AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-Out In The Be-Bop 1960's Night- The Salducci's Pizza Toss Bet

You all know Frankie, right? Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, map of Ireland, fierce Frankie when necessary, and usually kind Frankie by rough inclination when it suits his purposes. Yah, Frankie from the old North Adamsville neighborhood. Frankie to the tenement, the cold-water flat tenement, born. Frankie, no moola, no two coins to rub together except by wit or chicanery, poor as a church mouse if there ever was such a thing, a poor church mouse that is. Yes, that Frankie. And, as well, this writer, his faithful scribe chronicling his tales, his regal tales. Said scribe to the public housing flats, hot-water flats, but still flats, born. And poorer even than any old Frankie church mouse. More importantly though, more importantly for this story that I am about to tell you than our respective social class positions, is that Frankie is king, the 1960s king hell king of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, if not then North Adamsville’s finest still the place where we spent many a misbegotten hour, and truth to tell, just plain killed some time when we were down at our heels, or maybe down to our heels.

Sure you know about old Frankie’s royal heritage too. I clued you in before when I wrote about my lost in the struggle for power as I tried to overthrow the king when we entered North Adamsville High in 1960. By wit, chicanery, guile, bribes, threats, physical and mental, and every other form of madness he clawed his way to power after I forgot the first rule of trying to overthrow a king- you have to make sure he is dead. But mainly it was his "style,” his mad-hatter “beat” style , wherefore he attempted to learn, and to impress the girls (and maybe a few guys too), with his arcane knowledge of every oddball fact that anyone would listen to for two minutes. After my defeat we went back and forth about it. He said, reflecting his peculiar twist on his Augustinian-formed Roman Catholicism, it was his god-given right to be king of this particular earthy kingdom but foolish me I tried to justify his reign based on that old power theory (and discredited as least since the 17th century) of the divine right of kings. But enough of theory. Here’s why, when the deal went down, Frankie was king, warts and all.

All this talk about Frankie royal lineage kind of had me remembering a story, a Frankie pizza parlor story. Remind me to tell you about it sometime, about how we used to bet on pizza dough flying. What the heck I have a few minutes I think I will tell you now because it will also be a prime example, maybe better than the one I was originally thinking about, of Frankie’s treacheries that I mentioned before. Now that I think about it again my own temperature is starting to rise. If I see that bastard again I’m going to... Well, let me just tell the story and maybe your sympathetic temperature will rise a bit too.

One summer night, yah, it must have been a summer night because this was the time of year when we had plenty of time on our hands to get a little off-handedly off-hand. In any case it would have had to be between our junior and senior years at old North Adamsville High because we were talking a lot in those days about what we were going to do, or not do, after high school. And it would have had to have been on a Monday or Tuesday summer night at that as we were deflated from a hard weekend of this and that, mainly, Frankie trying to keep the lid on his relationship with his ever lovin’ sweetie, Joanne. Although come to think of it that was a full-time occupation and it could have been any of a hundred nights, summer nights or not.

I was also trying to keep a lid on my new sweetie, Lucinda, a sweetie who seemed to be drifting away, or at least in and out on me, mostly out, and mostly because of my legendary no dough status (that and no car, no sweet ride down the boulevard, the beach boulevard so she could impress HER friends, yah it was that kind of relationship). Anyway it's a summer night when we had time on our hands, idle time, devil’s time according to mothers’ wit, if you want to know the truth, because his lordship (although I never actually called him that), Frankie I, out of the blue made me the following proposition. Bet: how high will Tonio flip his pizza dough on his next pass through.

Now this Tonio, as you know already if you have read the story about how Frankie became king of the pizza parlor, and if you don’t you will hear more about him later, was nothing but an ace, numero uno, primo pizza flinger. Here’s a little outline of the contours of his art, although minus the tenderness, the care, the genetic dispositions, and who knows, the secret song or incantation that Tonio brought to the process. I don’t know much about the backroom work, the work of putting all the ingredients together to make the dough, letting the dough sit and rise and then cutting it up into pizza-size portions.

I only really know the front of the store part- the part where he takes that cut dough portion in front of him in the preparation area and does his magic. That part started with a gentle sprinkling of flour to take out some of the stickiness of the dough, then a rough and tumble kneading of the dough to take any kinks out, and while taking the kinks out the dough gets flattened, flattened enough to start taking average citizen-recognizable shape as a pizza pie. Sometimes, especially if Frankie put in an order, old Tonio would knead that dough to kingdom come. Now I am no culinary expert, and I wasn’t then, no way, but part of the magic of a good pizza is to knead that dough to kingdom come so if you see some geek doing a perfunctory couple of wimpy knead chops then move on, unless you are desperate or just ravenously hungry.

Beyond the extra knead though the key to the pizza is the thinness of the crust and hence the pizza tosses. And this is where Tonio was a Leonardo-like artist, no, that’s not right, this is where he went into some world, some place we would never know. I can still see, and if you happened to be from old North Adamsville, you probably can still see it too if you patronized the place or stood, waiting for that never-coming Eastern Mass. bus, in front of the big, double-plate glass pizza parlor windows watching in amazement while Tonio tossed that dough about a million times in the air. Artistry, pure and simple.

So you can see now, if you didn’t quite get it before that Frankie’s proposition was nothing but an old gag kind of bet, a bet on where Tonio will throw, high or low. Hey, it’s just a variation on a sports bet, like in football, make the first down or not, pass or rush, and so on, except its pizza tosses, okay. Of course, unlike sports, at least known sports, there are no standards in place so we have to set some rules, naturally. Since its Frankie’s proposition he gets to give the rules a go, and I can veto.

Frankie, though, and sometimes he could do things simple, although that was not his natural inclination; his natural inclination was to be arcane in all things, and not just with girls. Simply Frankie said in his Solomonic manner that passed for wisdom, above or below the sign in back of Tonio’s preparation area, the sign that told the types of pizza sold, their sizes, their cost and what else was offered for those who didn’t want pizza that night.

You know such signs, every pizza palace has them, and other fast eat places too, you have to go to “uptown” eateries for a tabled menu in front of your eyes, and only your eyes, but here’s a list of Tonio’s public offerings. On one side of the sign plain, ordinary, vanilla, no frills pizza, cheap, maybe four or five dollars for a large, small something less, although don’t hold me to the prices fifty years later for christ sakes, no fixings. Just right for “family night”, our family night later, growing up later, earlier in hot-water flats, public housing hot-water flats time, we had just enough money for Spam, not Internet spam, spam meat although that may be an oxymoron and had no father hard-worked cold cash for exotic things like pizza, not a whole one anyway, in our household. And from what Frankie told me his too.

Later , when we had a little more money and could “splurge” for an occasional take-out, no home delivery in those days, when Ma didn’t feel like cooking, or it was too hot, or something and to avoid civil wars, the bloody brother against brother kind, plain, ordinary vanilla pizza was like manna from heaven for mama, although nobody really wanted it and you just feel bloated after eating your share (and maybe the crust from someone who doesn’t like crust, or maybe you traded for it); or, plain, by the slice, out of the oven (or more likely oven-re-heated after open air sitting on some aluminum special pizza plate for who knows how long) the only way you could get it after school with a tonic (also known as soda for you old days non-New Englanders and progeny), usually a root beer, a Hires root beer to wash away the in-school blahs, especially the in-school cafeteria blahs.

