MILENA RAMPOLDI‘Joe Hill ain’t dead’: 5 questions to Fausto Giudice

 Milena Rampoldi, 12/7/2022

How did you discover Joe Hill?

I was a young immigrant in Sweden in the late 60s. Those were the ‘golden years’ of the reigning social democracy, which declared all dissent to be ‘deviance’ to be treated by psychiatry. I identified with the ‘damned of the earth’ and found the reigning Lutheran morality incomparably hypocritical. Those who claimed to want the good of the people had rewritten history, erasing the ‘other workers’ movement', which had fought against capital by anything but peaceful means. Joe Hill was a legendary figure in that ‘other labour movement’. In 1970, I found myself with a few hundred outsiders as an extra in Bo Widerberg's film about Joe Hill, in the southern districts of Stockholm. Until then, all I knew about him was the song sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock. Joe Hill told me that the Swedish working class had not always been the peaceful pachyderm of social democratic representation. Then I discovered Anton Nilsson, ‘the Amalthea man’. This 21-year-old worker had, with 2 comrades, planted a bomb near a ship called the Amalthea, moored in Malmö, which housed British strike-breakers imported by the bosses against a dockers' strike in 1908. Anton Nilsson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment following an international campaign, led in particular by the International Workers of the World, the union where Joe Hill was active in the USA.

What is Joe Hill telling us today?

Essentially, he is telling us two things: 1. that it is possible to organise the most exploited and the most oppressed in an intelligent and effective way by adapting the forms of organisation to the social reality of those ‘down below’ - migrants, women, the precarious, the unskilled - which is what the IWW did, avoiding any form of social-democratic bureaucracy. That's what the ‘other workers’ movement’ is all about, as opposed to apparatuses like the German DGB, AFL-CIO or the Swedish LO: a movement that sticks to the reality of the class, which is mobile, fluid and changing. 2- We can invent popular, creative, hard-hitting and humorous forms of communication. Joe Hill's songs are a magnificent example of this.

Are there any Joe Hills today?

Not that I know of. Some rappers could be, if they chose to sing with and for the workers who are organising themselves at Amazon, McDonalds, Starbucks, Deliveroo, Uber and all the companies of the ‘new capitalism’, which is only new in its forms.

What would Joe Hill and the IWW have done today?

They would have organised ‘other’ workers by walking on two legs: physical and virtual contact. That's what's happening in China, for example, where young workers in the world's factories, with no union to defend them, are using social media to make demands and organise themselves.

Why the ‘erga omnes’ series?

‘erga omnes’, “For all”, was the motto of the slave rebels led by Spartacus who endangered the Roman Republic between 73 and 71 BC. This collection aims to publish books on the great, sometimes forgotten, figures of logical revolts through the centuries. Others will follow Joe Hill.

 

 

CONTENTS

• A child of the iron
• Svenskamerika
• From New York to California
• Wobbly!
• Rebel Girl
• A Yankee lawsuit

FAUSTO GIUDICEAnnecy, France: an amok “in the name of Jesus Christ”

 Fausto Giudice,  Tlaxcala, 9/6/2023

Amok, a term derived from the Malay word amuk meaning “uncontrollable rage”, refers to acts committed by people - usually men - suddenly gripped by a murderous madness, engaging in knife attacks against random individuals in a race that generally ends with the murderer's death or suicide. This extreme form of suicidal decompensation, observed in Malaysia and other countries, has been the subject of countless ethnological and psychiatric studies, literary works - from Rudyard Kipling to Romain Gary and Stefan Zweig - and films (at least 9 since 1927).

What happened on the shores of Lake Annecy on Thursday, June 8, 2023 is a typical case of amok: Abdelmasih Hannoun, a 31-year-old Syrian, stabbed 4 small children to death before the eyes of their horrified mothers, and then two seniors. A young man, Henri, 24, who was passing by, tried to stop him with his backpack, but failed. This was all it took for the marketing student, who is currently on a tour of France's cathedrals, to become the “backpack hero” of the so-called social networks. The police, alerted, intervened, putting an end to the mad race, without killing the aggressor, but by shooting him in the legs.

