Thursday, June 26, 2014

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Approaches ... Some Remembrances -LeninThe Position and Tasks of the Socialist International




The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.

The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs, were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.                   

Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

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Teddy Martin had come from a long line of workers, some of his forbears had been among the first domestic weavers in Spitalfield, had been the first machine-tenders in Manchester and had been workers like him and his father in the London shipbuilding trade. He knew deep in his blood there was an “us” and “them” in the world without his party, the Labor Party, having to tell him word one on the subject. He had even read Karl Marx in his early teens when he was trying to figure out why his family was stuck in the faraway outer tenements with their squalor and their human closeness (he never could get over being in close quarters ever since then). So yes he was ready to listen to what some left members of the party had to say if the war clouds on the horizon turned any darker. But, and hear him true, his was like his forbears and his father before him as loyal a man as to be found in the country. Loyal to his king (queen too if it came to that) and his country. So he would have to think, think carefully, about what to do if those nasty Huns and their craven allies making loud noises of late threatened his way of life. Most of his mates to the extent that they had any opinion were beginning to be swept up in the idea that a little war might not be such a bad thing to settle some long smoldering disputes. Still he, Teddy Martin, was not a man to be rushed and so he would think, think hard, about what to do if there was a mass mobilization.

No question, thought Teddy Martin, his majesty’s government had gotten itself into a hard situation ever since that mangy Archduke somebody had got himself shot by a guy, a damn anarchist working with who knows who, maybe freemasons, over in Sarajevo, over in someplace he was not quite sure he knew where it was if somebody had asked him to point it out in a map. That seemingly silly little act (except of course to the Archduke and his wife also killed) apparently has exposed Britain, damn the whole British Empire that they claim the sun never sets on, to some pretty serious entanglements because if France were to go to war with Austria or someplace like that then the king is duty bound to come to France’s rescue. And Teddy Martin as thinking man, as a working man, as a member in good standing of the Labor Party ever since its inception was still not sure what he would do. Not sure that he would follow the war cries being shouted out by the likes of Arthur Henderson from his own party. All he knew was that the usual talk of football or the prizefights that filled the air at his pub, The Cock and Bull, was being supplanted by war talk, by talk of taking a nip out of the Germans and those who spoke in that way were gaining a hearing. All Teddy knew was that it was getting harder and harder for him to openly express thoughts that he needed to think about the issues more. That was not a good sign, not a good omen. 

Yes, once the Germans were on the march toward Belgium and then threatened Paris in a race to the sea if not stopped then the guys at the Cock and Bull became more pensive, started to see that they would have to do right by the king. One night, one July night before the blood started flowing on the continent, one of the boys, Brewster, Teddy thought had led a toast to the king and all including Teddy rather sheepishly. But now, now with the blood up, no with the Empire at stake, new with even the wogs in India clamoring to serve their king and emperor Teddy Martin could see where each must do his duty. And so Teddy found himself less and less at the pub with the boys and more and more at home with his wife and two young boys waiting  for that minute when he would find himself heading to the recruiting station to give his all for his country. Although he lifted no glass to that fact.           

                  

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The German Social-Democratic Party had given Fritz Klein everything. Had taken him from a small furniture-making factory(less than one hundred employees constituting in those days small) where he led the fight for unionization (against all odds for that woefully unorganized industry and against the then still standing laws against unionization pressed by the state as well as well as the outlaw status of the S-D Party in those pre-legal days) and brought him along into the burgeoning party bureaucracy (boasting of this number of party publications, that number of members, and the pinnacle the votes attained for the growing number of party parliamentarians in the Reichstag). Made him a local then regional shop steward agent. Later found him a spot in the party publications department and from there to alternate member of the party’s national committee. As he grew older, got married, had two lovely children the party had severely sapped the youthful idealism out of him. Still he was stirred whenever Karl Liebknecht, old Wilhelm’s son, the father whom he knew from the old days, delivered one of his intellectual and rational attacks against the war aims of the Kaiser and his cabal. Still too though he worried, worried to perdition, that the British and, especially the French were deliberately stepping on German toes. Although tired, endlessly tired, he hoped that he would be able to stick to the Second International’s pledge made at Basle in 1912 to do everything to stop war in case it came, as was now likely. He just didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know at all. 

Fritz was furious, furious at two things. First that those damn whatever they were anarchists, nationalists, or whatever had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand. Had threatened the peace of Europe, his peace, with their screwy theory of picking off various state officials thinking that would, unlike victory in the mass class struggles, change the world. Christ, they could have at least read Marx or somebody. Make no mistake Fritz had no truck with monarchy, certainly not the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy, despised the Kaiser himself right here in the German homeland (although on the quiet since the Kaiser was not above using his courts for the simple pleasure of skewering a man for lese majeste and had done so to political opponents and the idle wild-talkers alike). Still his blood boiled that some desperados would pick at a fellow Germanic target. Fritz was not at all sure that maybe the French, or the English, the bloody English were behind the activities. Hugo Heine thought so, his immediate regional director, so there could be some truth to the assertion.

Secondly, that same Hugo Heine had begun, at the behest of the national committee of the party, to clamp down on those who were trying to make the party live up to its promises and try to make a stand against any German, any Kaiser moves toward war over the incident at Sarajevo. The way Heine put it was that if war was to come and he hoped that it would not the Social-Democracy must not be thrown into the underground again like in the old days under Bismarck. Hugo had spent two years in the Kaiser’s jail back then for simply trying to organize his shop and get them to vote for the party then outlawed. The radical stuffing had come out of Hugo though and all he wanted was not to go back to jail now for any reason. Fritz cursed those damn anarchists again, cursed them more bitterly since they were surely going to disturb his peace.

