From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Generals Without Troops-Dutch Trotskyism during the Occupation

...the bane of the world Trotskyist movement since the time of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in Russia in the 1920s has always been hampered, with few exceptions, by the small number that have adhered to the myriad tendencies that claim allegiance to that tradition. In short the bulk of the world movement has consisted of various types and sizes of propaganda groups, with few links to the labor movement, certainly to the rank and file movement. Thus when huge shifts in world politics have occurred, and nothing is greater in world politics than major wars, those groupings have been marginal to the struggle. The key though has been, like in Spain in the 1930s, to intersect whatever movement is possible to break from that very ironic, if too true, title of "generals without troops."  What did Trotsky say at the end? Oh yeah, Forward.  
  

 

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. 
******** 

Generals Without Troops-Dutch Trotskyism during the Occupation

PART I

From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.4, Winter 1988-89. Used by permission.

The following is the complete English translation of the text of Wim Bot’s booklet, Generale zonder troepen. Het Comite van Revolutionaire Marxisten, zomer 1942-mei 1945, published in 1987 in Amsterdam and here printed with the author’s kind permission. The original contains a fully annotated apparatus of it’s source material, which we have been obligated to omit for reasons of space, and because, since all the materials are in Dutch, those conversant with that language will doubtless consult them in the author’s own version at first hand.

This is the second of two such accounts devoted to the struggle of the revolutionaries in the underground against the German occupation, his first being Tegan fascisme, kapitalisme en oorlog. Het Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, juli 1940 – april 1942, a detailed study of the oppositional current led by Henk Sneevliet, which was published by Syndikaat of Amsterdam in 1983. French readers should also consult the author’s chapter upon Sneevliet during the War contributed to Fritjof Tichelman’s biography, Henk Sneevliet, which appeared in Paris last year, edited by Rodolphe Prager.

Wim Bot was born in 1956, and came into revolutionary politics through the student movement. From 1977 to 1983 he was a member of the Internationale Kommunistenbond (now the SAP), the Dutch Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. and served upon the editorial board of its paper. He parted company with them at the time of a ‘turn to industry’ that involved in his opinion dogmatism a sectarian climate and party pretensions. He is a member of the editorial board of Links (Left), an independent journal of socialist analysis and discussion, and works at the left wing publishing house OJSIA in Amsterdam.
Material upon the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists is almost non-existent in English, though a little more is available about its antecedents. An article by Michael Williams entitled Sneevliet and the Birth of Asian Communism appeared in New Left Review No.123 (September/October 1980), and a further contribution On Sneevliet, the Dutch Communist Party and the February Strike of 1941 above the name of Graham Lock in No.127 of the same journal (May/June, 1981). For those with a command of Dutch there exists a full length memoir, Sneevliet, Rebel, written by his son-in-law, Sal Santen (1915- ) published in Amsterdam in 1971. Along with Herman Drenth, the former PvdA MP, Santen was a member of the Revolutionair Kommunistische Partij (Revolutionary Communist Party) which succeeded the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists as a section of the International Secretariat ofthe Fourth International during the post-war period. In 1960 Santen was arrested along with Michael Raptis (Pablo) and jailed for attempting to forge French banknotes to assist the struggle of the FLN against French rule in Algeria. When Pablo split with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1964, Santen and most of his group went with him. He has since largely devoted himself to writing. An interesting film about his career, Sal Santen, Rebel, made in 1982 and directed by Rudolph Vanberg, was screened at the National Film Theatre on 24 March 1986.

---

Introduction and acknowledgements

During the German occupation of the Netherlands only a small minority of the Dutch population was involved in illegal political activities. De Jong, who has tried to give a clear definition of the two concepts of active and passive resistance in his work, counts as activists those who were involved in clandestine resistance within a distinct organisational body. Thus the onderduikers (people in hiding), and the families which helped them, were involved in illegal activity, but, according to De Jong, they cannot be included in the resistance. According to his cautious and provisional estimation there were, until September 1944, about 25,000 resistance activists in the occupied Netherlands; afterwards their number grew to about 45,000.

Inside that minority of the Dutch population the revolutionary Socialists were only a small fraction. From July 1940 until April 1942 the latter were organised in the clandestine continuation of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (RSAP) and the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front (MLL-Front). [1] At the beginning of 1942 the leadership of the MLL-Front was arrested and, after a trial, was shot on 13 April. The remainder of the organisation then split into two group, the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists (CRM) and the Communist League Spartacus. De Jong estimates the number of persons active inside these three organisations at 400, though probably that is on the low side and it amounted to between 500 and 600. But that does not alter the fact that the revolutionary Socialists were a small numerical minority within the resistance.
That minority of a minority made itself politically distinct from the rest of the resistance. To them the struggle against Fascism and Nazism was a continuation of what they had been doing already during the ‘thirties. In the struggle against Nazism they refused to take the side of the Allies. The revolutionary Socialists did not consider the Second World War a conflict between democracy and dictatorship, but an imperialist war between ‘hungry and well-fed robbers’. As long as capitalism existed there would be world wars and only the international Socialist revolution could end the permanent threat of war. The revolutionary Socialists hoped and expected that, because of the Second World War, a revolutionary wave would sweep over the world, such as had been the case, to some extent, at the end of the First World War. They tried to promote the independent resistance of the workers, and to that end their main activity was to make propaganda in illegal publications. The revolutionary Socialists in the Netherlands did not carry out any armed or violent activities during the occupation.
This account deals with the Committee of Revolutionary Marxists. It is an amplification of my earlier publication regarding the MLL-Front. So it must be pointed out beforehand that the above remarks regarding the minority position of the revolutionary Socialists inside the resistance apply to a much greater extent to the CRM than to the MLL-Front, though as far as the MLL-Front is concerned there are some important reservations. Of the pre-war political parties only the RSAP and the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) went into clandestinity, of which the RSAP was the first. Its illegal publications appeared from July 1940. In January 1941 the first issue appeared of the most important paper of the MLL-Front, Spartacus; it was the first illegal paper printed in the occupied Netherlands. Spartacus had a circulation of 5,000. The importance of this becomes clear when one considers that the illegal press at that time only had a total circulation of about 57,000 copies. During the first phase of the occupation, when great confusion reigned, there was probably no other current in the occupied Netherlands which so sharply explained the politics and aims of the Nazis. The MLL-Front also contributed to the propaganda and agitation for the February Strike.
The CRM and the Communistenbond Spartacus (Communist League Spartacus), the other organisation originating from the MLL-Front, had much less significance. Spartacus was not capable of producing a real printed paper during the remainder of the occupation. On the other hand the other big underground newspapers only had a circulation of about 450 000 copies in December 1943. Whereas De Jong in his survey regularly mentions the illegal press of the MLL-Front, he limits himself as regards the CRM and the Communist League Spartacus to: ‘they were no more than political sects where the smaller the following, the more fiercely the fire of conviction burned: Indeed one of the CRM members wrote to me:’ What we did was no more than throwing a stone into a pond:
The purpose of this article is to give a summary of the development of a small group, which based its illegal activities upon a revolutionary Socialist judgement of the war. What were the possibilities during the occupation for groups which started from such a perspective? How did they analyse the course of the war and the occupation? What forms of resistance did they advocate? What was their relationship with other leftist groups? How did they come to their highly optimistic forecast of the future?
Up to now there has been no separate investigation of the CRM. In his unpublished article, De Trotzkistiese beweging in Nederland 1938-46 (The Trotskyist movement in the Netherlands 1938-46) Pieter-Jan Mol devoted a chapter to the CRM, which, however, was almost wholly based on the study of De Rode October (Red October), the main publication of the CRM. Moreover, Mol did not have available a great number of the issues during the period of the summer of 1942 to the autumn of 1943, since these are missing in the collections of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie and the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Through Herman Drenth, a member of the CRM leadership, I obtained photocopies of the issues from that first phase. In the end I only failed to trace four issues out of the 44 published during the occupation. I also consulted the issues of the internal discussion bulletin of the CRM, Het Kompas (The Compass). In the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie I further found a discussion paper for CRM Youth which had not been previously mentioned. I also found in the collection of the publications of the CRM and in the archives of Piet van ’t Hart and Georges Vereeken a (limited) number of pamphlets, circular letters and documents of the CRM.
Since I could fall back on no previous work the information that I got from former members of the CRM was indispensable in obtaining a picture of the organisational functioning of the CRM. I had contact with the following people: Thea Bloemsma, Andries Dolleman, Antoine Dolleman, Willy Dolleman, Herman Drenth, Peter Drenth, Cor van ’t Hart, Rein van der Horst, Sal Santen, Wout Tieleman and Frits Zeggelink. Of them Herman Drenth, Santen and Tielman are the members of the CRM leadership still alive. Seven people (Bloesma, Andries Dolleman, Antoine Dolleman, Willy Dolleman, van der Horst, Tielman and Zeggelink) were part of the CRM in The Hague. Of the doings of the CRM in the other places where it was active I have been able to obtain much less detail. My contacts varied from obtaining a few specific items of information (Peter Drenth) up to and including an extensive combination of correspondence, telephone conversations and interviews (Tieleman). Tieleman sent me a detailed comment regarding my publication on the MLL-Front, where in particular he went into the history of the CRM. A number of other people involved refreshed their memories on the basis of Tieleman’s contribution. The reader will observe that on a number of not unimportant points it proved to be impossible to reach a unanimous opinion. The importance of the reliability of the memory of those involved as an historical source is much greater for such a period of clandestinity than for ‘normal’ times, not only because it touches on a deeply felt period, but also because there are, on account of this clandestinity, scarcely any written sources which can elucidate certain organisational questions.
In the Dutch version I did not change anything in the spelling of the quotations incorporated in the text and in their accentuation. I thank for their co-operation, the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis and above all the members of the CRM mentioned, for whom my enquiry brought many emotions to the surface.
Of those members, the two sons of the murdered MLL-Front leader Willem Dolleman, Andries and Willy Dolleman both died, one after the other, in the first half of 1984. Until their death they remained principled Socialists.

