Blood and Oil on the Tarmac

TWO WHO DIED  Christophe de Margerie (October 20, 2014) and (below right) Enrico Mattei (October 27, 1962)

A top European oil boss who rejected calls to restore Cold War barriers against trade with Russia has been killed in a crash at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, after attending a Russian government-hosted investors' conference in Gorki, and within hours of meeting Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev on Monday.

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.

Christophe de Margerie's corporate jet was taxying to take off late on Monday night when it collided with the airport's snow plough and then burst into flames. Fire engines extinguished the blaze but all four people on board the plane were killed. 

Early reports said Russian investigators accused the snow plough driver of having been drunk. But the driver denied this, saying he did not drink, because he had a heart condition.  Airport authorities are investigating further, and the 'plane's black box has not yet been examined.
   
Christophe de Margerie, 63,  had been chief executive of the French Total oil company, third largest in Europe, since 2007.  A statement from the office of French President Francois Hollande said: "Christophe de Margerie dedicated his life to French industry and to building up the Total group. He made it into one of the very top global companies. It said President Hollande valued de Margerie's independence of character and devotion to  France.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences. Tass quoted a Kremlin spokesman as saying: "The President highly appreciated de Margerie's business skills, his continued commitment to the development of not only bilateral Russian-French relations, but also on multi-faceted levels.".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29699733


Among the first unofficial commentators on de Margerie's crash death was RT (Russia Today)'s highly unconventional business correspondent Max Keiser, who noted that the French oil chief had been one of the people who talked about "peak oil", meaning companies needed to harness all sources.  Keiser continued:

The last we heard from him, however, was from this July 5, 2014 Bloomberg story we covered:


“Nothing prevents anyone from paying for oil in euros,” de Margerie told journalists at the Cercle des Economistes conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. “The price of a barrel of oil is quoted in dollars. A refinery can take that price and using the euro-dollar exchange rate on any given day, agree to make the payment in euros.” The remarks from the head of France’s largest oil company are the latest in a debate sparked by an $8.97 billion fine slapped by the U.S. on French bank BNP Paribas SA (BNP) for transactions carried out in dollars in countries facing American sanctions. Read more at http://www.maxkeiser.com/2014/10/christophe-de-margerie-ceo-of-total-has-reportedly-died-in-small-plane-crash-in-russia/#WP4zstQqPavzBDQU.99

I’m sure it had nothing to do with his death, of course [insert nervous laugh], but here’s the second comment on that Bloomberg article:

Also someone take a life insurance policy on that guy I have a feeling Langley mercenaries will make someone rich

Read more at http://www.maxkeiser.com/2014/10/christophe-de-margerie-ceo-of-total-has-reportedly-died-in-small-plane-crash-in-russia/#8pL6IHYrTIrWxVmf.99

Langley, Virginia is the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA). In the United States, Forbes Business magazine did not rush into any speculation but had this to say:

Chatty and blunt, De Margerie didn’t hide his conviction that Peak Oil was a fast approaching reality, insisting at the time that the world’s producers would be hard pressed to ever grow past 95 milli on barrels per day. He may have revised that number upwards a bit in recent years, considering the booming development of tight oil in the United States, but his dogma remained the same as then: “There will be a lack of sufficient energy available,” he said. Because of this belief, De Margerie was tireless in grabbing new oil and gas opportunities for Total — while they were still available. De Margerie ventured out from Total’s headquarters in La Défense, the west Paris business district, to woo a who’s who of presidents, prime ministers, strongmen and dictators in places like Iraq, Iran, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Yemen, Angola and Burma. But none of De Margerie’s relationships have been more important than with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

This year De Margerie negotiated a venture with Lukoil to drill for tight oil in Siberia. And with Russia’s Novatek and China’s CNPC, Total is developing a $27 billion natural gas megaproject on the Yamal Peninsula. As De Margerie told Reuters this year, ”Can we live without Russian gas in Europe? The answer is no. Are there any reasons to live without it? I think – and I’m not defending the interests of Total in Russia – it is a no.”