Fritz Klein was beside himself when he heard the news, the Social-Democratic parliamentary caucus on August 4th had overwhelming to support the Kaiser’s war budget (and because overwhelming each member was duty-bound to vote en bloc the way the majority vote went and did so despite the pleas of Karl Liebknecht), to give him the guns, ammunition and whatever he needed to pursue the war aims that were just beginning to unfold. Fritz had not expected the party to be able to stop the war preparations, or once the war clouds got too ominous, to stop the mobilizations, but he did expect that the parliamentary delegation (which was under its own discipline and not the party’s) would not cravenly grant the Kaiser’s every war supply. All those brave peacetime proclamations about the brotherhood of man and international working-class solidarity were now so much paper in the wind. He sat for a moment in disgust and disbelief that now Europe would be in flames for who knew how long before he knew he would have to explain to the party stalwarts the whys and wherefores of the budgetary decision. And have to explain why he and his comrades would soon be loading rifles instead of bags of flour somewhere near the Atlantic Ocean. For a flash he hoped for a short war but in his gut he knew the fates were fickle and that the blood of the European working-class youth would be spilled without question and without end.       

    

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Jacques Rous (and yes he traced his family roots back to the revolution, back to the “red” priest who he was named after who had led some of the plebeian struggles back then that were defeated by those damn moderate cutthroats Robespierre and Saint Just) had long been a leader the anarchist delegation in his Parisian district, had been in a few fights in his time with the damn city bourgeoisie, and had a long, very long memory of what the Germans had, and had not done, in Paris in ’71,in the time of the bloodedly suppressed Commune. Also Jacques had long memories of his long past forbears who had come from Alsace-Lorraine now in German hands. And it galled him, galled him that there were war clouds gathering daily over his head, over his district and over his beloved Paris.  

 But that was not what was troubling Jacques Rous in the spring of 1914. He knew, knew deep in his bones like a lot of his fellow anarchists, like a lot of the guys in the small pottery factory he had worked in for the past several years after being laid off from the big textile factory across the river that if war came they would know what to do. Quatrain from the CGT (the large trade union organization to which he and others in the factory belonged to) had clued them in, had told them enough to know some surprises were headed the government’s way if they decided to use the youth of the neighborhoods as cannon fodder. What bothered Jacques was not his conduct but that of his son, Jacques too named in honor of that same ancient red priest who was the lifeblood of the family. Young Jacques something of a dandy like many youth in those days, something of a lady’s man (he had reportedly a married mistress and somebody else on the side), had told one and all (although not his father directly) who would listen one night that he planned to enlist in the Grenadiers just as soon as it looked like trouble was coming. Old Jacques wondered if other fathers were standing in fear of such rash actions by their sons just then.  

Old Jacques could see the writing on the wall, remembered what it  was like when the German threatened to come back in ’70 and then came the last time. Came and left the Parisian poor to eat rats or worse when they besieged the city, old Thiers fled to Versailles, and Paris starved half-aided by those Germans and he expected the same if not worse this time because that country was now unified, was now filled with strange powerful Krupp cannon and in a mood to use it now that one of the members of their alliance had had one of its own killed in Sarajevo and all Europe was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He believed that the anarchists of Paris to a man would resist the call to arms issued by the government. Quatrain, the great leader ever since Commune days, almost guaranteed a general strike if they tried to mobilize the Parisian youth for the slaughter. Yeah Quatrain would stand tall. Jacques though had personal worries somebody had seen his son, also Jacques, heading with some of his “gilded” friends toward the 12th Grenadier recruiting office in the Hotel de Ville ready to fight for bloody bourgeois France, for the memory of Napoleon, for the glory of battle. And he old Jacques knowing from some skimpily- held barricades back in ’71 just how “glorious” war was fretted in the night against his blood. 

Damn, the Germans were on the march again, yesterday it was Belgium and old Jacques knew in his heart where the bloody Kaiser was heading next. Hell knew it since those bloody May weeks in ’71 when the Germans acted as “honor guard” for the damn Thiers reaction once they broke out of Versailles so he was prepared to defeat his section to the death if it came to that, came to shedding an   old man’s blood. What worried Jacques, had worried him all spring was young Jacques cavalier attitude toward the impeding slaughter, his disregard for any of the principles that the old man had tried to instill in him from his youth.  Had in May joined the 47th Grenadiers who were now stationed in a forward position in the border area between France and Belgium. Sure young Jacques looked the gallant like all the Rouses but that last look, that unknowing look that old Jacques detected in his young son before he saw him off told plenty about the fears to come. The fear that no matter how far apart they had drifted, father and son, they were kindred, they were French at this dismal hour.           

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George Jenkins dreamed the dream of many young men out in the heartland, out in the wheat fields of Kansas a dream that America, his America would keep the hell out of what looked like war clouds coming from Europe in the spring of 1914 (although dreams and dreamers were located not just on the farms since George was not a Kansas farm boy but a rising young clerk in Doc Dell’s Drugstore located in the college town of Lawrence). George was keenly interested in such matters and would, while on break or when things were slow, glance through the day later copy of the New York Times or Washington Post that Doc provided for his more worldly customers via the passing trains. What really kept George informed though was William White’s home-grown Emporia Gazette which kept a close eye on the situation in Europe for the folks.      

And with all of that information here is what George Jenkins, American citizen, concluded: America had its own problems best tended to by keeping out of foreign entanglements except when America’s direct interests were threatened. So George naturally cast skeptical eyes on Washington, on President Wilson, despite his protestations that European affairs were not our business. George had small town ideas about people minding their own business. See too also George had voted for Eugene V. Debs himself, the Socialist party candidate for President, and while he was somewhat skeptical about some of the Socialist Party leaders back East he truly believed that Brother Debs would help keep us out of war. 

Jesus, those damn Europeans have begun to make a mess for themselves now that some archduke, Jesus, an archduke in this day and age (and George Jenkins thanked some forgotten forebear for getting his clan out of Europe whenever he did so and avoided that nonsense about going to the aid of somebody over a damn archduke). Make no mistake George Jenkins had no sympathy for anarchists and was half-glad a couple of years ago when the Socialist Party booted the IWW, the damn Wobbies, out if that is what they did and the beggars didn’t just walk out. Although he had an admiration for Big Bill Hayward and his trade union fights that is all it was-admiration and policy could not be made on that basis. So no he had no truck with anarchists but to go to war over an archduke-damn. Still George was no Pollyanna and kept abreast of what was going on and it bothered him more than somewhat that guy slike Senator Lodge from Massachusetts and others from the Northeast were beating the war drums to get the United States mired in a damn European war. No way, no way good solid Midwesterners would fall for that line. And so George watched and waited. Watched too to see what old Debs had to say about matters. George figured that if the war drums got loud enough then Brother Debs would organize and speak up to keep things right. That was his way.   

