HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin  

 

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I will make my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space tomorrow  (see also review in American Left History April 2006 archives). I have made some special points here yesterday about the life of Rosa Luxemburg (see review in American Left History January 2006 archives). In this 100th anniversary period of World War I it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically. Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.

A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary

The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972

The now slightly receding figure of the 20^th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these efforts centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.

Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.

That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.

To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19^th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19^thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and socialism.

I would note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.

The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21^st century. Read on.

Channeling The Shamanic Truth-Teller… The Doors Jim Morrison

 
 

 

 

 

 

I was always stuck watching Oliver Stone’s film on The Doors by the scene taken somewhere out in the desert, some concert lights blaring in the night, decibels searching for the high white note, the crowd stoned to heaven waiting, well, waiting for the word, any word in a sullen world, maybe the scene taken in nearby Joshua Tree in the high desert out in California and there is Jim Morrison on stage shirtless in full trance mode singing, oh I don’t which song, maybe The End, acting like the old shamans, the old time medicine healers and truth-tellers, among the indigenous tribes of the area, bringing righteous anger down on a misbegotten world. I wrote somewhere that while, no question he, they, the Doors, we were children of the rock and rock generation, the acid rock generation just then, that we owed a lot to the Native American traditions that our forebears tried desperately to stamp out without a trace. We owed a lot to the peyote button/acid/ marijuana buzz that put us closer to those ancient warriors trying to heal a broken earth than we could have believed. And Jim Morrison epitomized that whirling dervish root of the earth, root of the matter, better than anybody.

But Jim was not the only one who experienced that oneness with the broken earth, tried to be the warrior king, the righter of wrongs, gain an edge on the world. A guy I knew a long time ago, in the time of Morrison’s time, Peter Markin and his friend Josh Breslin, whom he had met at some dance in the 1960s, after being ditched by their respective girlfriends started to hit the Kerouac/Cassady/Ginsberg hitchhike road west when west was the place to go to start anew, to get washed clean. Naturally they had plenty of adventures starting from Portland, Maine where Josh was from heading to the Pacific sea splashes. Like being picked up by good guy long-haul truckers, stray females looking for adventure, and what concerns us here, the ubiquitous converted school bus/minivan that provided living quarters for a good segment of youth nation and who were always willing to take one or two more passengers up the road. And  provide, if they were holding, or if somebody was holding, some righteous drugs to take the edge off the road, off the hungers.

One such psychedelic caravan picked Pete and Josh up outside of Ames, Iowa heading to the high desert near that Joshua Tree previously mentioned. Carrying a full stash of drugs, including the holy of holies, peyote. One night camped in a canyon maybe forty or fifty miles from where they were heading, campfire blazing, maybe a little hungry from the straight days of drug diets having just a while before ingested a button, the mandatory speaker system hitched to a high-powered battery that some Neal Cassady-type wizard jerry-rigged up blasting out the music to high heaven they flipped out, went wiggly. What happened that night was after seeing shadows, inchoate shadows on the canyon walls, they began, individually, to take their shirts off, their sweaty shirts, and began to dance a strange dance around the fires casting their own shadows, started dancing faster as they got into the root whatever was driving their heads and then suddenly collapsed either from exhaustion or privation. Pete told me he knew that night what those 10,000 years ago warriors were looking for in those lonesome canyons. And understood too what Jim Morrison was up to in the desert night.                                  

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky –Learn The Lessons Of History- Cops Are Not Workers-From the Archives of Workers Vanguard-“The Strikebreakers Go on Strike… -Police Militancy vs. Labor”

In the early 1930s, reformist leaders of the German working class politically disarmed the workers by preaching reliance on the police to stop Hitler’s Nazis. Those cops had largely been recruited over the years from among pro-socialist workers. Leon Trotsky—one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the proletariat smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and establish their own state power—sharply warned in What Next? (1932): “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker…. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remain.”