I asked him in 2010 whether it was simply the case that international oil companies have no choice but to make deals with despots. “Bloody right!” he exclaimed. “Because we have not oil or gas. [...] This is why the French companies are always looking for partnerships.”

Sometimes he may have even crossed the line. In March 2007, a month after taking over as CEO, De Margerie was hauled in by French authorities for 36 hours of interrogation over a $2 billion deal with Iran in 1997 to develop its massive Persian Gulf gas field. In a 2007 interview with Petroleum Intelligence, De Margerie confirmed that he authorized payments of $40 million (for consulting and lobbying efforts) to middlemen–allegedly associates of former Iranian president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and his son. When Iran is someday welcomed back into the brotherhood of nations, you can bet Total will be ready to build it some LNG projects.

Because De Margerie was such a wildly effective dealmaker over the past decade, he leaves Total in an enviable position. The company has arguably the best portfolio of development projects among the super-majors, with particular emphasis on deepwater developments in Angola. Despite some delays completing error-prone megafields like Kazakhstan’s Kashagan, these new ventures are ready to goose Total’s output significantly. Total will likely add 500,000 bpd of production by the end of 2017, outstripping all the big European oil companies by a long shot and resulting in 2.8 million bpd of production by then. Free cash flow is expected to blossom from $3 billion last year to $8 billion in 2015 and $15 billion in 2017. Bernstein Research analyst Oswald Clint, in a research note last month, called Total his favorite stock pick among the European super-majors.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/10/21/totals-ceo-de-margerie-dies-in-plane-crash-moustachioed-dealmaker-predicted-peak-oil/

Although a BBC report suggested Total's Russian operations had been hit by sanctions, others indicate that De Margerie was determined to go ahead and resist such pressures. After quoting his success in in expanding African fields, a report in the Guardian said:

A staunch defender of Russia and its energy policies amid the conflict in Ukraine, De Margerie told Reuters in a July interview that Europe should stop thinking about cutting its dependence on Russian gas and focus instead on making those deliveries safer.

He said tensions between the west and Russia were pushing Moscow closer to China, as illustrated by a $400bn deal to supply Beijing with gas that was clinched in May.

“Are we going to build a new Berlin Wall?” he said. “Russia is a partner and we shouldn’t waste time protecting ourselves from a neighbour … What we are looking to do is not to be too dependent on any country, no matter which. Not from Russia, which has saved us on numerous occasions.” 

Total is one of the major oil companies most exposed to Russia, where its output will double to represent more than a tenth of its global portfolio by 2020.

Total is one of the top foreign investors in Russia but its future there grew cloudy after the 17 July downing of a Malaysian passenger airliner over Ukrainian territory held by pro-Russian rebels. The disaster worsened the oil-rich country’s relations with the west and raised the threat of deeper sanctions.

Total said in September that sanctions would not stop it working on the Yamal project, a $27bn joint venture investment to tap vast natural gas reserves in north-west Siberia that aims to double Russia’s stake in the fast-growing market for liquefied natural gas. De Margerie said then that Europe could not live without Russian gas, adding that there was no reason to do so.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/21/total-oil-ceo-christophe-de-margeriekilled-in-moscow-plane-crash-say-reports

Christophe de Margerie is not the first European oil company boss to die in a plane crash after stepping out of line with the other, particularly American, oil interests and Western policy, and pursuing national economic independence though trading with the Russians.

In Italy, Enrico Mattei,  who was put in charge of the state-owned AGIP corporation after the liberation decided that rather than break it up among private companies, he would expand and reorganise it to develop natural gas resources for Italian industry and reduce dependence on imported fuels. ENI, as it became,  Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), went on to negotiate important oil concessions in the Middle East and a major trade agreement with the Soviet Union. Mattei also pioneered the policy that oil-producing countries should receive three quarters of the revenue.

