Osugi Sakae, Japanese anarchist, born 17 January 1885, killed by police after the Great Kanto Earthquake, 16 September 1923. Also Ito Noe, Japanese anarchist and feminist, born 21 January 1895, killed by police after the Great Kanto Earthquake, 16 September 1923.
Livio Maitan, Italian revolutionary socialist, born 1 April 1923, died 16 September 2004.
Victor Jara, Chilean socialist songman, born 23 September 1932, murdered about 16 September 1973 in the repression following the coup of 11 September.
Finally, the military brought Victor Jara and other political prisoners to the Stadium of Chile, the place where the concert for Allende has previously been held. There the military men tortured and killed many people. They broke Victor Jara’s hands … so that he couldn’t play his guitar, and then taunted him to try and sing and play his songs. Even under these horrible tortures, Victor Jara magnificently sang a portion of the song of the Popular Unity party. After this, he received many brutal blows, and finally was brutally killed with a machine gun and carried to a mass grave.
More here.
Sergio Ortega, Chilean composer who wrote the songs “Venceremos” and “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido”. Born 2 February 1938, died 15 September 2003.
J. D. Bernal, Irish scientist and communist; born in Nenagh, 10 May 1901; died 15 September 1971.
And, while I’ve got the scanner out, here’s a blast from the past — a William Hague-era Conservative Party pledge-card that I was lucky enough to be given…
Front:
Back:
I’m moving offices at the moment, which means, among other things, going through old boxes of stuff. Here’s something I found in one of them, a label from a Libyan bottle of mineral water:
Don’t worry. I don’t think this is going to become a daily feature. Anyway, here’s Enkidu, Mac User, a few moments ago:
Andromache, earlier this morning:
This is what you miss if you don’t subscribe to the BBC Oxfordshire News RSS Feed!
I read through Martin Amis’s long piece in yesterday’s Observer, and was struck by one thing in particular: he writes in the third part that
The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.
It’s a while since I flipped through a book called The Camel and the Wheel by Richard Bulliet that deals with the fascinating story of the disappearance of wheeled transport from the post-Roman Middle East, but I don’t remember the story there having much to do with the “intellectual autarky” of the Islamic world, and a glance at this article, in which Bulliet summarises his argument, suggests that my memory’s working along the right lines.
So is anyone seriously making the case against Bulliet that Muslim “intellectual autarky” (rather than the good old-fashioned historical materialist reasons of geography, political economy and camels) was a major cause of the collapse in the use of the wheel (whose decline, in any case, predated the rise of Islam), or is this just becoming something people like Bernard Lewis and Martin Amis can say in order to make the Islamic world sound more unreasonable than it in fact was?
Christian Rakovsky, Bulgarian Communist, born 1 August 1873 (old style), put on trial in Moscow in 1938 and shot, 11 September 1941. More here, and some of his writings here.
Anna Lindh, Swedish social democrat; born 19 June 1957, assassinated 11 September 2003.
Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, b. 17 April 1894, d. 11 September 1971.
Salvador Allende, President of Chile: born 26 June 1908, died 11 September 1973 in the violence surrounding the coup which brought General Pinochet to power.
Enkidu, at full stretch:
