From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007-08)- On American Political Discourse (2007)

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007-08)- On American Political Discourse   

 

Markin comment:

In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on if you like      

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Adieu, Karl Rove- Almost

There appears to be something of a law that right wing political ideologues, venal as many of them are, do not retire but merely move on to greener pastures. At least that appears to be the case of one Karl Rove who until this past September served as President George W. Bush’s ‘brain’. No sooner had we seen him off to the rolling hills of East Texas the he pops up on the “Charlie Rose Show”. His purpose? To muddy the waters about who, and who did not act, impulsively in the lead up to the ill-fated Iraq War. Rove is retailing the notion that the legislative branch, in this case, the august ‘slumbering giant’ United States Senate ‘bushwhacked’ the Administration into a rush to judgment. Okay, Karl have it your way. That, however, is not the real point here. The nefarious Mr. Rove is getting a jump start on history by influencing what the first drafts will look like. Oh, well. But mark this, some ‘objective’ historian writing about the Iraq War and the slow demise of the American Empire in fifty or one hundred years will, in order to give all sides their due, cite Mr. Rove’s remarks as the coin of the realm. Nice touch, Karl.  But know this also, there is no truth to be found there. Nevertheless, as I noted in the commentary below written as a ‘tearful’ farewell to a departed foe in September here is a savage class warrior.       

COMMENTARY

A SAVAGE CLASS WARRIOR LEAVES BUSH TO HIS OWN DEVICES

Well by now everyone among the ‘chattering classes’ knows that Republican President George Bush’s ‘evil counselor’, one Karl Rove, has like so many in the recent past abandoned the sinking ship U.S.S. Bush and gone off to seek greener pastures in the hills of Texas. However, unlike most of the Bush ilk, the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to a name a couple, I will miss Karl Rove as a target. Why? I will make a confession based on a very long experience in politics- I get along better with and better understand right wing ideologues than the usual mushy ‘consultant’ types who populate today’s political scene. The ‘band- aid guys’ and the ‘scotch- tape gals’ whose political program is a small grab bag of ‘nice’ things to tweak the capitalist system while leaving it intact and that solve nothing leave me cold. One only needs to mention the name of the apparently recently retired Democratic Party consultant and perennially ‘loser’ Robert Schrum to bring this point home.

Give me the hard ball players, the real bourgeois class warriors, any day. They know there is a class struggle going on as well as I do and know that, in the final analysis, it is a fight to the finish. And who will dare say that Karl Rove was not the hell-bent king of that crowd. Anyone who could get a genuine dolt like George Bush elected twice Governor of Texas and twice President of the United States without flinching knows his business. Imagine if Rove had had a real political street fighter like Richard Nixon for a client. Yes, I know in the end Mr. Rove and I will be shooting from different sides of the barricades but Karl was a real evil genius and I will miss that big target.

Karl Rove honed two basic propositions that Marxists can appreciate, even if only from an adversarial position. One was the above-mentioned sense of the vagaries of the class struggle for the bourgeois class that he so faithfully represented. How he was able to grab the dirt poor and against the wall farmers of places like Kansas and the desperately poor of the small towns of the ‘Rust Belt’ as cannon fodder voters for a party that has not represented plebeian interests since at least the 1870’s is worthy of study. The second was his notion, parliamentary-centered to be sure, of a ‘vanguard’ party.  What? Karl Rove as some kind of closet Leninist? No. However, his proposition that the Republican party should cater to its social conservative base and drag whoever it could in their wake is a piece of political wisdom that leftists should think through more. Much better that approach than to  rely on the current dominant ‘popular front’ strategy of organizing on the basis of the lowest common- denominator issues whittled down to a meaningless point just to avoid antagonizing the Democrats instead of fighting for what is necessary. Yes, one can learn something from one’s political adversaries- Adieu, Karl.

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator”

 Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Robert Redford’s The Conspirator.

The Conspirator, directed by Robert Redford, American Film Company, 2010

Round- up everybody in sight, storm into houses without search warrants grabbing everything in sight, make the rules of evidence and procedure as you go along (as opposed to some vaunted “rule of law” that is the norm), trial by military commission rather than civilian trial by a jury of peers when such courts are open, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (bring forth the body-to some court for adjudication of a wrong), no right of appeal, torture, and execution. All episodes from today’s “war of terror” as the American government (and others as well) round up the bad guys, or whoever they suspect of being the bad guys.

Well, yes. But also, according to this Robert Redford –directed first film in the American Film Company production line, the prevailing atmosphere on the Union side, political, legal and military around those who conspired to kill Abraham Lincoln (and Vice-President Johnson and Secretary Of State Seward) along with John Wilkes Booth. The film centers on the pre-trial and trial events of the only woman brought to trial in the conspiracy (it was at her boarding house where conspiracy was advanced), Mary E. Surratt who was tried before a Union Army military commission, and eventually the first woman hanged by the federal government, for her part in the conspiracy.

We all, those of us who revere the historic memory of Abraham Lincoln are glad, glad as hell that the south and slavery were defeated. We are nevertheless as supporters of democratic rights now (and hopefully back then, as well) concerned about the modern day issues that this film brings out whether we are sympathetic to Mary Surratt’s plight (or those of today’s political prisoners). Watch this thought-provoking film which is a well-done production highlighting these issues without being maudlin about it.

Horse-Trading Versus Struggle

Paternalism and Ass-Covering in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

by LOUIS PROYECT

Which film about the abolition of slavery was intended to burnish the reputation of a contemporary President? If you answered that it was Spielberg’s lavishly praised “Lincoln”, you were right. When asked in a November 15^th NPR interview whether he saw parallels with the Obama administration, screenwriter Tony Kushner replied:

I think Obama is a great president and I feel that there is immense potential now for building – rebuilding a real progressive democracy in this country after a great deal of damage has been done to it. And I think that it faces many obstacles, and one of its obstacles is an impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people, with the kind of compromising that you were just mentioning, the kind of horse trading that is necessary.

