Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel -Ceasefire Now
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Thursday, July 31, 2014
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100 youth leaders from national food movement march on Wendy’s in Albuquerque, NM!Rooted in Community (RIC) makes Wendy’s a stop on its annual Youth Summit march! 
Gerardo Reyes of the CIW
(left, in dark shirt) speaks to RIC members following last week’s march on
Wendy’s.
Rooted in Community (RIC) is a national network of young food
movement leaders that empowers youth across the
country to take up leadership in the struggle to change unjust food
systems. A highlight of RIC’s work is the annual Youth Summit, an
eagerly anticipated national gathering which took place in Albuquerque this year
and was, as always, a high-energy weekend, filled
with field trips to local indigenous reservations, workshops on different
gardening methods, and conversations on food accessibility and food supply
chains.
Also this year, the CIW and the Student/Farmworker
Alliance were there to talk about the Fair Food
movement and the Wendy’s campaign, and their participation was met with a lot of
enthusiasm. Moved by the unprecedented advances for farmworkers under the Fair
Food Program and Wendy’s refusal to support those advances, the conference
participants decided to add a Wendy’s action to the agenda. During a march
through Albuquerque planned by RIC youth, the youth leaders stopped for a
protest and manager visit at a local Wendy’s, a spirited action that put
Wendy’s on notice that, in the words of Catalina
Avila, a student at Florida International University, “If they don’t
sign [a Fair Food agreement], we won’t buy!”...
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Boston Remembers Hiroshima & Nagasaki
Moving from Violence to Unity
Please join us
for the 2nd annual memorial procession to take action in building a non-violent
world free of the atrocities of nuclear weapons, militarism, and
oppression.
Almost 7
decades later, it's time to fund jobs in Boston's communities, not militarism
and violence!
Date: Wednesday, Aug
6th
Time: 3:00pm-5:30pm
Assemble at: First Church in Boston, Marlborough Street at Berkeley Street
Procession to: Boston City Hall Plaza
Time: 3:00pm-5:30pm
Assemble at: First Church in Boston, Marlborough Street at Berkeley Street
Procession to: Boston City Hall Plaza
Our keynote speaker will be Tina Chery, President and CEO of the
Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. After her oldest son passed away due to gun
violence, she founded this institute to educate and outreach to the families of
homicide victims. She subsequently developed the Peace Curriculum with the aim
of creating a safe environment for young people.
Boston
City Councillor Charles
Yancey will present the City Council's resolution in support of Boston Remembers
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Also Featuring:
Elaine
Scarry, author of "Thermonuclear
Monarchy" • Anna Baker, Pilgrim
Coalition
"Soran
Bushi" Japanese dancers • Aki Yamaguchi,
Taiko
Drummer
John Loretz,
topical folksinger
Evan
Greer, radical
genderqueer folk-punk-mama kicking catchy singalongs for
liberation
Massachusetts Peace
Action initiated
this event; Dorchester People for
Peace helped
bring it to Boston. The First Church in
Boston generously
opened its doors and embraced Boston Remembers Hiroshima &
Nagasaki.
Nuclear Savage - Film Screening and Potluck
U.S. nuclear bomb
tests in the Marshall Islands used the islanders as human guinea pigs for three
decades to study the effects of nuclera fallout on human beings with devastaing
results. Filmmaker Adam Jonas Horowiz tells the story using recently
reclassified U.S. government documents, survivor testimony and unseen archival
footage.
This
event will also welcome the walkers participating in "Walking for Peace and
Non-Violence" from July 30 through August 6, organized by New England Peace
Pagoda.
Date: Tuesday, August
5
Time: 6:00pm-9:30pm
Potluck 6pm; Screening 7pm
Location: First Church in Boston, 66
Marlborough St., Boston
Building a Nuclear Free Future - Watertown
Date:
Sunday, Aug 3rd
Time:
5:30pm-9:00pm
5:30pm – Film showing
of Hibakusha, Our Life to Live at Grace Vision
Church, 80 Mt. Auburn Street, Watertown.
7:30pm -
9:00pm – Silent March, Music and Testimonials, Candleboats on
the Charles River in Watertown Square.
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For peace,
Shelagh ForemanProgram Director |
Join Massachusetts Peace Action - or renew your membership today!
Dues are $40/year for an individual, $65 for a family, or $10 for student/unemployed/low income. Members vote for leadership and endorsements, receive newsletters and discounts on event admissions. Donate now and you will be a member in good standing through December 2014! Your financial support makes this work possible!