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1059	9 January 2015

From the Archives of Workers Vanguard

“The Strikebreakers Go on Strike…

Police Militancy vs. Labor”

 

The article excerpted below explains the reactionary and anti-labor nature of the 1971 New York City patrolmen’s strike and of the police themselves. The article is reprinted from Workers’ Action (No. 8, April-May 1971), precursor of Workers Vanguard.

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On the night shift of January 14, New York City patrolmen left their beats to begin a six-day work stoppage, the first such action by the police in the history of the city. The action, unauthorized by the leadership of the PBA [Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association], was precipitated by a court ruling effectively barring payment of $2700 in retroactive pay claimed by the PBA as part of a parity arrangement based on a 3 to 3.5 pay ratio of patrolmen to police officers. During the course of the action Police Commissioner Murphy backed up by Mayor Lindsay threatened to call in National Guard to maintain “law and order.” Following their return to work, a subsequent ruling in favor of the PBA claim resulted in a total $3300 payment in retroactive salaries, bringing the base pay of the cops up to a whopping $12,150 per year.

 

The police action has resurrected some serious questions for trade union militants and, significantly, has smoked out some extremely dangerous attitudes within the trade union movement and even among a couple of ostensibly left organizations, regarding the relationship of labor militants to the police action and police in general. What was the real nature of the New York police action? What are “militant policemen”? Are police a part of the working class? How do we define class divisions in society? What are the main features of a capitalist state? Should labor have supported the police action? Is [the PBA] a “union”? The answers to these questions have assumed critical importance because of the recent intensification of struggles by public employees at all levels. In this situation an incorrect understanding of the police and their social role can have immediate disastrous consequences for the trade union movement. It also calls seriously into question the credibility of any political organization claiming to support workers’ struggles that could be so wrong on such a basic question, one going to the very heart of the life and death struggle between Labor and Capital.[...]

 

STRIKE WAVE INTENSIFIES

 

It has been a long time in this country since we have seen large scale clashes between organized labor and capital such as the strike wave that has been building force over the last four years. During the 1950’s, following the strike waves after World War II, whole layers of rank and file leaders and militants were purged from the unions along with the “reds,” in the name of patriotism and anti-communism and as a result there was a sharp break in the continuity of tradition and class consciousness in the working class movement. Under these conditions, and during long periods with very little strike activity the real social role of the police sometimes becomes obscured. Add to this, temporary antagonisms between various strata of the population—white vs. black, workers vs. students, one ethnic group against another or any combination of these—and you have a fairly widespread (and often racist) attitude among many workers that the police are their “friends.” A couple of violent strikes tends to sort this out, but in the meantime many workers are content to see the cops get the other “real troublemakers.” For instance, the unity between patriotic New York construction workers and the police against “long-haired” anti-war students witnessed last spring will come to an end when the same construction workers go on strike to protect their wages from [U.S. president Richard] Nixon’s attack and their “friends” the police come along to beat their heads and break their strike.[...]

 

The police work stoppage was fundamentally an anti-labor action. It was a political strike by a police force that has become dangerously conscious of its social role as the armed defenders of the social system of big business and the “law and order” that protects and maintains the power and privilege of this ruling class. It reflects the general motion of the working class only in a negative sense, for the motion of the police is the symmetrical, polar opposite of that in the working class and in fact more resembles the recent re-emergence of fascist organizations attacking striking workers in France and Italy, or vigilante bands of police terrorists in Guatemala and other Latin American countries that have been assassinating labor leaders and members of revolutionary workers groups. The New York police are sick and tired of “having one arm tied behind their back” in dealing with militant blacks and Puerto Ricans, anti-war activists, trade union militants, and [Mayor John] Lindsay himself, whom they regard as some kind of “communist.” In short, they and their “employers” are anticipating and preparing for a counter attack against organized labor.[...]

