David Prashker's Book Of Days

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/

March 22

There are days in history which might well not have been, at least for those of us who record history on the universal, or even on the local scale.

The founding of the English Football League in 1888 is not going to gain my interest.

The release of The Beatles' first album "Please Please Me" in 1963 is even less likely.

The first movie screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895 could merit a quick google-surf, but maybe on another occasion.

As to the United States passing the Beer and Wine Revenue Act in 1933, I shall simply post a link to Dave Van Ronk singing Moonshiner (click here).

But apparently World Water Day is thirstily observed on this date in the calendar (but was skipped in 1903 at Niagara Falls, because - hard to imagine it I know, but true for all that - they temporarily ran out of water due to a drought). Click here

And in 1784 the Emerald Buddha was moved with great ceremony to its current location in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand: moved from where, and why, and why to here, and why is this so important? I have no idea.

Apparently my next-door-neighbour's great-aunt died on this date in, I forget which year she told me, and I know for certain that this was the day, in 1994, when my cousin Jackie gave birth to her first child... so clearly this day does count as historic, at least for some people.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

March 24

Amber page

Southern African Liberation Day, and click here for one of the reasons why.

But it was also the day on which the PFA, the "Party of the African Federation" was established in West Africa, then ruled by the French, in 1959 - the achievement of poet-turned-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, the same man who became the first head of state when Mali gained independence from France on June 20 1960.

The map shows the political geography of southern Africa in 1812, right at the start of European conquest.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

March 18

1871

The Paris Commune.

Not to be confused with the Paris Commune of 1789-1795, which was the official name of the Revolutionary government after the fall of the Bastille, and the reason why this uprising was named as it was. For the first version see, for example, Reine Audu on Oct 5.

The fall of this Paris Commune can be found, alas, on May 28; Trotsky's thoughts about it are on Aug 20.

Of the other keyplayers, André Léo can be found on June 17, but I am focusing here on three very remarkable women:

Adèle Paulina Mekarska, though she went by the nom de révolution of Paule Mink, or sometimes Minck. Thirty-two when the Franco-Prussian war ended in defeat and embarrassment, and the oppressed and starving workers of the capital decided that assez had become genug (she was born, of Polish descent but in France, on November 9 1839, and died on April 18 1901), she was already well-known as a revolutionary socialist and an even more revolutionary feminist, having joined André Léo's "Société pour la Revendication du Droit des Femmes" in the 1860s; her fame mostly from her published writings, on both themes: she had, for example, spent a year in Algeria, an official tour with an official title: "Anti-Imperialist and Anti-Clerical": so impactful was it on local Algerians, both "pied-noirs" and indigènes, that two Christian missionaries wrote their own book in dismay and consternation: "En zigzag du Maroc à Malte : à travers l'Algérie, la Tunisie et les états barbaresques : souvenirs d'Afrique External".

For more bio, and a detailed account of her role in the Paris Commune, click here (English) and-or here (French); a more scholarly-academic appraisal here, if you are able to access it

Louise Michel (1830-1905) known as “The Red Virgin”; an ideologue of anarchism (anarchism, not anarchy, those two are very different), she fought for the liberation of many other groups besides French women, including the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia (why them? see below) when they raised a revolution in hopes of independence from France, and for the Algerians in their similar cause later on.

The key positive date in her life was obviously today, which is why she is posted here. The key negative date was August 8 1873: imprisoned for twenty months for her part in the Commune, she was loaded onto the ship Virginie to begin a four-month sea-voyage to New Caledonia, where she remained until all those involved in the Commune were amnestied in 1880.

Returned to Paris, she resumed her commitment to a better world for those born without wealth or power, setting up her own newspaper, "La Vengeance Anarchiste", in March 1883, and then leading a demonstration of unemployed workers to demand jobs or at least social benefits. Arrested for doing so, this time she was sentenced to six years, all of it to be in solitary confinement to prevent her passing on her evil and wicked thoughts to others. When they let her out early, in 1886, she found the paper for whom she now wrote banned just weeks later, and herself arrested yet again - sent to an insane asylum this time, which quickly decided that she wasn't, and let her go. To England for five years, where she established a school that was much more about educating than about teaching; and then back to France, to die of pneumonia in Marseille on January 10 1905. And if you think of anarchists as solitaries and go-it-aloners who don't go in for crowds, you might be surprised to learn that her funeral in Paris was attended by more than 100,000 people.