But you would have also been right if you guessed “Amazing Grace”, the 2007 biopic about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who opposed slavery. Its producer Philip Anschutz, the rightwing billionaire who also recently unleashed the toxic defense of charter schools “Won’t Back Down”, clearly intended to promote the agenda of the Christian right and the Bush administration it supported. By turning the abolitionist movement in Britain into a Church-based enterprise, Anschutz sought to legitimize new missionary operations in Africa all too familiar to people with painful memories of the bible and the gun.

The paternalism embodied in both screenplays transcends narrow party affiliations. It is wrapped up in the idea that “good people” on high delivered Black people from their oppression. The chief difference between the two films is Kushner’s decision to eschew hagiography and portray Lincoln as a kind of down-and-dirty dealmaker. This Lincoln had more in common in fact with LBJ than Barack Obama whose pugnaciousness is most often directed at his voting base rather than the billionaires who financed his campaign.

Conservative pundit David Brooks told New York Times readers on November 22^nd that this is what “politics” is all about:

To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.

Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir not only embraces the idea that “legalistic games” must be played; he goes one step further and likens Lincoln’s maneuvers to Obama’s use of a secret “Kill List”:

Like many other people, I’m profoundly disturbed by the way the last two presidents have employed extra-constitutional authority to send purported terrorists to secret prisons, and to order the killing of both foreign civilians and American citizens who aren’t enemy combatants in any ordinary sense. But as “Lincoln” makes clear, in practice, we have entrusted our presidents with the power to violate the law on our behalf for most of our history.

Well, of course. Deploying Predator Drones against wedding parties and freeing the slaves—what’s the difference?

A counter-attack has been emerging against this interpretation. Eric Foner, a leading civil war historian of the left, wrote a letter to the N.Y. Times on November 27^th taking issue with Brooks. He reminded its readers that emancipation was as much a product of struggle from below as horse-trading in Congress:

The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist feminists headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Moreover, from the beginning of the Civil War, by escaping to Union lines, blacks forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda.

His letter was in line with an op-ed piece by historian Kate Masur that appeared in the November 12^th NYT:

But it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them. For some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation; however imperfectly, Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary “The Civil War” brought aspects of that interpretation to the American public. Yet Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gives us only faithful servants, patiently waiting for the day of Jubilee.

Like a speck of sand whose irritating qualities can generate an oyster’s pearl, Spielberg’s film might ultimately do some good by stimulating left scholars—both paid and unpaid—into taking a new look at the civil war.

It is likely that Kushner anticipated criticisms from the left and made sure to include a scene of Black soldiers imploring Lincoln to meet their demands for freedom at the beginning of the film. Once this ass-covering business was out of the way, he could go on to what he saw as the far more interesting scenes of Congressmen wrangling with Lincoln over what perks could be received in exchange for a vote for the 13^th Amendment—something that to me was equivalent to watching CSPAN with a bad hangover.

The real story of Black soldiers deserves to be told in all its rich detail and all the more so without the paternalism of the 1989 “Glory” that starred Matthew Broderick as the aristocratic Col. Robert Gould Shaw leading a company of bumbling ex-slaves.

According to Guyora Binder, the author of “Did the Slaves Author the Thirteenth Amendment? An Essay in Redemptive History” (Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, Vol. 5, 1993), the Black soldier did a bit more than imploring:

[O]nce the war was won, the presence of a large number of blacks under arms continued to exert pressure on federal policy. Black soldiers were willing to remain mobilized longer than whites and hence played a greater role in maintaining the military occupation of the South after the Civil War. By constituting a substantial portion—in many areas the bulk—of the occupation army, blacks were suddenly in a position to influence the terms of the peace. This was a situation that Northern and Southern whites alike found acutely uncomfortable, impelling efforts to speed the demobilization of black troops: “In addition to charges of incompetence and insubordination, Union generals charged that black troops were hostile and insulting to Southern whites, threatening to white women, and encouraged militancy and insolence among civilian blacks.” Mary Frances Berry has argued that the quickest way literally to pacify these armed guardians of black liberty was to constitutionalize emancipation by passing the Thirteenth Amendment.

One can be relieved that Tony Kushner decided not to depict such “hostile and insulting” black troops since the film would have been a lot closer in spirit to “Gone With the Wind” given his rather shocking remarks to the NPR interviewer:

I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of the war was a very, very smart thing, and it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered, the inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way without any question was one of the causes of a kind of resentment and the perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote/unquote “noble cause” and the rise of the Klan and Southern self protection societies and so on. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe and led – helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.

For Tony Kushner’s information, the North did “reconcile” with the South in 1877, when Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and the Klan was given a free rein to terrorize Black people. The notion of an “abused” South is rather obscene given the reality of lynching, prison chain gangs, and all the rest.

With respect to Black soldiers and emancipation, there’s more to the story than meets the eye. By 1864, when the 13^th Amendment was being drafted, the South itself was ready to abolish slavery and draft the ex-slaves on behalf of the secessionist cause. James McPherson’s magisterial “Battle Cry of Freedom” reports the following:

Robert E. Lee’s opinion would have a decisive influence. For months rumors had circulated that he favored arming the slaves. Lee had indeed expressed his private opinion that “we should employ them without delay [even] at the risk which may be produced upon our social institutions.” On February 18 he broke his public silence with a letter to the congressional sponsor of a Negro soldier bill. This measure was “not only expedient but necessary,” wrote Lee. “The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could at least do as well with them as the enemy… Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise … to require them to serve as slaves.”

In other words, Robert E. Lee advocated the same exact policy as contained in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln saw the Black soldier as means to an end: preserving the union. For his part, Lee saw them as a means as well: to preserve the confederacy. Black rights were never considered as an end in themselves.

From what I have observed on the Internet, Kushner’s defenders have begun to rally around a talking point, namely that he chose to tell a story about the passage of legislation that did not directly involve Blacks. Since they were not members of the House of Representatives, who could blame him or Spielberg for leaving them out? To fully comprehend how ludicrous this argument is, we can move forward in history to imagine a film about LBJ’s pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that included not a single important Black civil rights leader: no Martin Luther King Jr., no Bayard Rustin, no Stokely Carmichael, no Andrew Young. People would scream bloody murder. How could you leave them out?

