The Early Days of a Better Nation

Sunday, December 24, 2006



Season's Greetings

I remember how much we enjoyed Christmas Day when we were children. It was the only day of the year when all the other kids went to church and we got to play in the street. Ignoring Christmas was a religious observance. On New Year's Day, however, we did go to church. We listened to a discourse on the history of our denomination, and afterwards, outside, everyone shook hands and wished each other a Happy New Year. Then we went home for a dinner of turkey, roast potatoes, and brussels sprouts, followed by a rich dark steamed bowl-shaped fruit pudding. We pulled crackers and put on paper hats, and opened our New Year presents.

Every year, I still go to the sale of charity Christmas cards at St John's to make sure I get at least one set of cards that say Season's Greetings and that don't have any symbols of the Christian or of the old religion, such as Nativity scenes, angels, holly leaves and/or berries, significant trees and/or stars, carol-singers or Santa Claus. These are for those of my relatives who still feel that Christmas is pagan.

This is why the now traditional annual war-on-the-war-on-Christmas leaves me unimpressed. We did it so much better when I was a lad.

Merry Christmas, everyone!
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006



'A Popular Front in arms'

Home Guard Socialism: A vision of a People's Army

by Stephen Cullen

Copyright, Allotment Hut Booklets

Price £3.00. Available for cash, UK stamps, or sterling cheque made out to the author at 76 Hanworth Road, Warwick, CV34 5DX

The BBC comedy series Dad's Army has probably done more to shape the popular memory of the Home Guard, Britain's WW2 volunteer defence force, than any other source. Good though the laughs are, this is a shame, because the Home Guard was a serious organization whose history has some significance today and may have more in the future. Stephen Cullen, an anti-militarist with a sound knowledge of military history, here provides a clear, well-documented and non-sectarian introduction to one aspect of the Home Guard's history that deserves to be better known: the key role of a small group of socialists and Spanish Civil War veterans in its initial organization, in the training of thousands of its members, and in the popularization of its ideas and methods to a readership that extended well beyond the Home Guard itself. Tom Wintringham's New Ways of War (1940), and 'Yank' Levy's Guerrilla Warfare (1941), both Penguin Specials, provided their readers with the political rationale and the military tactics of guerrilla warfare as a method of national and popular resistance to mechanized warfare and fascist occupation. Guerrilla Warfare is a severely practical manual: Levy's personal experience ranged from the Royal Fusiliers through the Mexican Revolution and Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua to the British battalion of the International Brigades. He drew also on the contemporary experiences of the Soviet and Chinese partisans. It's a long way from Captain Mainwaring's comical crew.

Stephen Cullen's pamphlet provides a wealth of fascinating information about Wintringham, Levy and their comrades, the 'Osterley Park socialists', and their vision of a People's Army. It leaves its readers to reflect on the curious and unsettling fact that in the national and social crisis of 1940, the one moment in the twentieth century in Britain when an armed people led by socialists was an urgent necessity and was rapidly becoming a practical reality, the great majority of Britain's radical socialists were otherwise engaged.
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