena which, philosophically speaking, belong to the realm of humanism.
328. Modernity is the way to conformity - the way to conformity forever in the direction of the lowest.
329. Kali-yuga is characterised mainly by the passionate clinging to the continuous deterioration and disintegration of consciousness.
331. »Being devoured«: this is the fundamental word for what the rule of darkness realises; being devoured, which is followed by annihilation.
332. Kali-yuga is not merely a state but a threatening and devouring throat.
333. The disintegrating forces of darkness are living forces, living forces that bring death.
335. The forces of darkness can gain power in the world only because they have already gained power in the soul.
341. Kali-yuga is present in the consciousness, in the strict sense of the word, in the human psyche, in the spiritual manifestations and deeds of man, just as it is present in the surrounding world, in buildings, in music, in the different manifestations of artistic trends and in the very processes of nature. Wherever man directs his attention, be it inward or outward, he is everywhere surrounded and ruled by a world which is under the aegis of antitraditionality - that is being cut off from God, heaven, transcendence, superiority and the essence.
344. Modernity is not a stiffened, static reality, but a dynamic process, which is continuously working to make itself darker and darker.
361. Today’s man has gradually built a denatured world for himself: he has already been cut off from the supernatural, and now he is about to take leave of the natural.
364. The specific blindnesses of the dark age as a rule cloak themselves in rationalism.
366. A machine is demonic for it contributes to the emergence of a considerable alienation between producer, production and product - and this is always accompanied by an inner alienation.
375. The forces of darkness and the forces of light in a way want the same in the present age: to make the kali-yuga progress to its end. But whereas the forces of darkness tend to annihilate the true values as well, the forces of light tend to maintain the true values in the course of kali-yuga so as to serve in the building up of a future golden age.
376. One has to accommodate himself to the modern world so that his powers will not wear him out - but not in the sense of bending and assimilating to it, but as a kind of acclimatisation; for he who gets acclimatised will not »serve« the climate but resists the climate.
377. Despite all its losing track, deterioration and dissipation, today’s world and the tendencies operating in it show one direction: the direction of nothingness.
381. The postmodern state, in which everything can be manifested without any real consequence, and in which everything will be free, but nothing will matter, must be accomplished before everything falls apart in postmodernity. Without this, the final disintegration will not come about, since there would always be left certain positive remnants.
404. As light magnetises certain insects, so spiritual darkness attracts the overwhelming majority of people.
427. Everything that is against the supernatural also turns, sooner or later, against the natural.
488. Liberalism not only represents the view according to which every man is equal (to one another), but it also does its best to abolish quality in order to make every men equal.
528. Modern culture is the culture of anti-spirituality and anti-traditionality. Consequently, it can only be considered as pseudo-culture, or rather, counter-culture. This term denotes counter-cultivation, that is, the cultivation of man and the world in such a way and to such a degree that they are continually becoming more fit to receive the dark instead of the light.
529. Counter-culture does not simply mean being a poor hand at culture or that man’s world is inundated with cheap things instead of higher values. The real meaning of counter-culture is that man and his world turn in a completely different direction to the one they ought to, since instead of dominating and cultivating the light, he dominates and cultivates the dark.
531. That which is called the Enlightenment today was, unambiguously, darkening; and exactly that which was dark in it resulted in it being called »Enlightenment«: the denial of the spirit.
533. Turning towards the earth clearly reveals darkening and decay. But how degenerated this [materialistic] view has become is really shown by the fact that it is called »Enlightenment« instead of »Endarkenment«.
[The contemporary manifestations of these kinds of processes at the time were similarly criticised by Plato, according to whom this attitude originated in »grievous ignorance which, however, appears to be the greatest discretion.« (Laws 886B).]
538. The bulk of negative processes and tendencies, be they communism, environmental pollution or economic crises, might be suppressed and reversed. However, there is one process which cannot be held back, and there is not even a wish to hold it back, namely, the rapidly increasing »not-anything-like-ness« or »not-any-kind-of-ness«.
738. Each world that has lost its origin-awareness is characterized by annihilation.
773. Since the return to the origin is only possible from well-ordered states, anti-traditional forces and powers primarily attack the internal and external order of man. This way they create such counter-conditions from which the return to the origin becomes impossible, or almost impossible.
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Metaphysical aphorisms by András László
www.tradicio.org/english/solumipsum.htm
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Painting by Tadeus Brzozowski
Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg und Traun
(for further pictures and information please contact the link at the end of page!)
Maria Theresa monument in Vienna
The Maria Theresa monument is the most important ruler monument of the Habsburg monarchy in Vienna. It is reminiscent of the Empress Maria Theresa, who ruled from 1740 to 1780, and is since 1888 on the Maria Theresa Square on the Vienna ring road (Castle Square - Burgring) between the then Imperial Museums, in 1891 opened the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) and in 1889 opened the Natural History Museum (Naturhistorisches Museum), in front of the background of the Museum Quarter, then the imperial stables. This by Tritons and Najad Fountains accompanied Ensemble monument counts to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Vienna.
Historical Background
The Empire of Austria in 1859 and 1866 lost Lombardy and Veneto to the new Kingdom of Italy. It was in 1866 forced to resigne after the defeat of the German war, the Prussians had triggered by violation of the rules of the German Confederation from Germany, which in 1871 was constituted as German Empire under a new empire. In 1867 Emperor Franz Joseph I. in Compromise with Hungary had to agree to the formal division of the empire into a ruled from Vienna cisleithanian and ruled from Budapest transleithanian half of the Empire, with Hungary increasingly presenting itself not as a part of the empire, but as a largely independent state. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitha
During the World Exhibition 1873 in Vienna an economic crisis had occurred, the "founders' crash - Gründerkrach" that devalued liberalism as the leading political movement and new mass parties, for the time being, the Christian Social Party, and later the Social Democrats, putting forth. In addition, more and more national movements were felt in the multiethnic state.
Those centrifugal and the imperial power eroding tendencies one would counteract by patriotic appeals to splendor and glory of the empire. At the since 1858 under construction and in 1865 opened new Vienna ring road around the old town was offered the chance. On the Maria Theresa Square the center facing adjoining Heldenplatz outside the Hofburg in 1860 and 1865 monuments of the two most important generals of the monarchy were built. For the Maria Theresa square, which with the Heldenplatz should form an Imperial Forum, it was a good occasion to erect a monument to the historical mother of the nation. She had by her marriage to Francis Stephen of Lorraine and his election as emperor, the Roman-German Empire brought back to Vienna and the continuation of the dynasty, now as House of Habsburg-Lorraine, secured. She referred to a time when the development of the monarchy was not dependent on any political party nor on national political considerations, but by the wisdom of the rulers. Her reputation and popularity should radiate to the current empire.
The monument
Gypsum model of a draft of the monument
Maria Theresa surrounded by the allegories of the cardinal virtues
For the execution of the sculptures in 1874 the three sculptors Johannes Benk, Carl Kundmann and Caspar Zumbusch submitted designs. Emperor Franz Joseph I decided for Zumbusch, with his student Anton Brenek around 13 years working on the bronze sculptures, which have a total weight of 44 tons. Carl von Hasenauer designed the architecture of the monument.
With the base, the monument covers an area of 632 square meters and is 19.36 m high, on top the seated figure of the Empress with 6 m height. Base and chain pedestal consist of Mauthausen granite from Enghagen in Upper Austria, pedestal and base of brown hornblende granite from Petersburg-Jeschitz at Pilsen in the Czech Republic, the columns of serpentinite from Wiesen near Sterzing in South Tyrol.
The program's content for the monument came from Alfred von Arneth, director of the Imperial House, Court and State Archives. The monarch herself sits on her throne at the top, in the left hand a scepter and the Pragmatic Sanction, the State and the Constitutional Treaty, her allowing the rule in the Habsburg lands as woman, saluting with the right hand the people. Around the throne on the cornice are sitting as allegorical personifications of the cardinal virtues of justice, strength, gentleness and wisdom four female figures .
At the four sides of the base each is located a circular field with a relief and before that a freestanding statue in thematic context:
The consultants of the Archduchess are represented by Wenzel Anton Kaunitz as a statue and Johann Christoph von Bartenstein, Gundakar Thomas Graf Starhemberg and Florimond Claude of Mercy-Argenteau in relief, the background shows the Gloriette in the garden of Schonbrunn Palace.
For the administration stand Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz (statue) and Antal Grassalkovich I, Samuel Brukenthal, Paul Joseph of Riegger, Karl Anton von Martini and Joseph von Sonnenfels in a consulting room in the Imperial Palace.
For the military stand Joseph Wenzel I (statue) with Franz Moritz von Lacy, Andreas Hadik of Futak and Franz Leopold of Nádasdy in front of the castle in Wiener Neustadt, in which in 1752 the Theresa Military Academy was established.
Science and art are represented by the physician Gerard van Swieten (statue), the numismatist Joseph Hilarius Eckhel, the historian György Pray and the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn and the as child represented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in front of the Old University.
Consultants
Management
Military
Science and Art
On the diagonal axes surround equestrian statues of four commanders from the era of Maria Theresa the monument: Leopold Joseph von Daun (1705-1766), Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller (1683-1744), Gideon Ernst von Laudon (1717-1790) and Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg and Traun (1677-1748).
Leopold Joseph von Daun
Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller
Gideon Ernst von Laudon
Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg and Traun
Open base during the renovation (2008)
The monument is being totally renovated since October 2008. In a first step, the base whose granite cladding and the foundation were restored. Under the monument in the course of the work a 600-square-foot brick vault was discovered as a supporting structure that is similar to already known components underneath the equestrian statues on Heroes' Square. In a second step, the stone and metal surfaces are being rehabilitated until probably October 2013.
This photo is showing the working class men and their bikes. This image shows how the working class men would ride their bikes to work as the higher class men would drive their car. This shows the ideology that even if you work hard you don’t always get to have the perks of a higher class man. This relates back to the classical liberalism idea of private property. This is because the men buy what they can afford in which will help them get to work easier -Kiara Lilley-Bosch
The French Revolution obviously had a major impact on Europe and the New World. Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history.[1][2][3] In the short-term, France lost thousands of her countrymen in the form of émigrés, or emigrants who wished to escape political tensions and save their lives. A number of individuals settled in the neighboring countries (chiefly Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Prussia), however quite a few also went to the United States. The displacement of these Frenchmen led to a spread of French culture, policies regulating immigration, and a safe haven for Royalists and other counterrevolutionaries to outlast the violence of the French Revolution. The long-term impact on France was profound, shaping politics, society, religion and ideas, and polarizing politics for more than a century. The closer other countries were, the greater and deeper was the French impact, bringing liberalism and the end of many feudal or traditional laws and practices.[4][5] However, there was also a conservative counter-reaction that defeated Napoleon, reinstalled the Bourbon kings, and in some ways reversed the new reforms
'Dangerous Moment' for Europe, as Fear and Resentment GrowThe French presidential election will determine the fate not just of the French Fifth Republic .... .Most of the new nations created by the French were abolished and returned to prewar owners in 1814. However, Frederick Artz emphasizes the benefits the Italians gained from the French Revolution.For nearly two decades the Italians had the excellent codes of law, a fair system of taxation, a better economic situation, and more religious and intellectual toleration than they had known for centuries.... Everywhere old physical, economic, and intellectual barriers had been thrown down and the Italians had begun to be aware of a common nationality
Likewise in Switzerland the long-term impact of the French Revolution has been assessed by Martin
It proclaimed the equality of citizens before the law, equality of languages, freedom of thought and faith; it created a Swiss citizenship, basis of our modern nationality, and the separation of powers, of which the old regime had no conception; it suppressed internal tariffs and other economic restraints; it unified weights and measures, reformed civil and penal law, authorized mixed marriages (between Catholics and Protestants), suppressed torture and improved justice; it developed education .The greatest impact came of course in France itself. In addition to effects similar to those in Italy and Switzerland, France saw the introduction of the principle of legal equality, and the downgrading of the once powerful and rich Catholic Church to just a bureau controlled by the government. Power became centralized in Paris, with its strong bureaucracy and an army supplied by conscripting all young men. French politics were permanently polarized—new names were given, "left" and "right" for the supporters and opponents of the principles of the Revolution.The changes in France were enormous; some were widely accepted and others were bitterly contested into the late 20th century. Before the Revolution, the people had little power or voice. The kings had so thoroughly centralized the system that most nobles spent their time at Versailles, and played only a small direct role in their home districts. Thompson says that the kings had:
ruled by virtue of their personal wealth, their patronage of the nobility, their disposal of ecclesiastical offices, their provincial governors (intendants), their control over the judges and magistrates, and their command of the Army.After the first year of revolution, this power had been stripped away. The king was a figurehead, the nobility had lost all their titles and most of their land, the Church lost its monasteries and farmlands, bishops, judges and magistrates were elected by the people, the army was almost helpless, with military power in the hands of the new revolutionary National Guard. The central elements of 1789 were the slogan "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" and the "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen", which Lefebvre calls "the incarnation of the Revolution as a whole."The long-term impact on France was profound, shaping politics, society, religion and ideas, and polarizing politics for more than a century. Historian François Aulard writes:
From the social point of view, the Revolution consisted in the suppression of what was called the feudal system, in the emancipation of the individual, in greater division of landed property, the abolition of the privileges of noble birth, the establishment of equality, the simplification of life.... The French Revolution differed from other revolutions in being not merely national, for it aimed at benefiting all humanity."German reaction to the Revolution swung from favorable at first to antagonistic. At first it brought liberal and democratic ideas, the end of guilds, of serfdom and of the Jewish ghetto. It brought economic freedoms and agrarian and legal reform. German intellectuals celebrated the outbreak, hoping to see the triumph of Reason and The Enlightenment. There were enemies as well, as the royal courts in Vienna and Berlin denounced the overthrow of the king and the threatened spread of notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity.By 1793, the execution of the French king and the onset of the Terror disillusioned the "Bildungsbürgertum" (educated middle classes). Reformers said the solution was to have faith in the ability of Germans to reform their laws and institutions in peaceful fashion.The French swept away centuries worth of outmoded restrictions and introduced unprecedented levels of efficiency. The chaos and barriers in a land divided and subdivided among many different petty principalities gave way to a rational, simplified, centralized system controlled by Paris and run by Napoleon's relatives. The most important impact came from the abolition of all feudal privileges and historic taxes, the introduction of legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code, and the reorganization of the judicial and local administrative systems. The economic integration of the Rhineland with France increased prosperity, especially in industrial production, while business accelerated with the new efficiency and lowered trade barriers. The Jews were liberated from the ghetto. One sour point was the hostility of the French officials toward the Roman Catholic Church, the choice of most of the residents. Much of South Germany felt a similar but more muted influence of the French Revolution, while in Prussia and areas to the east there was far less impact.[29] The reforms were permanent. Decades later workers and peasants in the Rhineland often appealed to Jacobinism to oppose unpopular government programs, while the intelligentsia demanded the maintenance of the Napoleonic Code (which was stayed in effect for a century.The French invaded Switzerland and turned it into an ally known as the "Helvetic Republic" (1798–1803). The interference with localism and traditional liberties was deeply resented, although some modernizing reforms took place.[31][32] Resistance was strongest in the more traditional Catholic bastions, with armed uprisings breaking out in spring 1798 in the central part of Switzerland. Alois Von Reding, a powerful Swiss general, led an army of 10,000 men from the Cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden against the French. This resulted in the Swiss regaining control of Lucerne, however due to the sheer greatness in size of the French army, Von Reding's movement was eventually suppressed. The French Army suppressed the uprisings but support for revolutionary ideals steadily declined, as the Swiss resented their loss of local democracy, the new taxes, the centralization, and the hostility to religion.The long-term impact of the French Revolution has been assessed by Martin:
It proclaimed the equality of citizens before the law, equality of languages, freedom of thought and faith; it created a Swiss citizenship, basis of our modern nationality, and the separation of powers, of which the old regime had no conception; it suppressed internal tariffs and other economic restraints; it unified weights and measures, reformed civil and penal law, authorized mixed marriages (between Catholics and Protestants), suppressed torture and improved justice; it developed education and public works.French invaded the territory of modern-day Belgium and controlled it between 1794–1814. The French imposed reforms and incorporated the territory into France. New rulers were sent in by Paris. Belgian men were drafted into the French wars and heavily taxed. Nearly everyone was Catholic, but the Church was repressed. Resistance was strong in every sector, as Belgian nationalism emerged to oppose French rule. The French legal system, however, was adopted, with its equal legal rights, and abolition of class distinctions. Belgium now had a government bureaucracy selected by merit.Antwerp regained access to the sea and grew quickly as a major port and business center. France promoted commerce and capitalism, paving the way for the ascent of the bourgeoisie and the rapid growth of manufacturing and mining. In economics, therefore, the nobility declined while the middle class Belgian entrepreneurs flourished because of their inclusion in a large market, paving the way for Belgium's leadership role after 1815 in the Industrial Revolution on the Continent.The Kingdom of Denmark adopted liberalizing reforms in line with those of the French Revolution, with no direct contact. Danes were aware of French ideas and agreed with them, as it moved from Danish absolutism to a liberal constitutional system between 1750–1850. The change of government in 1784 was caused by a power vacuum created when King Christian VII took ill, and power shifted to the crown prince (who later became King Frederik VI) and reform-oriented landowners. In contrast to Old Regime France, agricultural reform was intensified in Denmark, serfdom was abolished and civil rights were extended to the peasants, the finances of the Danish state were healthy, and there were no external or internal crises. That is, reform was gradual and the regime itself carried out agrarian reforms that had the effect of weakening absolutism by creating a class of independent peasant freeholders. Much of the initiative came from well-organized liberals who directed political change in the first half of the 19th century..In Sweden, King Gustav III (reigned 1771–92) was an enlightened despot, who weakened the nobility and promoted numerous major social reforms. He felt the Swedish monarchy could survive and flourish by achieving a coalition with the newly emerged middle classes against the nobility. He was close to King Louis XVI so he was disgusted with French radicalism. Nevertheless, he decided to promote additional antifeudal reforms to strengthen his hand among the middle classes.[41] When the king was assassinated in 1792 his brother Charles became regent, but real power was with Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm, who bitterly opposed the French Revolution and all its supporters. Under King Gustav IV Adolf, Sweden joined various coalitions against Napoleon, but was badly defeated and lost much of its territory, especially Finland and Pomerania. The king was overthrown by the army, which in 1810 decided to bring in one of Napoleon's marshals, Bernadotte, as the heir apparent and army commander. He had a Jacobin background and was well-grounded in revolutionary principles, but put Sweden in the coalition that opposed Napoleon. Bernadotte served as a quite conservative king Charles XIV John of Sweden .The French Revolution won widespread American support in its early phase, but when the king was executed it polarized American opinion and played a major role in shaping American politics.[43] President George Washington declared neutrality in the European wars, but the polarization shaped the First Party System. In 1793, the first "Democratic societies" were formed. They supported the French Revolution in the wake of the execution of the king. The word "democrat" was proposed by French Ambassador Citizen Genet for the societies, which he was secretly subsidizing. The emerging Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton began to ridicule the supporters of Thomas Jefferson as "democrats". Genet now began mobilizing American voters using French money, for which he was expelled by President Washington.After President Washington denounced the societies as unrepublican, they faded away. In 1793, as war broke out in Europe, the Jeffersonian Republican Party favored France and pointed to the 1778 treaty that was still in effect. Washington and his unanimous cabinet (including Jefferson) decided the treaty did not bind the U.S. to enter the war; instead Washington proclaimed neutrality.[45] Under President Adams, a Federalist, an undeclared naval war took place with France in 1798–99, called the "Quasi War". Jefferson became president in 1801, but was hostile to Napoleon as a dictator and emperor. Nevertheless, he did seize the opportunity to purchase Louisiana in 1803.The broad similarities but different experiences between the French and American revolutions lead to a certain kinship between France and the United States, with both countries seeing themselves as pioneers of liberty and promoting republican ideals. This bond manifesting itself in such exchanges as the gift of the Statue of Liberty by France..The call for modification of society was influenced by the revolution in France, and once the hope for change found a place in the hearts of the Haitian people, there was no stopping the radical reformation that was occurring.[49] The Enlightenment ideals and the initiation of the French Revolution were enough to inspire the Haitian Revolution, which evolved into the most successful and comprehensive slave rebellion.[49] Just as the French were successful in transforming their society, so were the Haitians. On April 4, 1792, The French National Assembly granted freedom to slaves in Haiti[50] and the revolution culminated in 1804; Haiti was an independent nation solely of freed peoples.[51] The activities of the revolutions sparked change across the world. France's transformation was most influential in Europe, and Haiti's influence spanned across every location that continued to practice slavery. John E. Baur honors Haiti as home of the most influential Revolution in history..As early as 1810, the term "liberal" was coined in Spanish politics to indicate supporters of the French Revolution. This usage passed to Latin America and animated the independence movement against Spain. In the nineteenth century "Liberalism" was the dominant element in Latin American political thought. French liberal ideas were especially influential in Mexico, particularly as seen through the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant and Édouard René de Laboulaye. The Latin American political culture oscillated between two opposite poles: the traditional, as based on highly specific personal and family ties to kin groups, communities, and religious identity; and the modern, based on impersonal ideals of individualism, equality, legal rights, and secularism or anti-clericalism. The French Revolutionary model was the basis for the modern viewpoint, as explicated in Mexico in the writings of José María Luis Mora.In Mexico, modern liberalism was best expressed in the Liberal Party, the Constitution of 1857, the policies of Benito Juárez, and finally by Francisco I. Madero's democratic movement leading to the Revolution of 1911.The impact of the French Revolution on the Middle East came in terms of the political and military impact of Napoleon's invasion; and in the eventual influence of revolutionary and liberal ideas and revolutionary movements or rebellions. In terms of Napoleon's invasion in 1798, the response by Ottoman officials was highly negative. They warned that traditional religion would be overthrown. Long-standing Ottoman friendship with France ended. Sultan Selim III immediately realized how far behind his empire was, and started to modernize both his army and his governmental system. In Egypt itself, the ruling elite of Mamluks was permanently displaced, speeding the reforms. In intellectual terms, the immediate impact of the French Revolutionary ideas was nearly invisible, but there was a long-range influence on liberal ideas and the ideal of legal equality, as well as the notion of opposition to a tyrannical government. In this regard, the French Revolution brought such influential themes as constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, individual liberty, legal equality, and the sense of ethnic nationalism. These came to fruition about 1876.On 1 July 1798, however, French forces landed in Egypt, and Selim declared war on France. In alliance with Russia and Britain, the Turks were in periodic conflict with the French on both land and sea until March 1801. Peace came in June 1802, The following year brought trouble in the Balkans. For decades a sultan's word had had no power in outlying provinces, prompting Selim's reforms of the military in order to reimpose central control. This desire was not fulfilled. One rebellious leader was Austrian-backed Osman Pazvantoğlu, whose invasion of Wallachia in 1801 inspired Russian intervention, resulting in greater autonomy for the Dunubian provinces. Serbian conditions also deteriorated. They took a fateful turn with the return of the hated Janissaries, ousted 8 years before. These forces murdered Selim's enlightened governor, ending the best rule this province had had in the last 100 years.[5] Neither arms nor diplomacy could restore Ottoman authority.French influence with the Sublime Porte (the European diplomatic designation of the Ottoman state) did not revive but it then led the Sultan into defying both St. Petersburg and London, and Turkey joined Napoleon's Continental System. War was declared on Russia on 27 December and on Britain in March 1807.The Sultan's most ambitious military project was the creation of an entirely new infantry corps fully trained and equipped according to the latest European standards. This unit, called the nizam-i jedid (the new order), was formed in 1797 and adopted a pattern of recruitment that was uncommon for the imperial forces; it was composed of Turkish peasant youths from Anatolia, a clear indication that the devshirme system was no longer functional. Officered and trained by Europeans, the nizam-i jedid was outfitted with modern weapons and French-style uniforms. By 1806 the new army numbered around 23,000 troops, including a modern artillery corps, and its units performed effectively in minor actions. But Selim III's inability to integrate the force with the regular army and his reluctance to deploy it against his domestic opponents limited its role in defending the state it was created to preserve..The first major Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) began after Turkey demanded that Russia’s ruler, Catherine II the Great, abstain from interfering in Poland’s internal affairs. The Russians went on to win impressive victories over the Turks. They captured Azov, the Crimea, and Bessarabia, and under Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev they overran Moldavia and also defeated the Turks in Bulgaria. The Turks were compelled to seek peace, which was concluded in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. This treaty made the Crimean khanate independent of the Turkish sultan advanced the Russian frontier. Russia was now in a much stronger position to expand, and in 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimean Peninsula outright..At the same time the 30-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte, a general of the French Republic, returned from his ill-fated Egyptian Campaign. The French seizure of Egypt had produced results contrary to those which Napoleon had intended. Instead of striking a blow at the colonial power of Britain, the invasion had alarmed the Ottoman Porte and driven it into an alliance with the British as well as the long-standing enemy of the Turks, Russia. Yet, by 1802, the Peace of Amiens would put an end to the war between France and the Second Coalition. The Peace would give Napoleon, who was now the First Consul of France, a respite during which he could begin to mend French relations with the Ottoman Empire.The years 1802-1807 would witness a decidedly pro-Turkish policy on the part of Napoleon. For him, this slowly deteriorating empire would come to play, in these years, an integral role in his European diplomatic strategy. Friendship and alliance with the Ottoman Empire could serve him not only as a useful tool against the commercial power of his greatest enemy, Britain, but even more so (by 1805) as a means to bend Russia and its Tsar to his will. In his goal to rebuild and strengthen Franco-Turkish relations, Napoleon benefited from two things.[9] The first factor riding in his favor was the long history of diplomatic and economic relations that had existed between France and the Ottoman Empire - since the 16th Century. While many European nations had, over the centuries, made agreements and sent ambassadors to the Turkish court, the French had been one of, if not the most highly favored nation. The French were the first to conclude a commercial treaty with the Turks. French businessmen invested heavily in the Ottoman Empire and by the late 18th Century, all Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire were placed under French protection. A second factor which benefited Napoleon was that the Ottoman sultan, Selim III, had, for most of his life, been somewhat disposed towards the French.As the nephew of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, Selim had ascended to the throne in the same year that revolution had exploded in France: 1789. Since the time that he had been a young prince, secluded in the palace, Selim had apparently developed a personal taste for things European. Though he had a fondness for Western European theater, music, art and poetry, his greatest interest was in European military institutions and practices. Even before he became sultan, he had secretly written to the French court of Louis XVI requesting advice on how to build up the Ottoman armed forces to the level of those in Europe. This early desire for military reform would come to fruition after he became sultan, when the wars between the Ottoman Empire and the ambitious Catherine the Great of Russia had revealed the overall weakness, lack of discipline and lack of training among the Ottoman forces.Selim III was, however, thoroughly under the influence of French ambassador to the Porte Horace Sébastiani, and the fleet was compelled to retire without effecting its purpose. But the anarchy, manifest or latent, existing throughout the provinces proved too great for Selim III to cope with. The Janissaries rose once more in revolt, induced the Sheikh ul-Islam to grant a fetva against the reforms, dethroned and imprisoned Selim III, and placed his cousin Mustafa on the throne, as Mustafa IV (1807–08), on May 29, 1807.Outside France the Revolution had a major impact and its ideas became widespread. Furthermore, the French armies in the 1790s and 1800s directly overthrew feudal remains in much of western Europe. They liberalised property laws, ended seigneurial dues, abolished the guild of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, legalised divorce, and closed the Jewish ghettos. The Inquisition ended as did the Holy Roman Empire. The power of church courts and religious authority was sharply reduced, and equality under the law was proclaimed for all men.The French Revolution began in 1789 with the convocation of the Estates-General in May. The first year of the Revolution witnessed members of the Third Estate proclaiming the Tennis Court Oath in June, the Storming of the Bastille in July. The two key events that marked the triumph of liberalism were the Abolition of feudalism in France on the night of 4 August 1789, which marked the collapse of feudal and old traditional rights and privileges and restrictions, and the passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August. The rise of Napoleon as dictator in 1799, heralded a reverse of many of the republican and democratic gains. However Napoleon did not restore the ancien regime. He kept much of the liberalism and imposed a liberal code of law, the Code Napoleon.It proclaimed the equality of citizens before the law, equality of languages, freedom of thought and faith; it created a Swiss citizenship, basis of our modern nationality, and the separation of powers, of which the old regime had no conception; it suppressed internal tariffs and other economic restraints; it unified weights and measures, reformed civil and penal law, authorised mixed marriages (between Catholics and Protestants), suppressed torture and improved justice; it developed education and public works.For nearly two decades the Italians had the excellent codes of law, a fair system of taxation, a better economic situation, and more religious and intellectual toleration than they had known for centuries ... Everywhere old physical, economic, and intellectual barriers had been thrown down and the Italians had begun to be aware of a common nationality
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_the_French_Revolution
Macron work harder to get the French union and the way he can make it efficient with Europe
Definition
absolutism doctrine of government by a single absolute ruler; autocracy
absurdism doctrine that we live in an irrational universe
academicism doctrine that nothing can be known
accidentalism theory that events do not have causes
acosmism disbelief in existence of eternal universe distinct from God
adamitism nakedness for religious reasons
adevism denial of gods of mythology and legend
adiaphorism doctrine of theological indifference or latitudinarianism
adoptionism belief that Christ was the adopted and not natural son of God
aestheticism doctrine that beauty is central to other moral principles
agapism ethics of love
agathism belief in ultimate triumph of good despite evil means
agnosticism doctrine that we can know nothing beyond material phenomena
anarchism doctrine that all governments should be abolished
animism attribution of soul to inanimate objects
annihilationism doctrine that the wicked are utterly destroyed after death
anthropomorphism attribution of human qualities to non-human things
anthropotheism belief that gods are only deified men
antidisestablishmentarianism doctrine opposed to removing Church of England's official religion status
antilapsarianism denial of doctrine of the fall of humanity
antinomianism doctrine of the rejection of moral law
antipedobaptism denial of validity of infant baptism
apocalypticism doctrine of the imminent end of the world
asceticism doctrine that self-denial of the body permits spiritual enlightenment
aspheterism denial of the right to private property
atheism belief that there is no God
atomism belief that the universe consists of small indivisible particles
autosoterism belief that one can obtain salvation through oneself
autotheism belief that one is God incarnate or that one is Christ
bitheism belief in two gods
bonism the doctrine that the world is good but not perfect
bullionism belief in the importance of metallic currency in economics
capitalism doctrine that private ownership and free markets should govern economies
casualism the belief that chance governs all things
catabaptism belief in the wrongness of infant baptism
catastrophism belief in rapid geological and biological change
collectivism doctrine of communal control of means of production
collegialism theory that church is independent from the state
conceptualism theory that universal truths exist as mental concepts
conservatism belief in maintaining political and social traditions
constructivism belief that knowledge and reality do not have an objective value
cosmism belief that the cosmos is a self-existing whole
cosmotheism the belief that identifies God with the cosmos
deism belief in God but rejection of religion
determinism doctrine that events are predetermined by preceding events or laws
diphysitism belief in the dual nature of Christ
ditheism belief in two equal gods, one good and one evil
ditheletism doctrine that Christ had two wills
dualism doctrine that the universe is controlled by one good and one evil force
egalitarianism belief that humans ought to be equal in rights and privileges
egoism doctrine that the pursuit of self-interest is the highest good
egotheism identification of oneself with God
eidolism belief in ghosts
emotivism theory that moral statements are inherently biased
empiricism doctrine that the experience of the senses is the only source of knowledge
entryism doctrine of joining a group to change its policies
epiphenomenalism doctrine that mental processes are epiphenomena of brain activity
eternalism the belief that matter has existed eternally
eudaemonism ethical belief that happiness equals morality
euhemerism explanation of mythology as growing out of history
existentialism doctrine of individual human responsibility in an unfathomable universe
experientialism doctrine that knowledge comes from experience
fallibilism the doctrine that empirical knowledge is uncertain
fatalism doctrine that events are fixed and humans are powerless
fideism doctrine that knowledge depends on faith over reason
finalism belief that an end has or can be reached
fortuitism belief in evolution by chance variation
functionalism doctrine emphasising utility and function
geocentrism belief that Earth is the centre of the universe
gnosticism belief that freedom derives solely from knowledge
gradualism belief that things proceed by degrees
gymnobiblism belief that the Bible can be presented to unlearned without commentary
hedonism belief that pleasure is the highest good
henism doctrine that there is only one kind of existence
henotheism belief in one tribal god, but not as the only god
historicism belief that all phenomena are historically determined
holism doctrine that parts of any thing must be understood in relation to the whole
holobaptism belief in baptism with total immersion in water
humanism belief that human interests and mind are paramount
humanitarianism doctrine that the highest moral obligation is to improve human welfare
hylicism materialism
hylomorphism belief that matter is cause of the universe
hylopathism belief in ability of matter to affect the spiritual world
hylotheism belief that the universe is purely material
hylozoism doctrine that all matter is endowed with life
idealism belief that our experiences of the world consist of ideas
identism doctrine that objective and subjective, or matter and mind, are identical
ignorantism doctrine that ignorance is a favourable thing
illuminism belief in an inward spiritual light
illusionism belief that the external world is philosophy
imagism doctrine of use of precise images with unrestricted subject
immanentism belief in an immanent or permanent god
immaterialism the doctrine that there is no material substance
immoralism rejection of morality
indifferentism the belief that all religions are equally valid
individualism belief that individual interests and rights are paramount
instrumentalism doctrine that ideas are instruments of action
intellectualism belief that all knowledge is derived from reason
interactionism belief that mind and body act on each other
introspectionism doctrine that knowledge of mind must derive from introspection
intuitionism belief that the perception of truth is by intuition
irreligionism system of belief that is hostile to religions
kathenotheism polytheism in which each god is considered single and supreme
kenotism doctrine that Christ rid himself of divinity in becoming human
laicism doctrine of opposition to clergy and priests
latitudinarianism doctrine of broad liberality in religious belief and conduct
laxism belief that an unlikely opinion may be safely followed
legalism belief that salvation depends on strict adherence to the law
liberalism doctrine of social change and tolerance
libertarianism doctrine that personal liberty is the highest value
malism the belief that the world is evil
materialism belief that matter is the only extant substance
mechanism belief that life is explainable by mechanical forces
meliorism the belief the world tends to become better
mentalism belief that the world can be explained as aspect of the mind
messianism belief in a single messiah or saviour
millenarianism belief that an ideal society will be produced in the near future
modalism belief in unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
monadism theory that there exist ultimate units of being
monergism theory that the Holy Spirit alone can act
monism belief that all things can be placed in one category
monophysitism belief that Christ was primarily divine but in human form
monopsychism belief that individuals have a single eternal soul
monotheism belief in only one God
monotheletism belief that Christ had only one will
mortalism belief that the soul is mortal
mutualism belief in mutual dependence of society and the individual
nativism belief that the mind possesses inborn thoughts
naturalism belief that the world can be explained in terms of natural forces
necessarianism theory that actions are determined by prior history; fatalism
neonomianism theory that the gospel abrogates earlier moral codes
neovitalism theory that total material explanation is impossible
nihilism denial of all reality; extreme scepticism
nominalism doctrine that naming of things defines reality
nomism view that moral conduct consists in observance of laws
noumenalism belief in existence of noumena
nullibilism denial that the soul exists in space
numenism belief in local deities or spirits
objectivism doctrine that all reality is objective
omnism belief in all religions
optimism doctrine that we live in the best of all possible worlds
organicism conception of life or society as an organism
paedobaptism doctrine of infant baptism
panaesthetism theory that consciousness may inhere generally in matter
pancosmism theory that the material universe is all that exists
panegoism solipsism
panentheism belief that world is part but not all of God’s being
panpsychism theory that all nature has a psychic side
pansexualism theory that all thought derived from sexual instinct
panspermatism belief in origin of life from extraterrestrial germs
pantheism belief that the universe is God; belief in many gods
panzoism belief that humans and animals share vital life energy
parallelism belief that matter and mind don’t interact but relate
pejorism severe pessimism
perfectibilism doctrine that humans capable of becoming perfect
perfectionism doctrine that moral perfection constitutes the highest value
personalism doctrine that humans possess spiritual freedom
pessimism doctrine that the universe is essentially evil
phenomenalism belief that phenomena are the only realities
physicalism belief that all phenomena reducible to verifiable assertions
physitheism attribution of physical form and attributes to deities
pluralism belief that reality consists of several kinds or entities
polytheism belief in multiple deities
positivism doctrine that that which is not observable is not knowable
pragmatism doctrine emphasizing practical value of philosophy
predestinarianism belief that what ever is to happen is already fixed
prescriptivism belief that moral edicts are merely orders with no truth value
primitivism doctrine that a simple and natural life is morally best
privatism attitude of avoiding involvement in outside interests
probabiliorism belief that when in doubt one must choose most likely answer
probabilism belief that knowledge is always probable but never absolute
psilanthropism denial of Christ's divinity
psychism belief in universal soul
psychomorphism doctrine that inanimate objects have human mentality
psychopannychism belief souls sleep from death to resurrection
psychotheism doctrine that God is a purely spiritual entity
pyrrhonism total or radical skepticism
quietism doctrine of enlightenment through mental tranquility
racism belief that race is the primary determinant of human capacities
rationalism belief that reason is the fundamental source of knowledge
realism doctrine that objects of cognition are real
reductionism belief that complex phenomena are reducible to simple ones
regalism doctrine of the monarch's supremacy in church affairs
representationalism doctrine that ideas rather than external objects are basis of knowledge
republicanism belief that a republic is the best form of government
resistentialism humorous theory that inanimate objects display malice towards humans
romanticism belief in sentimental feeling in artistic expression
sacerdotalism belief that priests are necessary mediators between God and mankind
sacramentarianism belief that sacraments have unusual properties
scientism belief that the methods of science are universally applicable
self-determinism doctrine that the actions of a self are determined by itself
sensationalism belief that ideas originate solely in sensation
siderism belief that the stars influence human affairs
skepticism doctrine that true knowledge is always uncertain
socialism doctrine of centralized state control of wealth and property
solarism excessive use of solar myths in explaining mythology
solifidianism doctrine that faith alone will ensure salvation
solipsism theory that self-existence is the only certainty
somatism materialism
spatialism doctrine that matter has only spatial, temporal and causal properties
spiritualism belief that nothing is real except the soul or spirit
stercoranism belief that the consecrated Eucharist is digested and evacuated
stoicism belief in indifference to pleasure or pain
subjectivism doctrine that all knowledge is subjective
substantialism belief that there is a real existence underlying phenomena
syndicalism doctrine of direct worker control of capital
synergism belief that human will and divine spirit cooperate in salvation
terminism doctrine that there is a time limit for repentance
thanatism belief that the soul dies with the body
theism belief in the existence of God without special revelation
theocentrism belief that God is central fact of existence
theopantism belief that God is the only reality
theopsychism belief that the soul is of a divine nature
thnetopsychism belief that the soul dies with the body, to be reborn on day of judgement
titanism spirit of revolt or defiance against social conventions
tolerationism doctrine of toleration of religious differences
totemism belief that a group has a special kinship with an object or animal
transcendentalism theory that emphasizes that which transcends perception
transmigrationism belief that soul passes into other body at death
trialism doctrine that humans have three separate essences (body, soul, spirit)
tritheism belief that the members of the Trinity are separate gods
triumphalism belief in the superiority of one particular religious creed
tuism theory that individuals have a second or other self
tutiorism doctrine that one should take the safer moral course
tychism theory that accepts role of pure chance
ubiquitarianism belief that Christ is everywhere
undulationism theory that light consists of waves
universalism belief in universal salvation
utilitarianism belief that utility of actions determines moral value
vitalism the doctrine that there is a vital force behind life
voluntarism belief that the will dominates the intellect
zoism doctrine that life originates from a single vital principle
zoomorphism conception of a god or man in animal form
A statue of Winston Churchill by Oscar Nemon is installed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (during the Second World War) and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from 1922 to 1924, he was a member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill was president of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli campaign, but after it proved a disaster, was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. After two years out of Parliament, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning sterling in 1925 to the gold standard, depressing the UK economy.
Out of government during his so-called "wilderness years" in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for rearmament to counter the threat of militarism in Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In May 1940, he became prime minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain. Churchill formed a national government and oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Amid the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union, he publicly warned of an "iron curtain" of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. Between his terms, he wrote several books recounting his experience during the war. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. He lost the 1950 election but was returned to office in 1951. His second term was preoccupied with foreign affairs, especially Anglo-American relations and preservation of what remained of the British Empire, with India no longer a part of it. Domestically, his government's priority was their extensive housebuilding programme, in which they were successful. In declining health, Churchill resigned in 1955, remaining an MP until 1964. Upon his death in 1965, he was given a state funeral.
One of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere. He is generally viewed as a victorious wartime leader who played an integral role in defending liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. He has sometimes been criticised for his imperialism and certain comments on race, in addition to some wartime decisions such as area bombing, but historians nevertheless rank Churchill as one of the greatest British prime ministers.
The monument that stands in front of Gladstone’s Library was commissioned in 1910 by the National Gladstone Memorial Committee for erection in Phoenix Park, Dublin. It depicts William Ewart Gladstone, who was Britain’s Prime Minister four times and died of cancer in 1898. It was created by Irish sculptor John Hughes.
The committee commissioned two other memorials to Gladstone, for London and Edinburgh. The First World War delayed this monument’s erection in Dublin. After the war, the political scene was very different. The British Army had clashed violently with Irish nationalists in the Easter Rising of April 1916.
In 1923, Dublin City Council refused to accept the Gladstone monument, which was erected here in 1925 instead. The figure of Gladstone is made of bronze. Around the pedestal are allegorical figures: Erin (symbolising Ireland), Classical Learning, Finance and Eloquence.
Gladstone was born in 1809 in Liverpool and became a Conservative MP in 1832. He switched to the Liberal Party in 1859 and was Prime Minister 1868-1874. He used his premiership to disestablish the Anglican church in Ireland (separating it from the state and Church of England) and introduced reforms to improve the rights of Irish tenants.
His second stint as PM was 1880-1885. In his third stint, in 1886, he introduced a Home Rule Bill which would have given Ireland a devolved government. MPs defeated the Bill and Gladstone resigned. During his final term as PM (1892-1894) he promoted another Home Rule Bill, in a different form. It passed through the House of Commons but was blocked by the House of Lords.
Gladstone lived in Hawarden Castle after marrying Catherine Glynne in 1839. Her brother was Sir Stephen Glynne, the 8th Baronet. He died childless and the estate passed to William Henry Gladstone, eldest son of WE and Catherine Gladstone.
John Hughes (27 January 1865 – 6 June 1941) was an Irish sculptor.
Hughes was born in Dublin and educated by the Christian Brothers at O'Connell School in North Richmond Street, Dublin. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1878 and trained as a part-time student for ten years. In 1890 he won a scholarship to the South Kensington School of Art, London, after which another scholarship took him to Paris. He then studied further in Italy. He was appointed as teacher to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1894 and in 1902 became Professor of Sculpture in the Royal Hibernian Academy School. His last residence in Dublin was at 28 Lennox Street, Portobello. From 1903 he moved to Paris, where he worked on Ireland's monument to Queen Victoria. In 1905, Hughes became a founding member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. In 1920 he relocated to Florence, where he lived with one of his sisters until 1926, after which he spent most of his time traveling through France and Italy. He died at Nice on 6 June 1941.
Works
Statue of Queen Victoria in front of the National Library of Ireland (circa 1908)
In Ireland:
Man of Sorrow; Madonna and Child, both 1901, for Loughrea Cathedral
A dying Irish soldier overlooked by Erin, now in the garden of Dublin Castle Conference Centre
Monument to Charles Kickham, in Tipperary.
Monument to George Salmon, at Trinity College Dublin
Others:
W. E. Gladstone Memorial, intended for the Phoenix Park, but installed instead at Hawarden in 1925.
Queen Victoria, unveiled by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1907 outside Leinster House in Dublin, re-erected in Sydney, Australia in 1987.
William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-consecutive terms (the most of any British prime minister) beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, for over 12 years.
Gladstone was born in Liverpool to Scottish parents. He first entered the House of Commons in 1832, beginning his political career as a High Tory, a grouping that became the Conservative Party under Robert Peel in 1834. Gladstone served as a minister in both of Peel's governments, and in 1846 joined the breakaway Peelite faction, which eventually merged into the new Liberal Party in 1859. He was chancellor under Lord Aberdeen (1852–1855), Lord Palmerston (1859–1865) and Lord Russell (1865–1866). Gladstone's own political doctrine—which emphasised equality of opportunity and opposition to trade protectionism—came to be known as Gladstonian liberalism. His popularity amongst the working-class earned him the sobriquet "The People's William".
In 1868, Gladstone became prime minister for the first time. Many reforms were passed during his first ministry, including the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and the introduction of secret voting. After electoral defeat in 1874, Gladstone resigned as leader of the Liberal Party. From 1876 he began a comeback based on opposition to the Ottoman Empire's reaction to the Bulgarian April Uprising. His Midlothian Campaign of 1879–1880 was an early example of many modern political campaigning techniques. After the 1880 general election, Gladstone formed his second ministry (1880–1885), which saw the passage of the Third Reform Act as well as crises in Egypt (culminating in the Fall of Khartoum) and Ireland, where his government passed repressive measures but also improved the legal rights of Irish tenant farmers.
Back in office in early 1886, Gladstone proposed home rule for Ireland but was defeated in the House of Commons. The resulting split in the Liberal Party helped keep them out of office—with one short break—for 20 years. Gladstone formed his last government in 1892, at the age of 82. The Government of Ireland Bill 1893 passed through the Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords in 1893, after which Irish Home Rule became a lesser part of his party's agenda. Gladstone left office in March 1894, aged 84, as both the oldest person to serve as Prime Minister and the only prime minister to have served four non-consecutive terms. He left Parliament in 1895 and died three years later.
Gladstone was known affectionately by his supporters as "The People's William" or the "G.O.M." ("Grand Old Man", or, to political rivals "God's Only Mistake"). Historians often rank Gladstone as one of the greatest prime ministers in British history.
Jainism, traditionally known as Jain Dharma (जैन धर्म), is a spiritual, religious and philosophical tradition of Indian origin dating back at least as far as the 9th century BC, but believed by Jains to stretch back many centuries into the very distant past. A Jain is a follower of Jinas ("the saints"),[1][2] human beings who have rediscovered the dharma, become fully liberated and taught the spiritual path for the benefit of beings. Jains follow the teachings of 24 special Jinas who are known as Tirthankaras ('ford-builders'). The 24th and most recent Tirthankar is Lord Mahavira who lived from 599 to 527 BCE according to traditional history. The 23rd Tirthankar of Jains, Lord Parsvanatha is now recognised as a historical person, who lived during 872 to 772 BC.[3][4] Jaina tradition is unanimous in making Rishabha, as the First Tirthankar.[5]
A major characteristic of Jain belief is the emphasis on the consequences of physical and mental behavior.[6] Because Jains believe that everything is alive, in some sense, and that many beings possess a soul, great care and awareness is required in going about one's business in the world. Jainism is a religious tradition in which all life is considered worthy of respect and it emphasises this equality of all life, advocating the protection of the smallest creatures. Jainism encourages spiritual independence (in the sense of relying on and cultivating one's own personal wisdom) and self-control (व्रत, vratae) considered vital for spiritual development. The goal, as with other Indian religions, is moksha: realization of the soul's true nature, a condition of omniscience (Kevala Jnana or Keval Gyana).
Jains are a small, influential religious minority with at least 4.2 million followers in modern India,[7] and more in growing immigrant communities in the United States, Western Europe, the Far East including Australia and elsewhere. Jains sustain the ancient Shraman (श्रमण) or ascetic tradition and have significantly influenced the religious, ethical, political and economic spheres in India for over two millennia.
Jains have an ancient tradition of scholarship and the highest degree of literacy in India.[8] Jain libraries are India's oldest.[9]
Historical sources
Parshvanatha, the twenty-third Tirthankara (ford maker) is the earliest Jain leader who can be reliably dated.[3] According to scholars he probably flourished in 9th Century BCE.[15][16]
Kalinga (Modern Orissa) was home to many Jains in the past. Rishabh, the first Tirthankar, was revered and worshipped in the ancient city Pithunda. This was destroyed by Mahapadma Nanda when he conquered Kalinga and brought the statue of Rishabhanatha to his capital in Magadh. Rishabhanatha is revered as the 'Kalinga Jina'. Ashoka's invasion and his Buddhist policy also subjugated Jains greatly in Kalinga. However, in the 1st century BCE Emperor Kharvela conquered Magadha and brought Rishabhnath's statue back and installed it in Udaygiri, near his capital, Shishupalgadh. The Khandagiri and Udaygiri caves near Bhubaneswar are the only surviving stone Jain monuments in Orissa. Earlier buildings were made of wood and were destroyed.
Deciphering of the Brahmi script, India's oldest script, believed to have been created by the first Tirthankara Rishabhanatha, by James Prinsep in 1788 enabled the reading of ancient inscriptions in India and established the antiquity of Jainism. Discovering Jain manuscripts, continues and has added significantly to retracing Jain history. Jain archaeological findings are often from Maurya, Sunga, Kishan, Gupta, Kalachuries, Rashtrakut, Chalukya, Chandel and Rajput and later periods. Several western and Indian scholars have contributed to the reconstruction of Jain history. Western historians like Bühler, Jacobi, and Indian scholars like Iravatham Mahadevan, worked on Tamil Brahmi inscriptions.
Jainism has been a major cultural, philosophical, social and political force since the dawn of civilization in Asia, and its ancient influence has been noted in other religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism.
This pervasive influence of Jain culture and philosophy in ancient Bihar possibly gave rise to Buddhism. The Buddhists have always maintained that during the time of Buddha and Mahavira, Jainism was already an ancient, deeply entrenched faith and culture there. For connections between Buddhism and Jainism see Buddhism and Jainism. Over several thousand years, Jain influence on Hindu philosophy and religion has been considerable, while Hindu influence on Jain rituals may be observed in certain Jain sects.
For instance, the concept of puja is Jain. The Vedic Religion prescribed yajnas and havanas for pleasing god. Puja is a specifically Jain concept, arising from the Tamil words, "pu" (flower) and "ja" (offering).[17]
With 10 to 12 million followers,[18] Jainism is among the smallest of the major world religions, but in India its influence is much more than these numbers would suggest. Jains live throughout India; Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat have the largest Jain population among Indian states. Karnataka, Bundelkhand and Madhya Pradesh have relatively large Jain populations. There is a large following in Punjab, especially in Ludhiana and Patiala, and there used to be many Jains in Lahore (Punjab's historic capital) and other cities before the Partition of 1947, after which many fled to India. There are many Jain communities in different parts of India and around the world. They may speak local languages or follow different rituals but essentially follow the same principles.
Outside India, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda) have large Jain communities. Jainism is presently a strong faith in the United States and several Jain temples have been built there. American Jainism accommodates all the sects. Smaller Jain communities exist in Nepal, South Africa, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Fiji, and Suriname. In Belgium the very successful Indian diamond community, almost all of which are Jain are also establishing a temple to strengthen Jain values in and across Western Europe.
It is generally believed that the Jain sangha divided into two major sects, Digambar and Svetambar, about 200 years after Mahāvīra's nirvana. Some historians believe there was no clear division until the 5th century. The best available information indicates that the chief Jain monk, Acharya Bhadrabahu, foresaw famine and led about 12,000 Digambar followers to southern India. Twelve years later they returned to find the Shvetambar sect, and in 453 the Valabhi council edited and compiled traditional Shwetambar scriptures. The differences between the two sects are minor and relatively obscure.