Or how about plump Italian sausage, Tonio thickly-sliced, or spicy-side thinly-sliced pepperoni later when you had a couple of bucks handy to buy your own, and to share with your fellows (those fellows, hopefully, including girls, always hopefully, including girls) and finally got out from under family plain and, on those lucky occasions, and they were lucky like from heaven, when girl-dated you could show your stuff, your cool, manly stuff, and divide, divide, if you can believe that, the pizza half one, half the other fixing, glory be; onion or anchovies, oh no, the kiss of death, no way if you had the least hope for a decent night and worst, the nightmarish worst, when your date ordered her portion with either of these, although maybe, just maybe once or twice, it saved you from having to do more than a peck of a kiss when your date turned out not to be the dream vision you had hoped for; hams, green peppers, mushrooms, hamburg, and other oddball toppings I will not even discuss because such desecration of Tonio’s pizza, except, maybe extra cheese, such Americanized desecration , should have been declared illegal under some international law, no question; or, except, maybe again, if you had plenty of dough, had a had a few drinks, for your gourmet delight that one pig-pile hunger beyond hunger night when all the fixings went onto the thing. Whoa. Surely you would not find on Tonio’s blessed sign this modern thing, this Brussels sprouts, broccoli, alfalfa sprouts, wheat germ, whole wheat, soy, sea salt, himalaya salt, canola oil, whole food, pseudo-pizza not fit for manly (or womanly) consumption, no, not in those high cholesterol, high-blood pressure, eat today for tomorrow you may die days.

On the other side of the sign, although I will not rhapsodize about Tonio’s mastery of the submarine sandwich art (also known as heroes and about seventy-six other names depending on where you grew up, what neighborhood you grew up in, and who got there first, who, non-Puritan, got there first that is) are the descriptions of the various sandwich combinations (all come with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, the outlawed onions, various condiment spreads as desired along with a bag of potato chips so I won’t go into all that); cold cuts, basically bologna and cheese, maybe a little salami, no way, no way in hell am I putting dough up for what Ma prepared and I had for lunch whenever I couldn’t put two nickels together to get the school lunch, and the school lunch I already described as causing me to run to Tonio’s for a sweet reason portion of pizza by the slice just to kill the taste, no way is right; tuna fish, no way again for a different reason though, a Roman Catholic Friday holy, holy tuna fish reason besides grandma, high Roman Catholic saint grandma, had that tuna fish salad with a splash of mayo on oatmeal bread thing down to a science, yah, grandma no way I would betray you like that; roast beef, what are you kidding; meatballs (in that grand pizza sauce); sausage, with or without green peppers, steak and cheese and so on. The sign, in all it beatified Tonio misspelled glory.

“Okay,” I said, that sign part seemed reasonable under the circumstances (that’s how Frankie put it, I’m just repeating his rationalization), except that never having made such a bet before I asked to witness a few Tonio flips first. “Deal,” said Frankie. Now my idea here, and I hope you follow me on this because it is not every day that you get to know how my mind works, or how it works different from star king Frankie, but it is not every day that you hear about a proposition based on high or low pizza tosses and there may be something of an art to it that I, or you, were not aware of. See, I am thinking, as many times as I have watched old saintly Tonio, just like everybody else, flip that dough to the heavens I never really thought about where it was heading, except those rare occasions when one hit the ceiling and stuck there. So maybe there is some kind of regular pattern to the thing. Like I say, I had seen Tonio flip dough more than my fair share of teenage life pizzas but, you know, never really noticed anything about it, kind of like the weather. As it turned out there was apparently no rhyme or reason to Tonio’s tosses just the quantity of the tosses (that was the secret to that good pizza crust, not the height of the throw), so after a few minutes I said "Bet." And bet is, high or low, my call, for a quarter a call (I have visions of filling that old jukebox with my “winnings” because a new Dylan song just came in that I am crazy to play about a zillion times, Mr. Tambourine Man). We are off.

I admit that I did pretty well for while that night and maybe was up a buck, and some change, at the end of the night. Frankie paid up, as Frankie always paid up, and such pay up without a squawk was a point of honor between us (and not just Frankie and me either, every righteous guy was the same way, or else), cash left on the table. I was feeling pretty good ‘cause I just beat the king of the hill at something, and that something was his own game. I rested comfortable on my laurels. Rested comfortably that is until a couple of nights later when we, as usual, were sitting in the Frankie-reserved seats (reserved that is unless there were real paying customers who wanted to eat their pizza in-house and then we, more or less, were given the bum’s rush) when Frankie said “Bet.” And the minute he said that I knew, I knew for certain, that we are once again betting on pizza tosses because when it came right down to it I knew, and I knew for certain, that Frankie’s defeat a few nights before did not sit well with him.

Now here is where things got tricky, though. Tonio, good old good luck charm Tonio, was nowhere in sight. He didn’t work every night and he was probably with his honey, and for an older dame she was a honey, dark hair, good shape, great, dark laughing eyes, and a melting smile. I could see, even then, where her charms beat out, even for ace pizza flinger Tonio, tossing foolish old pizza dough in the air for some kids with time on their hands, no dough, teenage boys, Irish teenage boys to boot. However, Sammy, North Adamsville High Class of ’62 (maybe, at least that is when he was supposed to graduate, according to Frankie, one of whose older brothers graduated that year), and Tonio’s pizza protégé was on duty. Since we already knew the ropes on this thing I didn’t even bother to check and see if Sammy’s style was different from Tonio’s. Heck, it was all random, right?

This night we flipped for first call. Frankie won the coin toss. Not a good sign, maybe. I, however, like the previous time, started out quickly with a good run and began to believe that, like at Skeet ball (some call it Skee-ball but they are both the same–roll balls up a targeted area to win Kewpie dolls, feathery things, or a goof key chain for your sweetie) down at the amusement park, I had a knack for this. Anyway I was ahead about a buck or so. All of a sudden my “luck” went south. Without boring you with the epic pizza toss details I could not hit one right for the rest of the night. The long and short of it was that I was down about four dollars, cash on the table. Now Frankie’s cash on the table. No question. At that moment I was feeling about three feet tall and about eight feet under because nowadays cheap, no meaning four dollars, then was date money, Lucinda, fading Lucinda, date money. This was probably fatal, although strictly speaking that is another story and I will not get into the Lucinda details, because when I think about it now that was just a passing thing with her, and you know about passing things- what about it.

What is part of the story though, and the now still temperature-rising part of the story, is how Frankie, Frankie, king of the pizza parlor night, Frankie of a bunch of kindnesses, and of a bunch of treacheries, here treachery, zonked me on this betting scandal. What I didn’t know then was that I was set up, set up hard and fast, with no remorse by one Francis Xavier Riley, to the tenements, the cold-water flat tenements, born and his cohort Sammy. It seems that Sammy owed Frankie for something, something never fully disclosed by either party, and the pay-off by Sammy to make him well was to “fix” the pizza tosses that night I just told you about, the night of the golden fleecing. Every time I said "high" Sammy, taking his coded signal from Frankie, went low and so forth. Can you believe a “king”, even a king of a backwater pizza parlor, would stoop so low?

Here is the really heinous part though, and keep my previous reference to fading Lucinda in mind when you read this. Frankie, sore-loser Frankie, not only didn’t like to lose but was also low on dough (a constant problem for both of us, and which consumed far more than enough of our time and energy than was necessary in a just, Frankie-friendly world) for his big Saturday night drive-in movie-car borrowed from his older brother, big-man-around- town date with one of his side sweeties (Joanne, his regular sweetie was out of town with her parents on vacation). That part, that unfaithful to Joanne part I didn’t care about because, once again truth to tell, old ever lovin’ sweetie Joanne and I did not get along for more reasons than you have to know. The part that burned me, and still burns me, is that I was naturally the fall-guy for some frail (girl in pizza parlor parlance time) caper he was off on. Now I have mentioned that when we totaled up the score the Frankie kindnesses were way ahead of the Frankie treacheries, no question, which was why we were friends. Still, right this minute, right this 2010 minute, I’m ready to go up to his swanky downtown law office (where the men’s bathroom is larger than his whole youth time old cold- water flat tenement) and demand that four dollars back, plus interest. You know I am right on this one.

