Once Again, The Voice of The Generation Of '68?- Bob Dylan Unplugged

A YouTube's film clip of Bob Dylan performing "Blowin' In The Wind" in 1963.

CD REVIEW

The Times They Are A-Changing, Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963

In this selection we have some outright folk classics that will endure for the ages like those of his early hero Woody Guthrie have endured. "The Times They are A-Changing" still sounds good today although the generational tensions and the alienation from authorities highlighted there is markedly less now than than in those days-not a good thing, by the way. "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a powerful tale out of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" about the plight of an up against the wall family farmer out on the then hardscrabble prairies (and it has only gotten worst since and Dylan made one of his periodic 'comebacks' doing this song at a Farm Aid concert in the 1980's).

"With God On Our Side" like "Masters of War" is a powerful anti-war song although some of the tensions of the Cold War period in which it was written have gone (only to replaced today by the fears generated by the "war on terrorism'). "Only A Pawn In Their Game" was a powerful expression of rage after the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers. The "Hattie Carroll" song shows Dylan's range by dealing with injustice from a different perspective (and a different class) than "Only A Pawn In Their Game". But with no let up in highlighting blatant discrimination and animus in either case. Finally, in reviewing these early Dylan albums (and some of the later ones, as well) I have noticed that they are not complete without at least one song about lost love, longing or perfidy. Here, there is no exception to that rule with the haunting, pleading voice of "Boots of Spanish Leather".

posted by markin at 10:49 AM

7 Comments:
Kim said...

The problem is that Dylan himself clearly states that Masters of War is not an anti-war song:

Q: Give me an example of a song that has been widely
misinterpreted.

A: Take "Masters Of War." Every time I sing it, someone writes
that it's an antiwar song. But there's no antiwar sentiment in
that song. I'm not a pacifist. I don't think I've ever been one.
If you look closely at the song, it's about what Eisenhower was
saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in
this country. I believe strongly in everyone's right to defend
themselves by every means necessary... you are affected as a
writer and a person by the culture and spirit of the times. I was
tuned into it then, I'm tuned into it now. None of us are immune
to the spirit of the age. It affects us whether we know it or
whether we like it or not.

from http://expectingrain.com/dok/int/2003tour.html

And I think to say that "With God on Our Side" is an anti-war song is reducing the song to something topical. The idea that it is simply an anti-war song really ignores the last verse in the piece regarding Judas Iscariot. Judas Iscariot fought in no war, so then, if this is an anti-war song why is he even in the picture?

I believe it is far less an anti-war song and far more a song about asking the question: what does it mean to believe in God? To me, it's more about asking the question: shouldn't we be on God's side and not He on ours?

THIS question then throws into the spotlight the idea that God is on the side of America and that she is always right. Dylan, it seems to me, is not quite buying into that. None of us should. But he's not an either/or kind of a guy. He's not an "America is all bad or all good" kind. Hattie Carroll bites into two groups, and both come out severly wounded: the racists and their racist application of "justice" AND the liberals who decry injustice but do nothing about it.

7:10 PM
markin said...

When I used the term ‘anti-war’ in relationship to Bob Dylan’s song Masters of War I meant that in a generic sense rather than giving it some specific political or pacific meaning. According to the Dylan quote that Kim cited in her comment there is a tendency, including by Dylan, to equate the terms ‘anti-war’ and ‘pacifist’. I would not give such a narrow meaning to the term ‘anti-war’. In Dylan’s context it is essentially anti-militarism, especially the dramatically American militarism of the time by the Brecht-like phrases that he uses. That concept does not preclude the concept of just wars against the escalation of such militarism. Leftists except probably Quakers, as a rule, subscribe to some form of just war theory. Certainly in my youth the concept of just war meant supporting the struggle of the Vietnamese against the American presence.

One need not go back that far for an example, though. Much closer in time is the current ‘struggle’ by Iraqi forces against the American presence there. Although the situation is definitely murkier than in Vietnam, to the extent that any one is fighting directly against the American presence (as opposed to indiscriminately bombing everything that moves), theirs is an example of just war. Hell, in 2003 the simple act of the Iraqis, with or without Sadaam, defending themselves against the American invasion was an example of a just war. So Kim, you see that ‘anti-war’ is a pretty elastic term and that brother Dylan and I are, after all, not so far away in our idea that everyone has a right to defend themselves. It is a question of whose right to such defense is supported at any given point that is at issue.

After the above rather abstract discussion, let us cut to the chase about whether Masters of War is an ‘anti-war’ song. During the Vietnam War I was involved with a group of active duty anti-Vietnam War G.I.s (Army soldiers, in this case) who faced court-martial for disobeying lawful orders. Those orders being refused were orders to go to Vietnam, a rather serious offense for a soldier. As part of their defense at the court-martial a few of them, when they got on the stand to make statements, started reciting Master of War in order to have it placed in the transcript of trial. The colonels and majors who made up the court-martial board tried to, red-faced with anger, stop them. Those officers, at least, knew what ‘anti-war’ lyrics were when they heard them. Enough said, I think.

11:01 AM
markin said...

The question of whether “With God On Our Side” is an anti-war song is a little more problematic than that of “Masters of War”. I would only comment that one should not get hung up on the ‘god’ part as I consider this more a common political convention of the time in order to get a hearing for your song (a not unimportant consideration, by the way) that is a universalistic appeal to for America to get “on the right side of god”. In the 1960’s, an age wedded to existential concepts, references to god could be as directed to the void as they could to some religious supreme being. Later, as Dylan entertained more religious feelings in his life and in his work that argument might make more sense but certainly not in the early 1960’s. If one did not have a sense of irony then, one was ‘lost’. That ironic sense is why we listened to Dylan and others. They expressed in song things about the world that disturbed us at the time.

