In a previous essay , when first told my daughter was pregnant, I wrote about daughters, landscape and time with a slight detour via the Greek god Hephaestus. At its end I promised a future essay on finding his mother, Hera's mum. Well this is it, I hope.

It could be deemed odd being told you are a grandfather by your mother. But that's what happened just before Christmas. The daughter gave birth to a daughter. The daughter started to experience difficulties towards the end with an increase in blood pressure such that the obstetrician thought it warranted inducing the birth two weeks before term. It was a hard labour of 18hrs but she is young and strong and in the end she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy 7lb 6oz girl - the granddaughter. When we spoke she was high as a kite on the rollercoaster of emotion but which has settled down since. I wish them all well and a future of peace.

Other oddnesses. The daughter has the same surname as my mother's maiden name. When my brother was first searching for his birth mother (my mother was a single-mum who had a son by an American at the end of WWII but had to give him up for adoption when he was 18months old, a few months before meeting my father), he sent out letters to all women with her maiden name and first name initial. My daughter's mother also had the same first name initial and yes, you've got it, she also received the same letter that my mother received from my brother before I'd even met her. Freud had nothing to do with it!

Odder still. The granddaughter was born on the 16th December, her grandmother has her birthday on the 18th December and mine sits in the middle. If I were superstitious or believed in miracles the numbers 16, 17 and 18 would be numbers picked for the Lottery!

So how will the relationship develop between granddaughter and grandfather when the child is born in a time of war? What is the best way I can help try and secure the granddaughter's future? She was born 7 days before the UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran was passed.  The struggle for an end to the war is the priority. That it does not spread to Iran with the chances of a nuclear attack by America or Israel which would engulf the Middle East and the whole World. What can this cripple do? The only thing I have left - write and try to write well.

I now live in Totnes, moving here from Salcombe which took up the bulk of the previous musings on mortality. Totnes is still in the same district of South Hams, still surrounded by the amazing landscape of Devon's manicured hills and vales with their deep red soil. 7 miles from Dartmoor's granite mass. The town sits astride the River Dart, the major river to drain Dartmoor southward and discharges into the English Channel at Dartmouth. The river is tidal and navigable till Totnes and if your timings right, are patient and lucky, you may see Atlantic salmon leap the weir on their extraordinary journey to spawn in the upper reaches of the river.  Those that is which escape the licensed salmon netters downstream; the poachers; the ravages of pestilence introduced to wild salmon via escaped farmed salmon, or most damaging of all - the olfactory dislocation caused by human induced warming seas. 

!0,000 years before present the landscape in southern England was in the process of change as the last of the ice from the Ice Age retreated. The English Channel formed and within 2,000 years tundra gave way to forests of oak, hazel and birch and other decidious tree species. Evidence of habitation of this new landscape by hunter/gatherers between 8,000 and 6,000bp lies wih small flint tools - microliths - having been found near springs on Dartmoor which feed the river Dart. Then gradually from about 6,000bp farming started to develop. This was about 3,500 years after farming seems to have started in present day Turkey where obsidian sickles may have have been found dating from circa 9,500bp

Myth has it that Gaia, arising from Chaos and the original goddess from Greek antiquity, mother to Earth, gave her son Cronus a stone sickle to kill her husband and his father, Uranus the god of the Sky. It needs to be pointed out that Uranus was also Gaia's son produced through parthenogenesis - without sex with another. Cronus killed Uranus by chopping his balls off! The symbolism of Cronus dying from having his balls chopped off by his son borne by his mother is very obvious. It established the taboo of incest between mother and son. Less obvious and less salacious but far more important is another piece of symbolism to this story of the earliest gods. In our understanding of hunter/gatherer societies, gathering has traditionally been seen as womens activity whereas hunting has been seen as mens. It does seem a logical intrepretation that women were the first farmers of crops and that the stone sickle was their tool. In this interpretation the passing of the stone sickle becomes the signifier for the beginning of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, if you believe myth has a basis in human activity that is. And why not?

Here in Devon, 3,500 years after the first stone sickle but still 6,000 years ago, the neolithic age caught up with us with the beginnings of deliberate, conscious growing of plants and the domestication, the husbandry of animals. The forests started to fall to larger stone implements, like the axe replacing the microliths. Hunting was still important going by the intricacy of new stone tools like scrappers and leaf-shaped arrowheads discovered in the area.