Part 1 The birth of the CRM

Heavy is the blow which has been inflicted on the ranks of the proletarian vanguard. Heavy certainly, but not annihilating. For barely had the sentence been executed but the opposition was organised anew and here, not two months later, we are out again with our first publication which, imperfect as it is, gives proof that Fascism too, as so many of its predecessors in this regard, miscalculates when it thinks that by terror and mass murders it can suppress the resistance which will be instrumental in its doom ...

Certainly, in many cases we stood, in the Party, against the comrades now fallen, especially as regards the attitude that is to be taken to the Soviet Union, a struggle in which we shall continue to proclaim our own opinion; but always it was a joint and common conviction that only the working class through struggle with its own strength can reach victory, the Socialist society. That is why we did not, and will not, take an anti-German, but an anti-Fascist stand. Not as fighters for the National Liberation of the Netherlands, but as fighters for the International Liberation of the World Proletariat through Socialist Revolution did our comrades fall. From that they take their great significance. It is in this spirit that our new paper De Rode October will write and the proletariat will gain the victory (De Rode October no 1, June 1942).

With this article, written by Wout Tieleman. the revolutionary Socialists, who came to form the Comite van Revolutionnaire Marxisten, spoke out for the first time after the execution of Henk Sneevliet and the other leaders of the MLL-Front on 13 April 1942. Besides the CRM there came out of the MLL-Front the Communistenbond Spartacus. In order to understand why two new organisations emerged from the MLL-Front it is necessary to give some attention to the differences of opinion which had come up inside the MLL-Front.

The first difference was about the question how to evaluate the role of the Soviet Union. Sneevliet was of the opinion that no essential achievements of the 1917 revolution existed any longer in the Soviet Union. Influenced by the pact between Stalin and Hitler, he also found a convergence between the totalitarian system in the Soviet Union and that in Germany, and for that reason he denied the possibility of an invasion by Germany of the Soviet Union. When, on 22 June 1941, that invasion nevertheless took place, Sneevliet simply regarded the Soviet Union as on the same political level as its capitalist western allies. A part of the MLL-Front protested and advocated a revolutionary defence of the Soviet Union, notwithstanding its Stalinist degeneration, though they distinguished between this and the war aims of England and the United States.
The factional dispute was intense, especially when Sneevliet wanted to prohibit any discussion of this problem. Only after an ultimatum, principally from Willem Dolleman who, with Sneevliet and Ab Menist, constituted the leading trio of the MLL-Front, did Sneevliet climb down. In a letter, Mijn Afscheid (My Departure), Dolleman announced that he would build a new organisation in which there would be democratic freedom of discussion. The restriction of that freedom in an organisation which claimed to be anti-Stalinist was absolutely unacceptable to Dolleman. After Dolleman’s intervention there was an internal discussion bulletin – Tijdsproblemen (Problems of the Time) in which the various currents of opinion were developed. Because of the arrest and execution of the MLL-Front leadership the discussion on the Soviet Union came to an end.
A second area of dispute was the trade union policy. Before the war the RSAP had focused mainly on the Nationaal Arbeids Secretariaat (NAS), the small revolutionary trade union. Trotskyist opponents inside the RSAP were of the opinion that by this tactic the Party had cut itself off from the mass of organised workers. At the beginning of the occupation the NAS disappeared; on the orders of the Nazis it had to dissolve and to join the Nederlands Verbond van Vakverenigingen (NVV). A part of the NAS leadership had, by the way, in order to make its continued existence possible, immediately capitulated politically at the beginning of the occupation by advocating ‘self restraint’. They stated that it was useless to oppose the suppression of strikes and meetings.
With this development the MLL-Front leadership was faced with the disappearance of an important part of its social-political base. It was decided to orient to the workers who, before the occupation, had supported Social Democracy and part of that orientation was to work in the NVV, which was being ‘synchronised’ (gleichgeschalted) by the Nazis. The MLL-Front stuck to that option until August 1941 and combined its work in the NVV with calls to form illegal committees in the workplaces. In August 1941 the MLL-Front called on its members to leave the NVV, a part of the organisation, however, had earlier reached the conclusion that meaningful work was no longer possible inside the NVV.
Stan Poppe, a member of the MLL-Front leadership, developed Council Communist ideas. According to him the mass trade union movement had lost its clear purpose, and revolutionaries had henceforth to focus only on the formation of workers’ committees and workers’ councils.
In view of the political importance of both these differences it is very doubtful whether the unity of the MLL-Front would have been preserved if the wave of arrests of the beginning of 1942 had not ended the existence of the organisation. In any case these disputes constituted the background from which these two organisations emerged from the MLL-Front. At the time the question of the Soviet Union played the most important role, and this appears from the quotation from the first issue of De Rode October. The second point would come to the fore in the subsequent political development of the CRM and the Communistenbond Spartacus, for the CRM became a specifically Trotskyist organisation while Spartacus developed into a Council Communist one.
To reconstruct the origins of the split in the summer of 1942 is not a simple matter. Piet van ’t Hart, a member of the CRM leadership and, after the war, historian of the revolutionary Socialist movement, stated in the post-war period that the foundation of the CRM was a reaction to that of Spartacus. Spartacus was founded without asking the advocates in the MLL-Front of the defence of the Soviet Union to join. Moreover, the founders of the CRM had little confidence in the clandestine character of the Spartacus organisation. Such was the explanation given by the CRM in August 1943. In February 1944 the Spartacus leader Stan Poppe produced a totally different version; according to him ‘les officiels’, or the adherents of the Trotskyist Fourth International, had ‘entered’ the MLL-Front, and after the executions they had tried to take over the organisation. According to Poppe that attempt failed because of the distrust of the members. What actually occurred? Part of the answer is to be found in The Hague where Andries, one of the sons of Willem Dolleman says ‘When bidding farewell to my father (in Weteringschans prison) I whispered into his ear: “We carry on”: I did so (at that moment, five weeks after his arrest!) knowing that “we” had discussed that.’ Of course going on was not simple. So Andries’ younger brother Willy wrote to me:

I don’t think that I immediately reacted with enthusiasm. The arrests and the executions naturally left a deep impression, especially the time in the evening when my father was arrested. And saying farewell in the prison under SS supervision, I did not doubt the necessity of carrying on, but yet ...

Willy Dolleman here refers to a visit of his friend Wout Tieleman in May or June 1942, who took the initiative and came to see him. Willy had been involved in the production of the illegal publications of the MLL-Front. His mother Meta tried to make him and Tieleman change their ideas, but finally sent them to Dolf Langkemper who, at the time of the German invasion, had been the organisational secretary of the RSAP. Langkemper disagreed with them, which is not surprising, since already before the war he had spoken against clandestine underground work, and so he had not taken part in the MLL-Front. Tieleman and Willy Dolleman also drew a blank with the Hague MLL-Front man Aaldert Ymkers. The Hague youth had no contacts with other places, and they therefore decided to carry on themselves, on the basis of their standpoint of the necessity of the defence of the Soviet Union. At the end of May Antoine Dolleman, Theo Jansen and Wout Tieleman met; they decided to publish a new paper. So in June 1942 the first issue of De Rode October appeared.

During that same period there were complications in Rotterdam. On 15 May 1942 Piet van ’t Hart was released from detention in Bochum. Van ’t Hart had taken part in the MLL-Front leadership and in the conflict regarding the Soviet Union he had sided with Dolleman. On 15 August l941 he had been arrested when, during a house search, a discussion bulletin on this question had been found. When he was released his wife, Cor, told him about the executions. To Piet van ’t Hart this was, of course, a heavy blow. He was convinced that there must have been a leak, and he was determined to find it.
In Rotterdam, in the summer of 1942 (a more exact date is not known), the leadership of the Communistenbond Spartacus was formed. Poppe, with another comrade, was the initiator and had made the contacts. Poppe was the only member of the MLL-Front leadership who had not been arrested. He lived in Roosendaal, and Sneevliet had been with Poppe in his flat before he was arrested in Bergen op Zoom. For this reason van ’t Hart did not think that Poppe should play a leading role in an illegal organisation for a moment longer. Many unpleasant and inconclusive discussions followed. [2] Thereupon contact was made between van ’t Hart, who had not been involved in the first issue of De Rode October, The Hague youth and Harry Combrink. The latter had, after the arrest of the MLL-Front leadership, gone to Amsterdam; there, in order to speak about the necessity of building a new organisation, he had approached Sal Santen, a Trotskyist ‘officiel’, who in 1941 had been refused membership of the MLL-Front.
On 22 August 1942 the founding of the CRM took place in the church of the Swedenborg Society in The Hague; the father of one of The Hague MLL-Front youth, Frits Zeggelink, was the Minister there. Present at the founding were probably Harry Combrink, Andries Dolleman, Antoine Dolleman, Piet van ’t Hart, Wout Tieleman and Frits Zeggelink. What was decided at the founding conference?
In an internal publication of the CRM of autumn 1942 there was mention both of a decision to break definitively from Spartacus and of the founding of an independent group. After the war Piet van ’t Hart gave the same version; yet, according to him, it was also decided to strive for the restoration of unity in the future.
Thus far this is the account of the birth of both groups. The main uncertainty is whether, at the founding of Spartacus, it was decided not to involve the advocates of the defence of the Soviet Union. Piet van ’t Hart was, besides Poppe, the only survivor of the MLL-Front leadership. If van ’t Hart was not approached to form a new leadership one could put the responsibility for the split on Spartacus. It is, however, also possible that the foundation of Spartacus took place at the same time as the discussions between Poppe and van ’t Hart. In that case it is hardly possible to indicate who took the initiative in the split.
In any case Poppe’s 1944 version of the events does not convince. Some members of the Fourth International group in the Netherlands, the Group of Bolshevik-Leninists (GBL), had indeed entered the MLL-Front. At the beginning, the opposition to Sneevliet’s policy had not been their doing. The people who supported Dolleman’s and Piet van ’t Hart’s standpoint on the Soviet Union in the MLL-Front, sympathised with Trotsky, but they had not left the RSAP. The initiators of the CRM had not been members of the GBL.
The CRM and Spartacus started, in the summer of 1942, with about the same number of members who had been active in the MLL-Front. Both groups continued to exist during the remaining occupation years. Neither, however, reached the size and importance of the old MLL-Front. Indeed, while the resistance and clandestine activity grew the longer the occupation continued, for the revolutionary Socialist fraction of the resistance it seems that the pinnacle of their influence was during the first two occupation years.

Part 2 Organisational development

It was mentioned above that the formal founding of the CRM was a matter of a very small group from The Hague, Delft and Rotterdam. The term ‘committee’ was also chosen consciously; they considered themselves as a group which had yet to build an organisation.

