"Boycott This Poem"
Boycott this poem
for its candid display
of words that infiltrate
your much needed
safe space
for its candid display
of words that infiltrate
your much needed
safe space
Boycott this poem
for its recognition
of only two genders
I'm talking about
Adam and Eve
you assholes
Halloween is
a once a year
occasion
for its recognition
of only two genders
I'm talking about
Adam and Eve
you assholes
Halloween is
a once a year
occasion
Boycott this poem
for verification of
the decline in poetry
the only people
reading this shit
are insomniacs
in need of a sleep aid
for verification of
the decline in poetry
the only people
reading this shit
are insomniacs
in need of a sleep aid
Boycott this poem
it's a product of
a white male
who doesn't subscribe
to what you say
most poets are
left leaning hypocrites
who combat
misperceived fascism
with fascism
ANTIFA is a terrorist
organization
it's a product of
a white male
who doesn't subscribe
to what you say
most poets are
left leaning hypocrites
who combat
misperceived fascism
with fascism
ANTIFA is a terrorist
organization
Boycott this poem
for pointing out
the obvious
there's plenty
of parallels
when it comes to
the Alt-right and
Nation of Islam
but you won't see
any stupid ass
white people
attacking
Louis Farrakhan
for pointing out
the obvious
there's plenty
of parallels
when it comes to
the Alt-right and
Nation of Islam
but you won't see
any stupid ass
white people
attacking
Louis Farrakhan
Theatre Boycott Upstairs Right -- Robert V. Barritt
Charles Boycott (“Captain Boycott”) was a land agent for John Crichton, (3rd Earl Erne), a landowner in County Mayo, Ireland. One of his responsibilities was to collect rents from tenant farmers on the land, for which he earned 10% of the total rent (£500 a year). As a farmer himself as well as being an agent he employed local laborers, grooms, coachmen, and house-servants. In addition to being both a magistrate and English, he became unpopular among his tenants for fining them for petty restrictions he imposed such as not allowing gates to be left open or not allowing hens to trespass on his property, and for withdrawing some of their privileges such as collecting wood from the estate. In 1876 a British government survey reported that 10,000 people, 0.2% of the population, owned almost all the land in Ireland and that the 750 richest landlords owned ½ the country; many of them, like Crichton, were absentee landlords who hired agents to manage their estates. Landlords usually divided their estates into smaller farms that they rented; tenant farmers were generally on one-year leases and could be evicted even if they paid their rents. Michael Davitt was the son of a small tenant farmer in County Mayo who had been given a 15-year sentence for gun-running but was released on probation. In 1879 he formed the Irish National Land League (Conradh na Talún) to reduce rents, stop evictions, and give tenants ownership of the land they farmed. Davitt asked Charles Stewart Parnell, powerful Irish nationalist politician, to lead the organization.
ReplyDeleteOn 19 September 1880, in a speech to Land League members, Parnell asked, "What do you do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbor has been evicted?" to which the crowd responded, "kill him." But Parnell offered “a very much better way – a more Christian and charitable way, which will give the lost man an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by … isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed.” Crichton’s rents were due in October; due to a poor harvest he had agreed to reduce the rental by 10%, but his tenants demanded a 25% reduction. Boycott obtained eviction notices against 11 tenants. Three days after Parnell's speech a process server and 17 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary served 3 eviction notices, but the 4th, Mrs Fitzmorris, refused to accept hers and waved a red flag to alert other tenants. Women who arrived on the scene drove the party away by throwing stones, mud, and manure at them. Agitators from nearby Ballinrobe then provoked Boycott's servants and laborers to leave his employment immediately, and he was soon forced to run the estate without help. Within days, the blacksmith, postman, and laundress stopped serving him and shopkeepers in Ballinrobe stopped providing him food and other provisions. On 23 September journalist James Redpath told a local Land League leader, Father O'Malley, that he was bothered about a word: "When the people ostracise a land-grabber we call it social excommunication, but we ought to have an entirely different word to signify ostracism applied to a landlord or land-agent like Boycott. Ostracism won't do – the peasantry would not know the meaning of the word – and I can't think of any other." O’Malley suggested, "How would it do to call it to Boycott him?" Redpath used the term for the first time in the 12 October issue of the Chicago “Inter-Ocean.” In 1888, the word was included in the first volume of “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles” (the forerunner of the “Oxford English Dictionary”).