Diagramatic representation of Schisms within Jainism along with the timelines.In Sanskrit, ambar refers to a covering generally, or a garment in particular. Dig, an older form of disha, refers to the cardinal directions. Digambar therefore means "covered by the four directions", or "sky-clad". Svet means white and Svetambars wear white garments.
Digambar Jain monks do not wear clothes because they believe clothes are like other possessions, increase dependency and desire for material things, and desire for anything ultimately leads to sorrow. Svetambar Jain monks, on the other hand, wear white, seamless clothes for practical reasons, and believe there is nothing in Jain scripture that condemns wearing clothes. Sadhvis (nuns) of both sects wear white. These differing views arise from different interpretations of the same holy books. There are minor differences in each sect's literature.
Digambars believe that women cannot attain moksha in the same birth, while Svetambars believe that women may attain liberation and that Mallinath, a Tirthankar, was a woman. The difference is because Digambar ascetism requires nudity. As nudity is impractical for women, it follows that without it they cannot attain moksha.[19]
Digambars believe that Mahavir was not married, whereas Shvetambars believe the princely Mahavir was married and had a daughter. The two sects also differ on the origin of Mata Trishala, Mahavira's mother.
Sthanakavasis and Digambars believe that only the first five lines are formally part of the Namokara Mantra (the main Jain prayer), whereas Svetambaras believe all nine form the mantra. Other differences are minor and not based on major points of doctrine.
Excavations at Mathura revealed many Jain statues from the Kushana period. Tirthankaras, represented without clothes and monks, with cloth wrapped around the left arm, are identified as Ardhaphalaka and mentioned in some texts. The Yapaniya sect, believed to have originated from the Ardhaphalaka, follows Digambara nudity, along with several Shvetambara beliefs.
Svetambaras are further divided into sub-sects, such as Sthanakavasi, Terapanthi and Deravasi. Some are murtipujak (revering statues) while non-murtipujak Jains refuse statues or images. Shvetamber follow the 12 agam literature (voice of omniscient). Most simply call themselves Jains and follow general traditions rather than specific sectarian practices. In 1974, a committee with representatives from every sect compiled a new text called the Samana Suttam.
Jains, like Buddhists, do not have a teacher of our age. For Jains, Mahavira is the first or most recent teacher of the Way. Like other Indian religions, knowledge of the truth (dharma) is considered to have declined and then revived cyclically over the course of history. Those who rediscover dharma are called Tirthankara. The literal meaning of Tirthankar is 'ford-builder'. Jains, like Buddhists, compare the process of becoming a pure human being to crossing a swift river - an endeavour requiring patience and care. A ford-builder is someone who has themselves already crossed the river and can therefore able guide others. S/he is called a 'victor' (Skt: Jina) because s/he has achieved liberation by their own efforts. A Jain follows a Jina. Note that the Buddha Gotama was sometimes referred to as Jina. Like Buddhadharma, the purpose of Jain dharma is mental and physical purification to undo the negative effects of karma. The goal of this process is liberation accompanied by a great natural inner peace.
A tirthankar is considered omniscient, a role model but not a god. There have been 24 Tirthankaras in what the Jains call the 'present age'. Historical records the last two Tirthankaras: Parshvanath and Mahavir (the 23rd and 24th).
The 24 tirthankaras in chronological order are - Adinath (or Rishabhnath), Ajitanath, Sambhavanath, Abhinandananath, Sumatinath, Padmaprabh, Suparshvanath, Chandraprabhu, Pushpadantanath (or Suvidhinath), Sheetalanath, Shreyansanath, Vasupujya, Vimalanath, Anantanath, Dharmanath, Shantinath, Kunthunath, Aranath, Mallinath, Munisuvratanath, Naminath, Neminath, Parshvanath and Mahavir (or Vardhamana).
Jains believe that every human is responsible for his/her actions and all living beings have an eternal soul, jīva. Jains believe all souls are equal because they all possess the potential of being liberated and attaining Moksha. Tirthankaras are role models only because they have attained Moksha. Jains insist that we live, think and act respectfully and honor the spiritual nature of all life. Jains view God as the unchanging traits of the pure soul of each living being, described as Infinite Knowledge, Perception, Consciousness, and Happiness (Ananta Jnāna, Ananta Darshana, Ananta Cāritra, and Ananta Sukha). Jains do not believe in an omnipotent supreme being, creator or manager (kartā), but rather in an eternal universe governed by natural laws.
Jains hold that this temporal world holds much misery and sorrow and hence to attain lasting bliss one must transcend the cycle of transmigration. Otherwise, one will remain eternally caught up in the never-ending cycle of transmigration. The only way to break out of this cycle is to practice detachment through rational perception, rational knowledge and rational conduct.
Jain scriptures were written over a long period of time, but the most cited is the Tattvartha Sutra, or Book of Reality written by the monk-scholar, Umasvati (aka Umāsvāmi) almost 1800 years ago. The primary figures are Tirthankaras. The two main sects called Digambar and Svetambar, both believe in Ahinsa (or ahinsā), asceticism, karma, sanskār, and jiva.
Differences between the two main sects are mainly conduct related. Doctrinally, Jainism is uniform with great emphasis placed on rational perception, rational knowledge and rational conduct. {"samyagdarśanajñānacāritrāṇimokṣamārgaḥ", Tattvārthasūtra, 1.1}
Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is central to Jainism. Human life is valued as a unique, rare opportunity to reach enlightenment. To kill any person, no matter their crime, is considered unimaginably abhorrent. It is the only religion that requires monks and laity, from all its sects and traditions, to be vegetarian. Some Indian regions have been strongly influenced by Jains and the majority of the local non-Jain population is vegetarian.
History suggests that various strains of Hinduism became vegetarian due to strong Jain influences.[20] Jains run animal shelters all over India. For example, Delhi has a bird hospital run by Jains. Every city and town in Bundelkhand has animal shelters run by Jains where all manner of animals are sheltered, even though the shelter is generally known as a Gaushala.
Jainism's stance on nonviolence goes far beyond vegetarianism. Jains refuse food obtained with unnecessary cruelty. Many practice a lifestyle similar to Veganism due to the violence of modern dairy farms, and others exclude root vegetables from their diets to preserve the lives of these plants.[21] Potatoes, garlic and onions in particular are avoided by Jains.[22] Devout Jains do not eat, drink, or travel after sunset and prefer to drink water that is boiled and then cooled to room temperature.[citation needed] Many Jains abstain from eating green vegetables and root vegetables one day each week. The particular day, determined by the lunar calendar is Ashtami (eighth day of the lunar month), New Moon, the second Ashtami and the Full Moon night.
Anekantavada, a foundation of Jain philosophy, literally means "The Multiplicity of Reality", or equivalently, "Non-one-endedness". Anekantavada has tools for overcoming inherent biases in any one perspective on any topic or in reality in general. Another tool is The Doctrine of Postulation, Syādvāda. Anekantavada is defined as a multiplicity of viewpoints, for it stresses looking at things from others' perspectives.
Jains are usually very welcoming and friendly toward other faiths and often help with interfaith functions. Several non-Jain temples in India are administered by Jains. A palpable presence in Indian culture, Jains have contributed to Indian philosophy, art, architecture, science, and to Mohandas Gandhi's politics, which led to the mainly non-violent movement for Indian independence.[23]
According to Jain beliefs, the universe was never created, nor will it ever cease to exist. Therefore, it is shaswat (infinite). It has no beginning or end, but time is cyclical with progressive and regressive spirituality phases.
ains divide time into Utsarpinis (Progressive Time Cycle) and Avsarpinis (Regressive Time Cycle). An Utsarpini and a Avsarpini constitute one Time Cycle (Kalchakra). Every Utsarpini and Avsarpini is divided into six unequal periods known as Aras. During the Utsarpini half cycle, humanity develops from its worst to its best: ethics, progress, happiness, strength, health, and religion each start the cycle at their worst, before eventually completing the cycle at their best and starting the process again. During the Avsarpini half-cycle, these notions deteriorate from the best to the worst. Jains believe we are currently in the fifth Ara of the Avsarpini phase, with approximately 19,000 years until the next Ara. After this Avsarpini phase, the Utsarpini phase will begin, continuing the infinite repetition of the Kalchakra.
Jains believe that at the upswing of each time cycle, people will lose religion again. All wishes will be granted by wish-granting trees (Kalpavrksa), and people will be born in sets of twins (Yugalika) with one boy and one girl who stay together all their lives: a symbol of an integrated human with male and female characteristics balanced.
Jain philosophy is based upon eternal, universal truths. During the first and last two Aras, these truths lapse among humanity and then reappear through the teachings of enlightened humans, those who have reached enlightenment or total knowledge (Kevala Jnana), during the third and fourth Aras. Traditionally, in our universe and in our time, Lord Rishabha (ऋषभ) is regarded as the first to realize the truth. Lord Vardhamana (Mahavira, महावीर) was the last Tirthankara to attain enlightenment (599-527 BCE). He was preceded by twenty-three others, making a total of twenty-four Tirthankaras.
It is important to note that the above description stands true "in our universe and in our time" for Jains believe there have been infinite sets of 24 Tirthankaras, one for each half of the time cycle, and this will continue in the future. Hence, Jainism does not trace its origins to Rishabh Deva, the first, or finish with Mahavira, the twenty-fourth, Tirthankara.
According to Jainism, the Universe consists of infinite amount of Jiva'(life force or souls), and the design resembles a man standing with his arms bent while resting his hands on his waist. The narrow waist part comprises various 'Kshetras', for 'vicharan' (roaming) for humans, animals and plants. Currently we are in the Bharat Kshetra of 'Jambu Dweep' (dweep means island).
The Deva' Loka (Heavens) are at the symbolic 'chest' of Creation, where all Devas (demi gods) reside. Similarly beneath the 'waist' are the Narka Loka (Hell). There are such Seven Narka Lokas, each for a varying degree suffering a jiva' has to go through to face the consequences of its paap' karma (sins). From the first to the seventh Narka, the degree of suffering increases and Light reaching it decreases (with no light in the seventh Narka).
Jain philosophy (Sanskrit: Jain darsana; जैन दर्शन) deals extensively with the problems of metaphysics, reality, cosmology, ontology, epistemology and divinity. Jainism is essentially a transtheistic religion of ancient Indian.[24] It is a continuation of the ancient Śramaṇa tradition which co-existed with the Vedic tradition since ancient times.[25][26] The distinguishing features of Jain philosophy are its belief on independent existence of soul and matter, neither denial nor acceptance of a creative and omnipotent God, an eternal,and hence uncreated universe, a strong emphasis on non-violence, on relativity and multiple facets of truth, and morality and ethics based on liberation of souls. Jain philosophy explains the rationale of being and existence, the nature of the Universe and its constituents, the nature of bondage and the means to achieve liberation.[27] It is described as ascetic because of its strong emphasis on self-control, austerities and renunciation and called a model of philosophical liberalism for its insistence that truth is relative and multifaceted and for its willingness to accommodate all possible view-points of rival philosophies.[28] It has been compared to Western concepts of subjectivism and moral relativism. Jainism strongly upholds the individual nature of soul and personal responsibility for one's decisions; and that self-reliance and individual efforts alone are responsible for one's liberation. In this matter, it is similar to individualism and Objectivism.
In Jainism, truth or reality is perceived differently depending on different points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth.[29][30] Jain doctrine states that, an object has infinite modes of existence and qualities and, as such, cannot be completely perceived in all its aspects and manifestations, due to inherent human limitations. Only Kevalins - the omniscient beings - can totally comprehend objects and that others can knowing only a part. Consequently, no one view can represent the absolute truth. In the process, the Jains have their doctrines of relativity used for logic and reasoning –
Anekāntavāda - literally, "Non-one-endedness", "Nonsingular Conclusivity", the idea that no one perspective holds the complete truth;
Syādvāda – the theory of conditioned predication and;
Nayavāda – The theory of partial standpoints.
These philosophical concepts contributed immensely to Indian philosophy, especially in skepticism and relativity.[31]
The sidhha kshetra or moksha is situated at the symbolic forehead of the creation, where all the jivas having attained nirvana reside in a state of complete peace and eternal happiness. Outside the symbolic figure of this creation nothing but aloka or akaasha (sky) exists.
Karma in Jainism conveys a totally different meaning as commonly understood in the Hindu philosophy and western civilization.[32] It is not the so called inaccessible force that controls the fate of living beings in inexplicable ways. It does not mean "deed", "work", nor invisible, mystical force (adrsta), but a complex of very fine matter, imperceptible to the senses, which interacts with the soul, causing great changes. Karma, then, is something material (karmapaudgalam), which produces certain conditions, like a medical pill has many effects.[33] According to Robert Zydendos, karma in Jainism is a system of laws, but natural rather than moral laws. In Jainism, actions that carry moral significance are considered to cause consequences in just the same way as physical actions that do not carry any moral significance. When one holds an apple in one's hand and then let go of the apple, the apple will fall: this is only natural. There is no judge, and no moral judgment involved, since this is a mechanical consequence of the physical action.
Jain monks and nuns practice strict asceticism and strive to make their current birth their last, thus ending their cycle of transmigration. The laity, who pursue less rigorous practices, strive to attain rational perception and to do as much good as possible and get closer to the goal of attaining freedom from the cycle of transmigration. Following strict ethics, the laity usually choose professions that revere and protect life and totally avoid violent livelihoods.
Jains practice Samayika, which is a Sanskrit word meaning equanimity and derived from samaya (the soul). The goal of Samayika is to attain equanimity. Samayika is begun by achieving a balance in time. If this current moment is defined as a moving line between the past and the future, Samayika happens by being fully aware, alert and conscious in that moving time line when one experiences Atma, one's true nature, common to all life forms. Samayika is especially significant during Paryushana, a special period during the monsoon, and is practiced during the Samvatsari Pratikramana ritual.
Jains believe that Devas (demi-gods or celestial beings) cannot help jiva to obtain liberation, which must be achieved by individuals through their own efforts. In fact, Devas themselves cannot achieve liberation until they reincarnate as humans and undertake the difficult act of removing karma. Their efforts to attain the exalted state of Siddha, the permanent liberation of jiva from all involvement in worldly existence, must be their own.
The strict Jain ethical code for both laity and monks/nuns is:
Ahinsa (Non-violence)
Satya (truth)
'Achaurya Or Asteya' (non-stealing)
Brahmacharya (Continence)
Aparigraha (Non-attachment to temporal possessions)
For laypersons, 'brahmacharya' means either confining sex to marriage or complete celibacy. For monks/nuns, it means complete celibacy.
Nonviolence includes vegetarianism. Jains are expected to be non-violent in thought, word, and deed, both toward humans and toward all other living beings, including their own selves. Jain monks and nuns walk barefoot and sweep the ground in front of them to avoid killing insects or other tiny beings. Even though all life is considered sacred by the Jains, human life is deemed the highest form of life. For this reason, it is considered vital never to harm or upset any person.
While performing holy deeds, Svetambara Jains wear cloths, muhapatti, over their mouths and noses to avoid saliva falling on texts or revered images. It is incorrect to say that this to avoid accidentally inhaling insects, because obviously it is rare to encounter insects! Many healthy concepts are entwined. For example, Jains drink only boiled water. In ancient times, a person might get ill by drinking unboiled water, which could prevent equanimity, and illness may engender intolerance.
True spirituality, according to enlightened Jains, starts when one attains Samyak darshana, or true perception. Such souls are on the path to moksha, striving to remain in the nature of the soul. This is characterized by knowing and observing only all worldly affairs, without raag(attachment) and dwesh(repulsion), a state of pure knowledge and bliss. Attachment to worldly life collects new karmas, and traps one in birth, death, and suffering. Worldly life has a dual nature (for example, love and hate, suffering and pleasure, etc.), for the perception of one state cannot exist without the contrasting perception of the other.
Jain Dharma shares some beliefs with Hinduism. Both believe in karma and reincarnation. However, the Jain version of the Ramayana and Mahabharata is different from Hindu beliefs, for example. Generally, Hindus believe that Rama was a reincarnation of God, whereas Jains believe he attained moksha (liberation) because they are free from any belief in a creator - god. (Note: some Hindus, such as Yogis, accept aspects of Jain Dharma.)
Along with the Five Vows, Jains avoid harboring ill will and practice forgiveness. They believe that atma (soul) can lead one to becoming Parmatma (liberated soul) and this must come from one's inner self. Jains refrain from all violence (Ahinsa) and recommend that sinful activities be avoided.
Mahatma Gandhi was deeply influenced (particularly through the guidance of Shrimad Rajchandra) by Jain tenets such as peaceful, protective living and honesty, and made them an integral part of his own philosophy.[35] Jainism has a distinct idea underlying Tirthankar worship. The physical form is not worshiped, but their Gunas (virtues, qualities) are praised. Tirthankaras remain role-models, and sects such as the Sthanakavasi stringently reject statue worship.
Fasting is common among Jains and a part of Jain festivals. Most Jains fast at special times, during festivals, and on holy days. Paryushana is the most prominent festival, lasting eight days for Svetambara Jains and ten days for Digambars, during the monsoon. The monsoon is a time of fasting. However, a Jain may fast at any time, especially if s/he feels some error has been committed. Variations in fasts encourage Jains to do whatever they can to maintain self control.
Some Jains revere a special practice. When a person is aware of approaching death, and feels that s/he has completed all duties, s/he willingly ceases to eat or drink. This form of dying is called santhara. Considered extremely spiritual and creditable, with all awareness of the transitory nature of human experience, it has recently led to a controversy. In Rajasthan, a lawyer petitioned the High Court of Rajasthan to declare Santhara illegal. Jains see Santhara as spiritual detachment, a declaration that a person has finished with this world and now chooses to leave.