“As things stand, we have no evidence to suggest that there was any terrorist motivation,” said Annecy public prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis at a press briefing on the scene 6 hours later. As the assailant was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the investigation is focusing on his psychiatric history and psychological state. The investigators, who probably hasn’t read neither Stefan Zweig nor Émile Durkheim, will have have a hard time explaining this amok.

As the hours passed, details emerged about Abdelmasih Hannoun [literal translation: Merciful Slave of the Messiah]: a refugee in Sweden, where he married a Swedish woman from Trollhättan known in Turkey, this Syriac (“Assyrian”) Christian originally from Hassake, in northeastern Syria, spent some ten years in Sweden before divorcing and leaving the country. He applied for asylum in France, Italy and Switzerland before his first application for asylum in Sweden was finally accepted on April 26, 2023, resulting in the rejection of his application in France, notified on June 4. Having obtained a permanent residence permit in Sweden in 2013, he had applied for Swedish citizenship from 2017, which was rejected three times, despite having a child, now aged 3, and studying to become a nurse.

During his amok, this servant of the messiah shouted twice: “In the name of Jesus Christ”. He was carrying a cross and, in addition to his knife, a prayer book. As a result, the police did not shoot him in the head, which would certainly have been the case had he shouted “Allahu Akhbar”. This would have saved Mr. Darmanin, the Interior Minister, the trouble of racking his brain about “troubling coincidences” and calmed “the awe that is overwhelming our country” (Aurore Bergé, leader of the Macronist parliamentary group Renaissance, who took advantage of the Savoyard amok to denounce the “rag-tag battle” at the National Assembly over pension reform).

We could therefore add this definition to Gustave Flaubert’s  Dictionary of Received Ideas:

“Amok: a form of terrorism when the perpetrator is a Muslim, a simply frightening and disturbing act when the perpetrator is Christian, even if he is a bearded Arab”.

 

FAUSTO GIUDICERasmus Paludan: portrait of a troublemaker

   FG, BastaYekfi, 18/4/2022

The man who set fire to the Swedish suburbs during the Easter weekend and in the middle of Ramadan earned his time in the limelight. Express portrait.

Rasmus Paludan, by Morten Ingemann

Rasmus Paludan was born in 1982 in North Zealand to a Danish mother and a Swedish father, which allowed him two years ago to obtain Swedish nationality as well as Danish, and should open a path for him to become a candidate in Sweden’s legislative elections next September. He will probably have no more chance of being elected there than in Denmark, where he received only a few thousand votes, but this should widen his influence on the so-called social networks, where he is spreading out, multiplying provocations, but without meeting the expected success.

 Rasmus has a leftist younger brother - who called in a video not to vote for him in 2019 - and a feminist poet little sister, who also makes electronic music. He got married last fall to a 21-year-old woman, whose anonymity has been preserved and who is only known to the public as having had love affair since she was 17 with Peter Madsen, alias Raket-Madsen, the rocket and submarine inventor who is serving a life sentence for the murder, preceded by rape, of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall. Is this a sham marriage? We don't know. In any case, this news has put an end to the constant rumours of Rasmus' homosexuality, as Rasmus is also the subject of a complaint from a children's rights NGO for exchanging sexual comments with people under 15.

Rasmus has two personal problems: his brain and his overweight.

 

In 2005, at the age of 23, he was in a car accident that resulted in a 25% loss of brain power and compromised his law studies. But he learned enough law to specialize in all kinds of complaints and lawsuits, whether against the author of a message that Hitler hadn't finished the job of ridding the world of "fags" or against his namesake Rasmus Padulan Malver for improper use of his "middle name" (Padulan) as a surname.

 

But he has lost more cases than he has won and has been convicted a respectable number of times for his hate speech against Muslims.

