Was there any events to comparison with nowdays Tunnisian rising
An excerpt from Francis Wheen's : Karl Marx, A life
Alonside the history of bragging and xenophobia, however, there is another tradition – quiter but no less enduring – of English internationalism, particularly among trade unionists. One thinks of their campaigns agaist South African apartheid, or their refusal to produce goods for the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s: time and again, at least some British workers have been willing to demonstrate an instinctive kinship with the oppressed. As the Chartist George Julian Harney said at the time of the 1847 Portuguese uprising, 'People are beginning to understand that foreign as well as domestic questions do affect them; that a blow struck at Liberty on the Tagus is an injury to the friends of Freedom on the Thames; that the success of Republicanism in France would be the doom of Tyranny in every other land ; and the triunf of England's democratic Charter would be the salvation of the millions troughout Europe.' It would be easy to assume, as the ruling elite of the time did, that these friends of Freedom on the Thames existed only in Harney's imagination.
Why else did England remain immune from the revolutionary epidemic tha afflicted the rest of Europe in 1848? Harney' society of Fraternal Democrats – whose committee included refugees from France, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia- might hold meetings to discuss the stirring events on the Continent, but did ordinary British workers care two hoots about the struggle in far-away countries of which they knew nothing?
The answer was provided by the astonishing 'Haynau incident' of 1950 – wich, by happy coincidence, did indeed take place right beside the Thames. Field Marshal Baron von Haynau was a brutal Austrian commander known as 'the Hyena' who had fully earned the sobriquet by torturing the prisoners and flogging women whilw suppressing revolts in Italy and Hungary. In August 1850, as a respite from these exhausting duties, he took a short holiday inLondon, where his sightseeing intinerary included a tour of Barclay and Perkin's Brewery on the south bank of the river. Though Geore Julian Harnay encouraged all friends of freedom to prptest at the visit he had litle hope of success – and was as suprised as anyone by what happened next. As soon as the Hyena entered the brewery, a pose of drymen threw a bale of hay on his head and pelted him with manure. He than run out into the street, where lightermen and coal-heavers joined the chase -. Ripping his clothes, yanking out great tufts of his moustaches and shouting 'Down with the Austrian butcher!' Haynau tried to hide in a dustbbin at the George Inn on Bankside, but was soon routed out and pelted with more dung. By the time the police reached the pub, rowing him across the Thames to safety, the bedraggled and humilated butcher was in no fit state to continue his holiday. Within hours, a new song could be heard in the streets of Southwark:
Turn him out, turn him out, from our side of Thames,
Let him go to great Tories and high – titled dames.
He may walk the West End and parade in in his pride,
But he' ll not come back again near the George in Bankside.
Post je objavljen 26.03.2011. u 17:13 sati.