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INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST NEWS

Volume 9

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50 years of IHEU: Humanist Archives to write IHEU’s history <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

When, in July 2002, IHEU will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a jubilee World Humanist Congress in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, Congress participants will receive a book mainly dedicated to the half-century of IHEUÕs history.

No Man’s Land – The Green Fields of France<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Well how d’ye do Private William McBride,

D’ye mind if I sit here down by your grave side,

And I’ll rest for a while in the warm summer sun,

I’ve been walking all day and I’m nearly done

 

And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen

When you joined the glorious fallen in nineteen sixteen,

Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean, Or

Willie McBride was it slow and obscene?

 

Refrain

Did they beat the drum slowly did they sound the fife lowly,

Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered you down?

Did the bugles sing the last post and chorus

Did the pipes play the “Flooers o’ the forest”?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind,

In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?

And though you died back in 1916,

To that loyal heart are you always nineteen?

Or are you a stranger without even a name?

Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,

In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,

And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame.

 

The sun’s shining now in these green fields of France,

The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance,

The trenches have vanished, long under the plough,

No gas and no barbed-wire, no guns firing now,

 

But here in this graveyard it’s still no man’s land,

The countless white crosses in mute witness stand;

To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,

And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Fighting Anti-Science in the New Russia<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Thinking, o

Defending Laicité, Promoting Reason and Science<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Roger Lepeix

 

News from the French National Freethought Federation La Libre Pensée

 

The French Freethought Federation has been very active in 2000 and 2001.

 

Successful Conferences

First of all, at the national level, we have organized four important conferences:

 

In July 2000, we held a big international conference, with more than 300 people, in Avignon.

The Light of All Our Torches

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On 10 December 2001, Levi Fragell was invited as President of IHEU to the Nobel Pea