As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  
 

In say 1912 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other  to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing  who saw the v   of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy; writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….            

"--BUT A SHORT TIME TO LIVE"

Our little hour,--how swift it flies When poppies flare and lilies smile; How soon the fleeting minute dies, Leaving us but a little while To dream our dream, to sing our song, To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower, The Gods--They do not give us long,-- One little hour. Our little hour,--how short it is When Love with dew-eyed loveliness Raises her lips for ours to kiss And dies within our first caress. Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame, Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour, For Time and Death, relentless, claim Our little hour. Our little hour,--how short a tune To wage our wars, to fan our hates, To take our fill of armoured crime, To troop our banners, storm the gates. Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red, Blind in our puny reign of power, Do we forget how soon is sped Our little hour? Our little hour,--how soon it dies: How short a time to tell our beads, To chant our feeble Litanies, To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds. The altar lights grow pale and dim, The bells hang silent in the tower-- So passes with the dying hymn Our little hour. _Leslie Coulson_

 

***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night -Little Richard's Lucille

On His 82nd Birthday-HB 

 

   

 

On Entering North Adamsville High Redux , Circa 1960

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin 

A few years ago, maybe four or five now, around the time that Frank Jackman (always Frank and not Francis since that was too much like that St Francis who was good to animals and stuff and no self-respecting corner boy wanted that tagged to his name besides the formal name sounded kind of faggy when the guys talked about names one night, also not Frankie since that name was taken up in his crowd) and Frankie Riley (always Frankie and not Francis for the same reason as Frank but also Frankie because he had always been called Frankie since time immemorial to distinguish him from his father Frank, Sr.) his Jack Slack’s bowling alleys corner boy chieftain all through high school in North Adamsville had been commemorating, maybe better to say comparing notes, on their fiftieth anniversary of entry into that school in the ninth grade Frank had written a remembrance of the first day of school freshman year. He had written it at the behest of a female fellow classmate, Dora, for a class website where she was the webmaster that she and a few others had established so that those from the Class of 1964 who wished to, those who were able to, could communicate with each other in the new dispensation of cyberspace.

That remembrance, one of a series of sketches that he eventually did, and on recent inquiry from Jimmy Jenkins another classmate and ex-corner boy comrade, Frank has stated that he stood by that “sketch” characterization, centered on the anxieties that he had on that first day about making a brand new impression on the freshman class, about changing his junior high school quasi-“beatnik” style, his two thousand fact barrage that he would lay on anybody who would listen. A style change that lots of guys and gals have gone through when faces with a new situation, although the people he was trying to impress had already been his classmates in that junior high school and were painfully aware of the previous way that he had presented himself, presented himself  under Frankie’s direction, to the world. When Frankie at the time read what Frank had written, a thing filled with new found sobbing, weeping, and pious innocence he sent him an e-mail which brought Frank up short. Frankie threatened in no uncertain terms to write his own “sketch” refuting all the sobbing, weeping, piously innocent noise that Frank had been trying to bamboozle their fellow classmates with. The key point that Frankie threatened to bring down on a candid world, the candid world in this instance being the very curious Dora for one, and her coterie of friends who had stayed in contact since high school since they all lived in the area, to be clear about was the case of Frank Jackman and one Lydia Stevenson. Or rather the case, the love-bug case he had for her. That, and not some mumble-jumble about changing his act which he never really did since you could always depend on Frank going on and on with one of his two thousand arcane facts that he tried to impress every girl he ran across in high school with and to dress like he had just come walking in from post-beat Harvard Square, was the very real point of what was aggravating him on that long ago hot endless first Wednesday after Labor Day morning.

See Frank had gotten absolutely nowhere with Lydia, nowhere beyond the endless talking stage, and thus nowhere, in junior high but he was still carrying the torch come freshman year and fifty years later he still felt that fresh-scented breathe and that subtle perfume, or bath soap, or whatever it was she wore, breezing over him. Or maybe her curse, a North Adamsville curse that he claimed at one point that Lydia cast on him since he never had then a girlfriend from school, or from North Adamsville for that matter. Not in high school anyway. The currency of that fresh breeze that occupied his mind may have been pushed forward by his getting back in touch with classmates. And as fate would have it, the thrice-married Frank, never one to say never to love had as a result of getting back in touch with classmates on the website had a short fruitless affair with another classmate, Laura, who had been a close friend of Lydia’s in junior high school and told him a couple of things about what Lydia had thought about Frank. Laura confirmed that Lydia had expected Frank to ask her out in junior high school but also confirmed by that failed affair that Lydia’s curse was still at work fifty years later. And it is that missed opportunity to fall under the sway of that Lydia scent that will drive this short sketch, hell, forget Frank and his sketch business, this short piece.                   

