Volume , Number 0
There are no articles.
CommentaryThere are no articles.
CultureThere are no articles.
Features
Media Activism
Alison Weir
Theopolitics
Michelle Swenson
When War Crimes Are Impossible
Norman Solomon
Hotel Satire
Lydia Sargent
Classics
Anna Popkin
Book Excerpt
Site Administrator
Government
Don Monkerud
Africa
David Model
Special Report
Jorge Martín
Psychology
Bruce E. Levine
Mexico
Sonali Kolhatkar
Indigenous Organizing
Julia Kendlbacher
Interview
Andrej Grubacic
Gay & Lesbian Community Notes
Michael Bronski
Conservative Watch
Bill Berkowitz
Mideast
Phyllis Bennis
Reproductive Rights
Eleanor j. Bader
Immigrant Organizing
David Bacon
Zaps
There are no articles.
NOTE: Z Magazine subscribers and sustainers have access to all Z Magazine articles here and in the archive. The latest Z Magazine articles available to everyone are listed in the Free Articles box at the top of the table of contents, and are starred in the list below. Questions? e-mail Z Magazine Online.
Remembering Bobby Sands
D enis O’Hearn was born in New Mexico and is of Irish and Native Alaskan (Aleut) ancestry. He moved to Belfast in the 1970s and his articles for In These Times and the Guardian introduced Bobby Sands and the Irish H-Blocks prison conflict to the broad audience of progressives in the U.S. He is a community activist, former chair of the West Belfast Economic Forum, and jointly professor of social and economic change at Queens University Belfast and professor of sociology at the University of Binghamton in New York. May 5 is the 25th anniversary Bobby Sands’s death. I interviewed O’Hearn about his recent book, Nothing But an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation .
GRUBACIC: Tell us how you came to write a life of Bobby Sands and how the process of learning about his life changed your perceptions of him.
O’HEARN: When I started my research I thought I was writing a book about Bobby Sands, hunger striker. Since he was an icon of resistance, but also an enigma, I didn’t know whether I would like Bobby Sands or not or what would be his notable characteristics. I had no idea, for example, why he became a leader among his prison comrades. One former hunger striker told me that he could never figure out why Bobby was a leader because he was such a regular guy. But as I talked to more and more people about him, from his childhood to his early involvement in the IRA and his two periods in prison, I realized that I was writing a book about Bobby Sands, the political activist, rather than Bobby Sands the hunger striker.
That is not to deny that the story of Bobby Sands’s death, like the other nine hunger strikers who died, is gut-wrenching. But the life of Bobby Sands is ultimately an inspiring story of how he overcame the most extreme forms of oppression to express his own personal freedom and the collective freedom of his fellow prisoners by building solidarity, raising morale, and leading very effective and creative forms of protest.
Can you give an example of what you mean?
Bobby first went to jail at 18 years of age. He hadn’t much formal education and his politics were pretty simple and defensive. He had come under daily attack by sectarian anti-Catholic gangs in his community and he saw membership in the IRA as the best way to defend himself and his friends from these gangs. In jail, however, he had political status and he could freely associate with his fellow prisoners. Long Kesh was like a prison camp from an old war movie, with Quonset huts surrounded by wire fences that the prisoners called “cages.” They trained militarily and, most importantly, read and debated politics. Sands loved to study Che Guevara, Camilo Torres, and George Jackson. Later, he mixed what he learned from their writings with Irish revolutionaries like Liam Mellowes. To him, prison was a university where he became politically conscious and surprisingly sophisticated. So when he was released back onto the streets, he was not just an IRA volunteer, he was interested in organizing his community around things like housing, transportation, education, and cultural activities.
When he was caught a second time and sent to H-Block, this time
without political status and without the right to associate, it
had a big effect on him. He saw young prisoners all around who were
not highly aware, but who also did not have the opportunities he’d
had to raise their political consciousness in prison. You have to
remember the conditions they were living in. When they refused to
wear prison uniforms, these men were stripped of all clothing and
had to wear blankets [thus, they were known as blanketmen], they
were kept in lock-up 24/7, they had no reading materials except
a bible and a few religious pamphlets. Yet Bobby Sands was unwilling
to accept the restrictions that these conditions placed on him and
his fellow prisoners.
When he was first put in a cell with Tony O’Hara, whose brother later also died on hunger strike, he watched Tony sleeping all day. After a while, he asked him, “Tony, what do you do all day?” Tony replied, “I sleep, there’s nothing else to do.” So Bobby said, “Isn’t that a waste of your opportunities.”
