Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcasting since 1999. The show is archived at: www.gorilla-radio.com. The GR blog is at: gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com, and you can find and support the program at GRadio.Substack.com. Financial support is also possible through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PacificFreePress. Due to excessive bandwidth demands, we’ve been forced to shut down the vast GR archive for the moment. Please check out GRadio.Substack.com for past shows. – Ape
Every Armistice Day, pacifists and anti-fascists meet at Victoria’s memorial for the MacKenzie-Papineau Brigade. The “Mac-Paps” are those Canadians who defied their government to travel to Spain and fight the fascists during that country’s Civil War.
This year, Christina Nikolic went down to record the event for Gorilla Radio.
Here’s what wikipedia says:
“The Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion or Mac-Paps were a battalion of Canadians who fought as part of the XV International Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Except for France, no other country gave a greater proportion of its population as volunteers in Spain than Canada.[1] The first Canadians in the conflict were dispatched mainly with the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Battalion and later the North American George Washington Battalion, with about forty Canadians serving in each group. The XV International Brigade was involved in the Battle of Jarama in which nine Canadians are known to have been killed.”
If popular culture is good for anything it’s for providing a window on the zeitgeist; that ineffable yet immediately recognizable “spirit of the times.” Following my TV’s guidance then, the pervading essence defining us in this moment seems to be… the zombie. Brainless and soulless, devoid of imagination or self-awareness, though the maelstrom may rage about it, our zombie looks neither up nor down, but gazes directly ahead, able only to pounce on whatever happens to cross the narrow focus of its fixed eye.
Is it apathy, a feeling of powerlessness, or just the desperate need to ignore the impending catastrophe fueling our denial; making us now identify with the blissfully oblivious walking dead?
Dahr Jamail is a Truthout staff reporter and author of books, ‘The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan’, ‘Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq’, and, with William Rivers Pitt, ‘The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible’. His much anticipated forthcoming title is, ‘The End of Ice.’
And; this past week marked the centennial of Red October, Russia’s socialist revolution that not only shook the world, but shaped the 20th Century.
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist who’s covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Vltchek’s numerous book titles include: ‘Western Terror: From Potosi to Baghdad’, ‘Indonesia: Archipelago of Fear’, ‘Exposing Lies of the Empire’, and ‘Aurora’. His latest book is the freshly released, ‘The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.’
Andre Vltchek and revolutions remembered and those to come in the second half.
And; Victoria-based activist and CFUV Radio broadcaster at-large, Janine Bandcroft will be here with the Left Coast Events listing for good things to do in and around our town in the coming week. But first, Dahr Jamail and collective ADHD in the age of ACD.
Sat down to talk with Andre Vltchek about his newly released book, ‘The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism’ (please see blurb below).
On 25 October (7 November, New Style) 1917, the day the battleship “Aurora” fired its symbolic salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), the entire world was awakened to an absolutely new reality.
“So, with the crash of artillery, in the dark, with hatred, and fear, and reckless daring, new Russia was being born.” Wrote John Reed, an American author and journalist, who witnessed first-hand this amazing event that he then almost immediately celebrated in his immortal book “Ten Days that Shook the World”.
John Reed came to a simple and powerful conclusion: “Imagine this struggle being repeated in every barracks of the city, the district, the whole front, all Russia.
Imagine the sleepless Krylenkos, watching the regiments, hurrying from place to place, arguing, threatening, entreating. And then imagine the same in all the locals of every labour union, in the factories, the villages, on the battle-ships of the far- flung Russian fleets; think of the hundreds of thousands of Russian men staring up at speakers all over the vast country, workmen, peasants, soldiers, sailors, trying so hard to understand and to choose, thinking so intensely-and The Great October Socialist Revolution deciding so unanimously at the end.
On 25 October (7 November, New Style) 1917, the day the battleship “Aurora” fired its symbolic salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), the entire world was awakened to an absolutely new reality.