What really interests me today about Dylan’s lyrics on this song is how passive they are in relationship to the task that he has presented. In those days, the threat of nuclear annihilation was palpable as things like the Cold War –driven nuclear arms race and the Cuban Missile Crisis made plain. Dylan was apparently entirely willing to let some ultimately ‘just’ god pull the chestnuts out of the fire for us. Alternately, in those days a number of us preferred to take to the streets to organize the fight for nuclear disarmament. “God” could come along if he/she wanted to-no questions asked. Hell, we were so desperate for recruits that Judas Iscariot was welcome if he wanted to turn over a new leaf.

11:12 AM
markin said...

Here are the lyrics to Masters of War and you can make your own judgment about whether it is an anti-war song or not. I have given my opinion above. Markin

Masters Of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

7:31 AM
markin said...

A Voice Of His Generation

Nod To Bob: An Artists’ Tribute To Bob Dylan on his Sixtieth Birthday, various artists, Red House Records, 2001

A musical performer knows that he or she has arrived when they have accumulated enough laurels and created enough songs to be worthy, at least in some record producer eyes, to warrant a tribune album. When they are also alive to accept the accolades as two out of the four of the artists under review are, which is only proper, that is all to the good (this is part of a larger review of tributes to Greg Brown, Bob Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt and Hank Williams). That said, not all tribute albums are created equally. Some are full of star-studded covers, others with lesser lights who have been influenced by the artist that they are paying tribute to. As a general proposition though I find it a fairly rare occurrence, as I noted in a review of the "Timeless" tribute album to Hank Williams, that the cover artist outdoes the work of the original recording artist. With that point in mind I will give my "skinny" on the cover artists here.


It seems hard to believe now both as to the performer as well as to what was being attempted that anyone would take umbrage at a performer using an electric guitar to tell a folk story (or any story for that matter). It is not necessary to go into all the details of what or what did not happen with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 to know that one should be glad, glad as hell, that Bob Dylan continued to listen to his own drummer and carry on a career based on electronic music.

Others have, endlessly, gone on about Bob Dylan’s role as the voice of his generation (and mine), his lyrics and what they do or do not mean and his place in the rock or folk pantheons, or both. I just want to comment on a few songs and cover artists on this 60th birthday album. Overall this Red House Records (a well-known alternate folk tradition recording outfit) production is a true folkies’ tribute to old Bob where the artists while well-known in the folk field probably as not as familiar to the general listener.

Nevertheless several covers stick out: John Gorka’s rendition of the longing that pervades “Girl Of The North Country" is fine, as is the desperate longing of Martin Simpson’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather”. Greg Brown does a rousing version of “Pledging My Time” and the long time folk singer Rosalie Sorrels does a beautifully measured version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”. The finale is appropriately done by old time folkie, and early day Dylan companion on the folk scene Ramblin’ Jack Elliot with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” Solid work here. Kudos.

3:32 PM
markin said...

In the interest of completeness concerning my earleir evaluation of the Dylan songs "Masters Of War" and "With Good On Our Side" on his early albums here are the lyrics to the latter song.

Interestingly, except for changing the Cold War theme against the Russians then to the so-called War On Terror now against seemingly every Moslem that any American presidential administration can get it hands on (Bush in Iraq and Afgahnistan) and Obama (same and, maybe, Pakistan) these lyrics "speak" to me today. The word they speak is hubris, American hubris, that the rest of the world has had reason to fear, and rightly so. What do they "speak" to you?

"With God On Our Side"

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

The Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns on their hands
And God on their side.

The First World War, boys
It came and it went
The reason for fighting
I never did get
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

11:32 AM
markin said...
Guest Commentary

I have mentioned in my review of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home; The Legacy Of Bob Dylan" (see archives) that Dylan's protest/social commentary lyrics dovetailed with my, and others of my generation's, struggle to make sense of world at war (cold or otherwise)and filled with injustices and constricting values. Here are the lyrics of three songs-"Blowin' In The Wind", "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Like A Rolling Stone" that can serve as examples of why we responded to his messages the way we did. Kudos Bob.


The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Blowin' In The Wind

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Copyright ©1962; renewed 1990 Special Rider Music


Like A Rolling Stone

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Copyright ©1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Kenneth Edward Jackson’s “Masters Of War”

A YouTube film clip cover bt Pearl Jam of Bob Dylan's classic anti-war song, Masters of War.
Masters Of War-Bob Dylan
Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this space, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger, most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch had a nuanced story that brought him down to the ravines. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, is written under that same sign as the earlier pieces.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the genesis of this story follows that of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” story previously posted (and now is developing into a series).The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Kenneth Edward Jackson’s short, poignant, and hell for once, half-hopeful story, a soldier born under the thumb of the masters of war:
********
Hell, you know I didn’t have to go to Vietnam, no way. Yah, my parents, when I got drafted, put some pressure on me to “do my duty” like a lot of the neighborhood guys in my half-Irish, half- French- Canadian up the old New Hampshire mill town of Nashua. Maybe, you’ve heard of that town since you said you were from up there in Olde Saco, Maine. Hell, they were the same kind of towns. Graduate from high school, go to work in the mills if they were still open, go into the service if you liked, or got drafted, come home, get married, have kids and let the I Ching cycle run its course over and over again. You laughed so you know what I mean. Yah, that kind of town, and tight so if you went off the rails, well it might not be in the Nashua Telegraph but it sure as hell got on the Emma Jackson grapevine fast enough, except if it was about her three boys. Then the “shames” silence of the grave. Nothing, not a peep, no dirty linen aired in public.

See though I was a little different. I went to college at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham, studied political science, and figured to become either a lawyer or teacher, maybe both if things worked out. So Emma and Hank (my father) were proud as peacocks when I graduated from there in 1967 and then announced I was going to Boston University to pick up a Master’s degree in Education and be on my way. That’s where I met Bettina, my ex-wife, who was studying for her Master’s in Government at the time but was mainly holding up a big share of the left-wing anti-war universe that was brewing at that time, especially as all hell broke loose in Vietnam when in early 1968 the North Vietnamese and their southern supporters ran rampaging through the south. That’s around the time that LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States at the time) got cold feet and decided to call it quits and retire to some podunk Texas place.