Between 4,500 and 3,500bp ceremonial monuments associated with burials started to appear on Dartmoor and Beaker culture spread throughout Britain and most of western Europe. Beaker culture is associated with a style of pottery, a new stone age technology that probably spread along known trade routes. Towards the end of this period metal working in the form of bronze emerges in Britain. Copper and tin, the components of bronze are found in Devon. (Tin was still mined on Dartmoor until the early part of the 20th century). Also towards the end of this period reaves - field boundaries - started to become common and some of which still define the fields of today. The beginnings of land ownership and the concept of private property has been inferred from the building of the reaves. To date 200km of reaves have been identified enclosing 25,000 acres of land on Dartmoor.

A few miles off the mouth of Salcombe Estuary, marine archaeologists - South West Maritime Archaeological Group - have recently discovered 3,000 year old bronze artifacts and retrieved them from the site. They are presently with the British Museum for assessment. It doesn't take to much of a leap of imagination to believe that trading along the southern English coast from Europe and maybe further afield, was a reality at this time and that the river Dart, 20 miles eastward from the discovery, was visited. With vessels possibly even making it as far upstream to the place that is today called Totnes to trade for tin. The previous post stated that this site was of a Phoenician galley. This is a mistake on my part. Can't trust everything you read on the internet!

From about 2,600bp iron started to replace bronze and by 2,000bp it had become the dominant metal. Also during this time Hillforts became the major centres of population, replacing the scattered farming settlements that had spread through the preceding millenia. Nascent with the construction of the reaves, private property became accepted, embedded as a concept. No longer the sharing of the wealth of the land, ownership now was won or lost through aggression. Tribalism set in and was consolidated with the Hillfort becoming it's concrete expression in the landscape. We are not talking about a large population here, 1 to 1.5 million at the most throughout Britain.

Back to myth again and the son of Gaia, the patricidal Cronus became husband to his sister Rhea who herself was worshipped with orgiastic rites, and incest between siblings is still not taboo. And people today complain of a highly sexualised society! The issue of their union included Zeus and Hera. Zeus dethroned his father, the paranoid Cronus in the battle between the Titan pantheon and that of Olympus. Zeus and the Olympians won with the help of the Titan god Prometheus, the bringer of fire to the mortals and considered by leftists as 'the patron saint of the proletariat' (sic). Prometheus was grandson to Gaia and cousin to Zeus. Zeus became the undisputed god of gods and took his sister Hera as a subservient wife. Hera was the goddess of monogamous marriage.

What's this all signify? Well to my way of thinking - which is questionable to say the least - it means the consolidation of the patriarchy that had its beginning with the passing of the stone sickle from Gaia to Cronus. It also signals the end of the orgiastic rites associated with Rhea and places women, as exemplified by Hera, and their offspring under the control of men so inheritance of private property can be assured to male children of a known father. If orgiastic ceremony, symbolic of multiple partners is allowed to continue who can determine male parentage?

Prometheus has not been mentioned just in passing, but for a reason. About fourteen months ago I came under a scurrilous attack from Stan Goff whose organisation (Freedom Road Socialist Organisation) has an associated with the RCP via its family tree. The RCP is a long established and well known front for the American and British intelligence and security services. He had accessed a manuscript of mine (Empathy is not a Colour) which had not been made public except to a few people including some publishers and certainly not placed on a list-server by myself at that time. (Re-checking the articles by Goff for this piece I have found that some paragraphs and images directly relating to my writings have been removed, which for me confirms his spook status). At around the same time as Goff's attack an article appeared on Counterpunch criticising Hephaestus (son of Zeus and Hera) for producing the shackles that bound Prometheus to the rock on the order of Zeus. The writer of the article, Peter Linebaugh, has mistakenly stated that Prometheus was the son of Gaia, not of one of Gaia's sons, Iapetus.