[edit] Jain worship and rituals
Main article: Jain rituals and festivals
Every day most Jains bow and say their universal prayer, the Namokara Mantra, aka the Navkar Mantra. Jains have built temples, or Basadi or Derasar, where images of Tirthankaras are revered. Rituals may be elaborate because symbolic objects are offered and Tirthankaras praised in song. But some sects refuse to enter temples or revere images. All Jains accept that images of Tirthankaras are merely symbolic reminders of their paths to attain moksha. Jains are clear that the Jinas reside in moksha and are completely detached from the world.
Jain rituals include:
Pancakalyanaka Pratishtha
Pratikramana
Samayika
Guru-Vandana, Chaitya Vandana, and other sutras to honor ascetics.
The holiest symbol is a simple swastika. Another important symbol incorporates a wheel on the palm of a hand, symbolizing Ahinsa.
Other major Jain symbols include:
24 Lanchhanas (symbols) of the Tirthankaras
Triratna and Shrivatsa symbols
A Tirthankar's or Chakravarti's mother dreams
Dharmacakra and Siddha-chakra
Eight auspicious symbols (The Asta Mangalas). Their names are (in series of pictures)
Svastika -Signifies peace and well-being
Shrivatsa -A mark manifested on the centre of the Jina's chest, signifying a pure soul.
Nandyavartya -Large svastika with nine corners
Vardha-manaka -A shallow earthen dish used for lamps, suggests an increase in wealth, fame and merit due to a Jina's grace.
Bhadrasana -Throne, considered auspicious because it is sanctified by the blessed Jina's feet.
Kalasha -Pot filled with pure water signifying wisdom and completeness
Minayugala -A fish couple. It signifies Cupid's banners coming to worship the Jina after defeating the God of Love
Darpana -The mirror reflects one's true self because of its clarity
While Jains represent less than 1% of the Indian population, their contributions to culture and society in India are considerable. Jainism had a major influence in developing a system of philosophy and ethics that had a major impact on all aspects of Indian culture in all ages : from Upanishads to Mahatma Gandhi. The scholarly research and evidences have shown that philosophical concepts considered typically Indian – Karma, Ahinsa, Moksa, reincarnation and like - either originate in the sramana school of thought or were propagated and developed by Jaina teachers.[36] These concepts were later assimilated in Hinduism and other religions, often in a different form and with different meanings.
Jains have also wielded great influence on the culture and language of Karnatak, Southern India and Gujarat most significantly. The earliest known Gujarati text, Bharat-Bahubali Ras, was written by a Jain monk. Some important people in Gujarat's Jain history were Acharya Hemacandra Suri and his pupil, the Calukya ruler Kumarapala.
Jains are both among the wealthiest Indians and the most philanthropic. They run numerous schools, colleges and hospitals and are important patrons of the Somapuras, the traditional temple architects in Gujarat. Jains have greatly influenced Gujarati cuisine. Gujarat is predominantly vegetarian (as is Jainism; see Jain vegetarianism), and its food is mild as onions and garlic are omitted.
Jains encourage their monks to do research and obtain higher education. Jain monks and nuns, particularly in Rajasthan, have published numerous research monographs. This is unique among Indian religious groups and parallels Christian clergy. The 2001 census states that Jains are India's most literate community and that India's oldest libraries at Patan and Jaisalmer are preserved by Jain institutions.
Jains have contributed to India's classical and popular literature. For example, almost all early Kannada literature and Tamil literature was authored by Jains.
Some of the oldest known books in Hindi and Gujarati were written by Jain scholars. The first autobiography in Hindi, [Ardha-Kathanaka] was written by a Jain, Banarasidasa, an ardent follower of Acarya Kundakunda who lived in Agra.
Several Tamil classics are written by Jains or with Jain beliefs and values as the core subject.
Practically all the known texts in the Apabhramsha language are Jain works.
The oldest Jain literature is in Shauraseni and Ardha-Magadhi Prakrit (Agamas, Agama-Tulya, Siddhanta texts, etc). Many classical texts are in Sanskrit (Tatvartha Sutra, Puranas, Kosh, Sravakacara, mathematics, Nighantus etc). "Abhidhana Rajendra Kosha" written by Acharya Rajendrasuri, is only one available Jain encyclopedia or Jain dictionary to understand the Jain Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Ardha-Magadhi and other Jain languages, words, their use and references with in oldest Jain literature. Later Jain literature was written in Apabhramsha (Kahas, rasas, and grammars), Hindi (Chhahadhala, Mokshamarga Prakashaka, and others), Tamil (Jivakacintamani, Kural, and others), and Kannada (Vaddaradhane and various other texts). Jain versions of Ramayana and Mahabharata are found in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha and Kannada.
Main article: Jain Monks and Nuns
Palitana TirthaIn India there are thousands of Jain Monks, in categories like Acharya, Upadhyaya and Muni. Trainee ascetics are known as Ailaka and Ksullaka in the Digambar tradition.
There are two categories of ascetics. Sadhu (monk) and Sadhvi (nun). They practice the five Mahavratas, three Guptis and five Samitis:
5 Mahavratas
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अहिंसा Ahimsa: Non-violence in thought, word and deed
सत्य Satya: Truth which is (hita) beneficial, (mita) succinct and (priya) pleasing
अचौर्य Acaurya: Not accepting anything that has not been given to them by the owner
ब्रह्मचर्य Brahmacarya: Absolute purity of mind and body
अपरिग्रह Aparigraha: Non-attachment to non-self objects
3 Guptis
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मनगुप्ती Managupti: Control of the mind
वचनगुप्ती Vacanagupti: Control of speech
कायगुप्ती Kayagupti: Control of body
5 Samitis
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ईर्या समिति Irya Samiti: Carefulness while walking
भाषा समिति Bhasha Samiti: Carefulness while communicating
एषणा समिति Eshana Samiti: Carefulness while eating
आदान निक्षेपण समिति Adana Nikshepana Samiti: Carefulness while handling their fly-whisks, water gourds, etc.
प्रतिष्ठापना समिति Pratishthapana Samiti: Carefulness while disposing of bodily waste matter
________
Male Digambara monks do not wear any clothes and are nude. They practise non-attachment to the body and hence, wear no clothes. Shvetambara monks and nuns wear white clothes. Shvetambaras believe that monks and nuns may wear simple un-stitched white clothes as long as they are not attached to them. Jain monks and nuns travel on foot. They do not use mechanical transport.
[edit] Holy days
Paryushan Parva, 10/8 (Digambar/SVetambar) day fasts, and for observe, 10/8 important principles.
Mahavir Janma Kalyanak,[37] Lord Mahavir's birth,it is popularly known as 'Mahavir Jayanti' but the term 'jayanti' is inappropriate for a Tirthankar, as this term is used for mortals.
Kshamavaani, The day for asking everyone's forgiveness.
[edit] Jainism and other religions
See also: Buddhism and Jainism , Jainism and Islam , and Jainism and Sikhism
Jainism, while having no creator God, is not atheistic. The notion of god is replaced by the notion of "the very nature of things" (vastu-svs-bhavah-dharmah).
Jains are not a part of the Vedic Religion (Hinduism).[38][39][40] Ancient India had two philosophical streams of thought: The Shramana philosophical schools, represented by Jainism and Buddhism; and the Brahmana/Vedic/Puranic schools represented by Vedanta, Vaishnava and other movements. Both streams are subset of the Dharmic family of faith and have existed side by side for many thousands of years, influencing each other.[41]
The Hindu scholar, Lokmanya Tilak credited Jainism with influencing Hinduism and thus leading to the cessation of animal sacrifice in Vedic rituals. Bal Gangadhar Tilak has described Jainism as the originator of Ahinsa and wrote in a letter printed in Bombay Samachar, Mumbai:10 Dec, 1904: "In ancient times, innumerable animals were butchered in sacrifices. Evidence in support of this is found in various poetic compositions such as the Meghaduta. But the credit for the disappearance of this terrible massacre from the Brahminical religion goes to Jainism."
Swami Vivekananda[42] also credited Jainsim as influencing force behind the Indian culture.
"What could have saved Indian society from the ponderous burden of omnifarious ritualistic ceremonialism, with its animal and other sacrifices, which all but crushed the very life of it, except the Jain revolution which took its strong stand exclusively on chaste morals and philosophical truths?..
Jains were the first great ascetics. "Don't injure any, do good to all that you can and that is all the morality and ethics, and that is all the work there is, and the rest is all nonsense... Throw it away." And then they went to work and elaborated this one principle, and it is a most wonderful ideal: how all that we call ethics they simply bring out from one great principle of non-injury and doing good."
Relationship between Jainism and Hinduism-To quote from the Encyclopædia Britannica Article on Hinduism,[4]"...With Jainism which always remained an Indian religion, Hinduism has so much in common, especially in social institutions and ritual life, that nowadays Hindus tend to consider it a Hindu sect. Many Jains also are inclined to fraternization..."
Independent Religion - From the Encyclopædia Britannica Article on Jainism: "...Along with Hinduism and Buddhism, it is one of the three most ancient Indian religious traditions still in existence. ...While often employing concepts shared with Hinduism and Buddhism, the result of a common cultural and linguistic background, the Jain tradition must be regarded as an independent phenomenon. It is an integral part of South Asian religious belief and practice, but it is not a Hindu sect or Buddhist heresy, as earlier scholars believed."[5] The author Koenraad Elst in his book, Who is a Hindu?, summarises on the similaries between Jains and the mainstream Hindu society.
[edit] Languages used in Jain literature
Jain literature exists in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Tamil, Apabhramsha, Rajasthani, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kutchi, Kannada, Tulu, Telugu, Dhundhari (Old Marwari), English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.
[edit] Constitutional status of Jainism in India
Main article: Legal Status of Jainism as a Distinct Religion
In 2005 the Supreme Court of India in a judgment stated that Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are sub-sects or 'special faiths' of Hinduism, and are governed under the ambit of Hindu laws.[43] In the same year however, it declined to issue a writ of Mandamus towards granting Jains the status of a religious minority throughout India. The Court noted that Jains have been declared a minority in 5 states already, and left it to the rest of the States to decide on the minority status of Jain religion.[6]
In 2006 the Supreme Court in a judgment pertaining to a state, opined that "Jain Religion is indisputably not a part of the Hindu Religion". (para 25, Committee of Management Kanya Junior High School Bal Vidya Mandir, Etah, U.P. v. Sachiv, U.P. Basic Shiksha Parishad, Allahabad, U.P. and Ors., Per Dalveer Bhandari J., Civil Appeal No. 9595 of 2003, decided On: 21.08.2006, Supreme Court of India) [2
source
June 16 was just two days after the first anniversary of the defining event in the UK last year — the Grenfell Tower fire, an entirely preventable disaster, in which 72 people died when an inferno engulfed a 24-storey tower block in North Kensington in west London — and, to mark the anniversary, the survivors’ group Justice4Grenfell and the Fire Brigades Union organised a solidarity march in central London, starting and ending outside 10 Downing Street, and including a visit to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on Marsham Street, which is where this photo was taken, of a girl called Luna, who, soon after, tired of the event and made her mum take her away.
At each of the locations, there were powerful speeches about the need for accountability, and the need for everyone affected by the fire — everyone in social housing, for example, and everyone who understands the dangers of the prevailing neo-liberalism that preys on everyone except the rich — to keep on working together, to build on the extraordinary solidarity created in the Grenfell community in the last year, and to always remember those whose lives were so needlessly lost.
The disaster last June should never have happened because the tower was built of concrete that is largely resistant to fire, and because of a ‘compartmentalisation’, which is meant to ensure that any fire will be contained within the individual apartment in which it breaks out for an hour, giving the fire services time to arrive on the scene. However, Grenfell’s structural integrity had been fatally compromised during recent refurbishment, which was designed to make it look better, but which involved the application of highly flammable cladding.
The truth about Grenfell, which is slowly coming to light in the government’s official inquiry but was known to anyone paying attention at the time of the fire, is that those responsible for the safety of the residents of social housing in tower blocks — central government, local government, management companies and contractors — were all part of a world in which red tape had deliberately been cut to enable greater profits to be made, and it was somehow considered acceptable for dangerously inflammable material to be used as cladding. It’s also important to note that the establishment’s position now seems, shamefully, to be to blame the FBU for the disaster, when , of course, the real blame lies with those who turned a safe tower into a death trap in the first place.
For a truly shocking warning of the fire before it happened, see this Grenfell Action Group article from November 2016, just one of many ignored by Kensington and Chelsea Council and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which managed all of the council’s social housing: grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/kctmo-playin...
Please also read my article for the 1st anniversary: www.andyworthington.co.uk/2018/06/14/grenfell-one-year-on...
And check out ‘Grenfell’ by my band The Four Fathers: youtu.be/BLehKWOhMyY
Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 2255. Photo: RKO Radio.
Blue-eyed American actor Henry Fonda (1905-1982) exemplified not only integrity and strength, but an ideal of the common man fighting against social injustice and oppression. He is most remembered for his roles as Abe Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), for which he received an Academy Award Nomination, and more recently, Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981), for which he received an Oscar for Best Actor in 1982. Notably he also played against character as the villain 'Frank' in Sergio Leone's classic Spaghetti Western Once upon a time in the West (1968). Fonda is considered one of Hollywood's old-time legends and his lifelong career spanned almost 50 years.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1905. His parents were Elma Herberta (Jaynes) and William Brace Fonda, who worked in advertising and printing and was the owner of the W. B. Fonda Printing Company in Omaha, Nebraska. His distant ancestors were Italians who had fled their country around 1400 and moved to Holland, presumably because of political or religious persecution. In the early1600's, they crossed the Atlantic and were among the early Dutch settlers in America. They established a still-thriving small town in upstate New York named Fonda, named after patriarch Douw Fonda, who was later killed by Indians. In 1919, young Henry was a first-hand witness to the Omaha race riots and the brutal lynching of Will Brown. This enraged the 14 years old Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for the rest of his life. Following graduation from high school in 1923, Henry got a part-time job in Minneapolis with the Northwestern Bell Telephone Company which allowed him at first to pursue journalistic studies at the University of Minnesota. In 1925, having returned to Omaha, Henry reevaluated his options and came to the conclusion that journalism was not his forte, after all. For a while, he tried his hand at several temporary jobs, including as a mechanic and a window dresser. At age 20, Fonda started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse, when his mother's friend Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon Brando) recommended that he try out for a juvenile part in You and I, in which he was cast as Ricky. Then he received the lead in Merton of the Movies and realized the beauty of acting as a profession. It allowed him to deflect attention from his own tongue-tied personality and create stage characters relying on someone else's scripted words. The play and its star received fairly good notices in the local press. It ran for a week, and for the rest of the repertory season, Henry advanced to assistant director which enabled him to design and paint sets as well as act. A casual trip to New York, however, had already made him set his sights on Broadway. In 1926, he moved to the Cape Cod University Players, where he met his future wife Margaret Sullavan. His first professional role was in The Jest, by Sem Benelli. James Stewart joined the Players a few months after Fonda left, but he would become his closest lifelong friend. In 1928, Fonda went east to New York to be with Margaret Sullavan, and to expand his theatrical career on Broadway. His first Broadway role was a small one in A Game of Love and Death with Alice Brady and Claude Rains. Henry played leads opposite Margaret Sullavan, who became the first of his five wives in 1931. They broke up in 1933. In 1934, he got a break of sorts, when he was given the chance to present a comedy sketch with Imogene Coca in the Broadway revue New Faces. That year, he also hired Leland Hayward as his personal management agent and this was to pay off handsomely. Major Broadway roles followed, including New Faces of America and The Farmer Takes a Wife. The following year he married Frances Seymour Brokaw with whom he had two children: Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, also to become screen stars.
The 29-year old Henry Fonda was persuaded by Leland Hayward to become a Hollywood actor, despite initial misgivings and reluctance on Henry's part. Independent producer Walter Wanger, whose growing stock company was birthed at United Artists, needed a star for The Farmer Takes a Wife (Victor Fleming, 1935) opposite Janet Gaynor. I.S. Mowis at IMDb: “With both first choice actors Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea otherwise engaged, Henry was the next available option. After all, he had just completed a successful run on Broadway in the stage version. The cheesy publicity tag line for the picture was "you'll be fonder of Fonda", but the film was an undeniable hit.” Wanger, realizing he had a good thing going, next cast Henry in a succession of A-grade pictures which capitalized on his image as the sincere, unaffected country boy. Pick of the bunch were the Technicolor outdoor Western The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Henry Hathaway, 1936) with Sylvia Sidney, and the gritty Depression-era drama You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) with Henry as a back-to-the-wall good guy forced into becoming a fugitive from the law by circumstance). Then followed the screwball comedy The Moon's Our Home (William A. Seiter, 1936) with ex-wife Margaret Sullavan, the excellent pre-civil war-era romantic drama Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938) featuring Bette Davis, and the Western Jesse James ( Henry King, 1939) starring Tyrone Power. Fonda rarely featured in comedy, except for a couple of good turns opposite Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Tierney - with both he shared an excellent on-screen chemistry - in The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and the successful Rings on Her Fingers (Rouben Mamoulian, 1942). Henry gave his best screen performance to date in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939), a fictionalized account of the early life of the American president as a young lawyer facing his greatest court case. Henry made two more films with director John Ford: the pioneering drama Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) with Claudette Colbert, and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. In his career-defining role as Tom Joad, Fonda played the archetypal grassroots American trying to stand up against oppression. His relationship with Ford would end on the set of Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) when he objected to Ford's direction of the film. Ford punched Fonda and had to be replaced.