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -To the Workers and Peasants of India-Manifesto of the Fourth International-September 26, 1941

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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To the Workers and Peasants of India-Manifesto of the Fourth International
September 26, 1942

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Adopted: September 26, 1942
First Published: September, 1942
Source: Fourth International, New York, Volume III No.10, October 1942, pp. 296-301.
Author: Felix Morrow (according to Robert Alexander’s History).
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Daniel Gaido and David Walters, December, 2005
Public Domain: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive 2005. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the address of this work, and note the transcribers & proofreaders above.

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Workers and Peasants of India:

The Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution, joins with you in the struggle for the national liberation of India. The sections of the Fourth International throughout the world are rallying to the defense of the Indian struggle against the imperialists who are attempting to drown it in blood.

We have taken upon ourselves the task of rousing the workers and agricultural toilers of all continents to help the masses of India win their freedom. While the Second and Third Internationals—the reformists and the Stalinists—are aiding Churchill by condemning the present struggle of India, the Fourth International comes forward as the firmest supporter of the Indian fighters for freedom. We brand as an agent of imperialism any labor leader who opposes India’s struggle for independence.

India and the Fourth International

The struggle of India, China and the other colonial and semi-colonial countries of the East for national independence, must be supported by every worker. As we stated in our thesis, War and the Fourth International (1934): The struggle of the colonies “is doubly progressive: by tearing the backward peoples out of the Asiatic system of production, particularism and foreign bondage, it strikes powerful blows at imperialism.” At the Founding Conference of the Fourth International (1938) we stated in our program: “Some of the colonial or semi-colonial countries will undoubtedly attempt to utilize the war in order to cast off the yoke of slavery. Their war will be not imperialist but liberating.” This characterization applies fully to India and China today. During the first period of the present war, the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, in its Manifesto on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian Revolution (May 1940), declared: “By its very creation of enormous difficulties and dangers for the imperialist metropolitan centers, the war opens up wide possibilities for the oppressed peoples. The rumbling of cannon in Europe heralds the approaching hour of their liberation.” In the same Manifesto, taking note of Gandhi’s statement that he refused to create difficulties for Britain during its severe crisis, we said: “AS if the oppressed anywhere or at any time have ever been able to free themselves except by exploiting the difficulties of their oppressors!”

Since then Gandhi and a section of the Indian bourgeoisie have been compelled by events and the pressure of India’s masses to declare a civil disobedience campaign. Considering such an eventuality, Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International, wrote on the eve of the war in his Open Letter to the Workers of India (July 1939): “In the event that the Indian bourgeoisie finds itself compelled to take even the tiniest step on the road of struggle against the arbitrary rule of Great Britain, the proletariat will naturally support such a step. But they will support it with their own methods: mass meetings, bold slogans, strikes, demonstrations and more decisive combat actions, depending on the relationship of forces and circumstances. Precisely to do this the proletariat must have its hands free. Complete independence from the bourgeoisie is indispensable to the proletariat, above all in order to exert influence on the peasantry, the predominant mass of India’s population. Only the proletariat is capable of advancing a bold, revolutionary program, of rousing and rallying tens of millions of peasants and leading them in struggle against the native oppressors and British imperialism.”

These conceptions of the Fourth International on the nature of India’s coming revolution have been proven correct by the test of events. The best of the Indian revolutionists began to realize this during the last few years, and workers’ parties and groups of India and Ceylon came together in March 1941 to lay plans to launch an Indian section of the Fourth International. Succeeding in drawing into the new party still other groups, on the basis of a draft program, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India was formally launched in May 1942—on the very eve of the present struggle. Led by fighters tested in the vile prisons of British imperialism, our Indian section is wholeheartedly supporting and participating in the present struggle. We are confident that the lessons of events will bring them forward as the accepted vanguard of the workers and peasants of India.

The British Raj Must Be Overthrown

Events have demonstrated irrefutably that British imperialism will never agree to the national independence of India. If Britain grants the “demand” of so-called “friends of India” for renewal of negotiations between the All-India Congress and the British government, it will produce nothing more than did the gigantic fraud of the Cripps Mission. The brutal statement of Churchill in the House of Commons on September 10 should have made it clear to everyone that his policy remains what it was in January 1930 when he said to Parliament: “Sooner or later you will have to crush Gandhi and the Indian Congress and all they stand for.”

British imperialism will agree to new negotiations only if it feels that its repressions are failing of their purpose of destroying the nationalist and workers’ movement of India. Such negotiations and any resulting “compromise” would be designed only to give British imperialism a breathing-space in which to prepare more efficacious measures for crushing the Indian workers and peasants. That was precisely the role of the Cripps negotiations, initiated when Singapore and Malaya had fallen and Britain’s armed power in the East was broken; the negotiations gave Churchill time to send new troops and arms to India for the repressions now taking place. The second reason for the Cripps negotiations was to create the illusion that Britain was willing to give India its freedom—an illusion which is still strong enough to delude large sections of the American and British working class which would otherwise be sympathetic to India’s fight fm freedom. The Congress leaders aided Churchill in spreading this illusion by their participation in the private negotiations with Cripps. New negotiations would give a new lease on life to this dangerous illusion.

It is absurd to plead with Britain not to make in India the same ’’mistake” as in Burma and Malaya. The British rulers know what they are doing. British imperialism is fighting this war in order to maintain its empire; to lose control of India permanently would be losing the war. As in Burma and Malaya, Britain’s ruling class would prefer to surrender India to Japanese invasion, with the hope of reconquering it, than to lose India forever to the national independence movement. This essential fact must be understood by every worker throughout the world.

British imperialism could not exist, once India was lost to it forever. “If we lose India the Empire must collapse— first economically, then politically,” Lord Rothermere wrote in his newspapers on May 16, 1930. During the debate on the 1935 constitution, Churchill made a trans-Atlantic radio address to explain to America “why England cannot afford to give up India,” because “two out of every ten Englishmen depend on India.” The myth that British imperialism has been relaxing its exploitation of India is disproved by the simplest facts. In 1911, British investments in India constituted 11 per cent of its overseas holdings; by 1937 its Indian holdings had grown to 25 per cent of British overseas investments. Moreover, in addition to the huge profits from these “investments” (booty squeezed out of India and then “invested” there), much of the funds flowing annually to London from India come from direct political control (payments for British troops, Indian government orders for supplies, Viceroy-guaranteed bond payments, civil service salaries and pensions, etc.). Both types of loot would be ended by national independence for, whatever pledges for continuing to pay the British might be made by a bourgeois nationalist government, the overwhelming needs of the impoverished masses of India would soon put a stop to such blackmail payments.

How Britain drains India is indicated by the fact that the “public” debt of India has increased about 10 per cent every year during the past 80 years, while the national income, on the other hand, has grown only at the rate of 1 per cent per year. This pillage of India is the backbone of British imperialism. Without it British capitalism would be doomed. If a relatively slight contraction of Britain’s foreign markets after the First World War produced the political crisis which reached its climax in the General Strike of 1926, the loss of India would undoubtedly produce socialist revolution in Britain. Under no conditions will the British ruling class voluntarily agree to relax its stranglehold on India, for no ruling class ever agrees to give up its basis of existence.

Beware of American “Mediation”

Illusions about American imperialism can be just as dangerous as those about British imperialism. Yet the All-India Congress leaders for many years have looked to Washington for support. They either misunderstood or ignored the fact that American imperialism wished to end British political control of India only in order to replace it by the equally imperialist penetration of dollar-imperialism. The India League in the United States, representing the Congress Party, pays little attention to the genuine sympathy for Indian independence already existing among large sections of the American working class, and instead concentrates on “friends of India” in Washington and the bourgeois press.

How much these American bourgeois “friends” are worth was shown when the Cripps negotiations fell through. A veritable conspiracy of silence suppressed the Congress side of the story while the American radio and press adopted the lies of Cripps. American government support of Churchill against India was openly indicated on July 23, when Secretary of State Hull’s speech—obviously directed at India—told the colonial peoples that they must first support the war and thus “by their acts show themselves worthy” of post-war “freedom.” American government and press support was undoubtedly one of the major reasons why Churchill was encouraged to refuse the tiniest concession to India.