It is not clear whether the contacts with Herman Drenth, who after the arrest wave that struck the MLL-Front, had left The Hague and gone into hiding in Groningen, already existed during the founding or were restored shortly afterwards. Already in 1942, contacts with Flip Grave in Eindhoven were made. Towards the end of 1942 or in the beginning of 1943 Sal Santen also joined the CRM, after which the building of the organisation in Amsterdam could start. [3] Santen and Tieleman estimate that towards the end of the occupation the CRM had about 50 members. On the basis of the material that 1 collected 1 estimate a membership of about 75, mainly concentrated in the three big cities: Rotterdam (25), Amsterdam (20) and The Hague(10). Other groups of members were in the northern towns of Delfzijl, Groningen and Leeuwarden (in total about 10 people) and in Eindhoven. Separate members, or people who distributed De Rode October, were in Arnhem, Dordrecht, Leiden, Lutjewinkel and Nieuwewinkel. In Aalsmeer, Deventer, Sliedrecht and Zutphen the paper was distributed by members from other towns. [4]
Probably the number of 75 members is a bit on the high side, and the demarcation between members and sympathisers was not always drawn too precisely. Half a year after the liberation, on 1 December 1945 the CRM had 84 members; later the number of members rose to 150 by 25 January 1946.
As compared with the MLL-Front their small size appears clearly from these figures. The CRM itself spoke about a ‘wave of desertion’, the responsibility for which was ascribed, in harsh terms, both to the political confusion inside both the RSAP and the MLL-Front, as well as to the underestimation of the dangers of underground work. In my opinion, other important factors were the disappearance of the NAS field of activity, together with the death of Sneevliet and the other leaders who had played an extremely important role. In combination with that there was yet a further element which should not be underestimated. For the underground as a whole 1942 was a difficult year. However big the setbacks were, the overwhelming majority of the underground succeeded in recruiting large forces. A group like the CRM was thrown back on its own resources, and the army for which they hoped, that of the revolutionary workers, did not stir in Europe in 1942.
Moreover, the CRM itself applied far too rigid criteria for recruitment, which had a political as well as a practical cause. Time and again the necessity was underlined of building an homogeneous revolutionary party, which would be necessary for the direct and massive workers’ struggles that were expected; so therefore the formation of cadres was the most important task for the CRM. It is clear, too, that the shock of the executions had an effect in that everyone was very conscious of the difficulties and dangers of more open political work.
Wout Tieleman, looking back at the initial period of the occupation says:

Finally we were (and every illegal group initially was) a bunch of amateurs who dared to compete with a specially trained professional police and tracing apparatus who, during eight years and more, had gathered experience in Germany. We had only that experience in theory, and to obtain it in practice a price had to be paid. That price was, alas, paid, and it was higher than necessary.

The rigidity of the organisation may appear from the orders which were given in the internal organ, Het Kompas. Without the permission of the leading bodies no material should be delivered in person; membership should be kept secret, and no enquiries should be made about it, particularly as to members outside one’s own cell or unit. Discussion evenings with others could only be held with the permission of the leadership; permission was also necessary for making contacts – even where former party comrades were concerned. There were continual appeals for prudence, with special warnings against nationalist organisations. Van ’t Hart was of the opinion that during his detention in Scheveningen the latter had been too curious. In a conversation he states that he would have warned against the notorious traitor Van der Waals. The CRM leadership possessed potassium cyanide, dispensed by the eldest son of the Amsterdam revolutionary, Barend Luteraan. In case of arrest they intended to avoid a repetition of the MLL-Front drama.
 

Commitment

Clearly the directives were not always followed to the letter, but the CRM did become an organisation that worked prudently. As far as is known, nobody in the CRM was arrested because of their activities in the organisation. Leen Reedijk from The Hague, who was arrested in October 1944 after getting involved in a matter of false papers which had nothing to do with the CRM, was the only victim among the members of whom I am aware. Reedijk died when the train that transported him from Vught to Buchenwald was bombed.

The logical consequence of the severe demands of membership was that a very great commitment was required of the members. In Het Kompas one of the members wrote that the devotion of two or three evenings a week could be asked for. Another correspondent reacted; members who only distributed newspapers were not enough, a revolutionist had to give himself fully, ‘if necessary seven evenings a week’. The examples held up were those of the Russian illegal professional revolutionaries under Czarism. In De Rode October of February 1943 the rigid selection of the members was written about in a positive way: ‘The storms of the Imperialist War have blown away the chaff and the golden pure grains have remained’.
In the bigger towns the CRM was organised in groups of five members who, through a cell leader, were in contact with the local and national leaderships. The publications of the CRM were, as a rule, delivered clandestinely; only with trusted contacts could they, after consultation with the cell leader, be handed over in person. The CRM did not have financial problems, as one of the leading members found a way to get money illegally through his job.
The leadership of the CRM consisted of Harry Combrink, Herman Drenth, Piet van ’t Hart, Sal Santen and Wout Tieleman; the leadership also constituted the editorial board of De Rode October. It is not clear whether this leadership was elected during the founding conference on 22 August, or brought about by co-option. There is no agreed opinion among the former members as to the frequency or the location of the meetings of the leadership. The greater part of the articles for De Rode October were written by van ’t Hart and Santen; Tieleman was responsible for the production of the paper. Cor van ’t Hart maintained a large part of the communication network. She went to Drenth in Groningen and on her way there she delivered papers in Arnhem, Deventer and Zutphen and fetched things in The Hague before returning to Rotterdam.

Dangerous

She also took care of the contact with Santen in Amsterdam. During the winter of famine (1944-45) her role became still more important. Cor van ’t Hart was not a member of the leadership but she did the ‘greatest portion of the dangerous work’, to use the words of Tieleman.

In comparison with the MLL-Front, the youthful age and the relative lack of experience of the CRM leadership is remarkable. Only Piet van ’t Hart was more than thirty years old. Both because of this difference in age, and his participation as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War together with his past membership of the MLL-Front leadership, van ’t Hart possessed by far the greatest political authority within the leadership. The youthful age of the leadership was, for the rest, a reflection of the age structure of the group as a whole. In The Hague it was the younger ones who continued after the executions, and in Amsterdam the construction of CRM work was generally the work of members of the pre-war youth organisations of the RSAP. Thus it was pointed out in De Rode October that now the younger generation had taken over the work of the older ones.
The first issue of De Rode October had been typed by Tieleman on carbon copies in a sales office for lead and zinc where he worked at Zieken in The Hague. This illustrates how the CRM had to start from scratch, without even the beginnings of an apparatus. The second issue of the paper appeared after the founding conference of 22 August. The first issues were manufactured in the same primitive way. One of the carbon copies went to Rotterdam, where the copy was re-typed. It is not certain how long this mode of manufacture went on, but in any case the issues were mimeographed from August 1943. Indeed, one could hardly call the first machine of the CRM a proper duplicator:

Mimeograph box is a better term. It was indeed a kind of box, and inside it was a grid, on which a stencil could be attached. Under that there was a pack of paper and by moving a roller to and fro – something like modern paint rollers – you obtained a print. The disadvantage –very copy had to be taken out separately.

After the mimeograph box came some other simple gadgets, until the CRM got hold of an Edison Dick hand mimeograph, with which the greater part of the De Rode October issues were made. By these improvements the circulation grew from some tens of copies to 2,000 or 2,500 copies in 1943. From the thirteenth issue the paper appeared with a red heading:

To make a heading, we would buy a box of letters with enormously big rubber letters with which we composed the words De Rode October. Furthermore, we had the biggest possible stamp pad with red ink, but the stamp was too big for the box, so that for each heading the stamp had to be wetted twice.

The paper was supplied by Van ’t Hof in The Hague, an adherent of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) [5] – a Protestant Christian party – who worked for the illegal paper Trouw. Before the war he supplied the RSAP, and during the whole occupation he supplied the MLL-Front and the CRM with paper.

