Tom Wintringham: Revolutionary Patriot.

Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1915 he was elected to a Brakenbury scholarship in History at Balliol,^[1] but during the First World War postponed his university career to join the Royal Flying Corps, serving as a mechanic and motorcycle despatch rider.

At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny, one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International, a Communist party. As the party was formed, Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London, ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full-time in politics.

Political career and the Spanish Civil War

In 1923, Wintringham joined the recently formed Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1925, he was one of the twelve CPGB officials imprisoned for seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. In 1930, he helped to found the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, and was one of the few named writers to publish articles in it. In writing for the Communist party's theoretic journal Labour Monthly, he established himself as the party's military expert. In LM articles and in booklets on the subject, Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for air raid precautions several years before the bombing of Guernica. His arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party's wartime campaigns, that for ARP provision, and shaped government policy on the issue in the years leading up to the war.

Although at the centre of the CPGB organisation, he was often at odds with Party policy, believing in a communism of alliance and co-operation, rather than the dominant Comintern ideology of "class against class". Wintringham's ideas became party dogma when the Comintern announced the 'Popular Front', a form of communism Wintringham was prepared to fight for.

In 1934, he became the founder, editor and major contributor of Left Review, the first British literary journal with a stated Marxist intent. Although published by Wintringham and funded by the CPGB, it embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations.

At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Barcelona as a journalist for the Daily Worker, but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion^[3] of the International Brigades. Some socialist commentators have credited him with the whole idea of "international" brigades.

In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama.^[3] While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway, who based one of his characters upon him. He spent some months as a machine gun instructor. When he returned to the battalion the next summer he contracted typhoid, was again wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was repatriated in October. His later book English Captain is based on these experiences.

Second World War

On returning from Spain, Wintringham began to call for an armed civilian guard to repel any fascist invasion, and as early as 1938 he had begun campaigning for what would become the Home Guard. He taught the troops tactics of guerrilla warfare, including a movement known as the 'Monkey Crawl'. They were also taught how to deal with dive bombers.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Wintringham applied for an army officer's commission but was rejected. When the Communist Party promulgated its policy of staying out of the war due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he strongly condemned their policies. Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, he also regarded the Tories as Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office. He wrote for Picture Post, the Daily Mirror, and wrote columns for Tribune and the New Statesman.

In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard. On 10 July, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.^[4]

Wintringham's training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain. He even had veterans who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions. He also taught street fighting and guerrilla warfare. He wrote many articles in Picture Post and the Daily Mirror propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto "a people's war for a people's peace".

The British Army still did not dare trust Wintringham because of his communist past. After September 1940, the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined. Wintringham resigned in April 1941. Ironically, despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation itself because of a policy barring membership to Communists and Fascists.

Later Life
In his later years he worked mainly in radio and film, both producing documentary and critical programmes and writing criticism. He continued to write about military history, opposing the use and development of atomic weapons and championing Tito's Yugoslavia.
Tom Wintringham died on 16 August 1949, aged 51, after a massive heart attack while he was staying with his sister at her farm at Owmby, Lincolnshire.

Irexit Freedom: A Party to get behind

From the Irexist Freedom Manifesto:

1. NAME: Irexit Freedom

(in Irish: Eire Amach: Cumann na Saoirse ) Colloquially: Irexit Freedom to Prosper

2. OBJECTIVES:

“Irexit Freedom” is a national movement of the Irish people and a political party with the primary objective of re-establishing the national independence and sovereignty of Ireland and restoring its national democracy by leaving the European Union and thereby taking back control by the Irish People of our law-making, our citizenship, our currency, our trade policy, our borders and immigration policy, our taxation and budget policy, our sea-fisheries and marine resources, our human rights under the Irish Supreme Court, our foreign and security policy and maintaining a meaningful military neutrality.

Irexit Freedom positively desires and supports all democratic endeavours to achieve the consent of the voters of Northern Ireland for a re-united and independent Ireland under the control of the Irish people and not that of London or Brussels.

Irexit is necessary to prevent a second Partition of Ireland being implemented by the addition of new EU dimensions to the North-South border and the consequent creation of major new obstacles in the way of securing consent to future Irish reunification.

The secondary objectives of Irexit Freedom will be contained in the thrust of these principles below:

• We believe in a society of liberty with a free and diverse media which supports free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion.
• We believe in reduced taxation on Irish citizens and less wasteful government spending.
• We believe in a progressive tax system rewarding work, initiative and merit.
• We defend the separation of powers in the State and oppose the political / media hegemony that allows political and institutional corruption to flourish.
• As no nation has a future without children, as a patriotic party we are pro-natalist and supportive of stable families for the procreation, education and rearing of children.
• We believe in the equality of all Irish citizens before the law, oppose racism and the dominance of public policy by vested interests and privileged “golden circles”.
• Wishing to tackle corruption in key governmental institutions including the Gardai and our judicial and political systems, we believe that there must be legal and financial sanctions that penalise those involved in a culture of corruption and incompetence.
• As Irish people have no land to call their home but Ireland, we believe in the protection of the Irish language, culture and the natural environment. We hold that Ireland is our home, not an economic hostel, and that the Irish diaspora has a special part to play in building up our country.
• We believe that Ireland’s natural and financial resources should be utilised for the betterment of the life of the Irish people.
• We believe that the Irish people should have the right to control our money, our laws and our borders.
• We believe that no institution or government except Dáil Éireann should make the national laws or approve the budget applicable to the people of Ireland.
• We hold that the power to implement democratic change should be returned to the Irish people from the European Union and we are supportive of direct democracy including referenda for important public decision-making to the greatest practicable extent in our constitutional democracy.

