***Ain’t Got Not No Time For The Corner Boys-With George V. Higgins’ The Friends Of Eddie Coyle in Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Every kid, every “the projects” kid, a kid who would have to know this bit of urban legend wisdom sooner rather than later, know there was “no honor among thieves,” in order to survive out on the edge of society down there where the line between the lumpen and the downtrodden working poor (or can’t work poor) is blurred, very blurred. Know this by heart, by gut, in order to survive childhood in one piece unless he was “connected” or was tough enough, or had a brother or brothers tough enough to protect him. So would every triple-decker Southie/Dot/North Cambridge/Somerville/Revere and on and on Massachusetts Mom and Pop variety store holding up the wall looking for the heart of Saturday night corner boy, ditto on the “no honor among thieves” wisdom. Ditto too on the survival part. All knowing too that that principle though applies as well to “hit” men, stone-cold killers, grifters, drifters, midnight sifters, gunrunners, heist artists and every con man who walks the street going whatever his con is. Those young guys know deep in their hearts, and if not somebody better embed it there, just like Eddie Coyle knew, Eddie “Fingers” if you forgot his real name, and just knew him from his small reputation as a part-time stand-up guy, that despite all that stuff about the sanctified lumpen brotherhood down there in the grime of society, all that noise about keeping the faith as a stand-up guy if you want to stay in one piece, above about not being a “snitch” each of those projects boys or corner boys (could be the same depending on your town and its social structure) has to learn, and maybe the hard way, that down at the bottom of society, down there where the working poor meets the non-working poor meets the bottom feeder, what, Karl Marx, and not just him, called the lumpen that it is dog eat dog and the survivors move up the food chain.

And see the cops, the guys who deal with all of this one way or another as part of their jobs, who maybe lived in the projects coming up themselves or held up some corner storefront brick wall, work that knowledge to their benefit. Work each freaking guy up against it, each guy looking at some serious closed-up and forgotten time, each guy who comes up against their justice system and if you are a projects boy or a corner boy you will come up against that system if only for a search and frisk for being a po’ boy, to sell-out whoever and whatever he can to get right with whatever governmental agency has him by the cajoles. Not only do the cops know this but the guys who prosecute the cases for the government, you know the D.As. (really the Assistant D.A.s except in high profile cases),the judges, the jailers, and the constitutional law professors, most of whom did not come up that way, all know this. Laugh among themselves over drinks about how some poor snook could not figure out the fact that he was being used as an experiment in their “snitch” manipulations (mainly how to get those dockets cleared before noon day after day with ninety-five percent plea outs). The only ones who don’t know, or maybe do a little but don’t know the extent of it, are the average citizens who get bopped on the head, get their cars stolen, or get burgled.       

Hold on though there is another group, well, maybe not a group but a few guys anyway, smart guys in all ways, all important ways. Those of course are maybe guys who used to be in law enforcement now working as security for private businesses, maybe guys who used to try the cases for the government (or better get a negotiated plea out) now in lucrative private practices who make it their business to know so they could use that information when they went out and got real jobs, or maybe write about it, to wise the public up every once in a while.

That’s what this guy I knew once did, the late George V. Higgins, a guy who worked in the Attorney-General’s Office in Massachusetts and when he got tired of that moved up to the “bigs” in the federal district court in Massachusetts. Kind of a stand-up guy in his own way if anybody is asking although as far as I know he always had his nose in a book. He said one that he had done a little corner boy stuff and although he was a “projects” boy he gave up the thrill of the criminal life that beckoned to every corner boy early and from there went straight to the head of his class.

So George knew his stuff, had as they say “seen it all” and while he worked for chump change in the government he made a good living at writing the stuff up later because he knew his former low-rent “clientele” that wound up coming before him for a deal, looking for help, and ready to give up their acquaintances, their close friends, their relatives, hell, their mothers if it would get them out from under some long stretch in Cedar Junction, the old MCI-Walpole or you name your MCI, or down sunny “club fed” Danbury in Connecticut. Knew the Eddie Fingers of the world. Better, had a close ear to the way they talked, talked to each other, talked to the coppers, talked to the bench but most importantly knew how their minds worked, how they skittled the truth, on the job and off. Higgins knew too how to make a lot of guys at Sculler’s over in North Adamsville, guys like me who worked in that town and liked to stop off for a few after work, laugh that knowing laugh about that “honor among thieves” stuff.  (One time he said that North Adamsville was where he was originally from, or so I heard, and so he liked to go back to the old neighborhood taverns looking for “color.”)

I remember one time, it have to have been about thirty or forty years ago, Higgins came dragging his ass into the bar one night after some hardball case for the “feds” whom he was working for then had finished up, had become “case closed” and he was in an expansive mood so he just let it rip. Wanted to give out on about the 227^th version on the “no honor among thieves” thesis. So somebody bought him a high-end Scotch (I forget the brand but he always drank high-end liquor in those days).  See he had been (as had me and a few other guys there listening) a corner boy himself and so could see where going off track might lead, had been in thrall to the “life” for a while until he figured the percentage differently from those corner boys who he grew up with and who choose a different “career” path ending up doing plenty of collective “hard time.”  Yeah, that night he told us about old Eddie Coyle, old Eddie “Fingers” who the day before had wound up face down with about nine slugs in him in the front passenger side of a stolen 1970 two-toned Chevy over at the Fresh Pond Shopping Mall in Cambridge as the prime new example he could give about that honor among thieves stuff.