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Ivan Smirnov was no kid, had been around the block a few times in this war business. Had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass kicked by the Japanese in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his crewmates did not after that beating they took that did not have to happen if the damn Czar’s naval officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but overconfident that they could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval war game). More importantly he had been in the Baltic fleet when the revolution of 1905 came thundering over their heads and each man, each sailor, each officer had to choice sides. He had gone with rebels and while he did not face the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin his naval career was over.

Just as well Ivan had thought many times since he was then able to come ashore and get work on the docks through some connections, and think. And what he was thinking in the spring of 1914 with some ominous war clouds in the air that that unfinished task from 1905 was going to come to a head. Ivan knew enough about the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know that without some quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and good riddance. The hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future peasant conscripts who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought out land adventures to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly head-long into the Czar’s arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there was plenty of work to do. Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a kid.    

As the war clouds thickened after the killing of the archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West, Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had definitely separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war fever just because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that the party wished to emulate in Russia.

He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible. Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s tunnel vision, with great events working in the world. 
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The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International


Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33 November 1, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat, checked against the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 35-41.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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The gravest feature of the present crisis is that the majority of official representatives of European socialism have succumbed to bourgeois nationalism, to chauvinism. It is with good reason that the bourgeois press of all countries writes of them now with derision, now with condescending praise. To anyone who wants to remain a socialist there can be no more important duty than to reveal the causes of this crisis in socialism and analyse the tasks of the International.
There are such that are afraid to admit that the crisis or, to put it more accurately, the collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism.
Reference is made to the unanimity, for instance, among French socialists, and to the fact that the old groups in socialism have supposedly changed their stands in the question of the war. Such references, however, are groundless.
Advocacy of class collaboration; abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle; adaptation to bourgeois nationalism; losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient; making a fetish of bourgeois legality; renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle, for fear of repelling the “broad masses of the population”(meaning the petty bourgeoisie)—such, doubtlessly, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. And it is from such soil that the present chauvinist and patriotic   frame of mind of most Second International leaders has developed. Observers representing the most various points of view have long noted that the opportunists are in fact prevalent in the Second International’s leadership. The war has merely brought out, rapidly and saliently, the true measure of this prevalence. There is nothing surprising in the extraordinary acuteness of the crisis having led to a series of reshufflings within the old groups. On the whole, however, such changes have affected only individuals. The trends within socialism have remained the same.
Complete unanimity does not exist among French socialists. Even Vaillant, who, with Guesde, Plekhanov, Hervé and others, is following a chauvinist line, has had to admit that he has received a number of letters of protest from French socialists, who say that the war is imperialist in character and that the French bourgeoisie is to blame for its outbreak no less than the bourgeoisie of any other country. Nor should it be overlooked that these voices of protest are being smothered, not only by triumphant opportunism, but also by the military censorship. With the British, the Hyndman group (the British Social-Democrats—the British Socialist Party [2]) has completely sunk into chauvinism, as have also most of the semi-liberal leaders of the trade unions. Resistance to chauvinism has come from MacDonald and Keir Hardie of the opportunist Independent Labour Party.[3] This, of course, is an exception to the rule. However, certain revolutionary Social-Democrats who have long been in opposition to Hyndman have now left the British Socialist Party. With the Germans the situation is clear: the opportunists have won; they are jubilant, and feel quite in their element. Headed by Kautsky, the “Centre” has succumbed to opportunism and is defending it with the most hypocritical, vulgar and smug sophistry. Protests have come from the revolutionary Social-Democrats—Mehring, Pannekoek, Karl Liebknecht, and a number of unidentified voices in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland. In Italy, the line-up is clear too: the extreme opportunists, Bissolati and Co. stand for “fatherland”, for Guesde-Vaillant-Plekhanov-Hervé. The revolutionary Social-Democrats (the Socialist Party), with Avanti! at their head, are combating chauvinism and are exposing the bourgeois and selfish nature of the calls for   war. They have the support of the vast majority of progressive workers.[4] In Russia, the extreme opportunists of the liquidators’ camp[5] have already raised their voices, in public lectures and the press, in defence of chauvinism. P. Maslov and Y. Smirnov are defending tsarism on the pretext that the fatherland must be defended. (Germany, you see, is threatening to impose trade agreements on “us” at swordpoint, whereas tsarism, we are expected to believe, has not been using the sword, the knout and the gallows to stifle the economic, political and national life of nine-tenths of Russia’s population!) They justify socialists participating in reactionary bourgeois governments, and their approval of war credits today and more armaments tomorrow! Plekhanov has slid into nationalism, and is endeavouring to mask his Russian chauvinism with a Francophile attitude, and so has Alexinsky. To judge from the Paris Golos,[6] Martov is behaving with more decency than the rest of this crowd, and has come out in opposition to both German and French chauvinism, to Vorwärts, Mr. Hyndman and Maslov, but is afraid to come out resolutely against international opportunism as a whole, and against the German Social-Democratic Centrist group, its most “influential” champion. The attempts to present volunteer service in the army as performance of a socialist duty (see the Paris declaration of a group of Russian volunteers consisting of Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also a declaration by Polish Social-Democrats, Leder, and others) have had the backing of Plekhanov alone. These attempts have been condemned by the majority of our Paris Party group.[7] The leading article in this issue[1] will inform readers of our Party Central Committee’s stand. To preclude any misunderstanding, the following facts relating to the history of our Party’s views and their formulation must be stated here. After overcoming tremendous difficulties in re-establishing organisational contacts broken by the war, a group of Party members first drew up “theses” and on September 6-8 (New Style) had them circulated among the comrades. Then they were sent to two delegates to the Italo-Swiss Conference in Lugano (September 27), through Swiss Social-Democrats. It was only in   mid-October that it became possible to re-establish contacts and formulate the viewpoint of the Party’s Central Committee. The leading article in this issue represents the final wording of the “theses”.
Such, briefly, is the present state of affairs in the European and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. The collapse of the International is a fact. It has been proved conclusively by the polemic, in the press, between the French and German socialists, and acknowledged, not only by the Left Social-Democrats (Mehring and Bremer Bürger Zeitung ), but by moderate Swiss papers (Volksrecht ). Kautsky’s attempts to cover up this collapse are a cowardly subterfuge. The collapse of the International is clearly the collapse of opportunism, which is now captive to the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie’s stand is clear. It is no less clear that the opportunists are simply echoing bourgeois arguments. In addition to what has been said in the leading article, we need only mention the insulting statements in Die Neue Zeit, suggesting that internationalism consists in the workers of one country shooting down the workers of another country, allegedly in defence of the fatherland!
The question of the fatherland—we shall reply to the opportunists—cannot be posed without due consideration of the concrete historical nature of the present war. This is an imperialist war, i.e., it is being waged at a time of the highest development of capitalism, a time of its approaching end. The working class must first “constitute itself within the nation”, the Communist Manifesto declares, emphasising the limits and conditions of our recognition of nationality and fatherland as essential forms of the bourgeois system, and, consequently, of the bourgeois fatherland. The opportunists distort that truth by extending to the period of the end of capitalism that which was true of the period of its rise. With reference to the former period and to the tasks of the proletariat in its struggle to destroy, not feudalism but capitalism, the Communist Manifesto gives a clear and precise formula: “The workingmen have no country.” One can well understand why the opportunists are so afraid to accept this socialist proposition, afraid even, in most cases, openly to reckon with it. The socialist movement cannot triumph within the old framework of the fatherland. It creates new   and superior forms of human society, in which the legitimate needs and progressive aspirations of the working masses of each nationality will, for the first time, be met through international unity, provided existing national partitions are removed. To the present-day bourgeoisie’s attempts to divide and disunite them by means of hypocritical appeals for the “defence of the fatherland” the class-conscious workers will reply with ever new and persevering efforts to unite the workers of various nations in the struggle to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie of all nations.
The bourgeoisie is duping the masses by disguising imperialist rapine with the old ideology of a “national war”. This deceit is being shown up by the proletariat, which has brought forward its slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war. This was the slogan of the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions, which had in mind, not war in general, but precisely the present war and spoke, not of “defence of the fatherland”, but of “hastening the downfall of capitalism”, of utilising the war-created crisis for this purpose, and of the example provided by the Paris Commune. The latter was an instance of a war of nations being turned into a civil war.
Of course, such a conversion is no easy matter and cannot be accomplished at the whim of one party or another. That conversion, however, is inherent in the objective conditions of capitalism in general, and of the period of the end of capitalism in particular. It is in that direction, and that direction alone, that socialists must conduct their activities. It is not their business to vote for war credits or to encourage chauvinism in their “own” country (and allied countries), but primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie, without confining themselves to legal forms of struggle when the crisis has matured and the bourgeoisie has itself taken away the legality it has created. Such is the line of action that leads to civil war, and will bring about civil war at one moment or another of the European conflagration.
War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the   capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price"! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”(as Golos aptly puts it). The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.
The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”(as Golos wishes), but of opportunism as well.
The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task   of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!