During the first five weeks of the British White Terror against India which began on August 9, Washington continued its policy of full support to Churchill. The American press and radio during this period echoed every British slander against the Indian struggle. It was only when it became clear that the British were failing to crush Indian resistance that Washington changed its tactics, privately urging Churchill to open new negotiations with the Congress leaders. Washington hoped that new and lengthy negotiations would quiet down India. But Washington remains, fundamentally, the supporter of Churchill in India; any illusion that pressure by Roosevelt on British Indian policy will benefit India’s masses can be fatal to Indian independence. It is absolutely false to think that Roosevelt, if Britain agrees to his mediation, will be an impartial judge between the contending forces in India. On the contrary, we can predict in advance that in that case Washington will conduct a mock trial ending in a decision in favor of Britain and its native agents.

The American radio and press continue to report “news” from India in terms mainly favorable to the British. The occasional news-story or editorial which is critical of Churchill’s policy remains at the same time hostile to the All-India Congress and the struggling masses, and thus is aimed to support the idea of American mediation. These criticisms of Churchill are also designed to dissociate the United States from responsibility for Churchill’s White Terror in India and thus attempts to save the tattered Prestige of the “United Nations” in the eyes of the colonial masses of Asia, Africa, and Latin America who are wholeheartedly favoring the Indian struggle. But for every word of criticism of Churchill uttered by the American bourgeoisie, there are a thousand words against India’s struggle for independence.

The Treacherous Role of Stalinism

Unlike Britain and the United States, the Soviet Union is fighting a progressive war; every worker is duty-bound to support the Soviet workers’ state against imperialist invasion. While doing so, however, the workers of India must understand that there is a basic distinction between the Soviet Union and Stalin. Do not for one moment trust your fate to the Stalinist bureaucracy! Within the Soviet Union the Kremlin regime has wiped out the Soviet democracy of the days of Lenin and Trotsky and does not permit any voice to the masses; Stalin’s conception of the defense of the Soviet Union is bureaucratic, interested in preserving his own reactionary rule, and without a trace of internationalism. Stalin would in no way encourage a revolution in India, for such a revolution would inspire the masses of the Soviet Union to come forward with their own demands against Stalin. The actions of Stalin’s hirelings show his hostility to the Indian revolution: the Soviet press says not a word in defense of India’s struggle, while the Stalinist press in England, America and elsewhere is condemning your struggle on the ground that it “interferes” with the war efforts of the United Nations.

The Communist parties in England and America are telling the workers that they should not support your present struggle for independence. The Communist parties, which are merely agents of Stalin’s anti-internationalist foreign policy, are saying that everything must be subordinated to the war effort of the “democracies.” While they condemn the All-India Congress for its civil disobedience campaign, the Stalinists do not utter a single word of criticism of Jinnah and the other agents of British imperialism who are sabotaging Indian independence! And they propose to “solve” the conflict in India by appeals to Roosevelt to act as mediator. The events in India have once again laid bare the treachery of Stalinism.

Chinese sympathy with the Indian struggle is so widespread that even Chiang Kai-shek must give lip-service to it; but he does so only to divert it into the channel of proposing U. S.-Russian-Chinese mediation. Do not forget that it was with the approval of Churchill that Chiang came to India last spring! Chiang rules as a ruthless dictator in China, and has no sympathy with your democratic aspirations. Fearing the workers and peasants of China, he crushed the Chinese revolution in 1927. It is precisely because he destroyed that revolution and its mass strength that Japan was able to attack China. His friendship with Nehru and other Congress leaders does not mean that Chiang is a friend of the Indian revolution; on the contrary, those who can remain friends with Chiang show thereby that they are not above doing to the Indian revolution what he did to the Chinese revolution.

If Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek were to act as mediators of the Indian situation, they would be certain to hand down a decision acceptable to Churchill and Roosevelt. Thus the masses of India can expect no help from the “democracies,” and from the Kremlin and the Chungking government.

The Struggle against Japanese Imperialism

As for the “independence” promises of Japanese imperialism, the Fourth International endorses the warning words of our Indian comrades:

"The Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India warns the masses not to trust the fraudulent promises of the Japanese imperialists any more than the deceptive offers of the British imperialists. Just as much as the first task of the Chinese masses is to overthrow Japanese imperialism, the first task of the Indian masses is to overthrow British imperialism. This is the best example we can set the soldiers of the Mikado to turn their arms against their own imperialist masters, the best way we can persuade the thousands of deluded Burmans who are fighting alongside the Japanese army, to join instead with us in the mighty struggle to free India and Burma of all imperialisms. This is the best way we can contribute to the real defeat of Japanese imperialism and the victory of the struggle of the Chinese masses.”

India—Weakest Link in the Imperialist Chain

The revolution of India’s workers and peasants against British imperialism will find international allies, if only the struggle is carried on with firm determination. Not in the government buildings in Washington and London, Moscow and Chungking, Tokio and Berlin, but among the workers and peasants of the world are the allies of the Indian revolution.

Proletarians of India! It is within your power to assume today the glorious role that the workers of backward Czarist Russia achieved in 1917. Amid the darkness of the third year of the first imperialist world war appeared the red star of the Russian revolution. The Russian workers then appeared terribly isolated in a world of enemies, but to their aid came the oppressed masses of the world. The guiding star of the Russian revolution inspired the uprisings of the masses in Germany, Austria and Hungary and the awakening of the great masses in all Europe, in Africa and Asia. As Russia mum the weakest link in the imperialist chain in 1917, so India is today! Just as in 1917, the breaking of the weakest link today will inspire a series of revolutions which, in turn, will come to the aid of the Indian revolution against the imperialists.

And this time, if our revolutionary will is firm enough, the revolution everywhere will go on irresistibly to permanent victory over all the imperialists! The very fact of your revolutionary struggle in India today is proof that the new wave of revolutions will be far more extensive and deeper than that which arose out of the First World War. During 1914-1918, Asia suffered the peace of the graveyard; all the imperialist powers with holdings in Asia (Britain, United States, France, Portugal, Japan) were united in preserving “order” in Asia. The Indian bourgeoisie and the All-India Congress, instead of utilizing Britain’s difficulties in Europe, supported the war; the “pacifist” Gandhi helped Britain recruit Indian soldiers and raise war loans; hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers were slaughtered in the Gallipoli and other campaigns as British cannon fodder. Thanks to “peace” in Asia and the servile aid of the Indian bourgeoisie, Britain went through the First World War without serious difficulties in India.

How different is the situation this time—different altogether in favor of the Indian revolution! At the very beginning of this war, the Indian masses forced the Congress Ministries to resign in protest. Now the Indian workers and peasants have compelled the Congress to declare the civil disobedience campaign. Meanwhile, the imperialists are fighting among themselves in Asia, with no end to their war in sight. Now is the time for India to win its independence! Break the weakest link in the imperialist chain and the peoples of the world will follow and join with you!

The New Spirit of the British Workers

Nor need you fear that the British soldiers constitute an insuperable obstacle to the overthrow of British imperialism. There is a new spirit growing among the British workers and soldiers! The British government tries to conceal this from you, but it is nevertheless a fact—a fact of deadly significance to British imperialism.

In England today the overwhelming majority of the workers are already deeply distrustful of the Churchill government, The British capitalists would not be able to rule at all except with the help of the British Labour Party leaders. After two years of this capitalist-Labour coalition government however, the workers are discontented not only with the capitalist ministers but also with the “Labour” ministers. Despite anti-strike laws and imprisonment, despite frenzied appeals from the Labour leaders, the workers in England are more and more taking to strike action and thus directly coming into collision with the government. The British defeats in the Far East, which were a consequence above all of the refusal of the colonial masses to fight and die for their oppressors, have opened the eyes of the English workers as never before to the evils of imperialism. The British workers sincerely want an alliance with the masses of India. They are now learning that such an alliance is impossible so long as Churchill or any capitalist government rules Britain. They are beginning to realize that British exploitation of India is finished, whether through Japanese invasion, American displacement of Britain in India, or through a successful Indian revolution. It is infinitely better for the British workers that there be a successful Indian revolution than that India should fall under Japanese or American domination. Moreover, the disintegration of the British Empire is posing to the British workers as a life-and-death question the necessity of a workers’ government in Britain which would cooperate with a free India and other workers’ governments and non-imperialist countries in putting an end to all imperialisms, fascist or “democratic.”

