AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

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

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal-Partisan Defense Committee Workers Vanguard No. 1034

Free the Class-War Prisoners!-28th Annual PDC Holiday Appeal

This year marks the 28th anniversary of the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending stipends to class-war prisoners, those behind bars for the “crime” of standing up to the varied expressions of racist capitalist oppression. The PDC’s Holiday Appeal raises funds to send monthly stipends to 21 class-war prisoners and also provides holiday gifts for the prisoners and their families. We do this not just because it’s the right thing to do. The monthly stipends, just increased from $25 to $50, and holiday gifts are not charity. They are vital acts of class solidarity to remind the prisoners that they are not forgotten.

The Holiday Appeals are a stark contrast to the hypocritical appeals of bourgeois charities. Whether it comes from the megachurches of Southern televangelists or the urbane editors of the New York Times, the invocation of “peace on earth and goodwill toward men” at this time of year is nothing more than a public relations scam to obscure the grinding exploitation of workers and the beggar-the-poor policies that are the hallmark of both major parties of American capitalism. The lump of coal in the Christmas stocking for millions of impoverished families this year is a drastic cut in their already starvation food stamp rations. Christmas turkey for many is likely to be sculpted from cans of Spam.

The prisoners generally use the funds for basic necessities, from supplementing the inadequate prison diet to buying stamps and writing materials, or to pursue literary, artistic and musical endeavors that help ameliorate the living hell of prison life. As Tom Manning of the Ohio 7 wrote to the PDC four years ago: “Just so you know, it [the stipend] goes for bags of mackerel and jars of peanut butter, to supplement my protein needs.” In a separate letter, his comrade Jaan Laaman observed: “This solidarity and support is important and necessary for us political prisoners, especially as the years and decades of our captivity grind on.... Being in captivity is certainly harsh, and this includes the sufferings of our children and families and friends. But prison walls and sentences do not and can not stop struggle.”

We look to the work of the International Labor Defense (ILD) under its first secretary, James P. Cannon (1925-28), who went on to become the founder of American Trotskyism. As the ILD did, we stand unconditionally on the side of the working people and their allies in struggle against their exploiters and oppressors. We defend, in Cannon’s words, “any member of the workers movement, regardless of his views, who suffered persecution by the capitalist courts because of his activities or his opinion” (First Ten Years of American Communism, 1962).

Initiated in 1986, the PDC stipend program revived an early tradition of the ILD. The mid 1980s were a time of waning class and social struggle but also a time when the convulsive struggles for black rights more than a decade earlier still haunted America’s capitalist rulers, who thirsted for vengeance. Among the early recipients of PDC stipends were members and supporters of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the best of a generation of black radicals who sought a revolutionary solution to black oppression—a bedrock of American capitalism.

Foremost among these was Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), former leader of the BPP in Los Angeles. Geronimo won his release in 1997 after spending 27 years behind bars for a murder the cops and FBI knew he did not commit. FBI wiretap logs, disappeared by the Feds, showed that Geronimo was 400 miles away in San Francisco at the time of the Santa Monica killing. Other victims of the government’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) remain entombed decades later. Absent an upsurge of class and social struggle that transforms the political landscape, they will likely breathe their last breaths behind bars.

Among the dozens of past stipend recipients are Eddie McClelland, a supporter of the Irish Republican Socialist Party who was framed on charges related to the killing of three members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, and Mordechai Vanunu, who helped expose the Israeli nuclear arsenal. At its outset, our program included five British miners imprisoned during the bitter 1984-85 coal strike. State repression of labor struggle in the U.S. added to our program, for a time, other militants railroaded to prison for defending their union against scabs in the course of strike battles: Jerry Dale Lowe of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, Amador Betancourt of Teamsters Local 912 in California and Bob Buck of Steelworkers Local 5668 in West Virginia. (For more background on the PDC and the stipend program, see “18th Annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners,” WV No. 814, 21 November 2003.)

The most recent additions to the stipend program include Lynne Stewart and the Tinley Park 5. Stewart is an attorney who spent four decades fighting to keep black and radical activists out of the clutches of the state, only to find herself joining them behind bars on ludicrous “support to terrorism” charges. The youthful anti-fascist fighters known as the Tinley Park 5 were thrown in prison for heroically dispersing a meeting of fascists in May 2012.

At the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we warned that the enhanced police powers being amassed to go after immigrants from Muslim countries would also be used against the oppressed black population and the working class as a whole. That the “war on terror” takes aim at leftist opponents of this or that government policy is affirmed by the massive “anti-terror” police mobilizations and arrests that have accompanied protest outside every Democratic and Republican national convention, among other gatherings, in recent years. Other recent examples include the FBI-coordinated nationwide crackdown on “Occupy” movement encampments and the state of siege in Chicago during the 2012 NATO summit.

The witchhunt against the Tinley Park 5 coincided with and fed into the hysteria whipped up against the anti-NATO protesters, particularly anarchists and participants in Black Bloc actions. Sitting in jail awaiting trial for 18 months are three protesters set up by a police provocateur. They were arrested and charged under Illinois anti-terrorism statutes, the first time these laws were ever used. Free the anti-NATO protesters! Drop the charges!