Although his politics were Christian Democrat, Mattei openly set out to break the grip of the 'Seven Sisters', the major oil companies of the world. He angered NATO, the US government and its agents within the Italian state when he went to Moscow in 1959, ignoring the Cold War to broker a major oil deal with the Soviet Union. He further upset European colonial powers, particularly the French, ironically,  by showing sympathy for independence movements and offering more generous terms for oil extraction than the big companies usually did.


On October 27, 1962 on a flight from Catania (Sicily) to the Milan Linate Airport, Mattei's jetplane, a Morane-Saulnier MS.760 Paris, crashed in the surroundings of the small village of Bascapè in Lombardy. All three men on board were killed.

The authorities said it was an accident. Many people suspected otherwise, and there were reports that evidence had been destroyed.

Wikipedia tells us:

On October 25, 1995, the Italian public service broadcaster RAI reported the exhumation of the human remains of Mattei and Bertuzzi. Metal debris deformed by an explosion was found in the bones. There is speculation that the fuse of an explosive device was triggered by the mechanism of the landing gear. In 1994 the investigations were reopened and in 1997 a metal indicator and a ring were further analyzed by Professor Firrao of Politecnico di Torino and explosion tracks were found.^[10] Based on this evidence the episode was reclassified by the judge as homicide, but with perpetrator(s) unknown.

 

Honour the Victims, Not the Criminal

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   Above:  RALLY in Affile to oppose Graziani mausoleum and park, photo by Claudio Proietti.
   Below: GRAZIANI  (second from right) with Himmler (fourth from right), Heydrich (second from left) and other Nazis and fascists at the funeral of  police chief Bocchini, Rome, November 21, 1940,.
   
   
   
   UEFA is due to decide next month what to do about racist chants by fans of Rome club Lazio at their match with Spurs. Such behaviour by Lazio fans is nothing new. The Italian club has long had organised fascist gangs on its terraces, and former star player Paolo de Canio who made his name with his fascist salutes was a member of one of them.
   
   "I'm not a racist, I'm a fascist", Di Canio insisted a few years ago. He declared his admiration for Mussolini who had been "much misunderstood".  So far as I know his politics have not changed since he came into British football, which to a non-fan like me puts the fuss over what someone may have said in a heated exchange on the pitch into a curious context. Still, who knows, if the Swindon Town manager keeps upsetting people the way he did some of his own club's fans, he might end up doing some ankle stretching exercises just like his deeply misunderstood hero.  
   
   Lazio takes its name from the province around Rome, and that's where, about 50 km from the capital, there's a town called Affile where some people have found another way of saluting fascism.
    
   A mausoleum and park, dedicated to the memory of Fascist Field Marshall Rodolfo Graziani, has recently been opened in Affile, at a cost of €127,000 to local taxpayers. The mayor Ercole Viri has expressed hope that the site will become as ‘famous and as popular as Predappio’ – the burial place of Mussolini which has become a shrine to neo-Fascists.
   
   Graziani was Mussolini’s commander in colonial wars in Ethiopia and Libya where he carried out massacres and used chemical weapons against the native populations. In Libya in the 1920s he became known as ‘the Butcher of Fezzan’. He was directly responsible for suppressing the Senussi uprisings, and for the construction of concentration and labour camps. He was also directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans including Omar Mukhtar in eastern Libya.
   
   From 1935 to 1936, Graziani conducted the invasion of Ethiopia before becoming viceroy of Italian East Africa and governor-general of Addis Ababa in 1937. In an attempt to consolidate Italian control over the country, Graziani’s occupation army murdered up to 30,000 civilians in just three days in February 1937. Eyewitness accounts tell of how Italian soldiers doused houses with petrol and set fire to them.
   
   In the same month, Graziani ordered the massacre of the monks and pilgrims at the ancient monastery of Debre Libanos. In May, he was responsible for the assassination of up to 3,000 Ethiopian intellectuals. For these actions, Graziani earned his second title: ‘the Butcher of Ethiopia’.
   
   As Mussolini’s minister of defence in 1943, Graziani was responsible for putting down dissent in the Nazis’ puppet Salo republic, drafting a decree, which threatened any Italian who refused to serve in the army with execution. Many were killed as a result.
   