This is the way Frank described to me what happened after Frankie sent that fatal e-mail that might expose his long hidden thoughts:  

“Frankie, for once listened patiently as I finished my story, the one that he say was filled to the brim with sobbing, weeping, whining bull about starting anew and being anxious about what would happen, and which he threatened to go viral on, immediately after I was finished let out with a “Who are you kidding Jackman that is not the way you told me the story back then.” Then he went on. “I remember very well what you were nervous about. What that cold night sweats, that all-night toss and turn teen angst, boy version, had been about and it wasn’t first day of school jitters. It was nothing but thinking about her. That certain "she" that you had kind of sneaked around mentioning as you had been talking, talking your his head off about filling out forms, getting books, and other weird noises, just to keep the jitters down. The way you told it then, and I think you called me up right after school was out to discuss the matter, was that while on those pre-school steps you had just seen her, seen her with the other North Adamsville junior high girls on the other side of the steps, and got all panicky, got kind of red-faced about it, and so you are going to have to say a little something about that. And if you don’t I will.” 

Frankie continued along this line, stuff which seemed to be true but which made me wonder how a guy who when we met at the Sunnyville Grille over in Boston for a few drinks to discuss this and that, not the Lydia thing but our corner boy exploits, couldn’t remember where he left his car keys and we had to call AAA to come out and find them on his driver’s side seat. Jesus.  Here’s what he was getting at.

“See, I know the previous school year, late in the eighth grade at North Adamsville Junior High, toward the end of the school year you had started talking to that Lydia Stevenson in art class. Yes, that Lydia who on her mother’s side from was from some branch of the Adams family who had run the jagged old ship-building town there in North Adamsville for eons and who had employed my father and a million other fathers, and I think yours’ too if I am not mistaken, for a while anyway, around there and then just headed south, or to Greece or someplace like that, for the cheaper labor I heard later. She was one of the granddaughters or some such relation I never did get it all down. And that part was not all that important anyway because what mattered, what mattered to you, was that faint scent, that just barely perceivable scent, some nectar scent, that came from Lydia when you sat next to her in art class and you two talked, talked your heads off.

“But you never did anything about it, not then anyway although you said when we talked later about it you had this feeling, maybe just a feeling because you wanted things to be that way but a feeling anyway, that she had expected you to ask her out. Asking out for junior high school students then, and for freshmen in high school too because we didn’t have licenses to drive cars, being the obligatory "first date" at Jimmy Jack's Shack (no, not the one off Adamsville Boulevard, that's for the tourists and old people, the one on Hancock up toward the Square is the one I am talking about). You said you were just too shy and uncertain to do it.

“Why? Well you said it was because you came from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the old town, over by the old abandoned Old Colony tracks and she, well like I said came from a branch of the Adams family that lived over on Elm in one of those Victorian houses that the swells are crazy for now, and I guess were back then too. That is when you figured that if you studied up on a bunch of stuff, stuff that you liked to study anyway, then come freshman year you just might be able to get up the nerve to ask her to go over to Jimmy Jack's for something to eat and to listen to the jukebox after school some day like every other Tom, Dick and Harry did then.

“.... So don’t tell me suddenly, a bell rang, a real bell, students, like lemmings to the sea, were on the move, especially those junior high kids that you had nodded to before as you took those steps, two at a time. And don’t tell me it was too late then to worry about style, or anything else. Or make your place in the sun as you went along, on the fly. No, it was about who kind of brushed against you as you rushed up the stairs and who gave you one of her biggest faintly-scented smiles as you both raced up those funky granite steps. Yeah, a place in the sun, sure.”

And so there you had Frank satisfying Frankie enough with his agreement to make public on the class website the gist of his stubborn e-mail. Funny though as much time as they spent talking about it back in the day and then when they resurrected it a few years ago Frank never did get to first base Lydia in high school, although she sent him a few more of those big faintly-scented smiles which Frank didn’t figure out until too late. Within a couple of weeks of the school opening Lydia was seen hand in hand with Paul Jones, a sophomore then, the guy who would lead North Adamsville to two consecutive division football championships and who stayed hand in hand with him until she graduated. Frank had had a few girlfriends in high school, Harvard Square refugees like himself who went crazy for his two thousand facts but they were not from the town. The few times Frank did try to get dates in school or in town, get to first base, he was shot down for all kinds of reasons, a couple of times because he did not have a car and the girls had not the slightest interest in walking around on a date, a couple of times he was just flat stood up when the girls he was to date took the next best thing instead. Yeah, the Lydia hex sure did him in. And after that Laura disaster don’t say he wasn’t jinxed, just don’t say it around him.        