This new atmosphere among the British workers is also true of the British soldiers, most of whom come from the working class. The British soldiers everywhere are intensely discussing political questions—something unprecedented in the history of British imperialism. Among the British soldiers in India and Ceylon are large numbers of trade unionists and politically-minded workers; many of these already believe in the socialist future of humanity. Many of them are veterans of bitter strike struggles against the British capitalists. To the extent that the British workers and soldiers are supporting the British war machine, they are doing so in the mistaken belief that the British government is really fighting against fascism. The soldiers you see came to India net to fight you but believing that they were coming to smash Nazism and Japanese totalitarianism. In India their eyes have been opened to things they never knew before. They have seen in what poverty and oppression you are kept by British imperialism and they do not wish to be responsible for your misery.

The murderous British officers are ordering you to be shot down; but the British soldiers do not want to fire at you and, despite the threat of iron military discipline, they will not shoot, if they can find an alternative. You can show them that there is an alternative! Imperialist propaganda has dinned into their ears the myth that you are not fit to rule yourselves, that only the “martial races” among YOU can fight. YOU can disprove that propaganda by showing your determination to fight to the death for your freedom. Remember that in Russia in 1917 even the Cossacks refused to fire as soon as they saw that the great masses were determined to overthrow the oppressors! So it will be in India when, by your firmness and by fraternizing with them, you find your way to the ears and hearts of these British workers in uniform.

Revolutionary Methods versus Congress Methods

We write from afar, and much that is happening in India is hidden from us by the British censorship. Nevertheless it is clear that the workers and peasants of India during the last few weeks have made gigantic efforts to throw off the British yoke, and are ready to make even greater efforts. When we read the whining speeches of the zamindars and capitalists in the Central Legislative Assembly, asking Britain to be more reasonable, we know that these agents of the British are frightened because the great wave of mass struggle may sweep them away along with the British.

But it is also clear to us that the heroic efforts of the workers and peasants are not being utilized to get the best results. Invaluable energy is wasted, there are needless victims, because there is no general staff and no real plan for the struggle.

The insufficiency of the present methods of struggle in India flows from the false theory of the Congress leaders. They have the aim in this civil disobedience campaign, as in that of 1930-34, to create sufficient “deadlock” so that the British will be compelled to open new negotiations on the basis of the Congress demand for independence. But that means that the Congress is asking the British to agree to independence! This theory is absolutely false. NO amount of “deadlock” will ever get the British to agree to independence. The British imperialists would rather drown all India in blood than concede it freedom.

The “deadlock” theory of the Congress does not express the aspirations of the workers and peasants. It expresses the outlook of those who, in the end, want to make a partnership with the British rather than to see the workers and peasants overthrow the British Raj. It expresses the attitude of the capitalists and zamindars in the Congress leadership and not of the four anna members.

Workers and peasants of India: Beware of those on whom the British yoke sits gently! Those who toil like beasts of burden and who hunger—they are the only ones who can be trusted to throw off the foreign yoke. But those who live in great mansions which rival in splendor the palaces of the British capitalists, who pay 1,000 rupees for a seat at Congress meetings—they do not find the British yoke very galling! Their quarrel with the British is a dispute between partners concerning the division of the spoils; a Birla, a Rajaj, want the right to exploit the Indian workers and peasants without sharing so generously with the British as they now must.

Even now, as they dispute with the British, these rich Congressmen and their political agents lock fearfully behind them at the struggling workers and peasants. They fear above all that the masses will take into their own hands the destiny of India, and that the demand for independence will then mean concretely not only political freedom but also economic freedom. To prevent this, they have imposed upon the masses in the Congress the inadequate method of “deadlock.” To make even more certain that the movement for independence will not get out of their hands, they have attempted to impose upon it the non-violence doctrine of Gandhi.

If the masses of India were to limit their struggle within the confines of “deadlock” and non-violence, they could strive for a thousand years and still not win their freedom! Fortunately, even from afar we see that the masses are striving to go beyond the boundaries which the Congress leadership has attempted to impose. Neither the workers’ strikes nor the peasant struggles are being waged in the conservative spirit of the Congress leaders.

The workers and peasants of India have achieved a great deal by their spontaneous pressure on the Congress leadership. There would not now be a civil disobedience campaign, if the decision had been left to the Congress Committee. On May 20, 1940, Nehru said: “Launching a civil disobedience campaign at a time when Britain is engaged in a life and death struggle would be an. act derogatory to India’s honor.” Nehru never changed his mind—the workers and peasants forced him to embark on this civil disobedience campaign. Even after the Cripps Mission, Nehru said on April 12, 1942: “We are not going to embarrass Britain’s war effort in India.” It was not Nehru, therefore, who initiated a struggle which has produced the great strikes in the war industries! As for the rest of the Congress leadership, it was literally driven by the masses into the civil disobedience campaign.

So much the masses have achieved by pressure on the Congress leadership. But that pressure has not been able to change the inadequate methods of struggle advocated by the Congress. Nor would any amount of pressure be able to transform the Congress leadership into real revolutionists. They remain what they have always been. It is not enough for the masses to disregard the methods of the Congress leadership. They must be replaced with revolutionary methods, with a revolutionary plan, and with a revolutionary leadership.

National Liberation through the Agrarian Revolution!

National liberation can be won only through the agrarian revolution. The great driving force of the Indian revolution, as of the Russian revolution, is the agrarian crisis. The great mass of the peasantry is incessantly striving to throw off the three-fold oppression of government taxation, the landlord’s rent, and the usury of the moneylender. THE ABOLITION OF LANDLORDISM and THE LIQUIDATION OF AGRICULTURAL INDEBTNESS—these are the only slogans which can rally the peasantry to smash imperialism and its native agents. But the peasantry, although numerically so enormous, is dispersed over the countryside. History testifies to the fact that peasant rebellions cannot succeed, unless they are supported and led by a powerful class in the cities.

That class cannot be the bourgeoisie, with its close social and economic ties with the zamindars. And the Congress is the party of the bourgeoisie. The Congress leadership shows its bourgeois and zamindar character by the fact that it rebuked the peasants when they ceased to pay rent during the civil disobedience campaigns of 1920-22 and 1930-34. This time, too, the Congress Working Committee resolution of July 15 calls for a civil disobedience campaign without making a single proposal to lighten the rent and usury burden of the peasantry—not to speak of abolition of landlordism!

It is clear, then, that only the industrial proletariat can lead the peasantry in the revolution. As Trotsky wrote in 1939 to the workers of India: “The alliance of workers and poor peasants is the only honest, reliable alliance that can assure the final victory of the Indian revolution.”

The working class of India is fully capable of assuming the leadership of the Indian revolution. The specific weight of the Indian proletariat far exceeds that of the Indian bourgeoisie, and to its weight must be added its rich experience of political and trade union struggle since 1917. The Indian proletariat enters the revolution with the tremendous advantage of having before it the example of the Russian revolution, which was also led by a proletariat in a predominantly agricultural country.

What form will the alliance of the workers and the peasants take? The most democratic form possible—a vast network of committees elected directly by the toilers, with new elections whenever the masses desire it.

For Democratic Committees of Struggle!