George didn’t know much about Eddie’s early life but he guessed that like a lot of guys who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, guys from  Eddie’s “class” like Whitey Bulger who they just grabbed recently, a couple of years ago, grabbed good Eddie started early. Figure: probably a drunken father (like George’s had been, that was the first time I had heard that) who did, or did not beat, the kids (and wife) after a three day toot and who did, or did not, drink away his weekly wages leaving said wife with many empty envelopes for the “on time” bill collectors and repo men but who in whichever case applies was AWOL in bringing up sonny boy. Figure: a nagging mother (who despite the beating or short money would not leave her man, where would she go?) who kept sonny boy in tow for a while with “you do not want to be like your father” but who when he came of age turned more and more like his father-except he was in thrall to easy money, easy money “found on the ground” not whiskey. Figure too: too many kids in the family, too little space to breathe, always climbing over or under somebody, and the kicker- a serious wanting habit that never left him because there was too much to want and not enough to pay for it. Yeah, George did not know every detail, every Eddie detail but those of us on the stools kept nodding our heads as he spoke.

How to get that easy money though. Maybe Eddie started, you know probably with the “clip”, the “five-finger discount” at some cheap jewelry store downtown (and probably for some young girl that he was smitten with and had no dough to buy some harmless trinket. Little did he know then that there was not enough dough in the world when his women got their wanting habits on. That hard-bitten knowledge came later.). Kids’ stuff for kids’ eyes. Later when more serious dough was needed  maybe a quick Mom and Pop variety store robbery throwing a scare in the owners but no weapons (and not in the neighborhood either-funny about the “code” you did not hit the neighborhood stores but some other neighborhood stores with the same hard-working up against it small owners were fair game. Worse though was when the drugs came and distorted a lot so even locals were hit. But in Eddie’s time-stay away).Maybe some silly petty larceny thing finally graduating to more dough armed robberies, selling stolen goods, selling dope, maybe selling women who knows. The way George got to know Eddie though was as a gun-runner, one of the best in New England, and one of the surefire ways to get yourself before the “feds”-if you were looking for a way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Eddie was though, and here he was and is legion, was a career “soldier,” a guy just trying to do a little of this, a little of that to keep the vultures from the door. George said looking at photographs of Eddie when he was younger he looked pretty tough, but also a good- looking guy that would be spending a lot of time buying trinkets for one frail or another. George said think of maybe a young Robert Mitchum, all cleft-chin, barrel-chest, a mass of dark hair, and a little sneer that women, some women anyway, usually make it their business to take off a guy when they have a different set of wanting habits on. They would never make a movie of Eddie’s short unsweet mournful life but if they did he would suggest Mitchum for the role hands down.     

Yeah, so Eddie was just a guy doing the best he could, not an educated guy but “street wise” enough to get noticed by guys who notice such things. (Eddie dropped out of high school over at Rindge Tech in Cambridge after his first successful armed robbery and after he nearly beat one of the teachers, a shop teacher, to death when he asked Eddie where he was going with all shop materials in the back of his car after school).  Most of the time whatever caper he was on worked, a few mishaps, thirty days here, six months there and then back to the streets, back to the “this and that.” But here is where he got dragged into the “code.” One time he was look-out on an armed robbery of a department store on payday. Something went wrong and the guys who actually were to pull the robbery off fled leaving Eddie holding the bag. Eddie was left “holding the bag” (had a weapon on him as he was approached by the called cops.) Eddie, knowing the guys he was working with were “connected’ did his first stand-up guy routine-got a year and served six months. He would stand-up some more later but what was important was after that time, after he proved to be a stand-up guy, was when he began his career as the “armorer” anytime somebody needed some “clean” guns.   

 

But see guys like Eddie are street smart, or better be if they expect a longest career, but not smart, smart, not covered with about eight layers of protection before they might have to take the big fall, not brain smart and so guys like Eddie make mistakes, and certain mistakes cost a guy. That is how Eddie got his moniker. See mostly Eddie was after that youthful mishap stuff, that 30 days here, six months there stuff, a gun-runner, a job which means that he was “connected” if only by a “banker” to guys who mattered. Eddie was the guy who, if you were “connected,” could depend on to get guns for your caper and then you dump them in some river, any river and nobody was the wiser, no cops anyway. That was what Jimmy Smalls did, the case that later put Eddie face down, when he thought up his string of quick armed robberies and then fade out but needed a ton of hardware to pull them all off.

So there was always a demand, especially for guns that didn’t blow up on you when you used them, or blow up on you with a “history” (you know stolen, or from some government inventory storage, or used in some traceable criminal act if you got caught). Eddie made that mistake, once. See Eddie was supposed to give the good-housekeeping seal of approval on all the guns he sold, was to make sure that those guns had no history, had not been used before in some traceable criminal activity. That one time he got sloppy, dealt with a dealer who claimed the guns were clean (Eddie was always the “middle man” on these deals. Like George said where would he get guns, clean guns on his own.). Billy Banks, the old-time bank-robber (who like the more illustrious Willy Sutton said he did it because that was where the money was. Nice) depended on an Eddie gun, got into a squeeze with the “Feds” and found out the gun had been used in an unsolved murder. Well, Billy, who was connected from way back, was not going to be the guy who got the lesson. Our boy Eddie was. Here is how “connected” justice works though. They took Eddie’s hand (nicely giving him the choice of which one) and slammed it into a drawer-hard. So Eddie, now Eddie Fingers, had a grotesque set of knuckles on one hand ever after. Hence the moniker.                 

After that object lesson Eddie became cautious, much more cautious, for a long time. Like a lot of career guys, soldiers, he got married, had kids and so he needed a steady flow of cash and the gun trade was somewhat seasonal. So he branched out a little, worked a shipment of stolen goods up in Maine for a couple of guys, and got caught. That shipment turned out to be many, many cases of liquor, untaxed stolen liquor coming over the line from Canada. That is where George came into the story personally with Eddie. See an aging soldier with a wife and kids just can’t do the “time.” They had him solid on the heist, no question, and so Eddie seeing the writing on the wall, saw that being a stand-up guy was going to put him in nowhere land wanted to talk to one of George’s field guys, wanted to talk to “Uncle” George called the process.  And what “talking to Uncle” meant was that Eddie was ready to sell his mother to get out from under his expected two-to-five year sentence.