Continuing the Legacy of Class-Struggle Defense

The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the Marxist political views of the Spartacist League, which initiated the PDC in 1974. The PDC’s first major defense effort was the case of Mario Muñoz, the Chilean miners’ leader threatened with death in 1976 by the Argentine military junta. An international campaign of protests by unions and civil libertarians, cosponsored by the Committee to Defend Worker and Sailor Prisoners in Chile, won asylum in France for Muñoz and his family. The PDC has also initiated labor/black mobilizations against provocations by the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York to Springfield, Illinois, and mobilized sections of the integrated labor movement to join these efforts.

Cannon’s ILD, which was affiliated to the early Communist Party, was our model for class-struggle defense. It fused the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tradition of militant class-struggle, non-sectarian defense and their slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” with the internationalism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a revolution made not merely for the workers of Russia but for the workers and oppressed of the world. These principles were embodied in the International Organization for Aid to Fighters of the Revolution (MOPR), a defense organization formed in the Soviet Union in 1922 that was more popularly known as the International Red Aid.

The ILD was born out of discussions in 1925 between Cannon and Big Bill Haywood, who had been a leader of the Western Federation of Miners and then the IWW. The venue was Moscow, where Haywood had fled in 1921 after jumping bond while awaiting appeal of his conviction for having called a strike during wartime, an activity deemed a violation of the federal Espionage and Sedition Act. Haywood died in Moscow in 1928. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin, the other half in Chicago near the monument to the Haymarket martyrs, leaders of the fight for the eight-hour day who were executed in 1887.

The ILD was founded especially to take up the plight of class-war prisoners in the United States. Initially, the ILD adopted 106 prisoners for its stipend program, including California labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, framed up for a bombing at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in 1916, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant anarchist workers executed in 1927 for a robbery/murder they did not commit. The number grew rapidly: Zeigler miners in Illinois whose fights over wages and working conditions pitted them head-on against the KKK; striking textile workers in Passaic, New Jersey. The ILD monthly, Labor Defender, educated tens of thousands of workers about the struggles of their class brothers and carried letters from prisoners describing their cases and the importance of ILD support.

Many of the imprisoned militants were IWW members. After a brief membership in the Socialist Party (SP), Cannon himself had been an IWW organizer and a writer for its press. Witnessing the anarcho-syndicalist IWW crushed by the bourgeois state while a disciplined Marxist party led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, Cannon rejoined the SP in order to hook up with its developing pro-Bolshevik left wing. In 1919, that left wing exited the SP, with Cannon becoming a founding leader of the American Communist movement. He brought a wealth of experience in labor defense. As Cannon later recalled, “I came from the background of the old movement when the one thing that was absolutely sacred was unity on behalf of the victims of capitalist justice.”

In the year preceding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the ILD and sections of the International Red Aid led mass actions in their defense, including protests and strikes of tens of thousands on the eve of the executions. The SP and pro-capitalist union tops undermined the growing workers mobilization by looking to the political agencies of the class enemy, a policy accompanied by a vicious anti-Communist campaign of slander and exclusion. Cannon addressed the two conflicting policies:

“One policy is the policy of the class struggle. It puts the center of gravity in the protest movement of the workers of America and the world. It puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. While favoring all possible legal proceedings, it calls for agitation, publicity, demonstrations—organized protest on a national and international scale.... The other policy is the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy. It relies mainly on legal proceedings. It seeks to blur the issue of the class struggle.”

— “Who Can Save Sacco and Vanzetti?” (Labor Defender, January 1927)

The principle of non-sectarian, class-struggle defense has guided our work, in particular our more than two-decade struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. As a small organization, we don’t pretend that we are able to mobilize the type of hard class struggle that not only built the unions in this country but also harnessed the social power of the working class to the defense of labor’s imprisoned soldiers in the class war. Such struggles are today a very faint memory. Nor do we want to distribute rose-colored glasses through which even the most minimal stirrings against particular atrocities by the racist capitalist rulers appear as sea changes in the political climate—a practice that is common fare for sundry proclaimed socialists.

Instead, we are dedicated to educating a new generation of fighters in the best traditions of the early Communist defense work before it was poisoned by Stalinist degeneration. As Cannon wrote for the ILD’s second annual conference: “The procession that goes in and out of the prison doors is not a new one. It is the result of an old struggle under new forms and under new conditions. All through history those who have fought against oppression have constantly been faced with the dungeons of a ruling class.” He added, “The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.” Keeping the memory of their struggles alive helps politically arm a new generation of fighters against the prison that is capitalist society. We urge WV readers to honor the prisoners by supporting the Holiday Appeal.

The 21 class-war prisoners receiving stipends from the PDC are listed below.

* * *

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed the policeman. In 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office dropped its longstanding effort to legally lynch America’s foremost class-war prisoner. Mumia remains condemned to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Leonard Peltier is an internationally renowned class-war prisoner. Peltier’s incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier was framed up for the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents marauding in what had become a war zone on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation. Although the lead government attorney has admitted, “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 69-year-old Peltier is not scheduled to be reconsidered for parole for another eleven years! Peltier suffers from multiple serious medical conditions and is incarcerated far from his people and family.

Eight MOVE members—Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa—are in their 36th year of prison. After the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, they were sentenced to 30-100 years having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops when a bomb was dropped on their living quarters. After more than three decades of unjust incarceration, these innocent prisoners are routinely turned down at parole hearings. None have been released.

WRITE LYNNE!

Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!