Massachusetts Peace Action, 11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
617-354-2169 • info@masspeaceaction.org • Follow us on Facebook or Twitter
Click here to unsubscribe
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel
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my letter to the ICC: arrest the evil-doer terroristssent yesterday
Attention International Criminal
Court: [otp.informationdesk@icc-cpi.int]
If justice be done anytime, anywhere, ever - if indeed justice means anything - then you must arrest Stephen Harper [prime minister, Canada] and John Baird [foreign affairs minister, Canada ] for the creation of Hate Propaganda and promotion of Genocide. You must know that these individuals are using the powers of their office to persuade and encourage Canadians to support the genocide of Palestinians, at the behest of a foreign agent - Israel. I would ask you to take the same measure against the most senior war criminals in the United States: President Barak Obama, VP Joseph Biden and [former] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. [i left out: John Kerry, Secretary of State] :-( That should be a good start and a warning to all other complicits. The world - let alone the Palestinians!! - can not afford for decent people to dither over, nor condone by their silence, the actions of psychopaths who are a threat to the planet. I do not overstate the case, as i expect you must know. The world cries out of justice and I join them wholeheartedly. Paula Frances Soto [address snipped] |
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Defend The Cuban Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 978
15 April 2011
April 1961
Bay of Pigs: Cuban Revolution Defeated U.S.-Backed Invasion
This month we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the defeat of the CIA-organized Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) invasion of Cuba, an attempt to overturn the social revolution that overthrew capitalism in 1960. The attack, launched on 17 April 1961 by counterrevolutionaries and mercenary ground troops using U.S.-equipped bombers, amphibious assault ships and tanks, was defeated within three days by heroic Cuban fighters. The social composition of the invading forces, documented by Cuban authorities, was revealing: 100 plantation owners, 67 landlords, 35 factory owners, 112 businessmen, 179 people living off unearned income, 194 former soldiers of the Batista dictatorship that had been overthrown by Castro’s guerrilla forces.
The Bay of Pigs operation was ordered by Democratic president John F. Kennedy at the beginning of his term as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. JFK never forgave the CIA for the fiasco, whose planning had been authorized by the Republican Eisenhower administration a year earlier. Kennedy went on to tighten the U.S. embargo of Cuba and put his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, in charge of “Operation Mongoose”—a campaign of sabotage, destabilization and terror mobilizing the CIA and a range of government departments. The operation included repeated assassination plots against Castro and massive funding for a spy base in Miami involving Cuban counterrevolutionary gusanos (worms) and Mafiosi. In the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy took the world to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet nuclear missiles that were placed in Cuba, although later pulled out.
The intrigues and assassination attempts continued under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Last week, an El Paso federal court acquitted 83-year-old Cuban CIA-operative Luis Posada Carriles, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, of charges of lying at an immigration hearing. This assassin is wanted by both Cuba and Hugo Chávez’s populist capitalist government in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner, which killed all 73 people aboard, and for masterminding hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and wounded 12 other people. The Feds prosecuted Posada Carriles on immigration charges as a way to circumvent extradition attempts by Venezuela. We say: Extradite Posada Carriles to Cuba!
Although under the rule of a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, the workers and peasants of Cuba have gained enormously from the overthrow of capitalist rule on the island. When Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces marched into Havana in January 1959, the army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship shattered. The new government had to confront U.S. imperialism’s mounting attempts to bring it to heel through economic pressure. When Eisenhower sought to lower the U.S. quota for Cuban sugar in January 1960, Castro signed an agreement to sell one million tons yearly to the Soviet Union. Refusal by imperialist-owned oil refineries to process Russian crude led to the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties in Cuba in August 1960, including sugar mills, oil companies, and the power and telephone companies. By October of that year, 80 percent of the country’s industry had been nationalized. Cuba became a deformed workers state with these pervasive nationalizations, which liquidated the bourgeoisie as a class.
The elimination of production for profit and the introduction of a semblance of centralized planning on the island provided jobs, housing and education for everyone. To this day, Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and a renowned health care system, with more teachers and doctors per capita than anywhere else. Infant mortality is lower than in the U.S., the European Union and Canada. We stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state while calling for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose nationalist program of “socialism in one country” is an obstacle to the necessary extension of socialist revolution to the Latin American mainland and, crucially, to the U.S. imperialist heartland.