   In 1943, Gollancz published a book called The Trial of Mussolini, which pretended to be a verbatim report of the Italian dictator's trial - which never came - and featured a number of prominent British politicians and newspaper owners like Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, whom Musso was able to call as character witnesses for his defence, quoting things they had said in his support before the war. It was written by "Cassius" - a pen name used by Michael Foot.
   
   
   But Mussolini never faced such a trial, and nor did Graziani - even though he was among eight Italians against whom the UN War Crimes Commission agreed there was a prima facie case. We are bound to wonder whether Libyans and Ethiopians were seen as lesser breeds, against whom crimes could not only be forgiven, but forgotten. That is what people in these African countries  who know thier history may well suspect.  
   
   In 1950, an Italian military tribunal condemned Graziani to 19 years for collaborating with Nazis. He served only four months. He was never prosecuted for specific war crimes. In the 1950s until his death, he was the head of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement party, the MSI.  In the years of the Cold War when the NATO allies feared that Italy, with its strong Communist Party and unions might prove a weak link, they were inclined to see the fascists, including their terrorist wing, as a possible asset.  
   
   Nowadays, when Italy's far Right appears as arrogant and violent as ever, celebrating a fascist war criminal as a national hero is bound to give them a shrine to rally around, and encourage their actions. It is not just an insult to past victims but a threat to others roday.
   
   Fortunately, in Italy and other countries a campaign is under way to oppose the Affile mausoleum and say that Graziani and other leading fascists ought not to be honoured. There have been demonstrations in Affile itself and at Italian embassies in London and elsewhere. A petition circulating online says:
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   We, the undersigned, condemn unequivocally this atrocious use of public money to celebrate a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator.
   Furthermore, we call upon the European Union and our own governments to use current European and international legislation to:
   (1) Demand that the Italian government and the Mayor of Affile issue an apology for allowing the memory of Graziani’s victims to be desecrated in this way
   (2) Demand that the Italian government and the Mayor of Affile remove all allusions to Graziani, both direct and indirect, from the memorial
   (3) Demand that the Italian government and the Mayor of Affile dedicate the memorial to all those in Italy and around the world who gave their lives in the struggle against Fascism
   (4) Demand that the Italian government and the Mayor of Affile install a specific memorial at the site which commemorates those Africans who died resisting Italian occupation of their countries

   
    There is a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/Neverforgetcampaign
   
   And a website: www.neverforgetcampaign.wordpress.com
   
   
   

   On SS Lazio and di Canio:
   
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/19669979

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1506262/Im-a-fascist-not-a-racist-says-Paolo-di-Canio.html
   
   

   
   

   On "The Trial of Mussolini":
   http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2194&dat=19431029&id=0fIuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=A9wFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,5299772

Two gun outrages, differently reported, both raising questions and echoes of the past

TWO shooting outrages on the same day shocked two European cities this week. In the Belgian city of Liege, at least four people were killed in a gun and grenade attack at the Christmas market, and more than 123 people left wounded, some seriously.

In Florence's central squares a gunman killed two street vendors, both Senegalese, and wounded several others.

In both cases the killers appeared to have no rational motive, just opening fire on innocent people going about their ordinary lives. In both cases, the murderers were already known to the police, and each of them finished off by turning their guns on themselves, unlike the Norwegian killer Breivik who has lived to appear in court but whom doctors have declared insane.

Though neither outrage was on the scale of the massacre in Norway, both roused horor and anger, and both were rightly reported, but not to the same extent, at least in the UK. I saw the Liege shooting covered on TV, but not the attack in Florence. A report for the Institute of Race Relations wonders whether the difference in casualties in the two cities was big enough to justify their different coverage.

"The reporting was most obvious if you compare the BBC World Service's coverage between December 13 and 14 with that of BBC Radio 4. The World Service covered both incidents, while Radio 4 in its bulletins kept completely silent about Florence. In UK papers, too, the Liège story was front page news with the Florence incident, if covered at all, tacked on as an appendage. Was the reason that the victims in Florence were all Senegalese street vendors and violence against those without papers has become such an everyday feature of Italian life that it is not considered newsworthy?"