It is easier for Kushner to get away with this sleight of hand by referring to historical events a century earlier about which Americans have little knowledge. Most assume that Lincoln “freed the slaves” and know nothing about the likes of Frederick Douglass. If you refer to a “Radical Republican”, the average American of today would think you were referring to Rush Limbaugh rather than Thaddeus Stevens.

Speaking of which, one of the biggest travesties of “Lincoln” is the way that Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is represented. He is an irascible cartoon figure akin to Yosemite Sam who when given the floor in the House is more likely to call a Democrat a “nincompoop” than make the case for Black equality. Of course, since the proposal of the Thirteenth Amendment was calculated to sidetrack such a “divisive” discussion, it was in some ways accurate to depict a House with little to say about the social and economic demands of the African-American.

Kushner decided to leave out the Black struggle for full equality and to turn Stevens into some kind of comic relief for obvious reasons. He believes that progress is made through incremental steps orchestrated by wise and beneficent leaders like Lincoln or Obama.

If Hollywood was interested in bankrolling directors like Ken Loach or the late Gillo Pontecorvo, then our expectations might be different. We understand that there are class affinities between someone like Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama. Spielberg donated $1 million to Obama’s Super-PAC, the same committee that attracted $300 thousand from Sam Walton, the Walmart boss whose company Michelle Obama shills for. One big happy family.

Some day when a radicalization as deep as the 1930s or 60s grips American society once again, we might look forward to the making of a film that dramatizes the Black struggle of the 1850s and 60s—something that I and arguably most Americans would find far more interesting than the horse-trading that constitutes the lion’s share of Kushner’s dreadful screenplay.

It would focus on the elections of 1864 when those who Kushner patronized as “very good, very progressive people” but not enlightened enough to see the need for compromise (the people Obama’s ex-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once described as needing to be “drug tested”) asserted themselves politically in the same fashion as the Black troops: “encouraging militancy and insolence”.

That year the Republicans gathered in Baltimore to deliberate on proposals being submitted to the national convention. A contingent from the Sea Islands of South Carolina—the home of the Gullahs—sought to be seated. Among the group of sixteen was one Robert Smalls, who had won fame early in the war for commandeering a Southern ship and navigating his way to freedom in the North with a group of runaway slaves. The Republicans refused to seat them since they were not prepared to accept Blacks as equals.

Some things never change. On November 26^th an obituary for Lawrence Guyot appeared in the Times. It noted:

Mr. Guyot (GHEE-ott) was repeatedly challenged, jailed and beaten as he helped lead fellow members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and student volunteers from around the nation in organizing Mississippi blacks to vote. In many of the state’s counties, no blacks were registered.

He further pressed the campaign for greater black participation in politics by serving as chairman of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed to supplant the all-white state Democratic Party. It lost its challenge to the established Mississippi party at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, but its efforts are seen as paving the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the long struggle for freedom, both parties have found it convenient to deny recognition to the likes of a Robert Smalls or a Lawrence Guyot. If anything remains true after all these years, it will take this to establish full equality, not horse-trading:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list.

Protesters in Egyptian industrial capital eject city boss, announce independence – reports

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Published: 08 December, 2012, 03:07

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Protest, Politics, Opposition, Police, Egypt, Clashes

TRENDS:
Egypt unrest

Egyptian protesters demonstrate in the Nile Delta textile town of Mahalla el-Kubra (Reuters / Stringer Egypt)

Anti-government protesters in Mahalla, Egypt’s largest industrial city, have reportedly taken over the local city council and announced their autonomy from the state ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
­Protesters threw the head of their city council out of the building, announcing they “no longer belong to the Ikhwani state,” the Daily News Egypt reports.
Workers have attempted to create a "revolutionary council" and rule the industrial city, report suggests. The head of the Mahalla City Council, Ismail Fathy, however, denied the claims.
“The demonstrations, which attracted around 3,000 people, were peaceful,” he told satellite TV channel CBC in a phone interview. “Nothing of this sort happened.”
Mokhtar El-Ashri, the senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, also denied reports of Mahalla’s announcement to secede.
“I was in Mahalla all day, I did not see any of this happening,” he told CBC.
El-Mahalla el-Kubra, a city north of Cairo home to 450,000, was dubbed the cradle of the Egyptian revolution. The opposition April 6 movement was formed there in 2009, and the first major anti-government protests also took place there.
Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports circulating on Twitter suggest that protesters in four more Egyptian cities – Alexandria, Kafr Sheikh, Sharqaya and Sohag – have declared independence, announcing that President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have lost the legitimacy to rule following the deadly clashes in Cairo that left at least seven people killed and hundreds injured.
The Egypt Independent confirmed clashes between opponents and supporters of President Morsi in Alexandria on Friday evening, adding that demonstrators had broken into the city's local council building.
Meanwhile in Tanta, Egypt's fifth-largest city, a crowd of anti-government protesters reportedly torched the Freedom and Justice Party's local headquarters.

Tens of thousands of anti-Mohamed Morsi protesters gather in front of the presidential palace on December 7, 2012 in Cairo (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

Hoda Osman, president of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalist Association, believes that as public discontent in the streets grows, President Morsi is repeating his predecessor's mistakes.
“There are lots of feelings against the Muslim Brotherhood by a lot of Egyptians, especially because of the role they played right after the revolution,” she explained. “A lot of people saw that they were close to the army and the army was responsible for a lot of the problems that we were seeing."
Egyptians are seeing another dictator in the making – “they are seeing another Mubarak,” Osman said.
“Morsi is really making the same mistakes that Mubarak did during the January 25 Revolution,” she explained. “We are seeing him too slow to react to people’s demands. It is a fast moving situation, yet he is very slow to respond.”
Instead of calming people down, Morsi’s address to the nation actually enraged them more. On Friday, thousands of anti-government protesters surrounded the presidential palace in Cairo after dismantling the barricades around it, injuring several security officers in the process.
­“When protesters went down to the streets, their main demand was to cancel this constitutional declaration,” Osman said. “But today if you see the footage of Egyptians you can hear them asking Morsi to quit, asking him to leave just like they asked Mubarak.”