The fight to defend and extend the Cuban Revolution has been a hallmark of our tendency from its inception as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Against the SWP majority, which equated the Castro regime with the revolutionary Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, the RT fought for the understanding that Cuba had become a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Indeed, following the Bay of Pigs, the Castro regime tightened its political grip on the country. The Trotskyist press was suppressed, key labor leaders were replaced by Stalinist hacks, a one-party system was instituted, etc. The RT upheld the need to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties in Cuba and in the U.S., where the SWP majority was increasingly abandoning a revolutionary perspective, instead tailing Castroism and black nationalism.
Based on our analysis of the Cuban Revolution, the SL was able to extend Marxist theory to encompass how bureaucratically deformed workers states were created (see Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”). In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movement under exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right, the flight of the national bourgeoisie, hostile imperialist encirclement, a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—was able to eventually smash capitalist property relations. But Castroism (like other peasant-based guerrilla movements) could not bring the working class to political power. As stated in the International Communist League’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program”:
“Under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable, the petty-bourgeois peasantry was only capable of creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is, a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counterrevolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, an anti-working-class regime which blocked the possibilities to extend social revolution into Latin America and North America, and suppressed Cuba’s further development in the direction of socialism. To place the working class in political power and open the road to socialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party.”
The Soviet Union, which provided Cuba with crucial military support and economic aid, is no more, destroyed in 1991-92 by capitalist counterrevolution after decades of Stalinist misrule and imperialist pressure. The Cuban economy has suffered massively in the aftermath, although not evenly and uniformly. While the predominant section of the U.S. capitalist ruling class seeks to keep a stranglehold on the island through the trade embargo, some elements seek to relax the embargo along with Cuba’s diplomatic isolation from the U.S., seeing this as a more effective means of subverting the gains of the revolution. Meanwhile, Cuba remains in the imperialists’ military crosshairs, a fact that its people are reminded of every day by the presence of the U.S. naval base (and detention-torture center) at Guantánamo Bay. U.S. out of Guantánamo Bay now! Our defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against the class enemy is an integral part of our program for the overthrow of bloody U.S. imperialism through proletarian revolution here, in the “belly of the beast.”
*****
On The 50th Anniversary- Honor The Heroic Cuban Defenders At The Bay Of Pigs-Defend The Cuban Revolution!
Markin comment:
Those of us who came of age in the 1960s, especially those of us who cut our political teeth on defending, under one principle or another (right to national self-determination, socialist solidarity, general anti-imperialist agenda, etc.), the Cuban revolution that we were front row television witnesses to, cherish the memory of the heroic Cuban defenders at the Bay of Pigs. No one cried when the American imperial adventure was foiled and President John Kennedy (whatever else we felt about him then), egg on face, had to take responsibility for the fiasco.
Those of us who continue to adhere to the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist agenda, whatever our differences with the Cuban leadership, today can join in honoring those heroic fighters. Today is also a day to face the hard fact that we have had too few victories against the imperialist behemoth. The imperial defeat at the Bay of Pigs was however our victory. As today’s imperialist activity in Libya, painfully, testifies to those forces, however, have not gotten weaker in the past 50 years. So the lesson for today’s (and future) young militants is to honor our fallen forebears and realize that the beast can be defeated, if you are willing to fight it. Forward! Defend the Cuban Revolution! Defend Libya against the imperialist onslaught!
Workers Vanguard No. 978
15 April 2011
April 1961
Bay of Pigs: Cuban Revolution Defeated U.S.-Backed Invasion
This month we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the defeat of the CIA-organized Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) invasion of Cuba, an attempt to overturn the social revolution that overthrew capitalism in 1960. The attack, launched on 17 April 1961 by counterrevolutionaries and mercenary ground troops using U.S.-equipped bombers, amphibious assault ships and tanks, was defeated within three days by heroic Cuban fighters. The social composition of the invading forces, documented by Cuban authorities, was revealing: 100 plantation owners, 67 landlords, 35 factory owners, 112 businessmen, 179 people living off unearned income, 194 former soldiers of the Batista dictatorship that had been overthrown by Castro’s guerrilla forces.