Bettina, a girl from New York City, and not just New York City but Manhattan and who went to Hunter College High School there before embarking on her radical career , first at the University of Wisconsin and then at B.U. was the one who got me “hip,” or maybe better “half-hip” to the murderous American foreign policy in Vietnam. Remind me to tell you how we met and stuff like that sometime but for now let’s just say she was so smart, so different, did I tell you she was Jewish, so full of life and dreams, big dreams about a better world that I went head over heels for her and her dreams carried me (and us) along for a while. [Brother Jackson did tell me later the funny details of their relationship but, as I always used to say closing many of my columns, that is a story for another day-JLB.]

Bettina was strictly SDS, big-time SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, 1960s version. Look it up on Wikipedia for more background-JLB), and not just some pacifist objector to the war, she really thought she was helping to build “the second front” in aid of the Vietnamese here in America, or as it was put at the time Amerikkka, and I went along with her, or half-way along really in her various actions, marches, and rallies. Later, 1969 later when SDS blew up into three separate and warring factions she went with the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) the group most committed to that idea of the second front. But that is all inside stuff and not really what was important in 1968. The summer of 1968 when I got, via my parents, notice that my friends and neighbors at the Nashua Draft Board had called my name. And me with no excuses, no draft excuses, none.

So that is when things got dicey, my parents pulling me to do my family, my Nashua, my New Hampshire, my United States, hell, my mother pulled out even my Catholic duty (my father, a deeply patriotic man, in the good sense, and a proud Marine who saw plenty of action in the Pacific in World War II, but kept quiet about it, just rolled his eyes on that one). Bettina, and her friends, and really, some of them my friends too, were pulling me to run away to Canada (she would follow), refuse to be inducted (and thus subject to arrest and jail time), or head underground (obviously here with connections that may have rivaled, may have I say, my mother’s neighborhood grapevine). In the end though I let myself be drafted and was inducted in the fall of 1968.

Bettina was mad, mad as hell, but not as much for the political embarrassment as you would think, but because she, well, as she put it, the first time she said it “had grown very fond of me,” and more than that she had her own self-worth needs, so we were secretly married just before I was inducted(actually not so much secretly as privately, very privately, her parents, proudly Jewish and heavily committed Zionists and my parents, rosary-heavy Catholics who were a little slow, Vatican Council II slow, on the news that Jews were not Christ-killers and the like would not have approved ).

I will spare the Vietnam details, except to say I did my thirteen month tour (including a month for R&R, rest and recreation) from early 1969 to early 1970, a period when the talk of draw-down of the American troop commitment was beginning to echo through the camps and bases in Vietnam and guys were starting to take no chances, no overt chances of getting KIA (killed in action) or anything like that. I, actually saw very little fighting since as a college grad, and lucky, and they needed someone, I was a company clerk and stayed mainly at the base camp. But every night I fired many rounds any time I heard a twig break on guard duty or in perimeter defense. And more than a few times we had bullets and other ammo flying into our position. So no I was no hero, didn’t want to be, I just wanted to get back home to Bettina in one piece. And I did.

But something snapped in Vietnam, sometime in having had to confront my own demons, my own deep-seeded fears and coming out not too badly, and to confront through my own sights the way my government was savagely conducting itself in Vietnam (and later in other parts of the world) that made me snap when I came back to the “real world.” I had only a few months left and so I was assigned to a holding company down at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And all I had to do was stay quiet, do some light silly busy work paper work duty b.s., have a few beers at the PX and watch a few movies. Nada.

I guess Bettina really did win out in the end, the stuff she said about war, about American imperialism being some two-headed vulture, about class struggle and guys like me being cannon fodder was kind of abstract when she said it at some meeting at B.U., or shouted herself silly at some rally on Boston Common or got herself arrested a few times at draft boards (ironic, huh).But after ‘Nam I knew she was on to something. Better, I was on to something. So, without telling Bettina, my parents, or anybody, the day I was to report to that holding company at Fort Dix I did. But at that morning formation, I can still see the tears rolling down my face, I reported in civilian clothes with a big peace button on my shirt and yelling for all to hear-“Bring The Troops Home.” I was tackled by a couple of soldiers, lifer-sergeants I found out later, handcuffed and brought to the Fort Dix stockade.

A couple of days later my name was called to go the visitors’ room and there to my surprise were my parents, my mother crying, my father stoic as usual but not mad, and Bettina. The Army had contacted my parents after my arrest to inform them of my situation. And Bettina, in that strange underground grapevine magic that always amazed me, found out in that way, had called them in Nashua to say who she was (no, not about us being married, just friends, they never did know). They had offered to bring her down to Fort Dix and they had come down together. What a day though. My parents, for one of very few times that I can remember said, while they didn’t agree with me fully, that they were proud and Nashua be damned. They were raising money on their home to get me the best civilian lawyer they could. And they did.

Of course for Bettina a soldier- resister case was just the kind of activity that was gaining currency in the anti-war movement in 1969 and 1970 and she was crazy to raise heaven and hell for my defense(including money, and money from her parents too although they also did not know we were married, and maybe they still don’t). She moved to hard town Trenton not too far from Fort Dix to be closer to the action as my court-martial was set. She put together several vigils, marches, rallies and fundraisers (including one where my father, a father defending his own, spoke and made the crowd weep in his halting New England stoic way).

The court-martial, a general court martial so I faced some serious time, was held in early 1970. As any court proceedings will do, military or civilian, they ran their typical course, which I don’t want to go into except to say that I was convicted of the several charges brought against me (basically, as I told the guys at VVAW later, for being ugly in the military without a uniform-while on duty) , sentenced to a year of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth out in Kansas, reduced in rank to private ( I was a specialist, E-4), forfeited most of my pay, and was to be given an undesirable discharge (not dishonorable).