Jaan Laaman of the Ohio 7

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the two remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings of symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices, in the late 1970s and ’80s. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals, but, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They are victims of the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO operation, under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo were railroaded to prison and sentenced to life for a 1970 explosion that killed a cop, and they have now spent more than 40 years behind bars. Nebraska courts have repeatedly denied Poindexter and Mondo new trials despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a 911 audio tape long suppressed by the FBI, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

Hugo Pinell, the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, has been in solitary isolation for more than four decades. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with George Jackson, his comrade and mentor, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite numerous letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years, Pinell was again denied parole in 2009. Now in his late 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious torture chamber Pelican Bay SHU in California, a focal point for hunger strikes against grotesque inhuman conditions.

Jason Sutherlin, Cody Lee Sutherlin, Dylan Sutherlin, John Tucker and Alex Stuck were among some 18 anti-racist militants who, in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park in May 2012, broke up a gathering of fascists called to organize a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.” Among the vermin sent scurrying were some with links to the Stormfront Web site run by a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Such fascist meetings are not merely right-wing discussion clubs but organizing centers for race-terror against black people, Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else the white-supremacists consider subhuman. For their basic act of social sanitation, these five were sentenced by a Cook County court to prison terms of three and a half to six years on charges of “armed violence.”

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. This is not charity but an elementary act of solidarity with those imprisoned for their opposition to racist capitalism and imperialist depredations. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

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Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Reposted from the American Left Historyblog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. And an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers, articulate death row prisoners, anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters who took Che’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart* (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthersin their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven, as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. Many, too many for most of that time. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. The class-war prisoners must not stand alone.

Monday, December 23, 2013

(please forward widely)

As UNAC prepares for a new year of struggle for peace, we ask that you help us with a generous donation to support our work

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The need for an active anti-war coalition in the US was made clear from the events of the past year. Many antiwar groups exist throughout the country that are doing very important work but when we can coordinate our efforts throughout this country, and along with activists in other countries, we magnify our strength.

Such was the case with the important 10-city tour we organized with the Afghan Women’s Mission for the former Afghan legislator and human rights activist, Malalai Joya. The tour, which coincided with the 12^th anniversary of the Afghan invasion, attracted large audiences throughout the country. Joya explained that no one can liberate the Afghan people except for the Afghan people themselves. She said the continued US occupation of her country was the cause of much of the misery of Afghan women and Afghan people as a whole. We raised tens of thousands of dollars to support her work in Afghanistan and her ongoing mission to tell the truth about the US occupation.

UNAC also played an important role in organizing anti-drone actions in dozens of cities throughout the country during last April’s days of action against

drones. Three UNAC leaders also traveled to Pakistan at the end of last year with the Code Pink anti-drone delegation to that country. We were joined by thousands of Pakistanis as we pushed our way to the border of Waziristan where the US drones are taking their terrible toll and came back to speak to audiences throughout the country and Canada. We also attended the anti-drone conference organized by Code Pink last month to prepare ourselves for the continuing fight against drone warfare and mass surveillance.

As the war in Syria continued to heat up and mercenary forces, armed by the US and its allies continued to pour into country and when the Obama administration declared that it would strike Syria, we called for emergency demonstrations demanding “No U.S. War on Syria.” These took place in close to 100 cities and were larger than we had seen for a long time. Polls showed the people were overwhelmingly against any US attack. The British Parliament voted against supporting a strike and the US congress was poised to do the same. Obama was compelled to back down, at least for the moment.

UNAC sponsored or was involved in many more activities throughout the year. We held educational conference calls on the little known militarization and aggressive actions in the Philippines, North Korea and Africa. We continued our support for persecuted Muslim communities, communities of color and immigrants who were under attack. This we saw as the domestic side of the phony “war on terror.”

We also continued to support the civil and democratic rights of, Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani political prisoner in the US and we called for compassionate

release from prison for UNAC’s own coordinating committee member attorney Lynne Stewart. We spoke at and organized forums and meetings in support of Chelsea Manning, against NSA spying and growing attacks on civil liberties such as the recent attack on Palestinian-American leader Rasmea Odeh and the FBI attacks on the 24 antiwar and solidarity activists who had their homes raided and were served with federal subpoenas. Many of these 24 are leaders and supporters of UNAC.

We are faced with a dangerous year ahead. The US is building up forces in Asia and has conducted provocative military maneuvers directed at China and North Korea. The sectarian violence that the US helped create in many countries like Iraq, is increasing. War rages in many parts of Africa where the US has sent 3,500 troops to 35 nations to foster its neo-colonial agenda. The plight of the Palestinians continues to worsen. UNAC’s demand to “End all U.S. Aid to Israel” and to support the Palestinian call for BDS has found traction in the broader antiwar and social justice movements. The US still maintains troops in some 120 countries and US Special Forces and drones kill without regard to borders.

NATO is planning its next summit in Britain and many groups including international groups that UNAC collaborates with like the No to War, No to NATO coalition are planning actions similar to the ones we initiated and helped organize, such as the rally of 15,000 activists, when the NATO summit was held in Chicago in May, 2012. We will want to participate in these anti-NATO actions in Britain and perhaps build solidarity actions in the US.

UNAC is now scheduling its third national antiwar/social justice conference in 2014 with a focus on linking the deepening environmental crisis and global warming with the ongoing US wars over fossil fuels and the growing repression and austerity measures at home.