So Eddie made one of his life’s little compromises. Here is how that went. Eddie needing plenty of cash for family and lawyers got back into the gun-running trade while awaiting sentencing. Eddie was the broker for Jimmy Smalls’ caper like I said which needed much hardware in a short period. Eddie found his dealer, a young guy named Tiny Brown, who had serious connections to some small arms plant where they made the damn things, worked him hard, mercilessly in fact, to get the guns that were necessary for Jimmy’s series of quick bank robberies. Things went well for a while, Eddie got all the guns he needed at a decent price and plenty of dough for himself. The problem was the Feds were wired into the action (through the thoughtfulness of another snitch of course), wired in almost accidently.

In those days, back in the early 1970s, the Feds were up to their knees in trying to keep guns out of hand of black revolutionaries like the Panthers fearing some kind of race war with “whitey” getting the short end of the stick. Also as time went on and America got all crazy over Vietnam some white radicals figured they would start a “second front” in America to aid the Vietnamese revolutionaries over there and the black liberation fighters in America.  They too were looking for guns, heavy-duty M-16 kind of automatic weaponry. And Tiny was the man who could get such weaponry. So at one point on another Tiny dealt with some radicals looking for guns for the revolution at the same time as Eddie needed some quick gun turnaround. The Feds brought down Tiny, the gun-dealer with no problem. Oh yeah, with a little help from Eddie, something about machine-guns in the trunk of his car. George said Eddie’s logic was impeccable-he did not want to see his country overrun by n----rs and commies and why not throw a gun-dealer in the mix to lighten his sentence. Besides Tiny was kind of a snotty-nosed kid

Here is the funny thing about the “stoolie” business though, about when you stop being a stand-up guy. Once you give “Uncle” one thing he wants to put you on the “payroll.” Wants you to sing loud and clear in his choir. See George’s field guy went to bat for Eddie up in Maine but because he neglected to “dime” on the guys who ran the operation (connected guys and so you might as well cut your own throat if you brought them down as I am sure Eddie seriously thought about when he looked at his knuckles) the government guy in Maine wasn’t ready to do likewise. So our boy Eddie was going to have produce more than that one gun-dealer, like maybe give up who the guys were who organized that stolen goods shipment up in Maine. Here is where the “code of honor” goes to hell and back. The guy, or one of the guys who organized the stolen goods heist was a guy, Dixie, who ran a bar in Boston and was for his own purposes working for Uncle. And guess what Dixie was worried about. Yeah, Eddie’s problem, whether Eddie would be a stand-up guy when the deal went down. So Eddie became the classic victim of the squeeze. See Dixie put it in Uncle’s ear that Eddie was the guy who ratted out on the bank robberies, ratted out on Jimmy’s capers, that were spreading like wild-fire around Boston-using Eddie provided guns.

Here is what got Eddie doomed though, got him over to Fresh Pond. When the coppers, using information provided by a woman scorned girlfriend of Jimmy, the mastermind of those robberies, closed in for the arrests they killed one of his confederates.   A kid, a kid seriously connected to a local Mafia boss who treated the kid like a son. So the contract went out, the contract with one Edward Coyle’s, late of the Cambridge streets, name written all over it. An injustice, sure. A bad end, sure. Honor among thieves? Ask Eddie with his face down in some car seat. No, better, ask his widow. Jesus, that George sure could tell a story.                      

Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

Defend The Cuban Revolution

CHE GUEVARA- REVOLUTIONARY FIGHTER

BOOK REVIEW

COMPANERO- THE LIFE AND DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA, JORGE CASTANEDA, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 1997

 This year marks the 53^rd anniversary of the Cuban July 26^th movement, the 47^th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the 39^th anniversary of the execution of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara by the Bolivian Army after the defeat of his guerilla forces and his capture in godforsaken rural Bolivia. Thus, it is fitting to review the biography of the life of a man who stood for my generation, the Generation of 68, and for later generations as an icon of revolutionary intransigence. This writer has read a few earlier biographies of Che, which a reading of the author’s footnotes will guide the reader toward, but selected this biography for several reasons. First, it was published in 1997 when, after the demise of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states, more sources became available and thus a more rounded picture could be found for the enduring legacy of Che. Second, the author has done an excellent job of interviewing Che’s associates, political opponents, fellow revolutionaries, fellow ministry workers and flat- out agents of American imperialism to get their take on Che. In fact, the author has presented a range of hypothesizes, facts and just pure guesses by these interviewees for every controversial aspect of Che’s life from his troubled childhood to the still immense speculation around the circumstances of his early death under fire and in struggle.

Let us be clear about two things.  First, this writer has defended the Cuban revolution since its inception; initially under a liberal democratic premise of the right of nations, especially applicable to small nations pressed up against the imperialist powers, to self-determination; later under the above-mentioned premise and also that it should be defended on socialist grounds, not my idea of socialism- the Bolshevik, 1917 kind- but socialism nevertheless. Secondly,  my conception of revolutionary strategy and thus of world politics has always been  far removed from Che’s strategy, which emphasized  military victory by guerrilla forces in the countryside, rather than my position of mass action by the urban proletariat leading the rural masses. Those strategic differences will be discussed in another review in this space later concerning the fate of the Cuban Revolution. That said, despite the strategic political differences this militant can honor the memory of Che- exceptional revolutionary fighter.