I had used Hephaestus in the manuscript as analogy for the role of the full-time organisers in the Communist Party, those disliked by some of the 'theoreticians' as being non-intellectual and only worthy to carry out the 'theoreticians' ideas. A bit like Zeus' attitude toward Hephaestus. Hephaestus was smith to the gods, the deformed and ugly lover of culture and beauty and a god made in the image of mortal man - his deformity the result of arsenicosis from the arsenic added by smiths in the Bronze Age to give the bronze strength it would not otherwise have. Prometheus was used by Marx as analogy to working peoples endeavour stifled by the power of gods and class and his enslavement by the shackles enslaved the masses. But what has not been readily understood, even by Marx is that as a god Prometheus had the power to create mortals,  ie human beings and he only ever made mortal men! It was Hephaestus who made the first mortal woman!   Pandora admittedly, but woman. From which an interpretation could be made that binding Prometheus to the rock was a good thing. A male god creating woman can also be expounded as another example of male dominion over women and the consolidation of the patriarchy. Using the mythic Greek gods as metaphor or analogy can, for writers, be a dangerous thing!

2,000bp and another Iron Age peoples, the Romans arrive in Britain, conquer and stay for 400 years. All that went before is pre-history and all what follows is history as they say. They ruled through compliant, client Celtic tribal kings and the fomenting of civil war. All the while backed up by the 2nd Augustan Legion of which a detachment was stationed at Exeter - Isca Dumnoniorum - Devon's present day county capital and 22 miles north of Totnes. The area was so accepting of, and compliant to Roman rule that the detachment stayed only 20 years before moving to Caerleon in Wales to help subdue the country. The Welsh are still a much more fiercely independent peoples, as I learnt when leading the Welsh Communists and of which I am proud despite it all.

Exeter is the southern end of the Fosse Way. Totnes has been referred to as Statio ad Durium Amnem - a terminus - and could have been an extension of the Fosse Way which makes sense if the town was a port for Dartmoor tin to go as imperial booty to Rome.

I have been told since moving to Totnes that there never were any Celts - that they didn't exist. Try saying that to the Welsh, Irish, Scots, Cornish or Bretons! It's a bit like Golda Meir saying there were no Palestinians!   What the Romans did though was to kill off the intellectuals who brought religious, cultural and educational unity throughout a tribal Britain - the Druids - leaving the Celtic tribes disunited and lead by warring chiefs. The killing of intellectuals has been copied by imperialists since and of which Iraq is a prime modern day example. Divide and rule resonates down the ages since the advent of private property, unforeseen consequences from the construction of the reaves.

Another thing that was lost from Celtic culture with the arrival of the Romans was the equality of inheritance and succession between women and men - the best known example being Boudicca .  This was even recognised by the Roman historian Tacitus in his work Agricola.   On their leaving the Romans left behind monotheism and we know what a hate-filled scourge that has proved and is still proving to be.

Following the collapse of the Roman Empire 1,600 years ago, Britain like the rest of Europe, fell into a period referred to as the Dark Ages, though it was more 'silent' than dark in that there is scant written records for the time. (Fertile ground for the myths surrounding Arthur, his Knights and Camelot to be manufactured). Better it be known as early Medieval. Weakened without the centralised authority of Rome, Britain was 'invaded' in waves by settler-farmers from Europe, bringing with them the early English language from Friesland in modern day Holland. As an aside, the first five letters of my surname - SKEAT - is mid Anglo-Saxon - early English from 1,400bp - for penny, the coin, and I have Time Team to thank for that piece of information. It makes sense in that we have always been of the poor and always turning up like a bad penny!

The name Totnes derives from the Saxon for a fort or lookout on a ridge and from which it has been postulated that the town was originally a fortified Saxon settlement.

1,000 years after the Romans, the Normans arrive but it is still 1,000bp. Feudalism, emergent before the Normans is codified with their conquest. The serf - the peasant - and the Baron now know their place and it is common sense to them. Medieval myth has it that Britain was founded by Brutus of Troy and where he landed he established Totnes as his base. But that is medieval myth conjured by the lackey scribes   of Kings attempting to give historic foundation and justification to mere murderers and thieves. The population was still only 3 to 6 million throughout Britain.