During the occupation 44 issues of De Rode October appeared. Until September 1944 it was a monthly paper and after then, when the end of the occupation seemed to be near, the paper appeared every fortnight. During the whole famine winter they succeeded in issuing it twice a month; and even during the chaotic period of the razzias [6] in autumn 1944 editions were improvised. Because of the liberation of the south of the country the contact with the Eindhoven members was severed. Although just before that time a mimeograph had been brought to Eindhoven, as far as is known, no edition of De Rode October for the liberated zone was produced there. Because of the railway strike contact with Herman Drenth in Groningen was no longer possible; there too, no separate publication was undertaken. In autumn 1944 at Rotterdam, the local comrades mimeographed De Rode October at least three times. In Amsterdam too, material was independently produced.
The responsibility for production was in the hands of Tieleman who, together with Antoine Dolleman, produced the greater number of issues. The mimeographing was done from August 1943 until November 1944 in the attic of Antoine Dolleman at the Herderinnestraat; afterwards the production took place in the parental house of Tieleman in the Oltmansstraat. If necessary the duo Tieleman-Dolleman was assisted by others; Rein van der Horst and Thea Bloemsma were regularly involved in the production of material, and Lena Dolleman-Schenk, together with Antoine Dolleman, produced an issue of De Rode October during the great razzias in November 1944.
Those involved in production invested, often in freezing conditions, an enormous amount of energy in the creation of their paper, using ink, stencils and paper of war quality, and lacking spare parts for the maintenance and repair of the machine. It was therefore quite understandable that the editorial board and Antoine Dolleman reacted indignantly when one of the members, in an internal contribution, complained about the appearance of the publications.

Evolution

A clear evolution can be discerned in the contents of De Rode October. The first issues contained only some general articles about the course of the war and the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary Socialists. During the April-May 1943 strike some shorter, real news items were printed and more articles per issue appeared. According to the CRM itself De Rode October had become more of an actual political newspaper, an ‘agitational organ’. That conception does not seem quite correct to me, because the bulk of the paper continued to be analytical articles in which the general political line of the group was expounded.

The editorial board itself also regularly pointed out that because they did not have contacts in the state apparatus, like so many other illegal newspapers, they disposed of insufficient information. The members were urged to send in fewer polemics and more articles with a news value together with a theoretical introduction. The editorial board itself was greatly dependent on the Nazi press and the foreign radio and an article against the handing over of private radios to the Nazi officials referred to them as a ‘priceless possession: The art of interpreting such sources was excellently mastered, for it is clear that a serious analysis of the situation was given in the articles on the course of the war.
The contents of the paper were chosen entirely by the editorial board; articles which did not completely harmonise with the line of the organisation were not published. Articles refused were, with an argument against printing them, published in the internal discussion organ of the CRM, Het Kompas. The latter appeared from November 1942 until the end of 1944, when the publication had to cease because of communication problems; in all thirty issues appeared. In the MLL-Front such a bulletin had only appeared after a fierce discussion, but the CRM leadership wrote that such a paper was always a necessity for a revolutionary organisation. So, notwithstanding the conditions of illegality, the CRM provided a paper in which all members could discuss the politics of the organisation. Besides the articles refused for De Rode October (someone who had had an article turned down wrote that De Rode October had become the private domain of the editorial board) Het Kompas published articles on certain questions and on the work of the organisation. The editorial board repeatedly called for more discussion articles.
Around the beginning of 1944 in The Hague there emerged a discussion group of about five young people around the CRM. From the CRM itself were Leen Reedijk (the centre of the group), Rein van der Horst (the contact with the leadership) and Thea Bloemsma. This group published the discussion paper De Pionier four times. It is remarkable that much was written on topics like art and sexuality in this paper, which was unusual in the revolutionary Socialist movement of that time. Perhaps an explanation can be found in the fact that the CRM members in question came from the Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale (AJC), the pre-war youth organisation of the Social Democracy which was strongly oriented to cultural matters. Moreover, unlike the CRM members, the people in the group did not come from the working class. Indeed, these youth needed a discussion on these topics as they had become separated from mainstream cultural life; they did not go to the cinema, etc., because Jews were no longer allowed there. [7]
Because of its interests this group was a strange animal, and the CRM leadership had an ambivalent attitude towards it. They twice reacted rather untactfully to discussion articles from the group, the first one on the membership norms of a revolutionary party and the second one on the conceptions of Wilhelm Reich regarding sexuality. The reactions of the leadership were, probably for reasons of security, published in De Pionier under Rein van der Horst’s pseudonym, Barbarossa. He therefore wrote an angry letter to the leadership in which he, inter alia, criticised them because they had mentioned ‘the revolutionary Marxist party’. In van der Horst’s opinion this should not have been brought up because people had only got together to build a Socialist youth movement. [8]
On 21 November 1944, two days after writing this letter, van der Horst was arrested during a big round-up in The Hague. Leen Reedijk had been arrested one month earlier. The group evolved a little further at about that time. In January 1945 the fourth and last issue of De Pionier appeared under the chief-editorship of a new editor, who used the pseudonym H. Blommers. He pointed out that the character of the group was unclear. The clarity that he desired came with the appearance of the paper Revolutionnaire Jeugd (Revolutionary Youth), of which three issues appeared, from February till April 1945, with a circulation of between 500 and 1,000. The paper had two pages and appeared under the control of Piet van ’t Hart. Antoine Dolleman wrote the first issue, van ’t Hart wrote the next two. Revolutionnaire Jeugd differed from De Pionier, in that it appeared as the youth organ of the CRM and the cultural aspect of the struggle for Socialism disappeared.
Finally in April 1944 the CRM published a booklet with six articles by Trotsky, dealing with Stalinism. In the introduction they announced their intention of publishing Trotsky’s Transitional Programme and some of his texts on the rise of Nazism in Germany; these publications did not appear during the occupation.
Naturally the CRM needed ‘safe’ houses, forged coupons and ration cards and other papers on behalf of their own organisation. They could provide for their own needs in part. Andries Dolleman co-operated with Leen Molenaar, a member of the Spartacus leadership; as ‘Zwarte Kees’ Molenaar was very active in the field of security and welfare and through him the CRM got coupon cards. Thea Bloemsma and Rein van der Horst regularly had fugitives of their own circle in their home. The leadership co-operated with some resistance groups which specialised in providing those on the run and in the underground with coupon cards, identity papers and ‘safe’ addresses. Among others Combrink, Cor van ’t Hart and Santen were involved in this.

Collaboration

One of the groups with which they collaborated was that of Rinus Pelgrom, a Council Communist who was also active in the left-Socialist resistance group De Vonk. His group was part of the Free Groups Amsterdam, a circle that did not want to join the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers (LO) (National Organisation for Aid to Fugitives) because they wanted to preserve their organisational autonomy. The collaboration with his group became so close that a part of it, including Pelgrom, joined the CRM. Another important contact was Bertus ten Dam, who was, before the war, a member of the Bond van Revolutionnaire Socialisten (BRS) (League of Revolutionary Socialists), a split from the RSAP. Ten Dam had, together with Piet van ’t Hart, fought in Spain. He worked in the group of Daan Baruch and Eli van Tijn; Ab Oeldrich was the highly gifted forger of this group, which devoted itself to the falsification of identity cards and the obtaining of ration books. This group collaborated with the Persoons Bewijzen Centrale (PBC) (Identity Card Centre) of Gerrit van der Veen. Furthermore the CRM had, through Sal Santen, contact with the psychoanalyst Coen van Emde Boas. Herman Drenth, in Groningen, collaborated in the field of welfare with people from other groups. From the Pelgrom and Ten Dam groups, the CRM got coupon cards and false papers. Various CRM members were sheltered by Pelgrom. In its turn, the CRM in The Hague sometimes provided Pelgrom with ration books and coupons and assisted him in finding safe addresses.

