Fighting Fascism, Then and Now

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

by Alex Duval-Smith

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9493.htm

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These are the Klondikers of global warming: men from all over the world who have come to Hammerfest, gateway to the Barents Sea, to make their fortune from new resources - oil, gas, fish and diamonds - made accessible by the receding ice.

It is the dark season here - two months from November to January when the sun never rises above the snow-laced rocks around Hammerfest, ice-free thanks to the Gulf stream. In the horseshoe-shaped port, trawlers from all over the world wait for favorable weather to head back into the Barents Sea. Hammerfest, with its colorful wooden houses, feels cozy. But it is a nerve center of the scramble for the Arctic's wealth that raises urgent questions.

The 14 million sq km Arctic Ocean is home to 25 per cent of the planet's unextracted oil and natural gas. With a population of four million, the region is much more stable than the Middle East. Global warming, in combination with the current high oil price, makes it ever more accessible. Yet the bordering countries - Russia, Canada, the US, Norway and Danish Greenland - have yet to agree on who owns what. Long-forgotten bays, waterways and islands are moving to the top of the international agenda.

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[Generarth]

1. Oil in the Arctic or International Brigade in London?

something get mixed up?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. Oops! Here's the text I meant

...to paste in the original post from the article by John Pilger:

I first understood the importance of the struggle in Spain from Martha Gellhorn. Martha was one of my oldest friends. She was one of the greatest war correspondents and is remembered for her dispatches from Spain during the Civil War. In November 1938, she wrote this:

"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink: a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out, enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come for at least two hours. The flower stalls look bright and pretty along the promenade. 'The flowers are all sold, Senores. For the funerals of those killed in the eleven o'clock bombing, poor souls'. It had been a clear and cold day all yesterday …'What beautiful weather', a woman said, and she stood, holding her shawl around her, staring at the sky. 'And the nights are as fine as the days. A catastrophe,' she said … everyone listened for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers, they were like tiny silver bullets, moving forever up, across the sky."

How familiar that sounds. Barcelona. Guernica. Hiroshima. Vietnam. Cambodia. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq.

Martha never tired of explaining why people fought for the Republic, "the Causa", and why going to Spain was so important. She wrote of the International Brigade: "Whatever their nationality, whether they were Communists, anarchists, socialists, poets, plumbers, middle-class professional men, or the one Abyssinian prince … they were fighting for us all in Spain."