I did once hear a French woman suggesting that the authorities were planning to rename Mont St Michel after her, but I think she was probably being ironic.

Her memoir “The Red Virgin” in translation here; bio here

And last, but really she ought to be first, Élisabeth Dmitrieff, principal organiser of the Paris Commune and a close friend of Karl Marx, who she knew in London, and who sent her to Paris as the official envoy of the International. Her birthname, on November 1 1850 in Saint-Petersburg, was Elizaveta Lukinichna Kusheleva; and her goal was rather more a Russian revolution than one anywhere else, but Russia wasn't ready, so she went under her nom-de-guerre to Paris, aged just twenty, and organised the women's involvement in the Paris Commune instead...

and I promise that I will write a full piece about her, but not today. In the meanwhile lots available online, of which I recommend this in particular, this especially, and this one just as much.

She died on February 23 1919 in Moscow.

Also in Amber:

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, born today in 1893

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

September 7

Amber page

Good Queen Bess, born today in 1533, at what was then Greenwich Palace, but most of it got demolished after the Civil War, and then rebuilt as the Old Royal Naval College, designed by Christopher Wren, around 1690; you can still see some of the Tudor remains in the cellars.

Brazil declared independence from Portugal, today in 1822

The first world heavyweight championship under Queensberry Rules took place today in 1892; apparently Gentleman Jim Corbett defeated John L Sullivan, though whether on points or by knock-out I have not taken the trouble to find out

The Peace of Peking, or Bei-Jing as we are now told to pronounce it, signed in 1901, bringing to an end that other heavyweight bout, the Boxer uprising

The "blitz" started, today in 1940

And finally, and this really will require further investigation, though it is unlikely to be verifiable: according to a calendar note in the BBC History magazine, “3466 bc: End of the Great Flood - according to the 19th century Leipzig philologist Gustav Seyffarth.”

Everything you could possibly be totally disinterested in about Seyffarth can be found here; for our subject, take him to be part of the same school that alma matered Gesenius and the Bible Critics.

But the subject here is the precise precision of that date, and you cannot deduce it in the solar calendar because it is computed biblically in the lunar, and times of that period are famously magnified.

Genesis 7:24 tells us “the waters prevailed upon the earth 150 days”, but gives no starting date. Archaeologists of Hittite Ararat, and mythological speculators like Robert Graves, have tried to demonstrate that the Flood story was simply a Creation myth, a means of explaining the laws of science before Physics, Chemistry and Biology had been invented; the flood analogising the breaking of the waters when a woman gives birth, the tale pseudo-historicising a full solar year from God first calling Noah to build the Ark until the setting of the rainbow in the sky. This would make a date around September logical, because the Jewish New Year falls at this time. But how does Seyffarth compute the 7th of September specifically? Perhaps Rosh ha-Shana fell on that date in the year that he made his calculations, and he did not realise that lunar dates perambulate across the solar calendar? And as to the year itself (I am ignoring the BBC's usage of "bc" instead of BCE) - 3446. This is achieved, I guess, by counting the ages of known men backwards from the date of Christ, a method equally as preposterous as the Jewish one of counting forwards from the date of Adam (which itself would anyway put the New Year five days out!)

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

September 3

1752, 1658

Actually, there is no September 3 1752, not in British history anyway. "The Calendar (New Style) Act" of 1750 received royal approval in May 1751, and came into effect on Wednesday September 2 1752... but in order for the new calendar, the Gregorian, to concur with all the other countries of the world that had already adopted it – as with the Euro and so much else, the whole continent had made the switch a century ago, but Britain clung to the anachronism of its sovereign autonomy, until eventually it was obliged to give it up - it was necessary to reduce the year by eleven days, and so the day following September 2 was... September 14.

Until that time, and despite the efforts of Fra Roger Bacon both to explain the errors and to demonstrate their solution as long ago as the 13th century, the Christian world had stuck religiously to the Julian calendar, attributed to Julius Caesar but actually borrowed by him from the "New Egyptian" system: a 365 day year with a quadrennial leap year (see Feb 29). What Fra Bacon demonstrated ("Opus Majus", 1266) was that this depended on Earth rotating fully every 365 days and 6 hours; but it doesn't; it rotates every 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds, adding disparity by the tick and implication by the tock - more than 11 minutes every year, a whole day approximately every hundred years.