Totnes grows in prosperity during the Medieval period through trading with France and the Channel ports in wool, slates, tin and agricultural products to the extent that the town becomes the 16th wealthiest in Britain 400 years ago. About this time Britain starts instigating the crime of the millenium, the slave trade. From the super-profits created, great and obscene wealth is accrued and flaunted by a blood soaked aristocracy. Some of the profits went into research and development that led to the industrial revolution and Britain became an empire mightier even than Rome and like the Roman one, built on the backs of slaves. It only took 1,800 years from one to the other.

So what has this short journey, this intrepretation through history and myth, to do with the present day Anglo-American war for control of the world's major oil region? Nothing. Everything.

In Britain the continual racist demeaning of Muslims and others with the creation of false dilemmas is a classic case of divide and rule practised down the centuries since the Romans dominated this land. It has become very sophisticated with time and practise.

There are many recent examples, some of which I've already written about. A few more. Just before the most important festival in the Christian calender, Christmas, on 20.12.06 ,  headlines appeared claiming that a male suspect in the murder of a woman police officer, WPC Beshenivsky, fled the country disquised behind a veil. Pure speculation presented as fact by some of the most racist newspapers in blaring headlines and which followed on as an extension of Straw's manufactured discomfort when talking to veiled constituents. On 21.12.06   A soldier/translator stationed in Afghanistan is charged with passing secrets to Iran. He is a fluent Pashtun speaker, his mother being Iranian. Journalist were barred from most of the initial court proceedings. The EU expanded with the inclusion of Bulgaria and Romania on 1st Jan 07 and in the lead up to it a racist campaign against their migration to Britain started in the likes of the Sun and Mail . Taking their lead from statements of the home secretary, Reid limiting their rights as citizens of the European Union.

On 20.12.06 Blair makes a speech in Dubai calling on states in the region to join a 'monumental struggle' against Iran.  From Reuters ; ""Our response should be to expose what they are doing, build the alliances to prevent it and pin them back across the whole of the region," Blair said. Like Washington, Britain accuses Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons and of fuelling instability in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Iran denies the charges." 23.12.06 UN Security Council passes resolution placing sanctions on Iran at Anglo-Ameirican insistance and behind the scenes pressure including bribery. No evidence of Iran doing anything wrong or infringing the Non Proliferation Treaty to which they are a signature is produced. Everything rests on assertion alone by America and Britain when it is claimed Iranians are lying in their statements that they are not building a nuclear power plant for military purposes - to build a nuclear weapon but to secure their energy needs because their oil is running out and they need the earnings from its export.

On top of all this there is the continued propaganda exonerating our role in the violence in Iraq and blaming it on the victim, the Iraqis, as though the invasion and occupation are not the direct cause of the carnage. That the Arabs and Muslims are just barbaric subhumans who have to be forced to accept 'democratic' western norms of behaviour. As if our behaviour around the world is something to aspire to. The hypocrisy of it! 

For a state to have the ability to demonise and make 'Other' it requires something else for its population to rally around. In Britain we have the royal family. The week preceding the veil 'escape' and spying for Iran reports, the royal family had it's best press week since Diana's death exposed their callousness. It was centred around the populations sympathy for Diana's sons. 12.12.06; The announcement by the sons of a concert commemorating the life of Diana. 15.12.07;   The publication of the inquiry into Diana's death says it was an accident, that Diana was not pregnant and had no plans to get engaged to Dodi al Fayed, although he had bought a ring that day Whether an accident or not, pregnant or not, the greatest fear of the royal family and the British state would be the birth of a half sibling to the heir of the throne being a Muslim. They don't even allow Catholics to ascend to the throne. The relief was palpable throughout officialdom! The sons were given an advanced copy of the report. 16.12.07;   Headlines about Prince William passing out from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. And as a prelude to this obsequiousness, on 10.12.06 ;  their cousin, granddaughter to the Queen, Zara Phillips wins the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year. How? An organised phone-in by the Countryside Alliance I suspect. 

These reports and their timing is not coincidence but news management with the characteristics of Psy-ops written all over them.

One of the developments from our pre-history was the advent of private property and the subsequent us of aggression and war to secure its ownership. The Romans said when they invaded Britain it was to bring civilisation to the barbarians and not to acquire, to steal the country's wealth in gold, silver, tin, iron and wheat. Which they did anyway. Britain said and did the same when building it's empire. America and Britain are saying and doing the same today. The only difference now is the type of minerals intended to be stolen or controlled. In the words of the modern day imperialist: "What is our oil doing under their sand?!".