Notes

[1] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] The British Socialist Party was founded in 1911, in Manchester, as a result of the Social-Democratic Federation merging with other socialist groups. The B.S.P. carried on its propaganda in the Marxist spirit, was “not opportunist, and . . . was really independent of the Liberals” (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 273 Its small membership, however, and its isolation from the masses gave it a somewhat sectarian character.
During the First World War, a sharp struggle flared up in the party between the internationalist trend (William Gallacher, Albert Inkpin, John Maclean, Thomas Rothstein and others) and the social-chauvinist trend led by Hyndman. On a number of   questions a section of the internationalists held Centrist views. In February 1916 a group of party members founded the newspaper The Call, which was instrumental in uniting the internationalist elements. When, at its Salford conference in April 1916, the Party denounced the social-chauvinist stand held by Hyndman and his followers, the latter broke away from the Party.
The British Socialist Party acclaimed the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, its members playing a prominent role in the British working people’s movement in support of Soviet Russia, and against the foreign intervention. In 1919 the majority of the local Party branches (98 against 4) declared for affiliation to the Communist International.
The British Socialist Party and the Communist unity group played the leading part in founding the Communist Party of Great Britain. At the first Unity Congress of 1920 the overwhelming majority of the B.S.P. branches merged in the newly founded Communist Party.
[3] The Independent Labour Partya reformist party founded by the leaders of “new trade unions” in 1893, when the strike struggle revived and there was a mounting drive for a labour movement independent of the bourgeois parties. The Party included members of the “new trade unions” and a number of the old trade unions, representatives of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, who were under Fabian influence. The Party’s leader was James Keir Hardie.
From its early days the Independent Labour Party held a bourgeois-reformist stand, concentrating on the parliamentary forms of struggle and parliamentary deals with the Liberals. Characterising this party, Lenin wrote that it was “actually an opportunist party that has always been dependent on the bourgeoisie” (V. I. Lenin, On Britain, Moscow, p. 401).
When the First World War broke out, the Party issued an anti-war manifesto, but shortly afterwards took a social-chauvinist stand.
[4] See Note 20 in Position and Tasks of the Socialist International.
[5] For liquidators see pp. 333-34 of this volume.
[6] Golos (The Voice )—a daily Menshevik paper, published in Paris from September 1914 to January 1915, which followed a Centrist line.
In the early days of the war of 1914-18 Golos published several of Martov’s articles directed against social-chauvinists. After Martov’s swing to the Right, the newspaper came out in defence of the social-chauvinists, preferring “unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social chauvinism” (p. 113 in this volume)
In January 1915 Golos ceased publication and was replaced by Nashe Slovo (Our Word ).
[7] The Paris group or group for aid the R.S.D.L.P. was formed on November 5 (18), 1908. It separated from the common Menshevik and Bolshevik Paris group, to unite Bolsheviks alone. It was later joined by pro-Party Mensheviks and Vperyod supporters.
During the war the group consisted of N. A. Semashko, M. F. Vladimirsky, I. F. Armand, S. I. Gopner, L. N. Stal, V. K. Taratula, A. S. Shapovalov and others. Led by Lenin, the group took an internationalist stand and waged a vigorous struggle against the imperialist war and the opportunists.     
       