Free Chelsea Manning - President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

Birthday Vigil for Chelsea Manning In Boston

 

In honor of Chelsea Manning’s 27th birthday, this December 20^th 2014, responding to a call from the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike long-time supporters of freedom for Chelsea Manning from the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Committee, Veterans For Peace and other activists in Boston will celebrate Chelsea’s birthday. Currently, Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike actions are planned for London, San Francisco, Berlin, and Philadelphia.

Supporters are encouraged to also organize an event in their area, and Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike will publicize it.  Write to payday@paydaynet.org for more information and to share details of your event.

Boston vigil details:

1:00-2:00 PM Saturday, December 20

Park Street Station Entrance on the Boston Common

Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under torturous conditions, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013. If this stands, she’ll be out in 2045. We cannot let this happen- – we have to get her out! We will not leave our sister behind. Bring yourself and encourage others to attend and sign the petition for a presidential pardon from Barack Obama in this important show of support to Chelsea Manning  

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee Website- And A Personal Appeal From The American Left History Blog - Remembering The Class-War Prisoners During The Holiday Appeal     

 

James P. Cannon (center)-Founding leader of The International Labor Defense- a model for labor defense work in the 1920s and 1930s.

Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

http://www.partisandefense.org/

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010, updated December 2014.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley).

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, anti-fascist street fighters like the Tingsley Five to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year tough I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

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

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

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

Bloggers, Ritual, Spirituality | 1 Comment

Michael James :
A solo run west, ChicagoFest and Maxwell Street, and a taste for electoral politics, 1979

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Halsted by Maxwell had a great hot dog stand which I frequented during late night hunger attacks for polish sausages smothered with grilled onions and hot peppers and greasy fries on the side.

Long Train on the Plains, 1979. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.

By Michael James | The Rag Blog | October 7, 2014

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about — and inspired by — those images. These photos will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James’ Pictures from the Long Haul.]
Throughout 1979, work, politics, and travel commingled. The brutal winter blizzard that year brought me extracurricular work driving a dump truck and a small front loader to help remove the onslaught of paralyzing snow. When winter finally broke, I was in get-out-of-town mode; in April I embarked on a solo drive West.
Continue reading →

Bloggers | 1 Comment

Jonah Raskin :
Berkeley Free Speech Movement turns 50

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

Aging Berkeley radicals and young undergrads mark the anniversary of the FSM in a gathering that’s short on nostalgia, long on hope, zero on regret.

FSM vets and Berkeley students gather for rally, October 1, 2014. Photo by William Pinkus / The Rag Blog.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | October 7, 2014

BERKELEY — Lynne Hollander Savio served as the MC for the event and played a tape of her husband, Mario, delivering his famous speech in which he invites fellow students to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
Mike Smith of the Oakland Seven stood behind Lynne Hollander Savio and held an American flag. Sixties radical and UC Santa Cruz professor, Bettina Aptheker, spoke, as did Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers (UVF), plus Jack Weinberg, who noted famously ages ago, “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30.”
Continue reading →

Ron Jacobs :
BOOKS | Redefining urban renewal: Squatting
in Europe

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Thorne Dreyer

‘The City is Ours’ examines both politically and socially the squatters’ movement in Europe over the past 40 years and provides a template for the movement’s future.

Essays on the squatters’ movement in Europe.

By Ron Jacobs | The Rag Blog | October 15, 2014

[The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, edited by Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (September 2014: PM Press); Paperback; 336 pp; $21.95.]
British novelist Doris Lessing wrote a novel titled The Good Terrorist. The story revolves around an autonomous leftist cell in London that decides to step up their participation in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism by providing material support to the IRA. Eventually, the cell moves on to taking their own armed actions, which result in the death of one of their members.
The main character in the novel, a woman named Alice, has political and moral disagreements with the course she and her comrades have taken but remains committed to the course of action. The cell’s living quarters is in a squatted building in London. Unlike her fellow squatters, Alice takes an active interest in making the squat a livable quarters. Lessing’s descriptions of the squat and the work undertaken to make it livable are why I mention this work of fiction.
Continue reading →