Every other explanation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been and continues to be a lie. The big lie.  As is the most recent verbiage emanating from Washington and London in the propaganda prelude to an attack on Iran.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going so badly for the Anglo-American alliance that their armies are in danger of being broken, or so leading alliance army Generals, like Dannatt are saying. Yet it is nigh impossible to stop for those who believe that the accumulation of wealth through growth and the exploitation of finite resources to satisfy domestic demand is a natural state of things, is common sense. Bush/blair are gangsters who believe that the right to commit murder and theft on the grand scale is Divinely given.

An option for them is to maintain the war in Iraq (the call for a 'surge' in American troop numbers) and spread it to Iran via an air campaign which could include the use of nuclear weapons now they are integrated into American theatre battle plans. They even say that mini-nukes are safe for civilians!

The morale in the army is boardering on the mutinous. Americans are not reporting from the Reserves when called up or going Awol before a second tour and - previously unimaginable - British soldiers are going public with complaints about the lies of blair . The air force and navy on the other hand - the major platforms for nuclear weapons - have not been so degraded by the war that their flyers and sailors morale is shot. Being miles above the fray or miles offshore when delivering murder you never have to see the 'enemy' and live with your conscience.

It is not just the Anglo-American alliance that we need to be worried about attacking Iran. Israel has already made its own plans to attack Iran, claiming that they are under an existential threat again. 'I think I'm under attack therefore I am', is the absurd rantings of a paranoid state. The attack on Iran by Israel could very well be nuclear .

I started to write this essay before Saddam Hussein was executed - lynched - and therefore need to write something before finishing it.

Saddam was a CIA asset and had been for 40 years. When he started his rise to power in Iraq, with the help of the said CIA, they gave him the names and addresses of the members of the Iraqi Communist Party. Saddam had them and their families arrested, tortured and executed. He earned the designation 'The Butcher of Baghdad' early in his political career in the view of communists.

During the 1980s when that favourite of the neocons, Rumsfeld was shaking his hand, I was organising and campaigning against Britain and America supplying Saddam with the means to produce 'weapons of mass destruction', both chemical and biological. The WMD was used against the Iranians and the Kurds, most notoriously at Halabja , with the full knowledge of Britain and America. In the case of the Iranians, the Americans were actively helping him during the Iraq/Iran war by furnishing his military with satellite information of Iranian troop placements and movements, the better for the Iraqis to gas them. My opposition to Saddam is long standing as is my opposition to the death penalty.

An illegal invasion and illegal occupation do not for a legal trial make . Even Human Rights Watch has had to complain about the trial and its process having no validity . Three members of the defence team assassinated; two judges removed from the case, one changed because he was prepared to uphold some propriety in proceedings; the refusal to allow defence witnesses to be called or evidence to be used. To call it a trial is a travesty, it was a sham to give a fig leaf of justification for a lynching. Every decision during the sham trial was political and made by the puppet regime controlled from the American embassy in the Green Zone. And Britain is complicit with it.

The timing of Saddam's lynching is confirmation of American involvement, if any is needed. To lynch him on one of the holiest of holidays in Islam, Eid al-Adha, a day of mercy when Abraham was spared by Allah from sacrificing his son Ishmael and instead substituted a lamb, is a cynical provocation against all Muslims irrespective if it was Muslims who opened the trap door. Under Iraqi law, the law imposed by the puppet regime, "no verdict should be implemented during the official holidays or religious festivals", as stated by Kurdish judge Tizgar Mohammed Amin , the first judge at Saddam's sham trial. So why do it on such a day if not to further inflame Muslim sentiment? It certainly sits well with those who see a 'clash of civilisations' such as the Christain believers in the Rapture - the Denominationists - who are actively working for Armageddon in the Middle East and who have Bush's ear. 

In what may seem contradictory to inflaming all Muslim sentiment, it also deepens the sectarian divide so longed and worked for by the occupier. As evidence, a mobile phone video surfaced on the internet, which went mainstream almost immediately, showing Saddam's hanging with a soundtrack of him being verbally taunted, mocked in his last minutes by sectarians shouting slogans for a popular Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. It has made a martyr out of a gangster. 