Who was Che and why has he remained an icon for militant youth to this day. Obviously a brief outline of his biography reveals a very appealing rebel. In fact the chronology of his life is sometime no militant today can duplicate. The circumstances has long past that would make such experiences possible.  For openers, a wayward, carefree youth who gets serious about politics in 1950’s Bolivia when all kinds of upheavals are occurring; a marginal figure associated with the left in Guatemala at the time of the CIA coup against the Arbenz government; adrift in Mexico where he has a fateful meeting with the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and signs on; various adventures and misadventures in the mountains of Cuba where he rises to the leadership of the Rebel Army; the final triumphant march in Havana in 1959; assignment to various high positions in the revolutionary government including Minister of Industries; pro-Soviet then anti-Soviet advocate; advocate of and advisor to Third World revolutionary alliances against imperialism; disillusioned state bureaucrat; failed African liberation fighter in the Congo; and finally, failed Latin American liberation fighter in Bolivia.

 Youth needs, desires and deserves its heroes. In this sorry world today, unfortunately, there is an abysmal lack of role models available for those who want to storm heaven. More likely, today’s models want to rain hell down on the rest of us. You have to take your heroes where you can get them. With the caveat mentioned about political differences above, Che makes a damn appealing icon for militants today.

And one has many Che’s to choice from. If you read this biography you get to choice a classic Latin American revolutionary romantic of the old 19^th century European type; a wayward, carefree bohemian; an errant father, a competent bureaucrat; an exceptional military field commander; an exemplar of the ‘new man’ under socialism; a sycophantic and cruel Stalinist hack; a utopian Stalinist visionary; a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist upsetting the unity of the ‘socialist’ bloc ; a closet Trotskyist bend on permanent revolution; an internationalist fighter to the core; and, a hail fellow well met to name a few. As for this writer, I have in the past usually seen him as the Trotsky of the second half of the 20^th century. Another larger than life figure, however, seemingly doomed to oblivion by their political visions. There are many similarities in their personal makeup and in their revolutionary intransigence that made this true. Upon reflection, however, this is a more than a little wrong. The real comparison should be with the great French 19^th century revolutionary democratic barricade fighter Louis Blanqui. Comparison with that figure is no mean honor. For you conspiracy theorists out there- Che is dead! However, Che’s memory as a revolutionary fighter for the oppressed masses of this world lives on. And it should.

 

 

 

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Approaches -Lenin On The Tasks Of Social-Democrats 

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

World War I and the Betrayal by Social Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

At the outbreak of World War I on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party voted to fund the war effort of its “own” ruling class. This historic betrayal of the proletariat by the largest party of the Second International was repeated by “socialists” in almost all other combatant countries. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to break revolutionaries away from the social chauvinists of the Second International and regroup them around a proletarian internationalist program, as expressed in the excerpt below. This sharp fight, which hammered on the need to turn the interimperialist slaughter into civil war pitting the proletariat against the capitalists, was essential in preparing the Bolshevik Party to lead the working class to power in the socialist revolution of October 1917 in Russia.

 

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”.... 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”...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!

 

—V.I. Lenin, “The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International” (November 1914), Collected Works, Vol. 21

 

“Food Chains” private screening in NYC brings out a VIP crowd… Screening recruits powerful new allies in the fight for Fair Food! Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation, addresses the crowd ahead of the private screening of the documentary “Food Chains” in Manhattan this past Tuesday. These past few weeks, while millions of Americans have been hitting the beaches or heading to the hills to escape the mid-summer heat, the intrepid film crew from the documentary “Food Chains” has been criss-crossing the country as part of the long promotional campaign ahead of the film’s big November release.   Their tour brought them to New York City this past Tuesday for an invitation-only showing of the film at the Bryant Park Hotel screening room in midtown Manhattan attended by a VIP crowd of Oscar-nominated filmmakers, representatives of leading philanthropical foundations, and some of the city’s top labor, community, and food industry leaders.  Representatives from the CIW were also on hand to take questions from the crowd following the screening... Head over to the CIW website to read the firsthand report from the screening from “Food Chains” director Sanjay Rawal!

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

45,000 protest outside Israeli Embassy in London   Shipquay Street, County Derry, Ireland photo at right: massive die-in on Shipquay St, yesterday, 7/26 The Irish Government was tonight called on to remove the Israeli Ambassador from Dublin

 

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No Fracked Gas in Mass Rally

When: Wednesday, July 30, 2014, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm

Where: State House • Park Street T • Boston

Rally to Stop the Pipeline!
On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 from 11 AM to 1 PM, there will be a rally at the State House in Boston to welcome, support and join the “rolling marchers” who are walking to protest a proposed pipeline of fracked gas running through communities across the state.
For more information on this project:
http://www.nofrackedgasinmass.org
to sign the petition:
http://www.nofrackedgasinmass.org/pipeline-petition/

  

United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today.
info@justicewithpeace.org	617-383-4857	www.justicewithpeace.org

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

In Boston

Palestinian Children Killed in GAZA More children than Palestinian fighters are being killed in Israel's offensive on Gaza, according to the UN. Shown here are the name, age, and sex of 132 of those children, recorded by the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights     (click here for a larger view)