“Irexit Freedom” is a national movement of the Irish people and a political party with the primary objective of re-establishing the national independence and sovereignty of Ireland and restoring its national democracy by leaving the European Union and thereby taking back control by the Irish People of our law-making, our citizenship, our currency, our trade policy, our borders and immigration policy, our taxation and budget policy, our sea-fisheries and marine resources, our human rights under the Irish Supreme Court, our foreign and security policy and maintaining a meaningful military neutrality.

Irexit Freedom positively desires and supports all democratic endeavours to achieve the consent of the voters of Northern Ireland for a re-united and independent Ireland under the control of the Irish people and not that of London or Brussels.

Irexit is necessary to prevent a second Partition of Ireland being implemented by the addition of new EU dimensions to the North-South border and the consequent creation of major new obstacles in the way of securing consent to future Irish reunification.  

Visit: https://www.irexitfreedom.ie/Contact: info@irexitfreedom.ie

On Alain De Benoist in relation to Gramsci.

Unlike the majority of French intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, Alain de Benoist was not a supporter of Marxism, a fact which isolated his position. However, de Benoist nonetheless built his political philosophy upon a radical rejection of liberal and bourgeois values, a negation capitalism, individualism, modernism, as well as a rejection of geopolitical Atlanticism and Western Eurocentrism. Moreover, he contrasted “Europe” to the “West” as  two antagonistic concepts. For de Benoist, Europe is the field of deployment of a special cultural Logos handed down from the Greeks which intensely combined the richness of the Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Slavic, and other European traditions. The “West”, on the other hand, is equivalent to the mechanistic, materialist, rationalist civilization based on the predominance of technology over other spheres. Alain de Benoist, like Oswald Spengler, understood the “West” as the “decline of Europe” and, along with F. Nietzsche and M. Heidegger, he is convinced of the need to overcome modernity as nihilism and “the abandonment of Being in the world” (Seinsverlassenheit). In this regard, the “West” is identical to the very liberalism, capitalism, and bourgeois society against which the New Right strove to fight. At the same time, although not being materialists, the New Right agreed with the key significance assigned by Gramsci and his followers to “civil society.” For example, Alain de Benoist came to the conclusion that the phenomenon which Gramsci called “hegemony” is a set of strategies, attitudes, and values which he considered to be “pure evil.” This led to the proclamation of the principle of “Gramscianism from the Right.”

This Gramscianism “of the right” means recognizing the autonomy of “civil society” as understood by Gramsci as well as identifying the phenomenon of hegemony in this sphere and the personal choice of one’s ideological position on the opposite side from hegemony. Alain de Benoist has published a programmatic work entitled Europe and the Third World - One and the Same Battle[xiii] which entirely bases itself on the parallels between the struggle of the peoples of the Third World against bourgeois neocolonialism and the will of European nations to free themselves from the dictatorship of the bourgeois market society and the morality and praxis of traders, and replace such a system with heroic ethics[xiv] (Werner Sombart).
Quoted from Aleksadnr Dugin @ Katehon.com

The Windrush Generation: Hated by the Tories for being a committed section of the Working Class

We must stand shoulder to shoulder with those  that have contributed towards our national working class  institutions, our trades unions, our football clubs, our health service as opposed to those that mock the very idea of our society.

In the neo-liberal society that Thatcher created and has increasingly taken hold since the 1980s in these isles, particularly in the urban areas, atomised individualism has wrought havoc.

Enhanced by the destruction of the manufacturing base of the economy, working class collective institutions were denied their relevance and meaning. The family unit is now openly mocked, traditional parenting seen as "uncool" as the self indulgent musings of the Hampstead crowd filtered down to the less expensive parts of town. This  has denied our youth the support is needs. Along with this, the gun culture travelling across the Atlantic  has introduced a poisonous ingredient to the dysfunctional brew from which our present society. is forced to drink.

This has unfortunately particularly manifested itself amongst the young of the black working class because big city kids of any background have always had the winner/loser capitalist dichotomy thrust under their noses in the severest form.  This has historically been tempered by the institutions of family, locality, class. Yet no longer. However, urban youth in the metropolis has sought it's own collective institutions, ones far less positive than those of their parents and grandparents in nature, the results have been heart breaking to witness.

Now this! Further proof, if any were needed that Britain is not a community, but a "people mill", continually churning, a revolving door where if you don't conform  to the neo-con geopolitical agenda, goodbye.

The future of this country must be the healing of this country, it will not be found in the boardrooms of corporations, or the offices of foreign governments, but in our own autonomous institutions.