: Egyptian protesters have their picture taken posing with Egyptian army soldiers as thousands of opponents to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi gather in front of the palace on December 7, 2012 in Cairo (AFP Photo / Gianluigi Guercia)

A man holds a shoe with the face of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as thousands of opponents to Morsi gather in front of the presidential palace on December 7, 2012 in Cairo (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

Tens of thousands of anti-Mohamed Morsi protesters gather in front of the presidential palace on December 7, 2012 in Cairo (AFP Photo / Patrick Baz)

 

End the war on terror and save billions

By Fareed Zakaria, Published: December 6

As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.

For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.

Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.

In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”

But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”

Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. Not coincidentally, we have had the largest expansion of the federal government since World War II. The Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin have described how the U.S. government has built 33 new complexes for the intelligence bureaucracies alone. The Department of Homeland Security employs 230,000 people.

A new Global Terrorism Index this week showed that terrorism went up from 2002 to 2007 – largely because of the conflicts in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq — but has declined ever since. And the part of the world with the fewest incidents is North America. It could be our vigilance that is keeping terror attacks at bay. But it is also worth noting, as we observe the vast apparatus of searches and screening, that the Transportation Security Administration’s assistant administrator for global strategies has admitted that those expensive and cumbersome whole-body scanners have not resulted in the arrest of a single suspected terrorist. Not one.

Of course there are real threats out there, from sources including new branches of al-Qaeda and other such groups. And of course they will have to be battled, and those terrorists should be captured or killed. But we have done this before, and we can do so in the future under more normal circumstances. It will mean that the administration will have to be more careful — and perhaps have more congressional involvement — for certain actions, such as drone strikes. It might mean it will have to charge some of the people held at Guantanamo and try them in military or civilian courts.

In any event, it is a good idea that the United States find a way to conduct its anti-terrorism campaigns within a more normal legal framework, rather than rely on blanket wartime authority granted in a panic after Sept. 11.

No president wants to give up power. But this one is uniquely positioned to begin a serious conversation about a path out of permanent war.

comments@fareedzakaria.com

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A Call to all Supporters of the Budget for All Referendum to participate in the Monday, December 10: National Day of Action on the Fiscal Cliff Now is the time to bring the overwhelming results of the Budget for All vote into the public debate. On Monday, December 10 we have an opportunity to support two actions organized by our allies in this Battle of the Budget: the AFL-CIO and MassUniting. We must be there with our signs and our message. Please try to attend one or both of these events. Bring signs such as "Budget for All", "Fund Our Communities Not War", "Stop the Afghanistan War," and do everything you can to spread the word to your contacts. 1:00pm at Faneuil Hall in Boston Rally for Jobs, Not Cuts! Direct Testimony of those who will be affected by Budget cuts inside Faneuil Hall followed by a march to the Financial District. Join friends, neighbors and community leaders as we tell Congress it's time to get to work on the issues that really matter: protecting services, raising revenue and creating good jobs! Location 4:00pm Office of Sen. Kerry Candlelight Campaign Against Cuts 1 Bowdoin Square Boston (corner New Chardon and Cambridge Sts.; Bowdoin T stop) The AFL-CIO is organizing State Federations and Central Labor Councils across the country in a national day of action. Join the Greater Boston Labor Council and MoveOn.Org on International Human Rights Day to send Congress a message: NO Tax Breaks for the Richest 2% NO Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid Cuts. For a flyer, click here: http://gbclc.com/sites/gbclc.com/files/Candle%20Light%20Vigil%20No%20Cuts%2012-10-12.pdf

Join Massachusetts Peace Action - or renew your membership today! Dues are $40/year or $10 for student/unemployed/low income. Pay now and you will be a member in good standing through December 2013. Your financial support makes this work possible! Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 617-354-2169 • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter Click here to unsubscribe

Pardon Private Manning Stand-Out-Central Square, Cambridge, Wednesday December 12th, 5:00 PM

Stand In Solidarity With The Pre-Trial Events At Fort Meade.

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Central Square, Cambridge, Ma. For A Stand-Out For Bradley- Wednesday December 12th From 5:00-6:00 PM

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The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward a mid- winter trial now scheduled for March 2013. The recent news on his case has centered on the many (since last April) pre-trial motions hearings including defense motions to dismiss for lack of speedy trial (Private Manning’s pre-trial confinement is now entering 900 plus days), dismissal as a matter of freedom of speech and alleged national security issues (issues for us to know what the hell the government is doing either in front of us, or behind our backs) and dismissal based on serious allegations of torturous behavior by the military authorities extending far up the chain of command while Private Manning was detained in Kuwait and at the Quantico Marine brig for about a year ending in April 2011. Some recent news from the November 2012 pre-trail sessions is the offer by the defense to plead guilty to lesser charges (wrongful, unauthorized use of the Internet, etc.) in order to clear the deck and have the major (with a possibility of a life sentence) espionage /aiding the enemy issue solely before the court-martial judge (a single military judge, the one who has been hearing the pre-trial motions, not a lifer-stacked panel).     

 

For the past several months there has been a weekly stand-out in Greater Boston across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop (renamed Pardon Bradley Manning Square for the stand-out’s duration) in Somerville on Friday afternoons but we have since July 4, 2012 changed the time and day to 4:00-5:00 PM on Wednesdays. This stand-out has, to say the least, been very sparsely attended. We need to build it up with more supporters present. This Wednesday December 12th  at 5:00 PM  in order to continue to broaden our outreach we, in lieu of our regular Davis Square stand-out, are meeting in Central Square , Cambridge, Ma.(small park  at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue  and Prospect Street) for a stand-out for Private Manning. President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now!  

 

 

Dorchester (Ma.) People For Peace To Honor Bradley-December 10th

Dorchester (Ma.) People For Peace To Honor Bradley-December 10th

 Dorchester People For Peace Annual Awards Dinner- December 10, 2012 -6:00-9:00 PM Vietnamese –American Center, 42 Charles Street (Fields Corner Station on Red Line), Dorchester (Boston), Massachusetts  

Over the past several months as the Private Bradley Manning case has gained more publicity as a trial date has approached (scheduled now for mid-winter 2013) his cause has been aided immensely by an open declaration of support for his freedom by three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, and Adolfo Perez Esquivel. In one of those ironies of history they are asking a fellow Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, U.S. President Barack Obama, to release current Nobel Peace Prize nominee Private Manning from his jails.