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) set the tone for Henry Fonda’s subsequent career. In this vein, he gave a totally convincing, though historically inaccurate, portrayal in the titular role of The Return of Frank James (Fritz Lang, 1940), a rare example of a sequel improving upon the original. He projected integrity and quiet authority whether he played lawman Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946) or a reluctant posse member in The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943). In between these two films, Fonda enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, and served in the Navy for three years. He then starred in The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947), and Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948), as a rigid Army colonel, along with John Wayne and Shirley Temple in her first adult role. The following years, he did not appear in many films. Fonda was one of the most active, and most vocal, liberal Democrats in Hollywood. During the 1930s, he had been a founding member of the Hollywood Democratic Committee, formed in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. In 1947, in the middle of the McCarthy witch hunt, he moved to New York, not returning to Hollywood until 1955. His son Peter Fonda writes in his autobiography Don't Tell Dad: A Memoir (1999) that he believes that Henry's liberalism caused him to be gray-listed during the early 1950s. Fonda returned to Broadway to play the title role in Mister Roberts for which he won the Tony Award as best dramatic actor. In 1979, he won a second special Tony, and was nominated for a Tony Award Clarence Darrow (1975). Later he played a juror committed to the ideal of total justice in 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) which he also produced, and a nightclub musician wrongly accused of murder in The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956). During the next decade, he played in The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton a.o., 1962), How the West Was Won (John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, 1962) and as a poker-playing grifter in the Western comedy A Big Hand for the Little Lady (Fielder Cook, 1966) with Joanne Woodward. A big hit was the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours (Melvillle Shavelson, 1968), in which he co-starred with Lucille Ball. The same year, just to confound those who would typecast him, he gave a chilling performance as one of the coldest, meanest stone killers ever to roam the West, in Sergio Leone's Western epic C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) opposite Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale. With James Stewart, he teamed up in Firecreek (Vincent McEveety, 1968), where Fonda again played the heavy, and the Western omedy The Cheyenne Social Club (Gene Kelly, 1970). Despite his old feud with John Ford, Fonda spoke glowingly of the director in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary Directed by John Ford (1971). Fonda had refused to participate until he learned that Ford had insisted on casting Fonda as the lead in the film version of Mr. Roberts (1955), reviving Fonda's film career after concentrating on the stage for years. Illness curtailed Fonda’s work in the 1970s. In 1976, Fonda returned in the World War II blockbuster Midway (Jack Smight, 1976) with Charlton Heston. Fonda finished the 1970s in a number of disaster films wilth all-star casts: the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli/Tentacles (Ovidio G. Assonitis, 1977), Rollercoaster (James Goldstone, 1977) with Richard Widmark, the killer bee action film The Swarm (Irwin Allen, 1978), the global disaster film Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979), with Sean Connery, and the Canadian production City on Fire (Alvin Rakoff, 1979), which also featured Shelley Winters and Ava Gardner. His final screen role was as an octogenarian in On Golden Pond (Mark Rydell, 1981), in which he was joined by Katharine Hepburn and his daughter Jane. It finally won him an Oscar on the heels of an earlier Honorary Academy Award. Too ill to attend the ceremony, Henry Fonda died soon after at the age of 77, having left a lasting legacy matched by few of his peers. His later wives were Susan Blanchard (1950-1956), Leonarda Franchetti (1957-1961) and Shirlee Fonda (1965- till his death in 1982). With Blanchard he had a daughter, Amy Fishman (1953). His grandchildren are the actors Bridget Fonda, Justin Fonda, Vanessa Vadim and Troy Garity.
Sources: Laurence Dang (IMDb), I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
Gravestone of George Brown (November 29, 1818 - May 9, 1880), one the fathers of the Canadian Confederation. In the Necropolis, Toronto, Canada. Winter afternoon, 2020. Pentax K1 II.
www.biographi.ca/en/bio/brown_george_10E.html
BROWN, GEORGE, journalist and politician; b. at Alloa, Clackmannan, Scotland, 29 Nov. 1818; d. at Toronto, Ont., 9 May 1880.
George Brown was the elder son in the family of six children of Peter Brown* and Marianne, daughter of George Mackenzie, gentleman, of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Peter ran a prosperous wholesale business in Edinburgh, but he also spent periods at Alloa up the Firth of Forth helping to direct a local glassworks. Thus George Brown’s life began in the placid little Forthside port though the family returned to Edinburgh before he was eight. He attended Edinburgh’s celebrated High School and its Southern Academy, and he was always proud to link himself with Scotland’s national capital. After leaving school with prizes and honours, he joined his father’s business, and began to settle into a life in well-to-do Edinburgh commercial society.
George was very close to his father. Peter Brown was a convinced Whig-Liberal and evangelical Presbyterian, an ardent believer in civil and religious liberty, progress, the economic liberalism of Adam Smith, and the destruction of Tory aristocratic privilege. Moreover, he set a strong political example by actively sharing in the struggle for borough reform in Edinburgh and the larger campaign that won the parliamentary reform bill of 1832. In 1836, however, Peter was involved, as collector of assessments in Edinburgh, in a loss of nearly £2,800 of municipal funds, which had somehow mixed with his private accounts. There was no charge against him and his guarantors made good the loss, but he strove urgently to redeem the money and his name. With the onset of the depression of 1837 he saw nothing else to do but try a new start in America. And so, on 30 April 1837, George Brown, aged 18, set out from Liverpool with his father for New York.
Within weeks of landing there in June, they had opened a small dry goods shop, in which George was the only assistant. It thrived sufficiently that they could send for the family the next year. The business apparently continued to do moderately well, but Peter Brown was turning to other interests. In the next few years he became a contributor to the New York Albion, the weekly paper of the British emigrant community. Once more his son would acquire from him both a fervent abolitionism and a rooted preference for the British parliamentary system over the American republican model. Yet more than that, Peter Brown published his views in a book early in 1842, The fame and glory of England vindicated . . . (New York and London), and the ready reception of this work, at least by British emigrants in the United States and in neighbouring English Canada, stirred its author to turn fully to journalism.Again assisted by his willing son, he began the British Chronicle in New York on 30 June 1842, a little weekly more political and less literary in content than the Albion.
The new paper soon started noting Canadian affairs, as circulation spread in that quarter. It commented on the course of the union that had been set up in 1841 between the former provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, and approved the plan of responsible government which was backed by the existing Liberal or Reform leaders there, Robert Baldwin*, Francis Hincks*, and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine*. George Brown, moreover, began to travel up to Canada in the service of his father’s paper. His role was growing, as he finished his apprenticeship in journalism. In March 1843, when he was still only 24, he was denominated in the Chronicle as “Publisher,” his father as “Editor.” That spring he spent some time in Canadian centres such as Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal, talking with politicians and editors and acquiring considerable knowledge of the prospects of the country.
Meanwhile, Peter Brown had thoroughly committed the British Chronicle on an issue that had recently come to a head in Scotland. There the evangelical element in the established Church of Scotland had decided to withdraw from the state Presbyterian church altogether, in the cause of religious freedom as they saw it. Thus occurred the “Great Disruption” of May 1843, and the birth of the Free Church of Scotland. Inevitably Peter Brown’s sympathies were with the new Free Kirk. Indeed, there was considerable support for the movement throughout Scottish communities in America. Moreover, it grew evident that the conflict within Presbyterianism could also erupt in Canada because of colonial Scottish feelings for one or the other party in the homeland.
In this circumstance, Free Kirk sympathizers in Canada looked to the British Chronicle, which spoke so warmly for their side. In the summer of 1843 a group of leading Free Church supporters in the Toronto area signed an invitation and put up a bond to persuade Peter Brown to move his paper to Canada. This invitation they passed through the Reverend William Rintoul* to George Brown on his travels through Toronto. He was already interested in a move himself, partly because of friendly contacts he had made with leading Canadian Reformers, partly because he felt that British Canada would be far more congenial than the American republic and that in its youth and sparse development it offered much better possibilities for getting ahead than crowded New York. He put these arguments forcefully to his father and won his consent. On 22 July the British Chronicle made a last appearance, announcing that its editor would henceforth publish a weekly paper in Toronto named the Banner, expressing a Presbyterian interest and upholding “Reform principles” on all great public issues.
On 18 August the first issue of the Browns’ Toronto Banner came out. The editorial columns – which dominated the little four-page papers of the day – were divided between the “Religious Department” and the “Secular Department,” the provinces of Peter and George Brown respectively. The first department at once took up the Free Church cause; the second was slower to commit itself. But before the end of 1843, the resignation of the chief Liberal ministers, Baldwin, La Fontaine, and Hincks, from the government of Sir Charles Metcalfe* provided a major public issue on which George Brown soon began to speak out in the name of Reform principles.
It appeared to him that Governor Metcalfe’s insistence on controlling the power of patronage himself, the question on which his Liberal ministers had resigned, was a repudiation of the principle of responsible government. Metcalfe’s dismissal of the Reform-dominated assembly that December fully decided him. He made the Banner the forceful champion of the Reform leaders as the political crisis continued.
But that paper, with its own sectarian cause to pursue, could only be a part-time champion at best. And George Brown’s own interests were becoming wholly centred in politics. Recognizing his journalistic powers, moreover, a group of prominent Toronto Reformers approached him to found a new party paper; four of them offered to provide £250 starting capital. The sum meant more then – but also indicates how relatively simple it was to equip a small colonial weekly newspaper. Though they would continue the Banner, the Browns decided to establish the Toronto Globe. It first appeared on 5 March 1844, and it was really George Brown’s from the start. He above all was to make it the most powerful newspaper in British America.
He did so through his strong and stirring editorials, by pushing always for the latest and most detailed news reports (so that the Globe would be read, reluctantly, even by political enemies), and by seeking constantly to increase circulation through providing ever better press facilities. He introduced the new Hoe rotary press to Upper Canada before his paper was even three months old, and the greater production this permitted enabled the Globe to set up a book and job printing office also. In 1845 he established the Western Globe, to serve Reformers in the rising southwestern regions of the province, with its own sub-office in London to which material from the Toronto edition was regularly conveyed by road. The Toronto Globe itself advanced from weekly to semi-weekly; by 1849 it had tri-weekly issues, reflecting its expanding circulation, and a weekly edition specifically intended for the countryside was added. It was a further sign of the success of Brown’s “forward policy” that the Globe in October 1853 became a daily, printed by a steam press. By that time Brown’s paper had already become a province-wide institution, and soon could claim – with few to deny it – the largest circulation in all British North America.
As the Globe’s external influence expanded, it naturally grew internally as well. It had begun in the 1840s with a staff composed of George and Peter Brown, a printer, and a boy apprentice or two: one of them, according to tradition, George’s young brother, Gordon. In the 1850s the paper acquired a whole staff of printers (with union aims expressed in strikes in 1853 and 1854), pressroom and engine hands, reporters, and parliamentary correspondents; and the day had passed when George Brown would write the bulk of the editorials himself. He still kept a tight control over business affairs and the main lines of editorial policy, so that the popular presumption that he and the Globe were synonymous was not entirely wrong. But regular editorial management passed to his brother Gordon, named sub-editor in 1850 at the age of 22 – Peter Brown having then retired at 66, after closing down the Banner in 1848.
In short, within a few years of establishing his newspaper, George Brown had moved it from the day of personal journalism to the era of big newspaper business in Canada. He made himself a leading Toronto businessman in the process and also shaped a formidable political power. But though he was to enter politics himself, his strongest concern would always remain with the Globe, just as it did at its beginning, in March 1844.
He gave his first significant political speech in that very month on 25 March, to the Reform Association of Canada, at a meeting held in Toronto to protest Sir Charles Metcalfe’s attempt to carry on government with but a trio of ministers, W. H. Draper, Dominick Daly*, and Denis-Benjamin Viger*, who had not yet managed to fill up the other ministerial offices. The young Globe editor’s ringing denunciation of such an un-British and illiberal practice roused warm response. From that time onward, his fervent, powerful oratory was often called upon at party gatherings and public meetings. Meanwhile, he vigorously engaged the Globe in the Reformers’ battle against Metcalfe and the Tory–Conservative forces that were rallying to the governor general’s side. There was, indeed, a growing reaction in English-speaking Canada against what seemed excessively partisan Reform insistence on removing the governor’s power over patronage. Hence, in the elections held that autumn, pro-Metcalfe forces carried Canada West (popularly still called Upper Canada), though the victory of La Fontaine’s Liberals in Canada East, the largely French-speaking Lower Canadian section, meant that the new Conservative ministry had only a bare majority over all.
Many Canadian electors had apparently not fully understood the requirements of responsible government exercised through party rule. In the next few years of Tory–Conservative administration George Brown worked diligently to enlighten the public, and thus to strengthen the Reform party under Baldwin and Hincks in Upper Canada. By 1847, when the weak Tory–Conservative ministry failed to improve its position through a reconstruction, the chance for a resurgence of Reform seemed at hand: especially when Britain now accepted the full principle of responsible rule for Canada and sent a new governor general, Lord Elgin [Bruce*], instructed to put that principle decisively into effect.
In the elections of 1847–48 the Globe trumpeted the Liberal cause once more. But further, its editor personally entered into the contest in the western county of Oxford, where Baldwin asked him to conduct a campaign for Hincks who was away in Britain. This was Brown’s first full-fledged election campaign, even though he was not a candidate himself. Undoubtedly his enthusiasm and untiring efforts in speaking across the riding did a good deal to win the seat for Hincks – though it also left a heritage of jealousy between two strong-minded men. The Reformers swept into power in both sections of Canada, and in March 1848 the La Fontaine–Baldwin government took office as a wholly Reform cabinet embodying the principle of responsible rule.
This new administration, developing a broad programme of reforms, had a task for the editor of the chief party journal in the west. He was named secretary of a commission of inquiry to investigate alleged abuses in the provincial penitentiary at Kingston. The commission began hearings there in June and proceeded through the rest of 1848 as Brown worked zealously in a role which his energy and ability made markedly influential. This exhaustive inquiry produced voluminous evidence of brutality and maladministration, and the existing warden, Henry Smith*, was removed from office. The commission’s report, which Brown drafted as secretary early in 1849, passed withering judgement on “most frightful oppression – revolting inhumanity.” It also projected major forward steps in Canadian penology; for example, in recommending the separation of hardened criminals, first offenders, and juveniles, in making provisions for rehabilitation and aftercare, and in urging the appointment of permanent, salaried prison inspectors.
Otherwise, in 1849, Brown’s role was still essentially that of Globe editor. But his paper was now the official organ for the government in Upper Canada and he stood high in party circles. Accordingly, he was closely identified that spring with the La Fontaine–Baldwin ministry in supporting their contentious rebellion losses bill against angry Tory protests, which included an attack on his own home in Toronto. Later in that year of depression and turmoil he worked still more ardently to combat the movement for annexation to the United States that focussed on the Montreal Annexation Manifesto of October, but had lesser repercussions in Upper Canada as well. Through the Globe Brown strongly backed Baldwin’s efforts to dissociate the Upper Canadian Reform party from annexationism, particularly in a by-election in December 1849 when the Reform candidate, Peter Perry*, an old radical, displayed unfortunate annexationist leanings.
Despite pressure from the party leadership and the party organ, however, Perry was elected without having fully disavowed annexation, at least as a future possibility. Yet his victory was more indicative of local left-wing Reform discontent with central party direction than of any real support for annexationism, now fast disappearing. In fact, Perry’s success spurred radical elements, soon termed “Clear Grits” in the Globe, to shape a new movement by early 1850, which sought to push the party onward to “advanced” reforms in the belief that the leaders and their more moderate supporters had grown altogether too content with office. They demanded cheap and simple government close to the people and, above all, a fully democratic constitution on the American elective model. George Brown’s own commitment to the Baldwin ministry and his distrust of American written constitutions and egalitarian democracy made him a determined foe of Clear Grit radical proposals. His journal urged the superiority of British responsible cabinet government, so recently won for Canada. But the Clear Grits held local conventions, adopted a thoroughgoing democratic platform, and established a new organ of their own in Toronto, the North American, edited by William McDougall*, a clever young radical lawyer.
Furthermore, the Grits took up another reform cause with wide popular appeal in Upper Canada: the secularization of the clergy reserves set up by imperial statute at the founding of the province in 1791 to support a Protestant clergy. The Anglicans still received the major share of the funds from the sale of reserve lands, but this situation was sharply questioned, both by those who sought a more equitable division and by those who wanted the reserves abolished altogether as an improper endowment of churches by the state.
George Brown himself naturally agreed with the latter stand. For him the state should know no church, and churches should be voluntarily sustained by their adherents. On this “voluntary principle” he was in accord with the Clear Grits and various evangelical Protestant bodies as well as his own Free Kirk supporters. But he rejected the Clear Grits politically for their constitutional views, and relied on the declared intentions of the Baldwin government to settle the reserves – deeming the radicals’ demand a mere attempt to make political capital for themselves. The parliamentary session of 1850 gave him doubts, however. Resolutions were passed asking for an imperial act to authorize the Canadian legislature to deal with the reserves themselves. Yet James Price*, the minister who moved them, did so only as a private member, and La Fontaine and the French Canadian Reformers he led were plainly reluctant to tamper with a religious endowment. As Roman Catholics accepting ties of church and state, they approved of state support for religion – the antithesis of Brown’s own position.