 
 
Hands Off Syria! Hands Off Iraq!  No U.S. Intervention! 
*****

Obama asks for authorization to provide direct military training to Syrian rebels

June 26 at 3:21 PM
The Obama administration asked Congress Thursday to authorize direct U.S. military training and equipment for Syrian opposition fighters, a move that could significantly escalate U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war.
Money for the program would total $500 million and would expand a current CIA covert training program. It is included in a $68.5 billion request for Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, added to the fiscal year 2015 Defense Department budget.
Details of the OCO budget had been withheld from the budget request that Congress has been considering.
The administration has said repeatedly in recent weeks that it was preparing additional assistance to vetted “moderate” opposition forces who are fighting both the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and al-Qaeda-linked militants who have now spread their area of control across the Syrian border into Iraq.
If Congress approves the funding as requested, it would mark the first direct U.S. military participation in the Syrian conflict. The training would likely take place in neighboring Jordan, where the CIA is currently training Syrian opposition forces, and possibly in Turkey.
The request does not specify the type of military equipment that would be included. Although the administration has sent small arms and ammunition, as well as non-lethal assistance, and has allowed others to send U.S.-made anti-tank weapons, it has rebuffed opposition calls for portable anti-aircraft missiles.
The speed with which militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have taken control of Iraqi cities and towns has focused the administration’s attention on what now threatens to become a regional conflagration.
The Syria money is part of a new $5 billion Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund that President Obama announced last month in a speech at West Point. At least 20 percent of the fund will go to the State Department.
An additional $1 billion will pay for continuing U.S. military efforts to reassure NATO allies in Eastern Europe in the face of perceived new expansionary threats from Russia.
The OCO funds also will fund the final withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, as well as the residual force of 9,800 Obama has authorized.

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Jody Reynolds' “Endless Sleep” –Take Three  

 

JODY REYNOLDS
"Endless Sleep"


(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)

The night was black, rain fallin' down

Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around

Traced her footsteps down to the shore

‘fraid she's gone forever more

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?

Why did I leave her alone tonight?

That's why her footsteps ran into the sea

That's why my baby has gone from me.

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

Ran in the water, heart full of fear

There in the breakers I saw her near

Reached for my darlin', held her to me

Stole her away from the angry sea

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“You took your baby from me away.

My heart cried out “she's mine to keep

I saved my baby from an endless sleep.

[Fade]

Endless sleep, endless sleep

**********

I want the iPhone number and e-mail address of the person who wrote this one, wrote these death-dealing lyrics. Of course I would not touch a hair on the head of well-side-burned pretty boy Jody Reynolds since I may need to use his song sometime myself so I will reserve my fury for Delores Nance for leading Jody astray on this one. As far as getting her iPhone number and e-mail, well, okay since this song goes back a way I will give some choices just to show I am not a guy hung on being very, very up-to-date with the latest communications technology and don’t realize that not everybody has made their mark on the information superhighway. Hell I won’t be particular and will be old-fashioned enough to just request the landline number and street address of Ms. Nance. She, in any case should be made to run the gauntlet, or put on a lonely desert isle, or, and this would be real justice in this case made to follow Socrates, who also corrupted the morals of the youth of his time. Yeah, the more I think about the matter before us that latter choice seems most fitting.

Why all the hubbub? Why am I insisting on deep Socratic measures for some poor Tin Pan Alley denizen? Well read the heart-breaking teen angst lyrics printed above for your perusal on Endless Sleep. Old Jesse Lee, let’s call him that, although as in most cases with these 1950s teen lyrics, frustratingly, the parties are not named except things like Johnny Angel, teen angel, earth angel, be-bopper, him, her, she, he, they, etc. like giving names to angry anguished teens in the red scare cold war night was akin to aiding and abetting the Russkies or was some grave matter of kinky national security concerns, and his honey have had a spat, of unnamed origin so we never get to figure out who had justice on his or her side. Okay, so maybe it was a bigger one than usual but in the whole wide-world historic meaning of things still just a spat. Laura, high-strung Laura, again name made up although not the angst to give some personality to this sketch since we revealed Lee’s name and nothing much has happened to him as a result, judging from her reaction thought whatever irked her was a world-historic dispute, and she just flat-out flipped out. Nothing new to that as teenagers have been flipping out since they invented teenagers about a century maybe more ago although they have not always called what said teenagers did “flipping out.” And, as teenagers often will do in a moment of overreaction to some slight, Laura had gone down to the seaside to end it all. Throw her young body, whether it was shapely or not we never find out either but figure with a name like Laura she is, well, “hot,” high school hot or Jesse Lee and his big ass ’57 Chevy would have no truck with her to begin with, into the sea. Lee in desperation, once he heard from some inevitably unnamed third party apparently although maybe it was some more reliable source like Susie Darling, Laura’s best friend since elementary school, what she has done, frantically tried to find her out in the deep, dark, wave-splashed night. All the while the “sea” is calling out for him to join her. Jesus what a scene.

And that last part, the part where the sea, or Laura now acting as the ocean’s agent, practically begs for a joint teen suicide pact is where every right thinking person, and not just enraged parents either, should, or should have, put his or her foot down and gone after the lyricist’s scalp, to speak nothing of the singer of such woe begotten lines (although like I say not me, not me just in case that she I am eying right now might have a crush on Jody, or actually like such deathly lyrics). Yeah, I know old Jesse Lee saved his honey from the endless sleep but still we cannot have this stuff filling the ears of impressionable teen-agers. Right?