“LET GAZA LIVE” Stop the Bombing!  End the Blockade! *  *  *  * DPP Standout/Flyering WEDNESDAY, July 30 4:30-6PM Ashmont T-Station   Dear Friends, Many of you have read about or participated in protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza in Copley Square and downtown Boston.  Now it’s time to bring the message to our neighborhoods!   We had a successful standout at Roxbury Crossing on Saturday. Please join members of DORCHESTER PEOPLE FOR PEACE and local residents this Wednesday at Ashmont Station.   (This action will go on whether or not a cease-fire is declared because ending the siege of Gaza is what humanity requires.)   And whether you can come or not please make calls to Washington demanding an end to this massacre and blockade.   Israel has created a massive humanitarian disaster in Gaza.  At least 1000 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more injured.  According to the UN, three-quarters of the dead are civilians, including hundreds of children and women.  Tens of thousands have been made homeless.   Yet our Congress has unanimously passed resolutions blaming only the victims and calling the firing of ineffective mortars and rockets from Gaza “an unprovoked attack” on Israel.  This ignores decades of Israeli Occupation and a brutal 8-year Israeli siege of Gaza that has left 1.8 million Palestinians penned up and blockaded in an area only slightly larger than the city of Boston, with no place to run, no place to hide from Israeli bombs.   CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE - and Senators Markey and Warren - to say that this is unacceptable!  Israel must be held accountable and our government should stop supplying the $billions, the planes and the bombs it is using to destroy Gaza.   TELL THE US STATE DEPT to demand the bombing stop and the Israeli blockade of Gaza ended! Congressional Switchboard:  (202) 224-3121 (Find your Member of Congress at www.govtrack.us/congress/members) US State Department:  (202) 647-3672 Jeff Klein Dorchester People for Peace (617) 282-3783 / info@dotpeace.org

 

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Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

Jeremy Scahill On U.S. Media Coverage Of Israel-Gaza Conflict: 'We've Hit All-Time Lows'

imagine! on gatekeeper Huffington Post, by Jeremy Scahill, journalist for gatekeeper/democracker The Nation !!!

"we've hit all-time lows with media coverage in this country. When you look at what's happening right now in Gaza, this is a massive massacre and one epic series of war crime after war crime"

-------- Original Message --------

Beyond Propaganda: Discourse of War and Doublethink. €œWhen the Lie Becomes the Truth€

By Jean-Claude Paye and Tülay Umay

Global Research, July 25, 2014

Since the attacks of September 11, we are witnessing a transformation of the way the media report the news. They lock us in the unreal. They base truth not on the coherence of a presentation, but on its shocking character. Thus, the observer remains petrified and cannot establish a relation to reality.

The media are lying to us, but at the same time, they show us that they are lying. It is no longer a matter of changing our perception of facts in order to get our support, but to lock us in the spectacle of the omnipotence of power. Showing the annihilation of reason is based on images that serve to replace facts. Information no longer focuses on the ability to perceive and represent a thing, but the need to experience it, or rather to experience oneself through it.

From Bin Laden to Merah, through the €œtyrant€ Bashar al-Assad, media discourse has become the permanent production of fetishes, ordering surrender to what is €œgiven to see.€ The injunction does not aim, as propaganda, to convince. It simply directs the subject to give flesh to the image of the €œwar of civilizations€. The discursive device of €œWar of Good against Evil,€ updating the Orwellian doublethink process must become a new reality that de-structures our entire existence, of everyday life in global political relations.

Such an approch has become ubiquitous, especially regarding the war in Syria. It consists of cancelling a statement at the same time as it is pronounced, while maintaining what has been previously given to see and hear. The individual must have the ability to accept opposing elements, without raising the existing contradiction. Language is thus reduced to communication and cannot fulfill its function of representation. The deconstruction of the faculty to symbolize prevents any protection vis-à-vis the real to which we are in submission.

Enunciating a Statement And its Opposite at the Same Time
In the reports on the conflict in Syria, the double think procedure is omnipresent. Stating at the same time a thing and its opposite produces a decay of consciousness. It is no longer possible to perceive and analyze reality. Unable to put emotion at a distance, we cannot but feel the real and thus be submitted to it.

Opponents of the regime of Bashar al-Assad are dubbed €œfreedom fighters€ and Islamic fundamentalist enemies of democracy at the same time. It is the same with regard to the use of chemical weapons by belligerents. The media, in the absence of evidence, express certainty as to the Syrian regime€™s responsability, although they mention the use of such weapons by the €œrebels€. In particular, they relayed the statements of magistrate Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry into violence in Syria, who said, on May 5, 2013 on Swiss television, “According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas.” This magistrate, who is also the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia can hardly be called indulgent toward the €œregime of Bashar Assad.€ €œOur investigations should be further developed, verified and confirmed through new evidence, but according to what we have established so far, it is the opponents who used sarin,€ she added. [1]

The White House, for its part, did not want to consider this evidence and has always expressed an opposite position. Thus, as regards the August 21 Ghouta massacre, it released a statement explaining that there is €œlittle doubt€ of the use by Syria of chemical weapons against its opposition. The statement added that the Syrian agreement to allow the UN inspectors in the area is €œtoo late to be credible.€

Reduction of qualitative to quantitative.
Following the use, August 21, 2013, of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus, Kerry reiterated the €œstrong certainty€ of the United States concerning the liability of the Syrian regime. A U.S. intelligence report, released by the White House and said to rely on €œmultiple€ sources, also said that the Syrian government used nerve gas in the attack, the use of which by the rebels is €œhighly unlikely€. [2]

The individual is placed outside the differentiating power of language. That which is qualitative, that which is certain, is reduced to that which is quantitative, to the €œdifferent degrees of certainty€ expressed previously by Obama or the €œhigh certainty€ pronounced by J. Kerry. The €œvery little doubt€, as to the liability of the Syrian regime, also mirrors the €œhighly unlikely€ responsibility attributed to opponents. Quality is thereby restricted to a quantitative difference. Quality, that which is, becomes at the same time, that which is not or at least that which may not be, because it no longer expresses a certainty, but a certain amount or degree of certainty or doubt. The opposites, €œcertainty€ and €œdoubt€ become equivalent. The qualitative difference is reduced to a quantitative gap. There is no longer any quality other than that of measurement.

