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Anti-Empire
Human Rights in IrelandIndymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Lockdown Skeptics
Voltaire NetworkVoltaire, international edition
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Sarkozy to rob grave of Albert Camus but shall leave Sartre at rest!?!?![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() (me thinks French highbrow news might be of interest to the Irish highbrow peoples at the moment) The French chattering classes are reacting to the news that Sarkozy wishes to move the body of Albert Camus from his grave in Lourmarin in southern France where he was buried after the car crash which killed the then recently Nobel Laureated writer and his publisher to the Pantheon in Paris where France has collected over 70 "illustrious dead men" and one "radioactive woman". Camus will be the second individual claimed by anarchism to be given a place in the Pantheon following the pacifist and anarchosyndicalist opposer to WW1, Jean Jaures moved there in 1924). Camus would be the first Pantheon resident to have been born in Algeria. His kids don't want him moved at all. However, I see in this a consistent concern I have articulated over the years at how contemporary regimes and society abuse the memory of the dead and use their legacy :- ![]() Foucault's pendulum at the Pantheon in Paris. "still swinging away over the stolen dead - thus turneth our world" Every nation state with an exagerated and selective notion of its dead knows full well the importance of relics & dead bodies. Leaving aside any deep contemplation of the lack of remains and marked graves of many of humanity's most noted individuals (e.g. Mozart, Jesus, Muhumad) & those of the Irish nation's bosom who simply disappeared in the lime pit - the symbolic importance of Daniel O Connell's body enterred below a fake round tower in Glasnevin cemetery Dublin without its heart which is buried in Rome well exemplifies a 19th century habit of honouring the dead. The Polish composer Chopin likewise is one of those much admired individuals who died in that century whose body was seperated and is now found without heart in Paris and without body in Warsaw. So if we have a a garden of remembrance in Ireland without any bodies & a lime pit in Kilmainham without any bones - so too do the English enjoy their poet's corner of Westminister Abbey. The Americans have long excelled all the world with the city of Washington which is little more than a walking tour of war memorials and the bone marrow curdling lists of names which serve little purpose but to put Arlington Cemetary with its once racially segregated graves in context. |
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