And in the Christian world, this mattered, because the Council of Nicea in 325 had fixed the date of Easter at the spring equinox; but by the late Middle Ages the rebirth of fertility at Oester (they spelled it that way back then, from the Greek oestrus, "egg") was slipping back into no-buds-yet still-winter, making something of a mockery of the Resurrection. Bacon's mathematics were accepted, but his suggestion that the calendar be adjusted by a single day every 125 years was rejected, because that still didn't solve the problem; nonetheless it provided a starting-point for the work of others (you can read the full tale in my novel "The Persian Fire - click here), and a new calendar was adopted during the papacy of Gregory XIII in 1582 - the reason for its eponym - achieved through the immediate loss of ten days in order to correct the slippage, and the introduction of an additional new leap day for centenary years, divisible by 400. The eleventh day in Britain reflected the further slippage over the 190 years before it finally stepped into line, and this despite eurosceptic mobs - poor souls deprived of that year's birthday party, or whose heroics might now not be commemorated - who flocked the streets, demanding “give us back our eleven days” (click here).

This blog is trying, desperately sometimes, to record the positives of history; but sometimes the negatives are of such significance that they cannot be ignored or overlooked. So, today, is Oliver Cromwell's day – and threefold: the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, of Worcester in 1651, of his death in 1658. Oliver Cromwell, that nauseating stinkpot of mediaeval political correctness, the founding patron of the New Model Army which still barricades our culture with its intellectual fascism, still pickets our brains, and still demands that the most narrow-minded of bigotry be declared an inalienable human right. The spiritual father of "Woke" and "Cancel". If you are looking for Oliver Cromwell on the Index to this blog, you won't find him; he is listed among the GERs.

Worse even than Henry Tudor's ransack of the monasteries, the zeal with which Cromwell's devotees gouged out the eyes of gargoyles and reduced the life of the spirit of Man to mere sackcloth and ashes. Cromwell who suppressed the Levellers, who shut down the theatres and the art workshops, who subdued Eireland, who prorogued the elected Parliament in favour of the Barebones Parliament, and when it failed to achieve its grandiose and vainglorious ambition – to establish World Puritanism, to build the Kingdom of the God of Uncreation, bible-black, morbid and morose, life-hating, a universal deity with his headquarters in Westminster – he threw out even the Barebones, and set himself up as the One and Only Ruler in their place. Lord Protector! Lovely euphemism that. Napoléon Buonaparte did the same to the French Revolution. Several African and South American dictators come to mind who regard themselves in the same light.

There is – but only just – an argument in favour of Cromwell. That he did good things during his dictatorship. And so did Mao, Franco, Caucescu, Milosevich, Mussolini, and no doubt, if one looked hard enough, Stalin and Hitler too. It is not a defence however; only, at best, a mitigation; and even then only partial. That he reorganised, for example, the Church of England – except that he excluded Papists, Prelatists, and Anti-Trinitarians. That he established the United Kingdom – a boon for Englishmen, but a form of servitude for Gaels and Celts. That he enhanced the universities – with men of his own kind at the helm. And no doubt Jack the Ripper once helped an old lady across the street, and the Boston Strangler was notoriously kind to dogs.

As with all tyrants, his death nourished anarchy, because he left behind no other structure of government than edicts and sycophancy. And as to his legacy; what he destroyed is unrestorable. What he failed to destroy his disciples are still working at, the Ironsides of Political Correctness, the worshippers of his second epiphany, who has come in several would-be forms, the most recent obvious examples being Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump. In the bowels of Christ, let them recognise how far they are mistaken!

That's his funeral escutcheon, below

Amber page

1718

1976: Viking 2 (US) softlanded on Mars.

March 27

1615

Marguerite de Valois, popularly known as "La Reine Margot", born on May 14 1553, but she is remembered for authoressing the first full-length memoir by a woman in French, and memoirs happen at the end of life, not when it is just getting started: she died today, March 27 1615. Quite a memoir too; she was the sister of three French kings (Henry III, Francis II, Charles IX), and the wife of a fourth (Henry IV)! Her bio by someone else here, but why would you bother when the text of her own account is readable here. As to Alexandre Dumas’ rather fictionalised version, if you insist, here. Oh, and of course, how could there not be, the movie version here.

Amber pages

Francis Russell (Frank) O'Hara: writer, poet, art critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, born today in 1926; not to be confused with John O'Hara on Jan 31

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/