Ken Olende

Just saw wonderful Laurie Anderson at London’s Roundhouse supported by wonderful Lonnie Holley and Maria Somerville. First concert I’ve ever been to that finished with a tai chi form!

I’m in this piece talking about the Manchester links with the fifth Pan African Congress…

Photo of the covers of three old paperbacks: The Politics of Race and Residence by Susan J Smith; Racism and Black Resistance in Britain by Robert Moore; Because They’re Black by Derek Humphry & Gus John.

Twenty odd books on race and racism in Britain from the 60s & 70s turn up at the Oxfam shop. Surely I already have enough books on this subject? “No, Precious! We needs them all!!”

Mocking Gaza's murdered babies on national TV A nauseating case study into the dehumanisation of Palestinians

Mocking Gaza's murdered babies on national television.

We are living through a depraved period of history.

But this is what genocides do.

They're only possible because of the dehumanisation of their victims.

New post 👇

www.owenjones.news/p/mocking-ga...

Photo of carved figure under the water in a lake.

Photo of the Caishen figurine resting next to the lake

Went for a walk round Connaught Water in Epping Forest (by London) and saw a figure in the water. We pulled it out and it’s Chinese Taoist wealth god Caishen (財神). I hope he sends us some wealth for rescuing him. I believe people send paper boats out on lakes for luck.

Photo of garden through French windows with large white cat looking in. At the bottom of the garden a black cat sits, watching.

Local fatcat in our back garden demanding entry (and presumably food), but behind them is a portentous Bergmanesque memento mori!!!

Photo of Shem Arungu-Olende sitting on the grass in Kensington Gardens in central London, with his son Ken on his lap. It is 1965 and behind them is the Albert memorial.

Remembering my Dad, Shem Arungu-Olende, on what would have been his birthday. Here we are newly arrived in London in the mid 1960s. Behind us is the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens (& Dad is the one with the cool hat) .

Photo of view down Whitehall in central London from Trafalgar Square showing mass of pro Palestine demonstration with Big Ben in background

30th national protest in central London against the ongoing starvation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone by James Baldwin

Indeed, to oppress the populations they’d been occupying. It is so outrageous and it should be better known.

11/11 …Enemy: Britain, Japanese Troops and the Netherlands East Indies, 1945–1946’ History, Vol. 87, No. 286 (April 2002).

There is also a book (I haven’t read) by Stephen B Connor, Mountbatten's Samurai: Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Forces under British Control in Southeast Asia, 1945-1948

10/11 …another 30 went missing while the equivalent losses amongst Indian units were 550 and 300 respectively. It is less clear how many nationalists or socialists, fighting for freedom were killed by Japanese, British or Indian troops.

All quotes from Andrew Roadnight, ‘Sleeping with the…

9/11 …activities in the areas they still occupied and to maintain the status quo and civil administration.” Records show that in the year that this alliance lasted “the Japanese armed forces lost 717 men dead, 387 wounded and a further 205 went missing. By contrast 77 British troops were killed and…

8/11 …responsible up to the termination of hostilities”. Read that again - yes he used the Japanese troops who had recently been brutally occupying Indonesia, to stop any nationalist rebellions and allow the Dutch empire to return. “The Japanese were ordered, therefore, to halt all political…

7/11 …to be demobbed, but there was no enthusiasm in India to send troops to prop up colonial empires, when the promise of independence had just been won.

So Mountbatten decided “he had no alternative but to instruct the Japanese ... to maintain order in the areas for which they had been…

6/11 …and Siam, and only when these tasks had been completed were the principal islands of the NEI, Java and Sumatra, to be liberated.” The lack of military manpower to achieve various imperial ends led to the use of JSPs. At first he had tried to rely on Indian troops to allow British personnel…

Photo showing Japanese officers with British troops after the Japanese surrender at the end of the Second World War. Many were reclassified as Japanese Surrendered Personnel and used to reestablish imperial rule

5/11 …after the war”.

Mountbatten had received orders from the new Labour government: “On 13 August 1945, he was told that his primary objectives were the reoccupation of Burma, Singapore and key areas of Malaya. When this had been done, Mountbatten was to send troops to Hong Kong, Indochina…

4/11 …to cover up what they were doing. The new category also usefully removed them from POW statistics (and almost all were reclassified before they were recorded as POWs). One Japanese soldier on such duties was recommended for the “Distinguished Service Order in November 1945, only three months…

3/11 …the rules of the Geneva conventions and used as auxiliary soldiers - armed and under their own officers - attached to Lord Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command. Of course, part of the reason no one talks about this period is that the British authorities did everything in their power…

2/11 …to reestablish imperial control, particularly in Indonesia - then the Dutch or Netherlands East Indies (NEI). And because the Japanese were there and used to an imperial role some 35,000 Japanese Prisoners of War (POWs) were reclassified as ‘Japanese Surrendered Persons’ (JSPs), removed from…

Photo of two British soldiers in a jeep being saluted by an armed Japanese JSP soldier in Indochina in late 1945.

1/11 There is a lot of bunk talked about Victory in Japan Day. The media wants to recall the forgotten British Army left thousands of miles from home and how the Japanese were the most brutal imperialists, no one wants to mention a strange alliance between the defeated Japanese and the British…

3/3 …multiracial capitalism running and make plantation workers stay on their plantations. Incidentally the cover painting by Francois Cauvin of Toussaint with a guinea fowl on his head is symbolic. He identified with the bird, originally African, notoriously crafty & hard to catch & domesticate.

2/3 …understand the rebellion you need this too. Apart from anything else it is a reminder that Toussaint was a bourgeois revolutionary (& could hardly be anything else). As well as his military inventiveness fighting French, Spanish, British & Napoleon’s army, it details his attempts to get a…

Cover of Black Spartacus, showing a profile of Toussaint Louverture.

1/3 Finally finished #BLACKSPARTACUS, the magnificent biography of #ToussaintLouverture by #SudhirHazareesingh. The detail it goes into is remarkable showing his (occasionally contradictory) revolutionary development. If you only read one book #CLRJames’ #BLACKJACOBINS is still it, but to fully…

Bizarre right wing social media post claiming SWP has £25 million in cash.

4/4 …Please, Tribune, 19 May 1944). In the light of weird recent social media stories about police bussing lefties to anti-fascist demos; someone paying anti-racist demonstrators to attend (if only!); and the fantastic secret millions of the SWP, it all somehow seems relevant.

3/4 …in my experience, will believe that the Trotskyists are not in the pay of Hitler. I have sometimes tried the experiment of pointing out that if the Trotskyists were in the pay of Hitler, or of anybody, they would occasionally have some money. But it is no use, it doesn't register.‘ (As I…

1937 Soviet Stalinist poster denouncing Trotsky as a fascist agent.

2/4 …Tribune is not a Communist paper and not in the pay of the Soviet Government. One very curious characteristic of Fascists… is their failure to recognize that the parties of the Left are distinct from one another and by no means aiming at the same thing In just the same way very few Communists…

White propaganda poster from the Russian Civil War showing Red Army leader Leon Trotsky as part of a Jewish conspiracy (and in an age of replacement theory note the Bolshevik troops are shown as Chinese, not white)

1/4 George Orwell wrote in 1944 on extreme belief about who was in the pay of who, ‘Anyone acquainted with the [far right/fascist] type will know that no assurance, no demonstration, no proof of the most solid kind would ever convince the writer of this that [left wing paper Orwell wrote for]…

This juxtaposition says it all.