He convinced his fellow prisoners to take their monthly visits with their families and friends, even though they had to wear a prison uniform to do it. Then they started smuggling messages out to tell the public what was happening in the H-Blocks. They smuggled in ballpoint pen refills and cigarette papers, as well as tobacco for a bit of luxury. Then the corridors and other prison spaces became battlegrounds, as prisoners and guards struggled over who controlled them. This raised the morale of the prisoners tremendously.
Within weeks of arriving, Sands started writing articles about prison life and smuggling them out. When they were published they provoked public awareness and outrage. Without these accounts, public support for the prisoners would never have taken hold. Sands organized a letter-writing “factory” on his prison wing. He got other prisoners to write letters, hundreds of them, to influential people, from Jane Fonda to Leonid Brezhnev to trade union activists to folk singers.
How did the prison authorities react to this challenge?
Things got violent as the guards tried to catch prisoners smuggling. The prisoners had to keep things hidden, usually up their backsides. You can imagine the horrific scenes that resulted where prison guards were sticking their gloved fingers up a man’s anus and then using the same fingers to probe his mouth. The authorities devised new types of searches, each one more violent than the last. This was all made worse because some guards were drunk. They had a bar in the prison, can you imagine? The guards went to lunch and came back after several drinks. It was a recipe for violence.
What effect did this have on the prisoners?
They were often in fear, but the more the authorities took away from them, the stronger they became. The more they tried to degrade them, the more dignity they maintained. The guards took away their furniture, soap, and toothbrushes. The only thing the prisoners could not get rid of was their bodily waste. When they tried to throw their urine and shit out the cell window, the guards threw it back in. Eventually, the blanketmen had to throw their food into piles in the corner of the cell—we’re talking about 2 men in a 8 by 10 foot cell with two urine-soaked mattresses and a couple of blankets—and spread their shit on the walls. I’m sure you cannot imagine living in such conditions, but it is incredible what people can endure together for a cause they feel is just. The prison guards made snide comments about how the blanketmen were animals, but the blanketmen actually strengthened and gained dignity through it all. We’re not talking about a few weeks or months. They lived on this “no-wash protest” for several years.
What was Bobby Sands doing during this period of escalating conflict?
He was right in the middle of it. He was second in command of the prisoners. Their officer in command was Brendan Hughes who they called “the Dark.” For some reason, the prison authorities always kept Bobby Sands and Hughes in adjoining cells, for nearly four years. They talked through the crack by the heating pipes at the back of their cells and planned prison protests that way.
The thing that really made Bobby Sands a leader was his energy and the way he turned his energy to organizing things that could raise the prisoners’ morale. It wasn’t only things like getting men to write letters and poems and stories to send outside. He also organized Irish language classes. In time some prisoners who were hardly literate in English could speak and write in Irish. This gave them power over their jailers because they could speak openly without being understood and felt they were getting one up on the guards.
How did things escalate to a hunger strike?
One of the side effects of Bobby’s propaganda work was that it helped supporters to build a protest movement around the issue of political status for the blanketmen. Eventually, it became a wider human rights campaign, organized around five key demands, like the prisoners’ right to wear their own clothes and to organize educational activities. When conditions in the cells got really bad, the prisoners began to talk about a hunger strike because it was the ultimate protest. Hunger strikes had often succeeded before and they saw it as a way out of their conditions, perhaps the only way.
But the movement outside prison was opposed to a hunger strike. The IRA felt that it would divert resources away from the armed struggle. Gerry Adams opposed it because he felt that Margaret Thatcher would let them die and to no good purpose. So Adams and others convinced the prisoners to postpone hunger striking while they negotiated with Thatcher over the five demands. They had powerful support from public figures like the Irish Cardinal Tomás O Fiaich. But Thatcher would not move. Eventually the prisoners felt that they had no choice.
The story of the hunger strikes, there were actually two of them, is complicated. But, briefly, Brendan Hughes led the first hunger strike in late 1980. He called it off on the verge of a settlement in order to save one hunger striker’s life. He thought he had a settlement, but it was not in writing. When Sands finally saw the agreement that the British government put on paper, he exploded. It was not even near what they wanted. By the time Sands got back to his cell that night after visiting the hunger strikers in the prison hospital, he vowed that he would lead a new hunger strike and this time it would be to the death. He knew he would die, but he was determined to go through with it.