The Bay of Pigs operation was ordered by Democratic president John F. Kennedy at the beginning of his term as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. JFK never forgave the CIA for the fiasco, whose planning had been authorized by the Republican Eisenhower administration a year earlier. Kennedy went on to tighten the U.S. embargo of Cuba and put his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, in charge of “Operation Mongoose”—a campaign of sabotage, destabilization and terror mobilizing the CIA and a range of government departments. The operation included repeated assassination plots against Castro and massive funding for a spy base in Miami involving Cuban counterrevolutionary gusanos (worms) and Mafiosi. In the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy took the world to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet nuclear missiles that were placed in Cuba, although later pulled out.
The intrigues and assassination attempts continued under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Last week, an El Paso federal court acquitted 83-year-old Cuban CIA-operative Luis Posada Carriles, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, of charges of lying at an immigration hearing. This assassin is wanted by both Cuba and Hugo Chávez’s populist capitalist government in Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner, which killed all 73 people aboard, and for masterminding hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and wounded 12 other people. The Feds prosecuted Posada Carriles on immigration charges as a way to circumvent extradition attempts by Venezuela. We say: Extradite Posada Carriles to Cuba!
Although under the rule of a nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, the workers and peasants of Cuba have gained enormously from the overthrow of capitalist rule on the island. When Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces marched into Havana in January 1959, the army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship shattered. The new government had to confront U.S. imperialism’s mounting attempts to bring it to heel through economic pressure. When Eisenhower sought to lower the U.S. quota for Cuban sugar in January 1960, Castro signed an agreement to sell one million tons yearly to the Soviet Union. Refusal by imperialist-owned oil refineries to process Russian crude led to the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties in Cuba in August 1960, including sugar mills, oil companies, and the power and telephone companies. By October of that year, 80 percent of the country’s industry had been nationalized. Cuba became a deformed workers state with these pervasive nationalizations, which liquidated the bourgeoisie as a class.
The elimination of production for profit and the introduction of a semblance of centralized planning on the island provided jobs, housing and education for everyone. To this day, Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and a renowned health care system, with more teachers and doctors per capita than anywhere else. Infant mortality is lower than in the U.S., the European Union and Canada. We stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state while calling for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose nationalist program of “socialism in one country” is an obstacle to the necessary extension of socialist revolution to the Latin American mainland and, crucially, to the U.S. imperialist heartland.
The fight to defend and extend the Cuban Revolution has been a hallmark of our tendency from its inception as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Against the SWP majority, which equated the Castro regime with the revolutionary Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, the RT fought for the understanding that Cuba had become a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Indeed, following the Bay of Pigs, the Castro regime tightened its political grip on the country. The Trotskyist press was suppressed, key labor leaders were replaced by Stalinist hacks, a one-party system was instituted, etc. The RT upheld the need to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties in Cuba and in the U.S., where the SWP majority was increasingly abandoning a revolutionary perspective, instead tailing Castroism and black nationalism.
Based on our analysis of the Cuban Revolution, the SL was able to extend Marxist theory to encompass how bureaucratically deformed workers states were created (see Marxist Bulletin No. 8, “Cuba and Marxist Theory”). In Cuba, a petty-bourgeois movement under exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for social power in its own right, the flight of the national bourgeoisie, hostile imperialist encirclement, a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union—was able to eventually smash capitalist property relations. But Castroism (like other peasant-based guerrilla movements) could not bring the working class to political power. As stated in the International Communist League’s “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program”:
“Under the most favorable historic circumstances conceivable, the petty-bourgeois peasantry was only capable of creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is, a state of the same order as that issuing out of the political counterrevolution of Stalin in the Soviet Union, an anti-working-class regime which blocked the possibilities to extend social revolution into Latin America and North America, and suppressed Cuba’s further development in the direction of socialism. To place the working class in political power and open the road to socialist development requires a supplemental political revolution led by a Trotskyist party.”
The Soviet Union, which provided Cuba with crucial military support and economic aid, is no more, destroyed in 1991-92 by capitalist counterrevolution after decades of Stalinist misrule and imperialist pressure. The Cuban economy has suffered massively in the aftermath, although not evenly and uniformly. While the predominant section of the U.S. capitalist ruling class seeks to keep a stranglehold on the island through the trade embargo, some elements seek to relax the embargo along with Cuba’s diplomatic isolation from the U.S., seeing this as a more effective means of subverting the gains of the revolution. Meanwhile, Cuba remains in the imperialists’ military crosshairs, a fact that its people are reminded of every day by the presence of the U.S. naval base (and detention-torture center) at Guantánamo Bay. U.S. out of Guantánamo Bay now! Our defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against the class enemy is an integral part of our program for the overthrow of bloody U.S. imperialism through proletarian revolution here, in the “belly of the beast.”
