Click on the Films link above …

Stop Press: We are pleased to announce that we have a few copies for sale of the DVD ‘Lucio’ at £10.00 (English subtitles, 91 minutes). First come, first served … (Paypal payments to [email protected])

“The banks are the real crooks,” says Lucio Urtubia decisively. “They exploit you, take your money and cause all the wars.” Lucio therefore had no moral scruples about forging Citybank travellers’ cheques. His motivation was not his own gain, but to dent confidence in this powerful financial institution. Lucio was arrested for this and ended up in prison, but soon got back on his feet. Lucio is an engaging portrait of the anarchist Lucio Urtubia, born in Northern Spain in 1931, and who deserted from the Spanish army during his military service, going on to work as a tiler in Paris, where he immersed himself in the world of the Spanish exiles. Rapidly inter-cut archive images, interview fragments and reconstructed impressions are used to look back on his incredible life. A meeting with the legendary Quico Sabaté (1915-1960) put Lucio on the anarchist path, whereby his talents as a forger of identity papers and currency came in particularly useful. His real anarchist nature is revealed in his highly particular, carelessly expressed visions of phenomena such as Franco, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, the Black Panthers, May 1968 and the institution of marriage. This gives body to a lively ‘cops and robbers’ story in which – according to the best traditions – the true scale of Lucio’s role is never completely revealed

On 22 April 2010 Sebastian Lord Coe led the tributes to Olympic chief Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former International Olympic Committee president who died in Barcelona aged 89: “I have lost a friend, one that moulded my path through sport from my early 20s, and the world has lost an inspirational man. A man that challenged us all to fight for sport, its primacy and its autonomy, a fight he led fearlessly from the front, creating an extraordinary sporting movement that reaches millions of people around the world. He was quite simply the most intuitive leader I have ever met.”

In the photo Samaranch is standing next to his friend and colleague Rodolfo Martín Villa, the notorious fascist Minister of the Interior (1976 -1979), known as the ‘Truncheon of the Transition’ and deeply implicated in false-flag terrorist actions targeting the anarchist and libertarian movement (including the Caso Scala) and the attempted assassination of Antonio Cubillo, the leader of the independent Canary Islands movement. During Martín Villa’s time as interior minister the Atocha Massacre took place (January 1977) in which 5 legal workers were murdered by neo-fascist paramilitaries working in collaboration with Martín Villa’s security services

All available via the Films link above

Eight songs by Matt McGinn, Glasgow’s foremost singer/songwriter/poet of the West of Scotland radical movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Matt was politicised at an early age by Robert ‘Bobby’ Lynn, fellow Ross Street resident and stalwart of the anarchist movement in Glasgow from the 1940s through to his death in 1996.
Unfortunately, Matt’s paean of praise to Bobby, ‘Bobby Lynn’s shebeen’, was never recorded (to the best of my knowledge). Here, however, are a few of his other recordings:
‘We Ain’t Gonna Dig No More’ (miners’ protest song);
‘Gallowgate Calypso’ (Ross Street, now no more, ran onto The Gallowgate, one of the oldest thoroughfares in Glasgow. It bore many similarities to Barcelona’s barrio chino);
‘Hi Jack’ (tongue-in-cheek satire on the spate of aeroplane hijackings in the 1970s);
‘Janetta’ (a beautiful tribute to Matt’s wife Janette);
’On the road from Aldermaston’ (about the Easter anti-nuclear bomb marches from Aldermaston to London);
‘This is oor land’ (about the 1960s Holy Loch protest marches from Dunoon to Ardnadam Pier);
‘The Depth of My Ego’ (inspired by the ideas of Max Stirner as introduced to Matt by ‘Bobby’ Lynn);
and, lastly, the hauntingly beautiful ‘Magic Shadow Show’ (inspired by Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).
For further information go to – http://www.mattmcginn.info

La Libération de Paris
Short clips from the documentary — Le Journal de la Resistance — made by the Comite de Liberation du Cinema Francais during the urban guerrilla warfare in Paris between 15 and 25 August 1944. On August 15, the multi-national Resistance, including around 3,000 Spanish anti-Francoist refugees, launched an uprising in Nazi-occupied Paris. On August 25, the Resistance received backup with the entry into Paris of the half-tracks and armoured cars of ‘La Nueve’ (the Ninth Company of Foreign Volunteers’, manned mainly by Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT)  of General Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armored Division. These armoured cars, named ‘Ascaso’, ‘Durruti’, ‘Casa Viejas’, ‘Teruel’ ‘ Guadalajara’, ‘Madrid’ and ‘Teruel’, flew the Spanish Republican flag on the victory drive through Paris. The US Army arrived later…. Paris was formally liberated by Spanish anarchists who were led to believe that after Berlin and Berchtesgaden their next objective would be the liberation of Madrid. Sadly, that was not to be …