A Las Barricadas

Seems like I’m in a bit of a musical mood today. I absolutely love this song and hearing it sung by loads of people like in the above video sends shivers up my spine. For those of you who don’t know A Las barricadas is a song that was written and sung by anarchists during the Spanish revolution whilst they were fighting the Fascist Falange on one front and eventually the counter revolutionary stalinists on the other.

The lyrics were written by Valeriano Orobón Fernández and it was sung to the tune of Warszawianka 1905. The lyrics in Spanish are:

Negras tormentas agitan los aires
nubes oscuras nos impiden ver
Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte
contra el enemigo nos llama el deber.

El bien más preciado
es la libertad
hay que defenderla
con fe y con valor.

Alza la bandera revolucionaria
que llevará al pueblo a la emancipación
En pie el pueblo obrero a la batalla
hay que derrocar a la reacción

¡A las Barricadas!
¡A las Barricadas!
por el triunfo
de la Confederación.

Which translate into English as:

Black storms shake the sky
Dark clouds blind us
Although death and pain await us
Against the enemy we must go

The most precious good
is freedom
And we have to defend it
With courage and faith

Raise the revolutionary flag
Which carries the people to emancipation
Working people march onwards to the battle
We have to smash the reaction (or “reactionaries”)

To the Barricades!
To the Barricades!
For the triumph
of the Confederation

Absolutely beautiful song. Here’s the original version from a recording made during the revolution itself followed by a slightly punkier version by Spanish band Los Muertos De Cristo.

Ach hell here’s a funky lounge version of the song as well.

No Pasaran!

La Lucha Continua!

Atheists=Smart, Believers=Thick – It’s Science Dummies!!

Richard Lynn, emeritus proffesor of psychology at the University of Ulster will argue in a forthcoming paper that there is a link between intelligence and religious non/belief. In the paper, due to be published in the journal Intelligence, he cites various studies done over the years concerning religious belief. One such study showed that in a survey of the Royal Society there were only 3.3% of its members who claimed any form of religious belief whilst 68.5% of the Uk population at the time claimed to be believers.

Whilst to me it certainly comes as no surprise that academically minded people should come to the mind-numbingly obvious conclusion that there is no god, buddah, thor or zeus; I’m not sure how much to take his research seriously as Lynn has in the past made links between intelligence and both gender and race. That he done so leads me to believe that he is merely looking at statistics and not taking into account other societal elements.

The link between religious belief and intelligence does for me seem to be a no brainer. I’m not talking about academics here either but regular everyday folk. I can count on one hand the intelligent people of faith that I have met who weren’t in some way emotionally damaged. In the paper Lynn points out that all children are believers, we all believed in Santa now didn’t we, but as they grow and become more intelligent and questioning they become agnostic. No one leaves junior school still believing in Santa and it’s not that great a leap of intelligence to apply the same cold logic to jay-sus and his beardy daddy in the sky.

Unfortunately in most schools there are religious gatherings most mornings and kids are taught that either god exists – fact or that it is somehow taboo to question his/her/its existence. This, in my (n)ever so humble opinion acts as a mental block to taking the next logical and rational step and questioning the theocracy.

Education, in British schools, is woefully underfunded and with overcrowded class rooms and mile upon mile of red tape for teachers then it is little wonder that kids are not taught the wonders of the world through science which leaves them prey for superstitious cults like christianity to keep them mentally stunted. Religion should have no place in schools apart from in history and anthropology classes. Teaching our children that there is an omnipresent being in the sky that watches everything that they do and, should they be naughty, will punish them by burning them in a lake of fire for all eternity is tantamount to child abuse.

I know that Professor Dawkins had already said this in much more polite and eloquent form but it really gets my goat thinking about how our society has been crippled by this superstitious nonsense. As if capitalism wasn’t bad enough we’ve got these mental parasites feeding off our alienation and powerlessness and telling us that we will get what we deserve after we’re dead.

Bollocks! It’s my fucking world, the state and the capitalists have stolen it with the help of the mumbo jumbo types and I want it back. I’ll be willing to share like.

Oh well time for a song I feel.