Rasmus has specialized in one particular activity: he publicly burns Korans, often after wrapping them in bacon or smearing them with pork fat, both in Denmark and in Sweden, under police protection, in the name of the sacrosanct right to freedom of expression. To do this, he created a start-up, which presents itself as a political party but is more of a one-man business: Stram Kurs or Hard Line. The company's philosophy is summed up in two Instagrammed words: "ethnonationalist and libertarian". In short, he is a 21^st century crusader, who wants to cleanse Denmark of the Muslim spawn before it finally takes over at the end of the great replacement in progress.

 

Gellert Tamas: The debate on apathetic children in Sweden is dishonest

 Gellert Tamas, Dagens Nyheter, 29/10/2021
Translated by Fausto Giudice, Tlaxcala  

The debate on apathetic refugee children has been raging for almost 20 years in Sweden. A new book by neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan highlights mental, physical and environmental factors for the disorder - yet the Swedish media dismiss the apathetic children as malingerers, writes Gellert Tamas.

Could it be that the hotly debated question of apathetic refugee children affected by the resignation syndrome has finally been answered? It's not impossible, at least judging by the international reception of a new book on resignation syndrome by renowned neurologist and multi-award-winning author Suzanne O'Sullivan.

 

Neurologist and author Suzanne O'Sullivan. Photo: Guillem Lopez/TT

The debate has raged for nearly 20 years. Around the turn of 2005-2006, 10,000 people demonstrated to stop the ongoing deportations, while the media focus quickly changed. According to a survey by the Mid Sweden University, manipulation was the most common - 42% of articles - explanation for the children's condition. They were allegedly faking or being poisoned by their parents - all with the aim of obtaining a residence permit.

Then the debate turned. The first research findings were published in leading journals. Blood tests and tests of stress hormones, among other things, showed that neither malingering nor poisoning could explain the children's condition. In 2014, the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) introduced the resignation syndrome as a separate diagnosis code in the health care system. This seemed to settle the issue.

Although the research is still incomplete, all the research that does exist shows - despite differences of opinion on, for example, the view of hospital versus home care, the degree of parental involvement in the care process and the importance of residence permits for the recovery process - that manipulation cannot explain the condition itself, although there may be such individual cases. This is the same picture I have painted myself in both a book and in investigative television programmes.

In the autumn of 2019, the debate flared up once again, after two now-adults told me that as children they were forced to play apathetic by their parents. The focus once again fell on the issue of manipulation. Although there is no new research to overturn previous findings, or support the claim of mass manipulation, several commentators have argued that there is now compelling evidence; virtually all of the 1,000 cases of children diagnosed with symptoms resignation have in fact involved manipulation.

 The tone has been heated and not without political undertones. PM Nilsson, political editor at Dagens Industri, in an interview on Radio Sweden, dismisses withdrawal symptoms as “this strange story of apathetic children who were exploited by their parents to simulate a condition that made them pitiful cases.”

In the tabloid Expressen, Peter Santesson, former director of Timbro publishers and editor-in-chief of the magazine Kvartal, calls for a “sorry-we-were-wrong” statement from all the doctors and researchers who have concluded that the hildren are really sick.

The list could go on and on.

SUZANNE O’SULLIVANThe mystery of the refugee children in Sweden who won’t wake up

 

Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Sunday Times, 28/3/2021

Hundreds of children have succumbed to a mystery illness that can keep them in a sleeplike state for years. Leading neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan investigates

Extracted from The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan (Picador 2021)

I had barely stepped across the threshold and I already felt claustrophobic. I could see Nola lying in a bed to my right. She was about ten years old, I guessed. This was her bedroom. I had come knowing what to expect, but somehow I still wasn’t prepared. Five people and one dog had just walked into the room, but she didn’t have so much as a flicker of acknowledgment for any of us. She just lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, apparently peaceful.