ReplyDeleteThe Boycott Relief Fund was established in Belfast in early November to arrange an armed expedition against the boycotters and arranged with the Midland Great Western Railway for special trains to transport it from Ulster to County Mayo. London’s leading papers, the “Daily Express,” “Daily Telegraph,” “Daily News,” and “News Letter,” raised £2,000 to fund the expedition. On 10 November 50 men from Counties Cavan and Monaghan left for County Mayo, where a regiment of the 19th Royal Hussars and more than 1,000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary had already arrived, but Boycott insisted that he only needed 10 or 15 laborers to harvest the crops. On 27 November the 19th Hussars escorted the Boycott family and a local magistrate from the estate; they had to use an army ambulance since no driver would agree to take them. In Dublin his hotel was threatened with a boycott, so he left for England on the Holyhead mail boat on 1 December. He claimed that he lost £6,000 of his investment in the estate, and the government spent £10,000 to counter the boycott, "one shilling for every turnip dug from Boycott's land," according to Parnell. In December Parnell and other Land League leaders were tried for conspiring to prevent the payment of rent, but the case was dismissed after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict (it had voted 10 to 2 for acquittal). In January 1881William Edward Forster, chief secretary for Ireland (who gained the nickname "Buckshot" based on the rumor that he ordered the police to fire on unruly crowds), introduced the Protection of Person and Property Act to punish boycotters; it included a suspension of Habeas Corpus. Parnell led a filibuster, forcing the speaker of the house to declare that debate could be suspended if a 3-1 majority decided the matter was urgent (the first time a check was placed on Parliamentary debate). The act was passed on 28 February, but English opponents formed the Anti-Coercion Association in protest, a precursor to the Labour Party. In April prime minister William Ewart Gladstone introduced the Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, which established the principle of dual (landlord and tenant) land ownership and set up the Irish Land Commission to fix rents for a period of 15 years and guarantee fixity of tenure. On 13 October Parnell was arrested, and soon after the Land League was suppressed. In May 1882 Gladstone announced that the government intended to release Parnell and that Forster had in consequence resigned; on the following Saturday, Forster's successor, Lord Frederick Cavendish, along with his under-secretary, was murdered by the Irish National Invincibles in Phoenix Park, Dublin. In January 1883 their leader, bricklayer James Carey, testified against the others, leading to the executions of 5 of them; Carey fled to Cape Town in July but was killed by one of his passengers, a bricklayer from Donegal.
ReplyDeleteThe Antifa (“anti-fascist”) movement in the US consists of several autonomous groups (including anarchists, communists, and socialists) dedicated to direct action against far-right and white supremacist ideologies. Antifaschistische Aktion was formed in 1932 with support from the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany); although there is no organizational connection, Antifa uses Antifaschistische Aktion's two-flag logo, as well as the three arrow anti-fascist circle employed by the paramilitary Eiserne Front (Iron Front), formed in 1931 by the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party). The two-flag logo was designed by Max Keilson and Max Gebhard, members of “Asso,” the Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany); the anti-fascist circle was designed by Sergei Tschachotin, a former assistant to Ivan Pavlov, to cover Nazi swastikas. The three arrows represented the reactionaries (especially the monarchists), the Bolshevists, and the fascists. Decades later, in response to the prominence of neo-Nazism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, antifascist demonstrators began to rise again in Germany; in the US, Anti-Racist Action groups emerged from the punk and skinhead milieu. About 200 Antifa groups exist in the US. Scott Crow, an anarchist organizer from Texas, defended direct action: "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don't believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece."