The ration books obtained by the CRM were especially reserved for people who really needed them. Besides fugitives, there were the imprisoned comrades and the members working in Germany. For them Cor van ’t Hart prepared food parcels. On the suggestion of Piet van ’t Hart it was decided in order to prevent bureaucratisation and favouritism that CRM members were not allowed to use extra ration coupons, an example of van ’t Hart’s rigid proletarian morals. During the famine winter this rule was consciously ‘sinned’ against; Thea Bloemsma received extra coupons from Wout Tieleman so that she could continue to function as a courier.
The contacts described above were the responsibility of the leadership. For reasons of safety the making of local contacts was disapproved of. Reality was, however, more complicated. Rein van der Horst worked at the Burgerlijke Stand (Registrar’s Office) in The Hague and there he was involved in the sabotage of the German administration. In autumn 1944 Thea Bloemsma got involved by chance in the sheltering of Jewish children. Frits Zeggelink sometimes ‘took a little detour’. Such activities took place without the knowledge of the organisation.
Three phases can be discerned in the development of the organisation. The first was from the start in summer 1942 until the April-May strikes of 1943, during which time a national structure was developed. The second phase went from May 1943 until September 1944, during which De Rode October started to appear in a mimeographed form, and its character became more defined. At this time too Het Kompas appeared more regularly. De Jong characterises this period, as he does for the ‘illegality’ in general, as the purest unfolding of the resistance.
The third phase, from September 1944 until the liberation is the most difficult to judge. The partition of the Netherlands between that controlled by the Allies and that still occupied by the Nazis, the failure of the trains to function because of the railway strike, the dismantling of industry, the razzias of the male population and the famine winter led to the disintegration of society. Under these circumstances it was not so simple for the ‘illegality’ to continue to work, and certainly not for a tiny group like the CRM.
After the war Piet van ’t Hart wrote that in this period a small group of CRM members achieved an inhuman amount. In this phase Wout Tieleman and Antoine Dolleman succeeded in producing De Rode October twice a month, in the non-soundproof attic of the home of Tieleman’s parents. In Wout Tieleman’s words:

As soon as I had typed all the stencils I started, with stamp and stamp cushion, to stamp the headings on the first page. Quite a job! Meanwhile Antoine rolled on. Being ready with the stamp box I already started collating, and made small stacks of sheets...Antoine did the most fatiguing job, the rolling. I did not often relieve him because he had the machine so much at his fingertips that he felt when two sheets at a time went through the machine. The drying of the ink was a separate problem, for in that attic the ink remained too sticky and Antoine often had to warm the ink tubes on his naked body so that we could work.

After the beginning of the big razzias in the autumn of 1944 it was nearly impossible for any men to go onto the streets; the CRM leadership called on the older members and women to take over jobs. Thea Bloemsma began dealing with the supply of paper and ink in The Hague. In her words:

To me that was a day’s work in itself. I put the paper in my pram and my child upon it, which was a heavy load through the snow. It worked excellently, and in that way one passed the heaviest control posts. Once I had some very important letters which had to be delivered to Wout Tieleman. Those I rolled into a dirty diaper of my daughter and with child and pram I got under way. At the control post the question was put: “Was ist das?” (“What is that”) I said: “Das is Stront”(“That is shit”). I knew instinctively that if you said such a thing to a man you would pass the control post.

In worn-out clothes, on a bicycle with the ends of a garden hose as tyres, Cor van ’t Hart went through the freezing cold to The Hague, Amsterdam and the northern part of North Holland: ‘I had little time to read the paper. Sometimes I was away for ten days, and came home for a short while and then went away again on the bicycle.’ Harry Combrink also played a role in maintaining communications and, notwithstanding the razzias, made ‘walking trips’ between Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam.
 

Part 3 Main lines of the political position

Like the MLL-Front the CRM considered the Second World War not as a struggle between democracy and Fascism, but primarily as a conflict between various capitalist countries for the control of the world market. The Western Allies would try to stifle every important independent activity of the workers. The Allies’ victory could not break the impasse of world capitalism, and so new economic crises and a new world war were inevitable. That the Soviet Union also chose the political side of its western military allies was, for the CRM, an extra proof of the reactionary, nationalistic policy of the governing Stalinist bureaucracy. According to the CRM the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state which had to be defended against the aggression of capitalist Germany. They considered that revolutionary developments in Europe would spread to the Soviet Union, whereas the defeat of the USSR would mean that reaction, both inside and outside that country, would seize the chance to strangle all the gains of the Russian revolution for ever. For that reason the CRM was of the opinion that their advocacy of the defence of the Soviet Union was in direct opposition to Stalin’s policy.

In the first issue of De Rode October it was admitted that the situation was not encouraging. Because of the deep crisis of the workers’ movement there had, ‘against every expectation’ been no revolutionary resistance to the war. In December 1942 it was stated that the weakest link of the system lay in the German satellites in Italy and the Balkans. A revolutionary breakthrough might originate there but it would bleed to death if the German working class did not join the struggle. The national resistance in Europe was judged negatively; such ‘pro-English feeling’ would not produce revolutionary resistance. According to De Rode October, such a development was only possible if there were revolutionary uprisings in other countries.
In February 1943 there was a negative reaction to the possibility of an invasion of Western Europe; such a second front could only be established when Germany had been considerably weakened, which meant that this would be the most probable time for some revolutionary development. They stuck to this perspective until the invasion of June 1944: that there was a race as to which would be first, the German revolution or the invasion. The outcome would be either a general revolutionary wave or the victory of the counter-revolution.
The Allied invasion of Italy in July 1843 confirmed the CRM in their opinion; if the Allied advance succeeded, and Germany was occupied, the revolutionary possibilities would vanish for a number of years. In the discarding of Mussolini by governing circles in Italy, the CRM saw an attempt to keep the revolution at bay. They paid a lot of attention to the development of the workers’ resistance in Italy and to the counter-revolutionary role of the Allied military administration and of the Italian Communist Party. They warmly welcomed the important strike movements in England and the USA, and denounced the anti-democratic anti-strike measures of the governments in those countries.
A Political Declaration of August 1943 gives the fullest view of the Second World War by the CRM. The leadership attached much importance to this text which was put before the membership; they wrote that in a legal situation a conference would have been held. After consultation with the membership the final text was published in the fourteenth issue of De Rode October. Probably the Political Declaration is the most fundamental document of the revolutionary Socialist movement in the Netherlands during the occupation. Inter alia, a summary was given of the evolution of the resistance in Italy, Greece, the Balkans, the occupied West European countries and the Western Allied countries. For the CRM a rebirth of the German workers’ movement stood in the forefront:

The right slogans for the reinforcement of the resistance in the Netherlands against German imperialism will contribute towards that end. A sound spirit of resistance is alive in the Dutch proletariat. The coming events will decide whether the German revolution or the Allied counter-revolution will utilise this spirit.

From this quotation it appears that, under the influence of events, their appraisal of the resistance in the occupied European countries had undergone some change; it was judged less negatively now as compared with the first months after the founding of the CRM.
After the invasion of June 1944 the CRM corrected the perspective in a more pessimistic way:

In the sixth year of war, no wave of revolutionary resistance rolls over Europe, but discontented proletarians and peasants ally with their bourgeoisies in the uprising, in the partisan struggle, in the war against German imperialism and put all their hopes in the victory of Allied imperialism.

