Wales

this was originally posted on my myspace blog but i’ve moved it here since i’m deleting that.

Wales is great. Seriously. The people here are way more friendly then Londoners, or at least everyone weve met so far has been, and the local anarchists hooked up a couple of paying gigs for us. In our 4 days in the Cardiff/Newport area we did three open-mics, two paid shows, sold a bunch of CDs, met a ton of extraordinarily cool folks, and just generally ended up in a much better frame of mind then when we got there. In particular I want to give shout outs to the Cardiff Anarchist Network (C.A.N.) that hooked up our gigs, Pondlife MCs & Japonica who we played with twice (they kick ass), and Kilnaboy the local celtic anarchist punk brigade which includes somewhere between 5 and 9 truly brilliant folks that make some uber-cool noises who were going to be sharing a stage with at the festival in Somerset England next week.

The history of this place is truly incredible, unlike Scotland where English Colonialism at least pretended to have some basis in law, the conquest and colonization of Wales was just straight up balls-out no-holds-barred mass murder. The Norman kings in England couldnt ever really conquer it themselves, so instead they privatized the conquest and their Nobles were allowed to claim as much land as they could conquer and hold in the name of the crown. The result was that only a very few families ended up owning virtually everything and their descendants still own virtually everything to this day, over 800 years later! In the areas under English control, as elsewhere in Britain, the local Celtic language and religion was made illegal and right up until the early 20^th century Welsh schoolchildren who dared to speak Welsh in school were beaten by their teachers. The only reason Welsh survives as a language at all is that the geography was so mountainous that until the invention of modern transportation (trains, cars, planes, etc) it was more trouble then it was worth for the English government to really penetrate into the western part of the country. Nowadays its making a comeback in schools and whatnot and apparently most of the elite private schools in Cardiff and eastern Wales are Welsh-only, which is ironic since thats the part of the country where the language is used in everyday conversation the least. Im not sure what that means in the long-term and neither was anyone I asked, but its still interesting. Unlike Scotland, where the consensus seemed to be that the creation of a semi-independent Scottish Parliament was a stepping stone towards full independence, radicals here see devolution (as the decentralization is called) as a ploy to encourage people to spend their time and energy on cultural autonomy instead of pushing for independence. The danger, of course, is that more and more English people are moving into Wales because its relatively cheaper to live there and if they dont get independence soon theyll be outvoted in their own country by English immigrants (who of course do not consider themselves immigrants at all since they see Wales as part of the UK). not all english folks living in wales oppose independance – in the radical scene most seem to support it actually – and of course many welsh people think it’s a bad idea since as an independant country wales would go from being an underserved and impovrished area of a wealthy relatively large country to an impovrished tiny nation with water as its only large-scale export. Definitely a complicated situation with no easy answers.

No journal entry about Wales would be complete without taking about the Coal mines, nowadays the mines are mostly closed but the scars from two centuries of the most incredible exploitation you can possibly imagine are still livid. At one time the Welsh miners were among the most militant union workers in the world in the 1930s 1 in every 4 union miners went to Spain to fight with the Anarchists against Franco if that gives yall some idea of what they were like, but in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher (the Uks equivalent of Ronald Reagan) privatized the power supply and shut down most of the coal mines, leaving hundreds of thousands of people jobless and breaking the unions once and for all. Im not sure how I feel about it, on the one hand coal is an incredibly dirty source of power and no one should ever have to work in a coal mine (we spent about an hour on a guided tour through some of the bigger and better ventilated tunnels of one of the old mines and that was more then enough time for me), so shutting the mines down was probably a good thing all said and done, but after two centuries of powering England on Welsh (and Scottish and Cornish) coal and forcing the miners into absolutely absurd poverty in the process the government and the industry owed them a bit more then a fuck you we dont need you any more. Yet another reason to hate capitalism I suppose

Guess thats it for me, Ill write more once I get back from this festival thing.

Comments (copied over from myspace)

Geo-abuser!

You should see what closing the mines down in Cornwall has done. From being a massive industrial area, check the size of cornwall on the mappa munda, thats how important, it’s bigger than england to being one of the poorest “counties” (I say counties loosly) in the UK and in the bottom 10% in europe. And with tourism on an increase more and more english are moving down here, and as they see cornwall as part of england, cornish nationalist of those that want a cornish assemberly are moving into english political parties, mainly teh liberal democrats from Sendeth Kernow to get there point across, (I mean which english person is going to vote to a cornish nationalist party? – especially when they are un informed to start of with). And as these english push house prises up in the area buy buying them as holiday homes and letting them out to holiday makers the cornish can’t afford to live in there own homeland. Cornwall has some of teh mose exspensive hosue prices in the UK yet has the lowest wage average, proberly around just under £6 around $12 i think don’t count me on the number tho. BUt yet there is a feeling of being cornish around and the cornish language seein a much needed revivial http://www.lhi.org.uk/applications/console/console_description.rm?mediacategory=1375 Check it out, it’s a local festival near me…. Come to cornwall, you’ll love it but don’t buy a home hear lol Stux Posted by Geo-abuser! on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 at 6:49 AM

emcee lynx

definately going to come to cornwall on the next trip. thanks for keeping me posted on what’s going on out there, i’m glad the language and culture are still visible and moore importantly making a comeback, here’s hoping it can last in the face of large-sclae immigration. who knows, the basque country had massive immigration of non-basques under franco and now many people who’s parents came from outside euzkadi have learned the language and speak it on a regular basis, so maybe there’s hope. i hope so at least. Posted by emcee lynx on Wednesday, August 02, 2006 at 7:15 AM

Posted: June 16th, 2006 under culture war, personal.
Comments: none