In both cases there are questions to be asked about how the killers were loose on the streets with firearms. Liege is, it's true, not only an industrial city but one historically associated with weaponry, from the Middle Ages through to the NATO-issue FN FAL automatic rifle produced at nearby Herstal.

All the same it is worrying that Nordine Amrani, a man who, according the BBC, was already "known to Belgian police as a gun enthusiast"(sic) was able to leave home in Liege that morning with an FAL assault rifle, hand grenades and a revolver, just off you might say for a day's shooting.

Amrani received a five-year prison sentence in 2008 for possessing a large arsenal and growing cannabis. However, a court of appeal acquitted him of the gun conviction a year later on the grounds that he had had the necessary permissions to keep them, his lawyer Jean-Francois Dister told La Libre Belgique newspaper.

When he was paroled in 2010, his guns were not returned because of his drug-dealing conviction but otherwise he was under no special gun restrictions, Mr Dister explained.

According to Liege public prosecutor Daniele Reynders, the paroled man showed no sign of mental instability.

At the time of the massacre, the 32 year old Ixelles-born man, a welder by trade, had been due to attend a police station for questioning about a vice charge. He had appeared in courts several times in his life and had a previous vice conviction from 2003. Apparently he felt the police were picking on him.

When he was arrested in 2008, police found 2,800 cannabis plants he was growing in a warehouse. They also found 10 guns and 9,500 gun parts. The arsenal included a Law rocket launcher, an AK-47 assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a K31 rifle, a Fal assault rifle and hundreds of cartridges, Le Soir reports.

"Amrani made silencers himself," its article notes."At the time, Amrani refused to say where the weapons had come from and where they were destined." He was acquitted of gun possession charges due to "grey areas" left by a change in the law, the paper says.'

Amrani opened fire in a square not far from the police station where he had been due to report on charges relating to a party in November and a woman's disappearence. He killed himself rather than face custody. After searching addresses associated with Amrani, and finding the body of a murdered woman, prosecutors said they had not found any message from the gunman. The woman, who had been shot through the head, was found in the same warehouse where Amrani cultivated cannabis in 2008, prosecutors confirmed.

If the Belgian killer felt driven beyond reason, or was a petty criminal who had become mixed up with something bigger than he understood, there is less doubt about the motivation of the gunman in Florence. Like Ander Breivik, the perpetrator of the Oslo massacre, Gianluca Casseri was inspired by the racist politics of the far Right. As the IRR report comments, the similarity with the Breivik case, even though on a much smaller scale, make it more remarkable that the Florence shootings did not rate more media attention.

Casseri was a member of CasaPound, a fascist group which takes its name from the American poet Ezra Pound, who moved to Italy and became an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler. A contributer before the War to Oswald Mosley's fascist paper Action, Pound was charged with treason for his wartime broadcasts for the Axis, but a diagnosis of insanity saved him from execution. As much as his poetic standing, or even his links to Mussolini, what may commend Pound to current day fascists is his early obsession with "usury" as the culprit for war and crisis, and his admiration (some say later repudiated) for the classic conspiracy work The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Casseri himself was the author of fantasy novels including The Key of Chaos about a wizard, a mathematician and an alchemist, which enjoyed some popularity. He also wrote an academic paper about Dracula folklore and was the editor of a niche magazine about fantasy and horror fiction and comics. CasaPound - known in Italian anti-racist circles for its attacks on Left targets - denies being extremist, though its vice president Simone de Stefano while acknowledging that Mussolini's racial laws were a mistake, calls his 'brand of fascism' to be the group's 'point of reference, a vision of the state and the economy and the concept of sacrifice'. CasaPound has also sponsored rock concerts at which supporters whip themselves with belts because, according to them, it is 'a way to risk pain, to confront yourself in ways society does not allow'.