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”    Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Incessant Escalations-- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries From The Middle East! –Stop The U. S. Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

Nobel “Peace” Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama (and yes that word peace should be placed in quotation marks every time that award winning is referenced), abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally (Britain, France, the NATO guys, etc.),  has over the past several months ordered more air bombing strikes in the north of Iraq and in Syria, has sent more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred most recently, to “protect” American outposts in Iraq and buck up the feckless Iraqi Army, has sent seemingly limitless arms shipments to the Kurds now acting as on the ground agents of American imperialism whatever their otherwise supportable desires for a unified Kurdish state, and has authorized supplies of arms to the cutthroat and ghost-like moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to,  quite a lot of war-like actions for a “peace” guy (maybe those quotation mark should be used anytime anyone is talking about Obama). All these actions, and threatened future ones as well, have made guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue from the experience, have learned to think long and hard about the war drums rising as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world have made us very skeptical. We might very well be excused for our failed suspension of disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation (and the most recent hike of fifteen hundred kind of puts paid to that thought).

And during all this deluge Obama and company saying with a straight face the familiar (Vietnam-era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, or trying to, if you cannot rely on the weak-kneed Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now virtually non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to give whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets repeated exactly but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time Vietnam vets who I like to hang around might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq!–Stop The Bombings !- Stop The Arms Shipments!-Vote Down The Syria-Iraq War Budget Appropriations!     

***

Here is something to think about picked up from a leaflet at a recent anti-war rally:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

[Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right]  

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner  
 

In say 1912 in the time of the supposedly big deal Basle Socialist Conference which got reflected in more circles than just workingmen, small shopkeepers and small farmers, or 1913 for that matter when the big deal European powers were waging "proxy" war, making ominous moves, but most importantly working three shifts in the munitions plants, oh hell, even in the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam that summer they all profusely professed their undying devotion to peace, to wage no war for any reason. Reasons: artists who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society, freaked out at what humankind had produced, was producing to place everybody in an inescapable box and hence their cubic fascinations from which to run, put the pieces to paint; sculptors who put twisted pieces of scrape metal juxtaposed to each other  to get that same effect, an effect which would be replicated on all those foreboding trenched fronts; writers, not all of them socialists either, some were conservatives that saw empire, their particular empire, in grave danger once the blood started flowing  who saw the v   of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy; writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and for the sweet nothing maidens to spent their waking hours strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they with all their creative brethren would go to the hells, literary Dante's rings, before touching the hair of another human, that come the war drums they all would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.

And then the war drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, they who could not resist the call, could not resist those maidens now busy all day strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets for their soldier boys, those poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went sheepishly to the trenches with the rest of the flower of European youth to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for ….   

THE BEACH ROAD BY THE WOOD

I know a beach road, A road where I would go, It runs up northward From Cooden Bay to Hoe; And there, in the High Woods, Daffodils grow. And whoever walks along there Stops short and sees, By the moist tree-roots In a clearing of the trees, Yellow great battalions of them, Blowing in the breeze. While the spring sun brightens, And the dull sky clears, They blow their golden trumpets, Those golden trumpeteers! They blow their golden trumpets And they shake their glancing spears. And all the rocking beech-trees Are bright with buds again, And the green and open spaces Are greener after rain, And far to southward one can hear The sullen, moaning rain. Once before I die I will leave the town behind, The loud town, the dark town That cramps and chills the mind, And I'll stand again bareheaded there In the sunlight and the wind. Yes, I shall stand Where as a boy I stood Above the dykes and levels In the beach road by the wood, And I'll smell again the sea breeze, Salt and harsh and good. And there shall rise to me From that consecrated ground The old dreams, the lost dreams That years and cares have drowned; Welling up within me And above me and around The song that I could never sing And the face I never found. _Geoffrey Howard_

GERMAN PRISONERS When first I saw you in the curious street Like some platoon of soldier ghosts in grey, My mad impulse was all to smite and slay, To spit upon you--tread you 'neath my feet. But when I saw how each sad soul did greet My gaze with no sign of defiant frown, How from tired eyes looked spirits broken down, How each face showed the pale flag of defeat, And doubt, despair, and disillusionment, And how were grievous wounds on many a head. And on your garb red-faced was other red; And how you stooped as men whose strength was spent, I knew that we had suffered each as other, And could have grasped your hand and cried, "My brother!" _Joseph Lee_          

 