“She’s been like this for over a year and a half,” Dr Olssen said as she bent to stroke Nola gently on the cheek.

Djeneta, right, a Roma refugee who has been bedridden and unresponsive for two and a half years, and her sister, Ibadeta, for more than six months, in Horndal, Sweden, March 2, 2017. Photo MAGNUS WENNMAN*

I was in Horndal, Sweden — a small municipality 100 miles north of Stockholm. Dr Olssen had been caring for Nola since she had first fallen ill, so she knew the family well. She drew the curtains aside to let the light in, then turned to Nola’s parents and said: “The girls have to know it’s daytime. They need sun on their skin.”

“They know it’s day,” her mother answered defensively. “We sit them outside in the morning. They’re in bed because you’re visiting.”

This wasn’t just Nola’s room. Her sister, Helan, who was roughly a year older, lay quietly on the bottom of a set of bunk beds to my left. From where I stood, I could see only the soles of her feet. The upper bunk — their brother’s bed — was empty. He was healthy; I had seen him peeping out from around a corner as I walked to the girls’ room. I was there because I was a neurologist, a specialist in brain disease and someone who is familiar with the power of the mind over the body — more than most doctors, perhaps.

I approached Nola’s bed. As I did, I glanced over my shoulder at Helan, and was surprised to see her eyes open for a second to look at me and then close again.

“She’s awake,” I said to Dr Olssen.

“Yes, Helan’s only in the early stages.”

Nola showed no sign of being awake, lying on top of her bed covers, laid out in preparation for me. She was wearing a pink dress and black-and-white harlequin tights. Her hair was thick and glossy, but her skin was pale. Her lips were an insipid pink, almost colourless. Her hands were folded across her stomach. She looked serene, like the princess who had eaten the poisoned apple. The only certain sign of illness was a nasogastric feeding tube threaded through her nose, secured to her cheek with tape. The only sign of life, the gentle up and down of her chest.

I crouched beside her bed and introduced myself. I knew that, even if she could hear me, she probably couldn’t understand. She knew very little English, and I didn’t speak Swedish or her native language, Kurdish, but I hoped the tone of my voice would reassure her.

Nola and Helan are two of the hundreds of sleeping children who have appeared sporadically in Sweden over a span of 20 years. Rumour suggested the phenomenon had been around since the 1990s, but the number of children affected escalated at the turn of the century. Between 2003 and 2005, 424 cases were reported. There have been hundreds more since. It affects both boys and girls, but with a slight preponderance of girls. Typically, the sleeping sickness had an insidious onset. Children initially became anxious and depressed. Their behaviour changed: they stopped playing with other children and, over time, stopped playing altogether. They slowly withdrew into themselves, and soon they couldn’t go to school. They spoke less and less, until they didn’t speak at all. Eventually they took to bed. If they entered the deepest stage, they could no longer eat or open their eyes. They became completely immobile, showing no response to encouragement from family or friends, and no longer acknowledging pain or hunger or discomfort. They ceased having any active participation in the world.

The first children affected were admitted to hospital. They underwent extensive medical investigations, including CT scans, blood tests, EEGs (electroencephalograms, or brain-wave recordings) and lumbar punctures to look at spinal fluid. The results invariably came back as normal, with the brain-wave recordings contradicting the children’s apparent unconscious state. Even when the children appeared to be deeply unresponsive, their brain waves showed the cycles of waking and sleep that one would expect in a healthy person.

Some of the most severely affected children spent time under close observation in intensive care units, yet still nobody could wake them. Because no disease was found, the help doctors and nurses could offer was limited. They fed the children through tubes, while physiotherapists kept their joints mobile and their lungs clear, and nurses made sure they didn’t develop pressure sores through inactivity. Ultimately, being in hospital didn’t make much difference, so many children were sent home to be cared for by their parents. The children’s ages ranged from 7 to 19. The lucky ones were sick for a few months, but many didn’t wake for years. Some still haven’t woken.