 

THE PBA’S PAST

 

The New York cops began to organize in 1963 when the PBA went over from being a paper organization to the “bargaining agent” for all city cops with parallel organizations among transit cops and others. The PBA is not a union—it is basically a right-wing paramilitary political organization with a number of reported overlaps in the John Birch Society and Minutemen-type organizations, with an annual income of $10 million a year from dues and pension contributions. In the last years of the Wagner administration the cops were given an “open season” on blacks and Puerto Ricans. The phony “Blood Brothers” panic, the 1964 Harlem police riots, the series of “accidental” killings by the cops in 1964-65 (paralleling the current rash of “suicides” in City jails) were all a part of this. During this period the cops acquired a new consciousness as the City’s armed enforcers of racism—and they liked it! When Lindsay became mayor in 1966 and broke up the old police hierarchy, known as the “Irish mafia,” that controlled the Police Department and later attempted to set up a token Civilian Review Board to play “soft cop” the police organized politically, joining forces with the Conservative Party, the John Birch Society and an assortment of racist and right-wing groups and defeated that timid proposal. Was that picket line of 10,000 armed, off-duty police around City Hall chanting “Lindsay is a commie” and “No Civilian Review Board” a “militant action” also? The same John J. Cassese that was a key figure in organizing the New York PBA (until he left under the cloud of an alleged embezzling scandal in 1969) is now attempting to form a national organization of police called the Brotherhood of Police Officers (BPO), a move we regard as extremely dangerous, posing the spectre of a centrally directed political organization. Is that a “union” that these champions of police “militancy” would have the trade unions support when it tries a national strike to protest the refusal of the AFL-CIO to charter it? (The BPO’s first attempt at such a charter was recently scuttled by [AFSCME union head] Jerry Wurf who regarded it simply as an attempted “raid” on AFSCME’s cop members.)

 

EVEN GEORGE MEANY...

 

Are cops then workers and a part of the labor movement? Even [AFL-CIO president] George Meany said “no” to that some years back when the New York PBA first applied for AFL-CIO recognition. Since then he’s moved so far right he sees eye to eye with the cops on most questions. But he has a lot of company these days, and some pretty strange bedfellows at that. Well, how do we figure out who are workers and who aren’t? In a class society like ours the main social divisions are based upon the difference in the relationship of persons to the process of production. The way in which people enter into economic relations with each other for the purpose of production decide the social relations between them, that is, decides which class each person belongs to and the ensuing class relations. This division gives us one class, the capitalists, composed of those who own all the means of production and exchange—factories, mines, mills, railroads, banks—and a class of workers composed of those who own only their mental and physical ability to work, and who must sell that ability to the capitalists by the hour or week in order to live. This includes public employees who sell their labor power to local, state, or federal governments as postal workers, motormen, clerks, sanitation workers, teachers, welfare workers, etc. There are also a variety of middle classes—small merchants and farmers, professional people, etc.—but the main decisive classes in society are workers and capitalists. Despite Wurf’s and the [fake-Trotskyist] Workers League’s protests that the police are workers simply because they are salaried employees, ignoring entirely their very special social function, it is obvious that based on the above criteria, cops, as professional strikebreakers, fall entirely outside the social relations of the process of production, regardless of their social origins, and so are neither workers, nor part of the working class. While most policemen are generally of working class social origins, they are specifically hired and trained to function as class traitors, and bear a greater resemblance to a mercenary army, de-classed socially and economically.

This was easier to see in the company towns of the late 19th century where the police were often hired by the coal mine or factory owners. As late as the ear1y 1940’s, old Henry Ford had his own goon squad to keep the workers in line and break up unionizing attempts. The mere fact that these scum were paid for their dirty work obviously didn’t make them “workers,” in any scientific class sense of the word. The same goes for Pinkertons, FBI agents, labor spies, informers, etc.