Africans in Italy had no difficulty recognising what happened in Florence as a racist attack. About 300 people, many of them also street vendors, gathered in an impromptu protest at the killings, demanding to see Casseri's corpse. 'Don't tell us he was a madman', one told the Guardian, 'because if he was he would have killed whites as well as blacks'.

In both Italy and Belgium there are echoes from the past in these two attacks. Before they had the immigrants to target, Italy's modern day fascists made do with atrocities against their fellow-countrymen, such as the Milan bank and Bologna railway station bombings (August 1980). These actions were also part of a "strategy of tension" promoted by America's CIA and linked with elements in both Italy's own "secret state" and the so-called Gladio stay-behind network set up after the war supposedly to resist Soviet takeover. This was turned against the native Italian communists and left, both by 'false-flag' terrorism for which the Left was meant to take the blame, and creating a general mood of fear from which it was hoped a right-wing, even military government would benefit.

In Belgium a series of violent crimes between 1982 and 1985, culminating in another shopping centre shooting, in Brabant, were carried out by a gang later linked with supposed "rogue" policemen and the gendarmerie, as well as a shadowy fascist oufit called Westland New Post. There too the suspicion was raised of Gladio involvment and the aim of terrorising people into accepting a right-wing regime that promised "order".

[1] Tom Kington, 'Italy's fascists stay true to Mussolini's ideology' Guardian, 6 November 2011. [2] Tom Kington, 'Florence gunman shoots Senegalese street vendors dead', Guardian, 13 December 2011.

References in A tale of two cities, by IRR European News Team
http://www.irr.org.uk/2011/december/ha000016.html


Other references to see:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/13/florence-gunman-shoots-street-vendors?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/27/ex-berlusconi-minister-defends-breivik?intcmp=239

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-16175019

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16175795

Italy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1980_Bologna_bombing

London connections:

http://lombardia.indymedia.org/node/29267

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Fiore

Belgium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Brabant#Gladio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijvel_gang

Everything is Possible

SYLVIA PANKHURST.
Woman with imagination and vision, but no idle dreamer.

THERE was a capacity crowd in the hall at Congress House on Wednesday night, and I was one of the minority of males attending. A new feature-length documentary about a figure from early last century was having its screening at the SERTUC Film Club, SERTUC being the Southern and Eastern Region of the Trade Union Congress, but as I think the reversal of the usual sex balance might suggest, this audience was much more than "the usual suspects".
And it was a rewarding evening for all.

Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible tells the story of the battling sufragette and socialist who never surrendered her beliefs and principles, whether to brutality from State or pressure from Family, and never lost her feeling, often expressed in practical help, for humanity.

Born in Manchester, where her mother and father started a branch of the Independent Labour Party, Sylvia began studying at Manchester Art School in 1898, and in 1900 she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. In the film we see some of her work, depicting strong working women like some she might have known up north, with warmth, respect and admiration. But Sylvia was not one of those who stick at sentimentalising the oppressed while doing nothing to combat their oppression, and as she became more involved in the women's suffrage movement in London she decided to put her art to one side and concentrate on politics.

For Sylvia Pankhurst achieving the vote would never be an end in itself, and still less was she interested in raising a narrow elite of upper class women to take their place alongside men in a parliament maintaining wealth and privilege. As her repeated arrests and hunger strikes would show, it was not lack of courage that set her apart from the increasingly desperate actions taken by some sufragettes, but her insistance that the movement must involve the mass of women, and not just an elite of heroines - though a heroine she was.

What's more, while some working men still had no vote, she saw them as allies to be won, rather than competitors - whatever the backward attitudes of some union leaders, or the bizarre (to our modern ears) ideas of a self-styled marxist intellectual like Belfort Bax, who devoted his energies to opposing women's rights.

It was the First World War that shed sharp light on things. Like her friend Keir Hardie, Sylvia Pankhurst saw no glory in workers being sent to the trenches for rival imperialist powers and war profiteers. Unlike her mother Emmeline and older sister Christabel, she would not put aside her fight for equality to support the war effort, and getting more women into production, rather than parliament. But while her mother and sister waved the flag for Our Boys, it was Sylvia, based in London's East End, who helped to see their children were not neglected, with cost-price cafes, toy workshops where mums could earn a wage, creches, and mother and baby clinics in local pubs, one dubbed the Mother's Arms.

