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Sunday, March 8, 2015

Great Charter’s interminable bondage decree demands interminable, nonconforming progressivism

800 years Magna Carta 1215-2015
Editing and commentary by Carolyn Bennett

Charter of English liberties, the Magna Carta, was granted by King John in 1215 to appease the “high born” (kings and barons) and it “became a symbol and battle cry against oppression,” with succeeding generations reading into it protections of their own “threatened liberties.”  The Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) in England referenced the Carta’s Clause 39. National and state constitutions in the United States contain phrases whose ideas are traceable to Magna Carta.

Clause 39 states “No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed: deprived especially wrongfully of chattels or lands] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimized, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

1948
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
Clause 40 states “To no one will we sell; to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.” 


B
Endless struggle
ut the Magna Carta is not and was never intended to be a liberating document for all people anywhere. This is why any centuries-old document—even a later document such as the 1787 Constitution of the United States of America—requires sustained, deliberative progress, wise leadership of true progressives.

International neglect
Homelessness
Right to basics to
food, shelter
Endless struggle
Essential Occupy Movement

Occupy Movement
Endless struggle
In the early centuries of the Great Charter, some people recognized its deep flaws. One of its critics was an English Protestant religious reformer and political activist, Gerrard Winstanley (b. 1609, d.1676), a founder and leader of the English group called the “True Levellers” or “Diggers” whose members used to occupy public lands that had been privatized by enclosures.They dug them over, pulled down hedges, and filled in ditches to plant crops. 

Women's Movement
Endless struggle
Does any of this have a familiar ring to it, now, in the twenty-first century? Unless you've been sleeping in a cave, it should, because the same flaws are underlying causation for the same continuing struggles of victims of war, of women, of children, of masses of people needing basics of food and shelter and sustaining livelihoods--all the while the barons, the plutocrats (politicians and corporate peddlers, NGOs and pious charities), plunder and pillage, gorging themselves on far more than their share.
Basrah
US war crimes against
Iraqi women, children
Endless struggle

Leveller Richard Overton observed that the charter was “‘a beggarly thing containing many marks of intolerable bondage’”

Winstanley held that the Magna Carta retained kings as task masters
and that these best of laws were yokes and manacles “‘tying one sort of people to be slaves to another. Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom but the common people still are and have been left servants to work for them.’”


Sources and notes

Magna Carta

The Great Charter or The Great Charter of the Liberties (Latin) “agreed by King John of England at Runnymede near Windsor on June 15, 1215, was first drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons.”

“It promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons.” Neither side adhered to their commitments; Pope Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta, after which came “the First Barons’ War.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

See also: Magna Carta.  (2013). Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Deluxe Edition.  Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Diggers

The Diggers, one of several “nonconformist dissenting groups” of the time, were “Protestant radicals” begun by Gerrard Winstanley as True Levellers in 1649. They came to be known as Diggers because of their attempts to farm on common land, acts based on a belief in “economic equality.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers

Gerrard Winstanley (October 19, 1609 –September 10, 1676)

An English Protestant religious reformer and political activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrard_Winstanley

Also The Sunday Edition March 8, 2015, with Michael Enright: “Happy birthday, Magna Carta!” Enright notes in his introduction that “…Without the Magna Carta, there would be no United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, no Constitution of the United States, no Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this 800th anniversary year, hundreds of Magna Carta events are planned. In England, the celebrations have already begun, with academic lectures, conferences and exhibitions—even a Magna Carta tourism trail. In Canada, a not-for-profit organization called Magna Carta Canada is also planning a series of events, including a cross-country trek with an original copy of the Magna Carta.” In this episode Enright interviews historian Carolyn Harris, a teacher at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies who has partnered with Magna Carta Canada in writing a commemorative book Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada: Democracy, Law, and Human Rights. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/digging-a-hole-just-for-fun-barbara-taylor-s-madness-years-mozart-s-sister-equality-for-muslim-women-in-c-1.2983437/happy-birthday-magna-carta-1.2983523

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A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora

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