How could he follow such a course when he knew that he and others would have a very slow and painful death?
I put that down to two factors. One is the intense solidarity he felt with his comrades, a level that we cannot understand unless we have been in such a remarkable situation. Such solidarity can empower people to do things that are beyond the usual. Many ex-blanketmen express a surprising nostalgia for life in the H-Blocks, despite the violence and deprivation. One told me that he had never experienced such intense comradeship and he really misses that. Another described a time when he was in his cell and he was listening to Bobby Sands singing. He asked himself, “Even if I do get out of here, will I ever experience anything as good as this?” Bobby Sands told a cellmate that life as a blanketman was the closest thing he would ever get to true communism. So this intense solidarity, even love, for his comrades provoked him to do anything to help them to get out of their horrific situation. I know, it is ironic that a prisoner would say at the one time that his life is almost utopian and in the next sentence talk about what extremes he is willing to go to in order to get out of it. But that was the reality of the H-Blocks.
The second factor, of course, was Bobby’s political commitment. He believed in himself and he knew that someone would have to die for the prisoners to win their rights. So he took a personal responsibility to ensure that the second hunger strike was not interrupted short of victory as the first one had been.
Well, he won a by-election to British parliament while he was dying in a prison hospital and that opened a new form of struggle for Irish Republicans, one that provoked much debate and controversy. It is worth noting that although Bobby Sands was in favor of fighting elections he was never in favor of taking office. He thought winning elections would gain legitimacy for the struggle and he argued that his movement should bank those gains by creating autonomous, parallel structures of governance in communities where it had popular support.
Times have changed and in many ways Irish Republicanism, like other movements, has become less radical since the death of Bobby Sands. Many people ask me where I think Bobby would stand today, were he alive, on Sinn Féin’s peace strategy and the IRA’s ceasefire. I cannot say, although it is worth noting that almost all of Bobby’s closest friends support the current peace strategy.
Some people see “irony” in Bobby Sands supposedly giving his life for armed struggle while Gerry Adams used the hunger strike and Sands’s election victory to move the IRA away from armed struggle. Yet Bobby did not die for the armed struggle, he died to defend the right of people to resist oppression and to be able to choose the means by which they resist—armed struggle if necessary, other means if possible. Bobby’s commitment to grass-roots organizing shows that his politics were far more developed than simple adherence to armed struggle.
These days people are talking about autonomy and prefigurative politics, that is, the idea that we base our political actions today according to the future we want to build. Back in the cages, Bobby Sands and others were developing precisely these ideas. Gerry Adams, for example, was talking about “making the Republic a reality” by building autonomous representative governance in the communities and building alternative and autonomous services, administration, even industry and healthcare. Bobby tried to introduce these ideas into his own community of Twinbrook during the six months of his adult life when he was not in prison.
You know, as soon as he went into jail he learned Irish and within two years he was writing really interesting essays in Irish about building autonomous Irish-language communities in Belfast, with autonomous schools, services, and factories. The school part of it has actually become a reality in Belfast, to some extent. I spent time in Oventic and I saw parallels between what he was trying to do and the kinds of things the Zapatistas, for instance, are now making a reality in Chiapas.
What I would hope, 25 years after his death, is that more people will recover memory of him. I hope that those who never heard of Bobby Sands will learn to remember him and that others to whom he is an example for his way of dying will rediscover how extraordinary he was for his way of living.
Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist historian from somewhere in the Balkans. Photos from www. irishhungerstrike.com.
Z Magazine Archive
Announcements
OCCUPY TOGETHER - Occupy Together is the unofficial hub for the various occupations springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. Towns and cities worldwide are participating.
Contact: http://www.occupytogether.org/.
MAY DAY - May 1 is May Day, also International Workers Day, celebrating the successful fight of workers for rights such as the eight-hour workday. A General Strike is called for May Day by many groups, and events are planned worldwide.
Contact: http://maydayunited.org/; http://www.may1.info/; info@maydayunited.org.
LABOR - The 2012 Labor Notes Conference, themed Solidarity for the 99%, will be held May 4-6, in Chicago. Thousands of union members, officers, and grassroots labor activists will attend the event, which features workshops, meetings and organizing opportunities.
Contact: 313-842-6262; http:// labornotes.org/conference.
MARIJUANA MARCH - On the first Saturday of May (this year: May 5) marijuana legalization activists will hold informational and educational events, rallies and marches in over 300 cities around the world.