I guess I do want to say one last thing about the trial thought. As any defendant has the right to do at trial, he or she can speak in their own defense. I did so. What I did, turning my back to the court-martial judges and facing the audience, including that day my parents and Bettina, was to recite from memory Bob Dylan’s Masters of War. I did so in my best stoic (thanks, dad) Nashua, New Hampshire voice. The crowd either heckled me or cheered (before being ordered to keep quiet) but I had my say. So when you write this story put that part in. Okay? [See lyrics above-JLB]

So how come I am down here in some Los Angeles hobo jungle just waiting around to be waiting around. Well I did my time, all of it except good time, and went back home, first to Nashua but I couldn’t really stay there ( a constant “sore” in the community and worry to my parents) and then to Boston where I fit in better. Bettina? Well, my last letter from her in Leavenworth was that she was getting ready to go underground, things with her group (a group later associated with the Weather Underground) had gotten into some stuff a little dicey and she would not be able to communicate for a while. That was the last I heard from her; it has been a few years now.

I understand, and I feel happy for her. We were fond of each other but I was thinking in the stockade that a “war marriage” was not made to last, not between us anyway. Then after a few months in Boston, doing a little or this and a little of that, I drifted out here where things might pop up a little (it’s tough even with millions of people hating the war, hating it until it finally got over a couple of years ago to have an undesirable discharge hanging around your neck. I’m not sorry though, no way, and if I do get blue sometime I just recite that Masters Of War thing and I get all welled up inside).

I hear the new president, Jimmy Carter, is talking about amnesty for Vietnam guys with bad discharges and maybe I will check into it if it happens. Then maybe I will go to law school and pick up my life up again. Until then though I feel like I have got to stick with my “band of brothers” who got broken up, broken up bad by that damn war. Hey, sometimes they ask me to recite that Masters Of War thing over some night fire.

[The last connection I had with Kenneth Edward Jackson was in late 1979 when he sent a short note to me saying he had gotten his discharge upgraded, was getting ready to start law school and that he was publicly getting re-married to some non-political gal from upstate New York . Still no word from Bettina though.-JLB]

***Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks, (1944-1965) R.I.P.

Markin comment:
Private First Class, United States Army, Jimmy Jacks would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown stranger’s name? Well, here is another clue Jimmy J. (his local moniker), a few years older than I am, was the first kid from my growing-up working- class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreally and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy J’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth, and in disproportionate numbers its working-class and minority youth, into.

My first dozen years or so of life were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day, or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy Jacks all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working- class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos in no way was superior to “the projects” except that the tiny houses were, for the most part, single dwellings. And I really only knew Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, which is for sure.

See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies.” Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working-class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent immigrants just off the boat (or plane) or older ones who refused to become vanilla Americans, that term signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone, of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.

And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine-gun, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical "wild one" a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.

So who was this Jimmy? No a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes, other better left unsaid purposes), tee-shirt in season (and out). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh yah, he was a tenth-grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, drop-outs were a dime a dozen, including my own brother). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Employment (in order to get those wheels, jesus, don't you guys know nothing): unknown

That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor and the demands of the American military linked up. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known offense, real or made-up, wound up at his door. Some of it rightly so, as it turned out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate. Well, as anyone, including me, in own my very small-bore, short-lived criminal career can testify to when you tempt the fates long enough those damn sisters will come out and get you. The long and short of it is was that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.

Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working -class and minority youth to sign up for military service even in ill-fated war time because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this “economic draft” in a different sense although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. I just don’t have the data or anecdotal evidence to present on the issue. Jimmy, however, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison nevertheless) or the Army. Jimmy, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother).

Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy. Of course, his mother also came into high regard for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once he had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated something like a state function. The shawlies, in any case were out in force. Jimmy J, a belated R.I.P.

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star- Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

As a member in good standing of the generation of ‘68 I have spent much cyber-ink talking about this and that “seeking a newer world” experiment we tried, with the emphasis on “tried”, back in the day, back in the 1960s day under the sign of the 18^th century English poet William Wordworth’s response to the early stirrings of the French Revolution- “to be young was very heaven.”  And while, in the end, we were defeated by the monsters of the prevailing mores of American society we tried to rock the boat. And politics aside nowhere was this culturally more exploited by us that in our music, our second-wave rock music (Elvis, Chuck, Bo, Buddy and Jerry Lee being the first wave back in the 1950s).

Some argued, argued strenuously in the heat of 1960s chaos that “music was the revolution.”  Somehow, they argued, we would either withdraw from mainstream society and search for the gates of Eden in our own way, maybe in some Utah of our minds, or the music would drive all good-thinking youth tribesmen (tribe’s people?) to overwhelm that dangerous mainstream and bring forth that “newer world” we were so desperately seeking. Well, no, no it wasn’t, music wasn’t the revolution, but who could blame anybody at the time for thinking that lofty thought.  Nowhere was this sentiment, or parts of it, more pronounced that in the garages and family rooms of America, of suburban America when guys, and it was mainly guys then, tried to form their own rock and roll bands, especially in the wake of the “British invasion (the Beatles and The Stones, mainly)”. Formed rock and roll bands to become famous, and if not famous as was the fate of most bands that were formed then, to act as a magnet for, what else, girls.

And funny to think it could have just as easily been guys from Ames, Iowa or Winnemucca, Nevada trying for the brass ring amid the upheavals all around including the down-pressing pressing down hard on us war in Vietnam, the black liberation struggle south then north, the budding women’s and gay struggles, and our very publicly declared war, our own civil war, against parental authority. That sentiment moreover even seeped down in the crevices of society, down among my people, the working poor, as guys, corner boy guys with a little musical talent and big, big dreams saw that as a way to avoid the factory life signed, sealed and tattooed on their brains.       

Naturally, Ames, Winnemucca or Hullsville, my growing up hometown, as always with garage, family room and back of the school gym bands, there were struggles around who was, and who was not, going to be “on the bus”, going to be in the band. And what level of commitment those members were willing to pursue to make it to the “bigs.” Other issues that came up as well were how much hard time in lonely low-down joints were the band members willing to do to “pay their dues” and the big question in the break-out sixties about whether to be a cover band or concentrate, like the Beatles and the Stones, on writing their own music and not depend of Tin Pan Alley stuff, drivel really when the deal went down.    