Another measure of the session further aroused his concern about Catholic influence on government policy. This, the Upper Canada school act introduced by Hincks, enlarged provisions for separate denominational schools in the western system of public education, so that Catholic schools, specifically, could more readily be organized to receive state support. Brown saw this enlargement as an alarming inroad into the maintenance of one non-sectarian public system. His Globe called it “the entering wedge.” Then, as he and other voluntaryists were becoming increasingly exercised over “state church” influences on public affairs, the papal aggression question burst in England in the fall of 1850.
The root of the issue was a papal brief recreating a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England for the first time since the Reformation. The brief was at least unwise in declaring this realm of Anglicanism, Puritanism, and Methodism to be now returned to an “orbit” around Rome. There was strong response from Protestants, already reacting to the resurgent ultramontane and anti-liberal zeal of the papacy under Pius IX. Brown’s Globe was only one of numerous liberal or voluntaryist-minded journals in Canada that commented severely on these papal and Catholic presumptions, but its power and vehemence involved it in a bitter exchange of doctrinal arguments and name-calling with the local Catholic press. Inevitably, by the spring of 1851, Brown had emerged as either a potent voluntaryist champion or an arch anti-Catholic in a country deeply divided by religious passions.
Meanwhile he had decided to try for parliament himself, to strengthen the cause there of non-sectarian public education and the separation of church and state. He stood in a by-election for Haldimand County in April 1851. His chief opponent was William Lyon Mackenzie*, now back, amnestied, from his long American exile and a rather obstreperous ally of the Grit radicals. The power of Mackenzie’s name among western Grit farmers, the half-hearted support which the Reform leaders gave their own somewhat troublesome candidate, Brown, and, in particular, a powerful Catholic appeal to Irish Reformers to reject the sworn enemy of their faith, all combined to give the victory to Mackenzie. Brown’s growing breach with the ministry widened and his concern over Catholic influence in politics was only reinforced.
Then in parliament that June Baldwin resigned from office when Clear Grit objections to his reconstruction of the Court of Chancery produced a temporary Upper Canadian majority against him. His chief lieutenant, Francis Hincks, became the western head of the government – a man to whom Brown had never been as loyal as he had been to Baldwin, and whose motives he distrusted as more concerned with keeping office to promote the new era of railways than with upholding true liberal and voluntaryist principles. Early in July, the Globe editor brought his paper out against the ministry, on a path of independent Reform: the “one course for the opponents of priestcraft and state churchism.” His judgement that a Hincks government would prove an unprincipled office-holding combination seemed to be borne out when it speedily came to terms with the Grits. McDougall’s North American now became a government paper, and two Clear Grits, Malcolm Cameron and John Rolph*, entered the cabinet. The Grits still hoped to impel the ministry on to radical reform, but Brown was right in predicting that they would be swamped in the combination by the more conservative-minded forces of the railway builders following Hincks and the French Canadians now led by Augustin Morin* as successor to La Fontaine.
The new Hincks–Morin Liberal government successfully appealed to the country in the autumn of 1851. Brown ran as an independent Reformer in the southwestern county of Kent. This time he was elected easily, thanks to the strength of voluntaryism there and effective work by prominent local Reformers, one of whom, Alexander Mackenzie*, was to become his closest supporter. The elections were over by early January 1852, but parliament did not meet till August. The provincial offices first had to be transferred from Toronto to Quebec; it was a sign of the sectional division in the Canadian union that the seat of government had to shift between the former capitals of Upper and Lower Canada, no one permanent seat having yet been found.
Sectionalism had been embedded in the very constitution of the union, since the two Canadas had been given equal representation in its parliament. Underlying this political division, however, was the deeper division between two cultural communities: that of Upper Canada, English-speaking and mainly Protestant; that of Lower Canada, largely French-speaking and Roman Catholic. The distinction could only be sharpened by the different aims of zealous western voluntaryism, striving to end state support and recognition of religion, and equally zealous French Canadian Catholicism, seeking to establish new religious corporations for educational and welfare purposes or to back demands from the Upper Canadian Catholic minority for further separate school rights. Sectional strains mounted when the reserves question and ecclesiastical corporations bills came up, and when a new separate school measure for the west was carried through by Lower Canadian votes. It was charged that a “French domination” was imposing its will on Upper Canada. George Brown was in the forefront of debate, clearly representing a broader constituency in the west than just his own riding of Kent.
As parliament went on into 1853, he made himself still more prominent in Upper Canada by moving a resolution in March for representation by population. This would give the western section a preponderance of parliamentary seats for its population had now outstripped the east’s. French Canadians naturally feared being swamped by a western, English ascendancy, and held to the bulwark of equal sectional representation. In any case, Brown’s motion did not win many adherents as yet in English Canada, which was more divided politically between Reform and Tory parties than the more compact, ethnically united French Canadian minority. The idea of “rep by pop,” not originally Brown’s, would become strongly associated with him, and would increasingly gain western support as sectional strife continued in the union.
Indeed by 1854 it threatened to break up the Reform party and topple the Hincks–Morin government. In June the failure of that government to settle the reserves – though they now had imperial authorization to act – was a major factor in creating a sudden combination of dissentient groups that defeated Hincks in parliament and led to elections that summer. Brown was handily returned for Lambton, a constituency newly divided off from Kent. Out of the party turmoil he hoped to shape a new alignment to advance voluntaryism and secularize the reserves, composed of non-radical Reformers and moderate Conservatives, many of whom were now ready to support secularization.
The governing coalition that emerged when parliament met in September dashed Brown’s hopes. It combined Hincks’ former following of moderate Liberals and the French Canadian group still under Morin with the Tory–Conservative forces led by Sir Allan MacNab*. In this new MacNab–Morin regime, Tories and Conservatives would accept the need to abolish the reserves; and they and the followers of Hincks could foster railway development in the alliance, which upheld the French Canadians’ cultural interests. In short, this Liberal–Conservative coalition represented a fresh attempt to bridge sectional divisions, leaving in opposition George Brown and some western voluntaryists, the Clear Grit radical wing, and the smaller, largely French Canadian eastern radical faction, termed the Rouges, under Antoine-Aimé Dorion*.
Among these fragments of Reform there was no recognized opposition leader, but Brown increasingly took a prominent role, thanks to his parliamentary prowess and the strength of the Globe. When the government’s promised measure to abolish the reserves came up in October 1854, he and his former Clear Grit foes could vote together in criticizing loopholes in the bill, though they accepted its main tenor. Brown could also at least cooperate with the Lower Canadian Rouges in attacking alleged governmental waste and corruption in railway schemes, especially in regard to the costly Grand Trunk then building the main line across the province. In fact, he also might reach common ground with Rouges on many “state church” issues, since they had inherited the French Canadian strain of anti-clericalism. Nevertheless, any Liberal opposition front could only be a loose working alliance of sectional elements at best, and Brown’s prime effort was to form a coherent Reform party within the western half of the union.
He achieved a good deal of progress during 1855. The Globe made overtures to the Clear Grits, urging the need for Reform unity. Leading Grit radicals were ready to sink their differences with Brown and put by their hopes of sweeping elective constitutional reforms in the more urgent need to fight revived Conservative power and the dangers of “French Catholic domination.” It was an important sign, therefore, when Brown bought out the Grit North American in February and its editor, McDougall, joined the Globe staff. Then in May a new bill for Upper Canadian separate schools brought still more important developments. The act of 1855 introduced by Étienne Taché* was suddenly put through parliament in its last days at Quebec, when many Upper Canadian members had left for home. It was passed, moreover, by an eastern majority over the votes of those westerners still on hand, including Brown. This event seemed hard proof of Lower Canadian domination of the union, and of the Liberal–Conservative ministry’s connivance in that domination.
In the indignation that swept Upper Canada many Grit adherents called for dissolution of the union. But Brown, the Toronto businessman, was perhaps more conscious of the commercial values of the Canadian union than embattled western farmers. He and the Globe argued for representation by population instead: to remake rather than destroy the union, assure justice for Upper Canada but maintain the unity of the St Lawrence transport system and the broad economic development that would be lost by separation. They waged a campaign for rep by pop through Upper Canada in the summer of 1855. By autumn Grittism had been largely won to it, and Brown had supplied a powerful policy on which to focus the reunification of Upper Canadian Reform.
He made further gains the next year. In parliament in the spring of 1856, the Liberal–Conservative regime, facing sectional discords and internal divisions itself, lost some of its Liberal supporters to the Reform forces in opposition. The ministry was reconstructed in May, when MacNab was replaced by the far more able John A. Macdonald* as western leader – and still only narrowly avoided defeat in the assembly. During heated debates earlier in the session Brown and Macdonald had had a sharply significant personal encounter. Macdonald, who had always supported the cause of an old family friend, Henry Smith, the ex-warden of the Kingston penitentiary, was carried away in anger to accuse Brown as secretary of the 1848–49 commission of having falsified evidence and suborned witnesses. The committee of inquiry, which the latter immediately requested, heard a mass of testimony that palpably exonerated Brown; but it produced only a non-committal verdict, being politically weighted against him. A proud and sensitive man, he was left with the grave charges unretracted, which put more than political barriers between him and his great Conservative rival.
In August 1856, Brown began a new campaign through the Globe, calling for the annexation to Canada of the vast British territories beyond the Great Lakes, still the preserve of the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company. He had long been interested in the potentialities of the North-West. Now they were attracting widespread attention in Upper Canada, both from land-hungry farmers seeking new frontiers to settle and from Toronto businessmen hoping to direct new flows of trade to their fast rising metropolis. Brown and his brother Gordon were closely identified themselves with Toronto efforts to open communications with the North-West. And northwestern expansion was another powerful policy for a resurgent Upper Canadian Reform party, on which commercial and agrarian interests could unite. The time seemed ripe to cement party unity, when in December 1856 the emerging Toronto business and professional leadership group (with George Brown at its core) issued a call for a Reform convention to gather in the city.
The convention held on 8 Jan. 1857 brought together 150 Brownites, Clear Grits, and Liberals who had formerly followed Hincks. It readily adopted a platform that marked successful Reform reunion and included representation by population, annexation of the North-West, national non-sectarian education, and free trade. It was Brown’s platform; he dominated the proceedings and his friends the central party structure. He had remade the party in a Brownite image. Its opponents still might dub it “Clear Grit” – and “Grits” the Brownite Liberals would long be termed. But the old Clear Grit radicalism of American elective democracy had really been submerged within Victorian British parliamentary Liberalism.
The reorganized party faced its test when elections were announced in November by the government, now led by Macdonald and his powerful French Canadian ally, George-Étienne Cartier. Brownite Reform forces won a clear majority in Upper Canada, and Brown himself was triumphantly returned for both Toronto and North Oxford, but in Lower Canada the Rouges under Dorion were decisively defeated by Cartier’s large Bleu Conservative contingent. Hence the Macdonald–Cartier regime was able to continue in office when the new parliament opened at Toronto in February 1858. But Brown pressed hard on the ministry’s weakness in Upper Canada; by midsummer it was in trouble, meeting dissension in its ranks and minor defeats in the house. Accordingly, the Macdonald–Cartier cabinet decided to resign when a vote of 28 July rejected the choice of Ottawa as future permanent capital, a choice with which the cabinet was identified.
The governor general, Sir Edmund Head*, called on Brown as the leading figure in the opposition to form a new government. The danger for Brown was obvious, since his side had no real majority in the house. Yet if he refused, he would virtually endorse the constant Conservative charge that he was a “governmental impossibility.” He worked closely with Dorion, and succeeded in constructing an able cabinet, dedicated to establishing representation by population, but with constitutional guarantees for French Canada. As might be expected, this Brown–Dorion ministry was nevertheless defeated when it met parliament on 2 August; but Brown had then hoped to go to the country and win a new general election. Head refused his request, on the ground that elections had been held so recently. Brown could only resign, as he did on 4 August.
His “Short Administration” would become a standard item of political comic relief thereafter. Still, one can scarcely see that he had a better course. Furthermore, his Conservative foes revealed their own insecurity on resuming office in the narrowly divided house. They were sworn into one set of posts, then promptly switched them for another, which let them take advantage of a legal technicality and avoid having to withdraw from parliament to undergo by-elections, as the Brown–Dorion ministers had had to do. This “Double Shuffle” both added salt to Brown’s wounds and reinforced his belief that, under the existing sectionally divided union, government had become hopelessly unprincipled and venal. The failure of the courts to condemn the double shuffle in December 1858 [see Draper] further increased his bitterness, and a bad-tempered parliamentary session at Quebec in the spring of 1859 left him in a deeply despondent mood. The fact was that, for all his abundant physical energy, he was exhausted after two years of unrelenting political effort. In this state he let the Globe play with radical notions of dissolution of the union and written, American-style-constitutions – chiefly through the agency of an able Globe editorial writer, George Sheppard, with strong American constitutional preferences of his own.
During the summer of 1859, Brown largely recovered his spirits and his hold over his journal. In fact, he launched the Globe on a new campaign, for a federal union to settle the ills of the two parts of divided Canada, so that each could govern its own sectional interests, under one general government based on representation by population for matters of common concern. In September he laid plans for a new Upper Canada Reform convention to reinvigorate his disheartened party. Plainly, he meant to bring it to adopt federation: a constitutional remedy which could appeal to both sections of Canada, if rep by pop alone could not, and one – as he made clear – which would be a step toward “a great confederation” of all British America and the incorporation of the North-West as well. He and his Toronto leadership group worked carefully to arrange the key convention committees to ensure that any dissolutionist radical opinions would be outweighed at the grand party gathering.
The convention of 570 delegates met in St Lawrence Hall, Toronto, on 9 Nov. 1859. Again Brown’s presence, and engineering, dominated its affairs. Sheppard spoke powerfully for “simple dissolution,” reflecting a widespread agrarian Grit suspicion of political complexity. Then William McDougall offered a usefully vague compromise term, “some joint authority,” for the federal power to link two sectional governments; Brown made an eloquent appeal to national aspirations in urging federal union. Federation effectively gained the day. Thereafter the Globe boomed it exultantly across the west as chosen party policy.
Brown intended to move the convention programme early in the legislative session of 1860. But soon dissent appeared within his own parliamentary ranks, arising from moderate elements this time. Notably exemplified in John Sandfield Macdonald, they held that it was still possible to gain power in the existing union by winning more support in Lower Canada from ministerialists who were tired of extravagant, Grand Trunk–influenced government, and that a proposal for sweeping constitutional change would simply frighten them away. Brown, however, argued that an attempt at still another coalition merely for office would settle nothing. He won his point, but only by threatening to resign as party leader. When he finally did bring forward the convention policy, it was about 30 April and late in the session, and backing for it was visibly uncertain. It was easily defeated. Nevertheless Brown had recorded a party stand on federalism of much future consequence.
Meanwhile his health was suffering. He had evidently not fully recovered from his earlier strains – and these were financial as well as political, going back to the depression that had begun in 1857. By that date Brown had become an entrepreneur with sizeable investments in Upper Canada, quite apart from maintaining his large newspaper business. In the early 1850s he had acquired extensive lands in Lambton County, and when the new Great Western Railway was built across them in 1855 the village of Bothwell had risen on his estate. The “Laird of Bothwell” sold farm and town lots, built roads and mills, cut lumber, and operated a cabinet factory. But this was in boom time, in a country that virtually ran on credit. When the depression of 1857 brought swift contraction, Brown was soon in difficulties, with Bothwell mortgaged, and funds again committed to Globe improvements in advance of circulation and advertising revenues.
He struggled through several bad years, surviving without a serious loss of property. But the struggles – and his creditors – were particularly demanding in 1860. As a result, his health collapsed completely in the winter of 1861, and he was sent to bed for more than two months. He thus missed the parliamentary session of 1861, and was still weak in June when a general election was called. Brown did his best; but he was beaten in his Toronto seat and was out of parliament for the first time in ten years. At any rate, business conditions were at last improving because of rising American demands for lumber and other Canadian products, stemming from the onset of the Civil War that year. But more than that, oil fields were being developed in the vicinity of Bothwell; by the fall of 1861 it stood to become a boom town. Brown held on to his own estate and bought more land. His financial prospects now looked excellent. Meanwhile his Globe was warmly supporting the northern cause in the Civil War – Brown’s strong abolitionism made him a firm opponent of the slave-owning South – and no less warmly attacking the Grand Trunk railway influence and eastern power behind the Cartier–Macdonald regime in Canada.
In 1862, with his health still uncertain, he decided to take a long recuperative holiday in Great Britain. He landed in Liverpool on 23 July, his first return in 25 years. After a month in London, he moved on to Edinburgh, and there saw such old friends as William and Thomas Nelson, of the Nelson publishing family, who had been his school mates at the High School. Above all, he met their sister, Anne Nelson, lively, intelligent, and cultivated. He fell deeply in love at 43, and on 27 November, he and Anne were married at Abden House, the Nelson home.
They returned to Canada in late December, to receive a tumultuous mass welcome in Toronto. But soon, despite George Brown’s whole-hearted affection for his new domestic life, he felt the pull of unfinished political business. With his health fully restored and his horizons undoubtedly broadened by viewing colonial sectional politics from the centre of empire, he decided on another try: a man no less vigorous and resolute than before, but somehow more detached and judicious – perhaps the mellowing result of marriage.