That is the high political profile end of the support for Private Manning. But down in the anti-war trenches, down where the questions of war and peace are matters of personal, and life or death, interest there is also growing support for Private Manning’s cause. An example of this is Private Manning ‘s selection this year as a recipient of a Peace Prize from the Dorchester People for Peace, a grassroots organization with long time and long worked at roots in that multi-cultural working class neighborhood of Boston. This may not have the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize but Private Manning should cherish it just as much. Join DPP in honoring Private Manning on December 10th.  A representative of the local Bradley Manning Support Group (and member of Veterans for Peace, a strong supporter of his defense) in Boston will accept and pass on the award to Private Manning.

 

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Out In The Seals Rock Inn Night –Ah, Old ‘Frisco, Take One

Tugboat Annie, not her real name, real name unknown for the simple fact that what she had to say was heard by Adam Evans in passing (actually attempting to pass but stopped, stop momentarily, by Annie’s words, or a certain few of them anyway, and then hooked by the rest), heard in passing down at the edge of ‘Frisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, you know down by the faux, now faux, cannery row shopping stores, old day real cans, fish, seven kinds of eventually canned fish, filling the air with high fish albacore, red scupper, who the hell knows all the names of all the fishes, of the fish guts barely fit for leftover mongrel cats(not be-bop daddy cats blowing high white notes, no, that comes later), stink, and low wages with the braceros, Flip braceros, doing the stoop labor, fruits, seven kinds of fruits from the islands, ditto on the stoop labor, signed, sealed and delivered by Mr. Del Monte and kin, ditto on the six kinds of vegetables, down the end where for a few bucks you can pick up the thrill of riding an old time ding-a-ling open air trolley car watching them turnabout on the roundabout like in the old days over on Powell or Market, tourist stuff, not the faux trolley cars, doubled- up, in need of now roundabout meant for everyday work-a-day ‘Frisco business.

He knew the type though, the type of woman, the had been queen of the waterfront gin mills (Kake’s, where the Flip drunks hung out between ships, or crops, Katy’s, strictly for the Irishtown crowd , Jimmy the Greek’s, where Jean Genet the tough ass fag author spent some time with the rough trade, Red’s, the Harry Bridges longshoremen hang-out if for no other reason than it was called Red’s before the cold war red scare made them persona non grata, and tavern X, Y, Z where a man, any man, could get a drink, some company, name your flavor, and maybe his lights knocked out, for a dollar and some change), maybe a certain beauty (now certainly not beautiful, not stately seventy- something beautiful although despite the ravages of time a wisp of that ancient beauty in the eyes), a certain rough raw beauty in her time, her flowering (and deflowered, ancient word making you think of Walter Scott medieval romance novels with their quaint sex talk, their indirection missed by ignorant schoolboys, but maybe not schoolgirls who knew the code)1950s time, that old Okie/Arkie heartland prairie beauty one generation removed from the dust bowl, grandparents old dust bowl farmers, parents too, except when Mr. Morgan came for the mortgage they hightailed it out the back door and left no tracks, or only westward trek tracks and those soon disappeared when the dust howled up once too often.

That one generation removed and parents shoved the dust from their feet and took up city trades, maybe Pa went to night school on the G.I. Bill after some hard fighting in funny- named Pacific Islands and done. That not from hunger (unlike gaunt grandmother always looking underfed in the father and children first pecking order ) corn-fed wheat-fed (ironic, right) look that gave the 1950s beauties that ample bosom, those curved hips and firm thighs that said no way back to that plains goodnight. And their daughters their twice-removed daughters, oh, their daughters turned into those wholesome (although don’t ask any members of the football teams about wholesome) cheerleader try-out girls (also second generation amply busted, nicely curved and even more firmly thighed) who led the crowds in crowded Saturday afternoon golden sun stadia at UCLA, UCal, and Southern Cal, or watched, teeny- weeny bikini (and hence maybe a little less corn- fed shaped , reflecting steady groceries coming in steady houses and choices) golden tan beach watched their golden-haired surfer boys hanging that perfect five wave (or ten or fifteen, or whatever, nirvana number it took and how long) and then headed to that Adventure Car-Hop Drive just up the road surf board dragging out the back of de riguer woodie, or same thing, didn’t watch on the beach but waited, waited impatiently by the midnight phone for some simple-minded Johnnie to call so they could cruise in his father’s hand-me-down car in the Modesto night (shape, female shape indeterminate),or, or, and here is where Tugboat Annie, if she had a daughter, and she probably did although perhaps she did not know the present whereabouts of said daughter fit on the pendulum, some slightly overweight (ample, ample from too many twinkles and wise old potato chips), rowdy back-seat riding mama for some Oakland hell’s angel (yah, this story is filled with all kinds of angels, including angel Tugboat Annie).

So she had had enough beauty, certainly enough anyway for some whiskey-soaked sailor to nuzzle up to after she “enticed” him with that “what are you lookin’ for fella,” and “see what you like baby doll,” maybe not a whore, not a pro anyway, but always sexed-up, juiced up to pass the time of day, when the beat daddies hit town (black and white hipsters, from places like cajun Louisiana, no place Okies, tired out New York cities, with a train of fags from everywhere and nowhere looking pretty or looking for pretty boys to twirl with, like always at sea-change feeding times, and a few old sailor girls like Annie to spice things up) and the be-bop jazz(hell, Lester Young blew some very high notes without even trying, high as a kite on some mad dash mex weed and golden gate bridge sunsets at uptown Red Top, Hi-Hat, Kit Kat Clubs, and blew the white notes after hours, free time after hours when the music, the booze, the dope, the sex (or promise of sex, okay), blended together over at Jake’s Barbary Shore next to Pier 39), came to hang around the town and put sailors in old time tar snug harbor graveyards RIP, she was on to every hipster from old North Beach to the breakers,

Yah, he knew, he knew no hipster ever went within a mile of the breakers but it sounded kind of nautical, kind of fit in when describing Ms. Tugboat- yah, he knew her from ten thousand ‘Frisco nights, fifty years ago, forty years ago, thirty years ago, twenty years ago, hell, maybe yesterday, knew her hard luck story, now, of too many men, too much booze and drugs, and too much of never getting out of ‘Frisco hellhole dives where the sailors probably gave her that name themselves. She might have been a piece at one time. A piece worth going for, rum brave going for, if some old tar didn’t beat you to her, or her to him, if she had her wanting habits on. Yah, that name fit, that name fit with what she had to say, simple as it was, said to no one in particular, although there were a couple of “gentleman friends” nearby within hearing distance, “I ain’t seen ‘Frisco so dead for fifty years as it is now.”