Of course no 1960s coming-of-age reminiscence could avoid the generational conflicts as back-drop to muddy the cultural waters that a lot of us faced. You know-“what are you going to do with your life after this momentary “live free” obsession, son or daughter”-what do you mean you are dropping out of school after I have just paid X tuition”- what are you going to do about that damn draft notice”-what do you mean you’re going to just live with him, or her-well you get the drift. And as well the changing boy-girl thing in the post-pill world, the beginning of women striking out on their own guys be damned, drugs, more drugs, and of course more rock and roll. That is what it was like for a minute back then through as seen through the eyes of those who were pioneers, or just confused and “winging it”  And sometimes making great, if unheralded, music as well. Yah, if you listen to some of that stuff then you might know what I meant when I said “to be young was very heaven.”     

Recently I reviewed one of those 1960s memory mist film sagas, Not Fade Away, and I mentioned my nostalgic response to the film to my old friend, Peter Paul Markin, from up the road in North Adamsville, whom I met one summer night in 1965 I think, but it was summer and night for sure. The “for sure” part is due to the fact that I met him at the Surf Ballroom in my hometown while we were at a Friday night dance that featured the Rockin’ Ramrods, a local group that did covers of many 1960s rock groups like the Stones, the Kingsmen, and others. And that band was a band very much like the band in Not Fade Away.

Well, those remarks I made to Peter Paul brought to his mind the fate of Billy Bradley, a guy from his growing up neighborhood in the Adamsville housing projects, a guy who had plenty of ability and talent to put together a rock band and maybe make the big time. He even started to pronounce himself, trade puff himself up as the “President of Rock ‘n’ Roll” for a time. Yeah, as Peter Paul also said maybe Billy could have broken out, him and his corner boys who travelled the small-time band circuit with him, if he could have broken from that occasional armed robbery he pulled to get funds for his various music projects. A career choice that eventually led him to some serious time in the state pen, and later a fate face down in some southern hick town after trying to rob a White Hen variety store. Jesus. So, no, not everybody, make it out, made it out into the rock and roll night, or lived to tell about it. Let Peter Paul tell you one episode of his bouts with one Billy Bradley out in the be-bop 1950s night:                        

I hate Elvis, I love Elvis,” I can still hear the echo of my old “the projects” boy, William James Bradley, also known as Billie, Billie from the hills, a mad demon of a kid and my best friend down in the elementary school. We grew apart after a while, and I will tell you why in a minute, but for a long time, a long kid time long, Billie, Billie of a hundred dreams, Billie of fifty (at least) screw-ups made me laugh and made my day when things were tough, like they almost always were, at my beat down broke down family house.

You know fifty some years later Billie was right. We hated Elvis, especially at that time when all the girls, the young girls got weak-kneed over him and he made the older girls (and women, some mothers even) sweat and left no room for ordinary mortal boys, “the projects boys” most of all, on their “dream” card. And most especially, hard as we tried, for brown-haired, tow-headed, blue-eyed ten, eleven and twelve year old boys who didn’t know how to dance, or sneer. We both got pissed off at my brother because, he looked very much like Elvis and although he had no manners, and no time for girls, they were all following him. Christ there really is no justice in this wicked old world.

And we loved Elvis for giving us, at least as far as we knew then, our own music, our own "jump' and our own jail-break from the tired old stuff we heard on the radio and television but did not ‘”speak” to us. And for the songs that he left behind. Not the goofy, Tin Pan Alley or somewhere like that, inspired “happy” music that went along with his mostly maligned, and rightly so, films but the stuff from the Sun Records days, the stuff from when he was from hunger. That, as we also from hunger, was like a siren call to break-out and then we caught his act on television and that was that. I probably walk “funny”, knees and hips out of whack, today from trying way back then to pour a third-rate imitation of his moves into my body to impress the girls.

But enough of Elvis’ place in the pre-teen and teen rock pantheon this is after all about Billie, and Elvis’ twisted spell on the poor boy. Now you know Billie, or you should, from another story, a story about Bo Diddley and how Billie wanted to, as a change of pace break from the Elvis rut create his own “style.” Well, in hard, hard post-World War II Northern white "the projects" racial animosity poor unknowing Billie got blasted away by one of the older, more knowing boys about wanted to emulate a n----r for his troubles.

That sent Billie, Billie from the hills, back to Elvis pronto. See, Billie was desperate to impress the girls way before I was aware of them, or their charms. Half, on some days, three-quarters of our conversations (I won’t say monologues because I did get a word in edgewise every once in a while when Billie got on one of his rants) revolved around doing this or that, something legal something not, to impress the girls. And that is where the “hate” part mentioned above comes in. Billie believed, and he might still believe it today if he was alive, that if only he could approximate Elvis’s looks, look, stance, and substance that all the girls would be flocking to him.

Needless to say, such an endeavor required, requires money, dough, kale, cash, moola whatever you want to call it. And what twelve year old project boys (that’s the age time of this story, about late 1957, early 1958) didn’t have, and didn’t have in abundance was any of that do-re-mi. And no way to get it from missing parents, messed up parents, or just flat out poor parents. Billie’s and mine were the later, poor as church mice. No that‘s not right because church mice (in the way that I am using it, and as we used it back then to signify the respectable poor who “touted” their Catholic pious poorness as a badge of honor in this weasely old world) would not do, would not think about, would not even breathe the same air of what we were about to embark on. A life of crime, kid stuff crime but I'll leave that to the readers judgment.

See, on one of Billie’s rants he got the idea in his head, and, maybe, it got planted there by something that he read about Elvis (Christ, he read more about that guy that he did about anybody else once he became an acolyte), that if he had a bunch of rings on all his fingers the girls would give him a tumble (a tumble in those days being a hard kiss on the lips for about twelve seconds or “copping” a little feel, and if I have to explain that last in more detail you had better just move on). But see, also Billie’s idea is that if he has all those rings, especially for a projects boy then it will make his story that has set to tell easier. And that story is none other than he wrote to Elvis (possible) and spoke man to man about his situation (improbable) and Elvis, Elvis the king, Elvis from nowhere Mississippi like we were from the nowhere projects, Elvis bleeding heart, had sent him these rings to give him a start in life (outrageously impossible.) Christ, I don’t believe old Billie came up with that story even now when I am a million years world-weary.