Contact: http://globalcannabismarch.com; http://cannabis.wikia.com.
AMERICAN MUSLIMS - KinderUSA will celebrate its 10th Anniversary with a Fundraising Banquet Dinner in Los Angeles on May 5. The keynote speaker will be Norman Finkelstein. KinderUSA was founded as a group of concerned humanitarians and physicians, and has become a leading American Muslim charity organization helping families through health development and emergency relief.
Contact: http://www.kinder usa.org/.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE - SWAN (Service Women’s Action Network) will present Truth and Justice: The 2012 Summit on Military Sexual Violence in Washington, D.C. on May 8. The conferences will give survivors the opportunity to share their stories with congressmembers, policy experts and the general public; with key panels by military law and policy experts on major topics involving military sexual violence and survivors’ access to justice.
Contact: http://truthandjustice summit.org/.
MEDIA - The Alliance for Community Media Youth Summit 2012 will be held May 8 at Pierce College in Philadelphia, PA. The summit will consist of four one-day symposia that provide a public forum for discussion about media and news literacy in America. Participants will include educators, community leaders, media professionals, journalists, nonprofit leaders, policymakers and students.
Contact: http://www.allcommunitymedia.org.
MOMS/BOMBS - Moms Against Bombs and the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action will honor the long history of women’s resistance to injustice, war and nuclear weapons on May 12. A full day of activities is planned, including Orientation to the Trident Nuclear Weapons System, Nonviolence Training, Action Planning and Preparation, Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace, and a Vigil and Nonviolent Direct Action at the Bangor Trident Submarine Base.
Contact: Anne Hall, 206- 545-3562, annehall@familyhealing.com; gznonviolencenews@yahoo.com; www.gzcenter.org.
MOTHER’S DAY/PEACE - The Mother’s Day Walk for Peace began in 1996 for families who had lost their children to violence. On a day that celebrates mothers and children, the Walk became a place for families and friends to feel support and love with thousands of others who pledge their commitment to peace.
The day has also become a way for thousands of people to financially support the work of the Louis Brown Peace Institute. Mother’s Day is May 13.
Contact: http://www.kintera.org/faf/home/; http://www.ldb peaceinstitute.org/.
BRECHT FORUM - The Beginning Is Near: An Evening with Michael Moore & Cornel West, a special benefit for the Brecht Forum, will be held May 18 at Hunter College in New York City.
Contact: https://brechtforum.org.
LABOR - The Pacific Northwest Labor History Association’s 44th annual conference, A Century of Bread and Roses, is scheduled for May 18-20 in Tacoma, WA.
Contact: PNLHA, 2402-6888 Station Hill Drive, Burnaby, BC, V3N 4X5; 604-540-0245; pnlha@shaw.ca; www.pnlha.org.
HOMELESSNESS - PM Press and First Presbyterian Church will host author Summer Brenner at the Conference on Homelessness on May 19 in Palo Alto, CA.
Contact: First Presbyterian Church, 1140 Cowper Street, Palo Alto, VA 94301; http://www.pmpress.org/.
NATO/G8 - The Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda is organizing protests at the NATO and G8 meetings being held in Chicago, May 19-21. A legal, permitted, family-friendly march and rally are planned for May 19. An Occupy Chicago month-long occupation is being planned to begin May 1. The Network for a Nato-Free Future and American Friends Service Committee will also be hosting a Counter-Summit for Peace and Economic Justice May 18-19 at People’s Church in Chicago.
Contact: http://cang8.wordpress.com/about/; http://www.natofreefuture.org/.
ANARCHY FEST - A month-long Festival of Anarchy is scheduled for May in Montreal. The festival includes The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair (May 19-20).
Contact: http://www.radical montreal.com/;http://www.anarchist bookfair.ca/.
TRUTHDIG - Truthdig.com will be gathering May 20-25 in New Mexico with other concerned people to assess current prospects for progressive change. Speakers include Dennis Kucinich and Chris Hedges.
Contact: http://www.truthdig.com/event/santafe.
FEMINIST SCI-FI - The feminist science fiction convention WisCon 36 is scheduled for May 25-28 in Madison, Wisconsin, featuring discussion and debate of sci-fi/fantasy ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class.
Contact: WisCon, c/o SF3, PO Box 1624, Madison, WI 53701; concom35@wiscon.info; www.wiscon.info.
MULTICULTURE - The 25th Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE) holds its annual conference May 29 -June 2 in New York City.