To the CRM the invasion meant that the German revolution would take longer to mature, and that the revolutionary initiative would move to Italy and the occupied European countries.
In December 1944 it seemed a turning point was established by the development and growth of the workers’ resistance in liberated France and Belgium, and by the flaring up of the civil war in Greece. The judgement of the national resistance in a number of European countries underwent a further nuanced change:

‘Especially in France, Belgium and the Balkans, the resistance movement has assumed a radical character because of its predominantly proletarian supporters and the collaborationist activity of great parts of the possessing classes ...

The struggle of the proletarians supporting the resistance movement has taken on such a sharp character because it is coupled with certain illusions about social and national liberation assumed to be inherent in the victory of the “democratic” powers and the Soviet Union:
In February 1945 a second wave of resistance was observed, through which Europe was becoming a ‘revolutionary volcano’. The CRM continued to stick to this perspective; even in the very last issue of De Rode October that appeared during the occupation, it expected a further development of the resistance in Germany. This hope of a rebirth of the revolutionary sentiments of the German workers did not mean that the CRM had no eye for the enormous problems attached to it. In February 1943 the great importance of the defeat of the German workers’ movement in 1933, when Hitler came to power without striking a blow, and the subsequent years of terror and destruction of the workers’ movement were pointed out thus:

Therefore, young comrades, if the German proletariat has, notwithstanding this enormous and bloody war, not yet arisen, and if it takes such a long time before it takes up opposition, it is not because the German proletariat has changed, or because it prefers to play at soldiers so much, but because of this terrible defeat and nothing else.

Time and again this point was underlined by the CRM. In addition the policy of the Allies was mentioned as an inhibiting factor on German revolutionary consciousness. The CRM turned vehemently against any theory of collective responsibility for Nazism by the German people and against the Yalta treaty through which the German workers were driven once more into the hands of Hitler. In the publications of the CRM a distinction was consistently drawn between Fascist and anti-Fascist Germans, a term like ‘moffen’ (‘Krauts’) was not used: ‘Not in the London of Churchill, Gerbrandy and Albarda are our allies, but in the prisons and concentration camps of Germany.’ It is no exaggeration to say that the CRM tried to drum this into the heads of their readers against the stream.
Above all, the Soviet Union was reproached for its nationalistic policy, and for its support for the partition of Europe into spheres of influence, thus acting in opposition to a revival of the German workers movement. To the CRM the dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 was a symbol of this policy; they devoted a long article and a special manifesto to the dissolution, which thus met the wishes of the Western Allies. Nevertheless, they considered that revolutionary possibilities would be improved if the Red Army liberated Germany from the Nazis; the military successes of the Red Army were called a ‘glowing item’. In that respect the CRM thought that the soldiers of the Red Army would not turn against the revolutionary forces. For the same reason Hitler would prefer an advance by the Western Allies.

Notes

1. The MLL-Front had between 400 and 600 members. Added to these should be those who were members of the CRM or Communistenbund Spartacus but who did not participate in the MLL-Front. These were probably some few tens at most.

2. After the war several revolutionary organisations investigated Poppe’s role in Sneevliet’s arrest, because in the trial file was mentioned that Sneevliet had been arrested with help from Poppe. The investigating committee came unanimously to the conclusion that there had been no question of treason, and that no blame was attached to Poppe.

3. It is unclear at what exact date Santen joined. He thinks 1942. Piet van ’t Hart thinks 1943. Whichever it was, Santen played an important role within the leadership. It should not be forgotten that as a Jew, Santen was permanently exposed to danger, and that the occupation years were extraordinarily tragic for him. His father-in law Sneevliet had been murdered, his mother-in-law was imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and his own family was taken and did not return from the camps.

4. On 1 December 1945 the membership was as follows: Amsterdam 16: Rotterdam 20: The Hague 15; Delft 11: Eindhoven 4: Gronigen 13; Maastricht 1: Emmen 1.

5. The Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party is opposed to the principles of the French Revolution! It is therefore somewhat conservative. [Note by Editor]

6. Razzia, a word of Italian origin meaning the sweep of an area for slaves in the manner of the pirate galleys in the Mediterranean. In this case the police and soldiers arrested able-bodied men to send them as forced labour to Germany. [Note by Editor]

7. Interest in the ideas of people like Reich was not limited to those from an AJC background. It was shared by Herman Drenth and Harry Combrink.

8. The conflict around De Pionier seems to have had a resemblance with one in a number of Zaan youth papers in which CPN members and other youth co-operated.

***Sitting On The Rim Of The World- With The Son Of The Neon Wilderness Nelson Algren In Mind-Take Three

He wrote of small-voiced people, the desperately lonely, alienatedpeople who inhabit the Nighthawk Diner (artist Edward Hopper’s or Tom Waits’ take your pick), the restless, the sleepless, the shiftless, those who worked the late shift, those who drew the late shift of life, those who worked better under the cover of night in the dark alleyways and sullen doorways.

He wrote big time, big words, about the small-voiced people, big words for people who spoke in small words, spoke small words about small dreams, or no dreams, spoke only of the moment, the eternal moment. Waiting eternally waiting to get well, to get some kicks. Waiting for the fixer man, waiting for the fixer man to fix what ailed them. Not for him the small voice pleasant Midwestern farmers proving breadbaskets to the world, the prosperous small town drugstore owners, or of Miss Millie’s beauty salon (although one suspects that he could have) for in the pull and push of the writing profession they had (have) their muses. Nor was he inclined to push the air out of the small town banker seeking a bigger voice, the newspaper publisher seeking to control the voices or the alderman or his or her equivalent who had their own apparatuses for getting their small voices heard (although again one suspects he could have, if so inclined, shilled for that set). No, he, Nelson Algren, he, to give him a name took dead aim at the refuge of society, the lumpen as he put it in the title of one short story, those sitting on the rim of the world.

And he did good, did good by his art, did good by his honest snarly look at the underside of society, and, damn, by making us think about that quarter turn of fate that separated the prosperous farmer (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not short-weighting the world), the drugstore owner (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not dispensing his wares, his potent drugs, out the back door to a craving market) , Miss Millie (assuming as we must that she, secretly, was not running a call girl service on the side), the banker (assuming as we must that he, maybe secretly maybe not, was not gouging rack rents and usurious interest), the newspaper editor (assuming as we must that he, very publicly, in fact was printing all the news fit to print), and the politician (assuming as we must that he, secretly, was not bought and paid for by all of the above, or others) from the denizens of his mean streets. The mean city streets, mainly of Chicago, but that is just detail, just names of streets and sections of town to balance his work where his characters eked out an existence, well, anyway they could, some to turn up face down in some muddy ravine, under some railroad trestle, in some dime flop house, other to sort of amble along in the urban wilderness purgatory.

Brother Algren gave us characters to chew on, plenty of characters, mostly men, mostly desperate (in the very broadest sense of that word), mostly with some jones to work off, mostly with some fixer man in the background to wreak havoc too. He gave us two classics of the seamy side genre, one, the misbegotten Frankie Machine, the man with the golden arm, the man with the chip on his shoulder, the mid-century(20^th century, okay) man ill at ease in his world, ill at ease with the world and looking, looking for some relief, some kicks in that mid-century parlance, and, two, that hungry boy, that denizen of the great white trash night, Dove Linkhorn, who, perhaps more than Frankie spoke to that mid-century angst, spoke to that world gone wrong, for those who had just come up, come up for some place where time stood still to gain succor in the urban swirl, to feast at the table,come up from the back forty lots, the prairie golden harvest wheat fields, the Ozarks, all swamps and ooze,mountain wind hills and hollows, the infested bayous and were ready to howl, howl at the moon to get attention.