*****
On The 50th Anniversary- Honor The Heroic Cuban Defenders At The Bay Of Pigs-Defend The Cuban Revolution!
Markin comment:
Those of us who came of age in the 1960s, especially those of us who cut our political teeth on defending, under one principle or another (right to national self-determination, socialist solidarity, general anti-imperialist agenda, etc.), the Cuban revolution that we were front row television witnesses to, cherish the memory of the heroic Cuban defenders at the Bay of Pigs. No one cried when the American imperial adventure was foiled and President John Kennedy (whatever else we felt about him then), egg on face, had to take responsibility for the fiasco.
Those of us who continue to adhere to the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist agenda, whatever our differences with the Cuban leadership, today can join in honoring those heroic fighters. Today is also a day to face the hard fact that we have had too few victories against the imperialist behemoth. The imperial defeat at the Bay of Pigs was however our victory. As today’s imperialist activity in Libya, painfully, testifies to those forces, however, have not gotten weaker in the past 50 years. So the lesson for today’s (and future) young militants is to honor our fallen forebears and realize that the beast can be defeated, if you are willing to fight it. Forward! Defend the Cuban Revolution! Defend Libya against the imperialist onslaught!
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Get on the bus
from Boston #2DC4Gaza
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All out: National march on
Washington Saturday, Aug. 2!
The
destruction of a civilian shelter
Dear pf,
 Yesterday, Israel told civilians who sought shelter in the well-known United Nations School in Gaza to leave the compound. When moms and dads hustled their children out of the shelter into an open courtyard to evacuate to another site, they were mercilessly pounded by bombs and missiles. Two hundred people were wounded and 16 were immediately killed. Here's a report from the U.K's Guardian newspaper today (July 25): “Nour Hamid, 17, said: "We were packing up to leave when the attack happened. We were standing outside when they started hitting us, some of the women holding their babies. My sister-in-law was one of the injured. There were bodies everywhere, most of them women and children." “Laila al-Shinbari told Reuters: "All of us sat in one place when suddenly four shells landed on our heads … Bodies were on the ground, [there was] blood and screams. My son is dead and all my relatives are wounded including my other kids." “Ayman Hamdan, medical director at Beit Hanoun hospital, told the Guardian that medical staff were treating multiple shrapnel injuries and damage to internal organs, "Some of the bodies were blown apart. Such a massacre requires more than one hospital to deal with it," she said. “More than 140,000 Palestinians have sought shelter in UN premises during the conflict. Several schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, have come under fire in the last week. On Tuesday a school in Maghazi, central Gaza, sheltering about 1,000 people, was hit by Israeli shells as an UNRWA team inspected damage caused by an earlier strike.” The people of this country are mobilizing for the Saturday, August 2 National March on Washington D.C. People are coming by bus, cars, car caravans, trains and planes. Bring your friends and family. We can make a difference. Please make an urgently needed donation to help us pay for the buses and all the other expenses. We can do this with you, but not without you. The world is standing together for Palestine! 
Brian Becker
National
Coordinator ANSWER Coalition
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A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948 Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311 San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-687-7480 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488 If this message was forwarded to you and you'd like to receive future ANSWER updates, click here to subscribe. |
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Poet's Corner-British Poet Wilfred Owen's DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Dulce et Decorum Est
1 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
2 Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
3 Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
4 And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
5 Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
6 But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
7 Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
8 Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
9 Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
10 Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
11 But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
12 And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
13 Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
14 As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
15 In all my dreams before my helpless sight
16 He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
17 If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
18 Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
19 And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
20 His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
21 If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
22 Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
23 Bitter as the cud
24 Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
25 My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
26 To children ardent for some desperate glory,
27 The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
28 Pro patria mori.
2 Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
3 Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
4 And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
5 Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
6 But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
7 Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
8 Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
9 Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
10 Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
11 But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
12 And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
13 Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
14 As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
15 In all my dreams before my helpless sight
16 He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
17 If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
18 Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
19 And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
20 His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
21 If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
22 Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
23 Bitter as the cud
24 Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
25 My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
26 To children ardent for some desperate glory,
27 The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
28 Pro patria mori.
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Alan described the conditions the Nazis created
in 1943 in the Warsaw ghetto where Jews were locked in, systematically killed,
and most critically, where the world's governments, mostly, said and did nothing
to stop it. Many people see a strong historical parallel with Gaza now, most
importantly, people living there, including children.
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