But first you need the rings and as the late honorable bank robber, Willie Sutton, said about robbing banks-that’s where the money is-old Billie, blessed, beatified Billie, figured out, and figured out all by himself, that if you want to be a ring stealer that you better go to the jewelry store because that is where the rings are. The reader, and rightly so, now, might ask where was his best buddy during this time and why was he not offering wise counsel about the pitfalls of crime and the virtues of honesty and incorruptibility. Well, when Billie got off on his rant you just waited to see what played out but the real reason was, hell, maybe I could get a ring for my ring-less fingers and be on my way to impress the girls too. I think they call it, or could call it, aiding and abetting.

But enough of that superficial moralizing. Let’s get to the jewelry store, the best one in the downtown of the working class town we were appendaged to (literally so because it was located on a one road in and out peninsula). We walked a couple of miles to get there, plotting all the way. Bingo the Acme Jewelry Store (or some name like that) jumped up at us. Billie’s was as nervous as a colt and I was not far behind, although on this caper I am just the “stooge”, if that. I’m to wait outside to see if John Law comes by. Okay, Billie, good luck. And strangely enough his luck is good that day, and many days after, although those days after were not ring days. That day though his haul was five rings. Five shaky rings, shaky hands Billie, as we walked, then started running, away from the down town area. When we got close to home we stopped near the beach where we lived to see up close what the rings looked like. Billie yelled, “Damn.” And why did he yell that word. Well, apparently in his terror (his word to me) at getting caught he just grabbed what was at hand. And what were at hand were five women’s rings. Now, how are you going to impress girls, ten, eleven or twelve year old girls, even if as naïve as us, and maybe more so, that Elvis is you bosom buddy and you are practically his only life-line adviser with five women’s rings? Damn, damn is right.

P.S. It took a few years and some sense getting knocked into me, and a funny trip to the local library where I squirreled up and started reading books to break from the Billie, Billie from the hills habit, and his habits. We drifted away mainly because he was “hot” and I was just getting into being “cool”, or thinking I was. You read above about his fate. Damn, damn is right.

 

 

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star?
-The Byrds

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star?
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time
and learn how to play
And with your hair swung right
And your pants too tight
It's gonna be all right

Then it's time to go downtown
Where the agent man won't let you down
Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware
And in a week or two
If you make the charts
The girls'll tear you apart

The price you paid for your riches and fame
Was it all a strange game?
You're a little insane
The money, the fame, the public acclaim
Don't forget what you are
You're a rock 'n' roll star!

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 5, 1879-1890

06 August 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 5, 1879-1890

Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, coined the term "Veiled Protectorate." Painting by John Singer Sargent / National Portrait Gallery, London / Wikimedia Commons.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 5: 1879-1890 period -- Britain rules Egypt under 'Veiled Protectorate.'

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 6, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

As Selma Botman noted in Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952, by 1876 “in essence France and Britain began to control Egypt’s economy,” although Egypt continued to be officially part of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire.

So, not surprisingly, in September 1881, an Egyptian “military officer and Egyptian patriot, Ahmed Urabi, led an anti-government, anti-foreign revolt, directing his protest against both the Turkish pashas, who controlled most civil, military, and social posts...and the Europeans,” according to the same book. And a combined UK and French naval force of gunboats then arrived near Alexandria, Egypt on May 19, 1882, and anchored offshore.

In response, “inflamed popular resentment...exploded in Alexandria on June 11 [1882] in anti-European riots that killed over 2,000 Egyptians and 50 Europeans,” according to Jason Thompson’s History of Egypt. The French government’s naval force then sailed away from Alexandria. But the UK gunboats remained anchored offshore and shelled Alexandria and its residents on July 11, 1882; and, in August 1882, UK troops invaded the Suez Canal Zone and began the UK government’s military occupation of Egypt.

Ahmed Urabi’s troops were defeated on September 13, 1882, by the UK troops, Urabi was exiled to Ceylon/Sri Lanka by the UK government, and the son of Khedive Ismail, Khedive Tewfik (whom the UK government had pressured the Turkish sultan to name in 1879 as Egypt’s local ruler) was allowed to officially govern Egypt until 1892 as a UK puppet, until he was succeeded as the formal Egyptian ruler by Abbas Hilmy II.

But, in actuality, according to The Rough Guide To Egypt, “from 1883 to 1907, Egypt was controlled by the British Consul General, Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, who coined the term `Veiled Protectorate’ to describe the relationship between the two countries.”

A History of Egypt described in the following way how UK imperialism and Lord Cromer operated their “Veiled Protectorate” in Egypt after it was occupied militarily by UK troops in 1882:

Cromer’s official position in Egypt was...British consul general, yet he wielded power that many kings and sultans might have envied. His authority rested on no formal basis. Legally, Egypt was still a province in the Ottoman Empire... The khedive still governed nominally through his ministers, who exercised control over their ministries. In fact, the khedive could be controlled; he knew he owed his throne to the British, and alongside each of the government ministers was a British "adviser" whose advice carried the force of command.

Cromer referred to the arrangement as the "dummy-Minister-plus-English-adviser" system of government... Ministers soon learned that they would lose their posts if they paid no heed to their advisers. The long-serving prime minister during Cromer’s rule, Mustafa Fahmi, was noted for his subservience to the British. Cromer’s position was further strengthened by the presence of a British military garrison nearly 10,000 strong, while the Royal Navy could appear at Alexandria or Suez at any time, and the police forces in the cities were under European command...