Well, we all, in our cups (although while she was smoking, smoking cigarettes incessantly, some unfiltered things, not rolled, not Bull Durham rolled to save dough or just to inhale cheap tobacco, so she might have had a couple of bucks around, she did not have the apple annie swagger of someone on a toot, or just coming off one), say stuff, say cut up old torches stuff, to pass the time away and Adam Evans though nothing particular of it at the time. Later, middle of the night later, serious sea storm lashing waves across the street from the Seals Rock Inn, in ocean edge‘Frisco, tossing and turning a little from being overheated after earlier having half-consciously turned the thermostat too high to take an early morning chill off startled himself awake with the thought that, damn, sweet angel Tugboat Annie had been exactly right, and he said to himself that had to make sure that the next day he threw her a dollar or two for her wisdom . And here is why Tugboat Annie was wise, and why back in the day she might have been a ‘Frisco belle, hell the queen of the ‘Frisco (native- born division) 1950s beat night, and godmother when the trampled, besotted, bedazzled youth hit the coast from wherever they were fleeing (non-native division fleeing) in sometime summer of love 1960s (with or without flowers in their hair).

What know young, very young, middle young, hell, old young quaint 2012 San Francisco, what know they of anytime but earthquake rebuilt times in wharfish cleansed ‘Frisco, what do they know of the times when lions roared out their be-bop beat in holy hell break-out North Beach (locale today unknown to even those who live, Christ, live right on Chestnut or Bay Streets, he checked, jesus) and flower children spread their seed in just names now Haight Street and blasted the night away at Fillmore concert halls , ah ‘Frisco. What know they that Jeanbon (Jack ) Kerouac pidder-pattered down Columbus filled with love (big sky angelic love but maybe a little short, okay very short on earthly woman love , except, except strange old mere love ), lust (just like those old time sailors, tars all, that he shipped out with in 1942, big tidal wave ocean angers (angers derived from small men beat down, beat around , small men injustices, unspoken, and Lowell mill town boys benighted triple-decker economies) , immense hole-up speaks to a blasphemous world, patron saint of the beat down, beat around, beatitude beat (always close etched to mere and mere church clinging old country ways) be-bop singsong breaking his heart or his head over some negro, negress(when such a word was proper, okay, before black devoured the negro night, although still even now possessing, damn those damn negro streets), a waif a misfit in the hell broth ‘Frisco miss-mash.

What know they (except in chisel-etched commemorative stones, or sticks in the ground, or fiftieth anniversary City Lights bookstore editions stitched in fine leathers )that sainted Allen Ginsberg, robed, disrobed, bare-ass naked , maybe, howled against the winds, the mad cold war red scare atomic bomb winds and how we got there, up in some north beach garage, howled against his own madnesses (and singing kaddish over mother madnesses), and howled out in those negro streets(those kindred negro streets talk of alienation, jesus), those brethren streets, howled hoarse against the machine day, against the quaint faux Tudor buildings (and using that word with no approbation but mere fact, mere can’t go home again fact), against the quaint faux Victorian, against the faux cheeky Spanish fandango that founded the place before the injuns ruined it for every gringo, against the faux, hell against the faux California modern even, calling all to live in hovels, and live well, and loving mankind (and men, okay, before that was okay, when they were queer, hell, when in old Jack Lowell talk and Adam Evans Olde Saco talk, they were fags to be put to the faggots).

What know they that master zen wheelman of the world (of the four –dimensional world) Neal Cassady sky high benny-bennied, cheap wine on his hip, maybe Thunderbird or whatever three quarters would buy, drove studebaker chariots through the streets of ‘Frisco bringing refugees from the burnt- over east, to feat before the red golden gate sun, before the high priest ocean swirls, and the place of no turning back, land’s end America, making it or leave. What know they too of word gun-slingers, of desperado machine gun words, by the master gunsmith Gregory Corso, drunk, drunk as a skunk on wines, and Chestnut Street old wino leavings. And what know they of legend followers, of stinking tenements and rooming houses, and mattresses on floors, brother and sister cockroach, stinking shared urinals and bleached shower stalls stinking of three days, well, stink, and of tea freely smoked and passed and Tokay bottles (cheap okay, maybe cheaper that Thunderbird on the downward spiral) thrown every which way and a new brotherhood, okay, brotherhood formed, and women hanging on to be around that scene when some cool as a cucumber jazzman, black as night, black as the starless night, blessed, big lungs blessed, blew that very, very high white note in some dinge (as in dingy, okay) cabaret cellar. Yah, what know they of that old ‘Frisco, the ‘Frisco when Tugboat Annie knew to her core, or some of her ilk knew (and had the burned- out cigarette scars, the pimp daddies slashes, and the needle marks to prove it) that a new wind had blown in from the Japans, or somewhere and, that she (they) had better ride it, ride it as far as the currents would take her (them).

And what know they of break-out joys, Tugboat Annie (although then transformation calling herself as was the fashion, the new beginning new day fuck the bourgeois world plain name game fashion, the tabula rasa fashion ocean frontier found just like in those ancestor Okie plains days, Sister Sabbath, sister of the righteous, sister of the downtrodden, sister of the junkie hipped night, complete with kindly godhead heart tattoo on the back of her right shoulder really just a masterly re-do job by Max, Max from the tattoo shop over in hell’s angel Oakland who did all the low-rider biker work around, of her beat devil’s heart when she rode, minute rode before things got rough, the be-bop beat night with Whip-Saw Larry), she a godmother now and long lost mother of beat-ness once the old gang broke up, split for Oregon, Times Square (or other New Jack City locales), split for Buddha, Hari Krishna, hell, some god. And she, native-born division beat, she couldn’t find herself out of some Larkin Street dump, winos howling to some festering moon then not beat poets proclaiming the new world before the glittering golden sun and wine bottles smashing against back alley doors when the 1960s caravans came.