Contact: Southwest Center for Human Relations Studies, 3200 Marshall Avenue, Suite 290, Norman, OK 73072; 405- 325-3694; www.ncore.ou.edu.
BIKING - Bikes Not Bombs is holding its 24th annual Bike-A-Thon and Green Roots Festival in Boston, MA on June 3, with several bike rides scheduled, music, exhibitors and more.
Contact: Bikes Not Bombs, 284 Amory St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130; 617-522-0222; mail@bikesnotbombs.org; www.bikesnotbombs.org.
RADIO - The 37th Annual Community Radio Conference is scheduled for June 13-16 in Houston, TX with discussions and workshops.
Contact: National Federation of Community Broadcasters, 1970 Broadway, Suite 1000, Oakland, CA 94612; 510-451 -8200; conference@nfcb.org; www.nfcb.org.
PEOPLE’S SUMMIT - The People’s Summit for Social and Environmental Justice during Rio+20 is an event by global civil society that will take place between the 15 and the 23 of June at Flamengo, in Rio de Janeiro—alongside the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), Rio+20.
Contact: contato@rio2012. org.br; http://cupuladospovos.org.br/en/.
ADC CONFERENCE - The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ACD) holds its annual conference June 21-24 in Washington, DC, with panel discussions and workshops on civil rights, media, the Mideast, etc.
Contact: ADC, 1732 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington DC, 20007; 202-244-2990; convention@adc.org; www.adc.org/convention.
MEDIA - The 14th annual Allied Media Conference will be held June 28-July 1 at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. Participatory workshops and skillshares will emphasize DIY alternative media to advance visions of a just and creative world.
Contact: Allied Media Projects, 4126 Third St., Detroit, MI 48201; www.alliedmediacon ference.org.
LA RAZA - The annual National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Conference is scheduled for July 7-10 in Las Vegas, with workshops, presentations and panel discussions.
Contact: NCLR Headquarters Office, Raul Yzaguirre Building, 1126 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036; 202-785-1670; www.nclr.org.
PEACESTOCK - On July 14 the 10th Annual Peace- stock: A Gathering for Peace will take place at Windbeam Farm in Hager City, WI. Peacestock (formerly “Pigstock”) is a mixture of music, speakers, and community for peace. The event is sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Chapter 115 and has a peace-themed agenda.
Contact: Bill Habedank, 1913 Grandview Ave., Red Wing, MN 55066; 651-388-7733; billhabedank@yahoo.com; http://www.peacestockvfp.org.
POPULAR ECONOMICS - The Center for Popular Economics is holding its 2012 Summer Institute July 23-27 at Columbia University in New York City. No background in economics is needed for this intensive training. This year’s theme is Economics for the 99%.
Contact: Center for Popular Economics, PO Box 785 Amherst, MA 01004; 413-545-0743; programs@populareconomics.org; www.populareconomics.org.
CUBA/PASTORS - The 23rd annual Pastors for Peace Friendship Caravan to Cuba is scheduled for
July1-July 31. Volunteers will travel across the U.S and Canada collecting aid and educating about the unjust blockade against Cuba, before an orientation in Texas July 15-18, followed by an education program in Cuba July 21-29, and finally a return back to the U.S. People can participate by attending or hosting local events, donating materials, or sponsoring a traveler.
Contact: IFCO/Pastors for Peace, 418 W. 145th St., New York, NY 10031; 212-926- 5757; cucaravan@igc.org; www.pastorsforpeace.org.
COMMUNITY MEDIA - The Alliance for Community Media 2012 National Conference is scheduled for July 31-August 2 in Chicago. Hands-on workshops and skillshares will be offered by this grassroots coalition of community media groups. This year’s theme is Collaborate!
Contact: ACM, 1760 Old Meadow Road, Suite 500, McLean, VA 22102; www.alliancecm.org.
VETERANS - Veterans for Peace is holding the 27th annual convention August 8-12 in Miami, FL. This year’s theme is, Liberating the Americas: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Contact: Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec Ave., St. Louis, MO 63105; 314-725-6005; www.vfpnationalconvention.org
COMMUNITIES - The Communities Conference is a networking and learning opportunity for co-operative or communal lifestyles, with workshops, events and entertainment; scheduled for August 31-September 3 at the Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Virginia.
Contact: Twin Oaks Communities Conference, 138 Twin Oaks Road, Louisa, VA 23093; 540-894-5126; conference@ twinoaks.org; www.communitiesconference.org.