The British record in education was atrocious in Egypt... He imposed tuition fees... The British never spent more than 3 percent of the budget on education. They ignored demands for a national university, fearing it would become a center of nationalism…

As Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 observed, the UK “occupied Egypt for both financial and strategic reasons, gaining a decisive voice in all areas of Egyptian life” and the UK imperialist “occupation” of Egypt “lasted until 1956 in various forms.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 3, 1805-1849

21 July 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 3, 1805-1849

Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ottoman ruler of Egypt. Painting by Auguste Couder, 1841 / Wikimedia Commons.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 3: 1805-1849 period -- The autocratic rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

Nearly two years after Muhammad Ali began ruling the Ottoman Turkish Empire’s Egyptian province, UK troops landed in Alexandria in March, 1807, and attempted to establish a permanent military base in Egypt.

But “when the British sought to extend their control...the result was fiasco” and “many British soldiers were killed” by Muhammad Ali’s troops; and the remaining UK troops in Egypt were compelled to withdraw from Egypt after September 1807, according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

Then, according to the same book, in 1811 Muhammad Ali ended the remaining influence of the neo-Mamluk military elite in Egyptian society in the following way:

...Muhammad Ali held a celebration in the Citadel [royal palace] on Mar. 1, 1811... He invited all the principal people of Cairo, including nearly 500 Mamluk amirs. Afterward, as the Mamluks were leaving through the Citadel’s descending Interior Road...they found the exit locked... Sharpshooters [of Muhammad Ali’s loyal troops] appeared on the walls and shot them dead. Another thousand were hunted down and killed in Cairo over the next few days...

Egyptian Pasha Muhammad Ali next confiscated “the vast estates” of the slain Mamluks and the 20 percent of all Egyptian agricultural land that was owned by the religious endowments, or waqfs, and revised the Egyptian tax structure, so that “almost all of Egypt’s land came under state ownership” and he “could decree what to plant, then purchase the produce at a low price set by the state and export it for cash,” according to A History of Egypt.

Instead of just subsistence crops being grown on Egyptian agricultural land, more cash crops that earned foreign exchange -- like the cotton that became Egypt’s major export crop in the years after it was introduced in Egypt in 1821 -- were now grown on the state-owned land; and Muhammad Ali used the foreign exchange income to attempt to modernize Egypt’s economy by “building...factories and canals,” according to The Rough Guide To Egypt.

Muhammad Ali’s public works program of constructing 32 canals, 10 dikes, and 41 dams and barrages with conscripted Egyptian workers brought large amounts of new agricultural land into cultivation. In addition, as a result of his public works program of building factories in Egypt that produced textile, sugar, munitions, ships, and other manufactured goods, “Egypt became the leading industrial nation in the eastern Mediterranean” by the late 1830s, according to A History of Egypt.

By also conscripting Egyptian peasants into his military force, Muhammad Ali increased its size to 250,000 men and used his military force to occupy Sudan in the 1820, and “Egypt became the major military power in the eastern Mediterranean, making Muhammad Ali much stronger than his nominal master, the sultan in Istanbul,” according to the same book.

But after “the pasha became impatient with recognizing the sultan as his master” and “decided to move for independence” for Egypt in 1838, “a British force anchored at Alexandria” in 1839 and compelled him to reduce the size of his Egyptian military and no longer seek Egyptian independence from the Ottoman Empire of Turkey (which the UK government then supported), according to A History of Egypt.

Large numbers of Egyptians who were also drafted to work on Muhammad Ali’s various public works projects, however, lost their lives while working on the canal construction projects. As A History of Egypt, recalled:

One of the canals, the Mahmudiya, ran for 72 kilometers between Alexandria and the western branch of the Nile. It was constructed between 1817 and 1820 with...labor of as many as 300,000 conscripted workers (of whom between 12,000 and 100,000 are said to have died, according to widely varying accounts)...

And the same book also reported how large numbers of Egyptians suffered under Muhammad Ali’s undemocratic rule and his “modernization” policies:

Muhammad Ali’s accomplishments came at a heavy price to the Egyptian people. The degree of control that the pasha exerted in Egypt was probably unprecedented since ancient times... Every productive strip of land, every palm tree, every donkey, everything that could represent value was assessed and taxed at the maximum it could bear... The people complained incessantly, but they obeyed, for the pasha’s authority was absolute. A simple horizontal motion of his hand meant execution...

Although an “outbreak of bubonic plague in 1834-35 carried away as much as a third of Cairo’s population” during the years that Muhammad Ali undemocratically ruled people in Egypt, according to A History of Egypt, some improvement in Egypt’s health care system was achieved by the end of this pasha’s rule in 1848 (when he became insane) and his subsequent death in August 1849.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 2, 641-1805

11 July 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 2, 641-1805

Egyptian Mamluk warriors serving in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Image from The Lost Treasure Chest.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 2: 641-1805 period -- Egypt under many rulers.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

Egypt became part of the Islamic Arab Empire in 641 when Arab armies replaced Egypt’s Byzantine Empire rulers “thanks in part to aid from the indigenous [Egyptian] population of Coptic Christians,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 by Selma Botman.

But the indigenous Coptic Christians in Egypt eventually became a religious minority, as Egypt was Arabized and Islamized. And by 834 Egypt was an autonomous state of the Baghdad-based Islamic Arab Empire, which generally permitted it to be ruled by a locally-based elite of Turkish ethnic background.

In 969, however, the religious leaders of a Tunisia-based Shiite Islamic sect, the Fatimids, moved their troops into Egypt from western North Africa, started construction of the new city of Cairo and began ruling Egypt until 1171.

Between 1171 and 1250, Sunni Islamic religious leaders next ruled Egypt. And then, between 1250 and 1517, the Mamluks -- a military dynasty of former soldier-slaves of mostly ethnic Turkish or Caucasian origin -- were the rulers of the autonomous state of Egypt. And it was during the period when the Mamluks controlled Egypt that the bubonic plague spread from Europe to Egypt in 1347; and, by 1349, the plague had caused the death of 33 percent of the people who had lived in Egypt in 1347 and damaged the economic base of the Mamluk regime.