Volkswagen mini-bus caravans came of course or old beat up, beat down , beatitude beat yellow brick road merry pranksters-styled school buses turned into affordable living (and let breath) spaces, complete with seven sweat-stained mattresses, six unadorned half-empty shelves , five amped-up stereos, four tin- plated tins bent , three forks likewise, two pieces of bread (bread , bread not slang-bang for dough moola , kale but mother earth bread, those Kansas wheat fields left behind made bread) came like some unacknowledged homage to those be-bop daddies that stirred old Tugboat Annie.

Caravans (and one, twos and threes , hitchhiking on those same roads making the coast in a week with good luck and some angel long haul trucker’s loneliness kindness), crossing desperate fugitive pioneer plains playing that same move on game since the republic’s creation after the soil gave out in one spot except now instead of desiccated soils desiccated lives drains of life, crossing wheat field oceans until one was sick unto death of wheat and made solemn promises to not cross back that way, if outlaw crossing back became necessary, crossing sad-eyed injun deserts (taking time out in some flame-flecked campfire splashed canyon to ghost dance , high on peyote, maybe, high on something surely, the ancient ten thousand year war dance of the angel bravos before kill battles), treks to find refuge against world hurts, bombs away, jail hurts, and a tryst as some lifer’s honey, wall street hurts , and death to angelic trust funds, mother and father hurts, she doling out the father-earned dough dispassionately and un-motherly, he sneaking, or maybe not sneaking, up to daughter bedrooms, and she, daughter, had to split, or else, machine hurts, just take a number, hurt hurts, immense hurts to be assuaged in golden gate sun, and swept out on some misbegotten current.

And like old beat times Tugboat Annie, uh, Sister Sabbath, feasted, that time dispensing Owsley’s magic sugars out of side streets near Post ,taking tickets at the Fillmore where Grace Slick and the Airplane (no need to say Jefferson Airplane, not to this crowd) held forth needing someone to love (world love, humankind love ,boy and girl love, boy and boy love, girl and girl love, did he miss anybody), shamanic Jim Morrison calling one and all, ghost dancing like out in the canyons preparing his warrior trance, to get west, get west is the best, rolling over a couple of times for some young stud gurus in loincloth from Topeka or Ann Arbor who liked the idea of an older woman (hell, she wasn’t even thirty yet, not when that first way came through, the one right after Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters held forth on Russian Hill at the time when he, Adam Evans he, had made his first trip westward and maybe he had crossed paths with her, angel sister her although he still had pain memories of sweet mama love Butterfly Swirl, in that strobe- lighted night), and available, and not hung up and not worried about forever, and damn, not worried about finding herself, whatever that meant unlike the girls they had headed west with.

Yah, before the ebb she had a hell of a time, sleeping for free here and there on beloved Haight Street (ten million miles away from nasty old wino Larkin Street smashed down once the beat daddy hipsters blew town), smoking dope (and truth, selling a little on the side, good stuff too, Acapulco gold, mex weed, not that oregano-laced stuff the punks were passing off as weed once the hippie-clad tourists hit town about late 1968), standing on the stage when Jerry and the Dead gave their free, yah, free concerts in Golden Gate Park (funny she had never been there before even though it was maybe only twenty blocks from the wharves), and she even donned a buckskin jacket ,real, torn jeans, torn as style, wearing off-meshed color tie-dye tee shirts, and tied her hair in braids, wasn’t that a time. Yah, wasn’t that a time when for just a minute, just a hip, hipper minute the world could have turned on its axis a different way and she would not had to have been standing, chain-smoking some old unfiltered cigarettes, speaking to no one in particular about ancient times when lions roared and flowers were strewn on the free-booting streets of old‘Frisco town.

He went back to Cannery Row that next day, went back a couple of times, dollars at the ready, but no luck, no luck like you would kind of expect from rolling stones moving from place to place, maybe a Sally’s here (Salvation Army), a sailor’s flop house there, maybe in some rooming house over back of the wharves near Third Street, but here’s to you Tugboat Annie, the angel who was around when the lions and flowers ruled the old ‘Frisco night. Ah ‘Frisco.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Film Noir’s Carol Reed’s Fallen Idol

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipediaentry for the Carol Reed film noir Fallen Idol.

DVD Review

Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed, starring Ralph Richard son, 1948

“ Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we first practice to deceive,” or words to that effect are what drive this 1948 film noir based on a story by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed (most classically show-cased in the film noir world in the thriller starring Orson Welles as Harry Lyme, The Third Man). Although this is not one of Greene’s first-rate story lines the black and white film techniques used by Reed (although to better effect in The Third Man) highlight his almost claustrophobic and tight film style and demonstrate as well why he was nominated for an Oscar for this work.

As for the story line itself, well, the story is as old as Adam and Eve, maybe older. A guy (Ralph Richardson), a very married guy, working his dull little life away as an English butler (always suspense that job classification automatically of nefarious stuff right off the bat otherwise you will wind out following false leads, okay) in the French embassy in post-war (World War II to keep the wars straight) London has caught the attention of the ambassador’s precocious (and bratty) young son who seems organically incapable of telling the truth when he is cornered. In order to keep him in thrall said butler has, well, made up a false persona about his previous life, a life of African adventure, intrigue, and mayhem. Harmless stuff really, until the hammer comes down.

And that is where our butler’s being married, being very married, to one of the great crones of the ages, something out a witches’ Sabbath (and I am being kind) who works in the embassy as the nanny to that precocious young son comes in. See said crone winds up very mysteriously dead and the fingers begin to point at the butler. Oh, I forgot to tell you, said butler, said unhappy butler had been, ah, playing footsies (hell, having an adulterous affair) with one of the embassy typists, and wifey gotten wise, hysterically wise. Along the way the boy, the butler, anybody with any knowledge about anything, come around the police to confuse the issue. But all things work on in the end, even for chronic liars, at least in this film. As you can now see not strong on the plot line but strong on the direction.