In every factory, every work-place, every chawl, the workers must elect their own committees, to act on behalf of the workers in all matters where their lives, livelihood or other interests are endangered. Only if the workers are led by their own committees can they protect themselves, not only against British imperialism, but also against the treachery of the many Congress and trade union officials who are certain to capitulate to the British Raj. Such committees among the workers in the cities will, in turn, inspire the creation of village committees elected by the peasants to lead their struggles. These committees will unite all the toilers regardless of their political views, and in them all political parties can democratically compete for the allegiance of the masses while the work of the committees goes on. The war has brought the soldiers into the midst of the civilian population, and when the workers and especially the peasant committees are established, they will likewise inspire soldiers’ committees in the Indian army—for the Indian soldiers are peasants in uniform. A network of these workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ committees is the only sure way to mobilize the great masses for the struggle for national liberation from the yoke of oppression.

As soon as possible, delegates from the various committees in each locality must come together to centralize and coordinate their work. In turn, delegates from the localities must form regional bodies and, finally, there must be an All-India Council of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Delegates. Against such a powerful network, uniting the hundreds of millions of toilers of India, the British Raj will never prevail! It was under the leadership of just such a network that the Russian revolution marched to victory!

For the Constituent Assembly!

Through these committees India will be welded together as a united nation, including also the people of the Native States. The committees have an irrefutable answer to any claim by the British Raj, Jinnah’s so-called Moslem League, the Hindu Mahasabha or anyone else, that the struggle for independence is not supported by the overwhelming majority of India’s people. The question can be decided democratically by a CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, elected by universal suffrage of all men and women over 18!

Neither the British nor the native capitalists and zamindars dare to submit the issue to the election of a Constituent Assembly; on the contrary, they will move heaven and earth to prevent its creation. Only the successful revolution of the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ committees against the British Raj and its native allies can guarantee the establishment of a Constituent Assembly.

The Industrialization of India!

The agrarian revolution will open the way to the complete reorganization of agriculture. But a century of imperialist rule has systematically destroyed the native handicraft industries, and has forced so many hundreds of millions into agriculture that the first task is to draw scores of millions off from the land into industry. Furthermore, the revolution will not be content to till the soil by primitive methods; large-scale farming necessary after the revolution requires modern agricultural implements. Hence the reorganization of agriculture is impossible without INDUSTRIALIZATION of India.

In the Tata steel and iron plants, in the great munitions industry recently established in Bihar, the Indian workers— including peasants of yesterday—have shown how quickly they learn the skills of modern mechanization. Industrialization will wipe out the centuries of poverty. Industrialization will put an end to all the inherited evils of the past, creating not only hitherto undreamed-of standards of living for the Indian masses, but also bringing to all the scientific outlook on life. Not the loin-cloth and spinning-wheel of Gandhi but the dynamo and tractor are the symbols of India’s future!

A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government!

Industrial development is so imperative for India that it must not be permitted to proceed at the snail’s pace and with the anarchy and wastefulness of capitalism, including native Indian capitalism. Industrialization must proceed with the speed and on the scale that only a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government can make possible, as was shown by the Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union.

Moreover, India can look forward, not to the isolation in a capitalist world which was the fate of the Soviet Union for twenty-five years, but to socialist cooperation with the Soviet Union, with a regenerated China, Burma and Indo-China, and with the Socialist United States of Europe which will undoubtedly come out of the ashes of this war. Glorious indeed is the future of India and of all Asia!

For the Bolshevik-Leninist Party!

To march firmly toward this future, to carry out their revolutionary tasks, the workers of India require a general staff. They need their own vanguard party, a party which is really their own, independent of control by the Congress or the Stalinists.

There is such a party in India today! It is the Bolshevik-Leninist Party, the Indian section of the Fourth International. It is a party built on the firm foundations of the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. It is a party which knows how to connect India’s great struggle with the struggle of the workers and oppressed peoples of the whole world. It is a party which offers the workers and peasants of India the only program which can lead them to the successful overthrow of British imperialism.

Workers and Peasants of India! Rally around the Bolshevik-Leninist Party! It will lead you to victory over British imperialism and its native agents!

Workers and Peasants of India! Be assured that on all the continents of the world the sections of the Fourth International are defending your struggle, exposing the lies of the imperialists and rallying the workers and peasants to your side.

September 26, 1942

INTERNATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL

(World Party of the Socialist Revolution)

Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- The Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love” (1956) - A 55th Anniversary, Of Sorts- Billie's 1956 View

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Queens performing the classic Eddie My Love.

Markin comment:

This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived, and what we listened to back in the day.

EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)
The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962

Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.

Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long

Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone

Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone

Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long

(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)

**********
Billie here, William James Bradley, if you don’t know already. To “the projects” born but you don’t need, or at least you don’t absolutely need to know that to get the drift of what I have to say here. I am here to give my take on this latest song, Eddie My Love, that just came out and that the girls are going weepy over, and the guys are saying “that a boy, Eddie.” At least that’s what the wiser guys I hang around with say when they hear the record played on the radio. Except, of course, sappy Markin, Peter Paul Markin if you don’t know, my best friend at Adamsville Elementary School (or maybe best friend, he has never told me one way or the other what it was with us from his end, but sappy as he may be at times, he is my best friend from my end) who thinks Eddie should be righteous and return to his forlorn girl. What is he kidding? Eddie keep moving wherever you are, and keep moving fast. And please, please don’t go within a mile of a post office.

Why do I hold such an opinion and what gives me the “authority”, some authority like the pope of rock and roll, or something to speak this way? Well, first off, unlike Markin, I take my rock and roll, my rock and roll lyrics seriously, hell, I have written some myself. Also I have some talent in this field and have won vocal competitions (and dance ones too), although there have been a few more I should have won. Yah, should have won but the fix was in, the fix was in big time, against project kids getting a break, a chance to make something out of the jailbreak music we are hearing. I’ll tell you about those bad breaks some time but now I am hot to straighten everybody out, even Markin, on this one. Markin pays attention to, too much attention to, the “social” end of the question, looking for some kind of teenage justice in this wicked old world when there ain’t none. Get it, Peter Paul.

Look, I can read between the lines of this story just like anybody else, any pre-teenage or teenage anybody else. Parents, my parents, Markin’s parents, Ozzie and Harriet, whoever, couldn’t get it if you gave them that Rosetta Stone they discovered to help them with old time Egyptian writing and that we read about in Mr. Barry’s class. No way. But Billie, William James Bradley, who will not let any grass grow beneath his feet, is wise, very wise to the scene. Hey, it’s not rocket science stuff; it’s simply the age old summer fling thing. Eddie, handsome, money in his pocket, super-charged car under his feet, gas in the tank, and an attitude that he is king of the known world, the known teenage world, sees this cutie, makes his play, they have some fun, some teenage version of adult fun for any not wise kids, school days come and he is off to his next cutie. Yah, he said he would write and, personally, I think that was a mistake. A quick “I'll be in touch,” and kiss on the cheek would have been smarter.

See Eddie, love ‘em and leave ‘em Eddie, is really a hero. What did this teen queen think was going to happen when Eddie blew into town? Love, marriage and here comes the teen queen with a baby carriage. Please. Eddie, Eddie your love ain’t got no time for that. And that old threatening to do herself in or whatever she means by “my next day might be my last,” is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest snare a guy trick that is. Yah, maybe someday when things are better, and guys don’t have that itch, that itch to move on, and maybe can settle down in one place and have plenty of dough, plenty of ambition, and the old wicked world starts taking care of its own better. Whoa… wait a minute, I’m starting to sound like Markin. Jesus, no. Eddie just keep moving, okay. Billie’s pulling for you.

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2012 Anti-War Season-Troops Out Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace Facebook page for the latest news.

Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010

*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Markin comment:

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicke dold world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-Thoughts of the Evening: Olavi Kantola

From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-Luis Buñuel, chameleon: Revelations from the “Red Decade”

From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-Fanny, Queen of the Machine Gun

Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.