To consistently raise the alarm and take action against the criminal acts of our imperialist government and to continue to build a strong and expanding coalition, we need your support. Please send a generous donation to UNAC, PO Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054 or click the button above to make an on-line donation. Checks should be made out to UNAC.

Peace,

Joe Lombardo and Marilyn Levin

UNAC co-coordinators

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***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

…it wasn’t always about the struggle against some big societal hurts, against food hunger or that gnawing hunger, want hunger that eats away at a woman or man, it wasn’t always about what to do next to keep body and soul together, it wasn’t always about desperate heroic deeds ahead in places nobody had ever heard of , it wasn’t always about what to do, or not do, about fighting the night-takers of the world, it wasn’t always desperately waiting for news, waiting for the other shoe to drop about Johnny, Jimmy or Leroy. A lot of that was for those older coming of age youth but for the younger ones, the ones left to put nickels and dimes in Doc’s Drugstore jukebox (or name your jukebox location), it looked a lot like stuff that had been going on ever since some guy, some old guy from what everybody head, invented teenage-hood several decades before. And so it was with him, him and his hidden desire, virginal desire, maybe, maybe not, such things were kept on the QT then, for her, and the way she disturbed his dreams, disturbed his night.

It all started like all such things started no need to detail every little point like the story hadn’t been told before, hadn’t been told since Adams and Eve, maybe before. He spied her all black hair and freshness, she gave a furtive glance his way, maybe in class at school, maybe at Doc’s when some dreamy song came on the jukebox, or maybe in the back row of church, the possibilities were endless. They talked and they did their mating dance. They went out together, boy-girl together, made out, maybe more, but like I said such things were closely held in those days. Reputations mattered and everybody knew everybody else so if an “accident” occurred the old gone to Aunt Ethel gag came into play.

Whatever happened at night they had their favorite song, favorite spot (down at the far end of Squaw Rock, okay, meaning no question they doing it since nobody went there to get swoony over the ocean), favorite everything that there could be a favorite for. Then the hammer came down. See, that first furtive glance that got him going she gave him was to get Billy mad, Billy who had split them up running after some Jane and who was now contrite, was back in her field of vision, and so he, well, to put it in cold hard teen talk, was yesterday’s news. Yes, yesterday’s news and wandering, constantly wandering down at Squaw Rock, wondering.

Yes, wondering like some fool, like some kid fool and he almost ready to go, after summer’s end if he could survive this hurt, to his senior year in high school and then off to join brothers and fathers in that great big shooting gallery oversea (his preference, like his older brothers, to go west, go west to get those Japs, those beasts, after Pearl). But now kid hurt, kid hurt wondering how his old corner- boy, corner boy, junior high school version and so harmless standing older guys-like against Mom and Pops’ Variety Store until Mom and Pop chased them away, or they had to do homework, Billy, could cut him that way, could come back and take her away with the snap of his fingers when he knew for a blessed fact that Billy was just playing with her, playing with her fragile heart.

And as it turned out that was exactly what Billy was doing, or that was the way that she started to understand his actions, his sneaking out with other women, again. Actions that were trumped though by the happenings in Europe and Asia as Billy’s number was called and he went, went not like a lot of other guys with an air of resignation but kicking and screaming about how he was more useful on the home front. So much hot air according to his friends and neighbors at the local draft board. Trumped too by him, by his wandering and wondering as she once again was seen at Doc’s alone, playing that old jukebox, spending her nickels and dimes, constantly playing That’s When Your Heartache Begins. He spied her, she gave him the now familiar furtive glance and so they started that old mating dance again. Started until his number too was called and with an air of resignation he was off. She saw him off at the station when he was ready to go to the uncertain European front, saw him off with tears. The night before they had vowed that they would get married when he got back, got back in one piece, and she swore too that she would play their song, Til Then, on Doc’s old jukebox every day until he returned. How about that, my friends.

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Stalinism and Spain

...as a left-wing militant who came to political life in the early 1960s what happened in Spain in the 1930s always intrigued and bothered me. Intrigued because as I found out later the conditions for social revolution, the readiness of the people to rise and fight to the death, the so-called subjective factor was apparent. Bothered because as I also found out later the leadership, preeminently the Stalinists through the Spanish Communist Party and the Communist International, was not interested in fighting to the death for a social revolution. In fact Spain represented the first major transition from Stalinist policy being anti-revolutionary to being, in general, counter-revolutionary and subordinate to the mercurial aims of Soviet foreign policy. That intrigue and that bother continue to this day.

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********

Stalinism and Spain

and
Spartacist statement on the above article

From Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

As in all backward capitalist countries, class confrontation in Spain had always been direct. A Liberal/Socialist coalition government elected in 1931 had made no effort to challenge the power of the industrialists, big landowners or the church. The state machine was left intact and when peasants and workers reacted as reforms promised were not delivered, they were brutally suppressed. Such concessions, however, did not satisfy the bourgeoisie and in July l936 Manuel Azana’s liberal government, which was supported by socialists, communists and some anarchists, was challenged by a military uprising supported by the vast majority of the ruling class.

This deadly threat immediately threw the workers and peasants into action. They seized factories and land which they then controlled through their own committees. They set up armed militias. The government was confronted from below by a mass revolutionary upsurge. The choice was clear: either a rapid move towards proletarian dictatorship or a military takeover. The workers and peasants were starting to exert their control over society, the ruling class was intent on securing its rule by military terror.