Of course, from what I heard third-hand from a friend of a friend who claims to have scoped out what really happened, this quarrel that old Lee speaks of, and that Laura went ballistic over, was about whether they were going to go bowling with Lee’s guy friends and their girls down the old Bowl-a-Drome on to roll a few strings Saturday or to the drive-in theater for the latest Elvis movie. Jesse Lee, usually a mild-mannered kid despite his corner boy reputation and some things said about his style around town, reared up at that thought of going to another bogus Elvis film featuring him, the king. The king riding around in a big old car, some pink Caddy, dressed in gaudy Hawaiian shirt and white beach pants attire, singing some lamo syrupy songs that in his Sun Records days when he was young and hungry and talking about one night of sin and jailbreak-out stuff he would have thrown out the studio door, having plenty of dough in his pocket and plenty of luscious young girls ready and waiting to help him spent that dough. Of such disputes the battle of the sexes abound, and occasionally other battles, war battles as well. However, after hearing that take on the dispute, which sounds reasonable to me, I think old Jesse Lee had much the best of it. And, also off of that same take I am not altogether sure I would have been all that frantic to go down to the seaside looking for dear, sweet Laura. Just kidding.

Okay, okay I know what everybody is going to say, or at least think now. What has this guy not at least given Laura her say, her day in court to explain he dramatic behavior. This information was harder to glean because I had to get it from a friend of Laura’s friend Susie Darling. Susie sworn on a stack of seven bibles or something that she would not reveal to anyone Laura’s motivation under penalty of death. Of course in the ethos of the times and age that swearing unto death business just meant telling only one other person, a girl person in this case, come Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talkfest. So according to this hearsay what Laura was miffed about was that Jesse Lee had not been paying enough attention to her of late, had been almost every night out with his corner boys doing wheelers with his car or whatever guys do when their honeys are not on board. So the drive-in movie idea was to get Jesse Lee to pay more serious attention to her was not about the movie, not about Elvis although Laura, like every other girl in America had her dreams about how she could tame Elvis in a flash if she could just get close to him, but about “doing the do.” See Laura a few weeks before had let Jesse Lee have his way with her but since then-no go. And she wanted to do it. But here is the kicker the place where Laura went into the sea is exactly the place where they had first made love. Jesus.                

But now that we know what drove Laura off the edge that brings something up, something that I am not kidding about. Now I love the sea more than a little having grown up so near it that I could roll down a hill and take a splash. Love the sea and its tranquility, of the effect that those waves, splashing waves too, have on my temperament. But I also know about the power of the sea, about old Uncle Neptune’s capacity to do some very bad things to anyone, anything, any object  that gets in his way. From old double-high storm-tossed seawalls that crumble at the charging sea’s touch to rain-soaked, mast-toppled boats lost down under in the briny deep whose only sin was to stir up the waves. And Laura should have too, should have known on that dark rainy night the power of the sea. So I am really ticked off, yes, ticked off, that Laura should tempt the fates, and Lee’s fate, by pulling a bone-head water's edge stunt like that.

The whole scenario once I thought about it reminded me, although I offer this observation in contrast, of the time that old flame, old hitchhike road searching for the blue-pink great American West night flame Angelica, old Indiana-bred, Mid-American naïve Angelica, who got so excited the first time she saw the Pacific Ocean, out there near Point Magoo in California never having seen the ocean before, leaped right in and was almost carried away by a sudden riptide. It took all I had, all I knew or remembered about how to ride out a riptide ne to pull her out. To save her from the briny deep. And that Angelica error was out of sheer ignorance. Laura had no excuse. When you look at it that way, and as much as I personally do no care a fig about bowling, would it really have been that bad to go bowl a couple of strings. Such are the ways of teen angst.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

No New War In Iraq

Video: Chaos in Iraq - Andrew Bacewich, 24 min
23 Jun 2014
After the full broadcast interview, Bill so enjoyed his conversation with Bacevich that they kept talking, delving topics such as the Vietnam War, our evolving relationship with Iran and neoconservatives views on US foreign policy. Watch the extended interview
to watch the 24-minute broadcast with Andrew Bacewich, author and professor in Boston, from June 20, 2014, click on

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-chaos-in-iraq/

Full Show: Chaos in Iraq, June 20, 2014

The escalating bloodbath in Iraq has triggered renewed debate on how muscular America’s foreign policy should be. Speaking about the crisis on Thursday, President Obama said that the US is ready for “targeted and precise military action” against advancing Islamists if needed, adding that “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq.”

This week, Bill speaks with combat veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich about the events unfolding in Iraq and what they say about America’s role in the world.

While some neoconservatives lament that our “world order shows signs of cracking, and perhaps collapsing,” thanks to Obama’s inclination to engage less in other countries, Bacevich sees things differently.

“We have been engaged in the Islamic world at least since 1980, in a military project based on the assumption that the adroit use of American hard power can somehow pacify or fix this part of the world. We can now examine more than three decades of this effort.

Let’s look at what U.S. military intervention in Iraq has achieved, in Afghanistan has achieved, in Somalia has achieved, in Lebanon has achieved, in Libya has achieved. I mean, ask ourselves the very simple question. Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more democratic? Are we alleviating, reducing the prevalence of anti-Americanism?”

After the full broadcast interview, Bill so enjoyed his conversation with Bacevich that they kept talking, delving topics such as the Vietnam War, our evolving relationship with Iran and neoconservatives views on US foreign policy. Watch the extended interview
See also:
http://www.freembtranslations.net
http://www.therealnews.com
 
No New War In Iraq

Finally: Iraq Crisis Brings Swift Rebuke of Iraq Architects - Unz Review
25 Jun 2014
Modified: 12:19:37 PM
Mendacious Media Appearances Attract Ire and Condemnation
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Anti-war demonstration in Times Square_ Courtesy Nick DeWolf.png
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war 8ie.jpg
By Kelley Vlahos • June 24, 2014 • 1,700 Words
...............