Markin comment:

This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
Fanny, Queen of the Machine Gun

December 4, 2011
By Yvonne Scholten-->

Fanny Schoonheyt, born in Rotterdam in 1912, was the only woman among the contingent of Dutch volunteers to take up arms in defense of the Spanish Republic. There were other Dutch women in Spain during the Civil War, to be sure, but they generally worked as nurses. Fanny was already in Barcelona at the outbreak of the war and participated in those July days of 1936 in the defense against the military coup. In a letter to a friend in Rotterdam she later described how she and her comrades entered the military barracks from the roofs and how they confiscated the arms found there: “I wore a rather conspicuous yellow shirt and it is a miracle they didn’t shoot me. But perhaps be they were so surprised to see me they forgot to react.” Surprised to see a girl, is the supposition, although in those days a lot of young Spanish women came into action. Fanny immediately joined the antifascist milicias and as early as July/August ‘36 left for the Aragón front, where she stayed till November when she was wounded.

Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, in an officer's uniform of the Republican Army. (Private archive Marisa Gerecht-López.)

At the front Fanny quickly became famous for her exceptional technical knowledge and her bravery. Almost all Barcelona newspapers—from the CNT’s La Noche to the widely read Vanguardia—published long interviews with her, calling her “la reina de la ametralladora,” the queen of the machine gun. Still, her comandante at the front assured she was “a very feminine woman,” while the interviewer of La Noche described her as tall, blonde (“a real blonde, not peroxide”) with eyes “as blue as a Nordic lake.” Fanny herself was rather averse to what she called “this adoration” and later, when several Dutch newspapers translated the Spanish interviews, she complained in letters to her friend about “all this nonsense” being written about her.

Fanny came to Spain at the end of 1934, trying to make a living as foreign correspondent. In Rotterdam she had had a job as secretary of the prominent Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. She was an ambitious young woman, trying hard to be invited to join the editorial staff—an almost impossible aspiration in this still exclusively male world. Still, her job provided her with an entry into the cultural and intellectual circles of Rotterdam, where she met writers, painters and filmmakers such as Joris Ivens (who in 1937 would shoot The Spanish Earth, although at that point Joris and Fanny did not meet).

Earlier in 1934 Fanny had traveled to the Soviet Union. As so many young people and intellectuals in the ‘30s she was intrigued and attracted by the fame of the Bolshevik Revolution—although she had not the slightest idea of what was really going on in the USSR. She published a series of articles about her visit to Leningrad, where she was invited as art critic. Fanny was a rather talented pianist, but she likely wasn’t too interested in theoretical questions. In these articles she struggles in a naive way with the question what “revolutionary art” should be, and although she does not come to any definite conclusion, she is keen enough to predict the brilliant future of one of the composers she discusses: Shostakovich.

At the end of ‘34 Fanny decides to leave Holland, which she finds “dusty, musty, flat and boring.” She heads to Catalonia to look up the Surinam-born Dutch novelist Lou Lichtveld, one of the writers she has met in Rotterdam. Lichtveld (who, as it happened, also composed the score to one of Joris Ivens’s films) lives in Barcelona, where he is working about the colony of German/Jewish refugees who have fled the Nazi regime. In the broad Spanish political spectrum Lichtveld’s sympathies are on the anarchist side and he is a fervent anti-Catholic. His daughter, in her eighties now, vividly remembers her childhood in those turbulent days, the strikes and demonstrations in Barcelona—and especially the day she and her sister, on their way home from school, saw a chapel that was set on fire. As soon as they got home, the girls burned their doll’s house in a spontaneous act of anticlerical solidarity.

Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, Aug-Sept 1936. Copyright EFE/Juan Guzmán.

Fanny did not stay with the Lichtveld family for very long; she soon found a place of her own in the old center of Barcelona. But she never realized her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent for a Dutch paper. The letters to her friend in Rotterdam indicate that she was not doing well and had kidney trouble. She writes a lot about daily life in Barcelona, inviting her friend to join her on a trip to Ibiza (which she described as the cheapest place on earth), but she never once mentions Spain’s political turmoil. Nor does she give any sign of political commitment herself.

In fact, this is one of the many mysteries surrounding Fanny’s life: When, where, and how did she become politically engaged? Less than a year later, after the outbreak of the Civil War, writing to the same friend in Rotterdam, she is a convinced antifascist and a member of the PSUC (the United Socialist Party of Catalonia), the Catalan branch of the Communist Party. What happened in the interim?

I long thought that Fanny became politicized during the few weeks she worked as a press agent for the Olimpiada Popular, the alternative Olympic Games to be held in Barcelona in July, and on whose organizing committee sat a good number of German and Italian political refugees. When Franco’s coup interrupted the Games, several of them joined the milicias and formed the kernel of what later became the International Brigades. I supposed Fanny’s decision to join the armed Republican resistance against the coup had been a spontaneous one, motivated by a sense of solidarity with the people she had been working with in those weeks. But a conversation with Marina Ginesta in 2007 made me change my mind.

Marina, one of the last survivors of the SCW, is over ninety by now and still a beautiful woman. A photo depicting her on the roof of the Hotel Colon in Barcelona has become an icon of the SCW. During the war she worked as a translator, among others for Koltsov, the famous Pravda-reporter. Marina told me Fanny’s political activism had started much earlier: She had met Fanny at the end of ’35 or the beginning of ‘36 at the meetings of the Communist Youth in Barcelona. “It was hard not to notice her,” Marina told me. “She was tall, blonde and she smoked cigarettes! No woman in Barcelona at that time would have dared to light a cigarette in public. She paid no attention to us, young ignorant Spanish women, I even had the impression she looked down on us. The older men respected her a lot and the younger men… you can imagine.” Marina’s testimony undermined my earlier hypotheses. Could Fanny have lived a double life of which her Dutch friends were unaware?

Fanny Schoonheyt died in 1961, age 49. I have been fascinated with her since the mid-1980s, but reconstructing her life has not been easy. Reliable sources are few and far between. Apart from a handful of letters, Fanny left no personal papers; in fact, I suspect she purposely tried to erase all traces of her Spanish past. Even her daughter, who was born in 1940 in the Dominican Republic, had no idea that her mother had fought in Spain. The most extensive information about this period of her life is to be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. Between 600 and 800 Dutchmen participated in the Spanish Civil War and for almost all there is a personal dossier, compiled by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice. A special Royal Decree of summer ‘37 deprived them all of their Dutch nationality. Probably a third of them were killed in Spain; of those who returned—stateless—to Holland, many ended up in German concentration camps.

As it turns out, the Dutch National Archive contains an extensive correspondence about Fanny between the Dutch consul in Barcelona and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Several remarkable points jump out. In the spring of ‘37 the consul writes that Fanny has become an officer in the Spanish Republican Army. This is the time the militias, where anarchist influence is strong, are being dismantled, and the new army of the Republic, the “Ejército Popular” is being build. It is also the time of increased Soviet influence in the Army.

We don’t know what rank exactly Fanny held in the Republican army; Spanish military historians claim there never was a foreign woman officer at all. However, the uniform she is wearing on one of the few photos taken of her during the war is not the uniform of a simple soldier. Several sources affirm that Fanny was “directora” in the “campo de instrucción premilitar” at Pins del Valles, a little village not far from Barcelona where new recruits got their instruction. Remarkably, during the whole war Fanny never entered the International Brigades; she always operated in the realm of the Ejército Popular and the PSUC, the Catalonian Communist Party. Regardless of the specifics, hers was an exceptional career for a foreign woman.

How involved was Fanny in the internal political conflicts that divided the Republican camp? In his Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes the horrible days of May ‘37, when left-wingers in the streets of Barcelona engaged in a deathly struggle, ending up with the elimination of anarchists and POUMists (wrongly called “Trotskyites”) and the violent death of POUM leader Andreu Nin. Orwell mentions the Barcelona’s central square, the Plaza de Catalunya, whose “principal landmark … was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating the Plaza”: “In a window near the last O but one in the huge ‘Hotel Colón’ that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep the square with deadly effect.”