It also coincides with the death and lying in state of a previous US president, Gerald Ford. Besides being another American president unelected to office, the eulogies for him, and by extention American democracy and which compares favourably to the regime of Saddam. A salve to American conscience by implying a superiority in their means of making presidents, even one who gave the go ahead to mass murder in Indonesia and East Timor, which Ford did . He also appointed Bush senior head of the CIA during his 28 month presidency.

The Kurds are unhappy with the execution because it halted any future trial of the mass murder of Kurds with chemical weapons at Halabja. Not having that trial means British and American complicity in supplying the means of producing the weapons, the chemical plants and biological cultures like anthrax, will not now be raised. Execution as cynical manoeuvre to conceal ones own involvement in mass murder.    

Bush has made his own personal snuff movie with this lynching which has demeaned those who watched, nearly the whole world considering it has been broadcast on TV or internet and with stills carried by nearly all newspapers. This media process has been an attempt to implicate everybody in a lynching and debase our humanity. I wouldn't be surprised if Bush has the full uncensored video looped for a continual, visual backdrop projected onto a wall in the Oval Office to feed his addiction to murder. The opening line from Dylan's Desolation Row sums it up; "They're selling postcards of the hanging."

If I only got my information from the mainstream media or from most commentators on the internet who consider themselves progressive, I could probably forgive myself for believing that there is no way forward from the mess the world is in. That people are inevitably on the way towards their own destruction as a species. That there is no hope. But this is the road to despair fostered by a media in the most part complicit with causing the mess.

Some of the writers are brilliant with their invective exposing the crimes of Bush/blair, but fail to take their analysis forward to its logical conclusion and carry through their responsibilities to themselves and their readers by suggesting what can be done. Writing about how bad it is isn't good enough and fails to accept the symbiotic relationship between analysis and action - praxis. By failing in this, or suggesting violence as an option, they do themselves and their readers a disservice and, knowing or not, they further an agenda of despair. It is action that has a habit of bringing with it hope.

There are some writers who are exceptions to this, the foremost of which is Rebecca Solnit . Her writing is based on the ability of people to work together backed up with solid research of the myriad of unreported stories and actions that have pushed forward change. From the smallest actions like collecting for a petition or large ones like forcing an oil company in Nigeria to pay compensation for polluting the land. They all add up to challenging the powers that be, weakening them and helping the process of changing our future. Making another world possible.

I hate it when America produces writers of such calibre, it keeps shattering my fantasy that that nation is populated by a race of ignoramuses, is a nursery for arrogant fools. But then the Bush family and their sycophants are not 300million and that it is a much more complex and diverse place.

I discovered her writings at TomDispatch a few years ago with a piece of hers on the then recent death of Susan Sontag. The latest piece carried by TomDispatch is full of wit, warmth, humanity and most of all, hope. The essay is a fiction of dreams yet to be achieved which envisions a future of light, not a dark dystopia. Her words dance while making revolution.

Pandora , the first woman in the ancient Greek myths, she was given a box and told never to open it. Being human and curious she did and all the banes of our life escaped. Except our hope.

Throughout the human history that I explored earlier on in this piece there have been revolts and rebellions, large and small against the imposition of invidious condition upon the mass of the population, and which changed the direction of history. They may not have won as in a 'victory of the moment' but without the revolts we would not have such things as the 8 hour working day, holidays, the vote and the National Health Service - even if they are under attack from a Labour government.  From Boudicca against Rome to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 against serfdom. From the Diggers opposing Cromwell's settlement to the Abolitionists of slavery. From the Chartists campaigning for the vote to the Trades Unions and the General Strike . These are just a few of the struggles that are remembered still from those past times, that changed things and which give a history to all the daily actions taking place now for a different future, one of peace. 

So I will repeat it again as I have done in nearly all the previous essays on this site. The way forward in defeating the agenda of despair represented by gangsters like Bush/blair and their acolytes, knowing or not, in the mainstream media and on the internet, is non-violent mass participatory civil disobedience and direct action. Both small and large, international and local. They are the traditional political tools used by the oppressed when in the process of turning the world upside down. Actions envisaging hope.









Foot note: The archaeological research about Dartmoor comes from a pdf downloaded from the National Park Authority website .