Brown easily won a by-election in South Oxford in March 1863. He found himself in a parliament both altered and much the same. A moderate Liberal government under Sandfield Macdonald had replaced a crumbling Conservative regime in 1862, but Sandfield’s ministry was just one more attempt to keep the existing union running without dealing with underlying sectional and constitutional problems. Sandfield, in fact, had pinned his faith to the double majority principle, whereby neither section of the union would be governed against the will of its own parliamentary majority. But that principle had foundered shortly before Brown rejoined parliament at Quebec in April, when another separate school bill had been passed for Upper Canada without having received western majority support. The discredited government was thereupon recast to give it a firmer Reform character, Brown playing a prominent part as he reasserted his old influence in his party even though he preferred to stay outside the ministry. Dorion and his Rouge friends replaced moderate eastern Liberals in the cabinet; associates of Brown, such as Oliver Mowat*, entered its western half. This new Macdonald–Dorion ministry then went to the polls in July 1863. The Reformers won in Upper Canada emphatically (as Brown again did in South Oxford), but Cartier’s Conservatives equally swept the east. The two sides were practically in balance. Deadlock was approaching.
The fruitless power struggles in parliament that autumn showed that no real change had been made in the political situation. Brown, however, acting as a private member, disclosed a significantly new approach. He announced his intention to move for a select committee to inquire impartially into the sectional problems of Canada and report on the best means of remedying them. It was a constructive proposal, carefully worded to be non-partisan. But his motion did not come to a vote until the spring session of 1864, as the house battled on through more bitter, barren factional contests. The Sandfield Macdonald ministry, unable to govern, gave up in March. The Conservative cabinet that replaced it, under John A. Macdonald and Sir Étienne Taché, had no greater chance of achievement, or even survival. Brown’s single-minded aim was to settle the constitutional impasse and retire from the burden of parliament to the warm family world he longed for – his first child, Margaret, had been born that January. Finally, on 19 May 1864, his motion passed. He became chairman of a select committee drawn from leading members of all parties; he put it industriously to work. And on 14 June it reported to parliament “a strong feeling” in favour of “a federative system.”
This was only a general statement in a brief progress report. Yet it supplied the essential basis for a way out when, on the very day of that report, the Macdonald–Taché government collapsed. Brown moved decisively to use this latest crisis: he let the Conservative leaders know that he would support theirs or any other ministry if they would act to solve the constitutional problem. They were ready to respond. On 17 June, John A. Macdonald and Alexander Tilloch Galt*, a leading proponent of British North American federation, met with Brown in his room at the St Louis Hotel. Cartier later joined the discussions. It was soon decided that the only solution lay “in the federative principle suggested by the report of Mr. Brown’s committee,” and that an approach should first be made to the Atlantic provinces to seek a general British American federal union. Brown had looked ultimately toward this larger goal, but he had deemed earlier Conservative advocacy of it to be premature and mainly used as a red herring to evade action on Canada’s own internal constitutional problem. But since the Conservatives had now agreed to federate the Canadian union, he could only see a great gain if the other colonies could also be included. He agreed, though reluctantly, to enter the government with two Reform supporters. The new coalition to seek a confederation would thus have overwhelming strength in the house, backed both by the Brownite Grit western majority and Cartier’s Bleu eastern majority. Deadlock was over. George Brown had initiated the breakthrough, and the movement to a whole new union.
On 22 June 1864 the “Great Coalition” was announced to a wildly jubilant house. Brown joined Macdonald and Cartier and their colleagues in the cabinet as president of the council, along with Mowat and McDougall as his Reform associates; all under Taché as prime minister. During the summer this strong new government developed the outlines of a federal scheme to lay before representatives of the Maritime provinces at a meeting in Charlottetown in September. Among the eight Canadian cabinet members who went to the Charlottetown conference, Brown took an important role, on 5 September presenting to it the constitutional structure proposed for federal union. After the conference unanimously endorsed confederation in principle, he went on to meetings at Halifax and Saint John.
In October came the larger Quebec conference to work out detailed terms for confederation. Again Brown took a leading part in this critically important gathering – being, after all, the strongest representative there of the most powerful provincial interest, that of the future Ontario. Yet his own interest was not just sectional, but national. For example, it was he who moved the essential resolution stipulating central and provincial governments for the union, with provision for the admission of the North-West, British Columbia, and Vancouver Island. He took a stand against an elected senate in the new federal parliament, as he had previously against the elective upper house introduced in the province of Canada, because of the problem of basing British responsible government on the confidence of two representative bodies, particularly if they were of different party complexion. And he wanted simple, non-political new provincial authorities, since they were to be left only “insignificant” matters to deal with. Brown believed that the establishing of representation by population in the central government (another resolution which he moved) would give Upper Canada its due voice in important national matters, and that the provincial regimes would take the divisive, but essentially local, sectional issues out of high politics. It was a clouded vision, but at least a well-meaning one for this “sectional” politician become a confederation statesman.
After the conference closed, Brown was one of the spokesmen who first presented the actual plan for confederation embodied in the 72 Quebec resolutions to the Canadian people, in his case, through a major speech in Toronto on 3 November. Later that month he set out for England. He had been chosen to open discussions with the imperial government on the project of union, and also to discuss the transfer of the North-West from the HBC to this grand new design. During December he went into these questions with British government and opposition leaders in London, as well as the question of British North American defence, made urgent by strained relations with the United States arising out of the Civil War, now hastening towards a northern victory. He returned early in 1865, sure of imperial approval for the confederation project, hopeful of progress on the transfer of the North-West, but worried by apparent British readiness to see the still weak colonies “shift for themselves” in the face of American danger.
The Canadian parliament met again in February, to debate the Quebec conference scheme and to give the approval to be expected from the government’s big majority. Still, the confederation debates of 1865 were no mere rubber stamp; they expressed doubts and penetrating criticism, national hopes and powerful arguments for union. In the latter regard, Brown’s own speech of 8 February was perhaps his greatest, and one of the strongest in support of confederation. Before the vote was taken, however, the plan had met reverses in the Maritimes, where the pro-confederation government of Samuel Leonard Tilley* had lost an election in New Brunswick in March, and the Charles Tupper* regime had not even dared to introduce the Quebec scheme in the Nova Scotian assembly.
Another Canadian mission was accordingly sent to England to discuss the future of confederation, this time composed of Brown, Macdonald, Cartier, and Galt. After busy meetings and much social life in London in May and June, they succeeded handsomely, gaining imperial assurance of cooperation in forwarding the project and of the defence of Canada in event of war, though now that the Civil War had ended any American military threat seemed fast receding. The British government also promised aid in negotiating a new trade agreement with the United States, since the existing reciprocity treaty was to end the following year. While in Britain, Brown was fully involved in the working out of these vital concerns of the confederation movement. The remaining essential was winning back the Maritimes. After the mission returned he played a part here also.
In September 1865 he and Galt represented Canada at the Confederate Trade Council in Quebec, a smaller meeting of the provinces to consider their commercial future now that their reciprocity agreement with the United States was to be terminated. The common approach to trade the council sought, and the Maritime contacts Brown made, stood him in good stead afterwards when the Canadian government sent him to the Maritimes to try the climate anew on confederation. He marked a hopeful trend in New Brunswick, and dealt with Tilley andLieutenant Governor Arthur Hamilton Gordon* on ways to advance it. On his return in mid-November, however, he found the Canadian government had decided on a policy of their own for seeking reciprocity with the United States, by joint legislative action rather than by treaty, and this he firmly opposed.
Brown had long upheld reciprocity, as an economic liberal seeking to remove, not raise, the barriers of tariffs, and as an Upper Canadian who had seen his own section benefit from it. But he did believe its price might come too high. Legislative reciprocity, virtually open to change at the will of an American congressional lobby, would, he thought, place Canadian prosperity at the mercy of American dictation. He fought the proposal through tense cabinet discussions, yet failed to convince his colleagues. At length, on 19 December, he resigned. There is no doubt that the issue was crucial to Brown, though it is also true, of course, that strains had long been rising in the cabinet between two strong chieftains and old opponents, Macdonald and himself. Moreover Brown was still uneasy in a coalition, however great its purpose, and felt he was unduly committed in an old game of power-building and office-dealing. Hence he was emotionally ready to resign over an issue as important as reciprocity. There was meaning in the telegram he sent his wife: “I am a free man once more.”
In any case, confederation now was well in train. Brown continued wholeheartedly to support it, in the Globe and at the next session of parliament in 1866. He had the satisfaction of seeing New Brunswick elect Tilley’s pro-confederates in the spring, and Nova Scotia reopen the quest for union – not to mention, meanwhile, the failure of the legislative reciprocity approach to a scarcely interested United States. Towards the close of the year the final confederation conference met in London to draft the imperial bill, still fundamentally embodying the Quebec resolutions Brown had helped to formulate. It was passed as the British North America Act in March 1867.
By this time Brown was deep in party politics again, renewing contact with former Rouge friends such as Dorion and Luther Holton, who had opposed the confederation ministry, and striving to strengthen Reform party lines in Upper Canada, eroded by the years of coalition. Brown felt that any need for coalition would end with the inception of confederation and that party politics should reassert themselves in the new federal Canadian state. On the other hand, Macdonald Conservatives and some Liberals held that the new era should be instituted by a broad, non-partisan administration. Pressed by friends to take the lead for Reform again, challenged by the coalitionist stand, Brown overcame his sincere desire to be done with parliamentary life, and, as before, made one more try.
There was another large, excited Reform convention in Toronto in June 1867 to reaffirm party unity. There Brown virtually read from the party William McDougall and William Howland*, the two leading Liberals who still sat firmly in the coalition cabinet, Mowat having long since withdrawn to a judicial post. But the elections for the new union legislatures, held later in the summer, soon proved that the Reform convention had by no means overcome the wide popular appeal of the “patriotic” no-party cry. In August, Brown was beaten himself in South Ontario, a far from safe seat. By September it was clear that sufficient Reformers had joined with the Conservatives to give a majority in Ontario to the new federal regime of Sir John A. Macdonald and to a similar coalition government for the province led by Sandfield Macdonald. Brown himself was offered safer seats; but his feelings against parliamentary life had only been confirmed. In October 1867 he left Canada for an extended family holiday in Scotland: out of politics before he had turned 49.
In the next few years he gave himself largely to his growing family, now including two more children, Catherine Edith and George Mackenzie, to the Globe, his first love, and to his considerable business interests. He had sold his Bothwell properties to an oil syndicate in 1865 for $275,000, making him decidedly wealthy. But in 1866 he had bought a brand new estate at Bow Park near Brantford, where he began to develop a large herd of prime shorthorn cattle. Bow Park grew from a family country home to a cattle breeding enterprise that took much of his time. Nevertheless, he did not seek to escape from politics, only from public life. His journal was as potent a Reform organ as ever. Its owner, and former party leader, was regularly consulted by the Grit inner circle, whether in the provincial capital, Toronto, or the federal at Ottawa. Furthermore, he had a particularly close connection with Alexander Mackenzie, leader of the federal Liberal opposition in all but name, who had once been his election agent in early days in Kent and Lambton and later his trusted lieutenant in the old Canadian assembly.
Through the Globe he worked to bring about the end of Sandfield Macdonald’s “Patent Combination” in Ontario. In the spring of 1871 the second Ontario election gave the Reformers the balance of power in the provincial house, possibly helped by the fact that Brown in his paper had made peace with Roman Catholic voters, declaring that divisive sectarian issues had now been “banished.” Sandfield held on in office till December, but then a Liberal government under Edward Blake* replaced him. The next year, when Blake decided to move to the federal sphere, Brown helped persuade an old friend, Oliver Mowat, to leave the judicial bench and head the ministry, thus opening the long Mowat era in Ontario government in October 1872.
Meanwhile Brown had had his troubles as Globe proprietor, having faced a major printing strike by the Toronto typographical union from March to June of 1872. The strike ended in mutual concessions, but not before Brown and other “master printers” had had 18 printers arrested for intimidation, though they were released on bail and never brought to trial. The next year there was the very different excitement of the “Pacific Scandal.” Here the Globe was on the side of the angels, as it denounced the corrupt payment of election funds to the chief Conservative ministers by Sir Hugh Allan*, who had been granted the Canadian Pacific Railway charter. The Macdonald federal government fell; the Liberals under Mackenzie won a sweeping election victory early in 1874. The Mackenzie government then asked Brown to undertake a mission to the United States to seek a new reciprocity treaty.
He readily accepted the task of negotiating for the kind of reciprocity he supported. Moreover there seemed to be some hope that the Americans would now agree to a treaty, in order to avoid having to pay a cash settlement for access to the Canadian Atlantic fisheries. Brown arrived in Washington in February, officially to serve as joint commissioner with the British minister in Washington, Sir Edward Thornton, but really to carry the weight of the work himself. For several months he fenced and bargained with the American secretary of state, the affable but wily Hamilton Fish. An extensive treaty gradually was drafted, providing for reciprocal free admission of many manufactures as well as natural products. On 18 June the draft treaty was finally sent to Congress for approval. Fish had so delayed, however, that there was not time for it to be considered before the adjournment four days later. The Senate simply set it aside; there was little chance it would be revived since any American interest by now had waned. In fact, for Brown’s draft treaty of 1874 one well may use the dictum, the operation was successful but the patient died.
He played a declining part in political affairs after his Washington mission though he never entirely left them. He had been appointed a senator in 1874 but did not take his seat in Ottawa until the next year. Indeed, his attendance at the Senate was generally sporadic, and not a major return to politics. Still, Brown maintained his link with Mackenzie and the very core of stout Victorian Grittism. In this respect, he supported Mackenzie in 1874–75 against the passing discontents of the able Edward Blake, and the young Canada First idealists who temporarily gathered to him, finding Mackenzie’s rule too stale and uninspired. Blake was to be won back, but Brown and the Globe also joined battle with the redoubtable Goldwin Smith*, the sharp-tongued intellectual publicist who for a time was allied with the short-lived Canada First group. Indeed, there began a long feud with Smith, largely because of his presumption that Canada was doomed to partisan excesses and colonial inferiority until it breathed the pure air of independence, which to him seemed to mean annexation to the United States.
From 1875, however, Brown was spending his time increasingly on affairs at his Bow Park estate. There his neighbour’s son, Alexander Graham Bell*, offered him and his brother Gordon a share in the rights to the “sound telegraphy” system Bell had invented if they would advance $600 and patent the device in England. Both agreed to advance the money, and George Brown undertook to apply for a British patent for Bell in a forthcoming visit to Britain. But when the senator arrived in London in February 1876, the technical advice he received there discouraged him as to the value of Bell’s invention. He did not proceed, the agreement lapsed, and Brown did not become part-owner of a future Bell empire. He was more concerned with his plan to launch a joint-stock company in Britain to build Bow Park into a major pedigreed cattle-raising venture. Already well known to leading British stockbreeders and aristocratic fanciers alike, he succeeded in raising close to $400,000 of capital, and returned to Canada in May to obtain his charter.
Under these new auspices Bow Park grew much larger, and it became a show-place for agriculturalists visiting Canada. Yet by 1877 the country was deep in a world depression, and the market for pedigreed stock was not growing as anticipated. Brown’s enterprise was already heading into difficulties when the next year he turned his attention back to politics, to support the Liberal cause in the federal election of September 1878. He spoke through southern Ontario against the Conservative call for a “National Policy” of tariff protection. But after the National Policy, and the depression, swept Macdonald back into office, Brown returned to the mounting financial troubles of Bow Park.
In 1879 the British stockholders of his company sent over an expert manager, John Clay, to try to save the situation. By early December Clay’s work of reorganizing was beginning to bring an improvement, when a fire destroyed most of the estate’s main buildings. Then on Christmas day another blaze, almost certainly of incendiary origin, burned out the stables. George Brown’s pioneering venture into pedigreed stock raising in Canada seemed ruined. Moreover, early in 1880 he was facing problems at the Globe, where he had again invested heavily in improvements to produce a new multi-page machine-folded edition; delays in installation had held back its appearance.
On 25 March 1880, at the Globe, a former worker in the engine room, George Bennett, discharged by his foreman for intemperance, came into Brown’s office to seek a certificate that he had served five years. Brown tried to send the man, whom he did not know, to see the foreman. There was an argument; Bennett, who had been drinking, suddenly pointed a gun. As Brown grasped for it, it fired, inflicting a flesh wound in his thigh. His assailant was quickly secured. Brown’s injury was pronounced slight, and he left thankfully for Lambton Lodge, his Toronto home. But while he stayed at home, calling meetings there on Globe business and worrying incessantly over the losses at Bow Park, the wound, far from healing, grew inflamed. During April his financial outlook brightened, as a good cattle sale was made in Chicago and the new Globe edition came out. But by this time his leg was badly infected and he had too greatly taxed his strength. Gradually he gave way to fever and delirium, then coma. Early on 9 May he died at Lambton Lodge, at the age of 61.
His life was saddened at the end by a sense of failure. Yet actually Bow Park recovered under new direction, and the Globe assuredly continued to flourish. Above all, there remained Brown’s achievements in journalism, the Liberal party, and Canadian confederation itself. Lord Monck*, governor general in the confederation years, termed him “the man whose conduct in 1864 had rendered the project of union feasible.” A man, also, who refused the lieutenant governorship of Ontario in 1875 and a knighthood in 1879, he preferred always to remain George Brown of the Globe – which was distinction enough in itself.