From The Archives of The Class Struggle –Black Panther George Jackson’s “Blood In My Eye”- A Book Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Black Panther George Jackson.

Book Review

Blood In My Eye, George Jackson, Bantam Books, New York, 1972

George Jackson Lyrics-Bob Dylan

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

He wouldn’t take shit from no one
He wouldn’t bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love.
Lord, Lord,
So they cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards
Lord, Lord
They cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord
They laid him in the ground

Copyright © 1971 by Ram's Horn Music; renewed 1999 by Ram’s Horn Music

I have often had reason, when speaking of my long and painful trek to Marxism many years ago now, to note that the polemics of the third section of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels skewer the various left-wing political tendencies of their day for their short-comings, that I had probably espoused all the tendencies met there, or their modern day equivalents. That said, I have also noted that as a member (a member in good standing, by the way, meaning merely having survived the cultural wars of the past forty years or so and still standing) of the generation of ’68 I had run through all of the“theories” prevalent on the New Left (then New Left, now old and hoary with age) of the 1960s. They included such thread-worn “theories” as that the working class had then (and now by some new new left advocates) lost its central role (had sold out or been bought off in the vernacular of the times) as the vanguard for socialism, youth as a class was per se a revolutionary agent for change (perhaps best known in the“red” university premise), guerilla warfare (rural as in China, Cuba and many African countries and urban as in the Weathermen-like formations , and its various transformations, creating a second front for those rural struggles, just then, the Vietnamese Revolution, as the central fact of late 20^thcentury revolutionary theory), and most importantly for the discussion here blacks, blacks as an oppressed minority in the United States were, without question, and without questioning, the vanguard of the socialist revolution. And, one way or another, torturously one way or another, constituted a nation, with all that implied for the right of national self-determination, rather than as a segregated caste at the bottom, and an adjunct of the main society.

One would think, given even cursory look at the condition of the international revolutionary movement today, and particularly its American component, that that last premise would have been proved false by history and by reality. Not so. Recently I had occasion to attend a local planning meeting around the question of police harassment and surveillance of basically peaceful anti-war protestors who wanted to take action, rightfully so, to expose this nefarious police activity in a public way. Fair enough, just put together a united front of all those from civil rights advocates, to the peaceful anti-war activists under attack, to the anarchists who right now are taking the brunt of police activity, to any other segment like immigrants, victims of the “war on drugs,” etc. who have come under the police dragnet, set a time, publicize the event(s) and you are off.

Well not so fast, not so fast by a long shot. Apparently, at least in some quarters, some old New Left and some new new left quarters, whites, generic whites with “white skin privilege” (the basic component that made up that meeting) cannot move in their own defense without“waiting” on more oppressed (read: communities of color, but really black and Latinos) to chime in. Therefore no action was taken (except, maybe, more meetings to discuss this “theory”). So the old theories (granted in new clothing) have reared their very hoary heads. And sent me back to the 1960s era books. Particularly to the grandfather of all such theories derived, somewhat unfairly and somewhat haphazardly, from Frantz Fanon’s seminal work, The Wretched Of The Earth. And from there books, books such as legendary Black Panther George Jackson’s Blood In My Eye which took heavily from the revolutionary violence as necessity, and as social cleansing agent aspects of Fanon’s work.

Certainly if one merely observed empirically the thrust of revolutionary activity in the post-World War II period one would have seen vast national liberation struggles of colonial subjects from Algeria (Fanon’s revolution) to Cuba to Vietnam and everywhere in between to become free from the fetters of empire. And see, see in general, the relative decline of revolutionary activity by the Western working classes. Thus Marxism, or the parody of Marxism, was turned on itself to proclaim that new third world forces would create a new type of socialism (one based not on plenty since not frontal assault on the imperial centers after liberation was contemplated for the most part, but rather some ancient forms of societal existence, if any) led by new types of revolutionary organizations not tainted with the smell of sell-out Western and urban-centered communist and socialist parties or their colonial adherents, and creating a “new man”culture. But first the liberation, and the ethos of liberation.

Obviously such theories, based as they were on dismissal of the historic Marxist centrality of the working classes take state power and creating working class forms of economic and social life, could only work as theories of military defeat of the imperial centers by revolutionary declassed intellectuals and lumpenproletariat elements freed from the land in the black ghetto enclaves of America. In short the creation of urban guerilla armies, left to their own devices and not dependent on any correctives from the masses, guided by an ethos of revolutionary violence as cleansing its supporters in the process of knocking out the old order. In short, as well, a variant of the Narodnik theories in the old time19^th century Russian Empire that socialist revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky had to fight against in their time. As the Russian case showed, and as the fate of George Jackson, his heroic younger brother Jonathan (who seriously tried to implement this strategy with his raid on the Marin County courthouse in 1971), and the systematic decimation of the Black Panthers by the American state and its security agencies (aided by their own hubris) verified such self-isolating strategies in the face of passive (or hostile) populations cannot succeed.

The real problem with such lumpen-dependent strategies, borne out over time, and now in re-reading Blood In My Eye , painfully borne out, is that the masses play no, or a passive role, in their liberation with all the distortions that a strategy based on a central military strategy creates. Revolutionary violence is probably, very probably, necessary to overturn American imperial power but the cult of the gun, the cult of the purifying gun is not, and has not, worked in the struggle for a new socialist culture. The most dramatic example from the American left scene as comes shining through here was the fate of the Black Panthers whose best elements (George and Jonathan Jackson, Fred Hampton, etc.) bought into the Fanon substitutionalist revolutionary thesis (the internal black nation theory they got elsewhere including from early American Communist party doctrine on black self-determination as advocated by Harry Haywood and his fellows). And some very good Panthers wound up dead, wound up in jail (and some are still in jail) and wound up cynical for their efforts. Let that example set in as you read George Jackson’s personal political handbook, a book like I said earlier that was very influential in my own early left-wing thinking, and that of the generation of’68.