If Walt is correct, then these foreign policy institutions, as well as the mainstream media, were pretty irresponsible in the days following the domino-like overrun of Iraqi cities by Sunni-led ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) this month. While the very architects and defenders of the Bush Administration’s War in Iraq were scheduled in rapid succession on that first weekend’s round of talk shows, The New York Times actually sent a reporter out to Robert Kagan’s house to talk about his exhausting New Republic treatise promoting – again – America as both the reluctant and righteous superpower that must intervene to keep the world right.

In the NYT article, “Events in Iraq Open Door for Interventionist Revival, Historian Says,” Jason Horowitz takes a sycophantic turn on the shopworn story of the “Kagan clan,” and while Iraq is literally burning, expends precious ink telling us “Mr. Kagan, who often works in a book-lined studio of his cedar home here in the Washington suburbs, exudes a Cocoa-Puffs-pouring, stay-at-home-dad charm.”

If that weren’t cringeworthy enough, there is a color photo of Professor Coco-Puff in his one-percenter studio in the Washington ’burbs, and a line about how he fell in love with his now-Assistant Secretary of State wife Victoria Nuland, “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.”

But the swift rebuke of Kagan, his family and ilk in the last week indicates that, like the Twisted Sister declaration of war against the shackles of self expression in the 1980’s, “we’re not going to take it anymore,” the sorry predominance of the warmonger in our mainstream discourse – at least on the issue of Iraq – is coming to an end.

“With Iraq in the news again, a whole host of war boosters have re-entered the public conversation, despite their utter lack of credibility,” wrote Slate’s Jamelle Bouie “Neocons deserve one thing: to be ignored.”

The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who has been criticizing the Washington media hive for decades, is usually a soft touch. But the re-emergence of the folks like Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan’s little brother Fred Kagan appeared to set his teeth on edge.

“We now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago,” he wrote last week.

“In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to.”

There was this Tweet from Mother Jones, reacting, as many across the Twitter universe did, to Paul Wolfowitz making the June 15 Sunday talk show rounds.

“Why in the hell are people letting Paul Wolfowitz act like he’s an expert on Iraq?” the magazine demanded, leading to a piece by David Corn, who reminded that Wolfowitz had not only been wrong on how many troops it would take to stabilize the country after tearing it up in 2003, but had early-on dismissed the idea of a sectarian civil war (between Shia and Sunni).

And hadn’t he said the Iraqis would be able to pay for their own reconstruction and “relatively soon”?

Now, the deputy secretary of defense is on TV insisting, as he did with Chuck Todd on MSNBC the other day that he was “no architect” of the war in Iraq. “If I had been the architect, things would have been run very differently. So, that’s not a correct label.” He said the same to CNN’s Chris Cuomo who introduced him as such. It seems he has been denying it for years.

But the real question is, what was he doing on television anyway?” demanded Corn, adding:

Like his neocon comrades—Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, and others—Wolfowitz does not deserve to be presented as an expert with important ideas about the ongoing mess. He and the rest of this gang should have had their pundit licenses revoked after the Iraq War.

Matt Berman at The National Journal seems to suggest these neocons are a bit delusional about their cache with the American public. He pointed to a recent op-ed by former vice president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney in The Wall Street Journal. The Cheneys, “without a hint of self-awareness,” writes Berman, attempt to blame Obama for the current situation in Iraq, at one point writing, “rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

You may remember that when Dick Cheney left office in 2009, his approval rating was at 13 percent. At that same time, just 25 percent of Americans approved of how the Bush administration handled the war in Iraq during his presidency. Cheney may not know it, but this isn’t a particularly trusted foreign policy brain trust we’re talking about.

But that hasn’t stopped anyone from booking them. It’s mendacity only Burl “Big Daddy” Ives could approve of, and it seems to be sprouting all over the airwaves like, well, “turd blossoms.”

Luckily, when one of these blossoms pops up on Morning Joe or CNN, there is someone to pluck it out of the dung. Example: former Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, who is often credited with singlehandedly losing the first and most important battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, did his circuit last week. CNN’s Erin Burnett didn’t skip a beat.

“A lot of people are watching you right now and they’re —they’re hearing you give your ideas of what to do. And they’re saying, ‘but aren’t you the guy who got us in this mess?’”

Erin Burnett, arguably one of the most corporate of the corporate mainstream anchors on cable today, nonetheless seemed genuinely flummoxed over Bremer’s suggestion that another intervention into Iraq was in order. She pummeled him to the point where he sputtered, “Usually the system goes, you ask a question, the guest answers is, then you ask your next question.”

Former Bush Ambassador to the UN John Bolton got equally flustered in a interview with “The Independents,” a panel of libertarians on the Fox Business channel. Host Kennedy came out swinging on the issue of his culpability, leaving Bolton to charge, “I am not responsible for Iraq today. That’s because of what Barack Obama did!”

Things got decidedly more interesting as some of the architects have decided to double down and advocate for more war, including airstrikes and “boots on the ground.”

Blaming Obama was one thing – petty, politically predictable – but asking America to put more men and women at personal risk after so many had been killed and maimed — and for what? – this is the height of Big Daddy Mendacity. Especially hearing this from Wolfowitz, Kristol, Fred Kagan, and Sen. John McCain, the orchestrators and promoters of the so-called “surge” in 2007. That spectacular plan, touted as the key to saving Iraq, didn’t “win” the war but likely helped put Iraq on the path we see now.

Even David Ignatius, who could hardly be called “critical” of anything most of the time, blamed “America’s failed intervention in Iraq” for the shattering of the “rough balance in the region” in a column June 17. Talk about losing the narrative.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” John Heilemann, Bloomberg Politics managing editor, told Kristol to his face on Morning Joe when Kristol suggested U.S. soldiers in Iraq once more.

“This is American blood you’re talking about! You want to send people into another intervention in which most people in the country believe that this is a centuries-old sectarian violence that we have no place and no ability to solve!”

But what did he really expect from Kristol, who in 2003 told Terry Gross on NPR that “I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, Terry, a kind of pop sociology in America, that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.”

Jim Newell at Salon questions the judgment of the “upper echelons of the media” for letting these guys trot out their demands for open-ended intervention in Iraq – a plan which poll after poll indicates the American people are squarely against.