REFUSING TO KILL CAMPAIGNING WITH MILITARY REFUSERS, WHISTLEBLOWERS & PRISONERS   Nov/Dec 2014
Follow the links and visit our website refusingtokill.net for more information. Do write to refusers, whistleblowers and prisoners - your letters will keep them going!  Send us your news and circulate this newsletter to help build a stronger international network of refusal.
UPCOMING EVENTS
	LONDON THUR 27 November - film showing of “The Whistleblower”, organized by The Whistler at 6pm that day. Based on the true story of Kathry Bolkovac (pictured), a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia who unveils corruption and cover-up amidst a world of UN contingents, private contractors, and diplomatic doubletalk.
	INTERNATIONAL WED 17 December -  celebrate Chelsea Manning's birthday! So far, events planned in Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, London, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Venice. Over 50 musicians, actors & Nobel laureates signed a statement supporting whistleblowers. Sign & circulate the Amnesty International petition demanding Chelsea's pardon.
	Don’t miss the film "Kill the Messenger”, the story of Gary Webb who, in 1996, a reporter on a small newspaper who blew the whistle on a CIA drug operation in South Central Los Angeles aimed at undermining the Black movement and funding murder and destabilization in Nicaragua through arming the Contras.
	LONDON ongoing -  Support Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder. Join the vigil at the Ecuadorian embassy in London: Tue, Wed, Thu 4 -6pm and Sat 5.30 – 6.30pm                             CAMPAIGNING NEWS

Derrick Stanley & others of the Dallas 6

US 10 November - Dallas 6, US prisoners who blew the whistle on torture inside, won a "continuance" giving them time to prepare their defense. New trial date 17 Feb 2015.  Shandre Delaney, mother of Carrington Keys of the Dallas 6 and coordinator of the campaign, attended court with two dozen supporters.

Shandre Delaney

	US, Benton Harbor 3 November - Grassroots leader Reverend Edward Pinkney was convicted of five felony counts of election law violation by an all-white jury even though there was no supporting evidence. Benton Harbor is 96% Black. Sentencing will be on 15 Dec.
	TURKEY 5 November - Ali Fikri Işık, 56, a conscientious objector who has refused to serve in the Turkish army for over 30 years, was sentenced to 25 months in prison or a £4,000 fine. He is appealing the sentence.
	TACOMA, USA – Migrants staged a third hunger strike in the North West Detention Centre to denounce expensive/unhealthy food and exploitation (working for $1/day).  They have also joined the movement to press President Obama to stop deportation.
	GERMANY 11 November – The European Court of Justice (ECJ) Advocate General gave a favourable opinion on the case of Andre Shepherd, a US soldier who left his unit in 2008 during leave in Germany where he requested asylum. If the ECJ gives him the right to asylum, it will set an important precedent.  Ruling expected early 2015.
	UK 9 November - Veterans for Peace UK and their supporters commemorated Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, demanding “justice for all those affected by war”.  They wore a quote on their jumpers from WW1 vet Harry Patch “War is organised murder, and nothing else".
	ISRAEL - Conscientious objector Omar Sa’ad, 18, Druze citizen of Israel and musician, was jailed 6 times.  He was released from military service in June following an international campaign. He has just finished touring the UK with his string quartet. Druze refusal has been growing steadily.
Uriel Ferera	Uriel Ferera, 19, from an Orthodox Jewish family has, so far, been imprisoned nine times for advocating peace.  He was abused for refusing to wear military uniform in prison. Udi Segal, 19, was imprisoned for the fifth time on 30 Oct. for his refusal to enlist, and for part of that time was on hunger strike.	Udi Segal
Payday men's network payday@paydaynet.org   www.refusingtokill.net

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The Truth-teller-Malcolm X on Racist America

 

 

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."
 

No Justice, No Peace- The Case Of New York’s Eric Garner - Stop The Police Killings Of Black And Brown People-Malcolm X Where Are You Now When You Are Needed

 

 

Frank Jackman comment: 

The comment below was used just last week around the Ferguson, Missouri case of Michael Brown. The situation in New York yesterday is so raw that I am using that basic statement again.

It has always been easy for the American imperialist capitalist government and their police to treat black youth, especially black males and increasing Latinos like they have treated the peoples of Southeast Asia in the past, and in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan more recently as so much collateral damage when they pulled the hammer down. Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and a myriad of others shot down over the years by the police and/or vigilantes cry out for justice in New York City this day and will not accept another whitewash.  If only we had another Malcolm X around to properly channel this rage and really do something about the situation.  

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."