This reduction of qualitative to quantitative has otherwise already invaded our daily lives. We no longer refer to the poor but to the €œless fortunate€. Similarly, we no longer encounter invalids, but €œless able persons€. The least skilled jobs are now given names that deny de-qualification. Thus, a cleaning woman becomes a € housekeeper€, the cashier disappears in favour of the €œsales assistant€ and garbage Collector are now called « sanitation worker ».
The separating power of language is annihilated. Words are turned into verbal phrases that build a homogenized world. We are in a world in which everyone is advantaged. No more are there qualitative differences between human beings, but only quantitative differences. The vision of a world of perfect homogeneity where only equals exist, no longer differing other than quantitatively, was already foreseen by George Orwell in Animal Farm: « All are equal, but some would be more so than others » « [3].

Absolute Certainty in the Absence of Evidence.
The word, which describes and differentiates things, is replaced by an image, by that which is everything at the same time as being nothing. Instead of a word referring to an object, degrees of certainty concern only the feelings of the speaker. These verbal phrases are not intended to designate objective things, but to place the person who receives the message in the perspective of the speaker, to lock them in the warped meaning created by the latter.

Expressed certainty can detach itself from facts and present itself as purely subjective. It does not refer to an observation, but refers to a condition posing as objective through a quantization operation.
The certainty of U.S. and French authorities also distinguishes itself in that it is built on equivocal data, on the invocation of evidence of liability of the Syrian regime, although they recall the impossibility of knowing who struck and how chemical weapons were used. It is no longer possible to construct an objective certainty, because the observation of facts is defused and leaves room for the stupefaction of the observer. Expressed certainty no longer separates true from false, since the ability to judge is suspended.

Precisely, subjective and objective certainty is undifferentiated. It is not a matter of believing what is stated, but of believing the authority who speaks, no matter what he says. Statements of Presidents Obama and Holland are immediately given as absolute certainty, ie: they occupy the place that Descartes gives to God €œas a principle guaranteeing the objective truth of subjective experience€¦€ [4]. The matter of going through the steps of objective verification, through the judgment of existence, does not arise to the extent that certainty is set free from all spatial and temporal constraints. It is posited in the absence of limits, in the absence of what psychoanalysis calls the €œThird Person€, the place of the Other. [5]

Removal of the €œThird Person€
Absolute certainty, posing as the be all and end all, installs a denial of reality, that which escapes us. It does not recognize loss. Constituting €œwe€ is no longer possible because it can only be formed from that which is missing. The monad, for its part, lacks nothing because it is fused with state power. Fetishes fabricated by €œthe news€ fill the void of reality, occupy the place of that which is missing and operate a denial of the third party.

Absolute certainty is opposed to the establishment of a symbolic order integrating the €œthird person€ [6], the domain of language. The proper function of language is to signify that which is real, knowing that the word is not reality itself, but that by which it is represented. Jacques Lacan expresses this necessity with his aphorism €œthe thing must be lost in order to be represented€. [7]

On the contrary, absolute certainty attaches words to things and does not take into account their relationships. In the absence of a ’third person’, it prevents any real articulation with the symbolic. This absence of linkage is the formation of a social psychosis wherein that which is stated by power becomes reality. The deficiency also allows the emergence of a perverse structure that reverses the speech act and prevents identifying the reality of the psychosis.

Enrolling us in psychosis, the discourse of French and American authorities originates in perverse denial. It constitutes a coup against language €œcoup because disavowal is situated at the logical basis of language€ [8]. Denial of reality is realized by a commodification of words and a procedure of cleavage. The cynical coup is this: €œpervert that by which law is articulated, make language the reasonable discourse of unreason€ [9] as with €œhumanitarian war€ or €œcounter-terrorism€.

Counter-terrorism legislation is presented as rational actions to dismantle the law in favour of the fabrication of images. U.S. law is particularly rich in these pictorial constructions, such as the €œlone wolf€, a lone terrorist related to an international movement, the €œenemy combatant€ or €œunlawful belligerent€ that exist, because they are designated as such by the U.S. President. The enemy combatant, as illegal belligerent, may be a U.S. citizen who has never been on a battlefield and whose €œmilitary action€ amounts to an act of protest against a military engagement. Deviation from that which is stated by the powers that be is no longer possible. Similarly, any protection against its real threat is removed. The reality manifests itself without dissimilation and can henceforth petrify us.

The suppression of the Third Person reducing the individual to a monad, no longer having an Other outside of state power, allows authority, especially as regards discourse on the war in Syria, to produce a new reality. Evidence of the guilt of the Syrian regime exists, because authority says so.

A €œdisturbing strangeness€.
The absence of a €œthird person€ settles us in transparency, in a never-never land beyond language. It removes the relationship between interior and exterior. The expression of the omnipotence of the U.S. President, his will to break free from the constraints of language and of any judicial order, reveals our condition, its reduction to €œnaked life.€ There then occurs €œa special kind of scary€ Freud calls Unheimliche [10], a term which has no equivalent in French and which can as well be translated as €œdisturbing strangeness€ and as €œdisturbing familiarity.€

It would be, as defined by Schelling, something that should have remained hidden and which has reappeared. Unveiled, worldly things appear in their raw presence as Real. Where the individual believed himself at home, he suddenly feels driven from his home and becomes strangely foreign to himself. The inside of our condition, our annihilation is thrown out and appears to us as a plaything of the U.S. executive branch. The staging of our division, €œdisturbing strangeness€, becoming that which is most familiar to us, suppresses intimateness by replacing it.

Freud suggests a dissociation of the ego. The latter is then pulverised and can no longer display the Real, the threat that petrifies it. Freud speaks of the formation of a stranger “I” that can turn itself into moral conscience and treat the other part as an object [11].

This mechanism reappears as the return of the repressed archaic, that which is intended to hide the distress of the nursing child. The €œdisturbing strangeness€, produced by Obama’s speech is of the same order. It instrumentalises what happened in Iraq in order to prevent us from forgetting our impotence. Thus, it reinforces €œthe permanent return of the same€ constitutive of a sense of “disturbing strangeness” or disturbing familiarity. The process of repetition presents itself as an inexorable process, like a power that we cannot confront.