Then, in the 15th century, “another serious blow to the Mamluk economy came...when the Portuguese found the ocean route around Africa, providing Europe with a direct connection to India, the Far East, and the east coast of Africa, disrupting the Mamluks’ lucrative Red Sea trade and diminishing the importance of Egypt as a commercial connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea,” according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt.

But after the better organized, more disciplined, more numerous, and better-armed troops of Turkey’s Ottoman Dynasty defeated the Mamluk forces in the August 1516 Battle of Marj Dabiq in Syria and marched into Egypt in 1517, Egypt became a subject Arab province of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire for most of the next 400 years.

Yet as The Rough Guide To Egypt observed, “even after the Turkish conquest, the Mamluks remained powerful figures in the administration of what was now a province of the Ottoman Empire” and “the Mamluk army continued to grow with the import of Caucasian slaves.”

According, to A History of Egypt:

One can speak of a neo-Mamluk system that prevailed within Ottoman Egypt... The neo-Mamluks...quickly reinserted themselves into Egypt’s overall military establishment and again became the most powerful force in the land..... The Ottomans basically kept the commanding heights under their supervision, but left many administrative tasks to…religious endowments, or waqfs… About 20 percent of the land was religiously held by the end of the 18th century. The Mamluks…continued to control much of the rest.”

As a province of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was exploited as a “breadbasket” and a “land tax” source for the Turkish imperial government’s treasury; and “Egypt also provided a valuable base for Ottoman operations in the Red Sea,” according to the same book.

But between July 1798 and September 1801, Napoleon’s French troops temporarily occupied Egypt until UK troops and Ottoman troops jointly recaptured Egypt for Turkey’s Ottoman Empire in 1801. A new local ruler, a Turkish military officer named Muhammad Ali, was then appointed as viceroy/governor/pasha of Egypt by the Turkish government in Istanbul in July, 1805; and the royal dynasty in Egypt which he founded governed Egypt -- usually as puppet rulers for foreign imperialists -- until 1952.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part I, 525 BC-641 AD

02 July 2013

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part I, 525 BC-641 AD

Cleopatra VII and her son Caesarion at the Temple of Dendera. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 1: 525 BC to 641 AD period -- From the Persian invasion to the Byzantium Empire

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2013

[As literally millions demonstrate in Egypt in an attempt to bring down the Mohammed Morsi government, and as the Egyptian military appears poised to take action against the Morsi regime, we begin Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt." Also see Feldman's "hidden history" of Texas series on The Rag Blog.]

Most people in the United States now realize that most Egyptians want to see their society politically and economically democratized. But most people in the U.S. may not know much about the history of the over 83 million people who currently live in Egypt, beginning in 525 BC when the country was invaded by the army of the Persian Empire, led by Cambyses II, the son of Cyrus II (“Cyrus the Great”).

As The Rough Guide To Egypt observed, “the Persian invasion of 525 BC began…rule by foreigners” in Egypt that essentially lasted until 1952.

Despite a number of unsuccessful revolts by people in Egypt against their Persian rulers during the next two centuries, “Egypt remained under Persian control until 332 BC, when their entire empire succumbed to Alexander [the Great]" of Greece, according to The Rough Guide To Egypt.

And according to Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt, “so detested was the Persian yoke that when Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt, he was welcomed as a savior.” Initially, there was no resistance by people in Egypt to the rule of Alexander and -- following Alexander’s death in 323 BC -- to the rule of the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty of General Ptolemy Soter I and his descendants between 322 and 30 BC.

But according to A History of Egypt, “the population of Ptolemaic Egypt consisted of a comparatively small number of relatively privileged Greeks superimposed onto the great masses of native Egyptians, most of whom lived around subsistence level but whose back-breaking labor supported Ptolemaic society and government;” and, not surprisingly, “Ptolemaic rule…became highly resented over time.”

As the same book recalled:

There were numerous rebellions, especially during the second and third centuries BC. Most may have resulted from economic desperation or lax central control because of dynastic infighting, but some…expressed a longing for the glorious past when Egyptians ruled Egyptians. A distinctly "nationalistic" literature appeared… Government officials extorted everything they could from the peasantry, frequently leaving them insufficient means to sustain themselves. Famine, inflation, banditry, and flight are all too abundantly attested during the later Ptolemaic Period…

The last representative of the Ptolemaic Dynasty to rule Egypt, Cleopatra VII, was made queen by the Roman General Julius Caesar after his troops killed her brother and rival for the Egyptian throne, Ptolemy XIII, in 47 BC.

But, according to A History of Egypt, Cleopatra was “so unpopular that Caesar permanently stationed three legions in Egypt ” and “when he departed in spring 47 BC to new conquests...Cleopatra was pregnant.” Then, after Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cleopatra formed a similar political/sexual alliance with Mark Antony.

But, after Octavius Caesar’s Roman forces defeated Antony and Cleopatra’s forces in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium (and both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide), Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire in 30 BC.

As part of the pre-partitioned Roman Empire until 395 AD, Egypt was exploited as the grain-producing “breadbasket” of Rome; and during the 30 BC to 395 AD period of rule by Romans and their Roman legions, “vast amounts of Egyptian land” that had been owned by the state under the Greek Ptolemaic dynastic rule “were now mostly sold to private individuals, some of whom acquired extensive estates,” according to A History of Egypt.

As a result, “small landholders, though comprising a large proportion of the population, were increasingly hard-pressed;” and “many became little better than serfs and slaves on the estates of the privileged, who assumed powers that previously had belonged to the state, giving them even greater control over the peasantry,” according to the same book.

In 330 AD, Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople; and when the Roman Empire was partitioned for the last time into East and West in 395 AD, Egypt became a province of the Constantinople-based eastern Byzantium Empire until 641 AD; and during this period “Egypt’s grain and revenue remained extremely important to Constantinople,” according to A History of Egypt.

But the same book also notes that, “the Byzantine yoke became so odious to Egyptians, both politically and religiously…that they were not averse to the change of rule that came in the seventh century.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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