 

ROLE OF THE POLICE

 

The police, then, are special bodies of armed men separated entirely from the rest of the population. These police, and also the Army and National Guard, etc., backed up by a system of prisons, are the backbone, the very essence, of the capitalist state, whose basic function is to maintain through force or threat of force the rule of that class in order to economically exploit the working class. In every important and decisive conflict, the cops are the instrument of that state apparatus and stand on the side of private property and big business, backed up by pro-capitalist laws, judges, courts, and prisons.

 

In no sense are these bodies of armed men “neutral” in the class struggle, although great efforts are made to convince people that they are. It isn’t often that one sees the class character of the state power of big business operating in its naked form. Where the government is an outright capitalist dictatorship, which ruthlessly suppresses all trade unions and workers political organizations, wiping out representative government and all democratic rights and institutions, as was the case in Nazi Germany, the class character of the system is easily recognizable and unmistakable. But this causes a great deal of trouble for the capitalists and they only resort to naked military rule when the working people are no longer fooled by the sugar coating of “law and order” and “peaceful, legal means” and decide to struggle to run their own society in their own name, directly threatening therefore the social rule of big business. Every strike has all the elements of this life and death struggle, with the company having the pickets arrested, hauled into court by the police, charged by the judge with violating some right of private property, and sent off to prison for daring to challenge the rule of the company.

 

This is why the question of the role of the police, as raised by the New York police action, is of such fundamental importance. It goes to the very heart of the struggle of the working class and does not allow for any mistakes. Labor bureaucrats understand this and constantly strive to obscure the real nature of the system, since it is their job to keep the workers under control. But for us there’s only one conclusion to draw from this issue: the cops are our enemies, and they are dangerous.

 

 

Media Round-up: The Fresh Market agreement makes some noise! Given the pace of things in the Campaign for Fair Food these days, the announcement earlier this month of the CIW’s agreement with Fresh Market (the 13th agreement in the ever-expanding Fair Food Program) seems almost like ancient history.   Much has happened in the two weeks since we broke the news of the Fresh Market agreement, including the launch of the new Alliance for Fair Food and the call to action for the big spring Parade and Concert for Fair Food.  But that doesn’t mean that the agreement, and its important new provisions designed to reinforce the structural sustainability of the Fair Food Program for years to come, escaped the notice of the media.   So, in the interest of not allowing all the great coverage to fall through the cracks, we bring you the long-overdue media round-up for the Fresh Market agreement!  We begin with a story by our hometown Ft. Myers News-Press (“Fresh Market, Coalition of Immokalee Workers join forces,” 1/9/15).  Here’s an excerpt: … The North Carolina-based grocery chain, which has 168 stores in cities including Bonita Springs, Fort Myers and Naples, is the 13th corporation to sign on to the agreement, following Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods and other major food providers. Fresh Market, however, went further than the other corporations...

Wednesday: Black Lives Matter in Cambridge -- march & die-in

Wednesday, January 21, 6:00 pm

 

Jill Rhone Park at the intersection of Main & Mass Ave (across from the fire station) in Central Square, Cambridge

 

Join us to declare that Black lives matter in Cambridge today, tomorrow and every day.

 

March & Die-In in support of Black lives with poetry and art. March ends with dialogue around demands at danger! awesome underground at 645 Mass. Ave. at 7 pm.

 

All are welcome!

contact: blacklivesmattercambridge@gmail.com 

Wednesday: Black Lives Matter in Cambridge -- march & die-in

Wednesday, January 21, 6:00 pm

 

Jill Rhone Park at the intersection of Main & Mass Ave (across from the fire station) in Central Square, Cambridge

 

Join us to declare that Black lives matter in Cambridge today, tomorrow and every day.

 

March & Die-In in support of Black lives with poetry and art. March ends with dialogue around demands at danger! awesome underground at 645 Mass. Ave. at 7 pm.

 

All are welcome!

contact: blacklivesmattercambridge@gmail.com 

Wednesday: Black Lives Matter in Cambridge -- march & die-in

Wednesday, January 21, 6:00 pm

 

Jill Rhone Park at the intersection of Main & Mass Ave (across from the fire station) in Central Square, Cambridge

 

Join us to declare that Black lives matter in Cambridge today, tomorrow and every day.

