“Peace is more difficult than war. We were not scared as we resisted; we will not be scared when we make peace.” Turkish-born Kurdistan Workers’ Party founder Abdullah Öcalan has been in prison since 1999, during which time he has changed from advocating violence to advocating a political solution to the Kurdish situation in Turkey. (WP) The conflict has resulted in a minimum of 45,000 deaths. (WP)
The mural was launched on Sunday (2014-07-06); it replaces the Sands Family mural. Below is a shot from January 2017 showing damage to the mural.
There are two new pieces on the International Wall on Divis Street. The first is the “Free Leonard Peltier” bookmark-sized piece shown in progress, above, and completed, below. (The second is a 40th anniversary piece concerning the burning of Long Kesh. We will have the finished version of that tomorrow. The two together take the place of the 2007 Guernica mural, which was in bad shape after six and a half years.) The text reads, “An honourable man who has spent 10yrs longer in jail than Nelson Mandela”. Peltier has been in jail since 1977, convicted of killing two FBI agents (WP).
In a window on Queens Avenue, Glengormley: a Union flag, an Ulster-Scots flag (a Northern Ireland shield on a St. Andrew’s saltire, with the words “Ulster-Scots” below) and the Israeli flag.
“She Sat Down So We Could Stand Up”. Rosa Parks was born 101 years ago today, on February 4th, 1913. This board in the New Lodge hails her as as the “mother of the civil rights movement”. It includes images of Parks in old age, a reproduction of a photo of Parks sitting on a bus in Montgomery in 1956, after the Supreme Court ruling which declared segregation on the buses illegal, eleven months after the boycott began, and a Montgomery civil rights march on December 5th, 1955 led by Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. The title of today’s post is a Parks quote. Someone suggested to her, in an attempt to minimize her actions, that perhaps she had refused to move simply because she was tired, to which she replied, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in”.
Yesterday (29 January, 2014) marks the 50th anniversary of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, currently#42 on IMDb’s list of greatest films. (See the image below – Slim Pickens in the scene of a lifetime, a role Peter Sellers intended to play, alongside his three others; see also this New Yorker magazine retrospective “Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True”.) The movie retains its relevance in 2014, as evidenced by this stencil in Fountain Street, protesting the use of drone technology by the US in the mideast and Pakistan. Next the stencil of a cowboy riding a drone are the words “The Drone Ranger Tour 2014 – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria”.
As can be seen in the wide shot below, this piece is next to the Obama ‘I See You‘ (and round the corner from the ‘Don’t Drone Me, Bro‘ stencil).
Slim Pickens as T. J. “King” Kong riding a bomb to mutually assured destruction in Dr. Stangelove.
Four shots of the “Go safe Mandela – RIP” lettering by Gael Force Art on Slıabh Dubh/Black Mountain two weeks ago, commemorating the death of Nelson Mandela on December 5th, 2013. The one above is on the Springfield Road with ‘The Usual Suspects’ in the foreground. (Previously from the same location: G8 War Criminals.) The second, below, is from the Whiterock Road and involves the ‘IRA Final Salute’ mural.
Here is the completed Frederick Douglass mural in Northumberland Street. With quotes from …
Douglass himself (“It is easier build strong children than to repair broken adults.”)
Abraham Lincoln (“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”)
Angela Davis (“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”)
Muhammad Ali (“Why should I drop bombs on brown people in Vietnam while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs …”)
Steven Biko (“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”)
MLK (“I have a dream … black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.””)
Bob Marley (“Until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race.”)
Nelson Mandela (“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”)
Paul Robeson “The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I made made [sic] my choice. I had no alternative”, and
(without attribution) James Connolly (“The worker is the slave capitalist society, the woman [female worker] is the slave of that slave.”)
“History is ours, and history is made by the people — La historia es nuestra y la hacon los pueblos”
Here is a super-wide image of the new (c. Dec. 10th, 2013) board on Northumberland Street celebrating the socialist movement in 1970’s Chile. The Unidad Popular, whose emblem can be seen centre-left and in the close-up below, was a coalition of left-wing parties who supported the Marxist Salvador Allende (seen in the middle) for president in the election of 1970. Allende served as president from 1970-1973 until committing suicide during the coup.
Mural and stencil in Bóthar Chaıtríona (St. Katherine’s Road) in the St. James’s area showing Che Guevara above the words “I don’t care if I fall as long as someone else picks up my gun and keeps on shooting.” The remnants of the former mural – a Celtic design – can be seen to the left of Che’s head.
Extramural Activity 