ReplyDeleteLouis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott) is the son of Percival Clark, a Jamaican immigrant, and Sarah Mae Manning, an immigrant from Saint Kitts and Nevis, but his parents split up before his birth; he was later adopted by Louis Wolcott from Barbados. At 13 he was one of the first African-American performers on Ted Mack’s “Original Amateur Hour” and at 14 he won national violin competitions and then went to Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina on a track scholarship but dropped out to care for his new wife and child. In the 1950s, as “The Charmer” and “Calypso Gene” he recorded several calypso albums; one of his songs was on the top 100 Billboard Chart for five years in a row. In 1955 he memorized and recited verbatim the 10 questions and answers of the Nation Of Islam's Student Enrollment and wrote a Saviour's Letter (copied verbatim in the identical handwriting of the group’s founder, Wallace D. Fard Muhammad) and received his X as a registered Muslim/registered believer/registered laborer. (Since Black Muslims asserted that original African family names had been lost and replaced by slave names, they used an "X" until assigned Islamic names; so he was Louis X until the organization’s leader Elijah Muhammad renamed him Farrakhan, an Arabic name meaning "The Criterion." Within 9 months he was Muhammad X’s assistant minister at Muhammad's Temple of Islam in Boston, and then succeeded Malcolm when he was transferred to Muhammad's Temple of Islam No. 7 in Harlem, the predominantly African-American section of New York City. After Malcolm X abandoned the NOI, Farrakhan’s condemnations may have contributed to his assassination in 1965; he succeeded Malcolm as the head of the Harlem mosque and as the NOI’s national spokesman/national representative. In 1975 Elijah Muhammed died and was replaced by his son Wallace Muhammad, who imposed more orthodox Sunni Muslim beliefs, welcomed white worshippers, established inter-religious cooperation and outreach to Christians and Jews, rejected the deification of the group’s founder as Allah in person, decentralized the leadership, and renamed the group the World Community of Islam in the West and later the American Muslim Mission and, eventually, the American Society of Muslims, with himself as imam Warith Deen Mohammed (Warith Al-Deen Mohammed). At first Farrakhan (as Abdul-Haleem) followed the new dispensation but left the group in 1977 to form the Final Call, which in 1981 reinstituted the original NOI name and practices, including its reputation for militarism. Over time he regained many of the Nation of Islam' properties, including the National Headquarters Mosque #2 (Mosque Maryam) in Chicago, Illinois. In 1995 Malcolm X's daughter Qubilah Shabazz was arrested for conspiracy to assassinate Farrakhan due to his alleged role in his assassination, but charges against her were dismissed. Later that year he organized the “Million Man March” in Washington, DC (actually it was attended by about half that number), which featured speeches by various distinguished African Americans Maya Angelou; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King III, Cornel West, Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Chavis. On its 10th anniversary he organized the Millions More Movement, with New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz, Al Sharpton, and Addis Daniel. Nevertheless, the Southern Poverty Law Center describes Farrakhan as antisemitic and a proponent of an anti-white theology.
ReplyDeleteIn 2008 Paul Gottfried addressed the H. L. Mencken Club about what he called "the alternative right" and then republished his talk, "The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right," in Richard B. Spencer’s “Taki's Magazine” (called "Takimag" for short), an online magazine of politics and culture published by Taki Theodoracopulos. In 2009 Takimag published two more posts by Patrick J. Ford and Jack Hunter in which they discussed the issue. But the term “alt.right” was coined by Spencer, who in 2007 had dropped out of his Ph.D. program in modern European intellectual history at Duke University to, as he said, “pursue a life of thought-crime." In 2010 Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com and then, on Martin Luther King. Jr.'s birthday in 2017, AltRight.com. He considers himself an identitarian rather than a white supremacist, though he has advocated for a white homeland for a "dispossessed white race" and called for "peaceful ethnic cleansing" to halt the "deconstruction" of European culture. The alt.right has no formal organization and is not a coherent movement but is associated with various rightist ideologies such as racism, neo-fascism, isolationism, protectionism, antisemitism, nativism, populism, Islamophobia, antifeminism, misogyny, homophobia, and neoreactionism. It has its roots on websites such as 4chan and 8chan, where anonymous members create and use Internet memes to express their beliefs.
ReplyDeleteMichael Marrotti and I have crossed paths many times. Michael is an excellent writer who I admire. His personality can be a bite of tiger! LOL!
ReplyDelete