6 November is the feast day for not one but two saints whose patronage includes prisoners.
St Demetrian of Cyprus died around AD 912 but is well remembered in his land for pleading desperately and successfully to Saracen invaders who were removing Christian captives to lives of slavery in Baghdad.
St Leonard of Noblac died much earlier, in the sixth century, but his reputation as a freer of prisoners was sustained well into the middle ages and spread to England where he is remembered in St-Leonards-on-Sea, unsurprisingly not a stone’s throw from Hastings. Imprisonment comes with chains and Noblac and St-Leonards-on-Sea both had some association with iron foundries. At least one commentator has suggested that Noblac’s association and St Leonards’ patronage are linked. An early example of branding?
On 6 November 2005, Anthony Sawoniuk died in a UK prison. He was the first and and so far only person to be convicted under the UK War Crimes Act, an Act to confer jurisdiction on UK courts to hear allegations of crimes committed in German-held territory during World War II. The Act has not been without controversy. A more usual course for a nation which finds itself accused of granting a citizenship it should not have, is to revoke the citizenship and to deport. It is one of the few Acts to have been passed without the assent of the House of Lords.
Three years earlier, on 6 November 2002, Jiang Lijun was arrested in China. According to the Chinese PEN site, he was arrested for “internet writing and publishing dissident articles” and was charged with “inciting subversion of the state power”. Though sentenced to four years, he appears to remain in prison over two decades on. According to the US PEN site, China had demanded and Yahoo supplied information about Jiang Lijun’s identity.
Subversion of the state is a complex idea.
Slavery is an imprisonment of the soul. It has also been, for much of man’s history, a form of property and for many, the right to hold property is the greatest freedom. In the second half of the 19th century, a United States founded upon property and upon freedom was called upon to consider whether those member states who sought the freedom to maintain slavery were subversive. Abraham Lincoln became the key player in that narrative when he was elected the 16th president on 6 November 1860.