(Next time I stumble between the push-chairs and buggies parked in my local Wetherspoon by the mums who gather there with their ankle-biters to confer over brunch I will no longer grumble about what I thought was a modern-day development, having now seen the precedents shown in this film!)

All this was practical solidarity, not mere charity, and went with campaigning on rents and pensions, leading deputations of impoverished East End women to parliament, and editing the Women's Dreadnought, which eventually became the Workers' Dreadnought. It was Sylvia Pankhurst's paper, probably the first edited by a woman, which exposed things people were not supposed to know about, like British Army officers ordering 37,900 executions of conscripts. When an officer, Major Siegfried Sassoon, wrote A Soldiers Declaration, Against the War, it was the Dreadnought that published it.

If not many of us in Wednesday night's audience had known that, I would imagine fewer still of us realised before seeing this film that like James Connolly in Dublin before her, Sylvia Pankhust responded to police brutality by organising a people's army. We see them exercising with real rifles. Stirring times! No wonder by the Second World War our rulers were reluctant to trust the Home Guard with these, or that Sylvia Pankhust has yet to be given a place on a plinth outside parliament, or due mention in our school history books.

An enthusiast like many for the October Revolution in Russia, Sylvia Pankhurst was among the founders of the British Communist Party, though she was not unafraid to tell Lenin when she differed - notably on his advice to communists at the time to get in with Labour and take their place also in parliament. For his part, the leader of the Bolsheviks took Sylvia seriously enough to spend time arguing with her position in Left -wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.

Sylvia Pankhurst's internationalism continued, in and out of the Party. She supported the dockers who stopped work loading a ship called the Jolly George in London, in 1920 because it was going to carry arms to Poland for use against the Soviet Union. (another piece of working class history we must be grateul to this film for restoring, when nowadays such industrial action is well outside what is legally permitted by our anti-union laws, and there's a danger of such precedents being erased from working class consciousness).

In the 1920s and 1930s, Sylvia Pankhurst was among the first to recognise the menace of fascism and fight against it, and she also assisted Italian and Jewish refugees. She and an Italian socialist Silvio Erasmus Corio set up home at Woodford Green in Essex, and their son Richard was born in 1927.

In 1935, Sylvia launched the Ethiopian News to support the resistance to Italian colonisation. After her partner Silvo died in 1954 she was invited by Emperor Haile Selassie to come and live in Ethiopia, where she founded the Social Service Society and edited a monthly periodical, the Ethiopia Observer. Sylvia Pankhurst died in Addis Ababa on 27 September 1960. The emperor ordered that she should receive a state funeral. Richard Pankhurst became a professor at the University of Addis Ababa and is an outstanding scholar on Ethiopian studies.

Richard and his wife Rita are among the people interviewed in this film, along with academics like Mary Davis. No less than 100 volunteers were involved in conducting the interviews and digging out all kinds of rare archive footage, photographs and documents, some from security files, to tell the story of Sylvia Pankhurst and try to explain her politics. In doing so they have not only brought an under-rated heroine to life and a well-deserved fresh attention, but contributed a missing piece to our picture of 20th century history.

Directors Ceri Dingle and Viv Regan from WORLDwrite, and reporter Saleha Ali who did much of the interviewing were available to discuss with the audience on Wednesday, and I see Ceri Dingle and Professor Mary Davis are due to discuss Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is Possible on Sunday morning, October 9, when it will be shown along with a short fim about Ethiopia, at the Renoir cinema, in Brunswick Square, under the auspices of London Socialist Film Co-op.