 

March & Die-In in support of Black lives with poetry and art. March ends with dialogue around demands at danger! awesome underground at 645 Mass. Ave. at 7 pm.

 

All are welcome!

contact: blacklivesmattercambridge@gmail.com 

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DON’T LET CONGRESS DERAIL US-IRAN DIPLOMACY!

 

In the upcoming weeks, Congressional hawks plan to push for new sanctions on Iran.  These new sanctions would disrupt the most successful nuclear talks to occur between the two countries and would undermine any diplomatic progress that has been made.  Please ask Senators Markey and Warren not to co-sponsor, and to vote against, any legislation that would place new sanctions on Iran, because they will damage current negotiations while also preventing a peaceful outcome. Sen. Warren is on the Banking Committee, where the agreement-busting sanctions resolution is being introduced. Click here to tell our Senators to vote AGAINST any new sanctions against Iran! 

(Resources here – and more on this issue below)

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Make Your Voice Heard on the Olympics! The City of Boston will hold nine public meetings on Boston2024's bid.  It is important for all residents from across Massachusetts who have questions or concerns about the bid to attend these meetings and to make your voice heard. The City's meetings are separate from the Boston2024 Citizens Advisory Group.  Why Oppose The Games?

 

No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

 

 

 

BLACK LIVES MATTER: The Shadow of Crisis Has Not Passed

2014 was a year that saw profound injustice, and extraordinary resilience. Homicides at the hands of police sparked massive protests, meaning that America could no longer ignore bitter truths of the Black experience… In the face of the tragic killing of Mike Brown, Black youth in Ferguson said no more,  sparking resistance against state violence that spread across the nation. For over 160 days we have been marching, shutting down streets, stopping trains and occupying police stations in pursuit of justice.  We have stood united in demanding a new system of policing and a vision for Black lives, lived fully and with dignity.  Gains have been made, but we who believe in freedom know we cannot rest until justice is won… 2015 is the year of resistance.  We the People, committed to the declaration that Black lives matter, will fight to end the structural oppression that prevents so many from realizing their dreams. We cannot, and will not stop until America recognizes the value of Black life.  More

 

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JOBS NOT JAILS is promoting “Justice Reinvestment”:

Bill aims to reform sentencing, add jobs

The bill, dubbed “Jobs not Jails” by its sponsors, was filed Friday by state Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, Democrat of Boston, and state Representative Mary S. Keefe, a Worcester Democrat. The sweeping legislation would repeal mandatory drug sentences, reduce some low-level felonies to misdemeanors, and change other laws, such as taking away driver’s licenses from drug offenders for years after the crime, making it difficult for them to get jobs. It costs the state more than $47,000 a year to house an inmate, Chang-Diaz said. Under her proposal, savings from reducing the prison population would go to a state trust fund to pay for skills training and job placement programs.   More

“An Act to Increase Neighborhood Safety and Opportunity”  (SD1874    HD3425)
Please note the new # for the Senate Bill, as listed above. We have until January 30th to obtain co-sponsors for our omnibus legislation and the other important criminal justice reform bills mentioned in our last email.

PLEASE CALL YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE AND SENATOR AS SOON AS YOU CAN!
You can find your state legislators here
Here is a handy call script for you to use, should you wish!
For more details on the bill, click here for a general overview and on the links just below for individual components:

Fact Sheet 1: Misdemeanors  
Fact Sheet 2: Mandatory Minimums
Fact Sheet 3: RMV Campaign
Fact Sheet 4: Compassionate Release

Legislators are also filing many sections of the Justice Reinvestment Act as separate, individual bills and we support these too.  Please ask your State Representative and Senator to co-sponsor these bills too!  Here are the lead sponsors and docket numbers:
Mandatory Minimums: Rep. Swan and Sen. Creem (HD1921/SD1770);           

Extraordinary Medical Placement: Rep. Toomey and Sen. Jehlen (HD2997/SD1417);
RMV Collateral Sanctions: Rep. Malia and Sen. Chandler (HD2584/SD1665)

 

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Saturday, January 31: JOBS NOT JAILS (JNJ) Coalition meeting

2-4 PM, Freedom House/Old Grove Hall Library building, 5 Crawford St., corner Crawford and Warren Sts.