Jacques Lacan confirms this reading. Echoing the work of Freud on the €œdisturbing strangeness€, he shows that anxiety arises when the subject is facing the €œlack of lack€ that is to say, an all-powerful otherness that invades the self to the point of destroying every faculty of desire. [12]

In fact, the two translations, the first highlighting the strangeness, the second its familiar character, make each highlight one aspect of this particular anxiety that one can also deal with thanks to the notion of transparency. Interior and exterior confusing themselves, the individual is at once struck by the strangeness of seeing his impotence, by his interior deprivation exhibited outside himself and by the colonization of his intimacy by the spectacle, become familiar, of the enjoyment of the other.

Denial and Splitting of the Ego.
Dissociation is an archaic defense attempt when faced with a power with which one cannot cope. This disintegration of the Ego allows the return of a €œdéjà vu€. The Superego calls one to see oneself as an infant, as one who does not speak, thus causing a feeling of “disturbing strangeness”.

Faced with the imperative need to believe in the responsibility of Bashar Assad, the individual must suspend contrary information and treat it as if it did not exist. He proceeds to a denial of all that is different, then couched in the regressive position, that of the umbilical union with the mother, a stage preceding language, before the appearance of the function of the father. [13]

The denial of the contradiction between a thing and its opposite, the responsibility of the Syrian government and the use of chemical weapons by the rebels, is the act of denying the reality of perception seen as dangerous because the individual would then have to face the omniscience displayed by the powers that be. To contain the anxiety produced by the “disturbing strangeness€, the subject is forced to juxtapose two opposing and parallel ways of reasoning. The individual then has two incompatible unlinked visions. The denial of the opposition between these two elements removes any confliction; because there coexists within oneself two opposing statements that are juxtaposed without influencing each other. This denial rests on what psychoanalysis calls the €œsplitting of the ego.€

The cleavage gives one the opportunity to live on two different levels, placing side by side, on the one hand, €œknowledge€, the use of sarin gas by the rebels, and on the other hand a dodging of confrontation with a suspension of information. This is to prevent any struggle, any symbolism in order to enjoy the full omnipotence of the powers that be. In the absence of a perceived lack in what one is told, one finds oneself beneath the conflict in an annulment of any judgment.

Orwell has also highlighted this procedure in his definition of €œdoublethink.€ It consists in the following: €œto hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,€ while being able to forget, « whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed ». Then one must forget, ie: €œconsciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you have just performed. € [14]

Cleavage is recurrent in the speech surrounding the war in Syria. Things here are regularly affirmed, at the same time as that which contradicts them without a relationship being established between the different enunciations. Contrary to statements by Carla Del Ponte, Washington would first have arrived, €œwith varying degrees of certainty,€ at the conclusion that the Syrian government forces had used sarin gas against their own people. However, Barack Obama, at the same time, said the United States didn’t know € how [these weapons] were used, when they were used or who used them€ [15]. The operation places the subject in fragmentation, unable to react to the nonsense of what is said and shown. One cannot cope with a certainty that is claimed in the absence of evidence.

The logical reversal of language building becomes a manifestation of the power of the U.S. executive. It exhibits a capacity to overcome any language organisation and thus all symbolic order. The absurdity reclaimed by the statement is as a coup against the logical basis of language. It henceforth has a petrification effect on people and captivates them in psychosis.

Notes at online piece


This article was first published on our French language website www.mondialisation.ca
Article in French :
Discours de la guerre et double pensée. L’exemple de la Syrie. Mondialisation.ca, 29 of June of 2014
Translation : Roger Lagass

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The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 reopened what many people in America had long assumed was a settled ethical question: Is torture ever morally permissible? Within days, some began to suggest that, in these new circumstances, the new answer was "yes." Rebecca Gordon argues that September 11 did not, as some have said, "change everything," and that institutionalized state torture remains as wrong today as it was on the day before those terrible attacks. Furthermore, U.S. practices during the "war on terror" are rooted in a history that began long before September 11, a history that includes both support for torture regimes abroad and the use of torture in American jails and prisons. Rebecca Gordon received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.Div. and Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory from Graduate Theological Union. She teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco and for the university’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. Previous publications include Letters From Nicaragua  and Cruel and Usual: How Welfare "Reform" Punishes Poor People.  She is a member of the War Times organizing committee. Note: There has been a change in time and place for one of her talks below and the updated time and location has been included in the list below.  Talks by Rebecca Gordon on Mainstreaming Torture: Tuesday, 7/29 7:00 pm: Porter Square Books, Porter Square Shopping Center, Cambridge, MA Thursday, 7/31 7:00pm: UU Church, 669 Union Street, Manchester, NH  Friday, 8/1 2:00pm: Framingham Library, 49 Lexington St, Framingham, MA Wednesday, 8/20 5:00pm: Chilmark Public Library, 522 South Rd, Chilmark, MA Thursday 8/28 7:00pm: Rogers Free Library, 525 Hope St (rte 114), Bristol, RI Tuesday, 9/2 7:00pm: Walpole Public Library, 143 School St, Walpole, MA Contact Mass. Peace Action to arrange a presentation in your town. Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (Hardcover) By Rebecca Gordon $29.95 ISBN-13: 9780199336432 Availability: Available to Order Published: Oxford University Press (UK), 5/2014   Standing with you for peace, Cole Harrison Executive Director

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Manning, Snowden give Ellsberg “hope”, Ellsberg says at hacker conference

Tuesday, July 22 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
Last weekend at the Hope X (Hackers on the Planet Earth) conference in New York, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden led a discussion touching on the importance of government transparency and whistleblowers in order for the public, as Snowden said, “to be given back its seat at the table of government.”

