Archive for the ‘Adolfo Gilly’ Category
Tributes to Adolfo Gilly August 25 1928 – July 4 2023 – A Mexican revolutionary who visited Dublin in September 1979
Adolfo Gilly has passed away.
Suzi Weissman drew our attention to the tribute below, written by Olivia Gall :
Today Adolfo Gilly, a great among the great historians of the revolution and the post-revolution in Mexico, passed away.
Our beloved teacher has also gone. The first time I took class with Gilly was when he came to Mexico from Italy to give some classes at UNAM, before the Mexican government decided to grant him naturalization. The Faculty of Economics class was crowded. Every time he referred to something very critical about Mexican politics he told us “if I say this they’re going to apply the 33″…….. but, he laughed, “there they go.”
Later I attended, over several semesters, his Seminar on the History of the Mexican Revolution at the postgraduate degree of the FCPYS. Adolfo was a great teacher, perhaps the best of all the teachers I had back then and ever had.
Today also left Gilly my mentor, who accompanied the process of my doctoral research on Trotsky in Mexico very closely. I was fortunate to have his wisdom, his irremediably critical spirit, his ironic gaze, his strong passion for history and politics, his rigorous opinions, his scorn, and his relentless recommendations and warnings.
Years later, when Adolfo was talking about Friedrich Katz, he referred to him as “my Katz commander.”
Last time I saw him I mentioned his Argentinian origin. He reprimanded me: “Argentinian me? Ain’t no way I’m Mexican! ”
Dear Adolfo, we’ll miss you a lot, we’ll always miss you.


Adolfo Gilly in Dublin, September 1979
On August 27 1979, on the same day:
- The IRA killed 18 members of the British paratroop regiment at Narrow Water County Down
- The IRA killed a British Royal Family member Lord Mountbatten, in Sligo.
A tsunami of ruling class condemnation blitzed across the world’s media. Pope John Paul II joined the chorus. The Narrow Water ambush was not universally unpopular in Ireland.
Read the rest of this entry »Apologies and Recantations – The Strange Cases of two Elected Representatives from Ireland and England – Brian Stanley TD (Sinn Féin, Ireland) and Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour Party, England)
We start with a tip, and two savage cartoons.
All political apologisers – such as the Sinn Féin Laois-Offaly TD Brian Stanley – forced to swallow and spit out his words of praise for IRA ambushes in 1920 and 1979 – do not believe any of the sentences they are forced to utter in humiliating public recantations!

Nobody ever believes the recantation :
The same applies to apologies uttered under duress by former British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn.


Nobody believes the apologies. The effect is to censor debate on issues which ought to be publicly aired.
Every honest person knows Brian Stanley’s Kilmichael/Narrow Water Tweet about British soldiers successfully ambushed by the IRA in Ireland – Black-and-Tans (1920) and Parachute Regiment (1979) – is a public picture of his own personal opinion and the opinions of many members of his own party.
Read the rest of this entry »