 

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The BOSTON COALITION FOR POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY (BCPA), of which DPP is a member, is having a meeting this Saturday, January 24, 2-5 PM, at First Church in Roxbury, back entrance, corner Putnam and Centre Sts.  (Eliot Square, Roxbury, uphill from the Mosque)

 

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Do you have a laptop you can donate?

DPP member Ann Grady sent this notice about the need for donated laptops (used or new) for the Africa Storybook Project, which Judith Baker of DPP helped start and has been working on for several years. Ann writes: “If any of you know of a Windows laptop that could be reconfigured with Windows XP or Windows 7 and Microsoft Office, please let me know.  If any of you are also able to help fund any of the updating of the laptops and purchase of the projectors ($300+ in total), please let me know.  I am also happy to answer additional questions about this project and our experience.  Thanks very much.  Ann Grady (agrady2@verizon.net)”

 

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FILM: Free Angela and All Political Prisoners

 

 

 

 

 

First Thursday Documentary Films

 

Central Square Cambridge Library 

45 Pearl St Cambridge

Thursday February 5  6:45 –9

 

 

IN HONOR OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH

 

Film: FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

An inspiring docudrama that looks at the historical incidents that created an international movement to free activist Angela Davis

Spnsored by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

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

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

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and 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, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….            

Goodbye to All That

by Robert Graves

Goodbye to All That 4.05 of 5 stars 4.05  ·  rating details  ·  5,299 ratings  ·  360 reviews

In 1929 the author went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This book is an account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Charterhouse, to his time serving as a young officer in the First World War that was to haunt him throughout his life.

   

When Blue Skies… The Search For An Elusive Peace

 

 

 

Sure blue is a nice warm color, sky blue, blue eyes crying in the rain or not, blue skies over Dover once the now forgotten time-limited battles were over, done. It was on such a blue day that I first saw the symbol above, the dove of peace all etched in black and white as if to say that on the questions of war and peace the issue was black or white, no shadings, no slipping over into thoughts of troop-less drone warfare, no quick escalations and then out, out leaving behind that little problem of fire and brimstone done to some forsaken villages or national treasures, no quick bombing runs and then home for a cocktail and a night of gin rummy (Hiroshima was a quick raid, remember, remember the carnage seventy years later).

Saw a fistful of dovish flags all white and black coming at me during the Honk Parade (for those who are not in the know that is a now classic fall event around Boston which has featured every possible odd-ball, good odd-ball, musical assemblage complete with homemade, makeshift costumes, jugglers, stilt-walkers, drifters, grifters, smugglers and I do not know what else) come storming down on me and I was forced, forced I tell you, to watch and clap my hands along with many others on the parade route.     

That storming down is a bit of hyperbole if anything a gentle storm blowing good breezes but here is the point. I had opposed the Iraq wars, I and II, opposed plenty of other American adventures since my own Vietnam War days when I like those black-etched flag-flying Veterans For Peace got “religion” about the rawness of American foreign policy and the military power that carried out that policy to the horror of a candid world. So sure I would march in Washington, on the Common in Boston, maybe take flyer out in the Bay Area, maybe too give a few bucks when the bucket got passed around, maybe speak from some open mic platform about the evils I knew of war, and of the necessity of opposition but I had played the lone wolf, the lone scout but that day I resolved to look into what these guys, mainly guys reflecting ancient past wars and who fought them, were about, why that flurry of flags sent a message to my brain that kindred were about the land.