The film is also available on DVD at £10 and well worth showing at your union branch, trades council, history or student society etc


http://www.sylviapankhurst.com/

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WpankhurstS.htm

world.write@btconnect.com

www,gn.apc.org/sylviapankhurst

www.socialistfilm.blogspot.com

Sylvia Pankhurst was one of first to recognise danger of fascism. An article from Workers Dreadnought;
http://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/lobby/3909/raete/wd0411222.html

Investigate MI6 link with fascist terror

BOLOGNA, August 2 1980. Bomb at railway station killed 82 people.

BRITISH intelligence was involved in plotting a right-wing coup d'etat in Italy. The British and US governments considered the plan in order to forestall the possibility of the Communist Party being elected to government.

This has been unearthed by an Italian researcher going through British Foreign Office papers released under the thirty years rule. It must raise questions about whether the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, was involved along with the CIA in the "strategy of tension" pursued by Italian fascists for a number of years,under which bombings in public places
killing innocent civilians were aimed at terrorising people into acceptance of "strong government", that is, military dictatorship.

In 1976 the Cold War was raging, Henry Kissinger was US Secretary of State, and Europe already had an example of how democracy could be brutally torn away, in the Greek colonel's coup, which had been carried out according to a NATO contingency plan.

After 30 years ruled by the corrupt Christian Democrat party (DC), Italians were looking for change, and the Partito Comunista Italiana (PCI), which was the main party of the Italian workers movement just as Labour held sway in Britain, seemed best-placed to win people's confidence. Led by Enrico Berlinguer, it was also the most moderate of Europe's Communist Parties, moving towards reformism. But that did not
persuade the US State Department to accept it, nor apparently the British Foreign Office.

With elections due on June 20, 1976, and the possibility that the Communists would take first place and be able to form a coalition government, Kissinger expressed concern that having a Communist Party in office would break up NATO. It seems he was not the only one.

A secret Foreign Office memo dated 6 May 1976, entitled Italy And The Communists: Options For The West, floated one possible course of action as "action in support of a coup d'etat or other subversive action". The authors admitted: "By its nature, a coup d'etat could lead to unpredictable developments." But they added that, in theory at least, "it could be promoted. In one way or another, the force of the right could be counted on, with the support of the police and the army". The idea of a coup to remove the PCI or stop it coming to power "could be considered attractive" – but the idea was rejected as "unrealistic".

In the event the PCI came second in the elections, gaining 43.3 per cent of the vote, against the Christian Democrats' s 38.7 per cent.

How Britain plotted coup d'état to topple Italy's Communists
By Peter Popham in Rome. Independent 14 January 2008
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3336109.ece

But the "strategy of tension", already begun by fascists and elements within the Italian security(!) establishment before this, did not cease, but escalated. In probably the worst incident, 82 people were killed by a bomb in a railway station waiting room at Bologna.
Several of the fascists whom Italian authorities were investigating were able to take refuge in Britain, and successive Home Secretaries always dragged their feet over requests for extradition.

In the most notorious cases, Alessandro Alibrandi surfaced at meetings of the League of St.George, a British far-Right organisation, before returning secretly to Italy where he was killed in a gun battle with police; Roberto Fiore remained in Britain for many years, working with British fascists, and setting up right-wing charities and businesses before returning to Italy where he is active in fascist politics again. Italian investigators reportedly ascertained that Fiore enjoyed protection in return for providing MI6 with information obtained while he was with the Falange in Lebanon.
(Terror Fugitive is MI6 Messenger Boy, Searchlight, June 1989 )

Besides the armed wing of the Italian fascists, Britain has also helped the more "respectable' fascist leaders. Gianfranco Fini was invited to lecture at Chatham House in 1995, and by 2002 he was able to meet Labour's John Prescott as a minister. But then Labour was in office ion 1976 when the right-wing coup plot was considered. Harold Wilson might have considered whether the same plotters were working against him.

It is worth remembering that Wilson's Labour government had also been in office when MI6 combined with the CIA to prepare the Indonesian military coup, which brought the massacre of
up to a million "communists".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,530478,00.html
Elected governments come and go, but the secret government continues. What needs to be investigated is just how strong the links have been between Britain's intelligence services and the far-Right forces in Italy and the rest of Europe.