I remember reading somewhere, and I have forgotten where now, that someone had noted that Nelson Algren’s writing on Dove Linkhorn roots was the most evocative piece on the meaning of the okie–arkie out migration segment of that mid-century America ever written, the tale of the wandering boys, the railroad riders, the jungle camp jumpers, the skid row derelicts. Hell, call it by its right name, the white trash, that lumpen mush. And he or she was right, of course, after I went back and re-read that first section of Walk On The Wild Side where the Linkhorn genealogy back unto the transport ships that brought the first crop of that ilk from thrown out Europe are explored. All the pig thieves, cattle-rustlers, poacher, highwaymen, the “what did some sociologist call them, oh yeah, “the master-less men, those who could not or would not be tamed by the on-rushing wheels of free-form capitalism picked up steam, the whole damn lot transported. And good riddance.

The population of California after World War II was filled to the brim with such types, the feckless hot rod boys, boys mostly too young to have been though the bloodbaths of Europe and Asia building some powerful road machines out of baling wire and not much else, speeding up and down those ocean-flecked highways looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for kicks just like those Chicago free-flow junkies, those twisted New Orleans whoremasters. Wandering hells angels riding two by two (four by four if they felt like it and who was to stop them) creating havoc for the good citizens of those small towns they descended on, descended on unannounced (and unwelcomed by those same good citizens). In and out of jail, Q, Folsom, not for stealing pigs now, but armed robberies or some egregious felony, but kindred to those lost boys kicked out of Europe long ago. Corner boys, tee-shirted, jacket against cold nights, hanging out with time on their hands and permanent smirks, permanent hurts, permanent hatreds, paid to that Algren observation. All the kindred of the cutthroat world, or better cut your throat world, that Dove drifted into was just a microcosm of that small-voiced world.

He spoke of cities, even when his characters came fresh off the farm, abandoned for the bright lights of the city and useless to that short-weighting farmer who now is a prosperous sort, making serious dough as the breadbasket to the world. They, the off-hand hot rod king, the easy hell rider, the shiftless corner boy, had no existence in small towns and hamlets for their vices, or their virtues, too small, too small for the kicks they were looking for. They needed the anonymous city rooming house, the cold-water flat, the skid- row flop house, the ten- cent beer hall, hell, the railroad jungle, any place where they could just let go with their addictions, their anxieties, and their hunger without having to explain, endlessly explain themselves, always, always a tough task for the small-voiced of this wicked old world. They identified with cities, with city 24/7/365 lights, with Algren’s blessed neon lights, city traffic (of all kinds), squalor, cops on the take, cops not on the take, plebeian entertainments, sweat, a little dried blood, marked veins, reefer madness, swilled drinks, white towers, all night diners (see it always comes back to that lonely, alienated Nighthawk Diner just ask Waits), the early editions (for race results, the number, who got dead that day, the stuff of that world), a true vision of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk for a candid world.

He spoke of jazz and the blues, as if all the hell in this wicked old world could be held off for a minute while that sound sifted thought the night fog air reaching the rooming house, the flop, the ravine, the beer hall as it drifted out to the river and drowned. Music not upfront but as a backdrop to while the steamy summer nights away, and maybe winter too. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, he spoke of a small-voiced white world, residents of white slums and pursuers of white- etched dreams and only stick character blacks but his beat, his writing rhythm made no sense without the heat of Trouble In Mind or that cool blast of Charlie Parker, Miles, Dizzie be-bopping, made absolutely no sense, and so it went.

He spoke of love too. Not big flamed love, big heroes taking big falls for some hopeless romance like in olden times but squeezed love, love squeezed out of a spoon, maybe, but love in all its raw places. A guy turning his woman into a whore to feed his endless habit love, and her into a junkie love. A woman taking her man through cold turkey love. A man letting his woman go love, ditto woman her man when the deal went wrong. When the next best thing came by. Not pretty love all wrapped in a bow, but love nevertheless. And sometimes in this perverse old world the love a man has for a woman when, failing cold turkey, he goes to get the fixer man and that fixer man get his woman well, almost saintly and sacramental. Brothers and sisters just read The Last Carousel if you want to know about love. Hard, hard love. Yah, Nelson Algren knew how to give voice, no holds barred, to the small-voiced people.

***************
 

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Four

 From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-

A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of the bourgeois-driven push (okay, okay maybe going back further to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys) to get ahead in this wicked old world leaving you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city where youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, landed on your ass more than a few time but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done. Yeah so if you are wondering then what, have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed you off your sainted wheels, and got you into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, not faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, sisters and brothers), and need some solace, need to reach back to roots, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay).

If the norms of don’t rock the boat, the norms of keep your head down, keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual, and excuse, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, speaking some unknown language maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side, sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, gotten it taken away like some maiden virginity, those who never had anything but lost, not those who never had a way to be lost), dopesters inhaling, in solidarity hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor stiff out of his room rent for kicks, out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote if that earth angel connection comes through, creating vision of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get“connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night), hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japans ), the driftless (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them”too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup trestle, some Hoboken broken down pier, the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living, looking for busted black-hearted angels (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless gin mill), for girls with Monroe hips (swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and flaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells (descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys, get real, and left for dead with cigar wrapping rings, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten. 

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Dove Linkhorns of the world, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores, having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, the wretched of the earth and their kin, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

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"America, Where Are You Now...."- Stepphenwolf's The Monster-Take Two

A YouTube Film Clip Of Stepphenwolf Performing Monster. Ah, Those Were The Days
 

Commentary/CD REVIEW

Steppenwolf: 16 Greatest Hits, Steppenwolf, Digital Sound, 1990

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

The heavy rock band Steppenwolf, one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion of times, drop out of rat-race bourgeois society and it money imperative, its white picket fence with little e white house visions (from when many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older), drop out and create a niche somewhere, some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment, Much of which was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gens like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.

Steppenwolf was different. Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with current audience in mind, and notions of immortality for most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wildthat still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.

And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for intervention into Syria and Iran, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" (the chorus which I have posted above and lyrics below) said it all.

Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and other then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out the album. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen.
 

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary

Chasing the promise of freedom and hope

Came to this country to build a new vision

Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches

Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken

Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland

We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog

And when the war over

They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way

But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping

Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)
 

The spirit was freedom and justice

And it's keepers seem generous and kind

It's leaders were supposed to serve the country

But now they won't pay it no mind

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

And now their vote is a meaningless joke

They babble about law and order

But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin' the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner

We can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watching

(America)
 

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--
 

Born To Be Wild

Words and music by Mars Bonfire
 

Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild
Born to be wild
 

© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--
 

THE PUSHER
 

From the 1968 release "Steppenwolf"

Words and music by Hoyt Axton

You know I've smoked a lot of grass

O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills

But I never touched nothin'

That my spirit could kill

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes

But the pusher don't care

Ah, if you live or if you die

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, I say The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With the love grass in his hand

Oh but the pusher is a monster

Good God, he's not a natural man

The dealer for a nickel

Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah, but the pusher ruin your body

Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, God damn the Pusher

I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man

Well, now if I were the president of this land

You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man

I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run

Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun

God damn The Pusher

Gad damn The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man\
 

© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)

--Used with permission--