This is where the Stalinists stepped in. They were quick to deny that this was a fight for state power. A functionary of the Communist International explained:

In Spain it is not the proletarian dictatorship that is on the agenda of history. The struggle is not between proletariat and bourgeoisie for the establishment of the rule of the working class, but between the proletariat, the peasantry, the democratic bourgeoisie and the intellectuals on the one side, and the monarcho-feudalist reactionaries, the counter-revolutionary Fascists, on the other; against the hated monarchy, against feudal serfdom, against the fresh Fascist enslavement, for the maintenance of the democratic republic. [1]

Any attempt to hold onto this non-existent middle ground would mean the suppression of any force that was going beyond it. As Trotsky argued:

When the workers and peasants enter on the path of their revolution – when they seize factories and estates, drive out the old owners, conquer power in the provinces – then the bourgeois counter-revolution – democratic, Stalinist or Fascist alike – has no other means of checking this movement except through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. [2]

Adapting to the most conservative elements in the labour movement leadership and the scrag end of the bourgeois democracy, the Stalinists worked overtime to derail the revolutionary forces.

The first Moscow show trial was staged in the summer of 1936. Despite the commitment to ‘socialism in one country’, Stalinism is an international force. The thrust of the trials – that Stalin’s opponents in the Soviet Union were conspiring with the exiled Trotsky on behalf of the Fascist states, was largely for external consumption. Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor at all the trials, explored the international dimension at the first trial:

By rendering these accomplices of Fascism harmless, the people of the Soviet Union and its officials have not only done a service to their own country, but also to all fighters against Fascist slavery, to all friends of peace. For the fight of the French workers in the People’s Front, the heroic fight of the Spanish workers against the perfidious generals, the fight of the anti-Fascists before the Fascist courts in Germany, and lastly the fight of the peoples of the Soviet Union and their courts against the emissaries and supporters of Fascism, are all fundamentally one and the same fight, which is only being fought out on different sections of the front. [3]

Stalin’s opponents abroad could now expect the same treatment as his victims at home. Pravda brought this home in December 1936 with an unambiguous threat: ‘In Catalonia, the elimination of Trotskyists and Anarcho-Syndicalists has already begun; it will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR’. [4]

Early in 1937 came the second Moscow trial and in March Stalin gave a particularly lurid speech to the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party. He declared that Trotskyism had ‘long ceased to be a political trend in the working class’ and that Trotskyists had ‘become a gang of wreckers, diversionists, spies, assassins...working in the pay of foreign intelligence services’. Moreover, ‘the old methods, the methods of discussion’ were obsolete in the fight against them, and ‘new methods, uprooting and smashing methods’ were now the prescribed means. [5] Notice had been served upon all of Stalin’s left wing opponents (Stalinists were not fussy about whom they called Trotskyists). They could no longer expect even the kind of ‘debate’ to which they had been accustomed. Now it was the show trials, prisons and the GPU’s death squads.

The reckoning was soon to come to Spain. Tensions had been growing between militant workers and the authorities, sometimes leading to armed clashes, especially in the Catalonia region. The authorities, with the full support of the Stalinists, staged in May 1937 a provocation in Barcelona by seizing the telephone exchange which had been held until then by the Anarchists. The ensuing street fighting gave the government the pretext to clamp down on the left wing forces. Freshly back from Spain, George Orwell remarked upon the ‘thoroughness’ with which the government was ‘crushing its own revolutionaries’:

When I left Barcelona in late June [l937] the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not the Fascists but revolutionaries; they are not there because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are ... the Communists. [6]

The replacement of Francisco Largo Caballero by Juan Negrin as premier as a result of the May events was rapidly followed by an intensification of the repression against the left. Unlike his predecessor, Negrin willingly concurred with the Stalinists on the necessity to crush the left. The GPU was steadily extending its nefarious activities in Spain, not only acting in its own right, but infiltrating the republican judicial apparatus, the police and military forces, enjoying complete freedom of operation. On 16 June the leadership of the POUM, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, was arrested and its most prominent figure, Andres Nin, was kidnapped, cruelly tortured and murdered behind closed doors. Other left wing militants, Kurt Landau, Marc Rhein, Hans Freund (Moulin), Erwin Wolf, to name but a few, disappeared in the hands of the GPU.

In March 1938, as the final and most grotesque of the Moscow trials was being staged, the Spanish Trotskyists were charged with sabotage, espionage and planning the assassination of Negrin and, among others, leading Stalinists Jose Diaz and Dolores ‘Pasionaria’ Ibarruri. Time was running out for the POUM as well. In July the Executive Committee of the Communist International demanded ‘the complete extermination of the Trotskyist POUM gang’. [7] In October its leaders were brought to trial. However, Nin had not ‘confessed’, the ‘evidence’ against the accused was embarrassingly crude and, unlike the defendants in the Moscow trials who were burnt out after a decade of expulsions, exiles, isolators and capitulations, the POUM leaders demonstrated their contempt for the proceedings (one of them continually referred to the Spanish judge as Mr Vishinsky), and the more serious charges against them were dropped.