Ellsberg and Snowden speaking at the Hope X convention

Snowden continued, “If we’re going to have democracy, if we’re going to have an enlightened citizen, if we’re going to be able to actually provide the consent of the governed- we have to know what’s going on. We have to know at least the broad outlines of the policies. And we can’t have the government shut us out from every action they’re doing.
We have a right as Americans and as members of the global community to know the broad outline of government policies that have significant impact on our lives.”
Ellsberg stated that Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden give him hope, emphasizing the rare and heroic nature of risking their personal freedoms and lives to put forth massive disclosures for the good of the public:

“Hope… which had not been in great supply for me.  Recently when I saw the name of this conference I had mixed feelings about it. My feelings of hope go up and down and haven’t been too high… and there’s no question I felt [hope] when Chelsea manning was revealed.

I used to… ask in a way, ‘How often do you need a Pentagon Papers?’- which is a massive disclosure that is unequivocal of documents that really shows- one document doesn’t really do it’ …They can say, ‘Well we changed that the next day, that was just some particular little department, some low level person.’ What you really need is the massive stuff, as in the Pentagon Papers, that shows, no, this is what they said the next day, and the day after that, and here was the official policy and so forth.

And I waited forty years to hear that and so I was pretty much  losing hope that there would be anybody inside who was willing to risk his freedom, his life or her life and freedom to put out what needed to be put out.”

Ellsberg discredits politicians, most recently John Kerry and Hilary Clinton, who attempt to claim his leaks were a proper example of whistleblowing but proclaim Manning and Snowden to be traitors.

“This bullsh*& in a way started with Barack Obama, when somebody actually took the occasion to ask him about Manning… and said, ‘Didn’t Chelsea Manning do exactly what Ellsberg did?’ What [Obama] said was, ‘Ellsberg’s material was classified in a different manner’—Well, that was true in a way-  as I mentioned earlier, everything Manning put out was ‘Secret’ or less- and everything I put out was ‘Top Secret’. That was the difference.

…Thanks to Manning, and now to [Snowden], I’m getting more favorable publicity than in forty years. Because suddenly people who were all for putting me in prison for life before now realize that I’m a pretty good guy, I was the ‘good whistleblower’.

…When I read that Manning had said to Lamo, …[she] was willing to go to prison for life or even be executed, I said to myself I have waited forty years to hear somebody say that. That’s the way I felt forty years ago. And it’s taken this long. So I felt an immediate identification with [her]. So I identified with them, and I couldn’t bear to hear me getting good press, from the Secretary of State and from others, on the grounds that my motives were ‘different’.”

Tabling for Chelsea Manning at the Hope X conference, June 18, 2014

Ellsberg explained that he and Manning had similar humanitarian motives, and that he identified with Manning:

“My interest was not in setting the record straight, my interest was in ending an on-going war and for that I would much have preferred to put out current documents, which I at that moment didn’t have access to… It was a big secret what Nixon was up to, including nuclear threats. I hoped my documents would show a pattern that extended into the present and I failed.

Hardly anybody was willing to extrapolate and say, ‘Well, Ellsberg has shown that four previous presidents lied in the same way, escalated in the same way, made the same kind of secret threats: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson’… I thought, ‘Maybe they’ll figure out that maybe the current president is doing the same.’

But, no, it took documents and I didn’t have that.

So for years I’ve been saying to people it’s got to be with documents, even though it increases their risk. Well, people know that basically, but they weren’t willing to take the risk, I’m sorry to say.

So then Manning came out with [her]… hundreds of thousands of cables, and then [Snowden] with documents… it took those documents which took the risk… I saw it right away… without having met [Snowden], without having met Manning- this was someone I identified with and at the same time heroes.”

Government treatment of Manning and Snowden sets chilling precedents in their attempt to discourage further whistleblowers. Manning was criticized for not reporting through “proper channels”, but Snowden brings up negative government reaction to whistleblower, Thomas Drake, regardless of his use of “proper channels”:

“We in the public, we see these stories, they come in the news- The justice department, the President, all talking heads- they say these guys are bad guys. They say they risk country, they say they are spies, they get charged under the espionage act, they did bad things.

But when you look at what happened, when you look at the bad faith the government used in their case, particularly against Thomas Drake… You’ve got to remember that inside the intelligence community they are trumpeting these things, they’re holding these guys up as examples to say look- if you say what’s going on, if you step out of line, even if you’re doing it for the right reasons, even if you’re doing it the right way- there will be repercussions.

They talk about internal channels and what not but these guys used internal channels, and they, people like Thomas Drake, they end up getting indicted”.

Ellsberg continues, pointing out the future potential threat posed even to journalists, who some accuse of ‘aiding and abetting’ the leakers:

“They haven’t yet gone against the freedom of the press idea by prosecuting journalists… It is my opinion that that lies next on the grounds… That supposed journalist, Michael Kingsley, accused Glenn Greenwald, and Peter King has done the same, …and that is, ‘you guys, you journalists are aiding and abetting a crime, a criminal.’

…But aiding and abetting is a legal term and it has to do with a crime and perpetrating. Wasn’t it David Gregory who asked Greenwald, ‘In so far as you are aiding and abetting’ he’s saying ‘in so far that YOU ARE A CRIMINAL why should you not be punished?’ To accept that the giving of the information is unequivocally criminal is the first step, I’m sure to going along with Kingsley and Gregory and so many others… Publishing is also criminal… and they will go after that as well.”

Click here to watch the complete discussion with Ellsberg and Snowden.

 Artist Clark Stoeckley set up a table in support of Chelsea Manning at the Hope X conference, featuring Stoeckley’s book and a donation box for Chelsea Manning’s upcoming legal appeals. Stoeckley’s novel, The United States versus Chelsea Manning, is a graphic account from inside the courtroom of Manning’s court martial last summer. Click here to purchase The United States versus Chelsea Manning or for more information.