New of Fanny's having been wounded in La Vanguardia of June 17, 1937. Click on the image to see the whole page.

In the course of my investigation I became more and more convinced that Fanny Schoonheyt had has been one of the PSUC machine-gunners at the Plaza. After publishing my biography of Fanny in the fall of 2011, ALBA’s Sebastiaan Faber sent me a photo depicting Fanny, flanked by two men, standing with her back to a pile of sandbags in front of what looks like the façade of the Hotel Colón. The picture, taken by the famous Catalan war photographer Agustí Centelles, reinforces my supposition that Fanny played a significant role in the “hechos de mayo”. Interestingly, the picture forms part of the exhibit “Centelles in_edit_oh!” which opened in New York in October. In the show, Fanny is misidentified as Fanny Jabcovsky aka Fanny Edelmann, the equally legendary miliciana from Argentina who passed away this year, age 100. (I am still hoping to identify the two men at Fanny’s side, and welcome any suggestions anyone might have on the matter.)

Centelles’ portrait of Fanny is part of a series of at least three photos taken at the same place and time. A cropped version of one of the other images—this time with Fanny smiling—appeared on June 17th, 1937 in La Vanguardia. “La gran luchadora antifascista conocida por ‘Fanny’ gravemente herida,” the headline reads. The great antifascist fighter known as Fanny, the paper states, has been seriously wounded in a car accident near Tarragona.

This is the last piece of information concerning Fanny I found in the Spanish newspapers. What she did between June 1937 and the summer of 1938 is still an enigma, although some intriguing clues can be found in a book by the American journalist Isaac Don Levine. In The mind of an assassin (1960), a reconstruction of the life of Ramón Mercader, the Catalan secret agent who murdered Trotsky in August 1940, Levine describes how Mercader, during a hospital stay in June 1937, meets another convalescent patient: “a tall, blonde Dutch girl, Fani Castedo, prominent in the communist movement. Ramon had an affair with her. His room became a meeting place for some of the most notorious communists in Barcelona as well as Soviet NKVD operatives hospitalized in the establishment.” Unfortunately Levine does not indicate where he got this information. The name Castedo is traceable to a Catalonian painter prominent in the PSUC, a friend of Fanny’s who after the defeat of the Republic disappeared to the Soviet Union. Had she adopted his name as an alias? Had Fanny entered the NKVD’s spider web?

In the late spring of 1938 Fanny tries to get her Dutch passport renewed at the consulate of the Netherlands in Barcelona. Her request is denied. She tells the consul she wants to go back to Holland—an obvious lie. The summer of 1938 finds her in Toulouse, from where she resumes her correspondence with her friend in Rotterdam. She tells here she is in Toulouse “on duty” and will go on to Paris to obtain a pilot’s license. She is reticent about the exact nature of her activities, but she does tell her friend about a man she has fallen in love with, Georges Vieux, who works at Air France in Toulouse.

Georges, a highly qualified aeronautical technician, was likely involved with the informal aid Air France provided to the Spanish Republic. He regularly traveled to Barcelona, and is there on December 31, 1938, when Barcelona is heavily bombarded by Italian aircraft. “I almost lost my Georgie,” Fanny writes to her friend from Paris, where she is desperately trying to get her pilot’s license; her lessons are continuously postponed because of bad weather. On January 6, 1939, only a few weeks before the fall of Barcelona, she tells her friend she is still determined to go back to Spain, “whatever happens.” Meanwhile, it is not at all clear why Fanny was bent on getting her pilot’s license and what she would have done with it. Was she paid by the PSUC leaders to become some sort of private pilot at the moment a hasty evacuation might be needed? As it turned out, many PSUC leaders were hastily evacuated, with Soviet help, at the end of the Civil War.

There are many questions and just a few answers. Georges Vieux disappears from the scene altogether; I was not able to find a single trace of what happened to him after the war. Fanny stays in Paris till February 1940. How she makes a living is a mystery. A little agenda covering the year 1939—one of the few personal belongings she left behind after her death—contains a long list of more or less well known antifascist artists, painters, musicians, writers. In February 1940 she arrives in the Dominican Republic, then under the dictatorship of Trujillo. She is on the lists of the SERE (Servicio de Emigración para los Repubicanos Españoles), the agency that helped Spanish refugees to leave France. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the non-aggression agreement between Hitler and Stalin, life for communists everywhere had become unbearable. The Communist Party was outlawed and many Spanish refugees ended up in French concentration camps. Fanny, who continued to be stateless, did not choose to go to the Dominican Republic; refugees were simply assigned a destination. Trujillo had his particular reasons to admit several thousands of Spanish and Jewish refugees to his country, among which “improving the race” (with “white” European blood to counterbalance the “blacks” coming from Haiti) seems to have been an important one.

Interview with a hospitalized Fanny in "La Noche," Aug. 25, 1937. Click on the image for a larger view in pdf.

In April 1940 Fanny gives birth to a daughter, whom she will later tell that her father was a Spanish Republican fighter, named Julio López Mariani, who died on the same boat that brought Fanny to the Dominican Republic. From the documents of that time and from the research I did in Spain no such man ever results; most likely Fanny “invented” a father for her child. Regardless, from that moment on she calls herself Fanny López. She contacts the Dutch consul in the Dominican Republic and tries once again to renew her Dutch papers. The Netherlands by then is occupied by the Nazi’s, and Rotterdam has been destroyed in a massive bombardment. Fanny has good reason to hope that the information about her Spanish past has been lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately for her Dutch bureaucracy is still working and her application for Dutch nationality is denied once again. It is just because she gains the personal sympathy of the Dutch consul, Leonard Faber, that she is able to survive. Later on she starts a quite successful career as photographer. Remarkably enough she avoids almost all contact with Spanish Republican refugees that have settled in the Dominican Republic, and who according to all Dominican historians have had a determinant influence on Dominican cultural and intellectual life.

From the moment she arrives in the Dominican Republic Fanny seems bent on blurring her revolutionary past. Of course in a dictatorship it is always better to be extremely careful—and Trujillo’s rule was particularly brutal. But she becomes even more taciturn after 1947, when she is compelled to leave the Dominican Republic—the precise circumstances are unclear—and is allowed to move to Curaçao, then still a Dutch colony. Of course in the Western hemisphere in the 1940s and ‘50s there was little reason to boast of a revolutionary, communist past. But an additional reason for Fanny’s avoiding contact with her Spanish Communist comrades could have been her relation with Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin. Had that chapter of her biography become public information, her life would become even more complicated. Evidently, however, it did not: the FBI files on Spaniards in the Dominican Republic are extremely detailed, but Fanny is not mentioned.

Fanny’s silence about her Spanish past has puzzled me for a long time. When I first met her daughter, I was surprised to realize that she had not the faintest idea of her mother’s life before her birth. When I told her that her mother had been famous as “queen of the machine-gun” and the bravest girl of Barcelona, she was flabbergasted. Did Fanny hide her past only for opportunistic reasons? While in Paris in 1939, she met several Spanish artists who had been members of, or sympathetic to, the POUM. Did they open her eyes to what had really happened in those terrible May days of 1937? Did they tell her about the destructive consequences of Soviet “help” to the Republic? In other words, did she realize that in many ways she had made the wrong political choice?

Her old Dutch-Surinam friend Lou Lichtveld met her again in 1955 in Willemstad, Curaçao. She was “cool,” he said. She did not even invite him to her home. But Lichtveld had a different explanation: It was all due to the Dutch “fascistoid” government that still refused to grant Fanny her Dutch nationality: “She was stateless, so she had to be very careful.” In 1957 Fanny finally returned to Holland. She was in bad shape, her health was deteriorating quickly. On the eve of Christmas 1961 she died from a heart attack.

Yvonne Scholten is a Dutch writer and freelance journalist who has worked as a foreign correspondent in Italy and other countries. Her biography of Fanny Schoonheyt appeared with Meulenhoff in Amsterdam in 2011.