“There are probably only 10 or 20 people total in the United States now who agree with the neocon consensus that Iraq must be reinvaded indefinitely,” he wrote. “Why offer such a fringe opinion such ample media space? What sense does that make?”

It doesn’t make any sense unless they give ample space to the other side – Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich (check out his delicious takedown of Robert Kagan on June 4), and others who’ve been critical of the War in Iraq all along, not just when Obama won the White House.

Until then, the strident media pushback will have to do. And there is no one better than Jon Stewart who last week called out the media’s “rush to get the band back together” with “old Johnny Rotten” McCain as the proverbial front man.

“Johnny Rotten judgment: His advocacy of the Iraq war was legend, his sophisticated knowledge of the region unparalleled — in that it did not parallel with anybody who had knowledge of the region” …

“Since John McCain was one of the wrongest before and during the war it’s only fitting in this current crisis he was on so many shows you’d think he just won Dancing With the Stars” …

“John McCain’s military victory plan for America is the same as the John McCain media strategy – be everywhere, forever.”

Jon Stewart may not look like Dee Snider, but he’s a Twisted Sister insofar as he can say “we’re not gonna take it” better than anyone else.

............
Dailymotion video - Afghan War - Laugh Track Land - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19j3vr_afghan-war-laugh-track-land_cre
See also:
http://www.unz.com/article/finally-iraq-crisis-brings-swift-rebuke-of-iraq-architects/
The Latest From The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism


Click below to link to the Histomat:Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  

http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.

Additional Markin comment:

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. 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.
***********

the many-headed monster

the history of 'the unruly sort of clowns' and other early modern peculiarities




Marooned On An Island Monographs: An Early Modern Social History Summer Reading List

Mark Hailwood
It is the last day of term here in Oxford, and my thoughts have started to drift to what I might find time to read over the upcoming summer months. This is a purely fictional premise of course, for my summer is already booked up with conferences to attend, writing deadlines to meet, book indexes to compile: casual reading is unlikely to get much of a look in. Still, I thought I would indulge myself by thinking about some of the history books I would take with me if I was going to be marooned on an island between now and the resumption of term in the autumn (a nice idea huh? Someone should make a radio show along these lines…)
Marooned ReadingTo stop myself getting carried away I’ve imposed some fairly strict conditions: I have chosen only 5, and I’ve decided to stick to books in my specialist subject area. It’s a bit of a niche collection, I admit, but even narrowing down this list was hard enough! So, for anyone looking for a summer crash course in early modern English social history….
1) Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680
The only place to start
The only place to start
This is where it all started for me. The first book on early modern England that I read as an undergrad, and I was hooked. Ostensibly a textbook, though in reality a brilliant interpretative essay that creatively synthesised pretty much all that was known about the social history of Tudor and Stuart England in 1982, providing an enduring thesis that this was a period of profound economic, social and cultural polarisation between different classes. A masterpiece of telescoping between the minutiae of everyday life and the macro-historical processes shaping it. Remains the stand out introduction to early modern social history.

2) Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England
Hill: magisterial meta-narratives (if you like that sort of thing)
Hill: magisterial meta-narratives (if you like that sort of thing)
For me it started with Wrightson, but for him it started with the work of the next two authors on my list. Hill’s sweeping analyses of developments in English society between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution may seem a little outdated nowadays, but even if Marxist/Weberian grand narratives are not your thing, Hill is still a great read. His literary flourishes are a treat, and his ability to knit together political, social, cultural and religious changes is testament to a hugely impressive intellect, whether you buy it or not. This attempt to provide a sociology of puritanism, first published in 1964, still casts a long shadow over our understanding of early modern society.


3) Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost
An overlooked classic: what the hipster early modernists will be reading this summer...
An overlooked classic: what the early modern history hipsters will be reading this summer…
Perhaps the forgotten man among the founding fathers of social history. Whenever I dip into this 1965 classic I always get the urge to read it cover-to-cover again. Its intention is to set out the social structure of English society before the Industrial Revolution, in the most straightforward terms and with the widest possible audience in mind. The result is arguably the most accessible work of social history you could read, and it provides a great introduction to the agenda that has subsequently driven much of the work on early modern English society. What really makes it a classic though is that Laslett sets out to explain not only what was known at that time of writing, but why it mattered to know it. The final chapter, on ‘Understanding Ourselves in Time’, is one of the greatest expositions of why social history is so important.

4) Remaking English Society, edited by Steve Hindle, Alex Shepard and John Walter
Hot(ish) off the presses: the latest must-have accessory for the budding social historian
Hot(ish) off the presses: the latest must-have accessory for the budding social historian
From two of the foundational texts of early modern social history I want to jump forward to include this recent collection of essays, dedicated to Keith Wrightson by a stellar line up of his graduate students: who, I think it is fair to say, have dominated this field over the past two decades. The introduction offers a comprehensive review of historiographical developments from the birth of social history to the present, and the twelve subsequent chapters by the leading practitioners of early modern English social history range across classic topics such as social relations, poor relief and witchcraft to more novel concerns such as the history of intoxicants and the popularity of Italian opera singers in eighteenth-century London. It is a fascinating smorgasbord, and brings readers right up to speed with the current state of research.

5) Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer
A perfect summer read - if you can handle a bit of plague on your holidays
A perfect summer read: if you can handle a bit of plague on your hols
Yes, it’s him again – but what better way to top off this crash-course in early modern social history than a bit of micro-history from the master craftsman? It makes perfect summer reading, set as it is across the summer of 1636 in Newcastle. Albeit, it’s a plague year. But the plucky young scrivener Ralph Tailor [spoiler alert] makes it through unscathed, and left behind a paper trail that allows Wrightson to take us down to ground level to witness a seventeenth-century community experiencing the most trying of times. Its richly textured and historically illuminating, which is reason enough to pick it up, but how often can you say a work of social history made you shed a tear? This one did.
So, that would be my top 5 early modern social history summer reads: I’d love to hear other people’s suggestions below the line…