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December 23
December 23 is the 23rd day of December.
Events
1877 — Luigi Fabbri lives, Fabriano, Italy. Professor, Italian anarchist, theorist, writer. Contributed to Umanita Nova, an anarchist daily paper published by Errico Malatesta in Milan, along with Gigi Damiani, Camillo Berneri, Nella Giacometti, Armando Borghi, etc. Fabbri escaped the fascist regime in 1926 [1] [2]
1888 — Vincent Van Gogh cuts off his ear.
1890 — Spain: Salvador Segui Rubinat lives. Segui, "El noi del sucre", was an anarcho-syndicalist in the very active & popular CNT in Catalonia. He was assassinated in 1923 along with another trade unionist, Francesc Comes (murders financed by the governor of Catalonia). Fundacion Salvador Segui now exist in Barcelona, Valencia & Madrid. [3]
1899 — France: Louise Michel Fin 1899: Elle s'installe à nouveau à Paris et y donne une série de conférences.
1900 — US: Today Emma Goldman speaks to the Italian group of New London, Connecticut. Emma Goldman had returned to New York earlier this month with Hippolyte Havel & Eric Morton. Newspaper reports claim Emma had, under an assumed name, rented a hall on Dec. 11 for a mass meeting of the Social Science Club. Emma was the principal speaker & the paper attributed to her a statement favoring the assassination of Italy’s King Umberto.
1918 — US: Randolph Bourne dies. American literary radical, anarchist. It is in literature itself that Randolph Bourne appears most unforgettably, in a haunting stanza from 1919 (1932), centerpiece of the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos:
This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
always in pain & ailing,
put a pebble in his sling,
& hit Goliath squarely in the forehead with it.
. . . If any man has a ghost,
Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick & brownstone streets
still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State.
1908 — Italy: Fortunato Serantoni dies in Florence. Internationalist & anarchist militant propagandist. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Serantoni, founded "La Questione social" (title borrowed from Errico Malatesta’s paper). Published in Italian, it included a supplement in Spanish, & represented the organisational current of Argentinian anarchism which became the strongest in Latin America. [5] [6]
1936 — England: Emma Goldman arrives in London & finds the propaganda bureau of the Generalitat in a shambles. Earlier in the month, while in Barcelona, Emma was named official representative in London of the CNT-FAI & of the Generalitat of Catalonia. Vernon Richards’s twice-monthly Spain & the World appears to be her most reliable vehicle for communicating about the conditions & aspirations of the Spanish anarchists. [7]
1952 — Russia: Vasily Eroshenko (1890—1952) dies. A blind Russian anarchist, novelist, translator, & an important activist in the Esperanto Movement. [8] [9]
1954 — England: Bertrand Russell broadcasts on "Man’s Peril" — the H-bomb. [10]
1992 — France: The "Journal Officiel" publishes the abrogation of the "Exceptional Laws" (lois scélérates). [11]
2006 — John H. Bowman III, a former member of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, dies.