As the government and its Stalinist minions came down harder upon the left, the situation worsened for the republic. A month after the Trotskyists were charged, Franco’s forces had reached Vinaroz on the east coast, cutting republican Spain in two. Two weeks after the POUM trial had ended, republican troops had withdrawn to beyond the River Ebro. Barcelona surrendered on 26 January 1939, nationalist troops entered a defeated Madrid on 28 March. Under Negrin, much of the gains of the 1936 revolutionary upsurge had been whittled away. Land was returned to its former owners, factory directors and managers took back their old posts, restrictions on the church were eased and the army was rebuilt along traditional lines. Just before the fall of Madrid Trotsky noted:

The Spanish revolution was Socialist in its essence: the workers attempted several times to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to seize the factories; the peasants wanted to take the land. The “People’s Front”, led by the Stalinists strangled the Socialist revolution in the name of an outlived bourgeois democracy. Hence the disappointment, the hopelessness, the discouragement of the masses of workers and peasants, the demoralisation of the republican army, and as a result, the military collapse. [8]

With the revolutionary movement suppressed by the Stalinists on behalf of the republican government, Franco’s victory was assured.

No Aberration

Since the mid-1950s the Stalinists have moderated their invective against their left wing opponents and will admit that the Trotskyists and other militants were not, after all, in the pay of the Gestapo. However, the worst aspects of the 1930s, the ‘aggressive and uncritical extolling of Stalin and all aspects of the Soviet Union, including the Moscow trials’, did manifest itself ‘within the framework of a basically correct and creative strategy’, as Monty Johnstone, a leading British Stalinist, put it. [9] The slanders, show trials and assassinations are seen as an aberration, not as an integral part of the Stalinist strategy of the time. Today’s Stalinists want the omelette but not the broken eggs.

There was nothing accidental about the so-called ‘excesses’ of the 1930s either in the Soviet Union or in Spain. Even if it didn’t follow a predetermined plan, the repression was drawn along by a remorseless logic. By the 1930s the Soviet bureaucracy had developed into a despotic ruling caste as fearful as the western ruling classes of proletarian revolution. Ever since Stalin promulgated his dogma of ‘socialism in one country’, the parties of the Communist International had steadily become local agencies of Soviet diplomacy, not leading the fight for workers’ power but attempting to pressurise their ruling classes into establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union. The Popular Front of the 1930s was principally aimed at forcing the British and French bourgeoisies into concluding a collective security agreement with the Soviet Union to counter the growing threat from Nazi Germany. Stalin did not want the victory of Franco in Spain as he considered this would strengthen the position of Germany against France. He wanted the victory of a democratic capitalist Spain that would hopefully be aligned with Britain and France.

The Moscow trials were central to the Popular Front strategy even if, as Johnstone admits, they ‘made more difficult a closer relationship with and influence on the Socialists’. [10] If the Soviet Union was to forge friendly alliances with imperialist states, it would need a new image. 1917 was still fresh in people’s memories. The destruction of the Bolshevik old guard in the trials was to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was no longer a revolutionary threat to imperialism. The Stalinists were also concerned that their moderation would alienate the more active workers and were therefore determined that criticisms of their politics would not be heard. [11] If their left wing critics could be branded as ‘Fascists’ then no debate would be necessary. Those who recognised that workers’ democratic rights could only be defended by the struggle for state power received the worst of the Stalinists’ vengeance. Those who took the road of Socialist revolution would be crushed without mercy.

Still Lying

Many of the tales spread by the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War are still retailed today, if in a more moderate, more apologetic manner. They still insist that the response of the Barcelona workers to the Stalinist provocation in May 1937 was a putsch staged by adventurists and provocateurs. Despite the proven presence of the GPU in Spain, the Stalinists prefer their fond memories. Leading Spanish Stalinist Santiago Carrillo recalls:

... it is true that it has been said that there were GPU prisons. I personally have no proof that there were and I never saw one, even though I believe the Soviet people must have had certain services [!!] in Spain, connected with the presence of their volunteers who were fighting at the front. [12]

A common response of late is to admit that the allegations made against the POUM and the Trotskyists were slanderous and the persecutions unjustified, but that it is perfectly understandable why the Communist movement accepted it all at the time. To quote Carrillo on the disappearance of Nin:

In the eyes of public opinion in general the Barcelona putsch was a counter-revolutionary act; there was a revolutionary war in Spain and, for the whole of the army and the people, that putsch, which a small group of Anarchists and Trotskyists had got together to carry out, appeared to be a counter-revolutionary act aimed at opening the front and helping the Fascist offensive ... The putsch of May 1937 strengthened us in the opinion that the Trotskyists were counter-revolutionaries. [13]

The recent official history of the Communist Party of Great Britain considers that ‘it was hardly surprising that the POUM should be regarded as traitors’ and ‘the notion that Trotskyists could be allied with fascists, or used as tools of the latter seemed plausible after the experience of the POUM in Spain’. [14]

This is sheer dishonesty. The ‘evidence’ presented at all the show trials was shot through with blatant falsifications, inconsistencies and absurdities that were pointed out at the time. Nor could any honest observer describe the Barcelona May events as a POUM ‘putsch’. The Stalinists made no attempt seriously to analyse the politics of their left wing opponents. There was no excuse for believing all the filthy business at that time and there is certainly no excuse for justifying that belief four or five decades later. To have accepted the Stalinist line in the 1930s necessitated the shutting off of all critical faculties and the willing suspension of disbelief. By attempting to reject the more unpalatable features of their activities in the 1930s whilst defending the system which spawned them, the Stalinists graphically demonstrate their inability to extricate themselves from the web of slander and deceit which they themselves have spun.

