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Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 08:57:05 +0100 (BST)
Reply-To: schnews-l@gn.apc.org
From: Jo Makepeace (webmaster@schnews.org.uk)
Subject: SchNEWS 258, Friday 5th May 2000

DAMAGING A CRIMINAL

One pleasing improvement to Parliament Sq on Mayday was the green turf mohican and painted communist hammer and sickle on the statue of that racist old bigot Winston Churchill. He once described communists as "swarms of typhus-bearing vermin" and held similar views about everyone else who wasn't rich, reactionary and British like himself.

Justifying the slaughter of indigenous peoples, he wrote "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia by the fact that a stronger race has come in and taken their place". It wasn't that different at home - he was against women getting the vote. He believed dole money "should never be enjoyed as a right and tried to withdraw relief from striking miners' families in the '20s, sending in the army who killed two of the Welsh miners.

TIKB, the initials of a Turkish communist group, were written on the statue - a fact perhaps connected with Churchill's actions against the peoples of that region. As Foreign Secretary in the 1930s, Churchill ordered the use of mustard gas against Kurdish villages, saying "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using gases against uncivilised tribes". Not just a racist, but a mass murderer too.

Unfortunately, the British government's attitude to the Kurds has not changed much in the last 70 years. Blair's lot are strongly backing the Ilisu Dam project in Turkey (see SchNEWS 244) that will displace 16,000 Kurdish people, flood 52 villages and 15 towns and destroy Hasankeyef, a 3,000 year old city that is the heartland of Kurdish culture. We know the media couldn't give a toss about people in poor countries (as long as they don't come here) but they do seem to have suddenly developed a full-on concern for monuments. So why not ring up one of their hotlines to shop Tony Blair and his sidekick Stephen Byers for their planned destruction of one of the most ancient cities in the world - criminal damage that goes slightly beyond an easily removable lick of paint.

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