On this day, 23 April 1979, Aotearoa/New Zealand born teacher and socialist Clement Blair Peach was hit by police on an anti-Nazi demonstration in Southall, Middlesex, possibly with an illegal weapon, and later died.
Peach had joined thousands of people in an area with a large south Asian and Sikh population to protest against a meeting of the far-right National Front in the town hall. After he was hit he was taken into a nearby house which an ambulance was called. He was then taken to Ealing Hospital with an extradural haematoma, and died shortly after midnight.
A subsequent police investigation found that one of six members of the notoriously violent Special Patrol Group was responsible. The officers’ lockers were searched, and illegal weapons discovered like a lead cosh. The officers also quickly cleaned their uniforms and changed their appearances after the attack, and several of them lied to investigators. As a result of the deception, the guilty party could not be identified. The investigator did recommend that three officers who had conspired and lied should be charged with obstruction and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, but the director of public prosecutions appointed by the Labour government declined to prosecute them.
Officials refused to hold the inquest into Peach’s death in front of a jury, and despite multiple witnesses testifying to the police attack, the inquest returned a verdict of “death by misadventure”. The coroner disregarded witness testimony which he deemed to be from people who were socialist, or who were Sikh, and according to him “did not have experience of the English system” to be reliable.
It took decades to force the police to eventually release the results of their investigations which they did in 2010.
Police in the UK routinely help neo-Nazis organise meetings and demonstrations, attacking and arresting anti-fascists who protest against them. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1970898386428635/?type=3
“He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. That has been confirmed by every great revolution. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.”
— Lenin, “Military Program of Proletarian Revolution”, 1916.
“Karl Marx is most famous as a critic of capitalism, but at the heart of his critique can be found a desperate plea for the transformation of work. People, he argues, express themselves and create the world through creative and collective activity. This natural tendency is twisted into something unrecognisable in work under capitalism. He didn’t just think work around him was bad because it took place in noisy and dangerous conditions, or for low wages and long hours. The problem of work was a fundamental one: under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous. The forces of capital become ravenous, eating up all that is human, sucking on the very lifeblood of society.”
In early 2021, Bobbi Gould, a Los Angeles-based travel writer, says she came across a vague ad on Craigslist from a “big brand looking for willing sleepers.”
She’d always been interested in dreams, and the gig paid $1k. So she and her boyfriend decided to sign up.
A few days later, she says she found herself in an old warehouse with
17 other people, hooked up to an EEG machine, surrounded by Molson
Coors marketers.
Gould was told to watch the Coors video — complete with hypnotic
waterfalls, lush green landscapes, and flashes of Coors products — then
doze off to an audio recording of sounds from the video.
Over the next 8 hours, she had a variety of “weird Coors dreams.”
…Coors isn’t the only big brand looking into dreams as potential ad space:
Microsoft has explored ways to make pro gamers dream of their favorite Xbox video games.
Sony’s PlayStation has advertised a new game on the premise that it induces dreams about Tetris.
Burger King rolled out a Halloween-themed burger in 2018 that it claimed was “clinically proven” to induce nightmares.
Several large airlines have reached out to Haar for help with commercially driven dream-incubation projects.
And in a recent survey run by The American Marketing Association-New York, 77% of marketers said they had plans to use technology to influence dreams within the next 3 years.
I also just wanna say like good fucking luck dude my dreams are literally hellish but now they’re gonna toss a coke 0 in there while I’m being lit on fire and stabbed multiple times by demons or something so I’m looking forward to that
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