Paul Flewers
May 1988

Notes

1. International Press Correspondence, 8 August 1936.

2. L. Trotsky, The lessons of Spain: the last warning, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, New York 1973, p.313.

3. International Press Correspondence, 29 August 1936.

4. Cited in P. Broué and E. Témime, The Revolution and Civil War in Spain, London 1972, p.235.

5. J. Stalin, Defects in party work and measures for liquidating Trotskyite and other double-dealers, Works Vol.14, London 1978, p.261.

6. G. Orwell, Spilling the Spanish beans, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol.1, Harmondsworth 1984, p.302. Orwell was no Marxist but he could tell a revolution (and a counter-revolution) when he saw one:

The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. (Ibid.)

7. World News and Views, 23 July 1938.

8. L. Trotsky, Only revolution can end war, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, pp.234.

9. Marxism Today, November 1975, my emphasis.

10. Ibid. And the bourgeois parties the Stalinists were assiduously courting, as Johnstone omits to say.

11. Trotsky was well aware of how Stalin used the anti-Trotskyist campaign to influence both rulers and workers in the west:

The Comintern exists and, despite the turn toward opportunism and chauvinism, in the eyes of bourgeois public opinion it bears responsibility for the whole revolutionary movement ... Stalin tried with all his might ... to prove that the Comintern was no longer a revolutionary instrument. But his word was not always so easily believed. To strengthen his credit with the French bourgeoisie he thought it useful to take bloody measures against the Left Opposition. But neither will he be able to renounce the Comintern. So-called “Trotskyism”, i.e., the development and the continuity of Marx and Lenin’s ideas, is spreading more and more, even in the ranks of the Comintern ... That is why it is a matter of life and death for Stalin, for his political authority before the workers, to destroy “Trotskyism”. With words? That is not his way. He has the apparatus, which makes it possible for him to stage frame-up trials. In this way the accusations must strengthen Stalin’s authority simultaneously among the allied bourgeoisie and among the revolutionary workers. (L. Trotsky, Stalin is not everything, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935-36, New York 1977, pp.410-411)

12. S. Carrillo, Dialogue on Spain, London, 1976, p.52. Two British Stalinists say:

Stories about “NKVD agents” in Spain, especially in relation to the fight against Trotskyism, have been propagated so widely that one meets them almost everywhere, and this includes works by progressive historians. The authors of this article are inclined to think that most of them are apocryphal. (N. Green and A. Elliott, Our History, no.67, n.d. [late 1970s], p.22)

13. S. Carrillo, op. cit., pp.52-53.

14. N. Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941, London 1985. pp.235, 248. Ms Branson does not inform her readers of Nin’s terrible fate. He was, apparently, ‘almost certainly executed’ (ibid., p.244), by whom she declines to say.

Spartacist statement on the above article

The above article by Paul Flewers is devoted almost exclusively to a denunciation of the treacherous activities of the Stalinists in Spain, and therefore down-plays the crucial question of the Popular Front. It must be re-asserted that Trotskyists are not simply opposed to, but rather counterposed to, the Popular Front and every class-collaborationist alliance which subordinates the interests of the proletariat to those of the bourgeoisie.

Flewers’ strong Stalinophobic tilt amnesties the other reformist and centrist working-class tendencies. While the Stalinists were undoubtedly the most energetic and effective propounders and henchmen of the Popular Front in Spain, they did not occupy a social position to the right of the right wing of the Socialist Party: Trotsky spoke repeatedly of a ‘Stalin-Negrin government’. Ernest Erber, an experienced Social Democrat and former Trotskyist who spent some months in Spain during the Civil War as a representative of the American Young Peoples Socialist League, shows more political sense than Flewers: he scoffs at the idea of a Stalinist ‘totalitarian’ takeover of the Republican forces in Spain (see How real is the threat of a Communist “takeover”?, New Politics, Winter 1988).

Flewers treats the POUM, in particular, with kid gloves. But at crucial junctures the POUM – and the left Anarchists and Largo Caballero’s Socialists – each in their own way participated in the Popular Front. We cannot amnesty them from the standpoint of the revolutionary working class. This is particularly important in relation to the POUM.

Leon Trotsky broke all connections with Andres Nin and Juan Andrade when they led the erstwhile section of the International Left Opposition into fusion with the right-wing communists of Joaquim Maurin’s Workers and Peasants Bloc, giving birth to the misnamed ‘Workers Party of Marxist Unification’. The POUM’s first significant political act was to join in a common electoral bloc with bourgeois parties – the Popular Front.

Between the POUM, a member of the London Bureau ‘international of squeezed lemons’, and Trotskyism, there can be no common denominator in a revolutionary situation. Self-proclaimed Trotskyists who attempt to politically reconcile themselves with the POUM only succeed in compromising themselves – like Victor Serge and George Vereecken (the latter ended his political career writing the slanderous GPU Infiltration in the Trotskyist Movement for the political bandit Gerry Healy).

Referring to the ‘Treachery of the POUM’, in his last major work on the Spanish Revolution, The Class, The Party and the Leadership, Trotsky pointed out:

To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM ... But it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution ... It participated in the “Popular” election bloc; entered the government that liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; and took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising ... [A] centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution.

International Spartacist Tendency

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Out In The Slumming Mean Streets

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Yeah, you know all the names of the streets, Hollywood and Vine, Sunset Boulevard, Mullholland Drive, and twenty others, streets where the American dream, celluloid version was to come true for sweet sixteens from Omaha, Cincinnati, and, hell, Greenwood down in Mississippi too. Guys, hulks too from Toledo, Scranton and Biloxi. Every color, every sex, every religion, including those without, getting hopes high after landing at the bus station that if they sat at just the right drugstore soda fountain they would be “discovered.” Problem, was, is, that the dream was fit to size for only a small number of those hordes who bussed in from Lansing, Yonker, and Portland (east or west take your pick). And that is where the knight in shining armor, the old wind-mill chaser, the old Los Angeles fixture private eye, Michael Philip Marlin, came in, came in to try and save one such weary traveler cold before the lights went out.

Just in case you don’t know, private cops, more so than the public ones, depend on information from lots of places, have favors done for them from lots of people, with or without information. That is what caused our Marlin to be out in the mean streets of Hollywood one night in 1940. Seems that a guy, a guy, Mike Davis, who ran the Dee-Drop Inn Diner over on Noon Street in the fair city of angels had done Marlin a few good turns and so he asked Marlin to look into a cold case, a case of a young women, Milly Jones, from back home down in the Delta who, stardust in her eyes, wound up face down in a forsaken ravine with about seven slashes across her body. Not a pretty sight. (A cold case for the public police is one where they are clueless to solve and dump it before it even has time to get looked at, most cases as it turned out.)

So Marlin asked around and got nowhere, got nowhere from the cops, from anybody who knew the girl, Nada. Nada, until he accidently witnessed a drug drop just off of Noon Street where a young women, Terry Blake, appeared to have been set up by somebody because when she went to pick up the package half of the Hollywood Precinct came out of the woodwork. On a hunch Marlin swooped her up before she took the package. A good hunch too because she was just a pigeon in the play. Naturally when dope is involved, and not just dope, the fingers of Tripper Lamb had to be all over the deal. Tripper used his Club Capri over on Sunset Boulevard as a front for all his illegal operations; drugs, women, booze, numbers, and a special service for whatever Hollywood big-shot wanted, anything.

And that anything is how Terry almost got set-up for a five to ten count. Terry fresh off the buses from down in Greenwood, Mississippi needed a job and a place. Now she was good- looking and so one of Tripper’s gang who kept an eye out for such talent swooped in on her with talk of meeting Hollywood stars, parties, maybe even a part in a movie. Terry said, well, that was what she was here for and so started her career as a “hostess” in Tripper’s club. And to show her appreciation Tripper asked her, pretty please asked her to do this little, little favor of picking up that bag of dope. The set-up part though was Tripper feeling some heat from the cops who were feeling the heat from the tax-paying citizens of Los Angeles using Terry to pay off old debts to the cops by giving them an easy collar and plenty of ink about busting that damn dope ring stuff that had half the town nervous about the next shoot-out.

Terry, once Marlin found out what the hell had come down, was mad as hell. And Marlin sensing a roll in the hay if he helped out gathered in Terry’s anger. Gathered it too because no way, no way in hell was Tripper Lamb going to let some hick from wherever she was from bust up his operations and had one of his gunsels, Big Nig, assigned to shut her up, shut her up permanently, and he almost did except Marlin coming up the street and noticing a car that did not belong on the edges of Noon Street got the drop on the big guy (and he really was big, black, about six -five and two- fifty).

After that it was strictly war between one Michael Philip Marlin and one Tripper Lamb. Naturally Tripper came up short. Marlin didn’t get that couple of rolls in the hay with Terry before he put her back on the bus to Greenwood but that was the breaks. Put her on that bus though to get her far away from the means streets where she could not survive.

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Out In The Slumming Mean Streets

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Dear Al,

Secretary of State John Kerry and President Hassan Rouhani recently hammered out an interim agreement that granted Iran relief from some of the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and other countries. In return, Iran agreed to a short-term freeze of parts of its nuclear program.
Ask Senators Markey and Warren to support peace with Iran!
The agreement, while fragile, may lead to a permanent deal to normalize relations with Iran, lift sanctions and prevent the development of any Iranian nuclear weapons – and so increase the security of the region and decrease the chance of war.
But 27 Senators last week, led by Democrats Menendez and Schumer, introduced a bill, S.1881, to kill Iran negotiations and pledge U.S. support for Israeli strikes on Iran. This bill will invalidate the interim deal, take diplomacy off the table, and put us back on the brink of war.
Those who favor peace all agree: we cannot afford to miss this chance. Although President Obama has promised to veto this bill, the war party needs just 40 more supporters to pass the new Iran sanctions bill with a veto-proof majority.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has made statements indicating support for the agreement, but we need her to forthrightly declare her opposition to S.1881.
Senator Ed Markey has been silent on Iran since the interim agreement was signed. We need him to support diplomacy and peace and oppose S.1881.
Ask our Senators to speak out for diplomacy with Iran, not war and more sanctions.

Massachusetts Peace Action will give this everything we've got. We'll organize delegations, rallies and forums across the state to make sure our Senators hear that the people want peace, not war, with Iran.
Will you help ensure Massachusetts Peace Action has the resources we need to organize the people's voice? Please take a moment to support this effort with a tax-deductible donation of $100, $250, or whatever amount is right for you.